Volpone – Animal and Moral Monstrosity

Mihaela-Ilinca TĂNĂSELEA
Ovidius University of Constanţa

Abstract: This essay examines the ways in which the concepts of monstrosity and the
monstrous are dealt with throughout the dramatic interaction in Ben Jonson’s Volpone.
Whereas, on a first reading of the play, monstrosity and the monstrous are perceived as
notions which relay to matters of animal-like physicality, of mere grotesque appearance, it
is really the ethical ambivalence of its characters that formulates the suggestion that
monstrosity essentially bears upon moral corruption. Greed, lust, dishonesty, jealousy are
vices which relate to an understanding of the monstrous and monstrosity congruent to the
Renaissance view upon these notions as a matter of psychological and moral deformity
rather than a non-figurative medieval perspective upon the concepts. As a result, in Ben
Jonson’s Volpone, animal imagery conveying altered animal-like features merely represents
an element of comedy which serves as an amusement trigger, in order to entertain the
audience and achieve dramatic jesting, while moral monstrosity is actually a form of
challenging the social notions of physical monstrosity of the period by opposing the
monstrosity of the mind through monstrous exaggerations of the body. The human-like
mental monstrosity is enhanced through animal-like features of the characters and their
symbolic names. The beast imagery is wisely exploited with the intention of creating an
evocative reflection of a lustful Venice and its felonious, immoral inhabitants. The motif of
the medieval bestiary is accordingly employed by assigning beast-like features to almost
every character who adopts the corresponding behaviour of the animal that gives its name:
Volpone, the sharp-witted fox, a depraved hedonist; Mosca, the deceiving, unscrupulous
parasite; and the three legacy-hunters, Voltore, Corbaccio and Corvino—the insatiable
greed-driven prey birds. The end of Jonson’s comedy unfolds in a moralistic manner, where
Volpone and the other legacy-hunters’ mischievous nature is finally penalized. Their animal-
like depictions—avarice, the continuous illicit chase for fast and easy money—generate the
evil nature of the dramatic figures, which epitomize moral monstrosity.

Keywords: Ben Jonson, early modern drama, grotesque body, medieval bestiaries,
monstrosity, Volpone

This essay examines how animal imagery, conveying altered physical features,
merely represents an element of comedy which serves as an amusement trigger in
order to entertain the audience and achieve dramatic jesting. Alternatively, moral
monstrosity is actually a form of challenging the social notions of physical
monstrosity of the period by opposing the monstrosity of the mind through
monstrous exaggerations of the body. What do the monster-like characters in
Volpone demonstrate? Of what are they signs? To whom and for whom are early
modern monster-like characters constituted as meaningful creatures? I argue that the
mental monstrosity is enhanced in the play through animal-like features of the
characters and their symbolic names. The porosity of the boundaries between what
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was arguably seen as “monstrosity” and what the society would consider “normal”
is enhanced in early modern drama through the metaphors of the body during
dramatic action. Distorted body and mind become significant realities in the world
of the play, which, in their turn, are influenced by cultural representations of
monstrosity drawing on classical and early modern discourses.
Vices displayed during the dramatic interaction in Volpone are mental
monstrosities that affect most characters, while the animal imagery highlights the
parasite symbolism of the play, which indicates how one life-form feeds on another.
By examining the rhetoric of animalization in Volpone, the audiences are compelled
to determine which attributes actually represent the definition of the monstrous. Is
the animalistic allusion a direct designation for monstrosity? Or is it covertly implied
that there is a significant shift of monstrosity in Jonson’s play, from a medieval
physically-deformed understanding of bestiality to a reflection upon the moral nature
of the nobility in Venice? Hence, audiences are made to glimpse the contrasts
between the picture-perfect Venetian civility and its actual beast-like immorality.
The connection to Aesop’s fable of the fox, which shrewdly tricks the crow
into dropping its cheese, is evident in Volpone, being referred to several times during
the dramatic interaction. The play’s Prologue speaks of “our poet” (Prologue 5) who
“makes jests to fit his fable” (Prologue 28).1 The “fable” may be a moralizing story,
in the manner of Aesop’s fables, but it also signifies the products of imagination.
This is a meta-theatrical element that links the world of the play with issues of
authorship and self-mirroring effects. In following this fictional poet’s actions, the
Prologue says that it took the poet five weeks to fully pen the playscript, “From his
own hand, without a coadjutor, / Novice, journeyman, or tutor” (Prologue 16-17).
The originality of the play is, therefore, incontestable, as attested by the text itself.
This self-reflexivity is important in shaping the questions raised about the effects of
monstrosity in the comedy. The Prologue calls the play “this his creature” (Prologue
12)—a creature engendered by the poet’s imagination—which suggests “[a] created
thing or being; a product of creative action; a creation” (Oxford English Dictionary).
Therefore, the relation to the creative aspect of playwriting is clearly delineated from
the start. The Prologue invites the audience “to stop the gaps” in the poet’s “loose
writing” (Prologue 24), and so determine him to be more coherent. The aggressive
emendation of the dramatic text by the audience is expected to occur “With such a
deal of monstrous and forced action” (Prologue 25) that it may be similar to the
activity in “Bedlam” (Prologue 26).2 This self-critical note that Ben Jonson inserts,

1
References to Ben Jonson’s Volpone are keyed to Ben Jonson: Three Comedies, edited by Michael
Jamieson (1985). All references to act, scene, and lines are to this edition and will be given
parenthetically in the text.
2
According to Edward Sugden’s Topographical Dictionary, Bedlam was a medieval priory which
“was soon used as a hospital, and in 1402 was specially appropriated to lunatics” (53). Therefore, the
allusion to Bedlam as a medieval and early modern madhouse in London, in the Prologue of Jonson’s

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which refers to his own writing, demonstrates that the “monstrous and forced action”
of satire can have positive effects in the world of the theatre: to amend the vices
represented through the characters.
The image of the grotesque body in literature has been discussed by many
critics, starting with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body. In the chapter
“The Grotesque Image of the Body and Its Sources” in Rabelais and his World,
Bakhtin argues that gross exaggerations and hyperbole in literary texts are
“fundamental attributes of the grotesque style” (303) and “grotesque imagery
constructs what we may call a double body” (318). As Bakhtin cogently argues,

We find at the basis of grotesque imagery a special concept of the body as a

whole and of the limits of this whole. The confines between the body and the
world and between separate bodies are drawn in the grotesque genre quite
differently than in the classic and naturalist images. (315)

I want to point out the idea of “difference” between the depiction of the body in the
grotesque genre as opposed to classical images. This idea is applicable to Ben
Jonson’s Volpone from the beginning, because the Prologue makes the difference
between other plays (by Ben Jonson or his contemporaries) and this particular
comedy. As the Prologue states, the play “presents quick comedy refined” (Prologue
29); although the play observes the classical unities, of time, place, and character
(Prologue 31),3 the poet will “rub your cheeks” with salt till they become “red with
laughter” (Prologue 35). The grotesque picture of people’s red and bloated cheeks
demonstrates that images of monstrosity trigger not only negative connotations, but
they may provoke the audience to introspection. A fatty monster-like creature with
red cheeks can be as funny as the fox-like character who cons the gullible citizens of
Venice.
The beast-like imagery is exploited in the play to create an evocative
reflection of a lustful Venice and its felonious, immoral inhabitants. In Volpone: A
Critical Guide, edited by Matthew Steggle, Matthew C. Hansen draws our attention
to the fact that audiences would have to choose between understanding Jonson’s
characters to be essentially human, infused with certain animal characteristics as

Volpone, is in accordance with the entire play’s meta-theatrical self-referentiality. Just as the patients
in the madhouse, the play’s “poet” is considered rather mad because he used figures of bestiaries in
the dramatic action. Consequently, the audience are invited to amend this fact by “monstrous and
forceful action” (Prologue 25). Monstrosity, therefore, can be corrective and creative, through satire,
rather than demeaning.
3
As David Bevington observes in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, “Jonson commits
himself to limiting his dramatic action to a period roughly of twenty-four hours and to a single location
(Venice), so that the spectators’ credulity will not be stretched by having to imagine that the stage
represents several distinct places, or that a character is supposed to age before the spectators’ eyes
from a young to an old person” (73).

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indicated by their names, or they could be perceived as “talking animals” (Hansen

173). Hansen goes even further, launching the question: “Which dynamic—
animalistic humans or humanistic animals—is more threatening?” (173). The motif
of the medieval beast-play is accordingly employed by assigning animal-like features
to almost every character who adopts the corresponding behaviour of the animal that
gives its name. Volpone is the sharp-witted fox, a depraved hedonist, who manages
to cunningly deceive Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, at least in the beginning, but
who eventually becomes a victim of his own monstrous mental deformity. Mosca is
the unscrupulous master of disguise, a parasite whose only worth is obeying and
fulfilling his master’s corrupt orders and who ultimately adds disloyalty and perfidy
to his array of moral flaws. Voltore, Corbaccio and Corvino are legacy-hunters who
crave for Volpone’s money and incessantly try to act deludingly in order to lay hands
on Volpone’s fortune. The only character who lacks any animal-featured behaviour,
or other name-alluded attributes, is the virtuous Celia. While not portraying any
grotesque creature-like element, Celia however impersonates the objectified female.
There are two significant readings when referring to the animal imagery in
the play. In his introduction to Volpone: A Critical Guide, Matthew Steggle draws
attention to the fact that Volpone is an “oddity” (1) in the Ben Jonson canon because
of the fact that it lacks “much of Jonson’s characteristic interest in money and
wealth” (1). While this seems a strange thing to say, because riches are so obviously
central to the play, in Volpone, as Steggle argues,

money is interesting because it has a double nature: it is simultaneously the

tool required for a competitive display necessary to exercise social power,
and also the tool required to keep starvation at arm’s length. That doubleness
is what makes it slippery and fascinating. (2)

This paradoxical statement of the “doubleness” encountered in Volpone can be

applied to the play’s delineation of monster-like characters. While the characters bear
animal names and display beastly moral features, it is uncertain which elements
prevail. It is this doubleness, also observed by Bakhtin (318) in his analysis of the
grotesque that, as I argue, informs the representations of the monstrous body in
Volpone. While representing ordinary human beings evolving in the highly civilized
milieu of early modern cosmopolitan Venice, the play re-creates grotesque bodies
whose animal-like features are neither here nor there, neither beastly nor human. In
the language of the theatre, the monstrous body is both spiritual and earthly, both
human and animal.
Monsters in early modern culture are threshold figures that inhabit the porous
boundaries between science and imagination, between public and private. In the
study entitled Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic

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(2011), Wes Williams points out the connection between human imagination and
representations of monsters:

Figures both of and for the imagination, early modern monsters show forth
concerns and connections otherwise concealed by the institutional structures
which governed daily life: those of the family, of colour, caste, and state
politics, and of genre. (14)

Just as other discourses in early modern times, Ben Jonson’s theatre responded to the
social meanings attributed to monsters, but the play creates a different kind of
monsters. Drawing on early modern interpretations of monstrosity and the monster,
the beasts in Volpone, similarly to other dramatic representations of the same period,
are no longer notions that refer to the physically deformed portrayals of characters
but, on the contrary, it is the mental and moral corruption of the dramatic figures that
embodies human corrupt nature, which resembles animalistic behaviour and acquires
grotesque attributes.
Volpone, an Italian equivalent for “fox,” is the protagonist of the play, an
allegedly sick wealthy nobleman who, similarly to the fox’s shrewdness, tricks three
elderly gentlemen into thinking that he is extremely ill, almost on his death-bed.
Volpone’s unscrupulous nature and deceiving personality helps him receive
expensive attentions and gifts from these fortune-hunters. Volpone himself indicates
the similarities between him and the animal that denotes his name. Not only does he
wear “furs” (1.1.85; 1.2.97) and talks as a canny, sly fox, but he actually alludes to
Aesop’s moralistic text through his own suggestive discourse: “[…] and not a Fox /
Stretched on the earth, with fine delusive sleights / Mocking a gaping Crow—ha,
Mosca?” (1.1.94-96). In this conversation, Mosca (the Fly) is not only Volpone’s
interlocutor and the parasite privy to his con-art manipulations, but he is also an alter-
ego of the sly character, cunningly involved in staging the tricks for the gullible and
greedy target-monsters. Negativity does not have any effect on the cunning fox-like
creatures, as Volpone wisely tells Mosca: “The Fox fares ever best when he is
cursed” (5.3.119). Challenges and aggressivity are incentives for provocative
behaviour, according to Volpone.
The identity between Volpone’s character and that of the proverbial fox is
not perfectly overlapping, and Aesop’s fable is again brought into discussion. When,
at the end, Volpone is faced with his gulled victims, he still has the strength to mock
them, implying that Corvino should not have dropped his assets before seeing his
interests accomplished:

A witty merchant, the fine bird Corvino,

That have such moral emblems on your name,
Should not have sung your shame, and dropped your cheese,

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To let the Fox laugh at your emptiness. (5.7.11-14)

This is a direct reference to Aesop’s fable, in which the raven (in Italian, Corvino)
dropped the cheese it was holding in its mouth when trying to sing, in response to
the fox’s flattery, thus letting the fox have its bite.
Aesop’s fable is used as a warning against listening to flattery. In the 1595
English prose translation of Aesop’s fables, translated by William Caxton, in the
fable entitled “Of the Rauen and the Fox,” the moral of the story is clearly set from
the beginning: “They that be glad and joyfull of the praysing of flatterers, often times
they repent them, whereof Esope rehearseth to us such a Fable” (Aesop 74). Flattery
means temptation on the part of the flatterer and vanity on the part of the person
being flattered. Flattery is a moral weakness and it shows lack of virtue, which is one
of the highest manifestations of human reason. Similar to the animalistic lack of
ethics and morality, Volpone intently acts mischievously and unscrupulously in
order to satiate his desires, including seducing or even trying to rape Celia. His
monstrous depiction is mentally and morally enhanced by the animalistic
reminiscence of his name. Volpone uses his corrupt wealth for hedonist indulgences,
while greatly praising his laziness and deceiving skills. He asks Mosca to prepare
him “music, dances, banquets, all delights; / The Turk is not more sensual in his
pleasures / Than will Volpone” (1.5.87-89). Volpone heartily enjoys the riches he
has received from his gulls: “a pearl! / A diamond! Plate! Chequins!” (1.5.89-90),
which Corbaccio and Corvino had let fall in his lap, via Mosca. Volpone’s enjoyment
of sensual pleasures—which he compares to the Ottoman Sultan’s delights—is part
of his beast-like amoral nature. Volpone admits that enjoying riches is “better than
rob churches” (1.5.91) or “eating once a month a man” (1.5.92). Extremely sinful
activities, such as cannibalism, are shown as part of Volpone’s amoral attitude,
according to which nothing can be blameful or shameful.
Volpone is an Epicurean addicted to self-gratification and he totally
disregards ethical values. He worships “gold” (1.1.2) and “sacred treasure” (1.1.13)
with “adoration” (1.1.12) as his sole religion, his only “[D]ear saint” (1.1.21), and
he reflects that the gold he worships is

The price of souls; even hell […]

Is made worth heaven! Thou art virtue, fame,
Honour, and all things else. Who can get thee,
He shall be noble, valiant, honest, wise – (1.1.24-27)

Thus, it is not so much the menace of the animal that startles the audience, but the
beastly moral monstrosity which truly appals. Considering what is funny in Volpone,
Rick Bowers observes:

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Volpone represents a character at once out of control in terms of moral

intelligence, but radically in control of amoral situational intelligence. He
asserts all the energies of the joker, grouch and scapegrace—a figure at once
ethically void and yet constantly registering his ethical stance even as he is
appalled by the unethical extremes of others. (106)

Indeed, rather than being horrified by his worshipping of gold and his lack of morals
in duping others, Volpone is a trickster with a mission: he behaves immorally but his
depraved conduct helps reveal the faults in others. While acting as an irrational
animal—in total ignorance and disregard of human moral laws—Volpone is, in fact,
provoking the gulled characters to behave in a similar manner.
In spite of his sly nature, Volpone displays human gullibility, as he is
shrewdly conned by his seemingly most loyal servant, Mosca. His blind trust and
dependence on Mosca are evidenced by his affectionate discourse. Volpone calls
Mosca “divine” (1.5.83), “loving” (1.2.122), “belovèd” (1.1.30), “sweet” (1.3.48),
or “good” (1.2.66), revealing how his evil nature is cleverly outgrown through
Mosca’s delusive behaviour. Resembling the moralistic fable, Volpone’s and the
other legacy-hunters’ mischievous nature is finally penalized. As the First Avocatore
concludes educationally:

Let all that see these vices thus rewarded,

Take heart, and love to study’em. Mischiefs feed
Like beasts, till they be fat, and they bleed. (5.12.149-151)

This final symbolic simile of the play illustrates—through beast-like comparison—

the rebound effects that evil and vice have on human nature, emphasising the
grotesque elements which epitomize moral perversion. Avarice and the continuous
illicit chase for fast and easy money generates the evil nature of the animal-like
dramatic figures. Moreover, the moral of the story is the moral of the play, because
it is a warning addressed to the audiences, who can “see” (5.12.149) and “study”
(5.12.150), or analyse, the beastly vices unfolding before them.
Another character that displays immoral, beast-like characteristics is Mosca,
Volpone’s misleadingly most loyal servant, a parasite who initially seems to have no
independent judgement. Apparently, he blindly executes his master’s immoral
orders, but secretly, he is also monstrously greed-driven and deceitfully plots against
Volpone. Mosca’s traitorous nature is well disguised through flattery and servile
discourse, displaying his false praise for Volpone. After describing horribly inhuman
actions, such as tearing forth the fathers of poor families out of their beds and sending
them to prison, Mosca observes that Volpone’s “sweet nature doth abhor these
courses” (1.1.48). In a display of dramatic irony, Mosca continues to describe
Volpone’s apparent moral qualities: “You are not like the thresher that doth stand /

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With a huge flail, watching a heap of corn, / And, hungry, dares not taste the smallest
grain” (1.1.53-55); this means that Mosca thinks Volpone is not a miser who amasses
fortunes and refuses to enjoy them. Next, Mosca makes a comparison related to
Venetian commerce: “Nor like the merchant, who hath filled his vaults / With
Romagnia and rich Candian wines, / Yet drinks the lees of Lombard vinegar”
(5.1.57-59). This spatial metaphor, which shows the extent of Venetian commerce
(the Italian provinces of Romagna and Lombardy, but also Candia, or the island of
Crete4) is meant to be flattering in showing that Volpone is not a miser and knows
how to enjoy the pleasures of life. Mosca’s conclusion about Volpone’s character is
logical: “You know the use of riches, and dare give, now, / From that bright heap, to
me, your poor observer” (1.1.62-63). What is amusing in this apparently laudatory
display of Volpone’s riches and his capacity of enjoying them is the negative
characterization, alluded to by the repetition of “no” (1.1.41) “nor” (1.1.41; 1.1.57)
and “not” (1.1.53; 1.1.55; 1.1.60). By emphasizing what he thinks Volpone is not,
Mosca flatters his employer and tries to make him share his riches with him, Mosca,
and the other parasites. In this scene, it is Mosca who is the proverbial flattering fox
from Aesop’s fable, while Volpone is the gull who lets himself be influenced by
complimentary speech.
Mosca uses his manipulative flattery to ensnare Voltore, Corvino and
Corbaccio as well. Mosca addresses Voltore in an apparently laudatory note, but in
fact the adulation of the advocate is a negative description of the profession: Mosca
says that Volpone admires “[m]en of your large profession” (1.3.53), who speak
“contraries” (1.3.54) to every cause, and who “could turn, / And re-turn; make knots,
and undo them” (1.3.56-57). The lawyer’s ability to distort discourse and give
“forked counsel” (1.3.58) is presented as a positive trait, but in fact these descriptions
show the advocate’s manipulative capacity, reflected, as in a mirror-image, in
Mosca’s skilful manipulation of Voltore. Similarly, when addressing Corbaccio,
Mosca cunningly makes him think that every deceitful idea was the result of his own
ingenious plan to inherit Volpone’s fortune, and not the result of Mosca’s shrewd
persuasion. Corbaccio comes to think that the “plot” (1.4.109) was “Mine own
project” (1.4.112) and thus he falls into the trap set by Mosca. Mosca also cleverly
misleads Corvino into believing that Volpone chose him to be his heir, by telling him
that the moribund Volpone pronounced the name “Signor Corvino” as his heir
(1.5.30; 32; 33). The repetition of Corvino’s name is suggestive of Mosca’s skilful

4
The Kingdom of Candia was the official name of Crete during the period when the island was an
overseas colony of the Republic of Venice, from the initial Venetian conquest in 1205-1212 to its fall
to the Ottoman Empire in 1669. According to Edward Sugden’s Topographical Dictionary, Candia
“came into the hands of the Venetians in 1204, and was retained by them till 1648, when the Turks
attacked it and took it after a siege of 20 years” (96). Looking at the Cretan wines from the perspective
of Venetian commerce is a geographic feature of the play that demonstrates the extent of Venetian
wine traffic, from western Italian regions to eastern Greek islands of the Mediterranean.

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manipulation. In fact, Mosca is staging a mini-play in front of Corvino by repeating

vividly the presumed dialogue that took place between the apparently dying Volpone
and his servant.
Mosca’s name is indicative of his dishonest nature and deceitful discourse.
Mosca is the Italian equivalent for fly, an insect which has a parasite existence and
this feature highlights his bloodsucking duplicitous reputation. As Stella Achilleos
concludes about the character of Mosca, “[h]e proves to be an “acute reader of those
around him” (150) and he has an “acute insight into other characters” (162), being
able to manipulate through constant fawning and Machiavellian strategies. Mosca
initially conceals his true treacherous nature from Volpone and the audience,
displaying well-hidden lying abilities and the cleverness to slyly manipulate all three
legacy-hunters. Yet this manipulative attitude is not so contemptible as one might
expect. As Sam Thompson observes about the two characters, “[a]t least temporarily,
Volpone and Mosca evade interpretation in moral terms, as their carnivalesque
energy tugs against the condemnation they inspire” (22). Indeed, because they are
funny but grotesque, and display human weaknesses, the two characters’ monstrous
traits and manipulative energy cannot be entirely detestable. They evolve in the
world of the play as ordinary human beings do, and audiences may even forget that
they have animal or insect names and are supposed to be part of a moral fable.
Dramatic irony makes Volpone and Mosca almost likeable characters—were it not
for the fact that they display vividly grotesque traits that make them similar to what
was believed to be the characteristics of beasts devoid of reason.
Voltore, Corbaccio and Corvino represent the scavengers, Volpone’s wealth
predators. Each of them does his best to live up to his name: lawyer Voltore is the
vulture, elderly gentleman Corbaccio is the raven, and merchant Corvino is the crow.
Their beast-like connection is clearly evidenced through Volpone’s references in
animal language, when he speaks in an aside about his clients:

Now, now, my clients

Begin their visitation! Vulture, kite,
Raven, and gorcrow, all my birds of prey,
That think me turning carcass, now they come. (1.2.87-90)

Carrion birds are symbolic of despicable character because they feed on corpses. As
Volpone says, since the predators think he is turning into a “carcass” (1.2.90), the
dead body of an animal, he might as well prepare the stage for them and play the
moribund victim. When Voltore leaves the setting of Volpone’s enactment of illness,
and Corbaccio is about to enter, Volpone declares: “The vulture’s gone, and the old
raven’s come” (1.3.81). Volpone accurately characterizes these bird-like creatures,
emphasising their greediness and concurrent gullible nature.

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The three avarice-driven villains credulously try, one after another, to lay
hands on Volpone’s prosperity, similarly to how birds of prey feed on carrion,
overlooking the fact that what they actually achieve is adding to Volpone’s wealth.
They are so greed-blinded that each of them is willing to offer expensive gifts, or to
make surprising compromises, in order to become Volpone’s only heir. Corvino’s
insatiability, for instance, culminates with his decision to offer Volpone his most
guarded possession, his wife Celia. While he is jealous of his wife looking out of the
window to a “prating mountebank” (2.5.2)—who is actually Volpone in disguise—
Corvino sends Celia to sleep with Volpone. He acts on Mosca’s sly suggestion that
this is the medical recommendation given to Volpone as a last resort (2.5.34-35), to
avoid his imminent death. Corvino orders Celia to wear her best gown and jewels
and accompany him to a feast “at old Volpone’s” (2.7.17) to prove that he is “free
from jealousy or fear” (2.7.17). Mosca’s persuasive deceit determines Corvino to
disregard his fierce jealously and he willingly offers Celia in exchange of the legacy.
While fear is an animal instinct, jealousy is a human emotion that makes people
behave like animals. Whatever his emotions, Corvino is willing to exchange present
wealth and wife for the promised illusion of grandeur.
Comparably to a moralistic fable, all the depraved characters receive their
punishment, which shows how their degraded moral values bounce back at them
once the truth is unveiled. Volpone himself seems to have foreseen, since the very
beginning, what greed can bring: “’Tis true, ’tis true. What rare punishment / Is
avarice to itself!” (1.4.143-144). While Corvino is humiliated in public by being
made to wear donkey’s ears, Corbaccio loses all his properties in Bonario’s favour,
Mosca becomes a slave, Voltore loses his job for trying to deceive the court in his
benefit, and Volpone is caged like a wild animal. The gulls receive these punishments
because they have succumbed to animalic instincts. In “On Comedy and Death: The
Anamorphic Ape in Volpone,” Isaac Hui gives a discussion of the ape as an
anamorphic figure (as an image of distortion and deformity, constantly changing
shape, as well as challenging the audience’s perspective) in order to conclude that
the dwarf in Volpone is an important character that can be related to ideas such as
imitation, death, and castration (137). Hui remarks that “within the centre of the play
is a hook, with its image of distortion and compression” (141); this illustration hints
to the fact that “Volpone becomes an image of distortion and compression in the
end” (141), which Hui links to the anamorphic image. I would go even further in
analysing this image of the hook to say that an animal carcass is hung on a hook, so
this is a fit punishment for a human being who falls prey to animalistic impulses.
Last but not least, I would link the grotesque images of the animalistic body
and the visceral instincts to the harsh sounds produced in the play, which are aural
representations of the monstrous body in motion. There are onomatopoeic and
metaphoric sounds, such as those suggested by the names of the characters
themselves; incidentally, for instance, the cry of an aggressive fox, in nature, is

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similar to that of a crow or any bird of prey. There are also many songs in the play,
such as Mosca’s song about fools (1.2.66-81), Sir Peregrine’s song about elixirs and
drugs (2.2.114-125) and his song about medicines for the ailments of the soul
(1.2.182-193), as well as Volpone’s song for Celia, when he is disguised as the
mountebank Scotto Mantua (3.7.165-183). Beside their purpose of lulling the
audience into a false sense of security through the sounds of music, the songs in the
play are acoustic symbols of deceit and human monstrosity disguised as beautiful
harmony. However, there are also more subtle sounds, suggested by the animal
imagery in the comedy. When Nano presents Androgyno as a person in whom is
“enclosed the soul of Pythagoras” (1.2.6), an entire philosophy connected with
metempsychosis and the harmony of sound and music is represented. As Nano
continues in his long monologue about the transmigration of souls (in a mock-form
of the Pythagorean tradition), the souls of the ancients passed on to animals: “ox and
ass, camel, mule, goat, and brock” (1.2.23). This inventory of animals is spoken in
the mocking manner adopted by Nano, the dwarf, so the animal names are
accompanied by the sounds they make. This discussion about the Pythagorean theory
of the transmigration of souls is by no means incidental, since it sets the scene for
the development of animal imagery in the play.
The animalistic allusions in Volpone are not direct markers of monstrosity.
Although audiences might expect metaphoric representations of monstrosity in the
manner of medieval bestiaries, the play subverts these expectations and represents
apparently normal Venetians, whose social behaviour configures moral monster-like
characteristics. The transition from the metaphoric implications of animal-like
figures to the sophisticated and complex social interaction is achieved in the play by
means of exaggeration and loud expression. While pretending to take over the
features of animalistic bestiaries, the characters in the play reconfigure a social
reality in which loud gestures and strident sounds typify conflictual relations. Rather
than being mere metaphors of animality, the comedy dramatizes covert relationships
of greediness, hatred, and fear, in the resplendent milieu of commercial Venice. Like
the sonorous beating of drums and trumpets calling the audience to a carnival, the
grotesque moral interactions of the animal-like bodies in the play are triggers of
conflicting emotions that show the ambiguity of absolute moral statements. The
amplifications of the grotesque body in Volpone are strident and lead to the limit of
exaggeration, creating an aural/sonorous effect. This is possible in the context of the
physicality of the theatre, where the actors’ bodies on stage are both real (in the sense
that they reflect a physical personality) and imaginary (because they represent
animal-like characters). The rhetoric of animalization, therefore, is both real and
imaginary: while viewing loudly-speaking and monstrous characters on stage,
audiences can imagine their metaphorical ethical equivalent.

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