The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama

Simon Barker, Hilary Hinds, Simon Barker, Hilary Hinds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134661886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro

This anthology offers a full introduction to Renaissance theatre in its historical and political context, along with newly edited and thoroughly annotated texts of the following plays:
* The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd)
* Arden of Faversham (Anon.)
* Edward II (Christopher Marlowe)
* A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood)
* The Tragedy of Mariam (Elizabeth Cary)
* The Masque of Blackness (Ben Jonson)
* The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Francis Beaumont)
* Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (Ben Jonson)
* The Roaring Girl (Thomas Middleton & Thomas Dekker)
* The Changeling (Thomas Middleton & William Rowley)
* 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (John Ford).
Each play is prefaced by an introductory headnote discussing the thematic focus of the play and its textual history, and is cross-referenced to other plays of the period that relate thematically and generically.
An accompanying website contains a wide selection of contextual documents which supplement the anthology: www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415187346

Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman

First performed 1609
First published 1616

In many ways, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman works with the most familiar of comic raw materials. In Dauphine Eugenie’s plot against his uncle, Morose, we see the struggle of youth versus age; in the manoeuvres of Sir John Daw and Sir Amorous La Foole, Tom Otter and his wife, and the collegiate ladies, the play offers the customary comic battle of women versus men; and in the play’s setting, in Jacobean London, we have a sense of the contest between a new kind of urban social order and an older, less commercialised one. Throughout, too, the recourse to dissembling and disguise, in particular to cross-dressing, and the dependence on characters’ foibles, distortions or excesses as a source of humour and a trigger of the comic action indicate that we are in recognisable Renaissance comic territory. These staples, however, do not bring with them the usual reassurances or affirmations offered by such comedy. The end of the play, for example, is neither reintegrative nor restitutive. Although the young gallant, Dauphine, outwits Morose and secures his inheritance, thereby ensuring the triumph of youth over age (as comedy suggests it must), this is no natural succession and it is marked by no honouring of the generation on the wane. Instead, Dauphine revels in his success with a gratuitous and chilling cruelty, telling Morose that ‘I’ll not trouble you till you trouble me with your funeral, which I care not how soon it come’ (V.iv.232-3).

Such relentlessness and remorselessness are fundamental to the play as a whole. There is no relief from, and no alternative to, the parade of buffoons, dandies and viragos that rolls across the stage, no one whose values offer a secure point of anchorage to the spectator/reader tossed between one set of follies, perversions or vices and another. The confusion or blurring of gender roles, for example, is all but total: the women are masculine and emasculating; the men are effeminate, ineffectual, or both. The misogyny of the characters is similarly unremitting, varied and vigorous (see, for example Truewit’s attempt to dissuade Morose from marriage in II.ii), and is unalleviated by the more general but less acid misanthropy that also, undoubtedly, informs the play. Likewise, disguise and dissembling proliferate: Truewit pretends to be a messenger, Daw to be scholarly, La Foole to be a servant, Morose to be impotent, Otter and Cutbeard to be lawyer and parson, and Epicoene to be a woman. No counterweight of ‘reality’ underlies these pretences. Beneath is either absence: Truewit says of Daw, ‘A fellow so utterly nothing, as he knows not what he would be’ (II.iv.164-5), or more pretence: the boy who has played Epicoene, Truewit assures us, will continue to dissemble in the post-play world (V.iv.269-70). In this ‘comedy of affliction’ (II.vi.38), all are afflicted; none is immune.

If anything mitigates the harshness of this diagnosis, it is the sense that these ills are not the timeless and universal results of a fallen human nature, but are socially produced. This is a city comedy, a play rooted in its urban setting and the lives and mores of its citizens (see Gibbons 1980). Characteristically for plays of this kind, the excesses of the characters are represented, as Tom Otter’s tirade against his wife suggests, as those of the city itself:

All her teeth were made i’ the Blackfriars, both her eyebrows i’ the Strand, and her hair in Silver Street. Every part o’ the town owns a piece of her … She takes herself a sunder still when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes.

(IV.ii.84-9)

Mistress Otter is, quite literally, the product (and indeed the property) of the newly burgeoning consumer markets of Jacobean London, with their energy, clamour and glamour. Whilst the play invites criticism of the superficiality and triviality of this consumerist playground, we also need to beware of assuming our own immunity to its appeal, for it is this very energy, with its noise, inventiveness and exuberance, that drives the plot, generates the wit, and thereby constitutes the pleasure, of this play.

The topicality of Epicoene is, paradoxically, as much a result of its classicism as of its devotion to contemporary detail. As the notes to the text make clear, Jonson, as was his custom, drew on and adapted the work of a wide range of classical authors-here, in particular the Greek rhetorician Libanius (AD 314-393), the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC-AD 18) and the satirist Juvenal (c. AD 60-c....