Ben Jonson's Play Volpone -- Term Paper

1) What reality TV show might show a servant, who like Mosca, to flatter Volpone, states that wealth "It transforms/the most deformed, and restores them lovely, / as it were the strange poetical Girdle. IOVE / Could not inuent, to himselfe, a shroud more subtle, / to passe Acrisius guardes. It is the thing / Makes all the world her grace, her youth, her beauty." (5.2)

The set up of Volpone and Mosca, as well as the other less successful symbiotic relationships in "Volpone" suggests, more than any medical show -- the relationship between Donald Trump and the various Moscas of the "Apprentice." Although the "Apprentice" is not self-consciously satirical like the "Daily Show," no other program on television makes a virtue of self-interested flattery and features a constant array of parasites surrounding a corrupt central personality.No other show is willing as the "Apprentice" to nakedly suggest that money and profitability is all that matters in life. And of course, Mosca, the apprentice who usurps the master in corruption, embodies these values even better than Volpone, for Mosca begins as a servant, but nearly succeeds in catapulting himself into the higher classes of society. Mosca is thus the ultimate "Apprentice" as he is corrupt, stealthy, and has no loyalty to anything but himself and money, but he can seem as though he has loyalty….....