Ben Jonson's Volpone - This is our masterpiece; We cannot think to go beyond this.

We last saw brilliant, prickly, ambitious Ben Jonson flop badly with his Roman tragedy Sejanus His Fall (1603). A couple of years later he found himself in prison along with George Chapman for poking fun at Scots in Eastward Ho! (1605, also written with his old enemy John Marston, who skipped jail somehow), a play I was tempted to include in my Not Shakespeare schedule, except that I remember it as very much a period piece. Why not go straight to the good stuff? Because the next thing Jonson did was to write four great plays in a row, a deft balance of the old Italian (or Roman, or Greek) comic models with the energy of London life and language. So, Volpone (1606). The wealthy Fox pretends to be dying to extract valuable gifts from people – or birds, Vulture, Crow and Raven – who want to be his heir. Volpone’s sudden wave of lust for the wife of one of his victims gives enough twist to the plot to keep it moving past the first act. Whatever the moral basis of the satire, the…