Twentieth-Century Fox: Volpone's Metamorphosis

Abstract

Since it was restored to the English theatre during the 1930s, Volpone has enjoyed a unique currency amongst Ben Jonson's works; it has had a more consistent and successful performance history than any other of his plays. Although its beast fable scheme has apparently rendered it more immediately accessible (and allegedly more universal) than the author's humours comedies, it has also provoked responses of ambivalence and unease, in that its coupling of the animal and the human actively unsettles the ethical relations between nature, culture, economics and morality that the allegory ostensibly intends to clarify. In performance, the play has given rise to a critical discourse of vituperation, deviance and excess which reflects the tensions and contradictions endemic to the cultural vocabulary of anthropomorphism. Theatre practice has dealt with the play's problems and provocations by incorporating the image of the animal into an inclusive, consensual and predominantly realist mode of characterization and mise en scène. A notable exception was in 1968, when Tyrone Guthrie directed a production for the National Theatre at the Old Vic which literalized animal identities to the point of excess. The result was a radically contradictory rethinking of the play, and of the performance vocabularies which have been, and can be, deployed to animate it.