glad that Bonario and Celia were not “united in love but in innocence”. Their parting in separate ways allowed the audience to share in Jonson’s “cold implacability”. There
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Card 27
Front
Volpone is not animated by a fixed goal but by a “continual self-projection into a feigned and alien identity...it is the exhilarating play of possibility”
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Card 28
Front
Volpone’s historonic energy is actually a mask from the emptiness of his life since he is trapped in his house and body because of his feigned illness. Stopping at Act 4 would mean his “final silence” and so his “urge for pleasure” becomes “desperate
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Card 29
Front
Volpone “consciously and deliberately” ruins himself to achieve aesthetic effect “material punishment does not matter to Volpone for he had succeeded as an artist and put Mosca, the rival artist, in his place” (he still wins as the master trickster)
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Card 30
Front
Jonson was in a “Schizophrenic” predicament of having to flatter the authorities e.g. the King, whilst wanting to critique it and so must participate “in the same pattern of consumption and display” he denounces.
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Card 31
Front
debasement of religious imagery by associating it with mercenary society. Calls the first scene a “parody of prayer”
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Card 32
Front
Corbaccio’s deafness is not what makes him funny, or is against John Dennis’ “comedy of instruction”. It is the fact that his deafness “never interferes with his avarice” and is symbolic of his moral failing. “Avarice, in effect has supplanted his ot
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Card 33
Front
Jonson slightly anti-theatrical “all role-playing is evil” since those that do, is eventually punished.
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Card 34
Front
The play brings “contradictions between political liberty and a just legal system on the one hand and unscrupulous capitalism on the other” - warning that capitalism breeds avarice and will subvert justice
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Card 35
Front
Mosca and Volpone’s asides create a “conspiratorial relationship with the audience”
