In this essay, Cohen discusses the significance and detail of the setting of Volpone.
Theseus' observation that poets give "to airy nothing a local habitation and a name" is nowhere more confirmed than in the works of Ben Jonson. To his great plays Jonson has given local habitation a hundred names and made the sense of locale in those plays almost tangible. His plays are filled with scenes that go beyond an attempt to suggest a place and try instead to re-create it in all specifics. Where Shakespeare would supply a setting with a few bold impressionistic strokes, Jonson etches in every detail with Hogarthian thoroughness. Jonson first toyed with a precisely imagined setting in Every Man out of His Humour in 1599, but he did not approach setting consistently until he wrote Volpone in 1606......
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