We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Following Stefan Zweig’s influential adaptation of Volpone in 1926, the twentieth century saw a slew of adaptations of Jonson’s great comedy. This essay focuses on three less familiar adaptations of Volpone, which follow Zweig’s particularly twentieth-century interest in the intersection of financial scams and power. First, Lionel Bart’s musical Wally Pone, King of Soho (1958), staged at London’s Unity Theatre and set in 1950s Soho. Second, the 1962 musical Foxy, which saw a Broadway run. This version eschews direct contemporaneity, instead relocating Jonson’s narrative to a remote area in the Yukon experiencing an economic bubble at the height of the 1896 Gold Rush. Third, Larry Gelbart’s Sly Fox, a farcical comedy first staged in 1976 at the Broadhurst Theatre, New York. This adaptation also stages the invalid trick among gold prospectors, this time in nineteenth-century San Francisco. Each of these versions involves a complex repurposing of the play, to make it speak to the experience of completely different audiences. The adjustments made in these three adaptations reveal considerable transformations in value and ideology, particularly around matters of social class and sexuality. Together they demonstrate Jonson’s robust and still powerful critique of a sexually rapacious and, above all, money-driven society.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.