in the name part: 'Tom and I and my wife to the Theatre, and there saw "The Silent Woman." Among other things here, Kinaston the boy had the good turn to appear in three shapes; first, as a poor gentlewoman in ordinary clothes, to please Morose; then in fine clothes, as a gallant; and in them was clearly the prettiest woman in all the house; and lastly, as a man; and then likewise did appear the handsomest man in the house.'

Nearly all the great actors and some of the great actresses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries interpreted the rôles of Epicone, Kynaston, Michael Mohun, Betterton, Colley Cibber, Mrs. Oldfield, Wilks, Macklin, and Mrs. Siddons. When it was given in 1664 at the Theatre Royal1, the part of Epicone was assigned to Mrs. Knap-the first time, as far as we are aware, but by no means the last, that the boy's rôle was taken by a woman. In this cast Kynaston played Dauphine, Cartwright Morose, Mohun True-wit, Wintershall Sir Amorous La-Foole. Pepys seems not to have enjoyed the performance. June 1, 1664: To the King's House, and saw "The Silent Woman," but methought not so well done or so good a play as I formerly thought it to be.' But he changes his tone when he sees it three years later. April 15, 1667: 'Carried my wife to see the new play I saw yesterday but contrary to expectation, there I find "The Silent Woman.' On the 16th: I never was more taken with a play than I am with this "Silent Woman,” as old as it is, and as often as I have seen it. There is more wit in it than goes to ten new plays.' The next year Pepys's praise grows more extravagant. Sept. 19, 1668: 'To the King's playhouse, and there saw "The Silent Woman"; the best comedy, I think, that ever was wrote; and sitting by Shadwell the poet, he was big with admiration of it.' Dryden was at this time writing unstinted praise of Epicane in his prefatory essays.

1 Adams, Dict. of the Drama.

The precedent set in giving Epicone to an actress was followed Jan. 1707, when Ann Oldfield acted the part at the Haymarket. Betterton appeared as Morose, Wilks as True-wit, Booth as Sir Dauphine, Bullock as La-Foole, and Cibber as Daw. There is nothing noteworthy of other recorded appearances of the play in the following hundred years. Mrs. Thurmond appeared as Epicone at Drury Lane, Oct. 1731; Mrs. Butler at the same theatre in Feb. 1738. At Covent Garden, Hannah Pritchard essayed the same part, Apr. 17, 1745, but her fame as Lady Haughty seems to have been more widespread.

Epicone was a distinct failure in a carefully-prepared production by Colman and Garrick in 1776. Colman altered the comedy, as we have seen, to suit the town's' ideas of propriety, and Garrick managed the staging, assigning Epicone to Mrs. Siddons, Morose to Bensley, La-Foole to King, Otter to Yates, and Daw to Parsons. On its failure, Garrick substituted Lamash for Mrs. Siddons; but matters did not improve. The comedy kindled no applause, drew no auditors, and had to be withdrawn. Critics reiterate the statement that Garrick's failure was due to the fact that a boy's rôle was interpreted by a woman. Certainly it was an artistic blemish, but Epicone had been successfully interpreted by women since 1664. Besides, Lamash's inability to correct the fault, and the subsequent history of the comedy, point at a deeper-seated reason than the assignment of rôles. What delighted the hearts of Charles II's contemporaries found little favor in the sight of George III's. How could a generation of fastidious men and women, a generation of sentimentalists without keen sense of humor, find 'profit and delight' in Lady Haughty and her train, and in the 'noisy enormity' of Mrs. Otter and her humorous 'subject'? Two inimitable comic characters of this epoch, with unwitting Pharisaism, express the contemporary opinion when one confounds 'anything that's low', and

the other agrees that the genteel thing is the genteel thing any time'1.

So, greeted with cold disapproval at her reappearance in Covent Garden, Apr. 26, 1784, Epicone quitted the stage, and was not seen for over a century.

Coleridge left his opinion that 'this is to my feelings the most entertaining of old Ben's comedies, and, more than any other, would admit of being brought out anew, if under the management of a judicious and stage-understanding playwright; and an actor who had studied Morose might make his fortune'2. But neither stagemanager nor actor has arisen to claim the fortune Coleridge promises, and to prove the critic's judgment a correct one. In 1895, on Feb. 7, an enterprising class at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts produced the play as adapted for them by Mrs. Richardson. It was reproduced at Harvard College a month later, when faculty and students co-operated to make it a memorable dramatic performance. The Sanders Theatre at Cambridge, Mass., was transformed into an Elizabethan playhouse, modeled on Joseph Dewitt's drawing of the Swan Theatre, 1596, and in accordance with the orders of Philip Henslowe in building the Fortune in 1600. The parts were all acted by men. A typical Elizabethan audience impersonated by students, together with appreciative, vigorous acting of the comedy, in the fitting environment of the Elizabethan stage, made this last recorded appearance of Epicone an artistic success of the highest order.

2

1 Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, I. 2.

Coleridge, Notes on Ben Jonson (Bohn), p. 533.

3 G. P. Baker, Revival of Epicæne at Harvard College, Harv. Grad. Mag.

3.493.

C. LITERARY RELATIONSHIPS.

Of all Jonson's comedies there is none, except it be Bartholomew Faix, in which the reader breathes an atmosphere so familiarly English as in Epicone. Yet an examination of the play shows it to be largely foreign in its elements, a closely-woven tissue of un-English allusions. In writing it Jonson made use of Libanius and Ovid, as frankly as he used Tacitus and Suetonius when writing Sejanus; but in each case he used the material differently. In the first he modified and modernized narrative and expository material into a realistic English comedy; in the second he chose an historical event, set it forth in causal relations, deepened the individuality of the characters, and brought their actions within the limits of a classic Roman tragedy. His comprehension of the spirit of a past age is complete. His power to adapt the product of that age to the spirit of his own time is masterly. Only profound scholarship could produce such works of art, the scholarship of a man who 'held the prose writers and poets of antiquity in solution in his spacious memory. He did not need to dovetail or weld his borrowings with one another, but rather, having fused them in his own mind, poured them plastically forth into the mould of thought '.'

The borrowings thus fused in Epicone are from a dozen sources, chiefly classical; but they may be grouped under four heads, according to the use to which they are put. First, there are the sources of plot or situation; secondly, those of character; thirdly, those of ideas or arguments incorporated into the dialogue; and fourthly, there is the song in the first scene, translated from an imitator of Catullus. To the plot, an oration of Libanius, the Casina of Plautus, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night make the

1 Symonds, Ben Jonson, p. 52. Cf. Lowell, Fable for Critics.

most important contributions. Of the characters, Morose is taken bodily from Libanius, and Cutbeard and the 'ladies-collegiates' are suggested by the same source. Into the dialogue is introduced almost a whole satire of Juvenal, much of Ovid's Ars Amatoria, speeches from Libanius, and sentences from Virgil, Terence, Cicero, and other classic writers.

1. Sources of the Plot.

Libanius1. For the central plot of Epicone, in which a nervous misanthrope marries a woman reputed to be abnormally quiet-tongued, and discovers her to be a termagant, Jonson is indebted to the rhetorician Libanius, the publication of whose exercises, letters, and orations is frequent from early in the sixteenth century. Just before Epicone was written, a folio edition of Libanius came out at Paris, with a Latin translation printed in columns parallel with the original Greek text 2. We mention this book because it was in all probability the edition used by Jonson, as a Latin version is most distinctly reflected in the language of the play, and in the name of the central character. Jonson calls his hero Morose (Lat. Morosus) instead of the Greek Δύσκολος.

DECLAMATIO SEXTA, pp. 300-14, Morofus qui vxorem loquacem duxerat, feipfum accufat, is a speech supposed to be made by Morose before the city fathers. The speaker describes himself as a man of quiet habits and a hater of noise, whose life, once so calm and happy, is now utterly wrecked. He has come before the judges to tell his story, and gain permission to drink hemlock and die. The cause of his misery is a woman, his wife. A matchmaking 1 Born at Antioch, 314 A.D. Taught at Constantinople till expelled, 346. Died at Antioch, 391 A.D.

* ΛΙΒΑΝΙΟΥ | ΣΟΦΙΣΤΟΥ ΠΡΟ-ΓΥΜΝΑΣΜΑΤΑ ΚΑΙ ΜΕΛΕΤΑΙ | LIBANII SOPHISTÆ | PRAELVDIA ORATORIA LXXII. | DECLAMATIONES XLV. ET | DISSERTATIONES MORALES. | FEDERICVS MORELLVS REGIVS INTERPRES | PARISIIS. M. DC VI.