CLERIMONT: For God’s sake, let’s effect it: it will be an excellent comedy of affliction…
Epicoene is an older archaic spelling, nowadays we spell it ‘epicene’. Epicene means ‘having characteristics of both sexes or no characteristics of either sex; of indeterminate sex’. Intersex is, I think, the modern term.
Cast
Men
Morose: A gentleman that loves silence
Sir Dauphine Eugenie: A knight, Morose’s nephew
Ned Clerimont: A gentleman, Dauphine’s friend
Truewit: Dauphine’s other friend
Epicoene: A young gentlewoman, supposedly the silent woman
Sir John Daw: A knight, Epicoene’s servant
Sir Amorous la Foole: A knight
Thomas Otter: A land and sea captain
Cutbeard: A barber, also aids in tricking Morose
Mute: One of Morose’s servants
Women
Madame Haughty: one of the Ladies Collegiates
Madame Centaure: one of the Ladies Collegiates
Mistress Mavis: one of the Ladies Collegiates
Mistress Trusty: one of the Ladies Collegiates
Mistress Otter: The captain’s wife
Parson
Plot summary
Act 1
London. Morose is a wealthy old man with an obsessive hatred of noise, going as far as to live on a street too narrow for carts to enter. Morose is morbidly and comically averse to noise of any kind. He lives in a room with double walls and treble ceilings, the windows closed and caulked. It has a voicetube from his room to his servant, aptly named Mute. If they are in his presence, he insists he answers his questions by shaking their left or right legs. He turned away a serving man who came to the house because his new shoes squeaked!
With the miserly ill-will typical of a Jonson character, Morose plans to disinherit his nephew, Sir Dauphine Eugenie, partly because of them mean practical jokes Eugenie has carried out in the past, aided by his two buddies, Ned Clerimont and Truewit.
Dauphine concocts a plan with Cutbeard, Morose’s barber (itself a joke, since barbers were meant to be notoriously gabby), such that Cutbeard presents to Morose a prime candidate for marriage, a young and – here’s the point – very quiet woman to marry.
This main plot continues with Morose being introduced to Epicœne and testing her with questions to see whether she really is a silent woman. He tells her not to succumb to the temptations of the court and tells her about the virtues of silence. Under the assumption that his fiancée, Epicœne, is an exceptionally quiet woman, Morose excitedly plans their marriage. Unbeknownst to him, Dauphine has arranged the whole match for purposes of his own.
But there is a jungle of sub-plots which help to make this play unusually long. First there are two idiots – affected fops, Sir Jack Daw who thinks of himself as a clever intellectual who likes to drop Latin phrases into conversation, and Sir Amorous La Foole, a fop, who fancies himself as a great man-about-town and hosts grand parties. He’s holding a big feast tonight at the house of Captain Otter, a former sea captain and then supervisor of a bear-pit, whose wife is a relative of La Foole’s.
Second, we are told about a ‘college’ of strong-minded women, the so-called ‘Collegiates’ Lady Haughty, Lady Centaure, Mistress Dol Mavis:
an order between courtiers and country-madams, that live from their husbands; and give entertainment to all the wits, and braveries of the time, as they call them: cry down, or up, what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion, with most masculine, or rather hermaphroditical authority; and every day gain to their college some new probationer.
These ladies, too, have been invited to La Foole’s big party.
Act 2
Truewit takes it upon himself to visit Morose a) upsetting him by blowing a horn, such as postmen use but b) with the main purpose of delivering an extended lecture on why women are awful and so Morose should not marry. Almost all of this is copied from Juvenal’s satire against women, and it genuinely terrifies Morose about the prospect of marriage. Truewit warns him he will be made so miserable by a wife that he wants to kill himself, and humorously leaves him a noose behind on his departure.
Jack Daw fancies himself as a poet and so Eugenie and Clerimont egg him on to show his ignorance by a) reciting one of his bad poems and b) giving his ignorant opinions about the famous poets of history, during which it becomes clear that he has a vast library but has never read a book, taking the names on the covers to be famous authors even when, in fact, they are the titles. So, an extended satire on would-be literary pretentiousness.
Truewit returns to his friends and proudly announces that he has put Morose off marrying, for life. Eugenie is devastated and only now reveals to his friend that they have been planning for months to marry him to Epicœne precisely because she will be an agent of Eugenie’s and get Morose to reinstate him as his heir.
Scene 5
Cutbeard presents Epicœne to Morose. Morose has come to suspect that Truewit was sent by Eugenie deliberately to put him off marrying – and that has made him more determined than ever to bed wed! Morose cross-questions Epicœne at length, with Epicœne only rarely answering and then very briefly and softly. Excellent! Just what Morose requires. Morose is so delighted he gives Cutbeard the freehold to the property he was renting.
Scene 6
Cutbeard reports back his success to Eugenie, Truewit and Clerimont, who are delighted. When he’s gone they take the mickey out of the barber’s fondness for Latin tags, they are surrounded by pretentious idiots. Truewit suggests the practical joke of redirecting all the guests heading for La Foole’s feast round to Morose’s to celebrate his wedding. The noise will drive him mad. They all agree it’s an excellent idea.Then they mock Tom Otter, who they rank alongside La Foole and Jack Daw as a fool. Otter has retired from the bear-baiting business to open a pub which he keeps stocked with tankards with animal heads. He is hen-pecked by his powerful wife.
Act 3
Act 3. Scene 1. Tom Otter’s pub
Otter is being nagged and harangued by his wife who ridicules everything about him. The wits – Eugenie, Clerimont and Truewit establish that she is preparing to host La Foole’s party. The wits persuade Jack Daw to divert the party-goers to Morose’s house. La Foole enters and they con him, telling him Daw was trying to spoil his party but La Foole can get his own back be deliberately relocating his party to Morose’s house – which he promptly agrees to do.
Act 3. Scene 4
Cut to Morose who has been married by a feeble Puritan preacher with a heavy cold. And now takes place the Comic Reversal of the play which is that… Epicœne, once wed, turns out to be a chatterbox and a shrew, and immediately falls to nagging her poor husband.
MOROSE: Oh immodesty! A manifest woman!
She immediately starts bossing him around, not just him the servants, too. When Mute comes in and starts making the silent bodily signals Morose has requested, Epicœne scolds him and tell him no longer to use such silly unnatural signing.
MOROSE: She is my regent already! I have married a Penthesilea, a Semiramis, sold my liberty to a distaff.
Truewit arrives and ironically congratulates Morose on sticking to his guns despite his (Truewit’s) advice. Morose curses the barber Cutbeard and he and Truewit engage in several pages of comic abuse and elaborately appropriate curses for a barber.
Act 3. Scene 6
Daw arrives with three of the leading Collegiates to Morose’s horror. The Collegiate ladies are impressed by Epicœne’s self-possession and decide to invite her into the college. They then set about berating Morose for the hole-in-the-wall way he’s got married and criticise him for not having costumes and music and masques and an epithalamium. Morose shrivels with misery.
Act 3. Scene 7
Clerimont arrives with musicians who all start playing at once. La Foole arrives with Mistress Otter and her servants carrying an elaborate wedding dinner. Obviously this is all to the mounting horror and disbelief of Morose, but there is additional comedy when Mistress Otter argues with some of the Collegiates about the order they should enter Morose’s house. Sisters etc. Then arrives Captain Otter, with some trumpeters and drummers. Morose’s misery is complete.
Act 4
Act 4. Scene 1 Morose’s house
Clerimont and Truewit laughingly describing the racket in the house. Dauphine enters and tells Truewit Morose has retired to the tallest attic in the house and wrapped his head in nightcaps. Truewit proceeds to give an extended description of ‘women’ i.e. how they need to be pursued, only pretend to be coy, sometimes must be taken by force. Enough to make a feminist explode. Truewit’s role, after all, is the lecturer, compared to his lighter friends, and he delivers a massive block of prose about how to chat up and insinuate yourself with all types of women. Off the back of this rodomontade we learn that Eugenie is taken with the Collegiates, all of them.
Act 4. Scene 2
Enter Daw, La Foole and Otter who has brought his tankards with the lids shaped into the heads of different animals. They’re already drunk and proceed to have a drinking game and get even drunker. The three wits decide to encourage drunk Otter to express what he really feels about his wife, and get her to come and eavesdrop. He is predictably rude about all wives, in fact gives a very funny description of how Mistress O is assembled from a host of false parts (hair, eyebrows, teeth) manufactured in all parts of London, which have to be laboriously assembled every morning. Overhearing, Mistress O is predictably furious and falls on, starts beating him, while the wits order the trumpets and drums to play and yell, ‘A battle, a battle.’ Presumably all wives and husbands in the audience were laughing with recognition or mock horror.
Morose appears with a huge sword and drives the musicians and Mistress Otter away and runs off shouting, Eugenie follows him, and Truewit and Clerimont are left laughing. But it is very typical of Jonson that their last comments are not charitable, but are spiteful.
TRUEWIT: His humour is as tedious at last, as it was ridiculous at first.
Earlier Truewit had commented on Jack Daw that:
TRUEWIT: A mere talking mole, hang him! no mushroom was ever so fresh.
A fellow so utterly nothing, as he knows not what he would be.
Truewit is excellent at being vicious about people behind their backs. He is the driving force of the play and his motivation is malice and spite.
Act 4. Scene 3
The Collegiate ladies instruct Epicœne. They tell her to exploit her husband mercilessly, to demand a carriage and servants. And then to encourage men to court her, at the theatre, at the Exchange. For taking lovers never hurt anyone. In other words, a stereotyped list of all the behaviours moralists blamed women for.
Act 4. Scene 4
Enter Morose telling Dauphine he would do anything, anything, to be free of all these guests, this racket and his wife. Dauphine positions himself as the One Man Who Can Fix It – with a view to being reinstated as the heir.
Morose is so beside himself that Epicœne then declares he is going insane or having a fit (Truewit lets us know that she is being paid to play a part and is devising inspired means of her own to torment Morose; he is genuinely impressed). This leads into a comic couple of pages where the half-wit men (La Foole, Daw, Otter, ‘a brace of baboons’, Truewit calls them) and the pretentious women outdo each other with absurd remedies for mental illness drawn from a selection of wildly inappropriate contemporary authors.
On and on they pile the agony, Epicœne saying she will read him from each of these authors, at length, every night. We learn that Epicœne talks in her sleep. And snores. Very loudly. Morose storms off followed by Dauphine. The others set about insulting Dauphine behind his back so Truewit instructs Epicœne to go in and praise him to the skies. Dauphine recognises that Truewit is driving the narrative. ‘You have many plots,’ he says.
Act 4. Scene 5
Truewit vows to do down the baboons who were so recently denigrating Dauphine to the ladies. Hide behind the arras he tells Clerimont and Dauphine and watch a master at work. Enter Jack Daw. Truewit persuades Daw that La Foole is after his blood. He hustles Daw into a side room and locks the door, and then loudly pretends as if La Foole had charged up with drawn sword ready to hack Daw to pieces. He begs Dauphine to drag La Foole away, waits a beat then opens the door to Daw who is now petrified and convinced La Foole will murder him. Much ironic humour for the audience as Truewit monstrously exaggerates how many weapons La Foole was carrying and makes Daw admit he’d gladly sacrifice an arm or a leg so long as he lives. Truewit locks him into the room again.
Clerimont asks if he can have a role in part two but Truewit says it requires tact and quick wits. As you might expect, La Foole now appears in the corridor and Truewit similarly persuades him that Daw is out for his blood. Terrified, cowardly La Foole lets himself be pushed into the other room of this corridor and Truewit pretends to be talking to Daw now, who he pretends is outside with a bomb! He shouts through the door to La Foole what terms he will accept. Anything anything, La Foole replies.
Now Clerimont and Dauphine come out of hiding between the arras. Clerimont has the bright idea of going to fetch the ladies, so they can see the climax of the comic drama Truewit has contrived, although Dauphine thinks this is going too far, thinks Truewit is in love with his own contrivances.
Truewit now invites Daw out of the room where he’s been hiding and says La Foole is prepared to let bygones be bygones after payment of a small forfeit. First Truewit teases him by saying La Foole wanted his upper lip and six teeth! Then just two front teeth. Then that he’d be content with five good hard kicks. Daw agrees and Truewit signals to Dauphine, who is heavily disguised, comes out of hiding and delivers five swift kicks. ‘Six’ says Daw, so Dauphine gives him one more then retires. Grateful for his escape, Daw hands over his sword and is locked back in his room.
Now Truewit gives La Foole the same treatment, tells him to come out and, to save his life, must submit to be blindfolded and beaten around the mouth. So once he’s blindfolded Dauphine sneaks in (pretending to be Daw) and beats him round the mouth. Truewit pretends to restrain him and eventually send him away. He unblindfolds La Foole and locks him in his room
Now – all this was because La Foole and Daw joined in a bit of drunken banter about Dauphine and insulted his reputation, saying he was poor and forced to run errands for a living. This extended farce seems both elaborate and cruel. Cruel judgement, disproportionate and harsh punishment, is a characteristic of Jonson’s comedies.
Act 4. Scene 6
The Collegiate ladies arrive onstage having witnessed part of the last scene which has successfully disgraced La Foole and Daw in their opinion, and hugely raised Dauphine. They all fancy him and itemise his attractions.
And now Truewit crowns his farce by calling the two ridiculed knights out of their hidey rooms – first he and Dauphine cautioning the ladies not to titter or give any sign that have seen the ridiculing. And so Daw and La Foole emerge from their rooms and greet each other with excessive politeness and bow and smile and everyone else on stage and in the audience knows what fools they are.
Act 4. Scene 7
Enter Morose, back from the courthouse where he tried to find a lawyer to divorce him but couldn’t they were all so busy shouting at each other. Truewit promises he’ll get him the best lawyer in town, and packs Morose off inside. Then asks Dauphine to run and fetch Otter and the barber Cutbeard from wherever they’ve gone. He will dress them up and transform them into a learned divine and an imposing lawyer. This will be the final humiliation for act 5.
Act 5
Act 5. Scene 1
A scene in which Clerimont eggs Daw and La Foole on to boat about their feats with women, by telling them their reputations go before them as ladykillers, the Collegiate ladies all talk about them… and then lets them both stutter and hand over to the other and try to avoid having to tell any specific anecdote, giving the strong impression they might both be virgins. Clerimont even asks if it’s true they’ve both enjoyed Epicœne’s favours and they mumblingly admit that, yes, it might be true.
Act 5. Scene 2
Dauphine really is a hit with the ladies. Here we see him walking with Lady Haughty who flatters him then tells him to come to her chamber tonight, bouncy bouncy, her maid will let him in, she gives him a jewel to wear for her sake.
She is closely followed by Lady Centaure who tells him not to trust Lady Haughty, that she is over 50 and paints her face, you should see her first thing in the morning! No, he should come and visit her, Lady Centaure, one evening… She is followed by Mavis (another of the Collegiates) who gives him an Italian poem to translate before flitting off. Enter Clerimont who congratulates him on his popularity with the women.
Also to tell him that the rest of the company have carried on getting Daw and La Foole so drunk and egging them on so much that they are both fiercely claiming to have slept with Epicœne, almost vowing to have done so today. Dauphine is delighted, as their comeuppance is inevitable.
Act 5. Scene 3
Enter Truewit, the malicious impresario of the play. As planned he has dressed up Cutbeard and Otter as a canon lawyer and a divine, respectively. Now we realise why it was made a notable feature of both characters that they had a penchant for Latin tags: now they can go made and quote all kinds of dog Latin each other, while Morose stands between them being driven mad by their incomprehensible jargon.
Act 5. Scene 4
The ladies enter and interrupt the lawyerly bickering. Epicœne asks whether anyone ever saw anything so shameful as a bridegroom on his wedding day employing two professionals to help him get divorced. The women suggest they beat or blanket Otter and Cutbeard out of the building. Truewit prompts Morose to come forward and throw himself on the mercy of the women, abjectly apologise and reveal that he is, in fact, impotent!
The ladies all gasp in horror, but then insist he is inspected by a doctor; or why not by them (asks Mistress Otter) and Morose is reeling from this suggestion, when Epicœne caps it by saying she forgives him and will take him anyway.
At this point, there is yet another torment, namely Clerimont bringing forward Daw and La Foole who, if you remember, had been drunkenly banteringly persuaded to confess that they had slept with Epicœne. Reassured that Morose actually wants them to say this, they both agree, that yes, they have had Epicœne as their mistress. This crushes Morose right into the dirt.
MOROSE: O my heart! wilt thou break? wilt thou break? this is worst of all worst worsts that hell could have devised! Marry a whore, and so much noise!
Now at his lowest point, his nephew Dauphine steps forward and offers to save him. He tells Morose that he well knows that he, Dauphine, has repeatedly asked to be given £500 a year out of Morose’s annual income of £1,500 and the full amount upon Morose’s death. Now he gives him a document to sign to that effect. Morose signs it, all the company witness it – at which Dauphine steps forward and takes off Epicœne’s wig.
Epicœne is a boy! Dauphine has been planning the con, and paying Epicœne to act a woman, for 6 months. Now he dismisses Morose who shuffles back into his house without a word. He takes off Cutbeard and Otter’s disguises, telling the former he can keep his property and the latter that he will be reconciled with his wife.
A boy! Epicœne is a boy! Truewit congratulates Dauphine who has, for once, outwitted even him (Truewit). Truewit points out that the fact Epicœne is a boy makes a mockery of Daw and La Foole’s claims to have slept with her, but not with gentle ribaldry, with the savage cruelty which is so characteristic of Jonson:
Away, you common moths of these, and all ladies’ honours. Go, travel to make legs and faces, and come home with some new matter to be laugh’d at: you deserve to live in an air as corrupted as that wherewith you feed rumour.
He tells the Collegiate ladies to take care of such wretched braggarts in future, then steps forward and briskly asks the audience to clap if they liked the play, now that Morose has gone into his house he will not be disturbed.
Comedy of affliction
CLERIMONT: For God’s sake, let’s effect it: it will be an excellent comedy of affliction…
It’s hard to think of this as anything other than bullying. In the main plot the entire cast bands together to bully and humiliate and vex Morose. In the big farce sub-plot in act 4, Truewit contrives the extended humiliation and shaming of Jack Daw and La Foole. The plot amounts to as much humiliation, shaming and vexation as can be fitted into three hours.
Morose repeatedly begs for mercy:
MOROSE: Alas, do not rub those wounds, master Truewit, to blood again: ’twas my negligence. Add not affliction to affliction.
Pleas which are completely ignored and, indeed, mocked. When Morose trusts anyone, they deceive him, especially the self-appointed impresario of his torments, Truewit.
MOR: Do your pleasure with me gentlemen; I believe in you: and that deserves no delusion.
TRUEWIT: You shall find none, sir [Morose exits]… but heap’d, heap’d plenty of vexation.
Behind their backs Truewit is scathing. I found his character far more despicable than Morose’s. In fact what is wrong with wanting a quiet life? Whereas reducing a fellow human being to tears of despair doesn’t strike me as being a particularly admirable achievement.
MOROSE: O, my torment, my torment!
Themes
Quite clearly the play’s two main themes are gender and speech. They both seem pretty straightforward. As to gender, the three wits – Truewit, Clerimont and Dauphine – unman and humiliate all the other male characters, most notably Morose (who is forced to admit he is not a ‘real’ man at the play’s climax, then is dismissed) Daw and La Foole (who are subjected to the extended kicking and punching ordeal before being revealed as monstrous liars regarding sleeping the Epicene). Otter and Cutbeard are used to bring out the sham knowledge and empty argot of doctors and lawyers.
And ‘women’ as a gender come in for sustained and vitriolic criticism from Truewit on numerous occasions, besides being portrayed as manipulating exploiters of men who pretend to a noble sisterhood, while in fact secretly scheming and undermining each other (the Collegiate ladies) or straight-out nags and shrews (Mistress Otter).
As to language, clearly the entire play is built on the destruction of Morose’s wish for silence, and celebrates the triumph of cacophony, itself made up of countless different styles and rhetorics, from Mistress Otter’s nagging, to Truewit’s reversioning of Roman satire, to Otter and Cutbeard’s preposterous pretence of Latin learning as the fake doctor and divine. There’s the fake sisterhood of the Collegiate women and the pretended literary knowledge of Jack Daw and La Foole. The closer you look at it, the more you realise the play represents a kind of riot of rhetorics.
The more the play’s charivari of gulls and manipulators babbled on, the more I sympathised for Morose’s forlorn wish for them all just to shut up and go away.
Historic position
Apparently, Epicoene was the first play to be performed when the London theatres re-opened after the restoration of Charles II. He returned to England in May 1660 and as quickly as the next month some of the theatres had re-opened and Epicoene was being staged.
R.V. Holdsworth, in the introduction to the Mermaid edition of the play, speculates that this may have been because the play features many characteristics which appealed to the audience of the time and went on to influence or be reflected in many Restoration comedies, namely: it’s concern with upper-class manners and morals, the centrality of a mock marriage, the cynical libels on both sexes, the fundamental motive of the play – which is a young man extracting money from an old relative – and its colourful parade of wits, fops and middle-aged grotesques.
To my astonishment, John Dryden in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) considered the construction of Epicoene ‘the greatest and most noble of any pure unmixed comedy in any language.’ Really? Rather than any of Shakespeare’s comedies? This surprising opinion is an indicator of the height and influence of Jonson’s reputation for generations after his death.
Boys
It beggars belief that the play was written to be performed by boys, specifically the Children of Her Majesty’s Revels. It is packed out with bawdy double entendres and sexual references, not least Daw and La Foole’s boasting about their sexual escapades, all the Collegiate women making sexual appointments with Dauphine, Morose shouting that he is impotent – every page is (according to the notes) packed with sexual innuendo. And all performed by children!
The Wikipedia article on boy players says the actors were generally aged 8 to 12, chosen because they hadn’t yet hit puberty or their voices broken! I wonder if anyone in the modern era has tried to restage any of these plays a) entirely played by boys b) with a cast of 8 to 12 year olds? What would be the aesthetic, psychological, comedic impact of watching a lot of 8 to 12 year old boys spending three hours speaking a sustained barrage of sexual innuendo?
Books & Boots 