College Literature, June 1994 v21 n2 p1(18)
Masculine silence: 'Epicoene' and Jonsonian stylistics.
Lanier, Douglas.
Abstract: Playwright Ben Jonson's depiction of women in his works uses stereotypical characterization and his female characters are only distinct when compared to the male roles. Jonson's play 'Epicoene' represents masculinity in the manner in which males supposedly control speech. The main male character is characterized by stoicism and masculine silence, as opposed to the female's more vocal character.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 West Chester University
Nor was hee only a strong, but an absolute Speaker, and Writer: but his subtilty did not shew it selfe; his judgement thought that a vice. For the ambush hurts more that is hid. (Jonson, Timber 837-40; H&S 8: 589)(1)
Speake, but man and man together. (Jonson, Timber 1682-83; H&S 8: 614)
It is no news to anyone that feminist criticism has radically reshaped Renaissance literary studies, particularly our study of the familiar patriarchs of the British literary "malestream." It is remarkable, then, in the wake of revisionist readings of nearly every major male Renaissance poet and dramatist, that generally Ben Jonson has, with some exceptions,(2) remained relatively unamenable to gender-oriented criticism. Kathleen McLuskie apparently speaks for many when she characterizes the Jonsonian corpus as "barren ground for feminist reading" (159). Part of the reason for this may be Jonson's open contempt for Petrarchan sexual politics; part may be the absence of non-stereotypical female characters in Jonson's most studied works; and part may be that by and large Jonsonians have been far more preoccupied in the past decade with New Historicizing and (re)politicizing his canon. Yet I suspect that the greatest bar to an extended feminist reading of Jonson has been his own seemingly uncomplicated, consistent, and virulent misogyny. In the case of Queen Elizabeth, for example, whose virginal image connoted feminine power, Jonson iconoclastically represents the Fairy Queen in The Alchemist as a be-costumed whore who appears to a fool in a privy as part of an elaborate con-game. In his 1619 conversation with William Drummond, after recounting Elizabeth's virtual senility in her old age--Jonson reports that once she became old, Elizabeth never saw herself in a mirror and that her attendants would sometimes in making her up "vermilion her nose"--he offers this scurrilous explanation for the queen's mystical virginity:
that she had a Membrana on her which made her uncapable of man, though for her delight she tryed many [ . . . ] at the comming over of Monsieur, ther was a French Chirurgion [surgeon] who took jn hand to cut it, yett fear stayed her & his death. (Conversations with Drummond 342-46; H&S 1, 142)
Jonson's is a misogyny so conventional and overt that it has made him on matters of gender politics a figure relatively easy to shrug off as uninteresting. Certainly he has few of the fascinating ambivalences of, say, a Spenser or Shakespeare and, unlike Milton, he has, according to traditional literary histories, exerted far less power over subsequent poetic generations in shaping discourses of gender. As Virginia Woolf long ago dismissively opined, Jonson, with Milton, simply "had a dash too much of the male in [him]" (103).
Despite a certain truth to these premises, I want to demonstrate that it is nonetheless fruitful to "engender" Jonsonian studies by embracing Woolf's observation, that is, by shifting critical attention away from Jonson's admittedly jaundiced view of the feminine and toward his conception of the masculine.(3) Jonson's vision of masculinity, it would seem, governs much more than his representation of male and female characters. It governs his relationships with his patrons (male and female) and with his poetic forebears and progeny, and it shapes his depiction of male friendship. Most importantly, it is linked, through Jonson's conception of an explicitly masculine stylistics, to his seminal role--the metaphor is entirely appropriate--in recasting the practices of Renaissance authorship, particularly the re-masculinization of authorship after the death of Elizabeth. Jonson's oft-repeated dictum from Quintillian, that one cannot be the good poet without first being a good man, needs to be heard as a masculinist as well as a moral desiderata. When Jonson deploys this adage in his prefacing letter to Volpone, for example, he clarifies that the poet serves as an ethical guide to an exclusively male community: "He that is said to be able to informe yong-men to all good disciplines, inflame growne-men to all great vertues, keepe old-men in their best and supreme state, or as they decline to child-hood, recover them to their first strength . . ." (22-25; H&S 5: 17). Here I want to sketch one version of this project of "engendering" Jonsonian criticism, by tracing Jonson's masculinization of poetic style.
Classical and Renaissance rhetoricians seeking to prescribe proper uses of language often "tend[ed] to anthropomorphize style, and in this way ostentatious rhetorical ornament gradually [came] to be identified with women" (Desmet 43). Jonson is certainly no exception to this tradition. The figure of Poetry he seeks to restore to glory in his prefacing letter to Volpone is a much degraded "she." In Cynthias Revells the female masquers emblematize ideal modes of representation--the last of which is "Simplicitie" whose device is "no device" (5.7.55, 57; H&S 4: 167)--while, by contrast, their male counterparts supply the masque with the content of those representations, the virtues of grace, goodness, audacity, and beneficence. When Jonson discusses various writing styles in Timber, he does so in terms of explicitly gendered body types, declaring, for example, that "Too much pickednesse is not manly" (1422; H&S 8: 607). Real men, Jonson argues, prefer their truth raw and unadorned: "Pure and neat language I love, yet plaine and customary" (Timber 1870-71; H&S 8: 620). He is, so he claims, a straight-shooting, bottom-line kind of guy, a claim that underlies his authority as a satiric poet and sets him apart from the poetasters who, he so often reminds us, populate his barbaric age. Indeed, in Timber Jonson fantasizes how posterity will recognize his virile style and scorn the womanish works of his contemporaries:
Then in his Elocution behold, what word is proper; what is beautifully translated; where the figures are fit: which gentle, which strong to shew the composition Manly. And how he avoyded faint, obscure, obscene, sordid, humble, improper, or effeminate Phrase. . . . (793-99; H&S 8: 588)
In fact, Jonson takes the link between gender and style so seriously that to praise his female patrons, he typically makes the touchstone of worth the woman's father, husband, or son.(4) In the case of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, her feminine freedom from male touchstones (see Lewalski, "Lucy" 77) leads Jonson to transform her into an honorary man, in the final lines of Epigrammes 76 recasting the feminine distaff into a symbol of masculine autonomy:
Onely a learned, and a manly soule I purpos'd her; that should, with even powers, The rock, the spindle, and the sheeres controule Of destinie, and spin her owne free houres. (Epigrammes 76, lines 13-16; H&S 8: 52)
Even if it means doing a little shuffling of the sexes, Jonson insists upon speaking man to man, and the problematics of maintaining such a masculine discourse, a discourse Jonson allies with verbal restraint and finally silence, is at the heart of his career's concerns.
Jonson's masculine ideal finds its underpinning in the neostoic conception of the embattled yet resolute self expressed in Plutarch, Seneca, and Tacitus, the first two of whom figure prominently in the margins of Epicoene. Neostoic discourse becomes linked with masculinism in part because of the masculinist circles through which it makes its entrance into England--the Essex and Sidney circles (see Salmon). As Jonson formulates it, masculinity entails the maintenance of a rigorous self-identity and autonomy, what Thomas Greene has dubbed "the centered self." Strategic silence is a central component of that ideal: both Seneca and Plutarch write essay-length warnings about the dangers of talkativeness, and their warnings accorded with a slender yet insistent thread within Humanist tracts--exemplified by Thomas Elyot's Pasquil the Playne--counseling reticence and aversion to ornamentation. Geffrey Whitney's emblem for female silence has its masculine counterpart, the picture (adapted from Alciati) of a male scholar who is reading with his finger to his lips, a picture complemented by an elaborate epigram praising the virtues of silence and dangers of speech (60). Whitney's emblem neatly conflates a set of widespread associations: of speech with frivolity, sin and regret, and political vulnerability; and of silence with gravity, virtue, self-control, rationality and learnedness, rest, and most important manliness. The general sentiment Whitney expresses would have been familiar, for it appears in some of the first lines a Renaissance boy might learn, Cato's Disticha de Moribus 1.3.
This centered and silent ego-ideal, present and sufficient to itself, invulnerable to change or contingency--to use two of Jonson's favorite terms, "standing" and "still"--is in Jonson's work insistently gendered male and becomes the favored starting point in his epideictics. "To Sir Thomas Roe" provides a familiar example:
He that is round within himselfe, and streight, Need seeke no other strength, no other height; Fortune upon him breakes her selfe, if ill, And what would hurt his vertue makes it still. . . . alwayes to thy gather'd selfe the same. (Epigrammes 98, 3-6, 9, emphasis added; H&S 8: 63)
Jonson's praise of Roe converts an effeminizing threat--Fortune, the principle of contingency--into a condition that makes the masculine self's unwavering virtue manifest--"makes it still." And yet it does so almost as an unintended consequence and through no effort of its own, for the self's effort to make that virtue manifest would acknowledge that it needed to make virtue manifest, that somehow being virtuous was not sufficient to itself. Hence, too, the curious contentlessness of this poem, the lack of reference to any specific deed: Jonson's interest is in a more general masculine mode of being or style that exists independently of any particular external mark. Elsewhere Jonson stresses that manly souls disdain representation, for their manliness in no way depends upon any outward show of word or deed, the poet's or their own:
Men that talke of their owne benefits, are not beleev'd to talke of them, because they have done them: but to have done them, because they might talke of them. (Timber 1063-65; H&S 8: 596)
It is for that reason, as Stanley Fish has brilliantly argued, that Jonson's poems of praise are typically spectacularly self-erasing affairs, asserting that the work or person at hand doesn't need the praise. Jonson's epideictic verse typically points to the fact that the work or person is already so patently praiseworthy it doesn't need his accolade at all, the very superfluity of Jonson's poetry being, paradoxically, the content of his praise.
For Jonson, the genuine author aspires to this same masculine condition within discourse, a condition of utter self-sameness, self-presence, and self-sufficiency within the written word, a complete mastery over differance in all its myriad forms. Jonson's first published poem, "And must I sing?" signals the project of his entire canon, for the poem discards one by one all the conventional muses until the poet himself is left alone to "bring / My owne true fire" (Forrest 10: 28-29; H&S 8: 108) to the page. Even when Jonson recognizes--always momentarily--the ultimate impossibility of this project, as he does in his prefacing letter to Volpone, he does so only to immediately redouble his efforts to exert control over discourse:
Never . . . had any man a wit so presently excellent, as that it could raise itself; but there must come both matter, occasion, commenders, and favourers to it. If this be true, and that the fortune of all writers doth daily prove it, it behoves the careful to provide well toward these accidents; and having acquired them, to preserve that part of reputation most tenderly, wherein the benefit of a friend is also defended. (1-8; H&S 5: 17)
The letter that Jonson introduces here is an artistic defense before powerful centers of cultural authority, the "learned Sisters" Oxford and Cambridge, and the situation demands some acknowledgement of dependency upon "commenders, and favourers." Yet by the end of this remarkable passage Jonson has, in the very act of acknowledging the place of chance and patronage in authorship, converted himself from defendant to defender, from dependent to the one upon whom "the benefit of a friend" depends.
This Jonsonian drive toward a rigorously centered selfhood provokes relentless self-examination for signs of dependence, of theatricality, of vulnerability to material contingency, or of displacement by time or reinterpretation, all of which are represented within the Jonsonian imagination as emasculating or effeminizing. Within the realm of Jonsonian style the masculine signified stands outside discourse, the transhistorical truth above any given speaker's authority:
I will have no man addict himselfe to mee; but if I have any thing right, defend it as Truth's, not mine (save as it conduceth to a common good). It profits not me to have any man fence, or fight for me, to flourish, or take a side. Stand for Truth, and 'tis enough. (Timber 154-59; H&S 8: 568)
This self-evident masculine signified is set against the feminine signifier, for the material element of utterance--rhyme, trope, pun, generic convention--often threatens to direct or reshape or even create poetic content, rather than the other way around. Poets who give in to the seductive signifier, those who "have no composition at all, but a kind of tuneing and riming fall, in what they write," create a kind of verse that "runs and slides, and onely makes a sound," and deserve the damning label of "Womens-Poets":
They write a verse, as smooth, as soft, as creame; In which there is not torrent, nor scarce streame.
You may sound these wits, and find the depth of them, with your middle finger. They are Creame-bowle, or but puddle-deepe. (Timber 709-18; H&S 8: 585)
"Sound" indeed. Thus, too, Jonson's contemptuous fascination with jargon and cant, beautiful, powerful-sounding words that, in good social constructionist fashion, create their own seductive but finally chimerical realities. When Jonson comments on Mary Wroth's sonnets in the opening lines of Under-Wood 28, what he singles out for comment is their seductive sounds:
I that have beene a lover, and could shew it, Though not in these, in rithmes not wholly dumbe, Since I exscribe your Sonnets, am become A better lover, and much better Poet. (lines 1-4; H&S 8: 182)
As Mary Ellen Lamb has recently observed (154-56), Jonson here equates a feminine literary style and genre with the vocalized rhythms of intercourse, and limits Wroth's achievement primarily to verbal beauties rather than content: "readers take / For Venus' ceston every line you make" (lines 13-14). It is equally important that Jonson replies with a sonnet of his own that conspicuously resists the very "rithmes" he singles out for praise.
"Words, above action: matter, above words" (line 20; H&S 4: 43), Jonson declares in his prologue to Cynthias Revells, a hierarchy that governs every aspect of literary production. Even his practice of writing out his poetry first in prose and only after in verse would seem to underline the threat that words, particularly their mellifluous sounds, pose to virtuous matter. The obverse of masculine literary production is most memorably embodied in the person of Ursula the enormous pig-woman from Bartholomew Fayre, who, she tells us upon her first entrance, "shall e'en melt away to the first woman, a ribbe again," leaving sweaty traces of aleatory discourse in her wake: "I doe water the ground in knots, as I goe, like a great Garden-pot, you may follow me by the S.S.s I make" (2.2.50-53; H&S 6: 42). As Stallybrass and White have suggested (64-66), her grotesque materiality stands in contrast to the classical discursive body Jonson seeks to fashion for himself, but it is important to add that those very different bodies are very differently gendered. If Ursula, "the mother o' the pigs," epitomizes the materiality of feminine discursive production, Jonson would by contrast prefer to produce poems as Jove produced Athena, his oft-repeated image for representing the writing process: the poetic brainchild would spring fully formed from the head, bypassing entirely the messy, material, unpredictable, effeminizing labor (pun intended) of setting matter to words. To be a properly masculine poet, one must be conspicuously dumb.
Jonson's conception of gender, and of gender's link to the problematic of representation, is neatly summarized in a small satirical shrub nestled in his poetic miscellany The Forrest. That Jonson included it in The Forrest, a collection of what he regarded as his best efforts, testifies to its importance:
Follow a shaddow, it still flies you; Seeme to flye it, it will pursue: So court a mistris, shee denyes you; Let her alone, shee will court you. Say, are not women truely, then, Stil'd but the shaddowes of us men? At morne, and even, shades are longest; At noone, they are or short, or none: So men at weakest, they are strongest, But grant us perfect, they're not knowne. Say, are not women truely, then, Stil'd but the shaddowes of us men? (Forrest 7; H&S 8: 104)
This antifeminist song, with its refrain that invites "us men" to sing along with Ben, seeks to fashion an ideal male coterie. In fact, the second verse portrays a world in which men are perfected precisely because women are "not knowne." The song conceives of gender as a zero-sum game, each sex's power manifesting itself at the expense of the other. The feminine shadow, here also an image of the "stil'd" representational mark, points toward a masculine presentational strategy, one that is "confirmed" by the logic of Petrarchanism: fleeing the feminine shadow places the man in a position of self-sufficient power and authority. The circumstances of this poem's composition add yet another layer of significance. According to Drummond (Conversations 364-67; H&S 1: 142), Jonson wrote the poem, a free translation of Aneau's "Milier umbra Viri," at the Countess of Pembroke's behest, as a "penance" for Jonson's taking her husband's side in a dispute over women's status as men's shadows. Significantly enough, then, the poem becomes a denial of the circumstances of dependency--both upon the poem's source and the Countess's patronage--that characterize its production, and as such, doubly declares Jonson's masculine centeredness.
However, as we noted earlier Jonson acknowledges--no doubt with a wistful sigh--that "Never . . . had any man a wit so presently excellent, as that it could raise itself." Try as they might, male poets cannot do without their female shadows. For Jonson, the stylistic issue in poem after poem is how to demonstrate one's mastery over the effeminizing power of the signifier. The hallmarks of Jonsonian style--the preference for the epigram, the objectifying metrical regularity and closure of the heroic couplet, the plain style and disdain for jargon and aureate diction, the self-consuming poems of praise, the elaborate hedges against misinterpretation--all seek to register Jonson's mastery over the effeminizing power of the signifier. In this regard, we might see one of Jonson's unjustly neglected masterpieces, "A Fit of Rime Against Rime," as a synecdoche for his entire stylistic project. A few stanzas will give the flavor:
Rime, the rack of finest wits, That expresseth but by fits True Conceipt; Spoyling senses of their Treasure, Cozening Judgement with a measure, But false weight. Wresting words, from their true calling; Propping Verse, for fear of falling To the ground. Joynting Syllabes, drowning Letters, Fastning Vowells, as with fetters They were bound! (Under-wood 29: 1-12; H&S 8: 183)
This intentionally dreadful poem, with its punning title, hobblingly convoluted metrical scheme, and insistent alliteration and feminine rhymes, exemplifies how the compulsion to fit rhyme against rhyme can threaten to overwhelm content and lead to the poetic equivalent of an epileptic "fit." But this work is also a virtuosic tour-de-force. It masters the feminizing threat of the poetic signifier not only by making it the poem's topic but also by successfully negotiating the poem's preposterous formal demands, forcing feminine "rithmes not wholly dumbe" to speak in the service of phallogocentrism. As the title suggests, Jonson manages, in virtuoso masculine fashion, to write a fit of rhyme against rhyme.
As we have seen, Jonsonian masculine discourse so fetishizes self-presence that it aspires to a condition of silence. In Timber Jonson waxes eloquent on the feminizing dangers of rhetorical ornament. He laments that, these days,
Right and naturall language seem[s] to have least of the wit in it; that which is writh'd and tortur'd, is counted the more exquisite. Cloath of Bodkin, or Tissue, must be imbrodered; as if no face were faire, that were not pouldered, or painted? No beauty to be had, but in wresting and writhing our owne tongue? Nothing is fashionable, till it bee deform'd; and this is to write like a Gentleman. All must be as affected, and preposterous as our Gallants cloathes, sweet bags, and night-dressings: in which you would thinke our men lay in, like Ladies: it is so curious. (576-86; H&S 8: 581)
Just as Jonson dreams of a manly utopia without womanly shadows, so he imagines a manly style that is no style at all but pure unmediated communication, a writing that restrains or leaves behind words. He longs for a perspicacity so transparent that it needs no rhetorical ornament to convince, but rather, by sheer force of truth, can "invade, and break in upon [its readers]; and makes their minds like the thing he writes," a style to "shew the composition Manly" (Timber 792-93, 796-97; H&S 8: 588). The ideal is, in other words, a style that can subdue differences between writer and reader, language and thing. Logically, then, the perfect manly style would be total silence, where discourse is so complete it cannot be added to, where nothing need be said because author and reader share the same assumptions and virtues, where difference has been wholly silenced, where Truth and Error are already self-evident and, in the case of Error, self-defeating, where indisputable objects can replace obfuscating, noisy, and ambiguous discourse ("matter, above words"). For Jonson, following Plutarch, the mouth itself becomes an allegory for the proper resistance to discourse:
there was a Wall, or Parapet of teeth set in our mouth, to restraine the petulancy of our words: that rashnesse of talking should not only bee retarded by the guard, and watch of our heart; but be fenced in, and defended by certaine strengths, placed in the mouth it selfe, and within the lips. (Timber 332-38; H&S 8: 573)
For that reason, as a reflex of his masculinist conception of the poet Jonson longs for a state of effortless self-evidence, much like that he imagines for himself in Timber when called to defend his work before the Privy Council:
An Innocent man needs no Eloquence: his Innocence is in stead of it: else I had never come off so many times from these Precipices, whether mens malice hath pursued me. (Timber 1330-33; H&S 8: 604)
The problem is that such an ideal of masculine silence is untenable, and particularly for a writer. In the final lines of his prefacing letter to Volpone, Jonson characterizes his poetic project not as adding writing but as eliminating what is already there, stripping away the whorish costumes in which other poets have dressed Poetry and restoring (NOT creating) her to her original "primitive" habit, which is no "habit" at all but self-evident nudity:
. . . I shall raise the despis'd head of poetrie againe, and stripping her out of those rotten and base rags, wherwith the Times have adulterated her form, restore her to her primitive habit, feature, and majesty, and render her worthy to be imbraced, and kist, of all the great and master-spirits of our world. (129-34; H&S 5: 21)
Yet when in Volpone itself the infuriatingly naive Bonario and Celia rely on the silent self-evidence of their innocence to defend themselves, that strategy leads not to their salvation but to their convictions as rapist and whore. Even in the case of the Privy Council anecdote cited earlier, Jonson is quick to add that he could not bring himself to hold his tongue:
yet durst I not leave myself undefended, having a paire of eares unskilfull to heare lyes; or have those things said of me, which I could truly prove of them. (1346-49; H&S 8: 605)
Though Jonson clearly relished a good quarrel, there is evidence that he became increasingly distressed by the unmanly chattering that necessarily proclaimed and preserved his manliness. The Volpone letter itself acknowledges that Jonson must write to restore Poetry to her primitive habit, and for that reason he switches in the final lines to fantasize with shocking relish how his acid ink will eat off the faces of--literally deface--his rival poetasters, reducing them to readable, material characters that reveal their true natures to the world:
[Poetry] shall out of just rage incite her servants . . . to spout inke in their faces, that shall eate, farder then their marrow, into their fames; and not Cinnamus the barber, with his arte, shall be able to take out the brands, but they shall live, and bee read, till the wretches dye. . . . (138-43; H&S 5: 21)
Little wonder, then, that Jonson would abhor the self-consciously rough and broken style of poets who "would not have it run without rubs, as if that stile were more strong and manly, that stroke the ear with a kind of uneven[n]esse" (Timber 698-700; H&S 8: 585). Ironically, by "set[ting] a marke upon themselves" (Timber 704; H&S 8: 585), by depending upon a violation of stylistic decorum to display their manliness, they reduce masculinity to a matter of style, rather than an ontological condition independent of stylistic supplement. Elsewhere, however, the contradiction between the ideal of masculine silence and the reality of the need to write cannot be dodged. As Jonson closes his letter prefacing The Alchemist, he stands back to comment, with obvious ambivalence, on the act of prefacing itself:
This [i.e., the text], yet, safe in your judgement (which is a SIDNEYS) is forbidden to speake more; lest it talke, or looke like one of the ambitious Faces of the time: who, the more they paint, are the lesse themselves. (14-18; H&S 5: 289-90)
Manly texts, it turns out, inescapably look made up.
Jonson takes up the problematic of masculine stylistics in particular earnest with two works written in 1609, The Masque of Queenes and Epicoene. In The Masque of Queenes, written for Queen Anne and her retinue, Jonson gives the masculine resistance to feminine discourse a heroic cast, perhaps in response to Anne's sizable role in the authorship of early Jacobean masques. The masque opens with an antimasque of witches, who exemplify on several levels Jonson's conception of a threatening feminine discursive power. The witches represent principles of misinterpretation, a progression from passive Ignorance to active Mischief. Though the witches' charms are inefficacious, they take their power from sympathetic magic, the notion that words and actions can bring matter into being. Their demonic invocations are riddled with grotesque metaphors of birth. And the charms themselves are a gallimaufry of verse forms, leaning heavily toward accentual verse and drifting toward increasing internal and multiple rhymes, alliteration, and onomatopoeic nonce names and syllables. This material discourse, in which verses seem generated almost by the sound material itself and not the sense, is pointedly filled with meticulously catalogued material effluvia, stuffs used in the spells that form the counterpart of the verbal charms and the noisy music.
It is important, then, that Jonson chooses Perseus for his representation of "brave and masculine virtue," an authorial surrogate whose appearance inaugurates the masque proper and disperses the witches' circle. Perseus, as slayer of the Medusa, makes her slain image part of his power and undertakes a parallel mission in cutting off the witches. If, as Stephen Orgel argues (127-31), we are to identify the Medusa with the power of language to bewitch and astonish, then Perseus becomes a particularly appropriate stand-in for the "men-making poets" who undergird Fame's House. Indeed, the masque itself pointedly underlines at every opportunity the masculine preconditions for feminine fame, and the warrior queens who silently parade before James are, with the sole exception of Bel-Anna, remarkable for their masculine heroics, which Jonson takes some pains to stress in his lengthy descriptions. What the masque stages is not, as some have recently argued, an unsettling feminine discursive power, so much as the masculinization of that power, a process that offers a compliment to the queen only by first establishing the masculinist preconditions of its display and its resistance to the feminine alternative. That process is, of course, not without its ironies. As Barbara Lewalski notes ("Anne"), it is possible that the female discursive power of the witches is meant to carry over to the queens. After all, the "hags" are hitched to the queen's wagons. More to the point, Perseus is a speaking part. Even as a figure for the male conquest of female discourse (and there Perseus may subtly register Jonson's resistance to the queen's place in the masque's authorship) Perseus must announce his resistance and rehearse his credentials. The final song, addressed to Perseus as Virtue, warns of the danger of those "who yet imitate/Theyr noyses" (768-69, emphasis added; H&S 7: 316) and reminds the audience of the presumably silent, masculine "causes" of Fame's triumphs.
Also written in 1609, Epicoene returns to the same issue, but with a decided difference: it makes the problematics of masculine silence a central comic concern. Indeed, Jonson shapes Morose's situation in Epicoene so that it resembles his own dilemma as a "manly Poet." Huston Hallahan has argued that "Jonson certainly does not, as some have suggested, depict speech as feminine and silence as masculine. Instead he concerns himself with the degree of control which a man maintains through his speech or acquires through his silence" (126). Hallahan is correct to observe that the play is about control over discourse, but Jonson clearly allies that degree of control with gender differences. The ideal of eloquence, an Aristotelian mean between silence and chatter that Hallahan links to masculinity, is nowhere to be found in this play. If elsewhere in his work Jonson posits that there is a masculine writing degree zero, in Epicoene he prefers to explore the extremes. Like Jonson, Morose subscribes to a Stoic ideal of masculine virtue and silence:
My father, in my education, was wont to advise mee, that I should alwayes collect, and contayne my mind, not suffring it to flow loosely; that I should looke to what things were necessary to the carriage of my life, and what not: embracing the one, and eschewing the other. . . . So that I come not to your publike pleadings, or your places of noise; not that I neglect those things, that make for the dignitie of the common-wealth: but for the meere avoiding of clamors, & impertinencies of Orators, that know not how to be silent. (5.3.48-59; H&S 5: 258)
The irony is that to maintain his manly silence, Morose must speak, and copiously. When he first appears in 2.1 with his mute, Morose goes through preposterous discursive gyrations to preserve the peace that his own words constantly violate:
Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method, then by this trunke, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine eares the discords of sounds? Let mee see: all discourses, but mine owne, afflict mee, they seeme harsh, impertinent, and irksome. It is not possible, that thou should'st answere me, by signes, and, I apprehend thee, fellow? speake not, though I question you. You have taken the ring, off the street dore, as I bad you? answere me not, by speech, but by silence; unlesse, it be otherwise (--) very good. And, you have fastened on a thicke quilt, or flock-bed, on the out-side of the dore; that if they knocke with their daggers, or with brick-bats, they can make no noise? but with your leg, you answere, unlesse it be otherwise (--) very good. . . . (2.1.1-14; H&S 5: 177)
Ironically, as the scene moves along Morose's directions get more and more compendious--"And, he will come presently? answer me not but with your leg, unlesse it be other wise: if it be other wise, shake your head, or shrug (--) so" (2.1.17-20). Francis Bacon's ideal of a scientific language of silent signs rather than words, an ideal for which both Morose and Jonson long, ends up depending upon speech for its smooth operation. And that speech promiscuously proliferates. The more Morose speaks, the more his words multiply seemingly of their own accord. His sentences sprout appositives, additions, digressions: "they [noises] seeme harsh, impertinent, and irksome," "fastened on a thieke quilt, or flock-bed," "if they knocke with their daggers, or with brick-bats." This propensity for supplementarity Truewit mercilessly exploits in the scene immediately following, when, in a seemingly infinite series of "ors," "ands," and "ifs," he tortures Morose with tales of, significantly enough, feminine vices. In the final act, Cutbeard and Otter, posing as a pair of divines addicted to Latin buzz words, stage much the same situation.(5)
This point I want to push further. The song "Men's Shadows" expresses Jonson's disgust for the proliferation of feminine shadows--there, as in Epicoene, womanliness becomes a primal source of difference, a "parasitical doubling" (Womack 123) and hence weakening of the unitary male soul. In Epicoene words seem to proliferate according to their own logic, and, for Jonson, woman--the creature who proverbially cannot keep silent and who ornaments herself with cosmetics--becomes both site and symbol of that proliferation. A minor moment early in Epicoene illustrates this point. Foolish Sir Daw recites a hopelessly muddled ballad, a parody of the Jonsonian ideal of silence, in which he declares "Silence in woman, is like speech in man,/Deny't who can . . . You shall it see/Prov'd with increase,/I know to speake, and shee to hold her peace" (2.3.123-24, 128-31; H&S 5: 187). Asked to explain the line "Prov'd with increase" Daw replies,
Why, with increase is, when I court her for the comon cause of mankind; and she says nothing, but consentire videtur [appears to consent]: and in time is gravida [pregnant]. (2.3.133-35; H&S 5: 187)
The irony here is that woman's silence nonetheless signifies. Unlike manly silence--a refusal to signify, a return to "matter, above words"--even a woman's silence means something other than itself: her saying "nothing" means "yes." And, predictably, that "yes" leads to still more issue--a child. As Dauphine wryly observes, Daw has penned a "ballad of procreation." This principle of feminine proliferation is the obverse of the ideal of manly begetting, the kind of "spiritual mitosis" Jonson praises in the Cary-Morison Ode, where these men produce each other by means of a dual, simultaneous copying that eliminates any hint of difference.
But that unitary, silent male cannot stand alone. "Men's Shadows," for all its protestations of male autonomy, only reveals, in the shadow metaphor itself, the differential nature of masculinity. Only through the feminine shadow can we recognize masculine solidity. Only in woman's not being "knowne" can male perfection become manifest (Womack 123-24). For Jonson, manly silence is not merely the absence of discourse. It is, rather, the resistance to feminine discourse, a resistance, it would seem, that must be marked to be recognized. In Morose's opening speech the repeated phrase, "speake not, though I question you," serves that function: only by prompting then squelching language can Morose make silence palpable.
Throughout Epicoene Jonson stages the conditions of his own manly speech to examine, and finally to exorcise, its contradictions. He sets up one practitioner of manly silence, Morose, for ridicule, because Morose overvalues silence as a sign of his manly autonomy. Morose paradoxically depends upon speech, and its symbolic counterpart, women, to assert his own masculine self-possession and silence. Indeed, his marriage to Epicoene is motivated not by love but by a desire to hoard his own wealth (Epicoene is a means to a male heir) and to exercise his malicious authority over a newly-knighted, upstart nephew. At first, as bride-to-be, Epicoene then serves as symbol and site of an ideal masculine control over feminizing discourse and emasculating rival authorities. Only later, when after the nuptials she turns to speech, does Epicoene signal that ideal's impossibility. The continuing irony of the play is that no matter how Morose seeks to master Epicoene and the chattering self-dispossession she represents, he only generates more noise. He can silence neither proliferating discourse nor his wife (finally, the same thing), and eventually, in an attempt to master her, he doubly unmans himself, making a public declaration of impotence that doesn't finally have the interpretive effect he intends. By allowing his manliness to become wrapped up in external manifestations, he opens himself up to "affliction." Morose fails to grasp that true manly autonomy is a radically interiorized state, free from "accidents" that can be changed, subverted, or added to: the centered man is "round within himself."
If Morose presents a nightmare vision of emasculating discursive proliferation and misdirection, the obverse of masculine silence, the gallants Truewit and Dauphine Eugenie present alternative modes of masculine self-presentation. It is Truewit who has been most often lauded as a model for Jonsonian masculine wit. He does, after all, get the play's juiciest misogynist speeches (brilliant imitations of Ovid and Juvenal), and he functions as a highly successful, improvisatory stage manager, on the order of a Mosca or Face. In many ways, Truewit duplicates Jonson's strategy in writing the play: he adopts various stances--Wildean decadence, anti-feminism, praise of artifice--with an eye toward parodying them. That is, Truewit cites discourse without ever committing himself to it. Satirically disengaged from his own words, Truewit is unafraid that speech will sully his manhood because, unlike LaFoole and Daw, he takes very little very seriously. Jonas Barish has him right:
If the common denominator through all of these numerous rhetorical postures remains that of the negligent young wit, disdainful of excessive linguistic precision, it is nevertheless true that Truewit speaks through so many masks that one is not sure when, if ever, he is speaking in propria persona. (Barish 157)(6)
Truewit keeps a cynical distance from the feminine--both courtly discourse and courtly ladies--that Morose cannot, because he holds his entire world at arm's length. As many commentators have noted, this model presents its own problems, not least of which is a disturbing lack of any stable moral commitments. Truewit is also by far the most garrulous character in the play (Hallahan 967). We are meant to pause at so amoral, talkative, and self-congratulatory a man, particularly one who, Dauphine observes early in the play, cannot keep a secret and cannot refrain from publishing his own jests.
In fact, it is Dauphine who Jonson champions as a practitioner of discursive manliness. Dauphine's relationship to Morose--nephew to uncle--hints at Jonson's identification with him, for Jonson typically presents his struggle for poetic authority in terms of a prodigal story pitting younger generation against older. It is Dauphine who manages to deploy a silent manly discourse that successfully bypasses, however uneasily, the contradictions of gender and style this play explores. Dauphine has not attracted as much scholarly attention because, quite simply, he doesn't say nearly as much as his compatriots. That, I want to argue, is precisely his strength. We can sense Dauphine's (and Jonson's) discursive skill best in the play's notorious final scene. The play ends with Dauphine offering Morose a way out of his disastrous marriage to Epicoene in exchange for his rightful legacy. Desperate to rid himself of his suddenly talkative bride, Morose eagerly (and foolishly) contracts to support Dauphine, signing a writ in front of a roomful of witnesses. Dauphine then drops a bombshell: all along Epicoene has in fact been a gentleman's son disguised as a woman.
For the first-time reader or spectator, this revelation comes as a shock. Dauphine, we discover, has withheld from us and from his friends the secret that Epicoene is a boy. And, of course, Jonson has done precisely the same thing, in the process violating a cardinal rule of his own theatrical practice: never keep secrets from your audience.(7) Dauphine's startling revelation silences all those marked by their unmanly volubility: Morose is violently and wordlessly ejected, Cutbeard is instructed to motion his thank you only with his leg, Daw and LaFoole have no answer to the charge of pederasty. Dauphine is especially pointed in the case of the dumbstruck Collegiate Ladies: "Madames, you are mute, upon this new metamorphosis!" (5.4.243-44; H&S 5: 270). In fact, the final scene identifies Epicoene as "this Amazon, the champion of the sexe" (5.3.234-35; H&S 5: 270), transposing the masculinized woman of The Masque of Queenes from the feminine discursive realm, where he/she embodies female power, to the masculine discursive realm, where he/she serves the ends of Dauphine. This Amazon becomes the instrument whereby Dauphine can emasculate his rivals, penetrate the "mysteries" of a female bastion of power (the College of Ladies), and win, so Truewit announces, "the better halfe of the garland" (5.3.225; H&S 5: 270), the poetic bays. And, Truewit makes equally clear, Dauphine's startling success springs precisely from his play-long silence about Epicoene's true nature. What had seemed to be a feminine threat to masculine silence and authority was under the aegis of a masculine authority--albeit not Morose's--all along.
And Jonson's technique here mirrors Dauphine's. If Jonson's status as a manly poet rests upon his resistance to representation, theater presents a vexing theoretical challenge, for by its very nature drama is a parasitic simulation of reality, a literary shadow. It is a form whose status as re-presentation is particularly apparent, not least in the area of gender, where boys play the women's parts. The effect of Epicoene's gender-bending revelation is to expose, or, better, to draw attention to, the means by which women are represented on the stage, so that the audience becomes aware, at a conscious level, of what has been silently before them all along: that the female characters were always and only boys (males), always and only ventriloquizing feminine discursive independence. It is, in short, to insist that at this moment there is no dramatic illusion. If to represent is to negotiate a gap between signifier and signified, Jonson's final revelation seeks to erase that gap: the boy playing a woman is no more than a boy playing a woman. Because Jonson has kept quiet about Epicoene, we are as surprised as any of Morose's houseguests to learn that she is a boy. Because he has undermined our suspended disbelief by making us conscious of theatrical convention, we find ourselves, like the characters onstage, in the midst of a suddenly demystified social fiction. As Peter Womack has observed,
The point of this coup de theatre is that it releases truth from language altogether: the characters concerned are struck dumb, and not merely by a verbal representation which is more convincing than their own, but by a demonstration which is incontestable because it is wordless. (106-07)
The final scene constitutes for Jonson a fantasy of masculine discursive control, one calculated to prompt our retrospective admiration for what Dauphine and Jonson managed not to say, an inkling of male discursive power held silently in reserve.
But it is an evanescent fantasy. The play was suppressed soon after its initial performance because Lady Arbella Stuart, the king's cousin and a potential heir to the throne, objected to what she took as references that linked her to the Prince of Moldavia, an embarrassing impostor fiance. The offending line is LaFoole's and refers to Jack Daw's penchant for drawing maps of persons he encounters: "Yes, sir, of NOMENTACK, when he was here, and of the Prince of Moldavia, and of his mistris, mistris EPICOENE" (5.1.23-25; H&S 5: 251). The offense turns on Arbella Stuart's misreading of a single word, ironically the word "his," which refers in context to Daw, but which Arbella took as referring to the Prince, in effect casting herself, in another irony, in the role of Epicoene. Thus for all the play's masculinist ambitions, it quickly became threatened by a noblewoman's misreading of a single word, the mark of masculine possession "his," and in response Jonson tried valiantly and unsuccessfully to redeem his work with a second prologue directed against malicious application. The play's Folio publication seven years later, with its dedication to Jonson's compatriot at the Mermaid Tavern, Sir Frances Stuart, seeks to rectify the problem by setting the play before a representative of its properly male audience, this time a male Stuart. Only there, and in the voiceless medium of print, can the play rise to the level of, as Jonson puts it in his dedication, a "dumbe peece" (line 2; H&S 5: 161). Yet as the delay in publication and the proliferation of prefacing materials suggest, that ideal of masculine silence remains haunted by its feminine or emasculating shadow. That is, Jonson may not have been cognizant of the ironic parallels between his "dumbe peece" and the man-maid Epicoene whose silence becomes a torrent of noise and with whom the play shares its name. Michel Foucault, in suggesting the possibility of a history of silence, observes that silence "is less the absolute limits of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies" (27). Jonson's manly silence ends up being not the unitary condition he dreams of, but a differential effect of the very feminine "face" he sought to exorcise, and could not. The final irony of Epicoene is that, for all its denials and self-effacements, it reveals the necessarily epicoenic condition of manly discourse. Its final pathos is that Jonson could not bring himself to acknowledge the full force of that truth.
NOTES
1 All quotations from Jonson's works are taken from the Herford and Simpson edition (abbreviated H&S), and are noted parenthetically by the Herford and Simpson volume number and page, in addition to the work's title and line numbers.
2 The notable exceptions have tended to fall into two groups. The first group, addressing Jonson's portrayals of gender ambiguity or transgression, focus most often (and not surprisingly) on Epicoene: Paster, Rackin, Howard and Brown use Jonson as an example, and Newman focuses entirely on Epicoene; see also Cheney. The second group of studies concern Jonson's relationships with female patrons, and focus most often on the masques, particularly The Masque of Queenes. See Gossett, Lewalski ("Anne"), Lindley, Maurer, Orgel, and Riggs passim, though many readers would consider these studies, with the exceptions of Lewalski and Maurer, political rather than feminist readings. The following studies also concern issues of gender in Jonson, though neither is explicitly feminist in orientation: Barton passim argues that Jonson's portrayal of female characters becomes more judicious and less stereotypical in the course of his career, and Riggs uses a Freudian paradigm to explain Jonson's sexual adventures. McLuskie's discussion (158-92) is the most extensive to date about Jonson and gender, focusing primarily on the representation of women in Jonson's oeuvre and using Epicoene as her central case-study.
3 Analogues to this project can be found in a small yet suggestive corpus on Jonsonian masculinity: see Goldberg, Hiramatsu, and especially Huebert and Wayne. Also useful, though not directly addressed to this topic, are Fish, Crane, Finkelstein, Kuchta, and Peacock. A good introduction to recent work in men's studies can be found in Adams, Cohen, and Poovey.
4 The problem of praising women also arises in Jonson's masques for Queen Anne. In the Masque of Beautie, for example, the beauty of Anne and her attendants becomes the animating principle of the world, imaged in the marvelous microcosmic island, turning with motum mundi and motum Planetarum at once, that signals the opening of the revels. But as the dances continue, that feminine animating principle is assimilated and subordinated to the creative power of love, bodied forth in King James:
So beautie on the waters stood, When love had sever'd earth, from flood! So when he parted ayre, from fire, He did with concord all inspire! And then a motion he them taught, That elder then himselfe was thought. Which thought was, yet, the child of earth, For love was elder then his birth. (324-31; H&S 7: 191)
Jonson's highest compliment, offered in song just before the final dance, is tellingly backhanded:
Had those, that dwell in error foule, And hold that women have no soule, But scene these move; they would have, then Said, Women were the soules of men. So they doe move each heart, and eye With the worlds soule, true harmony. (368-73; H&S 7: 193)
As Jonson constructs the power of feminine beauty, carefully neoplatonized in the songs immediately preceding, it has power only insofar as it moves men. That is, the alternatives Jonson considers here are that women have no souls or that they are the souls (i.e., animators) of men. The notion of a female soul, a feminine self capable of its own will and action, is, even in this celebration of the queen's power, simply not a possibility.
5 Indeed, that scene (5.3; H&S 5: 256-63) anatomizes the ways in which scholars encourage language to multiply. Among the scholarly tropes Jonson parodies are disciplinary deference (5.3.39-42, 64-69), etymologizing (70-74), translation (75-83), Ramistic elaboration of species (87ff.), and argument over metaphor (124-29), as well as disputation over trifles, repetition, and absurd specification.
6 Barish goes on to note the similarity between Truewit and Jonson:
Truewit, then, like Jonson, speaks from a higher attitude of perception than his friends, but is willing to descend to their level and even to become a spokesman for their world. . . . In Epicene [sic], the exhibitor keeps his distance from his exhibits. Truewit stalks folly purely for the pleasure of the chase, staking nothing but his wit. . . . [Jonson] made of Truewit an ideal of equivocal detachment, equally unable to commit himself wholeheartedly to the world and to let it alone. (177)
7 Neither Jonson nor Dauphine even hint at Epicoene's true nature, despite Mirabelli's rather strained evidence to the contrary. In fact, Jonson leads us to believe that Dauphine has revealed all his secrets in the early scenes of the play. In 1.3, Dauphine tells Clement that he cannot trust Truewit with his secrets (the opening scenes of Act 2 bear out why) and confides that Daw absurdly courts Epicoene. When Truewit seems to have nixxed Morose's wedding in 2.4, Dauphine reveals his secret plot to saddle Morose with "this gentlewoman . . . lodg'd here by me o'purpose" (2.4.41-42; H&S 5: 189). From this point on, we seem to have gotten to the bottom of Dauphine's plan and sit back to delight in its unfolding. We are encouraged, by the typical structure of Jonson's comedies and by the absence of evidence to the contrary, to think we know what is really going on.
Jonson's strategy of withholding information is new with this play. For example, in the earlier The Case is Alterd, in which a fifth-act revelation plays a major role in the action, we are given unmistakable clues as to the true identity of characters. We are encouraged to guess, well before the fifth act, how the play will end, and the play's pathos in fact depends upon our making such a guess. From that play on, the dramatic irony in Jonsonian comedy typically operates at the expense of various gulls and vice figures, but not at ours. Indeed, Jonson voices his distaste for such romantic plotting and dei ex machina in his prologue to the Folio Every Man in His Humour (7-20; H&S 3: 303). Nonetheless, in the later comedies Jonson explores the possibilities of such unforeshadowed endings. See Barton's comments on Jonson's nostalgia for Elizabethan plotting (300-20).
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Lanier, assistant professor of English at the University of New Hamphshire, has written on Jonson, Shakespeare, Marston, and Milton. He is interested in the problematics of authorial self-presentation in English Renaissance literature, and has recently completed a manuscript entitled "Better Markes": Ben Jonson and the Institution of Authorship. His current work includes articles on Peter Greenaway's Prospero Books and Shakespeare in popular culture.
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