Signs of Life: Six Comedies of Menace Book

It's not surprising that there are no reviews for this play. What could a modern reader really have to say about it? This is a city comedy about changing customs, idiosyncratic behaviors, unusual events, and laughable tropes happening in London in the first decade of the seventeenth century. It's like a Jacobean episode of "Family Guy." Just as the average episode of "Family Guy" is so packed with inside jokes, pop culture references, current events, and cultural absurdities that it won't make any sense in twenty-five years, so is this play, which requires heavy reliance on footnotes and an extensive editorial introduction in order to be accessible at all. Just as an example, most of the jokes in the final scenes of the play are in Latin.

Usually I see in reviews of Elizabethan plays on goodreads concessions such as, "At least the poetry was nice." Well, Epicene wasn't written in meter, so it doesn't even have that going for it. What is there that the modern layman can still enjoy? The Morose character, who abhors all noise except the sound of his own voice, is a clever enough creation, and one can imagine that a scene in which he forces his servant to communicate with him through a series of intricate head wags and leg motions (like a horse counting by tapping his hoof, perhaps?) was quite funny on stage. But those amusing moments become fewer as the play progresses.

If you're interested in a Ben Jonson play that can still be appreciated today, read The Alchemist, a comedy about London in 1610 that doesn't rely so heavily on evanescent fashions.