When Hamlet elects to stage ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ before King Claudius and the Danish court in Act 3 of Shakespeare's tragedy, the spoken version of the play is preceded by a dumb show enactment of the main action: a king and queen embrace, the sleeping king is then poisoned in the ear by another man who in the process steals his crown, and the poisoner is then witnessed in a passionate embrace with that same queen. Ophelia, one of the court spectators to this production, turns to Hamlet and asks ‘What means this, my lord?’ (Hamlet, 3.2.130) and the real theatre audience is at that moment presumably several steps ahead of her in construing that Hamlet is staging before his uncle Claudius and his new wife, Hamlet's mother Gertrude, exactly what he believes happened to his own father. The dumb show is a ‘speaking picture’, a picture without words that condenses and as a result renders even more shocking the story that needs to be told.

Jacobean tragedy had a particular taste for using dumb show to present some of its most shocking actions and events. In John Webster's The White Devil (c. 1612), the device is used to depict some of the most extravagantly engineered deaths of the play (shown to the Duke Brachiano, and thereby to the audience, in the form of a dumb show by a conjurer), including the poisoning of the Duke's wife Isabella by means of a poisoned painting and the grotesque murder of his mistress's husband Camillo in a gymnasium: ‘as Camillo is about to vault, Flamineo pitcheth upon his neck, and with the help of the rest, writhes his neck about, seems to see if it be broke, makes shows to call for help’ (2.2.37 s.d.). What might have stretched the imagination if staged for real is both denaturalised and heightened in its horror by its rendition in this form. Death made pictorial and spectacular was clearly an effect that Webster appreciated, since he redeployed dumb show to great effect in The Duchess of Malfi. This is, then, the stage tradition which Caroline dramatist Richard Brome was able to build on and to benefit from in assuming a skilful ‘interpreting’ audience when he deployed dumb show in his experimental tragicomedy The Queen and Concubine in 1635.