Luxury in Volpone

Volpone takes place in Venice, one of the great centres of international commerce in early modern Europe. Jonson thus portrayed luxury as an alien vice, but his London audience would have had no problem recognizing in Volpone’s Venice an image of their own increasingly cosmopolitan trading capital. The main character of the comedy, Volpone is a rich magnifico – a nobleman – who pretends to be fatally ill. He has no family, so in the hope of inheriting his fortune, the merchant Corvino, the old gentleman Corbaccio and the advocate Voltore compete for Volpone’s favour by false flattery and expensive gifts – incited by Volpone’s servant and confederate Mosca. Volpone, of course, has no intention of naming any of them as heirs – and much less of dying – he merely seeks to satisfy his lust for pearls, silverware and gold. The play opens with Volpone’s homage to his treasure:

Perhaps Jonson remembered this opening monologue, when he concluded his Entertainment at Britain’s Burse with the line: ‘And god make me Rich, which is the seller’s prayer’ (Ref. 1, p. 140).³ Volpone’s worship of gold has a no less evident religious flavour. His talk of souls, adoration, relic and the sacred paints his greed as idolatry. This is in line with Augustin and Aquinas, who relate idolatry to a preference of sensual pleasures over the spiritual world of God. In the predominantly protestant England of Jonson’s time, such idolatrous practice was particularly associated with Catholicism, the dominant faith in Volpone’s Venice and in England’s chief military and economic rivals, France and Spain.Reference Eisaman Maus⁴

Volpone’s idolatrous worship of gold is in essence a worship of luxury. Luxury had two meanings in the age of Jonson, and he plays on both. In the Christian Middle Ages luxury (luxuria) designed excessive bodily appetites, in particular ‘lust’. This was still the common meaning in Jonson’s England.Reference Berry⁵ It is therefore not surprising that Volpone is quite a voluptuary, who is ready to spend a fortune to sleep with Corvino’s wife Celia. This association between luxury and illicit erotic appetites also quickly became part of the popular image of the Royal and New Exchange.Reference Baer⁶

The other meaning of luxury stems from the Roman Republican vocabulary, where luxury designated an excessive expenditure of wealth, often associated with declining elites or unmerited people rising to prominence. As such it was distinguished from the ‘magnificence’ expected of those entitled to power and wealth (Ref. 5, pp. 84–86). This idea of luxury was revived by Italian humanists and would be familiar to a man of such classical learning as Ben Jonson. It therefore seems deliberately ironic to give Volpone the title of magnifico in Venice, an Italian republic often praised among republican-inclined English Protestants as the true inheritor of the classical Roman republic (in contrast to modern Rome, the centre of the Catholic church), but also a city known in England as the ‘pleasure capital of Europe’.Reference McPherson⁷ For Volpone precisely embodies the degeneration of the civic virtue of magnificence into the private vice of luxury.

Jonson thus offers the spectator several interlinked perspectives on his main character. There is a Christian framework associating luxury with idolatrous sensual appetites, which is again linked to a stereotypical critique of the Catholic Church. And there is a political framework, which censures the pursuit of extravagant private pleasures for its disturbance of the social order and eclipse of civic virtue.

Now, the question is: how do we grasp this critical portrayal of luxury in its historical context? A critic such as Don E. Wayne describes the main theme of Volpone as a conflict between a ‘traditional moral doctrine of social obligation’ and the more modern principles of ‘rational self-interest, […] bourgeois acquisitiveness and individualism’ involving an ‘anticipatory awareness of the phenomenon of alienation in both the Marxian and existentialist senses of the term.’Reference Wayne⁸ In a somewhat similar vein, Stephen Greenblatt sees Volpone as an estranged, secularized individual who ‘has lost any immediate relationship to the order of the world’, and ‘is no longer enclosed in a web of sympathetic intercommunication linking all created things’Reference Greenblatt⁹ Such interpretations run the risk of illustrating the problem I mentioned earlier of using concepts that are foreign to what they seek to describe. To propose an alternative view, we must take a closer look at the relation between luxury, the market and the social order in Jonson’s London.

Luxury, the Market and Social Order

The English economy around 1600 was characterized by a chronic shortage of money. This was a hundred years before banknotes were first circulated by the Bank of England, so the value of money was basically the value of the gold and silver of which coins were made. The shortage of money was due to the scarcity of precious metals, but also to large state expenditures, a trade deficit and foreign exchange rates. This meant, in the words of historian Craig Muldrew, that the English domestic economy in Jonson’s time was basically ‘a credit economy in which everything was measured in monetary prices, but where money was not the primary means of exchange.’Reference Muldrew¹⁰ This network of credit was so extensive that according to Muldrew, the whole economy became ‘a system of cultural, as well as material, exchanges in which the central mediating factor was trust’ (Ref. 10, p. 85). If we return to Volpone, we see that his fortune is precisely built on a breach of the trust and reciprocity on which the credit economy of the time relied. In other words, Volpone is hardly a figure of bourgeois individualism or a liberal homo economicus. He does not do any trading, and he is not an egotist because he acts according to the rules of the market, but because he acts against them and the common good.

Now, this is of course only true to the extent that we do not consider Volpone’s extravagant spending as a way of re-circulating wealth to the general benefit of the market. But this would not be the general opinion at the time about the consumption of precious pearls, wines and meals consisting of ‘the heads of parrots, tongues of nightingales, /The brains of peacocks, and of ostriches’ (III.vii.201-2). As Alison V. Scott notes in her excellent reading of the play’s luxury motive, this extravagant menu deliberately evokes Pliny’s condemnation of the ‘trifles’ consumed in times of ‘moral corruption and luxury.’Reference Scott¹¹ Jonson’s contemporary, Michael Drayton, was one amongst many to complain about what he saw as a movement away from contentment with English abundance towards the taste for superfluous foreign ‘trash’ (Poly-Olbion (1612), 16.348-58 (citation from Ref. 1, footnote 13). Likewise, leading Mercantilists such as Gerard de Malynes, Thomas Mun and Thomas Milles linked the national trade deficit to the infiltration of the English market by exotic luxury goods (Ref. 5, pp. 102–106).Reference Harris¹² Since they saw wealth gained by foreign merchants as money lost for the English crown, the purchase of such goods was not perceived as benefiting the national market, but rather as a damaging drainage of the commonwealth’s capital and, as we have seen, as an affront to God.

In line with this critique, Jonson is careful to underline the international orientation of Volpone’s desire, not only in his taste for exotic commodities, but also in his luxurious appetite for women. To the dismay of Corvino’s wife, the modest Celia, Volpone thus attempts to seduce her by invoking an erotic cosmopolitan charade, where Celia will first appear as Europa and Erycine, and then

There is something dizzying in this flight of erotic imagination circling the globe in search of exotic arousal. The Protean space created in these lines echoes the disorienting ‘new region’ of foreign goods on display in Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse. The imaginative pleasure Volpone takes in creating such a space does not correspond too well with Don E. Wayne’s idea of Volpone as an emblem of ‘rational self-interest’ in the Adam Smithian sense. Instead, Volpone is portrayed as irrational. What characterizes him is not acquisitive individualism, but a lust for novelty, transformations and charades. He satisfies this desire through exotic luxury and the bedridden theatrical performance that earns him his fortune: the role he plays as an old, dying man for his greedy, presumptive heirs. As he says: ‘I glory/More in the cunning purchase of my wealth/Than in the glad possession’ (I.i.30-2).

It is this irrepressible desire for performance and deception, this insatiable urge to invent and play new tricks on his three visitors that spells Volpone’s end. This is evident in the opening of the Fifth Act, where Volpone has skilfully avoided exposure and defeated his opponents. His servant Mosca sensibly warns him that ‘Here we must rest. […] We cannot think to go beyond this’ (V.i.13-15). But Volpone does just that when he feigns his own death and installs Mosca as heir only to secretly glory in the chagrin of his visitors. This irrational move puts an end to his income and unnecessarily imperils him. Volpone here seems less of a rational homo economicus than a truly comical character at the mercy of a desire that drags him irresistibly towards his downfall. For when Mosca takes advantage of his new position to extort his master, they are soon both undone.

This ending teaches a moral lesson about the impossibility of standing outside or above social relations. For Volpone’s final imprisonment is ultimately caused by his disregard for the personal desires and ambitions of Mosca, his indispensable middleman. According to Stephen Greenblatt, Volpone is a portrait of modern man alienated from a traditional social order. It is certainly true that Volpone disdains both the institution of marriage and the trust of his peers. But the play’s ending reveals that Volpone’s independence from social relations and obligations was an ego-fantasy that made him blind to his reliance on his servant Mosca. Because of this blindness, the master unwittingly teaches his servant the fatal lesson of deceitful role-playing, which leads the servant to imagine that he can take the master’s place. Thus, Jonson not only condemns Volpone’s fraudulence as a sin and a breach of trust. He also portrays it in classical Republican terms as a threat to the ‘natural order’ of a body politic in which the corruption of the elites spreads to the lower social strata, who then threaten to turn the social hierarchy upside-down.

A Moral Comedy?

Such a moral lesson spoke well to a time and place concerned with social mobility and the moral effects of modern consumer culture. However, the lesson is complicated if we take into account the stage from which it was first delivered, the commercial theatre of the Globe. Contrary to his contemporary, William Shakespeare, Jonson did not write for only one Theatre Company and its stage, but for a number of competing playhouses. Without any secure income, he therefore continuously had to assert himself on the literary market. A paramount testimony to the self-confidence with which this bricklayer’s son did so, was his publication in 1616 of the Works of Benjamin Jonson, a publication often seen as one of the first instances of a modern author self-consciously presenting dramas written for the public stage to an anonymous public as works of serious literature.Reference Donaldson¹³ Jonson also often used the prologues of his comedies to praise their author. Volpone is a case in point. In its prologue, Jonson proudly claims that it had only taken him five weeks to pen it – without any assistance – and he favourably compares his ‘refined’ classical comedy with the ‘loose writing’ of other authors (Prologue, 24-29).

This self-promoting prologue is strangely echoed in Volpone’s boastful opening monologue. As we saw, this monologue casts Volpone in the stereotypical image of a Catholic ‘idolater’. Incidentally, Jonson himself had converted to Catholicism some years previously. Another parallel between the author and his protagonist is suggested by the fact that Volpone’s scheme relies on the construction of an elaborate theatrical performance, staging himself in the role of an old man whose secret motivation is a joy in deceiving and manipulating, revelling in the imagined luxury of Celia dressed in extravagant costumes. Volpone, in a sense, is both the director and main actor of his own drama. If we pursue this parallel a bit further, we might wonder if there is not also a resemblance between Volpone’s three visitors, who pay something like an entrance fee in the vain hope of getting a precious reward, and the audience paying to see Jonson’s play – including the wealthy patrons on whom he also relied financially. Certainly, both Volpone’s visitors and the theatre’s were presented with illusions, plots and actors. And perhaps Jonson’s audience and sponsors, like Volpone’s, were hoping for a reward. If not a pecuniary return of investment, then at least a moral lesson (which is all Volpone’s visitors get in the end as well). Jonson promises as much in the prologue, when he purports ‘to mix profit with your pleasure’ (Prologue, 8), thus recalling Horace’s dictum about comedy’s purpose to instruct and delight. What Jonson offers in return, in other words, is the play’s moral lesson about the wasteful nature of luxury. But the wording is a little ambivalent here: ‘To mix profit with your pleasure’. While the audience gets the ‘pleasure’, it is not so certain who will profit, and whether this profit really is a moral and not in fact a monetary gain – the gain, perhaps, of the author writing for the commercial public stage.

In this way, the play seems to acknowledge an ambivalent attitude towards the moral value of theatre and comedy. Such ambivalence is characteristic of Jonson, who often expressed doubt about the public audience’s ability to appreciate the finer points of his art.Reference Lake and Questier¹⁴ In this, he was not alone. The public theatres of his day were often accused of threatening the moral and social order. The so-called Puritans were particularly hostile and vocal in their denunciation of the damaging influence of London’s commercial stages. One common motif in their virulent critique was their view of theatre as a kind of idolatry. Thus, the pamphleteer Stephen Gosson claims in the notorious Playes Confuted in five Actions (1582) that since theatre was invented by the ancient Greeks and ‘consecrated to the honour of Heathen Gods’, it was ‘therefore consecrated to idolatrie’Reference Gosson¹⁵ So when Jonson begins his play by letting Volpone deify his gold, he also discreetly evokes this common idea of theatre itself as a place of idolatry that ‘rauish[es] the beholders with varietie of pleasure’ (Ref. 15, p. 17). Furthermore, in the Puritan imagination, theatre was a place of luxury in the sensual sense of the term. Gosson thus claims that public theatres in London – much like the Royal Exchange that he mentions in the same passage – ‘are as full of secrete adulterie as they were in Rome’ (Ref. 15, p. 28). In Histro-Mastix (1632), the Puritan William Prynne seconds that opinion, when he warns that the ‘effect of stage-playes, is luxury, drunkennesse, and excesse’ (1.6.7, cited from Ref. 11, p. 14). Finally, Gosson notes that London’s theatres are gateways for a damaging foreign influence, because their plays draw on ‘baudie Comedies in Latine, French, Italian, and Spanish’ (Ref. 15, p. 15). In particular, ‘many wanton Italian books, which being translated into english, haue poisoned the olde maners of our Country with foreine delights’ (Ref. 15, p. 8). In many ways then, the Puritan critique of London’s public theatres resembles the critique of luxury as sensual and commercial depravity advanced in Jonson’s play. What are we to make of these parallels?

Well, Jonson was certainly no Puritan. His comedy, Bartholomew Fair (1614), is widely recognized as one of the most uncompromising (and funny!) satirical portrayals of what Jonson considered to be Puritan hypocrisy and antisocial extremism. But even so he evidently shared some of the Puritans’ concerns regarding the social and moral effects of the burgeoning urban commercial culture. But whereas Puritans regarded the public theatres that first opened in London during the 1570s as a symptom of, and a contributing factor to, a decline in public morality, Jonson hoped that his plays could engage their audience in a critical reflection on, rather than outright pious condemnation of, the meaning of the social and economic transformations of which they were all a part. Whereas Puritans, hypocritically in Jonson’s view, often tended to think of themselves as an elect community on the margins or outside of society, Jonson recognized, although grudgingly at times, that his plays were also commodities that needed to attract customers. This is exactly what Volpone did with its quick-paced inventiveness, its sharp dialogue and monologues brimming with the imaginary exotic wealth of Venice. Hence the play’s ambivalence. For although it is meant to censure luxury, it conjures it up with such vivid detail that it inevitably also creates it as an object of desire for the audience. Likewise, although the audience is meant to distance itself from Volpone, the play does not prevent it from secretly sympathizing with the resourceful protagonist. So, ultimately, the play self-consciously asks if its moral instruction will be learned in the midst of all its luxurious delight; if the play will convert the public into virtuous Celias, who resist Volpone’s advances – or instead breed a host of cunning, selfish Moscas. And this is a question that no one can answer except the spectators, who are thus provoked into reflecting on their own role as consumers of theatre plays and other luxurious delights.