This book was first published in 2008. Ben Jonson's Volpone is the most widely taught and commonly performed English Renaissance play outside of Shakespeare. However, the dramatic circumstances of its writing are little known. Jonson wrote the play very shortly after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, an event in which he was personally involved. This book argues that the play alludes to the plot as openly as censorship will allow, using the traditional form of the beast fable. As a Roman Catholic himself, Jonson shared in the repression suffered by his co-religionists in the wake of the Plot, and the play fiercely satirizes the man they chiefly blamed for this, Robert Cecil. The elaborate format which Jonson devised for the 1607 edition of Volpone, with a dedication, Epistle and numerous commendatory poems, is reproduced here photographically, allowing the reader to appreciate Jonson's covert meanings and to approach the text as those in 1607 might have done.
• Outlines the little-known dramatic circumstances in which Volpone was written, and its close links with the sensational Gunpowder Plot • Includes photographic reproductions of the opening pages of the 1607 text, setting the context for the modern reader • Uses modern English quotations throughout, allowing non-specialist readers to appreciate the dramatic story
Contents
Introduction; 1. Jonson's life and the Epistle to Volpone; 2. Commendatory verses and 'metempsychosis'; 3. 'Sir Pol': dating, identification and satiric method; 4. Volpone and beast fable; 5. Volpone's Venice; 6. Patronage, plotting, and diabolic possession in the 'main-' and 'bye-plots'; Conclusions and aftermath.
Review
'Professor Dutton's reconstruction of what most engaged Jonson intellectually, emotionally and politically at the watershed moment in his career as a dramatist is never less than fascinating. It is always most persuasive. Ben Jonson, 'Volpone' and the Gunpowder Plot is yet more proof that Jonson's great plays were neither the self-conscious slumming de haut en bas of an anti-theatricalist, nor aloof exercises in the 'timeless' classical style. They were deliberately executed events designed to have an impact in the real political world, and written by a master-craftsman in the living, political art form of the theatre.' Journal of the Northern Renaissance
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