Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gender, Family, And Morality In Ben Jonson’S Volpone, Shanelle Kim

Posters, Presentations, and Papers

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, the transformation in categories of value resulting from a money economy clashed with older forms of institutionalized values. Ben Jonson’s dramatic satire Volpone (1606) diagnoses social ills arising from the emerging proto-capitalist culture of his time. Though Jonson critiques the corrosive impact of a money culture, the two distinct embodiments of moral good in Jonson’s play, Celia and Bonario, prove ineffective in battling the creeping value transformations associated with money. In part, their failure derives from systemic fissures in Early Modern understandings of the family unit and gendered roles within such a …