Volpone Essays

Volpone

I desire / the learned and charitable critic to have so much faith in me / to think it was done of industry.

--Ben Jonson, lines 110-112 of the prefatory epistle to Volpone

Ben Jonson’s play Volpone, or “Sly Fox,” was performed for the first time on...

College

Volpone

Before delving into the tense relationship between power, possession, and disease in Jonson’s Volpone, it is first necessary to sift through the forbearing tensions between “profit and pleasure” that Jonson mentioned in the Prologue of the play....

College

Volpone

In her article on English Renaissance Drama, Katharine Eisaman Maus asserts how “in the Renaissance theater, the generic spectator is male, the spectacle female, and in some sense sexually available” (Maus 577), and the play Volpone by Ben Jonson...