Table Of ContentVOLPONE’S
‘Isaac Hui’s study presents us with a passionate and highly original
approach to reading and thinking about Jonson’s comedies. Taking under
his critical lens – primarily, but not exclusively – Volpone and its ‘bastards’,
the book takes us on a wide and most rewarding journey through many
V BASTARDS
different and very topical issues and considerations.’
O
Alenka Zupančič, Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences
and Arts L
P
O
Brings Ben Jonson to the twenty-first century by reading Volpone
N
through psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and Marxism Theorising Jonson’s City Comedy
E
’
Through studying Volpone’s three bastard children − the dwarf, the S
androgyne and the eunuch − from the theoretical argument of Freud,
B
Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, this book discusses how Jonson’s comedies
A
are built upon the tension between death, castration and nothingness on
S
one hand, and the comic slippage of identities in the city on the other.
T
This study understands Jonson, first and foremost, as a comedy writer, A
linking his work with modern film comedies such as the Marx Brothers, R
Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Monty Python. It is a new approach to D
Jonsonian studies, responding to the current Marxist-Lacanian studies S
of literature, film and culture made popular by scholars such as Slavoj
Žižek, Alenka Zupančič [who also supplied the endorsement, it looks a
little incestuous!] and Mladen Dolar. While the book pays close attention
to the historical context of Jonson’s time, it brings him to the twenty-first
century by discussing early modern comedies with modern critical theories
and film.
I
s
a
Isaac Hui is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation at Lingnan University, a
c
Hong Kong. He has published a range of articles on Jonson, Shakespeare and comedy,
H
and studies of English translations of Chinese literature.
u
i
Cover image: The Cripples, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1568
© akg-images / Erich Lessing
Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk
ISBN 978-1-4744-2347-2
Isaac Hui
edinburghuniversitypress.com
Volpone’s Bastards
Theorising Jonson’s City Comedy
Isaac Hui
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses
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© Isaac Hui, 2018
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Acknowledgements iv
1 Introduction: Jonson and Comedy 1
2 ‘For pleasing imitation of greater men’s action’: Nano the
Anamorphic Ape 25
3 ‘Think me cold, frozen, and impotent, and so report me?’:
Volpone and His ‘Castrone’ Complex 48
4 ‘The case appears too liquid’: The Two Sides of Androgyno 73
5 ‘I fear I shall begin to grow in love with my dear self’: The
Parasite and His ‘Mirror Stage’ 97
6 Jonson’s Comedy of Bastardy 121
7 Conclusion: ‘Fools, they are the only nation’: Rereading the
Interlude and Beyond 145
Bibliography 168
Index 181
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of Chapter 2 and portions of Chapter 3 were pub-
lished in Comedy Studies as ‘On Comedy and Death: The Anamorphic
Ape in Volpone’ (5:2 (2014), pp. 137–47) and ‘The Dis-orienting
Orients – A Lacanian Reading of Philip Massinger’s Tragicomedy
The Renegado’ (8:1 (2017), pp. 22–35). A small section of Chapter 4
appeared in ‘Re-negotiating Domesticating and Foreignizing: Bridging
The Symposium and Niezi through the Imagery of Emptiness’ in Asia
Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies (3:1 (2016), pp. 33–46). A
version of Chapter 5 was published as ‘The Comedy of the “Para-site”:
Duck Soup, Volpone, and Hamlet’ in The Comparatist (40 (2016), pp.
170–89). I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to repro-
duce these materials. My thanks to the editors for their interest in my
work and to the readers for their comments.
Parts of this research have benefited from the financial support of
the Research Committee of Lingnan University, to which I am grate-
ful. The funding gave me an opportunity to conduct research trips to
the British Library, during which I was able to watch many live theatre
performances of Jonson and Shakespeare, including Volpone and The
Alchemist at Stratford-upon-Avon. I want to thank my teachers and
friends at the University of Hong Kong; my colleagues at Lingnan
University: they give me a wonderful platform to develop this project;
and the students, especially those who sat through my classes on Jonson,
Shakespeare, the Marx Brothers, and Lacan, Žižek and Zupančič.
I am grateful to Edinburgh University Press, especially Michelle
Houston, Adela Rauchova, James Dale and Ersev Ersoy, for their inter-
est in this project and assistance. Many people have offered me their
support and advice throughout the course of writing this book and my
career; among them I want to specifically acknowledge Alfie Bown,
Andrew Cutrofello, Richard Dutton, Roger Holdsworth, Zoe Ross,
James Smith, Joel Swann and Eliza Wright. Finally, this book would
Acknowledgements v
not have appeared were it not for Jeremy Tambling, who introduced
me to Jonson when he learned about my interest in comedy. For many
of his students in Hong Kong, who are far away from the Anglo-
American academic world, he provides us with a role model for how a
scholar should and would conduct himself. Without his teaching and
encouragement, I would never have imagined myself becoming a fan of
Jonson, let alone writing a book on him.
For my wife, Jennifer
Chapter 1
Introduction: Jonson and Comedy
NANO Now room for fresh gamesters, who do will you to know
They do bring you neither play nor university show;
And therefore do entreat you that whatsoever they rehearse
May not fare a whit the worse for the false pace of the verse.
If you wonder at this, you will wonder more ere we pass […]
(Volpone I.ii.1–5)1
Not only is Volpone (1606) Ben Jonson’s most well-known work, it
also, according to some critics, marks the turning point of his career.
The play is about how Volpone, the Venetian Magnifico, tricks the
old fortune-hunters Voltore (the vulture), Corbaccio (the raven) and
Corvino (the crow) into believing that they will get his inheritance
when he dies. With the help of Mosca (the fly, the parasite), Volpone
pretends to be sick and lies in a huge bed onstage, weaving one plot
with another, making ‘so rare a music out of discords’ (V.ii.18). This
makes the old Corbaccio think that he can outlive Volpone, so that he
disinherits his son Bonario; while Corvino, who gets jealous because
his wife Celia throws down a handkerchief to the mountebank (who
is actually Volpone), makes himself a virtual cuckold. However, since
the fox ‘glories more in the cunning purchase of wealth than in the glad
possession’ (I.i.30–2), he does not know when to stop and is sold out
by the fly and has to expose everything in the end, preferring to ruin
their scheme rather than allow the latter to outwit him. The play has
been widely discussed and studied, and often performed, and remains
Jonson’s most popular piece, but it still poses many problems.2 I want
to concentrate on one, which has not been successfully solved, and has
usually been ignored.
I refer to the interlude in Act I scene ii acted by what Mosca calls
Volpone’s bastard children, namely, Nano the dwarf, Androgyno
the hermaphrodite and Castrone the eunuch. Why these characters?
The incident is usually brushed aside by critics who claim it to be
2 Volpone’s Bastards
comparatively insignificant.3 These arguments and this treatment of the
interlude, for me, seem to be too easy, as if Jonson, who is famous for
being knowledgeable and an ‘author’, would devote a scene to a minor
extravaganza.4 Indeed, the scene is really puzzling. For instance, what
are the implications of being a ‘gamester’ in Jonson’s comedies? What
can be read from the metempsychosis of Apollo, Aethalides, Euphorbus,
Hermotimus, Pyrrhus of Delos, Pythagoras, Aspasia, Crates the Cynic,
the kings, knights, beggars, knaves, lords, fools, ox, ass, camel, mule,
goat, and brock (I.ii.6–24)? And why does the interlude end with the
song praising ‘Fools’ as ‘the only nation / Worth men’s envy or admira-
tion’ (I.ii.66–7)? How are these questions relevant to our understanding
of Volpone and other Jonsonian comedies? This book argues for the
significance of the interlude and the three bastards, answering these
questions, and more.
This book has another purpose: to read Jonson through the theory of
comedy. T. S. Eliot writes:
Of all the dramatists of his time, Jonson is probably the one whom the
present age would find the most sympathetic, if it knew him. There is a
brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large gold
designs in brilliant colours, which ought to attract about three thousand
people in London and elsewhere.5
Eliot’s comment on Jonson is still as relevant as ever. In the 2015 pro-
duction of Volpone by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-
upon-Avon, the play’s background is moved from seventeenth-century
Venice to the current world, which is struggling with the aftermath
of the financial tsunami of 2008. Eliot’s words and the RSC produc-
tion both suggest a point: Volpone is still a play that resonates with
us, the twenty-first-century readers and audiences. They raise another
question: can we understand the play and its comedy from a twentieth-
and twenty-first-century perspective? For example, can we interpret the
play on the basis of the more recent theories of comedy, or critical and
cultural theory, so that it would be even more relevant to current audi-
ences and readers? Drawing on references to many contextual materials
of Jonson and Volpone, this book gives the dramatist a more contem-
porary reading by discussing Jonson’s texts with many critical and
comedy theories, and some examples of modern film comedies. I want
to understand Jonson, first and foremost, as a comedy writer, and to
discuss how his work is still instrumental to our understanding of the
current world and comedy.
My aim, in essence, is to demonstrate how the interlude matters
through arguing for the importance of the bastards, and this helps
