Epicoene

Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, also known as Epicene, is a comedy by Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson. It was originally performed by the Blackfriars Children or Children of the Queen's Revels, a group of boy players, in 1609. Apart from its two prologues, the play was written entirely in prose.

The first performance of Epicœne was, by Jonson's admission, a failure; years later, however, John Dryden and others championed it and after the Restoration it was frequently revived—Samuel Pepys refers to a performance on 6 July 1660, and places it among the first plays legally performed after Charles II's accession.

The play takes place in London. Morose, a wealthy old man with an obsessive hatred of noise, has made plans to disinherit his nephew Dauphine by marrying. His bride Epicœne is, he thinks, an exceptionally quiet woman; he does not know that Dauphine has arranged the whole match for purposes of his own.

The couple are married despite the well-meaning interference of Dauphine's friend True-wit. Morose soon regrets his wedding day, as his house is invaded by a charivari that comprises Dauphine, True-wit, and Clerimont; a bear warden named Otter and his wife; two stupid knights, La Foole and Daw; and an assortment of "collegiates," vain and scheming women with intellectual pretensions. Worst for Morose, Epicœne quickly reveals herself as a loud, nagging mate.

Desperate for a divorce, Morose consults two lawyers (actually Dauphine's men in disguise), but they can find no grounds for ending the match. Finally, Dauphine promises to reveal grounds to end the marriage (Morose must come to financial terms with him). The agreement made, Dauphine strips the female costume from Epicœne, revealing that the wife is, in fact, a boy. Morose is dismissed harshly, and the other ludicrous characters are discomfited by this revelation; Daw and Foole, for instance, had claimed to have slept with Epicœne.

For Epicœne, Jonson relied to some extent on a variety of sources. While most details of characterization and plot are, as usual, his own invention, he found the scenario in two orations by Libanius: in one, a groom in Morose's situation argues for permission to commit suicide to escape his marriage, while in the other an elderly miser plans to disinherit a nephew who laughed at him. The coup de théâtre of Epicœne's unveiling, while traditionally viewed as derived from the Casina of Plautus, is closer both in spirit and in execution to Il Marescalco of Aretino. Finally, a comic duel between La Foole and Daw is usually seen as an echo of the mock-duel between Viola and Aguecheek in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Some more local details are also borrowed from the classical misogynistic tradition. True-wit's speeches condemning marriage are larded with borrowings from Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Juvenal's Satire VI. John Aubrey's claim that Morose was modelled on Elizabethan businessman Thomas Sutton is no longer credited.

...
Wikipedia