The Fox-Trap

Laura Kolb (Baruch College)

Ben Jonson’s Volpone, or the Fox is often read as a condemnation of greed. The title character’s idolatrous love of his gold invokes traditional warnings against over-attachment to worldly dross. At the same time, the play’s setting in Venice, glittering center of Mediterranean trade, turns our attention to the allure not only of gleaming, material gold, but also of liquid, circulating capital. Jonson’s play is a dark love song to protean, metamorphic money, which takes on fantastic shapes and draws together myriad people. In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, Volpone has been updated to comment on contemporary forms of money, greed, and transformation, as well. Volpone’s gold is still there, lavishly displayed in sleek glass cases that light up from within at the magnifico’s command: “Open the shrine, that I may see my saint!” But the world of Volpone, as Nunn has conceived it, is a distinctly 21^st-century one. It’s a world of stock tickers and iPads; of well-tailored suits and crisp, hard-cornered shopping bags; of selfies and self-promotion. Volpone snorts cocaine to shake off his post-trial jitters; Mosca uses security monitors to check who’s at the door; Lady Politic Would-Be, trailed by a cameraman, is on an endless quest to create viral content. The Venetian piazza, where Volpone performs as Scoto the mountebank, has become a corporate plaza, hemmed round by soaring walls of glass and steel.