"I am sailing to my port, uh! uh! uh! uh!": The Pathologies of Transmigration in Volpone

Abstract

In his comic drama Volpone (1606), Ben Jonson paints a satirical portrait of universal greed in the lurid colors of physical as well as moral pathology. The confidence trickster Volpone, seemingly infirm and bedridden, accepts an unending stream of gifts from a swarm of legacy hunters who, believing him to be on the brink of death, hope to be named his heir and to inherit his fortune. As he cheerfully profits from those who seek to profit from him, Volpone proves himself a master of feigned illness. Perhaps his finest piece of sick theater occurs when he performs the symptoms of his imminent death for his delighted dupe, Voltore. Lying in bed, he wails: "I am sailing to my port, uh! uh! uh! uh!" 1 This remark splices two of Volpone's most important thematic strands. The play's fascination with disease and its symptoms finds expression in Volpone's histrionic "uh!"s. But the image of the ship sailing to port also resonates with another, seemingly unrelated preoccupation, one that befits Volpone's Venetian location and its conventional dramatic connotations of merchant argosies: the exigencies and perils of foreign trade.