Jonsons Volpone and Dante

Abstract

Jonsorís Volpone and Dante Christopher Baker and Richard Harp No one has linked Dante's Infernoto Ben Jonson's Volpone. But there are a number ofreasons to think that the first canticle ofthe Italian poet's epic poem was influential on Jonson's most enduringly popular play. For one thing both works portray fraud as the root of all evil, as manyotherimportantworks aboutmoralitydo not.1 DanteusedAristotle to make the principal divisions of the Inferno into the sins of incontinence , malice and brutishness, the latter two classifications comprising the sins of fraud.2 Fraud, says Virgil to Dante in canto 11 when he is describing the plan of hell, "is man's peculiar vice; / God finds it more displeasing—and therefore, / the fraudulent are lower, suffering more" (è de l'uom proprio male, / più spiace a Dio; e però stan di sotto / li frodolenti, e più dolor li assale [11. 25-27]).3 Again, both Dante's and Jonson's master works are called"comedies," but both also contain harsh punishments. Jonson's play is quite distinctive here, not following in this regard his customary Roman models,and making a special effort"to put the snaffle in their mouths, that cry out, we never punish vice in our interludes." His moral labors in Volpone also required ofhim"to imitate justice, and instruct to life, as well as purity oflanguage."4 Jonson refers to Dante in the third act of Volpone when Lady Politic Would-Be, a tedious English dilettante visiting Venice with her equally shallow husband ,brags ofhaving read Petrarch,Tasso,Guarini,Ariosto,Aretino, and Dante, who, she says, "is hard, and few can understand him" (3.4.95). This couple, however, is such a pair offools that her judgment ofDante can hardly be taken for Jonson's own, and her ignorant dismissal of the poet implies exactly the opposite attitude on the part of the dramatist himself. That her remark echoes Dante's own comment to Can Grande that his epic was "polysemous" and "not simple"5 hints at more than a 55 56Comparative Drama secondary knowledge ofDante by Jonson. Jonson's satiric conception of Venice as a locus of corruption, his cast ofperverse characters, and his emphasis upon an appropriate final punishment for each of the evildoers combine to recall structural and thematic elements of Dante's work. And there is one final point: Jonson was a dramatist always sensitive to the shaping influence of native English morality plays; surely, then, he would also have been drawn to the most vigorous medieval condemnation of sin composed on the Continent, especially during those twelve years (1598-1610) when he was himself a Roman Catholic. All of these considerations would have made Dante's combination of comedy and severe morality an appealing combination to Jonson and one not easily found in most other sources available to him. Modern criticism has sometimes seen the punishment ofVolpone and Mosca as inconsistent with their sportive playfulness with folly and avarice.The pointhas also beenmade that the punishments are too harsh for the crimes.6 But Dante has manypersons in the Inferno who are admirable in manyways,such as the adulterous but winninglysympathetic Francesca, the fraudulent counselors but still upright and noble Jason and Ulysses, and the inciter to rebellion but lighthearted and gifted Bertrán de Born. All these and many others in the Inferno have been given their final hard punishment because of an overriding vice that finallydetermined their character andwhich theydesired more than their virtues. Neither Dante nor Jonson held the view that one's own personal sympathies or admiration ofintellector energyshould shape a finaljudgment of character. Jackson Campbell Boswell has recently shown knowledge of Dante to be much more extensive in England than was previously thought.7 Boswell has found 322 literaryallusionsto the Florentine in English books published between 1477 and 1640, a number ofthem by persons Jonson admired orknewwell, such as Sir Philip Sidneyand John Florio. In addition , Thomas Kyd, to whose Spanish TragedyJonson wrote additions in 1601-02, translated several verses from the Inferno in his 1588 translation ofTasso's The Householders Philosophie. Dante was often grouped by English writers with Petrarch and Boccaccio as important Italian poets and...