volpone critics Flashcards
John W. Creaser
“Sir Politic…. Is a kind of parody of Volpone…Both are dominated by self-love”
Alvin Kernan
“Each of the gold seekers, from Volpone to Sir Politic, thinks himself as rising in the social hierarchical scale by his efforts” (rising in the great chain of being)
Diane Maybank
Subplot “reflects the folly of trying to become what one is not! of loosing one’s own nature” If you mimic you loose a sense of what you really are.Man/woman, man/beast crumble Danger of becoming what one is not
Jonson on imitating
Jonson “I have considered our whole life is like a play; …we insist in imitating others, as wee cannot (when it is necessary) return to ourselves”
Wickham
“Mosca functions as a kind of conventional Vice figure”
Hiscock
“Jonson attempts to generate moral impulses in his audience by dramatising a world which has lost all ability to do so”
Campbell
“a sympathetic understanding of Villainy without sentimentalising the villain…later accomplished in poetry with Milton’s Satan”
Volpone
Knapp: “Volpone is a satanic challenger to God’s order and hierarchy”
Huebert
“Competitive masculine energies are displayed by most of the major characters…but Mosca and Volpone know how to exploit those energies in others”“most of the males associate manliness with domination but by the end of the play Volpone begins to feel his own masculinity threatened”
maus
“Celia is a strong-minded character who plays not only a pivotal role in the plot but an important thematic one as well”
Lyne
“Jonson’s characters take the classics far less seriously than Jonson did and this explains how the behaviour of those characters often falls short of classical ideals”
How did Jonson copy the classics
Blevins: “Jonson was imitating the words but not necessarily the sentiments of his classical predecessors”
