ABSTRACT
Towards the beginning of Ben Jonson's Volpone, Corbaccio-waiting expectantly on Volpone's apparently imminent death-advises Mosca that Volpone "should take/ Some counsel of physicians" (1.4.11-12).l "I have brought him/ An opiate here," he adds, "from mine own doctor" (12-13). In defending his refusal to administer this so-called medicine to Volpone, Mosca claims that his patron is deeply suspicious of doctors. "He will not hear of drugs," Mosca tells Corbaccio; "He has no faith in physic: he does think/ Most of your doctors are the greater danger,/ And worse disease f escape" (14; 20-22). Corbaccio's stratagem and Mosca's consequent anti-medical polemic appear, at first glance, to be little more than a humorous aside, a mocking illustration of Corbaccio's avarice and ineptitude as a would-be poisoner. The possibility that this episode articulates, however, that drugs and doctors are not what they seem and may, in fact, be their own fatal opposites, adds a physical charge to the play's representation of the dangerous consequences of dissimulation. In general, the deceitfulness of Volpone and his gulls highlights moral and epistemological concerns; in the case of counterfeit medicine, it threatens immediate death.
