ABSTRACT
When Christopher Rich appealed to the spirit of Ben Jonson to help the United Theatre Company, recently deserted by Betterton and other leading players, Ben’s children were not only male performers and dramatists. Jonson was the parent of a ‘Dramatick Generation’ which included daughters as well as sons. Women’s entry to the professional theatres as actors and dramatists inaugurated a major groundshift in performance traditions. Jonson’s Epicæne or The Silent Woman epitomised that change and, significantly, this was the first and most popular Jonsonian text to be performed in the years 1660–1710. The self-transforming figure of the silent woman functioned as a trope for the possibilities and the limitations to self-expression experienced by the wider female population. The Frolicks also uses a woman-centred perspective to glance retrospectively at the tradition of all-male performance which dominates Epicæne, and, inevitably, finds it wanting.
