ABSTRACT
The world of The Silent Woman is, as the subtitle suggests, a paradoxical place; it posits, like Joseph Hall's Mundus Alter et Idem (see the Introduction to Epicoene, 'Sources'), an alternative satirical world that is also identical with the real world of Jacobean London. The inhabitants are cliques of fools, rogues, consumers, and status-seekers who mark off their territories with aggressive displays of food, drink, dress, and noise. At the centre of this social map-making is the enigmatic Epicoene. Swirling around her, busy crowds of dilettantes and toadies violate boundaries of taste, common sense, personal privacy, discretion, and gender. They offend, attract, disorient, titillate, and frighten others, but, more to the point, their fascinating bustle almost eliminates our awareness of Dauphine's plot against his uncle. Instead we are caught up in the confusion of unstable social changes, fluid sexual identities, and the hostility such fluctuations usually arouse.
