Explore the impact of Act One of Volpone.
The first act makes very clear to the audience that Volpone is a Comedy of Types, meaning most character embody a set of characteristics in a very identifiable stereotype. This stereotype is backed supported by their names alluding to different types of animals, most commonly birds and “Volpone” meaning “fox”. Volpone is also a Beast fable, as the plotline is a realisation of the story of the fox playing dead to catch the scavenging birds of prey e.g. Voltore – a vulture, Corvino – a crow. However, Mosca and Volpone are different. They have a different type of characteristic. Their defining factor is deception, both by changing how they look, but also how they seem to think and act. At the same time as being their personality, they lose the “type” which the other characters have.
Money is presented as the driving force behind the characters. Volpone feigns his illness so that people will come and, ironically, give him more riches in the hope that they might become his heir. Mosca acts as the servant who is supposedly on the side of the men wanting to be his heir, although he tells all of them separately that they can buy their right to inherit. Jonson presents the loss of morality and ideals from each individuals wish for more money. Corvino brings what the audience suspects to be poison in the guise of medicine so that Volpone will die sooner, and Corbaccio is prepared to reassign his will away from his son to Volpone because he is convinced that he will then become the inheritor of Volpones’ riches. In the process of the three men being deceived, the audience sides with Mosca and Volpone because they are shown as more intelligent than the men coming for money, even though they know that they are more morally in the wrong by deceiving and Volpone playing the dying old man.
Volpone worships money, his first lines are: Good morning to the day; and next, my gold! Open the shrine that I may see my saint. Hail the worlds soul; and mine.
This shows him as being controlled by money, albeit consciously. Yet it also gives the view that the world too is driven by money, it is the soul of the world. These are the first lines of the play placing even more emphasis on the importance of money in being the driving force and challenge to money for characters.
The lack of clear identity of each of the characters forces the audience to question all of the characters true motives, and hence not being sure they can believe everything they hear. Volpone’s short soliloquy of sorts at the end o the first scene gives something of a better view of what Volpone is like beneath all the acting, but even then the audience cannot be certain he is not acting to them as well. This doubled the effect of the theatre as the audience watched a play where actors acted as characters who were acting as different people depending on their interactions. The hermaphrodite, the dwarf and the castrated man all embody the lack of identity and trickery in Volpone’s house as they have lost physical identity as supposed to the loss of identity defined by personality and soul.
It is clearer to the reader, and maybe contemporarily the more educated member of the audience, that Mosca and Volpone’s relationship takes the deception to a further level. As two characters on the stage they act to one another and could be described on the surface as thespian. However, Volpone’s dishonesty distorts his view of the situation with Mosca. Volpone’s vanity and belief that he is an astounding actor does not enable him to see that Mosca too has a sly plan and is using Volpone to achieve it. The master to slave dynamic can be switched around with Mosca as the master in control, and Volpone the tool which Mosca is using.
In Scene One, the interaction between Mosca and Volpone is very artificial. Although it seems Mosca is using more crude language, and hence the audience views him as lesser, he acts the more delicate and important role in deceiving the three men coming for money. IN the same way in this scene, Mosca flatters Volpone so that he overlooks Mosca as a possible threat to his money. Volpone is aware that Mosca is flattering him and says “Hold thee, Mosca.” when he feels it has lost insincerity, although it is insincere all along. Mosca’s description of Volpone as not a man of work is much cruder in comparison to Volpones:
MOSCA:
You are not like the thresher that doth stand
With a huge flail watching a heap of corn,
And, hungry, dares not taste the smallest grain…

VOLPONE: I use no trade, no venture;
I wound no earth with ploughshares; fat no beasts
To feed the shambles…
However, when Volpone recognises Mosca’s effective trickery, he congratulates him and Mosca quickly diverts the praise back onto his master “Alas, Sir, I but do as I am taught.” Similarly, Mosca speaks far more eloquently with the guests than he does with his master, not because of the relationship status, but because he is acting for a different purpose. Although, the more educated part of the audience and the reader are aware that Mosca is plotting behind Volpone’s back, it is not clear what he is going to do and no hint is given until the very end of the Act.
Mosca tempts Volpone with a woman, portraying her as valuable by saying “She’s kept as warily as your gold”. In comparing the woman to gold, Volpone is immediately enticed, especially as she is such a “rare artefact.” He immediately diverts his attention to achieving that goal, without even questioning his trusty Mosca of his source of this knowledge and why he didn’t tell Volpone sooner, to which Mosca replies “Myself but yesterday discovered it.” This makes it clear that Mosca has a life outside of the master-slave dynamic with Volpone that he can find this out. The Act closes with Volpone saying “I must maintain mine own shape still the same; we’ll think.” The act therefore closes with another layer of deception being introduced whereby Volpone must take on another form while not losing his prey which he and Mosca pulled in throughout the act just passed. It also makes the audience ponder on what his “own shape” really is.
The audience by this point will on the whole have sided with either Mosca or Volpone. Despite having the most immoral characteristics of the age, they are more appealing than the stupidity of the three men gulled by Mosca and Volpone. The more educated members of the 16th/17th century audience will side with Mosca as they believe he will “win” in the sense of tricking Volpone, while the rest of the audience, unaware of the independent scheming Mosca, will favour Volpone, as he seems like the obvious dominant character, and therefore, the winner.