Induction

Tyrone Guthrie once opined that there was a list of roles, starting inevitably with Hamlet, Romeo and Benedict, that any aspiring classical actor should essay; next in the list, surprisingly, comes Mosca in Volpone (Guthrie 1959:178).1 How many young actors today would see Mosca as a necessary role through which to further a career? After McKellen’s fine interpretation of Face or, for that matter, Wolfit’s or Scofield’s Volpone, it might have been expected that future generations of actors, young or mature, would begin to see such roles as touchstones through which to prove themselves in the way that Hamlet or Macbeth are deemed in theatrical circles to be benchmarks indicative of a performer’s technical development. There have been only one or two major impersonations of Volpone each decade since Wolfit ceased to play the role. Revivals of Jonson’s major plays (Volpone, TheAlchemist and Bartholomew Fair) are sound in number but limited in range; several of the lesser-known works (Every Man in his Humour, The New Inn, Epicoene, The Devil isan Ass) have recently had an airing; but the revivals over the last decade of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus have been legion compared with the one revival of The Devil is an Ass. Webster’s two tragedies have undergone regular, first-rate stagings; in 1995 there were no fewer than three professional productions of Ford’s The Broken Heart; Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, once thought to be an unpopular and unperformable play, has had numerous restagings by the RSC but no company has seen fit to revive A Tale of a Tub, which is as fine an example of rural social comedy. Why is this culturally the current situation? Why is there no recording of a Jonson production contained within the archives of the British Film Institute? Why does the BBC have only a truncated version dating back to the early 1950s of Wolfit’s Volpone in its archive of televised drama (though, to be fair, BBC radio has done Jonson proud over the years, largely because of the pioneering efforts of Peter Barnes as adaptor and director)? Is this a reflection of the view that Jonson’s plays are so preoccupied with the nature of theatre and of acting that they do not appear to advantage in another medium? If that view seriously obtains, then why are the plays not staged with greater frequency?