Volpone and the Beasts

Volpone 's 'Persons of the Play' list suggests that most of the characters are given names that betray the animal nature that each of these characters exemplifies in the play: Volpone (the fox), Mosca (the parasite), Voltore (vulture), Corvino (crow), Corbaccio (raven), Sir Politic Would-be (parrot), Peregrine (hawk).

The influence of beast fables on Jonson's play has been discussed by Brian Parker and David Bevington, the editors of the Revels Student Edition of the play (Manchester University Press, 1999). One of the prominent sources they idenitified for Volpone is the medieval tale of Reynard the Fox, which you can read here.

Image from EEBO

Image from EEBO

Consider whether we are meant to read Jonson's characters as humans exhibiting animal instincts, vices, and behaviour, or whether we should perceive them as animals exhibiting human characteristics in an allegorical tale.

What might the proximity of man to animal and animal to man tell us about the human and its limitations?

Here's an important passage from Erica Fudge's Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 7-8:

'If anthropocentrism - placing the human and human vision at the centre - leads, as I have argued, to anthropomorphism- seeing the world in our own image - and anhtropomorphism allows for the animalisation of humans then anthropocentrism paradoxically destroys anthropos as a category. By centralising the human, making the human vision the only vision, the separation of species is impossible. At the heart of the debate about animals lies a debate about humanity which has social and political ramifications. If an animal can beg, then is a (human) beggar also an animal? The implications of this question are plaued out in the sense that in order to assert human status writers have to make exclusions. Some humans are aligned with animals: in fact, some humans are not human at all.'