Dumb Reading: The Noise of the Mute in Jonson’s Epicene

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise

—Shakespeare, Hamlet

A Mute is one that acteth speakingly

—Brome, The Antipodes

The connection between “inexplicable” dumb shows and noise that Hamlet makes in his speech to the players provides the impetus and conceptual framework for this investigation. What do dumb shows and noise have in common with one another, and why might they be regarded as “inexplicable” phenomena? Jonson’s Epicene, or the Silent Woman is my principal case study, a curious choice, perhaps, given that the play does not contain a dumb show, and also given Jonson’s famous resentment of theatrical production—his abhorrence of the figurative “noise” of theater.¹ However, Epicene is a famous play on the subject of noise—the protagonist of the play, Morose, is afflicted by it—and Jonson’s treatment of noise is dramaturgically complex, if not contradictory. I will outline the contrariety of noise, figurative and actual, in Epicene and will analyze how noise is performed in various guises, positing a dialectical relationship between the expressive modes of the acoustic and the gestural in Elizabethan theater. I contend that Jonson’s play is marked by the gestures of the dumb show via the character of Mute, whose antics have hitherto evaded critical attention. I will consider the gestures made by Mute in Epicene (indications of which are given in the text) vis-à-vis those performed by the tongueless, handless Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, whose impassioned gestures make strange the act of gesturing on the stage and signal a potentially disruptive semiotic “noise.”² The animating figure of this essay is the mute who acts as a noisy signifier—“dumb,” but replete with meaning.

Dumb shows—pantomimed sequences set to music that intervene in the action of a play—remain a controversial and contentious aspect of early modern theater. We may know the constitutive elements of the dumb show, roughly, but we can only speculate as to their potential significance in performance. Dumb shows come to life on the stage; they are embodied gestures that imply a repertoire of actions and are but ghosts of themselves on the page. Rather than throwing our hands up at what we do not (and cannot) know, it is worthwhile, I suggest, to engage in some educated guesswork and to develop interpretive possibilities.

The dumb show is understood to symbolize the mood or theme of the main action by way of picturesque arrangements; it also prefigures aspects of the plot, marking the action to come in a few brief gestures.³ Hamlet may disapprove of the dumb show, and Shakespeare may have thought it old-fashioned, but one cannot dismiss it as simple fodder for the groundlings. William Engel postulates that dumb shows “open up, and to some extent are, windows onto another space—one that materially and mimetically remains contained within, but which metaphysically and allegorically reaches beyond, the contours of the main spectacle.”⁴ I find this conception of the dumb show as a potential window-onto-alterity provocative, as it suggests the possibility that the dumb show may have subverted the main action of the play by performing gestures that can signify otherwise.

Gestures in dumb shows, or that derive from dumb shows (hereafter referred to as “dumb” gestures), may be semantically overdetermined, which would support the association between noise and dumb shows that Hamlet makes. In his speech to the players, Hamlet advises against gestural “looseness” and expressive abandon. The action is to be suited to the word, the word to the action; there is to be no “gap,” no discrepancy, between the two.⁵ In this model, a player is in control of his faculties, and the possibility of “interference” in his performance is reduced; neither his gesture nor his intent will be confused. The players at Elsinore, following the edicts of the rhetorical tradition of acting...