EPICŒNE, or
1609
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I.i The conversation between Truewit, Clerimont, and Boy introduces the theme of sexuality and genre identity.
I.ii Morose is "a gentleman who loves no noise." His nephew, Dauphine, is a knight, who Morose suspects of playing tricks upon him to introduce clamor into his household. Because he suspects his nephew of trying to discomfort him, Morose proposes to take a wife—if a silent woman can be found to marry him—and disinherit Dauphine.
Dauphine has two fun-loving friends—Clerimont and Truewit. They delight in discomforting the pompous Morose, but have had no intention of separating Dauphine from the old man's testamentary conveyance. They learn that Morose has found a silent woman via his silent Barber, Cutbeard, who has acted as liaison for Morose in his quest.
I.iii In order to keep Morose from marrying and thereby disinheriting his friend, Truewit goes to the old man dressed as a post, complete with trumpet, and relates the horrors of marriage to Morose in hopes of talking him out of his intended marriage. We learn early that the silent woman, Epicoene, is somehow connected to an elaborate joke that Dauphine and Clerimont propose to play on Morose. Truewit has does not know of the conspiracy.
I.iv Meanwhile, Sir Amorous La Foole—a silly knight on the pattern of Sir Andrew Aguecheek—greets Clerimont and invites him to a party to be hosted by himself and attended by the collegiates, a group of ladies which includes Lady Haughty, Lady Centaur, and Mistress Dol Mavis.
We learn that Sir John (Jack) Daw is to present the Lady Epicoene at the party. Daw is another foolish, cowardly, Aguecheek-styled knight. He lives in the same house with Epicoene and is enamoured of her.
II.i Morose with Mute demonstrates his hatred of noise.
II.ii Truewit tortures Morose with a long-winded discussion (during which Jonson manages to slip in his own name and reputation.
II.iii Dauphine and Clerimont, in furtherance of their plan, meet Daw and the silent woman, Epicoene.
II.iv When Truewit returns to Dauphine and Clerimont with the news of what he has done to Morose, having put Morose right off the idea of marriage, the two conspirators are shocked. They fear he has spoiled their plan. Cutbeard enters, an obvious conspirator in the prank, and tells them, however, how Truewit's attempt has backfired and only set Morose more firmly in his resolve to marry
right away.
Dauphine takes Epicoene with him to Morose's house, and we learn that Daw is a fool indeed. Clerimont convinces Daw that Dauphine has wronged Daw by taking the lady who Daw was to present. Daw takes offence, but also insists that his is not one to fight. He determines instead to act melancholic in order to demonstrate his dissatisfaction with Dauphine's offensive action.
II.v At Morose's house, Morose questions Epicoene, who is so light of speech that she wins him instantly. Morose determines to marry at once, gives Cutbeard a reward for finding Epicoene by forgiving the lease on Cutbeard's house. He sends Cutbeard out to find a silent cleric to marry them. Cutbeard relates this information to Dauphine, Truewit, and Clerimont.
II.vi The three conspirators determine to lure La Foole's party over to Morose's house to celebrate the marriage and afflict Morose. They manage to succeed in luring the party. In the bargain they hope that a group of musicians, smelling the party food paraded through the streets, will follow and provide raucous music for the feast in Morose's house.
III.i & ii We are introduced to Otter to Mistress Otter. She was the higher born of the two and has economic control of the family. His place is in the kitchen. He seldom dares speak. Truewit and Dauphine plan to have fun in loosening his tongue.
III.iii Clerimont tells Daw that Daw's beloved Epicoene has married Morose, that Dauphine has made her feel guilty about her wrongs to Daw, and that she wishes to repent herself by doing Daw "more favors, and with more security now, than before." He convinces Daw that La Foole has been in league with the plan to injure Daw, and has prepared a feast in celebration of the marriage behind Daw's back. But, he tells Daw, since Epicoene is guilt-ridden for her treatment of Daw, she will honor him by having the dinner in Daw's name. Clerimont instructs Daw not to let on to La Foole that he knows La Foole's deception, in order to make La Foole's folly smart all the more.
Dauphine next takes La Foole aside and tells him that Daw has diverted La Foole's party to Morose's house in order to do La Foole an injury. He instructs La Foole that if he "be rul'd by us, you shall quit him, i' faith." He instructs La Foole to proceed the feast to Morose's house with a towel draped over his arm. Ostensibly this is to make it clear to all that it is La Foole's, not Daw's food, but it also acts to verify Clerimont's tale to Daw that La Foole is the founder of the feast to the disgrace of Daw.
III.iv The parson who marries Morose to Epicoene has a cold, and can barely be heard. For his quietness Morose pays the parson handsomely, but when the parson has a coughing fit, Morose demands some of the money back. Cutbeard steps in to say that the parson cannot make change and that he should give all the money back and make up the difference in continued coughing. At the prospect of more noise, Morose relents and lets the parson go on his way with all his money.
Once married, Epicoene turns into a shrew, a nag, and, as Morose says, "a manifest woman!" Just as Morose sees his folly in marrying a scold in silent clothing, Truewit enters.
III.v Truewit informs Morose that the whole town knows of the marriage and that it was the barber, Cutbeard, who told everyone. He tells Morose of the party on its way to fete the occasion. Morose and Truewit try to out-curse each other, casting aspersions upon the barber in a sudden cascade of words. Morose soon realizes that he is encouraging the talkative Truewit and declares "I will forgive [Cutbeard], rather than hear any more. I beseech you, sir."
III.vi No sooner does Morose silence Truewit but Daw enters, conducting Haughty, Centaur, Mavis, and Trusty. Morose is overcome by the prospect of Epicoene having so many friends. The ladies approve of Epicoene's wresting of control from Morose and at once accept her into their college. Morose is distraught.
III.vii Clerimont enters with musicians. The music and general din of the party drive Morose from the room.
Truewit reminds Morose that he warned the old man against marriage. He counsels Morose to "put on a martyr's resolution . . . . 'Tis but a day, and I would suffer heroically."
IV.i It is all too much for Morose; "He has got on his whole nest of nightcaps, and lock'd himself up i' the top o' the house, as high as ever he can climb from the noise."
Dauphine tells his friends that he is infatuated with the collegiate ladies, but they do not like him. Truewit promises to arrange to have all of them fall in love with Dauphine before the night is over.
IV.ii As the party goes on there is much drinking, music, and noise making. Mrs. Otter grows angry at her husband's chattering and beats him. Morose descends with a long sword and drives off the revelers and musicians.
IV.iii The collegiates take Epicoene into their group and share their womanly secrets with her. They instruct her to dominate her husband as does Mistress Otter. La Foole and Daw hang around them constantly.
IV.iv Morose, unable to take the talking and commotion runs out to seek a divorce.
IV.v Meantime, Truewit convinces Daw that La Foole is seeking to fight a duel with Daw over some slight, and means to kill him. Daw, of course, is a great coward. Truewit takes Daw's sword and hides Daw behind a door. Truewit then plays the same trick on La Foole, convincing him that Daw is after him, takes his sword, and hides him behind another door. Truewit then has Dauphine disguise himself, calls for Daw and tells him that La Foole will count himself satisfied if Daw allow him to administer five kicks to which the greatly-relieved Daw insists it be six kicks for friendship's sake. Truewit calls for Sir Amorous (Dauphine disguised), who gives Daw six swift kicks.
Truewit dismisses Daw to the closet again, and calls for the ladies to be brought in to witness the fun. They enter unseen above, La Foole is called in and blindfolded (so that if anyone ask if he were injured by Daw he could answer "not by my knowledge"). Dauphine comes in, pretending to be Daw, and tweaks La Foole's nose. La Foole is then sent to his closet.
IV.vi The ladies are told this merry jest was Dauphine's idea, and the ladies take a great liking to the young gallant. They each secretly set up an assignation with Dauphine, thus Truewit makes good his promise to Dauphine that they should all love him by night's end.
IV.vii Morose returns, unable to plead his divorce in the court because of the great tumult that greeted him there, he sought refuge back at the relative quiet of his home. Truewit promises to go out and round up a lawyer to dissolve the marriage. When Morose leaves, Truewit has Cutbeard the barber and Otter dress up like a canon lawyer and a divine, owing to their ability to speak some Latin.
V.i Clerimont unites Daw and La Foole and, in a bit of good ol' boy talk, gets each to confess that he has bedded the lady Epicoene, stolen her maidenhead, and generally taken their pleasure of her at their will in the past.
V.ii Haughty, Centaur, and Mavis each make secret assignations with and declare their love for Dauphine.
V.iii Truewit, Otter (disguised as a divine), Cutbeard (disguised as a canon lawyer), and Dauphine torture Morose with a legal debate as to the twelve accepted reasons for divorce, one by one.
V.iv Morose's only remedy is to claim that he is impotent, which he does before all the ladies, but when the ladies call that he be examined to determine the truth of his statement, he relents and that course is closed. Finally, They call on Daw and La Foole to confess what they have said to Clerimont about bedding Epicoene, but determine that, because Morose did not make virginity a stipulation of marriage, he cannot now claim it as a reason for divorce.
Just when it appears that Morose is stuck forever with Epicoene, Dauphine comes forward and asks him what he will receive if he rid Morose of Epicoene. Morose agrees to make Dauphine his absolute heir, puts it in writing, if Dauphine can get him out of the mess. Dauphine pulls the wig from Epicoene's head to reveal it is a boy and no woman at all.
The collegiates are mortified that they have divulged their female secrets to one of the opposite sex, the knights are exposed as liars and character assassins, not at all chivalrous, in having borne false witness against the maid who they claimed to have deflowered, the gallants are given a good laugh at Dauphine's clever trick, Morose is freed, and Dauphine gets his inheritance.
Truewit is the more satisfying choice for the comic hero, except he does give that title to Dauphine in the end. He has most of the good ideas, is more reasonable than Dauphine in his treatment of Daw and La Foole, and is best intentioned in his attempt to keep Morose from marrying and thus disinheriting his friend.
Clerimont is barely sketched-in, a mere cardboard figure next to the other two gallants, Truewit and Dauphine.
Morose is a difficult character to pinpoint as well. He is the anti-comic character, the anti-holiday that must be ejected at play's end in order that the festivities can continue (like Don John in Much Ado, Jacques in As You Like It, or Malvolio in Twelfth Night). But, although he takes things to extremes, his point is well taken when he wishes to be locked away from these fools inhabiting the world—collegiates, Daw, La Foole, etc. Therefore, he is not really despicable in a comic sense.
All the characters are epicene to some extent
Only Dauphine of the main characters seems to have a non-epicene sexual identity.
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During the Restoration, when women began taking the stage, the part of Epicoene was still taken by a boy, but it became more difficult to convince an audience that he was supposed to be viewed as a woman, there being other real women on the stage along side the fraudulent female. Soon women began taking the role, but the reverse effect occurred; it became difficult for the audience to accept the unwigged actress as a boy, knowing her to be a woman in truth. The play disappeared from the stage between 1784 and 1895, when Epicoene was revived in an all-male production at Harvard. The same problems of male-female identity and casting makes this play a problematic production to this day.
Epicoene is Jonson's most daring departure from comedy's normal intention and direction. There seems to be no moral vision in the play, no "norm" by which all the action can be measured. High comedy requires some form of comic vision, some type of "good guy", some normative that would demonstrate the drastic deviation of the fools and villains from that normative standard (even if that standard is eccentric to the normatives of the world beyond the stage). Not only is there no comic normative here, there is no sexual normative. No sexual norm exists of sexual identity itself, every character being somewhat epicene (as has already been discussed). In fine, nothing is normal. One reason for this departure from a normative comic or sexual standard is the audience for which Epicoene was written: the audience at Whitefriars.
Whitefriars became a theatre late in the history of children's companies. Children's companies moved from St. Paul's and Blackfriars out beyond the city walls, beyond Ludgate, though not quite out to the Middle Temple, to an area that came to be called, in the eighteenth century, Alsatia. The theatre they founded there was called Whitefriars. Because the area was frequented by whores and hoodlums, panderers and cut-purses, and all manner of moral deviant—and, indeed, was sought out for that very reason by adventure-minded nobles and merchants—the plays written for production in that area reflect the amorality of the inhabitants. Child pornography is probably too strong a term for what went on at Whitefriars, but the theatre was leading in that direction at this time.
By the time the children's company moved to Whitefriars, it was hardly a children's company anymore. Of the principal comedians in the production, Nathaniel Field was already twenty-two years old; he was destined to write A Woman is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies within three years of Epicoene's first production.
Field probably played Truewit. William Barksted was also an adult in the company; he finished Marston's The Insatiate Countess the year after Epicoene's first production. Barksted probably played Morose. Gil. Carie joined an adult company two years after Epicoene's first production, but it is unknown whether he was still a child and taken on to portray female roles for the adult company. Therefore, by the time the company moved to Whitefriars, the distinction between children's and adult theatre companies was breaking up-and this was certainly the case by 1609 when Epicoene was first performed.
In addition to the amorality of the characters in the play, the play itself deviates from the standard comic formula. Instead of moving towards a marriage by play's end, Epicoene begins with a marriage and moves towards a happy divorce. The feast, usually associated with the happy marriage at the end of the play (acting to knit all the heroic characters together) is placed at the end of Act III in Epicoene, and represents not a happy harmony but an unpleasant cacophony intended to disturb Morose rather than celebrate the comic heroes.
Epicoene can be called a "comedy of affliction." Like Barabas in The Jew of Malta, Morose is tied to a stake and baited by the noisy types he most despises. Hence, there are a great many references to Bull- and Bear-baiting within Epicoene; indeed, Captain Otter is a keeper of baiting animals.
The play also demonstrates two strains of SATIRE, probably reflecting a bifurcation in Jonson himself. One strain, represented by Morose, the bitter, caustic satire, spat from the mouth of a misanthrope, flouting the world, is Juvenalian in origin. The second strain, represented by Truewit, the sophisticated, urbane satire, chuckled from a man who enjoys life's absurdities, is Ovidian in origin. Also notable is the discussion, though comic, naturally, of the relative merits and demerits of old authors versus new authors. See especially II.ii.110-116 and IV.iv.52-129. Synopsis:
Jonson's Prologue is a good document stating the playwright's attitude towards neo-classicism and the modern style. Characterization:
Dauphine would be the likely character to represent the comic norm, mainly because Truewit bestows the comic laurels on him at the end of the play. But there are troublesome qualities in Dauphine that make him a poor candidate for the comic hero. First, he is in favor of maiming La Foole and Daw in the trick he plays on them and must be modified by Truewit to simply administering kicks and nose tweaks. Second, he seems to have little taste in women, professing love for the grotesque collegiates, and setting up trysts with these married women and thus demonstrating a lagging morality. Third, he seems rather callous to Morose at the end of the play, caring not when Morose dies and leaves him seized of his inheritance (much unlike Olivia at the end of Twelfth Night, who demonstrates a strain of pity for the wronged Malvolio). Fourth, his very name is "Frenchified", therefore effeminate by Elizabethan standards, and even takes the feminine "e" ending, making him nominally akin to La Foole.
Notes of interest:
Epicoene has been called "the greatest play for the children's theatres." Dryden thought it a "perfect comedy", complete with unity of time and action (but not place). It has gradually gained a reputation as being as good as Shakespeare's comedies.