POSTHUMANIST ANIMETAPHORS FOR CRITICISM OF THE ENGLISH PROTOCAPITALISM IN BEN JONSON’S VOLPONE

Abstract

Though being filled with numerous veiled or direct allusions to innate human rational capacity, Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1606) is, indeed, a very cruel irony and subversion of the predominant Eurocentric and mostly anthropocentric ideals of Renaissance humanist reform clinging to an optimistic belief in the daring extreme deeds of well-educated human reason. As a result of 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 financial rivalry among individuals longing for being one of the members of the protocapitalist haute bourgeoisies. Accordingly, as this article 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 co-existence of mental entities and physical matter, which were conventionally separated from each other under the deep shadow of Cartesian dualism.