In Ben Jonson's Volpone, the title character's bed figuratively -and in some performances, literally -takes centre stage. It is the space from which Volpone conducts much of his deceptive business, cozening would-be heirs and ushering his servants into action in his role as a dying glutton. In Act III scene xii, however, the bed facilitates another form of action: the failed seduction of Celia, Corvino's obstinately pure wife, through a kind of bed-trick interrupted. The play thus nods to the bedchamber's dual connotations as a space of death and as a space of sexual generation; there are, however, two major problems with these connotations as staged in the play. Volpone is not sick and dying, and he is not Celia's consensual lover in either a marital or extramarital sense. What, then, is the bed's role in the play, if not as a locus of death or love? This paper will argue that Volpone's bed operates as a domestic performance space, a miniature stage upon which actors like Volpone may perform and encode their own physicality according to and against audience expectations. In particular, I will explain the ways in which Volpone, within the performatic framework of the bedspace, attempts to code his body into polarities of power: the impotence of the sick body versus the potency of the sexually aroused body; the passivity of the needy unwell versus the activity of relentless seducer.

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This article analyzes the ability of archival resources to make the especially transient and unstable performances of early modern mountebanks accessible and meaningful for performance studies research. Because mountebanks were itinerant performers and medical practitioners whose multiple roles challenged regulatory authorities and generated few lasting records, this article argues that mountebank performances may be best recovered and accessed by approaching the available archival materials not as records of fact, but of function. Documents like handbills associated with mountebanks were, after all, functional, inviting their readers to witness performances and test medical services. Self-authored documents like bills as well as representational and fictional texts replicate and reenact performative strategies attributed to mountebanks, namely, the cultivation of ambivalent rhetoric and compulsion to independent judgment of truth.

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But Herrick says, that 'As Cupid danced among The gods, he down the nectar flung; Which on the white Rose being shed, Made it, forever after, red.' FABLE I.