Shakespeare Outfoxed

Shakespearean Actor Donald Wolfit, whose wares are popular in the English provinces (TIME, March 3), had no luck selling Hamlet, King Lear and As You Like It to Broadway critics, and only fair luck selling The Merchant of Venice. But last week when he fished up Ben Jonson's Volpone (rhymes with macaroni), a play that modern Broadway had never seen as Jonson wrote it,* the crowd-- or, at any rate, the critics--made an excited grab for it.

They were not being capricious. Not only is Volpone Wolfit's liveliest production, and Volpone his lustiest role, but the play itself is one of the world's masterpieces of sardonic comedy. Its Elizabethan author managed to make it both a scalding comment on human avarice and a high-spirited entertainment.

Wily, wicked Volpone (the Fox) is a Venetian magnifico who pretends to be dying and to be deliberating on who shall be his heir. A crowd of voracious hopefuls rise to the bait, heap gifts upon him, satiate his own love of gold. With the help of his parasite, Mosca (the Fly), Volpone performs ever more devilish hoaxes upon his would-be heirs. In the end, duped and dupers alike are punished.

Men of real wit and imagination, Volpone and Mosca are exhilarating villains; their dupes are ludicrous victims. And Ben Jonson, the solidest playwright of his age, was possibly its finest rhetorician--a man who could give words color and weight, impact and grandeur.

* In 1928 a free adaptation of Volpone, translated from the German of Stefan Zweig, was produced by the Theatre Guild.

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