Epicene, or the Silent Woman Literary Elements

City Comedy

English

London, 1609

There is no narrator in the play, though Truewit offers the closing remarks when he asks the audience to clap at the end.

Irreverent, chaotic, light-hearted

Protagonist: Dauphine (nephew). Antagonist: Morose (uncle).

Morose wants to disinherit his nephew Dauphine, so he agrees to marry a woman whom he perceives to be silent. Unbeknownst to him, Epicene is working for Dauphine in order to trap Morose in an undesirable marriage.

In the last scene of the play, the big revelation is made: not only does Morose learn that Epicene was "planted" by Dauphine, but all the characters (and the audience) also learn that Epicene is a boy in disguise.

The marriage between Captain Otter and Mistress Otter foreshadows that between Morose and Epicene.

At the end of the play, Truewit asks the audience to clap in order to cure Morose of his affliction. This is an example of understatement, as Morose detests noise of any kind and would only be more infuriated.

John Daw makes numerous allusions to poets and philosophers, most from antiquity, throughout the play. He lists their names in quick succession, suggesting that he is actually unfamiliar with their work and pretending to be more learned than he is.

Throughout the play, various male characters use competing imagery to describe women as either beautiful, deceitful, or repulsive. The images they use suggest their own perception of appropriate standards for women at the time, an ironic motif that reveals the foolishness of men who think they can control women in society.

Morose looks for the marriage to Epicene to be a solution to his objective of disinheriting Dauphine, but it ends up becoming a problem that ultimately leads him to restore Dauphine's inheritance.

Just as Dauphine is making a fool of Morose, Truewit makes fools of Daw and La Foole by tricking them into believing the other wants to duel, managing to get both their swords. The marriage between Captain Otter and Mistress Otter also parallels the marriage between Morose and Epicene.

When Epicene reveals that she is actually loud and opinionated, she asks Morose if he had preferred to marry a living doll. Here, Epicene uses personification to suggest that Morose wrongly considers women as objects for possession.

The play is written entirely in prose, which is unique for the genre and for Jonson's repertoire. However, the use of prose helps underscore some of the more absurd moments in the play, as characters will frequently drone on about either unimportant nonsense (Daw and La Foole) or, in Morose's case, their own hypocrisy (as he speaks at length about his desire for others not to speak). The use of prose also helps situate the play as a city comedy that is more interested in the lives of ordinary city-dwellers than in royalty or imagined worlds. In early modern English plays, prose typically denotes a speaker from the lower classes, while verse was reserved for high nobility and members of the court.