VENICE AND THE CITY OF LONDON: PLACES OF MEMORY IN BEN JONSON’S VOLPONE, OR THE FOX
VENICE AND THE CITY OF LONDON: PLACES OF MEMORY IN BEN JONSON’S VOLPONE, OR THE FOX

Summary/Abstract: This essay uses Pierre Nora’s influential concept of “lieux de mémoire” (7) and narrows its scope to the place-consciousness derived from dramatic representations of places of the city (Venice and the City of London) in Ben Jonson’s city comedy Volpone, or the Fox (1605-1606). I provide reflections on—and nuances of—nostalgia, in a way that largely discusses the less precise paradoxes and ambivalences that the concept potentially entails in relation to urban environments and places related to early modern drama. I argue that the cosmopolitan city of Venice in Ben Jonson’s play—with its commercial environment, the Senate and the judicial system—is a locus of commercial and historical memory, identified with the city of London in the minds of the Jacobean audience. Moreover, urban environments in Jacobean city comedy (the marketplace, the exchange, public squares and, ultimately, the theatre) dramatize a specific place-consciousness that displaces the emotion of rural nostalgia, replacing it with the cultural memory of commercial encounters—whether in early modern Venice or London.

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