"In Renaissance Venice, Greed is Fun, Festive, and Energetic… but Is It Good?!: Ben Jonson, "Volpone""
Dr. Eric Nicholson

The Tragedy of Othello ends in a bed, and the comedy of Volpone, or The Fox begins in one, back in Venice. We are invited to imagine ourselves inside a sumptuous palazzo, where an aging and fabulously wealthy “Magnifico,” as much for fun as for profit, pretends to be dying and ready to choose his heir among a pack of gift-giving but self-interested, scavenging, and insatiably greedy Venetians, likened to a crow, raven, and vulture. Several English characters, early practitioners of the Grand Tour of Italy, also enter the scene, which changes to an “obscure nook” of the Piazza San Marco. Here Volpone disguises himself as a mountebank, and like a quack Dottore of the “commedia dell’arte” hustles his “precious liquor” to an admiring crowd, until the insanely jealous merchant Corvino interrupts the proceedings, aptly calling himself a Pantalone and casting his innocent wife as a promiscuous “Franciscina”. More intriguing encounters and complications ensue, as Jonson takes us on a rollicking imaginary trip through Venice’s houses, courts, streets, piazze, and canals, filled with twists, turns, and an exciting climax that enables audiences to think deeply while they also laugh heartily. As we will discuss, a major facet of Jonson’s theatrical portrait of Venice is the reflecting link between the opulent “floating” city of Palladio’s glittering façades of Palladio, Titian’s sensual paintings, the courtesan poet Veronica Franco’s love lyrics, the erotic madrigals of Monteverdi, the lavish banquets of Carnival, private parties in gleamingly gilt gondolas, etc. and the booming, ambitious, and ever more commercialized early 17th century metropolis of London. Thus the superstar city of Venice, on the Globe stage not far from the Thames river, can be strangely familiar, a fantasy island filled with fun facts, and a still modern mirror of personal identities and social relationships lacerated by competitive, acquisitive, obsessive greed. And did I mention that this play is inventively smart as well as outrageously funny?!