Epicoene or The Silent Woman

''A silent and loving woman is a gift of the lord''

This ''excellent comedy of affliction'' enjoyed enormous prestige for more than a century after its first performance: for John Dryden it had ''the greatest and most noble construction of any pure unmixed comedy in any language''. Its title signals Jonson''s satiric and complex concern with gender: the play asks not only ''what should a man do?'',...