Volpone

Tone is defined as the author's attitude towards the subject he is dealing with. This question asks us to look at the songs in Volpone, and describe how Jonson uses them to indicate to the reader what he thinks of the events of the play. If we do so, we note, first of all, the songs are all light in tone, jovial, and tend to celebrate trickery and roguery; for example, Scoto's songs to sell his medicinal oil, or Nano's song about the life of the fool. Or there is Volpone's song to Celia in III.vii, which lyrically describes the life of sensuous pleasure he envisions for them. And finally, there are no songs after Volpone's attempted rape of Celia. The last one, Volpone's, comes right before that event. This suggests that the presence of song is directly linked to how we should view Volpone; the light-hearted songs encourage a similarly light-hearted attitude towards Volpone and his trickery. But after the attempted rape, the songs disappear, and the attitude of the play in general changes, and becomes much harsher towards Volpone; the sudden lack of song helps signal this to the reader. Other purposes the songs may serve include characterization and the exploration of the themes of parasitism and "gulling."

There are at least two good examples to choose here: Volpone's disguise as Scoto Mantua, or Sir Politic Would-be's disguise as a tortoise. When thinking about why these disguises are each a "good fit" for the person wearing them, we should think about what the associations each disguise has. Volpone disguises himself as a mountebank. A job description of a mountebank could be as follows: deceive people into giving you money with the promise of good health contained in his medecine. Substitute "money" for "good health" and "inheritance" for "medecine", and the description now applies to Volpone. Furthermore, Scoto's personality is much more like the Volpone we see in Act One, presumably Volpone's real personality, than the one he deceptively presents when dealing with the legacy hunters in Act One. As for Sir Politic, the tortoise is traditionally thought of as being dim-witted and slow, a wandering animal that carries its house on its back. The similarities between the tortoise and Politic can be elaborated with textual analysis and an attempt to fit Sir Politic into the "fable" of Volpone, the animal understory that Jonson creates by naming the principal characters after a fox, a fly, and three carrion birds.

The key to answering this question is first asking a related question: what makes us closer to a character, and what pushes us farther away? To see a character behave cleverly, heroically, to share a secret with them, or to see them victimized draws us closer. To see the character behave violently or to see him made the subject of irony pushes us further away. Jonson paints Volpone as a character whose energy and lack of self-restraint makes him prone to all these different events. And he organizes the play in such a way that our distance to Volpone is initially small; we identify with Volpone, and take what he says to be true. But this distance gradually increases over the course of it, until the final Act when we again draw closer to him due to his victimization by Mosca. But by now our picture of Volpone has radically changed from our first picture; Jonson has qualified and changed his initial portrait to such an extent that he can now subject Volpone to satire without danger of appearing self-contradictory. A good answer will detail the precise sequence of these events, and should make reference to Volpone's attempted rape of Celia in Act III, scene vii.