This whole play has Volpone dressing himself up to be someone he is not. Starting from the beginning of the play from Act one, Scene one, he has Mosca dress him up as ill and sick and near death. All this is done to make a profit off the people that would visit him. Although he uses different disguises to be the con man he is, all his disguises and plots to gain money have a sick intention.
For example, in the second plot he has to sell people a great potion that cures anything and everything. His audience is the people who are sick or have some form of distress in their lives. Either he plays sick or benefits off the sick. Although this is an obvious analysis of his character I would like to look into how these different “people” he pretends to be just bury his true self deeper and deeper.
I have hard a hard time figuring out who he really is and what he really wants out of his own life. He has Mosca in his life who is described as parasite. In the same way Volpone would become a parasite on the society he is scheming upon.
The shape-shifting metaphors that proliferate in Volpone’s attempted seduction of Celia intensify the problem of identity that Shazia highlights here. “Buried under his own schemes” offers a surprisingly literal description of the ultimate consequences of the ease with which he inhabits his disguises.