 In English theatre tradition, a dumbshow is a masque-like interlude of silent mime usually with allegorical content that refers to the occasion of a play or its theme, the most famous being the dumbshow played out in "Hamlet" (III.ii).Dumbshows might be a moving spectacle, like a procession, as in Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy" (1580s), or they might form a pictorial tableau, as one in the Shakespeare collaboration, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" (III.i)—a tableau that is immediately explicated at some length by the poet-narrator, Gower.Dumbshows were a Medieval element that continued to be popular in early Elizabethan drama, but by the time "Pericles" (c. 1607–08) or "Hamlet" (c. 1600–02) were staged, they were perhaps quaintly old-fashioned