"Epicoene": An Ambivalent Comedy

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses Ben Jonson's famous play, "Epicoene or The Silent Woman." The paper analyzes the plot and the characters of the play. It discusses the style in which "Epicoene or The Silent Woman" is written and its structure of an overlapping array of plots that essentially subsume one another throughout the course of the play. The paper looks at Jonson's purpose in the play and its success.

From the Paper:

"There is also the sexual sub-plot, which is skillfully woven into the play. Truewit and Clerimont assert halfway through that the play seems to be a mere repetition of previous dramatic forms. But Dauphine, at the end of the play, reveals that he is one step further than the rest of the characters when he reveals Epicoene's true gender. Thus, Dauphine comes closest at this point to the role that the author, Jonson, has been playing throughout - as the author is always one step ahead of the audience. Again, Elizabethan conventions of dramatic form are exposed, ridiculed, and discarded in favor of a more open-ended, modern approach to the question of gender. An Elizabethan audience would not have questioned the fact that Epicoene was being played by a boy, as this was a norm during the Elizabethan period. But by exposing Epicoene as a transvestite at the end of the play, Dauphine - and Jonson, by extension - effectively disrupts this norm - the very sort of norm that would be upheld by Morose, who is the ultimate victim of this deception."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Attridge, Derek. "Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of Literature." Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge. 1-32.
• Barton, Anne. Ben Jonson, Dramatist. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• Boughner, Daniel. "Clizia and Epicoene." Philological Quarterly19 (1940): 89-91.
• Bryant, J.A. The Compassionate Satirist. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1972.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.

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