Consider Volpone as a Dark Comedy

Volpone as a Dark Comedy

Dark comedy is a type of funny comedy but shows the unpleasant side of human life. It is also known as black comedy, black humor, morbid humor, or dark humor. It is a play having elements of comedy and tragedy, often involving gloom or morbid satire. 

Volpone deals with the unpleasant side of human life. Almost all the characters of the play are greedy. The play opens with Volpone’s worship of gold. He regards gold as the best of things. The place where he keeps his gold is a shrine to him and the gold to him is the saint. His worshiping of gold sets the moral tone of the play. It suggests that Volpone is utterly consumed by greed. Besides greed, he moves on to blasphemy calling his gold a saint.

Volpone is a cunning fox. He despises the ordinary method of carning money. He pretends to be sick and dying and extracts money from the people who seek to inherit him after his death. People treat him with great respect and everyday new clients are attracted to his house including men and women of every class and age. They bring presents for him with the expectation that when he dies, their presents will come back to them, worth ten times what they were. Some of them are greedier than the others. They vie with each other in presenting gifts.

Volpone is a cunning rogue. He pretends to be sick but wants to enjoy the pleasures of sex. When he finds Celia alone in his room, he jumps from his bed and begins to praise her beauty. He entreats her to make the best use of the opportunity they have got in love making. He offers her to have a romantic life with him. He tempts her with his fabulous wealth. But Celia remains unmoved. Finding her alone in his room, Volpone at last tries to rape her by force; but she was saved by Bonario.

Jonson in the play also points out the dark side of the legacy hunters- Voltore, Corbaccio and Corvino. Voltore is so obsessed with money that he can plead against his Maker if he were paid a fee of six sols more. Corbaccio, the oldest of the legacy hunters, agrees to disinherit his own son, Bonario, in order to inherit Volpone’s wealth. Even he disclaims Bonario as his son. Corvine forces his innocent wife to sleep with Volpone. He also denounces his wife as a whore and says that he has seen his wife with his own eyes in the act of sexual intercourse with Bonario.

At the end of the play the evildoers get their due punishment. Mosca is to be whipped first and then sent as a galley slave. Volpone is ordered to be imprisoned and to be in chains while his property is to be confiscated and given to the hospitals of the incurables. Voltore’s license to practice is cancelled and is banished from the state. Corbaccio is ordered to be sent to the monastery of San Spirito and his property is given to his son, Bonario. Corvino is ordered to return the dowry, three-times, which Celia brought with her at the time of her marriage. She will go back to her father’s house; Corvino shall be rowed about in Venice and then made to stand in the pillory.

Thus, in Volpone all of the characters are equally greedy. They deserve their punishment. This play ends with punishment not just ridicule and this ending makes it a dark comedy.