Adrian Curtin
Dumb Reading: The Noise of the Mute in Jonson’s Epicene
Volume 43.1, Spring 2009

In this essay, I outline the contrariety of noise, figurative and actual, in Ben Jonson’s Epicene, and analyze how noise is performed in various guises, positing a dialectical relationship between the expressive modes of the acoustic and the gestural in Elizabethan theatre.  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 consider the gestures made by Mute in Epicene (indications of which are given in the text)vis à vis those performed by the tongue-less, hand-less 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.” The animating figure of this essay is the mute who acts as a noisy signifier – “dumb,” but replete with meaning.

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