In Act 1, Scene 1, Volpone utters his very first words in the play: a command to his servant, Mosca, to pull back the curtains hiding his trove of treasure in his bedchamber. What follows is a ridiculous, hyperbolic prayer to his own wealth that sets the tone of the play and establishes Volpone’s greed as his central vice:
Open the shrine, that I might see my saint.
[…]
Hail the world’s soul, and mine! More glad than is
The teeming earth to see the longed-for sun
Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram,
Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his;
That lying here, amongst my other hoards,
Show’st like a flame by night, or like the day
Struck out of chaos, when all darkness fled
Unto the centre.
Volpone speaks to his piles of gold as though they are his god. In this hyperbolic display of affection for his wealth, he compares the gold to the sun itself and to the first light of day after creation. This is a man who will do just about anything to get what he wants, and the rest of play sees him doing just that. In these few lines, Jonson prepares the audience for a satire of greed in 17th century Venice.
In Act 2, Scene 5, Corvino unleashes his wrath at Celia as he accuses her of being unfaithful to him for consorting with the "mountebank," who is really Volpone in disguise. In the heat of his anger, he threatens to confine Celia to a small space in their house. He also hyperbolically notes the dangers that await her if she leaves this area, using a simile comparing his rage to an occult summoning ritual gone wrong:
First, I will have this bawdy light dammed up;
And till’t be done, some two, or three yards off
I’ll chalk a line, o’er which if thou but chanceTo set thy desp’rate foot, more hell, more horror,
More wild, remorseless rage shall seize on thee
Than on a conjurerer that had heedless left
His circle’s safety ere his devil was laid.
According to the contemporary understanding of black magic that Jonson references, if a conjurer wished to summon a demon, they would have to work within a summoning circle that offered protection from the devilish forces at hand and, if they were to leave the circle at any point in the ritual, they would fall prey to the demon. The hyperbolic simile of Corvino’s statement comes from his comparison of his wrath and the wrath of hell itself.
This scene builds upon a pervasive theme of gendered expectation and behavior in Volpone—Celia is expected to be the model Renaissance woman, a complacent companion to her husband. Corvino’s anger comes from his baseless suspicion that she has been acting on her own accord. Jonson’s depiction of Corvino’s rage satirizes the stereotype of Italian husbands exerting extreme control over their wives by taking it to a dark and violent extreme.
