• 1 The discursive realm in question usually locates “performativity” first to the speech-act and socia (...)
• 2 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham, D (...)
• 3 In the case of early modern theatre, for example, W. B. Worthen uses “performativity” in order to d (...)

2I borrow the word performatic, based on the Spanish performàtico, from Diana Taylor, who suggests it as an alternative to the adjective “performative”, given that the latter has been theoretically tied to processes of socialisation to such a degree that it cannot be extricated from that discursive realm.1 Performatic, in contrast, can be used to refer to nondiscursive “embodied praxis” of the kind that happens in performance.2 A necessary caveat here is that, as Taylor acknowledges, the performatic is always engaged and in friction with the performative. A performance, as an embodied expressive system for transmitting social knowledge – with whatever spectacular, comedic, moral, etc. intent – must refer to and be shaped by the discursive social identities and habits made visible through performativity.3 I hope, in this paper, to demonstrate that this kind of informative friction is legible within the world of Volpone; in particular, I argue that the bed’s material and symbolic legacy in spheres of early modern performativity allow the bed-space ultimately to exceed its conceptual bounds as a theatrical prop and become, instead, the very impetus and vehicle for Volpone’s own performatic embodiment.

• 4 Scholars have recently suggested that the play’s internal theatricality rises to the level of meta- (...)
• 5 Emphasis mine. All quotations of the play are from the Norton edition of Volpone in Richard L. Harp (...)

3Volpone has long been noted by directors, playgoers, and scholars for a certain glee that it takes in its own theatricality and in the possibilities of performance.4 Not only does Volpone himself relish in the successes of his embodiment of a dying man as well as a particularly verbose mountebank, but the inclination towards self-conscious performance settles upon nearly all of the play’s characters: Volpone’s witty parasite Mosca acts as both actor and director of all performance proceedings, both openly, as the orchestrator of Volpone’s household entertainments, and covertly, advising Voltore, for example, to “pretend you came and went in haste” and “Put business i’ your face” (I.iii.68, 78).5 Mosca continually demands superficiality, reminding the characters of what they must seem to be and do, and what must be legible in their appearance; the entirety of the play’s action, in fact, relies on what Nano describes as “pleasing imitation” (III.iii.13, emphasis mine).

• 6 The language of the play labels the object as a couch, but as Leslie Thomson points out, there seem (...)

4Within this thick setting of deceit, Volpone’s bed is a nearly inseparable accompaniment to Volpone’s own performance of illness. Stage directions in playtext and dialogue initiate Volpone’s transformation into and out of his sick-dress, often referring explicitly to the bed: Volpone requests “My pillow now” when Voltore first arrives (I.ii.123), springs “My couch! Away!” at Lady Would-Be’s entrance, (III.iii.21) and is advised by Mosca soon after to “keep you at your couch” (III.v.32) and later again to get “To your couch, sir” (III.viii.19). The stage directions included in Jonson’s edited works suggest the embodied action associated with these demands, with Volpone “leaping from his couch” (I.iv.132 sd) before he later “Retires to his couch” (3.iii.27 sd).6 As such, the bed always seems to be physically present as symbol and site of the ruse, a stage as well as tiring-house for Volpone, whose character transformation within the bed-space often involves him donning a sick-cap. Some performances have even literalised the bed’s association with Volpone’s faux-illness, reimagining it as a kind of hospital gurney, most notably in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2015 production directed by Trevor Nunn (figure 1).

• 7 See especially David Cressy’s Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tu (...)
• 8 Laura Gowing, “The Twinkling of a Bedstaff”, Home Cultures 11:3 (2015), pp. 275–304, 278.
• 9 On death rites and customs, see Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver, Oxford (...)
• 10 Thomson, “Beds on the Early Modern Stage”, p. 46.

6The bed is clearly, then, a creative and transformative space from which Volpone can generate his various identities, but the logic that makes this transformation possible deserves, I think, further attention. I argue that the bed offers a particular facility of deceit due to its preexisting status as a highly performative space. As social historians have clarified the bed’s role in the early modern lifecycle as traced through marriage, childbirth, and death, concepts of performativity have illuminated the conventions of embodiment surrounding its material presence.7 Laura Gowing, for example, argues that beyond the nuptial rituals that saw wedding guests accompanying the newlywed couple to bed and assisting in disrobing in anticipation of consummation, the marital bed remained fundamentally social insofar as neighbors participated in “policing” the state of the marital bed in order to inform adultery proceedings – for a married couple, union in a bed was in part a performative display of domestic order.8 The deathbed, as well, has long been understood as a key site for the performative rituals constituting the ars moriendi; the dying man, surrounded by friends and sources of Christian counsel, passed through stoic meditations that involved commemorating loved ones to God and settling final debts and conflicts, the process of which could also act socially as recollections of a dying person’s participation in public life.9 Witnesses of death often commented on whether or not the dying said anything profound during their final moments and embodied the stoicism that demonstrated their readiness to leave the world. In other words, and in terms that might perhaps sound facetious, to be witnessed conscious in a bed in early modern England was, in most cases, to have something quite important expected of you. It is for this reason, I believe, that Leslie Thomson interprets beds’ theatrical import on the early modern stage as displaying vulnerability: “More generally and regardless of the particular context or gender”, she says, “a figure on a bed is usually somehow vulnerable and rarely has control over her or his situation. Hence bed scenes often include an element of titillation and voyeurism as part of their effect. In other cases a curtained bed creates suspense and anticipation of a discovery”.10 The entire purpose of the theatrical bed, in Thomson’s terms, is to provide space for an interplay of seen and unseen, anticipation and exposure.

• 11 OED, “impotence, n.”, 2.b.
• 12 Felix Platter, Platerus golden practice of physick ..., London, Peter Cole, 1664, sig. 2Y2v.

8He begins, first – and for three full years – with performing impotence. Because the grounds of Volpone’s deceit involve inheritance, impotence necessarily takes on two meanings: the first meaning is, of course, decrepitude, and the second meaning is sexual infirmity constituted as either infertility or the “[c]omplete absence of sexual power”.11 The two forms of weakness, physical and specifically sexual, are often tied together by association with age and especially within men: the male body’s increasing humoral coldness and dryness in old age could weaken the seminal vessels, cause an insufficiency of seed, or prevent the generation of heat associated with venery; Felix Platter’s Platerus golden practice of physick (1664) explains of sexual impotence that in general “Men are more deficient than Women, for the man doth more in that act than the Woman”.12 In combination, the two forms of impotence establish Volpone’s performance as masculine and even patriarchal, being an attempt to control the estate through the illusion of passive relinquishment.

• 13 See Thomas Harman, A Caueat or warening for common cursetors called vagabones..., London, Wylliam G (...)
• 14 Tobin Siebers explains the choice of the terminology to deliberately highlight artificiality in suc (...)
• 15 Lauren Coker, "‘There is no suff’ring due’: metatheatricality and disability drag in Volpone”, in R (...)

9The falsification of physical impotence as illness was an active social concern, primarily in early modern contexts of beggary; the cony-catching literature of Thomas Dekker and Thomas Harman, for example, attempted to outline the processes by which beggars called “palliards” and “clapperdudgeons” would construct an image of ill health by crafting false wounds, feigning epileptic fits, and foregoing use of one or more limbs in order to solicit sympathy from passers-by.13 Voyeuristic accounts of such beggars reveled in exposing their tricks, but as audience members, we have the privilege of seeing Volpone’s adoption of impotence from the play’s outset. In addition to jumping into bed and donning his cap, Volpone invokes his feigned illnesses as a set of transformative muses: “Now, my feigned cough, my phthisic, and my gout, / My apoplexy, palsy, and catarrhs, / Help, with your forcèd functions, this my posture” (I.ii.124–6). Helped by Mosca’s repeated insistence upon specific impairments – as Mosca tells Corvino, “He cannot understand, his hearing’s gone” (I.v.15) – Volpone produces repeated verbal and stage signals of his physical performance of illness: for example, lines interrupted with coughs (“I feel me going; Uh! uh! uh! uh! / I’m sailing to my port, Uh! uh! uh! uh!” in Act I scene iii [28–9]) and the stage direction that has Mosca “shout[ ] in Volpone’s ear” to demonstrate his deafness to Corvino (I.v.51 sd). The actions narrate for the audience the very things that the actors onstage must do in order to play their roles – indeed, Volpone’s performance of deafness is rather like a ventriloquism or a metatheatrical reflection of the actor playing Corbaccio must do. This farcical embodiment of impotence constitutes what we might in contemporary theoretical parlance call “disability drag”, a term that has gained traction as a way to describe what happens when an able-bodied actor plays the part of a disabled character with the audience’s knowledge, such that the actor’s able-bodiedness haunts their performance of disability.14 As Lauren Coker has argued, “Jonson’s depiction of the body in Volpone satirize[s] the credibility of disability”.15

• 16 An especially provocative comparison, given the printed union of Aretino’s sonnets with Marcantonio (...)

11Because he is (ostensibly) physically weak, Volpone is imagined here as sexually non-threatening even in the moment that he is about to become such. His body, with its restricted motion, places him is in contrast to “some young Frenchman, or hot Tuscan blood / That had read Aretine” (III.vii.59–60).16

• 17 See OED, “leap, v.”, 9. “Of certain beasts: To spring upon (the female) in copulation”.

12This mistake arising from the bedchamber performance of illness allows Volpone, figuratively, to flip the script, or at least the schema of his performance. Corrupting the performative implications of the nuptial bed by having Corvino give his wife away as if in marriage – as Corvino has already decided that “The cases are all one of wife and daughter” (II.vi.73) – Volpone shifts with delight from playing at one form of dying to playing for another. This shift is marked by an altered relationship with the bed as a performance space: as soon as Volpone is alone with Celia, we get the stage direction for Volpone “leaping from his couch” (III.7.139), an alteration in both physical and sexual potency, as his leaping now suggests the connotations of animal copulation.17 Volpone seems to interpret the opposite of his performance of impotence to be showcasing virile male potency, stressing to Celia how “fresh” and “hot” he is (III.vii.157–8) and how bedridden he is not. Here, however, his replacement of the performative marital and sexual action of the bed with an ostentatious performance of illicit sexuality cannot work without conscripting Celia into the action both physically and theatrically: in order to maintain Celia’s ignorance à la a traditional bed-trick, Volpone would need to continue to perform impotence; to convince Celia of his personal virulence, Volpone would need, it seems, to relinquish the secure constructedness of his theatrical performance and with it some degree of his control.

• 18 Howard Marchitello, “Desire and Domination in Volpone”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 3 (...)
• 19 The mediation through the balcony is likely an important component of this success as well; on the (...)

17One useful approach articulated by scholars such as Howard Marchitello and Alexander W. Lyle argues that Volpone’s performance primarily fails when it is transferred from the private to the public, a statement that would seem to be supported by Volpone’s own complaint after his first trial, that “I ne’er was in dislike with my disguise / Till this fled moment: here ‘twas good, in private, / But in your public – cavè whilst I breathe” (V.i.2–4).18 There are a few difficulties in this interpretation, one of which being that we see Volpone’s performance as Scoto succeed in its intentions, and that this takes place in the open piazza, even if its targeted audience is a woman indoors.19 In the first portion of his trial, too, Volpone scrapes by, perhaps because he attempts to bring the performance space of the bed with him: In Act IV scene vi, the officers of justice return “bearing Volpone on a couch” (IV.vi.21 sd). Voltore takes advantage of his physical posture to defend him from the charge of rape: “See here, grave fathers, here’s the ravisher / ... / Do you not think / These limbs should affect venery? Or these eyes / Covet a concubine? Pray you mark these hands; / Are they not fit to stroke a lady’s breasts? / Perhaps he doth dissemble!” (IV.vi. 23–29). I would argue then that Volpone’s downfall is not determined only by physical space, but by scripted versus unscripted performances. The impotence and virility of the bed, as performative behaviours, offer a preconceived script on which Volpone can ground his performance, just as the mountebank’s speech has as its foundational influence the similar speeches of real mountebanks. But Volpone, in his habit as a commendatore and at last in the final trial, fails to improvise according to sudden changes in scene. As a result, when the fox is at last sentenced to what he calls “mortification”, his performance is stripped of its power, and he of his power to perform.

• 20 Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, pp. 570–89.

18It is worth considering, then, what changes in performances such as Trevor Nunn’s production that replace the stage property of the bed with an alternative – the use of a hospital gurney, for example, reflects in a “modernised” production the disappearance of the performative deathbed of early modern England in a twentieth- and twenty-first-century context that sees a shift, as Philippe Ariès notes, toward the hospital death.20 The expectation of nuptial performativity, however, is not overwritten onto the same object, and the production compensates for this lack by bringing in a round bed to supplement the gurney, which remains onstage during the failed seduction scene as a remnant of Volpone’s performance of impotence (figure 2).