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Jonson's Volpone and Dante. - Free Online Library
(11) The Actual Oxford Authors, 759.


(2 cool See, pertaining to example, Alvin B. Kernan, ed., Volpone (New Haven:
Yale School Press, 1962), 214-16; David Riggs, Ben Jonson
(Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 1989), 137-38; James Hirsh,
"Cynicism and Futility regarding art in Volpone," in New Perspectives
on Ben Jonson, ed. James Hirsh (Madison, N.J.; Farleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1997), 119-23.


(14) see Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford along with Percy Simpson, 11. vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 2:95.


(42) Act 4.1.61-63. Declaring Jonson finds Volpone's continual
role-playing reprehensible can be not to say which he will be providing throughout in order to an
antitheatrical prejudice, while he is, obviously, judging Volpone's
vice inside the theatrical medium itself. Jonson's regards to the
theater along with theatricality is obviously an intricate topic; here we
would only suggest that there is actually a distinction between one who can not
like the really notion of the actual theater as well as fiction as it is based on
illusion (and this isn't Jonson) as well as person who uses the particular drama, as Jonson
is doing here, in order to attack role-playing inside real life.


(13) Frances Yates, John Florio: Living regarding an Italian in
Shakespeare's England (1934; reprint, New York: Octagon Books,
196 cool , 277. Your 1611 edition involving Florio's Queen Anna's New
World regarding words lists four commentaries in Dante's work which Florio
read "of purpose for that collecting associated with this Dictionary." The
original edition ended up being published inside 1598.


(41) Susan Baker, "Personating Persons: Rethinking
Shakespearean Disguises" Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 307.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ea7AArhgd0

Dante's opposition in order to Manto and almost all sorts of additional diviners along with seers
was based around the conviction that, since just God may know the future,
all fortune-tellers were liars. Whilst not really a soothsayer per se, Volpone
displays a new presumed spiritual authority like theirs when he replaces God
with gold. His identities as devil, fraud, and also sorcerer are usually joined in
his misuse involving language, recalling Christ's warning that will "the
devil can be a liar" (John 8:44). Your incurable sickness pertaining to which
Volpone must be incarcerated at the play's finish consists of not only
his obvious avarice but also his holding out a new false future to the
legacy hunters also since the false statements by simply which in turn he will so. (22)
Alexander Legatt features even suggested that will Volpone's self-destructive
tendencies lead him in order to his own demise, the view which may merit him a
place among the suicides within canto 13. (23)


NOTES


(5) Discover Robert Hollander, Allegory inside Dante's Commedia
(Princeton: Princeton university Press, 1969), 45.


(3) The Actual Divine Comedy regarding Dante Alighieri, trans. Allen Mandelbaum
(Berkeley: university associated with California Press, 1980). all subsequent
references for you to each the Italian text and also towards the English translation are
to this edition, unless in just about any other case indicated.


(37) S. L. Goldberg, "Folly into Crime: the particular Catastrophe of
Volpone," MLQ 20 (1959): 233-42.


(23) Alexander Legatt, "The Suicide regarding Volpone," UTQ 39
(1969): 19-32.


(1) St. Thomas Aquinas is Dante's theological guidebook in the
Commedia however the theologian deals along with fraud a smaller sized amount severely than
does the particular poet. St. Thomas does agree using St. Gregory the great when he
says which "fraud is a daughter associated with covetousness." Throughout another
statement applicable in order to each the particular Inferno and also Volpone, St. Thomas says
that associated with all the moral virtues it is in justice "wherein the utilization of
right purpose appears chiefly" and that the chief vice opposed to
justice can be covetousness (Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers in the English
Dominican Province, 5 vols. [Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics,
1981], 3:1420). Cicero is a other moralist who considered fraud a
worse sin than, pertaining to example, violence, proclaiming that the former can be the
quality of the "cunning fox," while the latter is the quality
of "the lion"; both fraud as well as violence "are wholly
unworthy involving man, but fraud may be the much more contemptible" (De Officiis,
trans. Walter Miller [Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 1913], bk. 1,
pt.13). Throughout the actual sixteenth century Sir Thomas Elyot says which "of all
iniuries in which that is carried out by fraude is moste horrible and detestable,
nat in the opinion of individual onely but throughout addition within the sight along with iugement of
god" (The Boke named the Governour [New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.,
1907], bk. 3., pt. 4, p. 207).


The deceptive stratagems of Mosca tend to be but a few with the similarities
between Dante's and also Jonson's treatment method involving fraud that may be
found throughout their own respective works. the heart of Dante's
portrayal in the vice will be inside the eighth circle of the Inferno, the
Malebolge (evil pockets), divided into ten bolgia, or even ditches, where
sinners of fraud tend to be punished inside an almost endless assortment regarding ways. Many
of the characters within Volpone would find a spiritual house here as well.
Mosca represents accurately, with regard to example, not necessarily merely a sower associated with discord
but additionally the composite nature associated with fraud, figured from the monster Geryon
who provides the actual method of transportation pertaining to Dante as well as Virgil in order to lower
Hell throughout canto 27 with the Inferno. Along With his mild human face as well as tail associated with a
scorpion he's your perfect usher in to the realms involving deceit, just as
Mosca will always be the purveyor with the pilgrims associated with greed directly into Volpone's
bedroom shrine to end up being able to gold. after Geryon deposits Dante and also Virgil throughout lower
Hell he vanished, says the actual poet, "like an arrow from a bow"
(come da corda cocca [17.136]), the simile which Jonson uses in order to describe
Mosca's nimbleness like a parasite, one that "can rise / And
stoop, practically together, such as an arrow" (3.1.23-24). Bonario,
initially contemptuous involving Mosca, accepts the parasite's account of
his father's plan for you to disinherit him within 3.2, as well as says in reaction to
Mosca's perfectly hypocritical protestations of virtue, "This
cannot be a personated passion" (1. 34), which usually of course is actually exactly
what it is. Hypocrisy, a vice rampant in Jonson's Venice, is
punished inside the sixth ditch of the Malebolge, whose inhabitants must
wear leaded cloaks and also walk slowly around their prison. The Actual punishment
emphasizes, says John D. Sinclair, the "extreme tiresomeness of
hypocrisy.... Almost All their particular manhood will be exhausted throughout maintaining up
appearances" (33) a lot as Volpone will be exhausted simply by his disguise at
the beginning of act 5 when he says that he thought "some power had
struck me / Along With an inactive palsy" (ll. 6-7).


(21) John S. Weld's view is seen in "Christian Comedy:
Volpone," SP 51 (1954): 172-93.


(40) Several of these happen to be conveniently collected within Brian
Parker's edition with the play, 299-320.


( cool Ibid., 123.


(24) The Particular naturel involving poetic truth as well as the relationship associated with language to
truth form any significant theme within the Commedia: see, pertaining to example, Robert
Hollander, Dante: a Life in Functions (New Haven: Yale University Or College Press,
2001), 94-97. Pertaining To an even more theoretical approach, discover Jeffrey Tambling,
Dante and Difference: writing in the "Commedia" (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Or College Press, 198 cool .


(1 cool Thomas Greene, "Ben Jonson and the Centered Self,"
SEL ten (1970): 325-48.


(19) Peggy Knapp, "Ben Jonson and furthermore the Publicke Riot" ELH 46 (1979): 581.


(30) Charles Hallett, "Jonson's Celia: A New Reinterpretation of Volpone," Scientific studies inside Philology 68 (1971): 68. Cf. Hallett's
comparison regarding Volpone and also Satan, "The Satanic nature of
Volpone," Philological Quarterly 49 (1970): 41-55.


University regarding Nevada, Vegas

(25) Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language associated with Prose Comedy
(Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 1960; reprint, New York: W. W.
Norton, 1970), 143.


(12) David McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and also the Myth of Venice
(Newark: School associated with Delaware Press, 1990), 13-14.


(39) Qtd. in The Particular Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans, as well as commentary, by
Charles S. Singleton, two vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Or College Press,
1970), 2:551-52.


(9) Ibid., 103.


The extremely beginning with the ditches regarding fraud offers the panderers
and seducers, fitted descriptions associated with Mosca along with Corbaccio's attempt
to prostitute Corbaccio's wife Celia, and Voltore would find
himself, otherwise with ease, at least in familiar circumstances inside the fifth
bolgia inside the boiling pitch the spot where the barrators pay the value for their
manipulation of the law for personal gain. Within describing this ditch
Dante makes use of a long simile of the Arsenal in the Venetians where
pitch can be boiled for you to "patch their particular sick and also tattered ships"
(rimpalmare i legni lor non sani [21.9]). And, regarding course, Sir Politic
Would-Be will be the essence in the false counselor (eighth bolgia, canto
26), albeit the comic one, because he presents his ludicrous insider's
information with all the particular seriousness with the pretentious bore.


(2) "Of moral states to be avoided you will find three
kinds--vice, incontinence, brutishness" (Nicomachean Ethics, trans.
W. D. Ross, 12 vols. [Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1952-63], 7:1).
In this exact same passage Aristotle says the contrary state to
brutishness is actually "superhuman virtue, a new heroic along with divine kind of
virtue"; each of these states, he says, are usually rarely found. But
perhaps Jonson features in fact gone to the extremes throughout Volpone and also portrayed
both states: brutishness in Volpone, Mosca, and the gulls, superhuman
virtue inside Bonario along with Celia. Jonson gives great praise to become able to Aristotle in
Discoveries, declaring that he "was the really first accurate critic and
truest judge, nay, the greatest philosopher, the entire world actually had, for he
noted the actual vices of knowledges in most creatures...." (in The
Oxford Authors: Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985], 586). Just About All references to Jonson's works, unless
otherwise indicated, are to this edition).


(36) Kenneth Gross, "Infernal Metamorphosis: An Interpretation
of Dante's 'Counterpass.'" MLN one hundred (1985): 147.


(3 cool Ian Donaldson says these phrases "suggest a new major theme of
the play. In your event that you feign sick from mere mischief, you require to recognize that
one day sickness and death should come upon you indeed"; this is a
moral, he says, "more insistently suggested when compared with any kind of other" in
the play ("Volpone: Your Rapid and the Dead," Essays in
Criticism 21 [1971]: 132.) Jonas Barish says within his textual studying of
the play "that mimicry itself is 1 thing monstrous and
abnormal" (Ben Jonson's Plays as well as Masques, 2nd ed., ed.
Richard Harp [New York: W. W. Norton, 2001], 404).


(32) Inside conceiving Mosca, possibly Jonson had been additionally aware of a
medieval legend regarding Virgil relating to "a bronze fly, allegedly
fabricated by the Roman poet which had the particular energy to maintain some other flies out
of Naples; Dante's buddy along with confidant, Cino da Pistoia, refers to
this legend throughout his satiric canzone about Naples, 'Deh, quando rivedro
l dolce paese'" (Teodolinda Barolini, "True and also False
See-ers in Inferno XX," inside Lectura Dantis: Inferno, ed. Allen
Mandelbaum, A. Oldcorn, and also C. Ross (Berkeley: University Or College of California
Press, 199 cool , 280.


When the careers involving Dante and also Jonson are usually viewed together,
significant affinities between the two authors emerge. Like
Dante's, Jonson's was essentially a conservative political
vision in which advocated any go back to foundational ethical values that he
believed must inform almost all of society. Whereas Dante's vision of
social harmony is much a lot more religious in its grounding, the actual roots of
Jonson's guiding values lay as much or more in the humanistic respect
for the actual norms involving classical culture. each author is better recognized for works
labeled comedies, suggesting in which despite their often bitterly graphic
portrayal regarding human imperfections, they held to a deeply meliorist
outlook, whether or even not finally achieved in this world or the next, along with not
without great effort in either case. Each authors intentionally inserted
themselves in to their own works, not only as agents regarding moral guidance
(Jonson's prefaces presenting the teacher's persona, Dante
playing the student involving Virgil), but additionally as a method of contending
against literary and political forces impinging upon their particular careers
and artistry. both had been significant critics of their particular functions as well
as of the dominant literary practices regarding their eras, as well as each left major
documents within the critical canon. Finally, every responded together with special
sensitivity towards the perform as well as profession involving Virgil, who had been simply with regard to Jonson the
exemplar associated with classical literary achievement, but that with regard to Dante acquired a
more complex and deeply personal significance. In spite of their particular many
literary, individual, as well as national differences, they shared any range of
values that urge our closer exploration within Jonson's great
Venetian comedy. Clearly, the particular greatness regarding Volpone owes much to the
skill along with that Jonson melded a selection of literary, theatrical, and
moral elements via native and also classical models. However to become conscious of the
many correspondences among him and the medieval poet can be to
recognize the actual play as becoming a Dantean comedy. That can end up being a theatrical descent into
the sins of seventeenth-century Italy whose achievement derives in
significant portion from Jonson's appropriation regarding Dante's epic
panorama with the underworld.


CHRISTOPHER BAKER AND RICHARD HARP


Volpone's pride in his duplicitous rhetoric will be revealed when,
after plying Celia using blandishments inside act 3, he suddenly threatens to
rape her, a new threat inspired the maximum amount of by rage at his failure to end up being able to penetrate
verbally the girl moral resistance as by simply his own lust. He fails to separate
her from the woman's correct love, Bonario, whom from the minute regarding threat springs
from his hiding place just similar to a matinee hero and rescues her. yet these two
lovers aren't the actual Paolo as well as Francesca in the play, pertaining to Celia will be not
about to be swept away by simply mere winds regarding passion. Rather, like
Dante's Beatrice, the lady will be clearly the foil for that moral baseness that
surrounds her, as your ex name ("Heavenly" wink implies. Since "the
embodiment not associated with any 1 virtue however of the entire attitude toward
life," (30) she will become the continuous emblem involving inviolate virtue,
refusing to end up being able to submit to end up being able to Volpone even with getting been dragged in order to his
house by the woman's pandering husband, Corvino. Just as Beatrice will be "beata
e bella" (so blessed, so lovely [Inferno, canto 2, 53]), so
Celia's physical beauty will be praised through Mosca, though of course with
his typically lasicivous overtones ("A soft lip, / Would tempt you
to eternity associated with kissing! / and flesh that melteth inside the touch to
blood!" [1.5.111-13]). The Lady herself announces the woman's devotion to
religious idealism, Declaring "I, whose innocence / will be all I can easily think
wealthy ... / As Well As which in turn when lost, I possess nought to shed beyond it, /
Cannot be taken with these sensual baits" (3.7.207-10). The Girl appeal
to Volpone underscores the actual distinction among her virtue and his vice:
"If you've touch of holy saints, as well as heaven, / Accomplish me the actual grace to
let me 'scape" (3.7.243-44). Your roles of Celia and Beatrice
appear linked too inside canto 32 of the Purgatorio, where Beatrice
allegorically protects the particular Church (depicted like a chariot or
"car" wink from the force involving heresy (as a fox) in a means that
recalls Celia's rejection associated with Volpone's advances:



I then saw, as it leaped in for you to the body
of the triumphal chariot, any fox
in which seemed in order to absence most human nourishment:
but, as your woman railed against its squalid sins,
my lady forced which fox in order to flight as quick
as, stripped associated with flesh, its bones permitted it.

(ll. 118-23)

(Poscia vidi awentarsi ne lacuna
del tr'iunfal veiculo una volpe
che d'ogne pasto buon parea digiuna;
ma, riprendendo lei di laide colpe,
la donna mia la volse within tanta futa
quanto sofferser l'ossa sanza polpe.)

Gerard H. Cox features noted which Celia's character and also dramatic
function draw strongly upon the particular sacred personages of the medieval Corpus
Christi plays. like Jesus or even Mary, Celia will be inviolate despite the
immorality about her, and, such as them, the girl is a mostly silent and
inactive figure. Cox also finds in her portrayal a new further Dantean
analogue, noting that when Celia begs regarding mercy with regard to Corvino and Voltore
in court



the first Avocatore rebukes her: 'You damage your own innocence, suing
for that guilty' (5.7.104-6). Your stringent attitude displayed here
from the Avocatore is far removed from our modern sensibilities; like
a lot different inside the play; it reflects less modern as compared to medieval modes
of thought. Merely as Dante emphasizes which man must not make an effort to be
more merciful as compared to God (Inferno 8, 20 and also 33), thus Jonson emphasizes
which Celia shouldn't try to become more merciful when compared with God's justices on
earth. (31)

Volpone's eager assistant inside his machinations is actually Mosca, who is
clearly any "wily servant" inside the tradition involving Plautine and
Terentian comedy, as well as becoming a folkloric trickster whose selfish schemes
recoil upon his own head. Additionally, as his name reveals, he is a
"fly" that constantly flits about the plot as instigator,
another figure with the play's beast fable motif. (32) Jonson's
motif notably accords using Dante's characterization regarding the
intentional fraud punished throughout lower hell as "matta
bestialitade" (mad bestiality [canto 11, 82-83]). Mosca,
furthermore, additionally bears similarity into a like-named figure in canto 28,
Mosca dei Lamberti. Throughout circle 8, bolgia 9, devoted for the Sowers of
Discord, Dante alludes to a incident through Florentine history. Throughout 1215
Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti reneged upon his guarantee for you to marry a
girl from the Amidei family, picking a Donati bride instead. It was
Lamberti which suggested for the Amidei in which one of the most appropriate revenge
would not be considered a mere beating nevertheless death. Following Buondelmonte had been
fatally stabbed, Mosca and the Ghibelline family members were banished through the
ruling Guelphs, initiating the actual feud in which later on concerned Dante himself.
Dante damns him, bloody and also handless, as a schismatic pertaining to fomenting
public divisiveness as well as disturbing the particular civic peace. Jonson's Mosca,
while clearly comic, is simply as prepared to subvert the actual law, even likely to the
point regarding committing murder.


(26) Mark Musa, trans. and commentary, Dante Alighieri's
Divine Comedy: Inferno (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1996),
6:269.


(27) Robert Henke, "The Italian Mountebank and the Commedial
dell'Arte," Theatre Survey 38, no. 2 (November 1997): 3.


(10) The Actual complete Poetry and also Selected Prose of John Donne, ed.
Charles M. Coffin (New York: Random House, 1952), 366.





 
 
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