Volpone: ‘What a Rare Punishment is Avarice to Itself’

**Philip Rowe** (0:10)
Welcome to The History Of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 213, Volpone. What a rare punishment is avarice to itself.
Last time in All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare took us abroad to an almost recognizable France and Italy. But if his audience were worried about realistic characters with explicable motivations, they would have struggled with that play as many later critics did. Fortunately that wasn't what the contemporary audience were expecting. Although Ben Jonson's next play was a very different sort of theatrical offering, in this respect it does have some similarities with All's Well That Ends Well. To suggest that there was a direct dialogue between Shakespeare and Johnson during this period is a step too far, but we will find some interesting comparisons. Volpone can be played as a realistic piece, but also has elements that put it into the world of the fantastical and the fable.
In the spring of 1606 a new Ben Jonson play premiered, not on this occasion at the Blackfriars Theatre, performed by one of the child companies, but at The Globe and performed by the King's Men. The reasons for why Jonson sold his play to the King's Men are not completely clear. Having a play performed by the King's Men was of course prestigious in itself and some of his early plays had been performed by the Lord Chamberlin's Men, but up to this point for his most recent plays Jonson had seemed to prefer using child companies. It may be that the Children of the Queen's Revels were wary of another Jonson play after the problems that Eastward Ho had caused to the playwrights. Or perhaps Jonson himself felt that it would be wise to distance himself from that association and switching to the adult company was a way of doing that. Then again perhaps Jonson had seen the writing on the wall for the Children of the Queen's Revels after they had got into trouble for a production of a play by John Day called The Isle of Gulls. Written in 1605 and performed early the following year, that play satirised the King's current favourite, The Earl of Somerset, the King himself as a spender of public funds for his personal pleasures and the Queen as a promoter of corrupt personal friends. And although the play was ostensibly set in the arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral romance its English framing and satire of current politics was far too obvious to be ignored. John Day was questioned by the Privy Council and may have spent some time in jail. Some of the boy actors certainly did for a short time. When they were released and got back to the Blackfriars, they found that their patronage had been revoked by Queen Anne and they were now just the Children of the Revels.
Although the company continued to exist until 1616 and would perform Johnson plays in the future, this can be seen as the beginning of a slow decline for child actors. The loss of patronage followed by the long closure of the theatres thanks to the extended outbreak of plague in 1606 led to the lease for the Blackfriars being negotiated back to the Burbages and the King's Men. Negotiations were protracted and the handover of the theatre didn't happen until 1608 It was bad news for the child company, but it gave Shakespeare an indoor space to write for, which is something for which we should all be grateful as it went a long way to shaping his later plays.
More of that another time. Back in 1606, The King's Men premiered the play that was to become Johnson's most consistently performed play. Unfortunately, we have no evidence for who originated the roles in the play, which has led to lots of speculation about how they might have been distributed amongst the company. Following those original performances and the closure of the theatres due to the plague, the company included the play in their repertoire as they toured the south of England, waiting for the plague to abate in London. Performances at Oxford and Cambridge are recorded, and there are suggestions that Johnson was still adding to the play in this period. It remained in the repertoire of the King's Men for many years. A performance for Charles, then Prince of Wales, took place in 1624 and it was again presented at court in 1630 and 1637
Here is a brief synopsis of the plot of Volpone.
The play opens as Volpone, a wealthy Venetian, is admiring his accumulated wealth. He tells Mosca, his servant, how he plans to trick wealthy people into giving him expensive gifts by pretending that he is dying while hinting that, as he is without children or other family, he will make them his heir.