Readers of my Ben Jonson, ‘Volpone’ and the Gunpowder Plot (Cambridge, 2008) will recognize a good deal of the material in this chapter. It was drafted before that material came together in book form, but has only found its way into print subsequently. Such are the vagaries of academic publishing. For all the inevitable repetitions there are, I believe, two major differences between the chapter and the book, which makes the chapter worth publishing in its own right. The chapter traces the long gestation of my thinking about Volpone and its context, from my doctoral dissertation (1971) and the book that flowed from it (1983), through occasional, unrelated revisitations of aspects of the play (1998ff), to my belated appreciation of the significance of its ‘metempsychosis’ material, the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place. In doing so the chapter also traces a long and sometimes painful journey from being a Cambridge New Critic, through the famous ‘return to history’ of early modern studies in the 1980s and 1990s, to my current critical mode. I should describe that as one of a revisionist cultural historian, sufficiently comfortable with poststructural thinking to be able to approach the play from the perspective of its first readers rather than that of the text per se. Ben Jonson, ‘Volpone’ and the Gunpowder Plot is not concerned with that journey.