Posthumanist Animetaphors For Criticism Of The English Protocapitalism In Ben Jonson’s Volpone
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Date
2024
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Ankara Üniversitesi
Abstract
Ben Jonson's Volpone (1606), lled with numerous veiled or direct allusions to innate
human rational capacity, is, indeed, a very cruel irony and subversion of the predominant
Eurocentric and mostly anthropocentric ideals of Renaissance humanist reform linked to
an optimistic belief in the daring extreme deeds of well-educated human reason. As a
result of the supposedly cultivated human rationality, the Renaissance is also marked by
its economic and political balances, embroiled in the bourgeoisie and exposed to
tremendous changes due in part to the not yet settled but upcoming free market economy
which steadily escalated nancial rivalry among individuals longing for being one of the
members of the protocapitalist haute bourgeoisies. Accordingly, as this study aims to
show, while Jonson criticises social hierarchy caused by a humane inclination towards
legacy hunting and the protocapitalist system forcing parasitism as a licence to own power
and carnal pleasure, he also attacks the biological hierarchy established between human
and nonhuman beings. Though Jonson was a playwright who has a classicist set of
values regarding the place of human and nonhuman entities, his use of humours in
Volpone becomes a fully functioning political, biological and psychological metaphor for
certain generic similarities between the two species. By doing so, Jonson displaces the
human/animal distinction, and instead; celebrates the co-existence of all natural beings
in harmony, which enables the play to be open to a posthumanist reading involving the coexistence of mental entities and physical matter, which were conventionally separated
from each other under the deep shadow of Cartesian dualism.
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Keywords
Ben Jonson, Volpone, English Renaissance Drama, Posthumanism, Protocapitalism, Animal Studies