Double Trouble: Dramatic Characters as Foils in The Merchant of Venice and Volpone Sara Benesova College

Renaissance dramas still remain among the most popular pieces of literature of today. The ability to create a piece of writing which surpasses time with its wit and humour comes as one of the main reasons why it still does not fail to astonish its spectators even after 400 years. However, the main stars of the renaissance dramas were unquestionably the infinitely diverse characters created by their genius authors. They became professional ‘people observers’ and managed to build unforgettable figures which sometimes overgrew the drama itself. As Creizenach states in his book on renaissance drama, “All (authors) had a lively sense of the immeasurable variety of human individuality, and all took pleasure in it; it was their keen observation of the manifold activities of the real men who surrounded them that enabled them to breathe new life into the historical and legendary figures which they read in books.”[1]

The observation of life around them gave William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson a special opportunity to take the most prominent and distinct features of the human nature and put it into one character. The miscellanist Aubrey also tells us that Shakespeare, like Ben Jonson, went about collecting the ‘humours of men’ to use in...