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Ben Jonson, Volpone and the Gunpowder Plot, by Richard Dutton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 178. Cloth $95.00.
Richard Dutton is editing Jonson' s comedy Volpone for the forthcoming modernized six-volume Cambridge Ben Jonson. In Ben Jonson, Volpone, and the Gunpowder Plot, a by-product of his editing labors, Dutton advances several claims. In keeping with the preference among many Jonson scholars for Jonson's edgier quarto editions over the later versions of the plays published in the monumental first folio of 1616, Dutton favors the 1607 quarto edition of Volpone. He focuses attention on its prefatory poems by John Donne, George Chapman, and Edmund Bolton, among others, and its Epistle addressed to the play's dedicatees, the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Jonson scholars have long recognized the aesthetic significance of his Epistle, in which Jonson articulates his humanist credo and defends by means of classical precedents the harsh judgments meted out to the protagonists of his satiric comedy. Dutton, by contrast, reads the Epistle and several of the prefatory poems as coded political responses to the crisis of the Gunpowder Plot. In Volpone, Dutton argues, Jonson uses a beast fable set in Venice to address "the parlous state of England - rather than Venice - at the time it was written, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, albeit hiding behind the [plausible] deniability which beast fable, of all forms, traditionally affords" (73). Dutton also reads Volpone' s biting satire of patronage relations, and its subplot starring the inane English diplomat Sir Politic Would-be, as vehicles for Jonson's political and religious estrangement from the government over its repression of religious minorities.
One of the key assumptions Dutton makes in his study relates to Jonson's Catholicism. Dutton views Jonson's conversion to "Roman Catholicism as an act of symbolic resistance to the overweening state" (25-26) that had branded and imprisoned him in the years immediately prior to...