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

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.

In this essay, I seek to unravel these two strands and their interconnections in order to show how Jonson articulates, through a variety of medical discursive lenses, certain emergent perceptions of what we would now call a national economy--i.e., a territorially bounded commercial system that, although dependent for its welfare on transactions with other such systems, engages the "foreign" in often aggressively self-protective and even xenophobic fashion. To this end, I will argue, Jonson also makes effective satirical use of the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of the soul. The doctrine provides him with a richly suggestive model for the migratory nature of individuals and commodities in a mercantile universe where movement across the boundaries of national body politics, particularly via their ports, has become both a constitutive principle and an occasion for considerable anxiety.

As I will show, the Pythagorean-inflected mercantile body politic of the play entails two related pathological dimensions. The first of these pertains to the type of migratory foreign commodity upon which Volpone lavishes the most attention: fashionable drugs of dubious efficacy imported from the Orient and the Americas. Jonson's dramatic treatment of luxury foreign medicines, I shall argue, demands to be interpreted in the light of early modern English economic debates about international trade and domestic protectionism, within which the comparative merits of imported and native drugs played a crucial role. For certain of Jonson's contemporaries, luxury foreign drugs were less medicinal remedies than potentially lethal agents of commercial as well as corporeal contamination, capable of disturbing national financial health and individual humoral balance in equal measure.

The contaminating properties of foreign drugs are linked to the second pathological dimension of Jonson's mercantile body politic. In Volpone, international transmigrations of goods and people are accompanied by a heightened attention to the foreign provenance of diseases, particularly plague. This attention involves an implicit, if only partial, rethinking of the dominant Galenic paradigm of illness as dyskrasia or humoral imbalance. ² Rather than an endogenous state, disease in Volpone is often analogous to a migratory foreign commodity: it is imagined, in other words, as a determinate thing that invades the body rather than as a condition inside it. In an important set piece, plague is presented by the English tourist Sir Politic Would-Be as an alien entity that is literally shipped into Venice as if it were a foreign commodity. Sir Pol's vision of plague as a quantifiable, dangerous thing infiltrating the body politic through its ports is but one symptom of his characteristic paranoia concerning the secret, dangerous cargos of mercantile transmigration. Yet even as Jonson satirizes Sir Pol's paranoia, he arguably partakes of it himself...