Epicoene by Jon Benson

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December 12, 2011
Book Summary
“Epicoene” is a play by Jon Benson, which is about the agreeable against the disagreeable demeanors of men and women. The play begins by positioning at the focus of the plot a boy cloaked as a woman and named Epicoene. Morose is a misanthrope hoping to marry Epicoene, the disguised woman. Morose is a misanthrope because he hates the society’s noise, and instead, aspires to live in complete silence. “Silent Woman”—, which is Epicoene’s descriptive name—is submissive and humble. When she successfully goes through all of Morose’s insulting interrogation and they are wedded, all of a sudden, she starts reproofing him clamorously and impinging on his serene surroundings by introducing her rowdy friends. Dauphine, who is a nephew to Morose, promises to get a way to bring this marriage to cessation as long as he paid back with a lavish allowance for his work, bringing him out as greedy.
Following the eventual signing of the divorce papers, Dauphine takes out a wig from Epicoene’s head to show that Epicoene is a male actor adapted to the role of a female. Ben Jonson’s comedy is different from Elizabethan’s usual flow from unhappiness to happiness because Jonson’s comedy starts with high spirits but concludes in loss and dismay (Bradbrook 108). However, depending on a reader’s judgment, the play has a happy conclusion because Dauphine becomes a hero after plotting the deception to get him a position to secure his rightful legacy by frustrating Morose’s strategy to marry and father another heir. “Epicoene” is also looming, funny, and blames nearly all social levels. The play is all about egocentricity and pretense, as well as how outwardly playful cosmetic disguise only produces dishonesty and deception. Accordingly, this paper digs into the topic of deception and disguise through cross-dressing in “Epicoene.” In particular, this paper will attempt to answer the following questions:
Cross-dressing in Epicoene
Outwardly, “Epicoene” is plot driven with the goal of standing out as a humorous play and a way of effecting shifts in characters through deception and disguise. However, cross-dressing, which is the center for that deception and disguise, is also traditionally a sociological theme that involves gendered play. For instance, in Shakespeare’s plays the theme of cross-dressing is often demonstrated as an indication of a revolutionary discontinuity in the meaning of the family, as a way for a woman to be emphatic without evoking hostility, as cultural concern about the weakening of the social hierarchy, and as homosexual arousal (Shapiro 140). These interpretations point to the multi-voiced nature of the theme. However, the fact that most of these interpretations are not true with “Epicoene,” Jonson’s use of cross-dressing can be said to be disguising and deceptive.
Before making the interpretations based on Shakespeare’s plays of Jonson’s “Epicoene,” it is recommendable to consider a few theatrical realties. One, regardless of what is acted on stage, the reality that boys are playing cross-dressing women and men is tenaciously metaphorical. In other words, the actual realism of cross-dressing—i.e. either a male actor posing as a woman, a male cross dressed as a female, or a female cross-dressed as a male—is split between the homoerotic and the obscuring of gender. But then, the acting feminine character that cross-dresses functions factually to relieve the masculine actor, leastwise for a time, from impersonating a female. From other works of literature like most of Shakespeare’s plays, staged characters that cross dress may present various poses ranging from the misogynist jeering of the feminine to the adeptly and acquiescently homoerotic (Dutton, Howard, and Rackin 114). However, in Ben Jonson’s “Epicoene,” the use on Epicoene as a cross-dressed character and the cross dressing motif is only a disguise whose intension is to bring about a surprising ending for Morose and as well as for his heterosexual viewers.
So far, the theme of cross-dressing in acting may pose either the homosexual or heterosexual as a representation, but interpretation will depend entirely on the context. Greenblatt (p. 92) argues that the disguise is used in most renaissance dramas as one of the ways of reassuring a conformist audience or as means of reenacting a process of gender or sexuality, individuation does not annul the exigent metaphor, which is the basis of the representation. Greenblatt (p. 92) also contests that this sort of claim does not justify other uses to which authors put the theme during in the contemporary literature. Besides, Garber (p. 16) debates that the cross-dressing in the English renaissance plays gives hope to the efforts of configuring and confounding culture, and reenacting a category crisis that mirrors a potential weakening of the main hierarchy.
The play “Epicoene” makes use of cross-dressing in a style that diverges dramatically from Dekker’s model of liberty as well as the Shakespearean pattern of disguise. In “Epicoene,” Jonson develops a mockery scenario where Morose, an actor infatuated with silence and with espousing a silent lady to beget heirs as a way to dispossess his nephew, tumbles into his nephew’s trammel by getting married to such a woman, who is initially stereotypically chatty, but is eventually exposed to be a man. The use of cross-dressing in “Epicoene” comes out as a homoerotic subject only during the exposure, but even then, in the end, it is presented as a surprise to indicate relief from a female blabber and the liberation of Dauphine.
Up to the point of exposure, Epicoene, the character whose name, according to Woodbridge (p. 181) literally translates as “androgynous,” acts mainly to comically stage the stereotypes men have customarily held against women, i.e. that they are not submissive or quiet, or that the nature of a chatty woman is to dictate males. Regardless of its overriding pattern of an ingenious youth outfoxing a nefarious scene in a plot pertaining to male empowerment, “Epicoene” is principally a presentation of misogyny in which the cross dressing of Epicoene simply supports the opinions more entirely viewed in Mistress Otter, a dominant woman who must be humbled with Morose’s rapier.
The motif of cross-dressing is also distinctly exposed, for the very first time, in the scene containing exposure and re-identification. Following the exposure, Epicoene becomes a nobleman’s son who Dauphine has nurtured “this half year at my great charges” (Jonson 237), but again one who without a voice or clear identity as the play comes to the end. Cross-dressing has been utilized to put wealth into Dauphine’s hands, while the use of repugnant demeanors to the misogynist to mirror the male stereotypes in regard to women as a way to take Morose into insanity. Accordingly, the use of cross-dressing in “Epicoene” takes a representative role to engage an apparently male heterosexual and yet misogynous audience, emptying their presuppositions when the female is actually exposed to be a male and at the same time meeting their longing to be freed of the blabbing dominating woman. Contrary to Shakespeare’s plays that would suggest the three possibilities highlighted previously in this papers, “Epicoene” is disguising and deceiving since the homoerotic content is brought out when Dauphine takes of Epicoene’s periwig, but the scene is contextual and it has a different motif.
Deception and Disguise in Epicoene
As already established in the previous paragraphs, the author uses the disguise of a man posing as a woman, but the disguise is a secured surprise and the viewers are kept very ignorant of Epicoene’s actual identity until the last scene of the play. The disguise does not complicate the plot of this play, but Morose’s humor and his violent repugnance of noise. In addition, Epicoene’s disguise does not break or reduce the irony in the comic until the last scene when her disguise is exposed and the audience learns her actual identity. Therefore, while the author deprives his readers or viewers of the facts that Epicoene is actually a boy, Dauphine hides from his allies, Clerirnont and Truewit the true identity of Epicoene as Truewit kvetches of this illusion in the speech at the conclusion of the play.
Epicoene first enters the scene cross-dressed in mask but removes it when Morose makes a request. Most probably, the author allows the disguise as a means of shortly delaying the disclosure of her identity to turn the moment more spectacular; it could also be a joke since the unmasking does not actually disclose her gender identity. This kind of performance is common to Elizabethan plays, but the audience has little information about this feature. The humor staged by Morose is revealed to the audience in the duologue between Truewit and Clerimont as well as in the first scene of “Epicoene,” where the audience discovers that Morose’s humor is identified by his headdress. This is what Truewit tells of Morose:
“True. I met that stiff piece of formality, his uncle, yesterday, with a huge turban of nightcaps on his head, buckled over his ears.
Cler. O, that’s his custom when he walks abroad. He can endure no noise, man.” (Jonson 209)
Truewit does not hesitate that the civil gown and the canonical mask will turn a barber into a lawyer and a sea captain into a parson, or that Morose, just like most men, will take their outerwear for the concealed man:
“Hood an ass, with reverend purple,
So you can hide his two ambitious ears,
And, he shall pass for a cathedral Doctor.” (Jonson 174)
These words bring out the disguise and deception. Does this imply that any individuals can deceive another just by the kind of dressing he chooses to adopt?
In act III, particularly in the third scene, Dauphine brings himself out as the auctorial figure of the play. Nevertheless, he prominently determines the plot of the play. Like the author, Dauphine also tacitly pulls himself out of the authorial process. For instance, he describes how the gulls will sacrifice their selves:
“Daup. They’ll believe themselves to be just such men as we make ‘em, neither more nor less.
They have nothing, not the use of their senses, but by tradition.” (Jonson 219)
These words disclose the origins of deception, with which Jonson uses cross dressing to present. Dauphine, by saying that “they’ll believe themselves to be just such men as we make ‘em’” (Jonson 219), has apparently confessed to being the original cause of deception in “Epicoene.” However, the succeeding statement unravels the real origin of deception as the dupes’ dependence on custom and not on experience. Would this be the reason behind Jonson’s motif of cross-dressing?
Jonson deliberately chooses to cross dress boys to disguise and take the roles of both women and men. In Brown’s words, “So not only were there no real women on the stage—and this always contained gender ambiguity—there were no 'real men,' or even real men. Only boys—or if I may put it so, only ingles abroad” (Brown 259). Far from disguise and deception, the close immediacy of the viewers to a stage dominated by boyish characters works to create a multivalent bind. The playwright draws his audience up to the stage to disclose fully the theatrical tactics of his time that involved young boy actors staging the roles of women characters and the viewers can unmistakably see that Epicoene is surely a boy in a periwig. As the exposure of this disguise the audience may ask, for instance, ‘what else could be acted on stage?’ ‘If Epicoene were not a boy cross-dressing a woman, what else would he be?’
“Epicoene” demonstrates the audience’s precarious tendency of believing what they see or, occasionally, what they want to see. In other words, the audience is hypothetically deceived by the very conventions covered and disclosed as only conventions. What is more, the audience’s toleration of these theatrical strategies gives Jonson the sustenance to disguise Dauphine’s identity, while he at the same time discloses the mystery to his audience every time Epicoene is on stage. This coinciding exposing/concealing of Dauphine in turn becomes doubly disguised behind the familiar structure of the playwright’s comedy of humors allowing the audience to be on the sub-plots and in jokes.
In “Epicoene,” Jonson presents an apparent counter discourse of the blabby male. It is Morose, but not Epicoene or any other females in the play, whose speech is profusely out of control. With the motif of cross-dressing, the playwright success in the reversal of gendered anxieties is still satirical, and although it is disguising, it does possible points to a wave in early modern culture of disquiet over controlling male blabbing. In addition, Jonson uses disguise and deception to express chatty males to present an exceedingly strange gender dynamics in “Epicoene.” “Epicoene” is clearly among the rare types of plays that involve males, rather than females, cross-dressing. In fact, even after the ultimate disclosure that Epicoene is actually a boy, the confused impressions of gender covered within the play are barely resolved. Actually, what the disclosure of Epicoene’s male identity has to do more with further contradicting the relation between “played” and “actual” gender identities than is has to do with unifying different levels of cross-gender disguise.
According to Levine (p. 137), Epicoene’s uncloaking in the last scene and the disclosue that “she” is actually a boy arouses various questions regarding the gender identities of the Collegiates also on stage. For instance, ‘Does the elimination of Epicoene’s disguise covertly uncloak the Collegiates and disclose masculine identities under their dresses? The impracticality of returning Epicoene’s “male” identity without covertly raising concerns about the genders of almost all characters on stage suggests that male-to-female cross-dressing is just as baffling and subtle as female-to-male cross-dressing is.
In this play, disguise has ludicrous implications, but its intentions are more than amusing. For instance, this disguise serves to disclose Daw and La Poole’s posing of the Collegiate madams and Morose. The main disguise in “Epicoene,” which is a male child disguised as a woman, give another dimension, but that of recollection. At the event that the reader or viewer is not given a chance to participate in this joke while the play is underway, he or she has an opportunity to review some specific scenes that change complexion entirely when Epicoene’s identity is disclosed to him. In the last setting ahead of Morose’s confession of his frigidity, Epicoene vows that she will keep him with all his faults. However, the revelation that Epicoene is actually a boy sets an additional comic dimension to the avowal as the last scene flips back to the mind.
Despite cross-dressing being disguising and deceiving, the revelation at last scene of “Epicoene” is distinctively advantageous in this play. Disguise makes the readers or viewer to go back to specific scenes he or she has just read or watched with an amazing enchantment as the comic nature of those scenes becomes deeper with the new knowledge. For instance, revisiting the declarations by Daw and La Foole become more hilarious compared to the initial reading or watching as each acknowledges that he has delighted the Epicoene’s favors before her matrimony. However, finding out that Epicoene is a man in disguise strips them utterly bare of their pretenses before fellow characters as well as the audience, and the settings where their avowals took place hop to memory. Rereading some scenes after discovering disguise is not seen as deceiving, but as a delight.
From a different perspective, the modern anxiety with cross-dressing might make critics to concentrate exclusively on cross-dressed disguises. However, it is apparent that when looked at in the context of full dramatic composition, these disguises relapse as occurrences among many other masquerades. The cross-dressing disguises may appear occasionally in the setting of many other non-cross-dressing disguises to indicate that cross-dressing disguise might be similar to or function within some broader plot of disguise that does not necessarily pertain to gender and sexuality. As far as the audience may be infuriated for being disguised or deceived by the use of cross-dressing, the two are advantageous to the tenacity of the dramatic accomplishment—Dauphine fulfills his promise to Morose by the modest act of uncloaking the male bride. In other words, what appeared to be a ridiculously complex situation to unravel is resolved by the lifting of a headgear and gown.
Conclusion
In “Epicoene,” the playwright tries to address the risks of social and sexual misdemeanor by preserving the socially okayed gender roles and by resolving his work in the abolishment of sexual obscurity when the cross-dressed character is eventually exposed as the boy the character who played him actually was. The playwright strips away Epicoene’s delusory gender identity to disclose his actual sex, rejecting deception and basing his resolution in nature. The play employs cross-dressing, which is the theatrical performance of mannish women to stage a fundamentally misogynist comedy in which the stereotypical blames on women are denounced as a source of hilarity.
Epicoene is represented as a character serving as the means of empowering Dauphine who is after his inheritance. Morose is first enticed to her by her quietness, but after the marriage, is upset to the extent of being driven to madness by her chattiness and dominance of his house. With Morose’s madness, Dauphine finds a ground to propose a solution that involves his own empowerment. Following the signing the documents of re-inheriting him, he discloses the bride’s cross-dressing as the means that Morose might be dismissed from the wedlock. In this setting, contrary to the interpretations of other pieces of literature using the motif of cross-dressing, the play ends with a revelation of disguise and deception. In addition, the notion of homoeroticism comes up only in the Epicoene’s exposure, but as a surprise that instantly fulfills the hopes of Morose and those of the misogynist audience, whose provocation has been achieved by reifying male stereotypes in regard to women.

Works Cited
Bradbrook, M. C. The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy. New ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Print.
Brown, Steve. “‘…and his ingle at home’: Notes on Gender in Jonson’s Epicoene.” Renaissance Society of America. Philadelphia, 21 Mar. 1986. Print.
Dutton, Richard, Jean E. Howard, and Phyllis Rackin. “Shakespeare's Crossdressing Comedies.” A Companion to Shakespeare's Works 3 (2007): Chapter 6. Print.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. London: Routledge, 1992. Print.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1988. Print.
Jonson, Ben. Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. Ed. William Gifford. Lincoln: Harvard University, 1838. Print.
Levine, Laura. Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Print.
Shapiro, Michael. Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage Boy Heroines and Female Pages. Ann Arbor (Mich.): The University of Michigan Press, 1996. Print.
Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1986. Print.