Volpone; Or, The Fox

About the book

Volpone and his resourceful servant Mosca turn the expectation of an inheritance into a profitable performance. Visitors bring gifts and promises, each persuaded that special favour will secure the fortune when the supposed invalid dies. Their animal names sharpen Jonson's picture of a predatory society, but the comedy's real mechanism is the readiness of apparently respectable people to believe what serves their desires. As the deception grows more ambitious, the struggle for advantage draws innocent lives and the machinery of justice into its orbit. The play mixes verbal brilliance with a deliberately uncomfortable view of appetite and self-deception. Its Venice is a stage on which wealth seems able to purchase credibility, until competing performances threaten to expose one another.

• Greed
• Deception and performance
• Corrupted judgment

Why read it

For an energetic dark comedy in which the promise of money makes respectable motives unravel in public.

English play with introductory material and glossary