This chapter discusses Androgyno. Apart from Act I scene ii, the androgyne only briefly appears in Act III scene iii, Act V scene v and Act V scene xi. However, the lack of appearance does not mean that Androgyno carries no significance in Volpone or for other Jonsonian comedies. Two important points should be noted. First, Androgyno is a fool, and, second, the androgyne is characterised by Jonson as a hermaphrodite. These two points will be instrumental to my reading of the androgyne's significance as they suggest the ambiguous attitude of Jonson towards the figure: while the former suggests the importance of folly, the latter, if we follow the portrayal of Ovid, shows an anxiety about effeminacy and castration. To understand Jonson's androgyne, we should examine the figure of the epicene, which is the title of the play written three years after Volpone. Different from the dwarf and the eunuch, the androgyne, hermaphrodite and epicene were not popular characters in Renaissance drama. Jonson's Volpone and Epicoene were the only plays to have a hermaphrodite and an epicene character in them.

OED suggests that androgynous means (1) someone who unites the (physical) characters of both male and female at once, a hermaphrodite; and (2) a womanish man, an effeminate. Hermaphrodite means (1) a person or animal (really or apparently) having both male and female sex organs; (2) an effeminate man or virile woman; (3) catamite; and (4) an animal in which the male and female sexual organs are (normally) present in the same individual, as in various molluscs and worms. Based on these definitions, it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between the androgyne and the hermaphrodite. They both refer to someone who has the physical characteristics of men and women, and relate to effeminate men. In Pushkin's ‘A Journey to Arzrum at the Time of the 1829 Campaign’, while among the Turks in the Caucasus region, he discovers a hermaphrodite among the prisoners. The hermaphrodite is described as follows: