Clif Hostetler's Reviews > Volpone

This is a satire play (first produced in 1605–1606) that shows the level of debasement some individuals will lower themselves to in order to gain wealth. It involves a wealthy man named Volpone who has no heirs, and he uses this fact together with the help of his servant to con three other gullible patrons who hope to become Volpone's designated heir by giving him lavash gifts. Leading on these three individuals results in a complicated interweaving of three parallel plot lines (four if you count the scheming of the servant).

In this review I'll not try to explain the details of these three plot lines. Instead I will note a couple snippets that I found so comical as to be beyond absurd. One is an extremely jealous husband who immediately flips his priorities when he's told he can be heir to the fortune if he prostitutes his wife to Volpone. Then after the wife is saved from being raped the judicial charges are turned upside-down by claiming that the innocent wife has concocted the story in order to blackmail Volpone. When one of the conspirators reverses his testimony to save this innocent wife from an unjust conviction, he is talked into re-reversing his testimony once again when he's promised to be made heir. In order to make this re-reversal of testimony believable he falls on the floor pretending to be mentally insane.

I was recently in a group discussion of this play during which it was suggested that this play could be easily adapted to the modern business world of employees trying to please a narcissistic boss. We were informed that such a movie [Il Volpone (1988)] has been made in which a very rich shipowner dissimulates to be close to death in order to capture the attention of three of his friends. There are probably other examples of this sort of adaptation.

This play is written in Elizabethan English (technically it's Jacobean era, not Elizabethan), so it takes a bit of effort on the part of a modern reader to understand what's going on. I had to reread portions in order to make sense of it.