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Article: Jonson's Volpone and Dante.(Ben Jonson, Dante Alighieri )
- Article from:
- Comparative Drama
- Article date:
- March 22, 2005
- Author:
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No one has linked Dante's Inferno to Ben Jonson's Volpone. But there are a number of reasons to think that the first canticle of the Italian poet's epic poem was influential on Jonson's most enduringly popular play. For one thing both works portray fraud as the root of all evil, as many other important works about morality do not. (1) Dante used Aristotle to make the principal divisions of the Inferno into the sins of incontinence, malice and brutishness, the latter two classifications comprising the sins of fraud. (2) Fraud, says Virgil to Dante in canto 11 when he is describing the plan of hell, "is man's peculiar vice; / God finds it more displeasing--and therefore, / ...
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Article: Jonson and the Motives of Print.
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...Scholars concur that Ben Jonson presented himself to the world with ... remains a slippery question. Accounts of Jonson's emergence into self-proclaimed ... only in print, the "real" play, Jonson suggests, is the one that he composed ...
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