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    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "Volpone"
    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "Volpone"
    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "Volpone"
    Ebook41 pages39 minutes

    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "Volpone"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "Volpone," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 3, 2016
    ISBN9781535842198
    A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "Volpone"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Ben Jonson's "Volpone" - Gale

      1

      Volpone

      Ben(Jamin) Jonson

      1605

      Introduction

      Jonson was a serious classicist who modeled his plays on classic Roman and Greek tragedies. Jonson thought that the poet had a moral function to educate, and the purpose of Volpone is to teach lessons about greed. The topic is quite serious, although this is comedy, and there are many moments of humor in the play, especially when Volpone is feigning illness and lies disguised. This play is, in many ways, a play within a play. Volpone and Mosca are actors playing roles throughout, but they are also directors leading the three fortune hunters, Corvino, Voltore, and Corbaccio, through their performances. Jonson differed from other playwrights of the period in that he did not use old stories, fables, or histories as the sources for his plays. Instead, Jonson used a plot type as the source for most of his plays. In Volpone, the plot is the familiar one of a swindle. The action is set in Venice, which many Englishmen thought was a center of debauchery and sin. Jonson’s characters are not well defined, nor do they have any depth. Instead, they are types familiar to the audience: the dishonest lawyer, the jealous old husband married to a beautiful young girl, and the miserly old man who cannot be satisfied until he can amass even more money.

      Volpone was first performed in 1605. Since there were no reviews, the audience’s exact reaction cannot be known. But we do know from letters and diaries that Jonson was not popular with audiences. His plays provided morals and tended to preach to the audience, something they resented. William Shakespeare’s plays were much more popular, since they set out to entertain, and this fact was not lost on Jonson, who is credited with being privately annoyed at Shakespeare. Volpone is considered Jonson’s most popular work, since it is the one most frequently staged.

      Author Biography

      Jonson was born in about 1572. The date is uncertain since Elizabethans were very casual about the recording of exact dates. He was a scholar, a poet, and a dramatist. Jonson was born near London shortly after the death of his father. He was educated at Westminster School and for a short period worked as a bricklayer for his stepfather. Jonson was briefly in the military, where he killed

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