Theater Review: Ben Jonson’s ‘Volpone,’ From The Red Bull Theater

Inveterate diarist Samuel Pepys took a break from his tiring duties in England’s naval bureaucracy to attend a performance of Volpone. The Restoration man of the world rated the performance highly:  “the best I ever saw, and well acted.”

Most of the other works by Ben Jonson do not approach the high standard set by this 1607 satire, but Pepys might have been more correct than not about this one classic. As wondrous as Shakespeare’s comedies can be, none could approach the fierce bite of Volpone. Remarkably, Jonson’s jaundiced vision of a society gulled, and defined, by greed has only gained in currency, as evidenced by the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis.

More often than not, it’s become the practice of modern companies to stage Jonson’s contemporary, friend and rival, William Shakespeare, in modern rather than Elizabethan dress. The modern age takes this to an even stronger extreme in the case of Jonson: They not only junk the dress but the text. Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1967 film The Honey Pot took the skeleton of the play—a rich man, with the help of his equally cunning servant, convinces a group of people that he's dying, and that a small monetary offering from them will secure his bequest them his far larger fortune—but the results did not match the promise of the writer-director’s earlier illustrious resume (e.g., All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives). Larry Gelbart’s 1976 play Sly Fox updated the action to San Francisco in the late 1800s.  The one production I saw onscreen that retained the Elizabethan time period was Maurice Tourneur’s 1941 French film, based on a screenplay by Jules Romains, with an uncredited assist by Stefan Zweig.

New York’s Red Bull Theater, now in its 10^th year of staging classics, stuck with Jonson’s early 17th-century dress and Venetian setting in their production, which closed this past Sunday. In this case, the setting might be even more important than the period garb. The Italian city-state resembled the United States of the early 21^st century in being a national force facing increasing challenges to its military and commercial sway. At the same time, it was reaching simultaneous heights in art and decadence. 

As faithful readers might recall from this prior post, I have been a great fan of Jonson’s satire for awhile, but I had never actually seen it performed on stage till now.  That’s why, when I heard the Red Bull Theater was putting it on, I had to rush down before it closed.

 

By staging the production without updated accouterments, Red Bull trusted the audience to draw its own conclusions about similarities between the Baroque Venice and our time. At the same time, in the Off-Broadway venue at the Lucille Lortel Theatre down by New York's Christopher Street, it created a sprightly, sumptuous production that still allowed viewers to absorb one of the most remarkable texts in the history of English theater.

Clint Ramos’ costume designs were marvelous (particularly for Michael Mastro’s merchant-on-the-make, Corvino), and the sets—principally, Volpone’s bedroom and a Venetian courtyard and courtroom—sprang to life at the hands of John Ardone.

Director Jesse Berger skillfully accentuated the farcical elements in this classic: the  lightning-fast maneuvers of Volpone and his equally grasping manservant, Mosca, to keep each of their three targets continually on the hook without disabusing the others of their illusions; the hearing-impaired mistakes made by the elderly Corbaccio (played by Alvin Epstein, with droll skill); and the way that the Englishwoman, Lady Would-Be Politic (a delicious Tovah Feldshuh) mounts an alarmed Volpone, in her attempt to enjoy his favors while there’s the slightest touch of life in him.

Stephen Spinella (perhaps best known to theatergoers for his role in Angels in America) made of Volpone more than simply a wizened wizard of wiliness. He transformed him a kind of comic counterpart to Richard III, a figure of boundless energy who, in his zestful scheming, made the audience complicit in his crimes. He was especially effective in the scene in Volpone’s bedroom, where this aging character jumped up and down with youthful energy, attempting to seduce with gilded rhetoric and shameless exhibitionism the pretty young wife of one of his targets. Cameron Folmar gave Mosca a flair for the smoothly plausible lie that complemented his boss’ grandiose greed.

 

The names that Jonson gave his characters—shorthand for their most marked traits—fall principally into the animal (e.g., Volpone, fox; Mosca, fly; Voltore the lawyer, vulture) and heavenly (Celia, the beautiful, virtuous wife of Corvino, the heavenly one; Bonario, good) kingdoms, with precious little room in between. His play, in the highly accomplished hands of the Red Bull Theater, became a still-relevant warning that when it comes to greed, it isn’t hard at all for man to fall into the depths.

 

Quote of the Day (Ben Jonson, on the ‘Fine, Elegant Rascal’)

“I fear, I shall begin to grow in love

With my dear self, and my most prosperous parts,

They do so spring and burgeon; I can feel

A whimsy in my blood: I know not how,

Success hath made me wanton. I could skip

Out of my skin, now, like a subtle snake,

I am so limber. O! your parasite

Is a most precious thing, dropt from above,

Not bred 'mongst clods, and clodpoles, here on earth….

I mean not those that have your bare town-art…

But your fine elegant rascal, that can rise,

And stoop, almost together, like an arrow;

Shoot through the air as nimbly as a star;

Turn short as doth a swallow; and be here,

And there, and here, and yonder, all at once;

Present to any humour, all occasion;

And change a visor, swifter than a thought!”—Ben Jonson, Volpone: Or, The Fox (1606)

A bitterly funny playwright, Ben Jonson—born on this date in 1572—would probably say a lot of cynical things about why, though far more learned than his slightly older friend and contemporary William Shakespeare—and a greater literary celebrity in their lifetimes—his work is far less well-known and read than the Bard’s today. He’d probably start by noting mordantly that, if that’s the case, how come the facts of his life are so much better known than Shakespeare’s? “You don’t see people claiming that the Earl of Oxford wrote my plays and poems,” he’d say, deep in his cups at some pub.

(The shadow cast by Shakespeare seems even more difficult to fathom when considering Jonson's tumultuous life: Let's see--a twentysomething soldier, a graduate of his nation's finest schools, who goes on to become a hard-drinking, wenching guy who ends up in legal trouble because of a violent incident, then puts himself front and center in his works. Who ever knew that Norman Mailer time-traveled?)

In an essay on Jonson in his work of criticism The Sacred Wood (1921), T.S. Eliot—himself subject to the changing tides of academic approbation—identified the problem as “the most perfect conspiracy of approval”: “To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries.” There was really only one way to rescue him from this dilemma: “[I}n order to enjoy him at all, we must get to the centre of his work and his temperament, and …see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary. And to see him as a contemporary does not so much require the power of putting ourselves into seventeenth-century London as it requires the power of setting Jonson in our London: a more difficult triumph of divination.”

At this juncture, seeing Jonson through early-20^th-century London is a conceptual leap. But we don’t have to look that far. In Volpone, his satiric masterpiece of greed, we can see a clear through-line to Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Kenneth Lay, and Bernie Madoff.  Jonson would have scoffed at the idea that some regarded greed as gold. No, he’d correct you: like his elderly Venetian title character, they regarded gold as a secular religion to be worshipped unashamedly.  

Modern screenwriters and playwrights have regarded Volpone as rich with action and insight into human behavior. Joseph L. Mankiewicz adapted it for his 1967 film The Honey Pot, while Larry Gelbart of M*A*S*H fame alluded to it as his inspiration by borrowing and transforming the subtitle: Sly Fox (1976). Even the master-parasite dynamics present between Volpone and his servant Mosca (translation: “fly”) are reproduced between Burt Lancaster’s power-hungry Gotham columnist and Tony Curtis’s hustling small-time press agent in the 1957 cult classic Sweet Smell of Success.

The “Quote of the Day” comes from the Mosca soliloquy that begins Act III. The first seeds of the capitalist system take root not merely in the merchant class holding sway already in Venice and emerging in London, but more broadly, in a philosophy of secular humanism that Jonson is eyeing suspiciously. Mosca, a man on the make, is unmoored from considerations of family (he's “dropt from above”), honor or religion (“like a subtle snake” is as obvious an illusion to the Garden of Evil as you can get).

Freedom and individualism, Jonson is saying through this theatrical mouthpiece (attractive, despite his amorality, because of his sheer energy), offer more than just the opportunity to improve one’s circumstances. They open avenues to anyone willing to use words to alter the appearance of situations, to lie, to cheat on a grand scale.

Jonson’s Volpone and Mosca, then, are more than T.S. Eliot’s contemporaries; they are ours, too, every bit as much as Jonson was of the more celebrated Elizabethan, Shakespeare.