VolponeVolpone was first performed at the Globe Theater in 1605 and printed in quarto in 1607, having been performed with great applause at both universities, and was reissued by Jonson in 1616 without modifications or additions. Volpone is undoubtedly the best comedy in the English language outside of the works of Shakespeare. Bold and energetic in its conception, brilliant and impeccable in its execution, its extraordinary merits have excited the enthusiasm of all critics. The great French historian of English literature, Henri Taine, dedicated some of the most splendid pages of his famous work to him. “Volpone”, he exclaims, a sublime work, the most vivid painting of the morals of the century, where the full beauty of wicked lusts is displayed, where lust, cruelty, the love of gold, the shamelessness of vice. , display sinister and splendid poetry, worthy of a Titian bacchanal. In no other of his plays, not even in The Alchemist, in Bartholomew Fair, or in The Silent Woman, is Ben Jonson's prodigious intellect and ardent satirical genius so perfect. revealed as in Volpone. Not all of Juvenal's satires are more full of contempt and indignation than this one piece, and the portraits that the Latin poet has given us of the letchers, morons, pimps and parasites of Rome are not drawn with a virulence more passionate than the The English playwright represented the magnificent Venetian, his creatures and his seagulls. Like The Misanthrope, Peter's Feast, like The Miser, Volpone could more aptly be called a tragedy, for the merciless unmasking of the fox at the end of the play is more terrible than sufficient. Volpone is a splendid sinner and commands our admiration through the finesse and the very excess of his wickedness. We are hardly shocked by his lust, so magnificent is the vehemence of his passion, and we are amazed and are more dismayed than disgusted by his cunning and his audacity. As Mr. Swinburne observes, "there is something as much of the lion as of the fox in this original and incomparable figure." Volpone's capacity for pleasure is even greater than his capacity for crime, and Ben Jonson has added to both of these salient characteristics. a third, also dominant among the Italian, is the passion for the theater. The disguise, the costume and the attitude have an irresistible attraction for him, the blood of the mime is in his veins..