Volpone and WoB Critics Flashcards
Susan Snyder
Comedy, beginning in turmoil but ending in harmony, celebrates life.
Erasmus
Fools are the only plain honest men who speak truth.
Freud
A joke is a metaphorical mask behind which lurk aggressive or obscene thoughts.
Dollimore
Do these plays reinforce the dominant order or do they interrogate it to the point of subversion?
McEvoy
Nothing is stable and untradeable, nothing has value in itself; everything even a human being, has its price
Richard Allen Cave
In all the sum of pleasure Volpone offers Celia, he never includes a constant heart and mind
Partridge
The play “dramatises man’s insatiable greed”.
Goldberg
Mosca and Volpone are “deceived by their own cleverness”.
Miles
The Avocatori are made to represent anything but justice
Leicester
The Wife is “An example of an early feminist, striving for autonomy.”
Hansen
The Wife is a “product of a masculine imagination against which she only ineffectually and superficially rebels”
Winny
She has overthrown the prohibitive morality of the Medieval Church and planted her own pragmatic doctrine of the ruins
Cook
The Wife will never achieve such a charity or the accompanying correction of her ways because she will never submit to a husband in accordance with the sacrament
Robertson
She is not a ‘character’ in the modern sense but … a device created by Chaucer for the purpose of outlining and rejecting a point of view
Finke
The link between sexuality and monetary gain is the key to the Wife’s performance - she produces not children but money
