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

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


Introduction

A man posing as a woman is a central element in Epicoene, and a sizable literature has grown up around gendered implications of cross-dressing in the play. One element of Epicoene rarely considered in the literature, however, is what this paper identifies as a second instance of “cross-dressing”: the ruse of presenting non-professionals as a cleric and a lawyer. Like gender crossing, professional cross-dressing depends on clothes and manner. It is a matter of appealing to what people assume to be true—that the outward signs we show to one another are indicative of something deeper about who we are or (in the case of a lawyer) what we know. To be sure, this second instance of cross-dressing is a less “sexy” element of the play than the specter of a male actor donning a dress to play a man playing a woman. Nevertheless, it is key to moving the plot forward and to understanding how events unfold.
Ultimately, this paper argues, gender and sexuality are important motifs in Epicoene, but they do not drive the play. What drives the play is Jonson’s insistent exploration of the fragility of social trust. Trust depends in no small part on being able to interpret what we see about people in a straightforward way. Yet it can be so easy to fool other people, and manipulate what they see in order to get what we want. This, at least, is what Dauphine—the character who engineers social deceptions in order to trick his uncle into giving him an inheritance—reminds us. In some senses, moreover, Dauphine is just a stand-in for Jonson himself, who uses Epicoene to remind us that the world we take for real on the stage is all a matter of deceit.
This argument is not meant to detract from the varied and intriguing readings of gender and sexuality in the play. However, it is meant to supplement them by showing that cross-dressing prompts reflection on many things, of which the potential instability of gender is only one. If we focus too exclusively on gender implications, we are liable to lose sight of what the play reminds us at a deeper level: the trust that makes
social life possible is (like gender) a more flimsy and constructed thing than we typically acknowledge.

The Big Reveal: Epicoene as a boy playing a boy playing a woman
In many senses the play Epicoene is best read backwards. This is because there is nowhere in the play that Dauphine reveals to the audience that Epicoene is a man drafted by Dauphine to play the part of a woman as part of a plot to secure an inheritance from his uncle Morose. We might expect that Dauphine would at least hint at this to the audience, share something with his friends to let us in on the joke. However, the audience is as in the dark about the plot as is Morose.
To be sure, it seems that audiences viewing Epicoene today would know about the cross-dressing charade from the start—it is the thing that keeps us talking about the play in many respects. However, the way the play was engineered, the key element of Dauphine’s plot is not revealed until the end. At the dénouement Morose, believing that Dauphine has saved him from a vexing marriage, signs a writing that will give a third of his estate for life to Dauphine and the whole to Dauphine upon Morose’s death. As soon as the papers are signed, Dauphine shows Morose what a pawn he has been and whips off Epicoene’s “peruke and other disguises” (V.i) revealing Epicoene to be a boy. Dauphine pronounces:

You have married a boy, a gentleman's son, that I have brought up this half year at my great charges, and for this composition, which I have now made with you.—What say you, master doctor? This is justum impedimentum, I hope, error personae? (V.i).

There is every reason to suspect that this revelation would come as a titillating shock to Jonson’s audiences. The fact that young men played women on the stage was an accepted but nonetheless charged aspect of Elizabethan theater. 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.)—indicating how serious the transgression was.
Thus the fact of young men playing women on the stage was a charged phenomenon. One of the paramount facts of their ability to play women was their beardlessness. Johnston notes that “beardless faces of boy actors playing the parts of women could easily be disregarded as insignificant, but . . . this absence is crucial since the shared lack of facial hair between women and boys, for example, is an extension of a fundamentally economic correspondence” (403). In other words, when the young man playing Epicoene is revealed to have been a man in the play as well as real life, it must have created a stunning visual assertion of how twinned the young man and the woman were.
Hence it is not surprising that many commentators have interpreted the cross-dressing in Epicoene in light of issues of gender and sexuality. Interpretations in this light have ample theoretical material to work with, emerging from feminist and queer theory, both of which emphasize the constructed, mutable and multivalent nature of gender and sexuality. So, for instance, in reviewing episodes of cross-dressing in Epicoene and other works, Tsamous suggests that “a constant struggle of gender classification takes place in [Renaissance] plays” (10). Similarly Julian suggests that the Renaissance “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 in various ways—for instance, through inquiries into space and markets. Yiu suggests that a “queer space” (72) is opened in Morose’s home through the play. 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. 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.
All this makes it tempting to adopt a reading that cross-dressing in Epicoene is somehow chiefly “about” the slipperiness gender and sexuality. 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 proposes, if we insist on reading cross-dressing chiefly in terms of its implications concerning the mutability of gender and sexuality, 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 professionals—buffoons cross-dressing as a cleric and a lawyer. Read in this way, for the syntagmatic associations across instances of “cross-dressing,” the donning of women’s clothing in less wholly about gender and sexuality than it is about social trust and deception.

Dressing to Cross Lines of Gender and Profession
As discussed above, 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 broad context of the play, therefore, is a complete breakdown in trust between Dauphine and Morose, due to Morose’s intention to marry specifically in order to disinherit Dauphine.
There is a curious implication to the fact that the heart of the play is a fight between two men over money. In a sense, this conflict serves to empty the various machinations (i.e., to marry or to thwart a marriage) of their sexual and gendered content. The bride must be a woman so as to grant Morose an heir. However, there is no sense in which sexual desire itself is at issue. Similarly, in Dauphine’s plan to introduce a man, the goal is not sexual humiliation of Morose (though it also helps to bring about his sexual humiliation). Rather, there is a simple calculation that this is a ploy that will work to get Dauphine his money. The sex or gender of the future wife, or her femininity, is in this sense 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. The same is true of Morose’s defining characteristic: his fear of noise. Morose’s aversion to noise has gender implication, but in terms of the plot its function is to make him the perfect sop. Truewit asks, “Can he endure no noise, and will venture on a wife?” (I.i). This “bizarre” desire for a wife who can be silent makes Morose vulnerable to a hoax. Dauphine is able to instruct the false woman to be silent before marriage, thus making it possible to lure Morose to his bait. In this sense, 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, is only “about gender” for entertainment value; in the terms of plot, it is about Dauphine’s money-driven machinations, no more no less. To Elizabethan audiences, the switch may well have seemed a hilarious 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. In this sense, 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 also 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, Cutbeard.
Dauphine protests that he cannot imagine how such a ruse could work--an ironic stance, given that he has contrived to have a young man play the role of a bride to Morose. Here, Truewit makes the important observation that it is all a matter of appearances:

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).

Yet more insight into the mechanics of cross-dressing comes in V.i., when Otter and the Cutbeard are about to be presented to Morose as, respectively, a cleric and a lawyer. Truewit instructs them as to how to carry out the deception. “If you chance to be out, do not confess it with standing still, or humming, or gaping one at another: but go on, and talk aloud and eagerly; use vehement action, and only remember your terms, and you are safe” (V.i.). In other words, the key to deception is to carry on and keep believing in the role. If you stop and seem to lose yourself, there may be room to question your performance and who you are. But if you keep moving forward, carrying out your role, there will be no time for others to stop and think. The garments of cross-dressing, furthermore, are there to act as a support. As Truewit instructs: “at first be very solemn, and grave like your garments” (V.i.). In other words, the act of cross-dressing gives a signal both to the person performing and the person perceiving the performance. It sets the stage. From there it is a matter of carrying out the performance with confidence.
At this point, Morose’s fear of “noise” comes into sharp relief. As Otter and Cutbeard roll out their semi-farcical interpretations of law, with liberal sprinklings of Latin (real or imagined), Morose feels overwhelmed. “No excursions upon words, good doctor, to the question briefly” (V.i.) he cries. Yet if he had been willing to pay attention to the details of Cutbeard and Otter’s performance, he may well have understood the ruse. This is another key to cross-dressing, the fact that overall we would like to see what we perceive at first glance. Every other details becomes “noise” that we are likely to drown out. Hence we become vulnerable to deception.
Intriguingly, the deception in this instance is not about gender but professions. It is, to be sure, a much less enticing topic for analysis than gender-based cross-dressing. 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. For the play, the deception wrought by the false bride is just one deception—indeed, just one instance of cross-dressing. There are multiple deceptions at work, and at least two instances of cross-dressing, the second having to do with misrepresenting who a professional is rather than who is a woman. In other words, where gender and sexuality form one motif, the larger theme that unites gender crossing with other elements of the play is the fragility of social trust. Trust is what makes social life possible, but it is also what leaves us vulnerable. After all, even professionals can be cross-dressers.

References

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

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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
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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.