Scribd
Upload
6K views2 pages

Volpone As A Comedy of Humour

Ben Jonson's play Volpone is a comedy of humors, focusing on stereotypical characters that each represent a type of personality or humor that is taken to an extreme. The main characters, including Volpone, Mosca, and the legacy hunters, are mentally imbalanced due to their obsessions with greed, flattery, or ambition. Their exaggerated humors and resulting imbalanced behaviors drive the comedic elements of the play.

Uploaded by

Gurudas Sutradhar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
6K views2 pages

Volpone As A Comedy of Humour

Ben Jonson's play Volpone is a comedy of humors, focusing on stereotypical characters that each represent a type of personality or humor that is taken to an extreme. The main characters, including Volpone, Mosca, and the legacy hunters, are mentally imbalanced due to their obsessions with greed, flattery, or ambition. Their exaggerated humors and resulting imbalanced behaviors drive the comedic elements of the play.

Uploaded by

Gurudas Sutradhar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Ben Jonson's Volpone as a Comedy of Humours

A comedy of humors refers to a type of drama that focused on characters, each character
representing a type of personality. The characters in Volpone are stereotypes. They represent a
character type rather than a flesh-and-blood. There are some characters in this play that have
physical abnormalities such as Nano, Castrone and Androgyny and yet they are not as out of
balance as the ones who are mentally imbalanced such as Volpone, Mosca, Voltore, Corvino,
Corbaccio, etc.

Volpone as a Comedy of Humours

Volpone is an imbalanced character. At the very beginning of the play, he worships gold as his
god.Volpone’s worshiping of gold suggests that Volpone is utterly consumed by greed. Besides
greed, he moves on to blasphemy calling his gold a saint. He also earns his wealth by duping
the legacy hunters and wants to have sex with beautiful Celia. He also derives pleasures by
tormenting the legacy hunters. All these show that he is mentally imbalanced.

Mosca, the parasite of Volpone, is also greedy like his master. He appears in the play to be a
greater rogue than Volpone. He flatters his master and torments the legacy hunters to please
him. At the end of the play he appears in his true colors when he tries his best to cheat his
master. Thus, he is also mentally imbalanced.

The predominant humor in Volpone is avarice, which afflicts all the legacy hunters- Voltore,
Corbaccio and Corvino. Voltore brings a costly antique plate as a gift to please Volpone. He is
so obsessed with money that he can plead against his Maker if he were paid a fee of six sols
more. Corbaccio, the oldest of the legacy hunters, agrees to disinherit his own son, Bonario, in
order to inherit Volpone’s wealth. Even he disclaims Bonario as his son. Corvine forces his
innocent wife to sleep with Volpone. He also denounces his wife as a whore and says that he
has seen his wife with his own eyes in the act of sexual intercourse with Bonario.

The humors of Sir Politic Would-be and his wife are not inborn but acquired. The humor of Sir
Politic is to affect great political skill and statesmanship. In addition to his political humor, he
also suffers from the humor of a stereotypical traveler, who took note of every trivial activity
during his visit abroad. Lady Politic Would-be is a medley of various academic disciplines. Her
theory of obsession and possession is a crude travesty of Platonic thinking. She is also very
greedy. To acquire Volpone’s wealth, she is ready to offer her body.

The characters in Volpone are stereotypes. All of the characters are imbalanced as well, so their
‘humors’ are out of balance and they thus act in comical ways. Thus, Volpone is a comedy of
humours

You might also like