Volpone Critics

Question	Answer
Neil King	1) "The ultimate irony in the play is, of course, that Volpone trusts Mosca." 2) "One is tempted to admire Volpone and Mosca for their cunning in the way that they gull the fools who come to them."
Peggy Napp	1) "The play reveals a world where a man who is nothing but roles has no shape or place in the divinely ordered universe" 2) "Volpone is a satanic challenger to God's order and society\|
Robert Watson	"Gold replaces God"
Katherine Maus	"Celia is a strong minded character"
Samuel Pepys	"A most excellent play; I think the best I ever saw"
Alan Dessan	1) "Volpone provides a devastating portrait of a society for which gold has become 'the world's soul'" 2) "Celia remains the spokesman for Christian values"
Nick Bowers	"Is it rape or romp?"
Raphael Lyne	"Jonson's characters often fall short of classical ideals"
Mike Brett	1) "Jonson was at pains to present himself as a playwright with impeccable moral values" 2) "He was by no means an ideological moralist"
Charles A Hallett	"Celia and Bonario scarcely count in this welter of cheating. They neither know nor understand what they are doing, nor indeed, much of what happens to them. Their virtue, such as it is, must be taken for granted"
Edward Partridge	Analysed Celia's role, likening her to a nun and pointing out that her first word is patience and last word is mercy
Giorgio Agamben	In "Our culture, the decisive political conflict... is that between animality and the humanity of man"
D.A. Scheve	"Jonson saw the divide of the fox feigning death as an emblem or allegory of the deception of legacy-hunters"
Peter Whalley	Sir Pol is "bought in merely to lengthen out the play"
Jones A Barish	"The final unselling of the tortoise [is] parallel to the uncasing of the fox in the last scene"
Robert Macdonald	"It is difficult to condemn real vultures for behaving like vultures"
William Gifford	Lady Pol is "the most finished and amusing female pendant which the stage ever produced"
David Cook	"The artist in him is stronger than the money-spinner"
Tillyard	1) Cosmic disorder was a recurrent theme in Elizabethan poetry. Where human affairs are well ordered they are not just neat in themselves but they also harmonise with a greater divine order perceivable in the whole universe 2) "Gregariousness is of course common to [man and woman] for it is not woman's function to stand alone. Uxoriousness is purely masculine falling"
Christopher Hill	"Milton specifically compared the marriage between contract to the political contract between king and people"
Blake	"He was a true poet of the Devil's party without knowing it"
C.S. Lewis (Part 1)	1) "Adam fell by uxoriousness" 2) "Eve fell through Pride... (later) she decides that is she is to die, Adam must die with her" 3) "I am not sure critics always notice the precise sin Eve is now committing... its name in English is murder" 4) "He enters as a spy into the universe"
C.S. Lewis (Part 2)	5) "Satan wants to go on being Satan" 6) "It is by his own will that he revolts... by his own will he becomes a serpent" 7) "Satan is the best drawn of all of Milton's characters" "To admire Satan, then, is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking"
William Empson	1) 'Milton genuinely considered God in need of a defense' 2) "His praise of the beauty of the world…is used by Satan merely to argue that the world ought not to have been made for such inferior persons" 3) "Surely one must also feel horror at the God who has deliberately reduced him to such a condition?"
Chloe Batt	Milton 'Seeks to redefine classical heroism in Christian terms'
Kenneth Gross	1) "Satan, at times, seems to be the only character with a voice, mind or attitude of his own" 2) "The lure of Satan is the lure of the dramatized mind" 3) "Satan is Milton’s picture of what thinking looks like"
Saif Patel (Part 1)	1) “By [Adam's surrender] Milton annihilates the arguments for an accusation of misogyny” 2) “Milton shows that Adam played as much a part in the fall as Eve” 3) “Adam is Reason manifest and Eve is passion (or “delight”) incarnate” 4) “She fails to realize that if they rend themselves separate from each other, this strength I undermined”
Saif Patel (Part 2)	5) “Neither Reason nor Passion should be sacrificed – rather, the two should be integrated into a proper view of the world in which we live” “6) God is still presented as one who will forgive even the gravest of sins” 7) “He [Milton] seems to believe the fall was inevitable”
Saif Patel (Part 3)	8) “Eve, as a mouthpiece for Milton affirms that a cloistered happiness – like Virtue – is not happiness at all; she, like Milton, ardently disagrees that ignorance is bliss” 9) “Adam also consciously eats of the fruit, knowing full well the consequences, whereas Eve acted on impulse, without fully considering the results of her actions”
Saif Patel (Part 4)	10) “It would seem that Milton is arguing against the ideas of love of material wealth vs. love of God, since the cause of the couple’s separation is the wish to produce more through organizing their work”
Walter Savage Landor	1) "It is Adam who acts and suffers the most" 2) "Although Eve is the more interesting, Satan the more energetic, and on whom the greater force of the poetry is displayed. The Creator and his angels are quite secondary"
Mary Shelley	‘Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost.’
Coleridge	"Milton has marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven"
Balachandra Rajan	1) "His very situation as the fearless antagonist of Omnipotence makes him either a fool or a hero…" 2) "The heroic qualities which Satan brings to his mission... are qualities not to be imitated or admired. They are defiled by the evil to which they are consecrated"
A.J.A.Waldock	‘The changes do not generate themselves from within: they are imposed from without. Satan, in short, does not degenerate: he is degraded.’
Regina M.Schwartz	"Re-inflicting his injury on others, Satan finds that it only redounds upon himself, and he falls forever. ‘Revenge, at first though sweet/Bitter ere long back on itself recoils’ – Such repetitions only lock him in his injury, precluding any genuine change, precluding, that is, innovation"

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	Created by Grace Gregory almost 9 years ago