4. Mosca

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about the character of Mosca, thinking in particular about his status in the play – is he a servant? a slave? – his role as an 'actor' and similar to the other great manipulators of the early modern stage, e.g. Puck, Iago, Richard III, etc. – the tension between himself and Volpone, and the anger he directs towards Corbaccio at the beginning of Act 5.

Course

In this course, Professor Matthew Steggle explores Ben Jonson's early 17th-century comedy Volpone. The course begins by thinking about the setting of the play in Venice, and what associations that city might have evoked for Jonson's original audience. After that, in the second module, we think about Volpone's scam, focusing in particular on its legality, its language and its tone. In the third and fourth modules, we focus on two major characters in the play: Celia, the wife of the merchant Corvino, in the third module, and Mosca, Volpone's servant – or is he a slave? – in the fourth. And in the fifth module, we think about the ending of the play in which the court deals out the various punishments and rewards for how the characters have acted in the play – but do each of the characters get what they deserve?

Lecturer

Matthew Steggle is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University. He is fascinated by the plays of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare's contemporaries, an area in which he has published many scholarly articles and written four books. He has edited Measure for Measure for the Norton Shakespeare, and is particularly interested in the work of Shakespeare's colleague Ben Jonson, whose comedy Cynthia's Revels he has edited for the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson.