Sunday, October 15, 2006

I closed the book on Volpone satisfied that they got theirs. Who is this they? There are two main groups here. The carrion birds; Corbaccio, Corvino, and Voltore all recieved due punishment for their willingness to perjure, pimp, and prosecute innocents all for the sake of a dying man's wealth. The other main cluster of those getting theirs are Volpone and Mosca's punishment for playing with people's lives for their own amusement. The other noteworthy come-uppance is Sir Politic Would-be's ridiculing at the hands of Peregrine. I think it worth the time to examine the appropriateness of their punishments. Corbaccio loses his estate to his son and is sent to die in a monastery. The crime against Bonario is righted and the only consideration given to Corbaccio is a place to die which fits his old age and utter uselessness. Corvino is to be paraded around marked as a criminal of a sexual nature as befitting one who falsely accuses his wife of lechery shortly after offering her to Volpone. Voltore recieves a simple banishment and stripping of office. Note that each of the carrion eaters recieves a punishment equivocal or suggestive of that which they used to gain favor with Volpone. Volpone is made to live the falsehood that caused this debacle by being chained until sickened enough to die. Mosca's sentence is arguably the harshest which befits his role in the problems of the play. This synthesis of crime and punishment brings a fine comedic order that wraps the play up nicely.
A little edit to my post to apply it a bit to the prompt. The scene I spoke of in my post was the last one where the punishments were handed out. The points I made in the blog post serve to augment the satire in that the crimes of the characters were married to their punishments. This is Jonson saying that people who act this way will get theirs according to their actions. I think an English crowd of Jonson's time would respond favorably to this form of satire and take away from the play his assault on avarice which is driven home by the punishments.

1 Comments:

Blogger Daniel Lupton said...

Nathan, I like how you've picked apart the parallels in the punishments and the crimes in the play, though I wish you'd gone a bit deeper into why (and if) these seem appropriate. Yes, the punishment for crimes brings about a comedic order, but is this appropriate? Is punishment as appropriate an end for a comedy as marriage? To me, the punishments seem rather perverse, though I'm not sure what Jonson was getting at.

12:30 PM  

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