Ben Jonson, Volpone and the Gunpowder Plot

In this study of Ben Jonson's most popular play, Richard Dutton sets out to demonstrate that the author, while acting within the constraints of contemporary censorship, nevertheless managed to comment on the plight of his fellow Catholics after the Gunpowder Plot, and on his own complex and unequal relationship with James I's ‘chief minister’, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. Moving away from the familiar text found in Jonson's carefully-fashioned Works of 1616, he argues that the apparatus of epistle, commendatory verses, and prologue, equally carefully crafted for the first printing of the play in 1607, would have pointed many readers to Volpone’s characteristically subtle subtexts. The impression taken away by a knowing audience, seeing the play for the first time, would thus be reinforced effectively in print. Professor Dutton's subtle textual argument does justice to the nuances of Jonson's mature work. Occasionally, however, there is less subtlety in the corresponding political and religious analysis, and this becomes important, given the conclusions that Dutton seeks to draw. It tests the known complexity of late-Elizabethan politics to claim that the ‘great soul’ in John Donne's ‘Metempsychosis’, which in its latest identity might indeed be taken to refer to a manipulating power beyond the obvious construct involving Queen Elizabeth herself, must necessarily suggest Cecil simply because the Earl of Essex is now dead (p. 45). Moreover, while Jonson may, possibly, have had reasons to strike out at Cecil in his writings, the myth of an all-powerful statesman dies hard. Dutton all but ignores the growing evidence for Cecil's enduring vulnerability in the court of the new king, and his argument suffers as a result.