Zusammenfassung von Volpone oder Der Fuchs

Punkt 1 von 6

A fox who worships his gold

The play opens at dawn in Volpone's grand house in Venice. He greets the day, and then he greets his gold, which he calls his saint. He has the treasure uncovered in a kind of shrine, and he speaks to it as a priest speaks to a god. In a few lines Jonson tells us that this man has swapped religion for money.

Volpone is not an ordinary miser, though. He does not want to hoard coins in silence. What he loves is the getting of them, and he says so. He enjoys the cleverness of the game more than the wealth itself, and he boasts that he never harms an honest trade or ruins a family by hard dealing. This is his own version of honesty, and it is already a little suspect.

He shares the house with three odd companions. Nano is a dwarf, Androgyno is a creature of mixed nature, and Castrone is a eunuch. They are his entertainers and his household fools, and they perform a short comic piece about how a soul passes from body to body. The piece mocks the idea that anything in the world has real meaning, and it sets the tone of the whole play.

Then comes the plan itself. Volpone lies in his bed, pretends to be sick, and waits for visitors. He has done this for years, and the gifts keep coming. The first scene gives us a man who is rich, bored, clever and sure that nobody can touch him, and that is the kind of man a comedy likes to test.