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Seeing to Things in <I>Volpone</I>

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Seeing to Things in <I>Volpone</I> SEEING TO THINGS IN VOLPONE Frances Nicol Teague NEAR THE END OF VOLPONE, Volpone turns on Corvino and says to him: Methinks Yet you, … the fine bird Corvino, That have such moral emblems on your name, Should not have sung your shame and dropped your cheese, To let the Fox laugh at your emptiness. (V.viii.9–14)1 This speech alludes to one of Aesop’s fables, but it also refers to images in emblem books. Emblems, combining the visual and the verbal, offer a resource for this play. In this instance, Gilles Corozet’s Hecatomgraphie (1542) has as its “eleventh fable that of the fox and the crow with its motto/title ‘Ne croire la louange des flateurs,’ and its woodcut of the crow dropping the cheese into the fox’s mouth.”2 Clearly, Volpone refers to this woodcut or one similar to it using the fable from Aesop (see Figure 1). The lines may also recall that one of the play’s sources is beast lore. D. A. Scheve explains that: The episode of the fox feigning death is set forth in detail in a book Jonson had in his own library,’ Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animahum (1557): When she [the fox] sees the flocks of birds flying about, she lies prone on the ground and at the same time shuts her eyes, and places her snout on the ground, and holds her breath, and at once assumes the appearance and likeness of one sleeping or rather dead. But when the birds see her thus stretched out upon the ground, thinking her dead, they glide down in flocks, and sitting on her, they mock her, as it were. But the fox devours them with her gaping and threatening mouth as 1All quotations from Volpone are taken from Brian Parker’s Revels edition, although I have also checked the text in C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925–52), v. V, 11–137. 2Laurence Grove, Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture: Emblems and Comic Strips (Aldershot, 2005), 36. 112 SEEING TO THINGS IN VOLPONE 113 they approach her snout.3 This episode of the fox feigning death is not in an emblem, but as Robert Evans has pointed out, an emblem may serve as an analogue. Alciatus’ emblem no. 159, for instance, carries the motto “Opulenti haereditas” (“The inheritance of a rich man”). The accompanying picture shows a raven and vulture pecking at a naked corpse identified as Patroclus, the Greek warrior. The epigram explains that while the Trojans took Patroclus’ belongings, the Greeks were left with his body, and the poem moralizes the event by noting that “This little story is acted out when a rich man dies.” The poem goes on to identify the scavenging birds as a raven (coruis) and vulture (vultur), analogues to Jonson’s Corvino and Voltore.4 Volpone is, of course, set in Venice, a city that might be said to be the crossroads of the eastern and western Mediterranean, given its strategic position at the head of the Adriatic Sea, Figure 1. Wenceslas Hollar, etching “Fox as well as its commercial ties to western and Crow” from John Ogilby, The Fables of Aesop, Paraphras’d in Verse and Europe and to Constantinople. It was in Adorn’d with Sculpture (London, 1665), Venice that Aldus first published the 337; courtesy of WikiMedia Commons. Hieroglyphica in 1505, a work that helped initiate the growing popularity of emblem books across Europe, and in 1546, Aldus would also publish a Venetian edition of Alciati’s popular emblem book, which went through well over 100 editions.5 Such emblems constituted an important part of the mental world of Europe, helping to provide a common base of references across national boundaries, growing out of shared classical references, proverbs and mottoes, and visual associations. The Venetian characters of Volpone look at the world with that common base of reference, and 3D. A. Scheve, “Jonson’s Volpone and Traditional Fox Lore,” RES, n.s. 1 (1950), 242–4. 4Robert C. Evans, “Jonson and the Emblematic Tradition: Ralegh, Brant, the Poems, The Alchemist, and Volpone, Comparative Drama 29 (1995), 130. 5 Henry Green, “Andreae Alciati, Emblematum Fontes Quatuor; Namely an Account of the Original Collection, Made at Milan, 1522, and Photolith Facsimiles of the Editions, Augsburg 1531, Paris 1534, and Venice 1546” (London, 1870). 114 FRANCES NICOL TEAGUE Jonson expected his London audience to share it as well. Yet a seventeenth- century Venetian, or any cultured person in the Mediterranean, would have recognized the image of the foolish crow, even if not understanding the English play that refers to it. Like the magnificence of Venetian art, emblem books and staged action formed a visual culture that persisted across national and linguistic boundaries, tying the Mediterranean to the European world at large. Other emblems also lie behind the play.6 In one a fox, traditionally crafty, is beguiled by love, much as Volpone loses sight—and control—of his confidence trick because of his desire for Celia. In another a fox gazes at an actor’s mask and marvels at the face with no mind (see Figure 2); Volpone constantly underscores the difference between Volpone’s “wolfish nature” and the mask he presents to Figure 2. Andrea Alciati, the world. Given that “wolvish” nature, it is Emblematum liber (Augustae perhaps pertinent that a traditional allegory for Vindelicorum, 1531), pl. 189; Avarice depicts a woman with a wolf behind courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. her, while that for Cunning (Astuzia Ingannevole) shows a woman wearing fox fur. The subplot of Volpone may invert an emblem, as Evans notes: Whitney’s emblem on the “virtues of wives” describes and depicts Modesty as a woman with her finger at her lips (symbolizing silence) who stands on the back of a tortoise (93b). Anyone who recalled this emblem would have taken extra delight in Lady Politick Would-be, who is anything but modest or silent, and whose hen-pecked husband (in a memorable moment) climbs under a tortoise shell. In Whitney the tortoise symbolizes a wife who stays at home (not a virtue practiced by Lady Would-be), so that if Jonson had this emblem at all in mind, he gives the woman-on-a-tortoise image a nicely ironic twist.7 6Evans mentions a number of other relevant emblems in Whitney. Online databases are wonderful tools for examining emblem books, making it clear how often a particular emblem might appear in different books. On 26 August 2008 I found the fox beguiled by love through the University of Illinois’ Open Emblem Portal <http://media.library.uiuc.edutprojects/oebp/>; it occurs in Otto Vaenius, Amorum Emblemata as emblem 118. The fox holding a mask is from Alciato, Book of Emblems, emblem 189 <http://wwvv.mun.ca/alciatate189.html>. Avarice and Cunning occur in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (Perugia, 1764), v. 1, 177, 179; Evans, 130. Allen Gilbert’s work is also important in understanding Jonson’s use of allegorical figures, and I want to acknowledge this work as the one that first introduced me to that aspect of Jonson’s technique. 7Evans, 129. SEEING TO THINGS IN VOLPONE 115 Finally, Brian Parker has unearthed more information about fox lore and illustrations of foxes, especially the way the play employs material from Reynard tales. Parker remarks that “In fact, as one examines the texts and iconography of the many Reynard versions, it becomes clear that certain incidents were much more popular than others, both to writers and to visual artists.”8 It seems an especially astute point to make about this particular play, a work that depends so heavily on the visual effect to makes its point. In this essay I want to consider how one looks at Volpone, or more particularly how one looks at stage bodies and objects.9 As the fox lying on the ground must be seen if it is to capture its dinner, so too the play must be seen in order to capture its audience. If a reader studies Volpone as a text alone, that experience is incomplete. Like the emblem that Volpone mentions, one must have the picture as well as the words. Ben Jonson was well aware of the importance of both the visual and the verbal. As he remarks in Timber, or, Discoveries, “Whosoever loves not picture, is injurious to truth, and all the wisdom of poetry.”10 While I would not want to suggest that one is “injurious to … the wisdome” of Volpone unless viewing it as exclusively emblematic, one must find a way of including the stage pictures in the play as well as the language. Volpone’s use of stage furniture is important, as is his dizzying rhetoric. Sir Politic Would-be’s logorrhea matters, but so does his tortoise shell. David Bergeron notes one such moment: When Mosca in Volpone informs Lady Would-be that her husband is ostensibly cavorting with “the most cunning courtesan in Venice” (III.v.20), she makes a puzzling request. She determines to find Sir Politic, and she asks of Mosca: “I pray you, lend me your dwarf.” He acquiesces: “I pray you, take him” (29). And off she goes, dwarf in hand. This whole incident, such a small, seemingly insignificant matter, we pass over in the text as we read; editors of the text, including Herford and Simpson in their copiously documented edition, apparently find it unworthy of comment. But in a report on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Volpone in Stratford in Fall 1983, Tony Howard notes that Lady Would-be’s “lend me your dwarf” evoked applause from the audience.
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