Performing power and the power of performance in the bed-space of Jonson’s Volpone (1606)

Abstract

The bed or couch in Ben Jonson’s Volpone is, like many theatrical beds, never a place of rest. Instead, it is the play’s foremost metatheatrical locus, a conceptual and material stage and tiring house that facilitates theatrical deceit beyond the bed-trick. This paper argues that Jonson’s play invokes the bed as an already performative space, wherein actions of love and death are given social meaning, in order to translate its connotations and functions into theatrical ones: Volpone never occupies the bed as a dying man or a lover, but he crafts his theatrical manoeuvrings through the expectations that as a man lying in bed he should be one or the other. When removed from the bed and its suggested scripts, forced to improvise in front of the Avocatori, Volpone’s performance collapses. The paper concludes that as the connotations of bed-space have changed over time, with experiences of chronic illness and death removed to hospitals, our understanding of how deeply rooted Volpone’s performance is in the bed as social object may be obscured.