Theoretical Approaches to Jonson's Volpone

        By the midpoint of the semester in English 211, you have acquired a vocabulary of words with which to describe a drama's parts.  You probably can read it well enough to get at least some of the comedy and satire.  That enables you to take a seat at the scholarly table. Now let's listen to what they're saying in the ongoing scholarly conversation which English majors study formally in English 215 (Critical Methods).  What do scholars do when they try to discover something new about this play?

 

     These are some current theoretically-supported approaches:

Structural analysis--how do the play's acts work together to construct, bring to a crisis, and resolve the plot's situation?  how do the characters set up oppositions of greed-generosity, powerfulness-powerlessness, insider-outsider, etc. etc. to dramatize Jonson's intentions?  how does the Venice-London opposition play out in the Volpone/Sir Politic Would-be plots, and to what degree do they reflect different (and similar?) problems about identity, social values, gender roles, or what have you?

 

Historical analysis--what are the play's ancestors in Roman satire and more recent adaptations of that satire in English lit. (e.g., Wyatt "Mine Own John Poins"), and how does Jonson spin that tradition to create something new, original, yet connected to the great past?  what was the English attitude toward the Italians at the turn of the C17, and how did the play's satire of contemporary English and Italian manners reflect the facts of life on the street in London or Venice?

 

Deconstruction--do any of the play's binary oppositions (see structural analysis above and feminist criticism below) break down because characters refuse to fit the categories or fit into both rather than only one?  if so, what does that tell us about the values the binary opposition asserts to be "natural" or "normal"?

 

Feminist analysis (also a subset of structuralism)--how does the play construct masculinity and femininity as a set of gestures and speech acts successfully (or unsuccessfully) performed?  what role does reproduction (sexual, imitative, etc.) play in the plot and how does that reflect a view of the "female" biological role [and is that view typical of Jacobeans or particularly Jonsonian]?  how are issues of legitimacy and illegitimacy raised as part of the inheritance plot, or the mountebank plot, as reflections of male anxieties about identity arising from the reproductive act?

 

     There are other ways to look at the play, of course, but those are some of the critical moves available to experienced scholars, and it's our job to begin joining that society.