Deception And Disguise Through Cross Dressing In Epicoene

Deception and Disguise through Cross-Dressing in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene


Introduction

There is a sizable literature around cross-dressing in Jonson’s Epicoene. Not surprisingly, a good deal of that literature draws on feminist and queer theory in order to explore how Epicoene’s false gender presentation informs issues of desire, sexuality and gender boundary-crossing in Renaissance literature. It is an enticing and informative literature. However, it draws heavily on anachronistic concepts; moreover, it may cause us to lose sight of some of the other critical ways that deception functions in the play.
One element of Epicoene rarely considered in the literature is what this paper identifies as a second instance of “cross-dressing”: the ruse of presenting a non-professional as a lawyer. Like gender crossing, professional cross-dressing depends on clothes and manner. This is a less than “sexy” element of the play, to be sure, but it is key to how events unfold. This paper reviews the literature on cross-dressing in Epicoene and then proposes an alternative reading that considers gender cross-dressing in tandem with professional charade. Ultimately, the paper argues that gender and sexuality are important motifs in Epicoene, but they do not drive the play forward. What drives the play forward is Jonson’s insistent exploration of the fragility of social trust.

The View from Feminist and Queer Theory
Much of the literature around cross-dressing in Renaissance literature adopts the view that cross-dressing represented a potential contestation of gender norms in a patriarchal society. For instance, as Gorman notes, feminist critics of Shakespeare and his contemporaries

re-imagined cross-dressing on the Elizabethan stage as a phenomenon always within patriarchal structures; whether specific instance of cross-dressing are interpreted as transgressive or as reaffirming patriarchal power, they nonetheless become inevitably defined only in relation to “the patriarchy (n. pag.).

This is the approach taken, for instance, by Tsamous, who suggests that “a constant struggle of gender classification takes place in [Renaissance] plays” (10).
Not only feminist but queer theorists as well have concentrated on the gender-bending nature of cross-dressing in Renaissance literature. Julian, like a number of the literary critics he cites to, suggests the act of boy actors donning clothes to portray a woman was not merely a matter of pragmatism on the Renaissance stage. Rather, “the boy actor possesses an unashamedly ‘epicene’ nature,’” which makes him a productive site of gender-based challenge and play (7).
This basic line of analysis has been extended through inquiries into space, markets and bodies. Works on spatial boundaries in Jonson highlight the queerness and transgression of gender norms in domestic and public spaces. For instance, Yiu suggests that a “queer space” (72) is opened in Morose’s home through the play. Yiu details this by referencing numerous points in the play where doorways and facades are breached in curious manners. Ultimately, she suggests that it is Morose’s “queer marriage” to a “cross-dressed boy, a travesty of marital domesticity” (Yiu 72) that opens up the queerness of his domestic structure—the body of the wife becoming a parallel to the architectural breaches that she finds. Similarly, Pearson attends to “doors, windows, walls and thresholds” in order to suggest that cross-dressing figures in Renaissance plays were continually subverting lines of domestic and public space as they subverted gender appearances. She notes, for instance, with regard to Dekker’s character Moll Frith, that, “as a result of [her] gender hybridity, she is defined not only through ambiguous clothing but also through an association with both closed and open spaces, ‘chamber[s]’ (IV.i.86, 93) but also extra-domestic spaces like ‘Grays Inn Fields’ and the like (II.i.294)” (Pearson 165).
Tsamous, meanwhile, twins an analysis rooted in the feminist theory of Judith Butler with an emphasis on markets and consumption at a time when the merchant classes were rapidly gaining social power. For Tsamous, the element of cross-dressing highlights the potential of women to craft their images through make-up and elegant dress, throwing into question what the feminine actually is. Indeed, the phenomenon has the potential to hollow gender of its meaning. She suggests, “Epicoene demonstrates that a woman's ability to improve her appearance with make-up and fine clothing in order to flaunt her position and empower herself is put in jeopardy if she finds that she is who she is exclusively because of her commodities” (Tsamous 54). Ultimately, then, for Tsamous cross-dressing in Jonson’s play is a foil for questioning the selfhood of women in a newly commodity-driven era. Just as with Yiu and Pearson, who focus on spatial realities, the heart of the issue is gender and its potential instability.
There is undoubted merit to interpretations such as this. There is a clear record that cross-dressing was a topic of central importance to definitions of gender in Renaissance Europe; it would be wrong to underplay this aspect. Pagnac notes that there was fierce controversy over the convention of boys playing women on the stage, with some at that time arguing that it was a subversion of biblical precepts (n. pag.). There is also relatively contemporary evidence that the phenomenon stirred discussion of homosexuality and sexual play. Senelick, for instance, notes that:

in the epilogue to The Parson's Wedding (1663), in apology for current lewdness, the public was told:
When boys play'd women's parts, you'd think the Stage,
Was innocent in that untempting Age.
No: for your amorous Fathers then, like you,
Amongst those Boys had Play-house Misses too:
They set those bearded Beauties on their laps,
Men gave 'em Kisses, and the Ladies Claps (127).

Cross-dressing for other purposes than the stage (for instance, so that a woman could accompany her husband to war as a “page,” or so that a working-class woman could go out to find work), was severely punished, often with imprisonment at Bridewell Hospital (Pagnac n. pag.). Meanwhile, upper-class women would sometimes don one item of menswear, such as a manly hat, as a kind of token of resistance to masculine power (Pagnac n. pag.).
Therefore, it would be easy to adopt a reading that cross-dressing in Epicoene is somehow chiefly “about” gender and patriarchy. Indeed, there is no doubt gender is a major issue in Epicoene. There is a continuous thread of discussion in the play concerning the virtues of a quiescent woman. Indeed, the title character’s chief perfidy may not have been her hidden genitalia, but her masquerade as a quiet and submissive bride. When she stands up to Morose, he cries out “O Amazonian impudence!” (III.ii). Equally bad in Morose’s eyes, she brings with her the opinionates “collegiates”—women who travel as a group without their husbands and do not shrink from speaking their minds. Hence, the play is in many senses manifestly caught up with themes of gender. Because the audience does not know that Epicoene is indeed a man disguised, they have ample time to laugh at and meditate on the troubling nature of women.
That said, this paper chimes in with Gorman, who suspects that interpretations that bring in ideas of patriarchy and gender-bending may be anachronistic. (Witness Yiu’s description of Morose’s marriage as a “queer marriage” (72).) As Gorman notes, “In the process of re-imagining early modern gender many critics have re-constructed it in a fashion inescapably influenced by the discourse of modern gender and sexuality” (n. pag., emphasis in the original). Moreover, this paper proposes, if we insist on reading cross-dressing chiefly in terms of its patriarchal and its queer (or hetero-normative) implications, we may lose sight of the other significant meaning in Epicoene. One issue that has escaped sustained analysis is the way that the appearance of a false woman at the heart of Epicoene is paralleled by the appearance of false lawyers—buffoons cross-dressing as professionals. Read in this way, for the syntagamatic associations across instances of “cross-dressing,” the donning of women’s clothing in less wholly about gender and patriarchy than it is about social trust and deception. Therefore, the remainder of this paper focuses on an analysis of Epicoene that puts gender-deception into a larger framework of impersonation and issues of social trust.


Dressing to Cross Lines of Gender and Profession
The paramount fact of Epicoene is that cross-dressing is used as part of a larger plot meant to enable Dauphine to get what he wants and thwart his misanthropic, sound-phobic uncle, Morose. The context of the play is a complete breakdown in trust between Dauphine and Morose, due to Morose’s intention to marry specifically in order to disinherit Dauphine. The bride must be a woman so as to grant Morose an heir. However, there is no sense in which desire is at issue. This is as much a machination as Dauphine’s later plan, rendering the femininity of the future wife more or less beside the point.
From the beginning, then, the cross-dressing element of the charade is rooted in the issue of social deception and manipulation, rather than in anything to do with femininity or desire. Morose’s aversion to noise makes him the perfect sop. (Truewit asks, “Can he endure no noise, and will venture on a wife?” (I.i).) Morose’s “bizarre” desire for a wife who can be silent makes him vulnerable to a hoax. The plot is then driven forward by Dauphin’s machinations in collaboration with Truewit; issues of gender and sexuality become context and pretext—and the cause for amusement—but they do not make things happen in the play.
Indeed, even the silence of a Morose’s bride is in some senses removed from issues of gender. Morose dislikes the noise anyone makes, man or woman. His repugnance is gender-neutral. When he requires information from his male servant he suggests that the servant communicate in signs:

Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method, than by this trunk, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine ears the discord of sounds? Let me see: all discourses but my own afflict me, they seem harsh, impertinent, and irksome. Is it not possible, that thou should'st answer me by signs, and I apprehend thee, fellow? Speak not, though I question you (II.i).

When the servant (who is mute) manages to answer Morose using leg motions rather than words, Morose is pleased. This might lead one to suspect that Morose prefers silence in people of lesser stature—women and servants—alone. Yet he remarks “Very good. This is not only fit modesty in a servant, but good state and discretion in a master” (II.i).1
Even the wife’s switch from obedience to verbosity has, in the end, nothing to do with gender. To be sure, in the context of a performance where the audience is left in the dark as to the ruse, it would seem at first to be a hilarious (to Elizabethan audiences) reflection on the womanly need to irritate and dominate her husband. However, by the end of the play it has become clear that the whole reason the wife appeared to be silent and then proved to be shrewish had to do with the quarrel between Dauphine and Morose over money. It is less a reflection on Elizabethan gender wars than a reflection on the lengths men will go to in order to deceive on another. (Here the word “men” is used advisedly, in both its generic and specific senses.)
Most importantly, perhaps, the sex charade is not the only instance of cross-dressing in the play. In the end, Dauphine’s plot depends on his ability to manage not just the marriage but the divorce. Luckily for Dauphine and his part-time co-conspirator Truewit, Morose’s anxiety about noise renders him as inept in dealing with courts as he is in dealing with women. Morose experiences “such a noise in the court” with all the “speaking and counter-speaking” that he finds the common noise of conversation at home to be “silence to’t” (IV.ii). Once again, this aversion makes him vulnerable to a ruse. Morose is so grateful for Dauphine and Truewit’s suggestion that they will find him the perfect lawyer, that it is as if all the suspicion and mistrust between them has been erased. Truewit then, in private, describes to Dauphine how they will be able to create the perfect lawyer and cleric for the purpose of “advising” Morose, using a pair of buffoonish men with no professional standing—Otter and the barber. Dauphine can’t imagine how such a ruse could work, but Truewit knows that it is all a matter of appearances:

Do not fear me. Clap but a civil gown with a welt on the one; and a canonical cloak with sleeves on the other: and give them a few terms in their mouths, if there come not forth as able a doctor, and complete a parson, for this turn, as may be wish'd, trust not my election: and, I hope, without wronging the dignity of either profession, since they are but persons put on, and for mirth's sake, to torment him. The barber smatters Latin, I remember (IV.ii).

The deception in the second instance is not about gender but professions. It is, to be sure, a much less enticing topic for analysis. Perhaps a lone sociologist will someday write a thesis on the professions in Jonson’s plays; however, the sociologist will have none of the extensive theoretical apparatus provide by feminist and queer theory to use in elaborating the theme. Nonetheless, this second instance of cross-dressing is central to driving the play forward, and—notably—it depends equally on dress and manner as does gender deception. Once the faux lawyer is dressed appropriately and has a few appropriate phrases to say, Morose’s imagination will do the rest.
There is something doubly intriguing here, since the professions are all about social trust. Lawyers take oaths that bind them to certain loyalties and codes of conduct. Impersonating one breaks a certain social expectation. The play then, while it is dripping with ideas about gender and sexuality, is actually driven forward by the topic of social deception and subversion not of gender norms but of social trust. This topic of subversion of social trust, meanwhile, unfolds in the context of a three and half hour play that uses detail to create a sense of realness. “Jonson’s use of strict verisimilitude helps to facilitate yet another layer of deception” notes Jackson (n. pag.). This makes it all the more shocking when at the end of the play Epicoene, the title figure is revealed as a man, something that was hidden from the audience. Jonson has made his own breach of social trust, all in service of highlighting how easily we can be fooled—and how much we depend on trust to keep things in order.

Conclusion
There is no doubt that gender is a major theme of Epicoene. However, it is better described as a theme, or a motif, than as a driving force in the play. The plot of the play depends on two primary instances of deception: first the faux wife (initially proved false because she speaks too much, and eventually proved false because her sex is revealed), and second the use of fake advisors, who will prime Morose for the divorce solution that leaves Dauphine with a sizable sum settled on him. At the end of the play the audience realizes that they themselves have been deceived—both because Epicoene is revealed to have been a man (that is, a man playing a man playing a woman), and because their sense of what was happening was misguided. Dauphine’s will to deceive drove the plot from the beginning, and Dauphine was discreet enough to hide the truth even from the audience.
There are many satisfying ways to read the play as amplifying issues of queerness or gender in the Renaissance. Such readings are imaginative, trenchant and useful. However, in the end such readings may be more about our own preoccupations than about what the play proposes. Trust is what makes social life possible, but it is also what leaves us vulnerable. After all, even professionals can be cross-dressers.

References

Gorman, Sara. "The Theatricality of Transformation: Cross-dressing, Sexual Misdemeanour and Gender/Sexuality Spectra on the Elizabethan Stage, Bridewell Hospital Court Records, and the Repertories of the Court of the Aldermen, 1574-1607." Early Modern Literary Studies 13.3 (2008): 1-37.

Jackson, J. A. “On forfeit of your selves, think nothing true”: Self-Deception in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene. Early Modern Literary Studies. Web. 17 December 2011. <http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/10-1/jackjons.htm>.

Julian, Erin. Dangerous Boys and City Pleasure: Subversions of Gender and Desire in the Boy Actor's Theatre. Thesis. McMaster University, 2010. Web.

Pagnac, Susan. Cross-dressing in Context. 1998. Web. 17 Dec. 2011. <http://web.archive.org/web/20040224204959/http://english.okstate.edu/RenDrama/susanp/context.htm>.

Pearson, Jacqueline. “The Least Certain Of Boundaries: Gendered Bodies and Gendered Spaces in Early Modern Drama.” SEDERI 13 (2003): 163-181

Sanchez, Reuben. "'Things Like Truths, Well Feigned': Mimesis and Secrecy in Jonson's Epicoene." Comparative Drama 40.3 ( 2006): 313-36.

Senelick, Laurence. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre. London: Routledge, 2000.

Tsamous, Melanie Elizabeth. Speaking Themselves: Cross-Dressing And Gender
Performance In Early Modern Comedies. Thesis. California State University, Long Beach, 2009. Web.

Yiu, Mimi. "Sounding the Space between Men: Choric and Choral Cities in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or, The Silent Woman." PMLA 122.1 (2007): 72-88.