THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

misanthropy to public scrutiny and ridicule. In order to spite his nephew, he marries himself to a ‘silent woman’, but
his bride first turns out to be a nagging shrew and is ultimately revealed to be no bride at all, but a boy dressed as a
girl. The comedy ends with a disturbing ambiguity, not with the tidy romance of a marriage but with a necessary
divorce and with the financial justification of Morose’s disinherited nephew, Sir Dauphine Eugenie (another ‘wellborn’
heir).
The Alchemist centres not on the admirable tricker as the exposer of folly but on the professional trickster as the
maker of fools. It begins with a noisy quarrel (‘I fart at thee’, ‘I’ll strip you’, ‘I’ll gum your silks | With good strong
water’), rapidly develops by setting a series of carefully engineered schemes in motion, gathers speed in the third act,
and then seems to head towards an inevitable catastrophe which Jonson averts by letting the intrigue unwind rather
than explode. The whole action of the play is confined to a house in Blackfriars, but as the original audience in the
Blackfriars Theatre must have guessed, the play draws a larger London, including that of the audience’s experience
and expectations, into itself. When in the last act Subtle, the alchemist of the title, vanishes, he is left free to find
more gulls in whatever larger London he escapes into (indeed his erstwhile assistant, Face, offers to send him a
customer ‘now and then, for old acquaintance’). In the course of the action Subtle and Face have managed to exploit
an extraordinary range of urban suckers (Mammon the gourmandizing knight, Drugger the tobacco seller, Surly the
gamester, and the self-righteous Puritans Tribulation Wholesome and his deacon, Ananias), but we are left at the end
with the feeling that the next victim may be sitting next to us in the theatre. Jonson exploits similarly disconcerting
effects in Bartholomew Fair, a play set in London’s once great August Fair. The Fair, with its multi-purpose sideshows
(such as Ursula’s pig tent which serves as eating-house, privy, and brothel, where ‘you may ha’ your punk, and
your pig in state, sir, both piping hot’), is in fact an unrestrained, carnivalesque city beyond the City. Those who
attempt to restrain it, witness against it, or jeer at it, whether
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they be Justice Adam Overdo, the Puritan Zeal-of the-Land Busy, or the two gallants, Quarlous and Winwife, are
drawn willy-nilly into its reversals, ambiguities, surprises, and role changes. ‘Remember you are but Adam, flesh and
blood!’, the floundering Overdo is counselled at the end of the play, ‘You have your frailty; forget your other name of
Overdo and invite us all to supper’. He can do nothing but accede.
Volpone, or The Fox is Jonson’s most savage comedy. Despite its title and its Italianate menagerie of characters
(‘Fox’, ‘Flesh-fly’, ‘Vulture’, ‘Crow’, ‘Raven’) it never seeks to reduce men to beasts or mere concepts. Its virtuous
characters, Celia (‘Heavenly’) and Bonario (‘Good’), may act like ciphers and may mouth moral platitudes, but they
leave us wondering how else uprightness might express itself in such a singularly naughty world. The Venice of
Volpone is anything but serene. Its merchants are unscrupulous and self-seeking, its husbands mercenary and violent,
its lawyers mendacious and corrupt, and even visitors to it mistake its dissimulation for sophistication. In Volpone’s
superbly modulated opening speech all values are reversed or thrown open to redefinition:
Good morning to the day; and next my gold
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint.
[Mosca draws a curtain, revealing pales of gold]
Hail the world’s soul, and mine! More glad than is
The teeming earth to see the longed-for sun
Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram,
Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his;
That lying here, amongst my other hoards,
Show’st like a flame by night, or like the day
Struck out of chaos, when all darkness fled
Unto the centre. O, thou son of Sol
But brighter than thy father, let me kiss,
With adoration, thee, and every relic
Of sacred treasure in this blessed room.
Volpone flaunts his riches as did Venice in its prime, and like the city he glories ‘more in the cunning purchase of my
wealth | Than in the glad possession, since I gain no common way’. Nevertheless, he allows that gold overturns the
metaphors of pagan legend and Christian Scripture alike; it usurps the splendours of nature and the joys of love and
even renders hell ‘with thee to boot’ worth heaven. Volpone is no Marlovian outsider, no aspiring intellectual no
detached, clever upstart (unlike Subtle); he is an aristocratic insider with a particular flair for exploiting the darker,
passive side of mercantile acquisitiveness. He is, above all, a man of creative energy, one who splendidly acts out a
series of roles (the plutocrat, the invalid, the mountebank, the musician, the poet, the lover) but one who is finally