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- Title
Soliloquies and Self-Fashioning in <italic>Volpone</italic>: An Empirical Approach.
- Authors
Hirsh, James
- Abstract
In <italic>Volpone</italic> Ben Jonson employed in daring and sophisticated ways the astonishingly precise and intricate late Renaissance convention of self-addressed speech. Plentiful, conspicuous, unambiguous, varied, and entirely one-sided evidence demonstrates that in late Renaissance drama soliloquies represented the spoken words of characters as a matter of convention, not their unspoken thoughts. This nuance of the convention is illustrated by the episode in which Mosca overhears part of a soliloquy spoken by Corvino in 2.6 of <italic>Volpone</italic>. Similarly overwhelming evidence demonstrates that soliloquies by characters engaged in the fictional action in late Renaissance drama represented <italic>self</italic>-<italic>addressed</italic> speeches, rather than passages knowingly addressed by characters to playgoers. If a soliloquy had represented a speech knowingly directed by the character to the hearing of playgoers, the character's motive in speaking would have been to inform, entertain, persuade, dismay, or otherwise produce an effect on a large group of strangers. A self-addressed speech depicts <italic>how the character interacts with himself</italic>. Playgoers evidently took voyeuristic pleasure in eavesdropping on the most private speeches of characters and were not interested in what a character engaged in the action would say to themselves if the character knew that he was merely a character in a play. Soliloquies in <italic>Volpone</italic> depict characters engaged in a huge variety of <italic>self</italic>-directed activities: self-congratulation, self-justification, self-reassurance, self-control, self-determination, self-denigration, self-manipulation, self-deception, wishful thinking, and so on.
- Subjects
VOLPONE (Play : Jonson); JONSON, Ben, ca. 1573-1637; SOLILOQUY; LITERARY characters; RENAISSANCE drama
- Publication
Ben Jonson Journal, 2018, Vol 25, Issue 1, p52
- ISSN
1079-3453
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.3366/bjj.2018.0210