For three years, as the play opens, Volpone (the name means "Fox") a Venetian of magnificent wealth, has pretended, with the collaboration of his servant Mosca ("Fly"), to be dying, in order to revel in his neighbors' displays of greed as they try to woo his inheritance. His suitors are the lawyer Voltore ("Vulture"), the doddering Corbaccio ("Crow") and the miserly Corvino ("Raven"), whose greed so overcomes even his frantic jealousy that he offers his young wife Celia to enliven the "dying" magnifico's bed.