'I'm Looking at the Man in the Mirror:’ A Dramaturgical Analysis of Ben Jonson’s Volpone and the Many Masks of the Mirror Stage Anonymous College

In the early 1950s, French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan broke into the field of psychoanalysis with his theory of the mirror stage. Within Lacan’s notable text Ecritis, the psychiatrist gives two facets to his theory. In the first, the mirror stage is identified as the point where a young child is first able to recognize himself reflected in the mirror. This step mark causes the child to identifies himself as “I” and everyone else as the “other” (Lacan, 75). The second situation is when a subject’s rigid perception of identity causes him to project an ego and confirming his belief that the self is predestined identity. As Lacan’s states, a “person’s identity comes from his projection” where his projections are many and changing throughout a lifetime (Hui, 172). I want to argue that Ben Jonson’s play Volpone relies on the dramaturgical device of the mirror stage to describe the nature of the con. The art of the con adds a Machiavellian arc to the universal necessity of deciphering “actualities from appearances” within the stage of life (qt in Lyman and Scott, 113).

From the beginning of the play, the character Mosca is referred to by another name, “parasite.” The name “parasite” holds an allegorical weight in its ability to embody...