In Act 3, Scene 4, Volpone comes face to face with Lady Would-Be's flamboyant intellectualism. In one long chain of allusion, Would-Be fends off Volpone's attempt to dismiss her knowledge:
Volpone: The poet,
As old in time as Plato, and as knowing,
Says that your highest female grace is silence.Lady Would-Be: Which o’your poets? Petrarch? Or Tasso? or Dante?
Guarini? Ariosto? Aretine?
Cieco di Hadria? I have read them all.Volpone [aside]: Is everything a cause to my destruction?
Lady Would-Be: I think I ha’two or three of ‘em about me.
[…]
Lady Would-Be: Here’s Pastor Fido—
[…]
All our English writers,
I mean such as are happy in th’Italian,
Will deign to steal out of this author, mainly;
Almost as much as from Montagnié…
The entertainment of this scene derives from Would-Be's impassioned response to Volpone's attempt at silencing her. She demands that Volpone cite his assertion that a woman's greatest virtue is her silence, and she follows this up with a rapid-fire list of ancient and contemporary poets she has read—including Giovanni Battista Guarini, whose highly influential play Il pastor fido she mentions by name. With the invocation of Guarini, from whom apparently "all [...] English writers" will "deign to steal," Jonson has a bit of fun at the expense of his profession and the dense network of relationships and overlaps between works of Renaissance drama.
In fact, Jonson apparently borrows the format of this exchange between Volpone and Lady Would-Be from an Ancient Greek source, "On Talkative Women," thereby enacting the pattern of literary borrowing that Would-Be references in her dialogue. The Greek source and Volpone's reaction to Would-Be's incessant conversation reveal the gendered stereotypes at play in Jonson's depiction of Would-Be's intellectualism. She is a highly educated, exceedingly well-read woman in an era when the “renaissance woman”—as a complement to the “renaissance man”—was expected to be no such thing.
In Act 3, Scene 6, Volpone attempts to seduce Celia. In the grandest terms possible, he describes the wonders that would await her if she took his hand. Volpone anchors his flowery appeal in an allusion to the elaborate myths of the classical world:
Our drink shall be prepared gold and amber,
Which we will take until my roof whirl round
With the vertigo; and my dwarf shall dance,
My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic.
Whilst we, in changèd shapes, act Ovid’s tales,
Thou like Europa now, and I like Jove,
Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine;
So of the rest, till we have quite run through,
And wearied all the fables of the gods.
Then will I have thee in more modern forms,
Attirèd like some sprightly dame of France,
Brave Tuscan lady, or proud Spanish beauty;
The specific allusion Volpone makes is to Metamorphoses, a poem by the Roman poet Ovid that tells a mythological history of the world. Volpone appears to be offering Celia a life so lavish that they could become anything they want—even the Roman gods themselves—as they re-enact the great narratives of world literature.
Volpone's invocation of a work like Metamorphoses is quite apt. Ovid's work is, first and foremost, an account of mythic transformations: god and human to animal, animal to human and god. Transformation—of identity and appearance—is also the core mechanic by which Volpone and Mosca are able to deceive and manipulate their suitors, and Celia herself. Jonson's allusion to Metamorphoses is a nod to the prevalence of transformation as a literary device in the Western canon, and to the human-animal duality of the cast of characters in Volpone.
In Act 5, Scene 3, Mosca and Volpone continue to toy with the suitors by faking Volpone's death. As Mosca begins to read the lengthy will without naming any of the suitors as an heir, Lady Would-Be bursts into the room, using an idiom to inquire about Volpone's fate:
[Enter Lady Would-Be.]
Lady Would-Be: Mosca!
Is his thread spun?Mosca: Eight chests of linen—
In Ancient Greek myth, destiny was personified by the three Fates (the sisters Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos), and mortal life was represented by a thread of fabric. The sisters would spin these threads of a life and, when they had been spun, measure and cut the threads; they would thereby determine how and when a mortal would die. When Lady Would-Be asks, "Is his thread spun?" she is idiomatically asking whether or not Volpone has died, thus alluding to this mythic tradition of the Fates. This is also a bit of wordplay on Jonson's part, as Mosca is reading a portion of the will that lists the considerable variety of fabrics in Volpone's fortune, which are technically "Volpone's spun threads."
Lady Would-Be's idiomatic question builds upon a strain of classical allusion that Jonson weaves throughout Volpone, as he builds the Italian Renaissance setting of his narrative; as a satirical take on an over-educated English aristocrat, Lady Would-Be constantly makes erudite allusions that emphasize her elite education.
