Word: mosca
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...Caprice". Ben Jonson gave the Fox his being and his taste to trick the would be inheritors, who licked his hands for the delicious death sweat. Since then "Volpone" has been through the adaptation of Stefan Sweig and the translation of Ruth Langner. Even now, in the buzz of Mosca the Gadfly, the pandering servant who wins gold for Volpone to dirk him in the end with his own weapons of pen, ink and attested parchment, one can recognize that wise hardness that was to stiffen the ease of Elizabethan lyricism...
Volpone and Mosca were played with skill by Claude Rains and Earl Larimore. In his nightgown, his cracked and reedy voice gleeful with deception, Volpone remained to the end a riddle. After the Fox, in planned guise of death, has signed away his coffersful to his servant, Mosca throws into his teeth the question: "Who are you?", and there is no real answer. Volpone is no longer Volpone, for Volpone made a will and died. But he never was anyone; even to Johnson he never was more real than the idea of greed...
...lies in bed groaning and pretending to be dying. Seeing him so, his companions in coin-clutching, each hoping to be made his heir, come to his bedside bearing gifts and ready to commit other offices of friendship. Volpone's assistant in deception is the smart and fluttering Mosca; together, they are reaping a rich harvest until Volpone attempts to perform rape upon a friend's wife, sent to him for no better reason. Tried in court for this offense and adjudged innocent, Volpone tries another wily and audacious rascality, one which leads to his own undoing. Mosca...
...Volpone is fox in Italian: the names of all the important characters in the play are Italian words. Mosca means gadfly: Canina (a prostitute who tries to marry Volpone) is bitch...