Ben Jonson saw theatre as instructive. In the Prologue to Volpone he states that the poet’s ‘true scope … [is] … to mix profit with your pleasure’. Throughout his drama, Jonson is acutely aware of audience. Many critics have noted that his plays work far better in the theatre than they do off the page. One reason for this is that studying them as literature rather than as theatre can lead to overlooking or misreading key theatrical signifiers that are written into the play texts. Another reason, and one that is central to the argument of this chapter, is that his plays are crucially concerned with the performance and interrogation of notions of the self; they imply an interaction between performers and spectators. Jonson’s ‘mixing of profit with pleasure’ includes a restless exploration of how the concept of self is fluid and only becomes meaningful in a social context. The chapter demonstrates this beginning with the soliloquies in Sejanus, and moving through those in Volpone, The Alchemist, and The Devil is an Ass.