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Article: Jonson's Volpone and Dante.(Ben Jonson, Dante Alighieri )
- Article from:
- Comparative Drama
- Article date:
- March 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 www.wmich.edu/compdr. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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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's masque markets and problems of literary ...
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... ... have provided little consolation for Ben Jonson, who complained frequently of losing ... from gift economy into the marketplace, Jonson, whose society did not yet conceive of ... works of art and as material objects--Jonson was able to market his work, particularly ...
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