"This is called mortifying of a fox": "Volpone" and How To Get Rich Quick by Dying Slowly

The interactions between the individual and the common at Volpone's deathbed provide insight into Jonson's understanding of the commer- cial theater, another space that can be seen as a site either of value-generating communal endeavor or of individualistic artistic, authorial, or critical aspirations. Since Jonah Barish's influential description of Jonson as an "anti-theatrical" play- wright, suspicious of spectacle and impersonation, critics have been inclined to read a condemnation of theatricality into the depiction of Volpone's fraud.7 However, as I show, Volpone is less concerned with rejecting morally dubious mimetic deception than with exploring the nature of a selfhood that understands itself through its ability to mimetically deceive. In drawing together the judgment of the Avocatori, Volpone's characterization of that judg- ment as "mortifying of a fox," and the call for audience judgment, Jonson asks us to ponder how the earlier analogy between acting and dying signifies within a wider, institutional context and gives way to a resemblance between theater and mortification. [...]theater does not only resemble Volpone's mortification in having an institutional character.