Topical allusions can be said to anchor a literary text in history, but they soon prove to be an unsteady mooring once we begin to investigate the textual operation by which they are transformed. References to historical figures and events ultimately put into question the naive assumption that literature can be a mirror reflection of reality; they rather show us that “the text takes as its object, not the real, but certain significations by which the real lives itself—significations which are themselves the product of its partial abolition.”¹ These “significations” are social representations, values and beliefs that serve the interests of a particular class; they “abolish” the real because they are an ideological refraction of it. Since by definition topical allusions never announce their presence, they can easily lead us to think that the text gives us a knowledge of history which is free of ideological mediation. The fact is, however, that the text so assimilates historical references as to transform them into an ideological signification of reality. A consideration of topical allusions can thus disclose a text's politics, its relation to a particular ideology, finally enabling us to arrive at a penetrating articulation of its place in history. For the literary historian, the crucial task is not only the accurate identification of such allusions, but a careful examination of how and to what end they are exploited.

When we approach the Stuart masque from this perspective, the matter grows more complicated. Critics have long regarded the masque as a politically significant genre, and there have already been important efforts to identify historical references in specific masques.² Indeed, following Jonson's suggestive mention of “present occasions” in the preface to Hymenaei (1606), Leah Sinanoglou Marcus has found that “the court masque was perhaps the most inherently topical of all seventeenth-century art forms. Masques were shaped by contemporary events and intended, in turn, to give shape to those events.”³ Without meaning to diminish the considerable value of this discovery, I would suggest that we revise our understanding of Jonson's remark: it is necessary to recognize that “present occasions” is an imprecise blanket term that may conceal more than it reveals; we can better illuminate the political dimension of court entertainments by distinguishing between true and proper occasions and topical allusions.⁴ The Stuart masque is occasional in that it was designed to act as a festive celebration, usually of the Christmas season or an aristocratic wedding. But often it also alludes to royal policies and proclamations, to political theories and issues, to historical developments that actually lay beyond the immediate reason for its creation. This distinction is worth making because it can expose the different ideological determinants that operate on a given masque. In the case of the occasion, we can always discern the effects of the feudal ideology of degree, which subordinates the lower classes in English society by reserving for royalty and aristocracy the effusive praise of the songs and speeches and even the privilege of attending the performance. In the case of the topical allusion, more specific ideologies may be at work, and these may transform historical facts so as to legitimize a certain royal policy or, alternatively, question it and advocate the competing position of the dominated classes. Both the occasion and the topical allusion demonstrate that the masque has the capacity to maintain the feudal social hierarchy and justify the king's hegemony, but they do so in quite different ways. Clearly, it is the study of allusions, as Professor Marcus' work has persuasively shown, that will allow us to grasp the precise political function of a masque.

With this in mind, I want to examine a rather ingenious topical allusion in James Shirley's text for The Triumph of Peace. Thanks to the memoirs of Bulstrode Whitelocke, a lawyer who sat on the planning committee for the production, we have a reliable account of the occasion: performed during February of 1634, the masque was one of those court celebrations that traditionally took place during the Christmas season, but it was also intended to express the affectionate loyalty of the Inns of Court to the King and Queen and thereby voice their disagreement with the attack on theater recently published by their colleague William Prynne.⁵ The masque contains several topical allusions, one of which, a glance at Caroline monopolies, has already received some attention.⁶ My discussion will focus on another allusion to contemporary issues which shapes the entire antimasque: the interactions among the characters, the changes in scenery and the various dances all comprise a reference to Charles's prohibition of the gentry's residence in London.⁷

I

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, members of the landowning classes increasingly visited the capital city for both business and pleasure. In their younger days many of them had attended one of the Inns of Court to acquire that basic knowledge of the law which was necessary to manage their estates and serve their counties as local officials or MPs. Yet since it was not unusual for them to be mired in some sort of litigation against tenants or neighbors, they occasionally returned to the city to be near the courts at Westminster where they made their depositions and inquired about the progress of their suits. As the center of commercial activity in England, London also offered the gentry the opportunity to borrow money from merchants, invest in trading companies and industrial monopolies, sell the products from their farms and procure those imported luxuries that did not reach the remote markets in their counties.⁸ It was in the city, furthermore, that they could find a remedy for any dissatisfaction they may have felt with the routine and solitude of country life. By residing in London for much of the winter or spring, the country gentleman and his wife might indulge in the latest crazes from the Continent, see new plays and masques, enjoy the company of many friends and move in the most exclusive aristocratic circles. Perhaps the greatest attraction of the city was the dazzling range of things to do, for there was something to please every taste. Whether the visitor from the provinces was interested in learned sermons or dicing, news of foreign wars or court scandals, an audience with an ambassador or a frolic with a prostitute, he would not be disappointed.⁹

Under James I, the gentry's visits to the capital had begun to occur with some regularity, and by Charles's accession, it must have appeared that many were spending a great part of the year in London or even living there permanently. The early Stuart kings viewed this trend as a twofold threat: it could weaken the ascendancy of the feudal ideology, which justified and reproduced the established social order, and ultimately affect their political power by limiting their control over local affairs. They believed that the gentry's residence in London inevitably meant a decay of rural hospitality and a loss of esteem for that medieval ideal of generosity (largesse), one of the “virtues” which set the gentleman above the commoner in the social hierarchy.¹⁰ And they were concerned that this could have ominous effects: when gentlemen neglected housekeeping in the country and spent their wealth elsewhere, their customary relief of the poor languished, able workers went unemployed, and there might be a rise in crime as well as riots, if not rebellion. Similarly, the kings feared that when this landed wealth was consumed in prodigal spending on city pleasures, the result might be an increase in social mobility which would upset the traditional class structure.¹¹ Since the gentry were the backbone of local government, their frequent absences could also have a damaging effect on legal and political practice. Landowning gentlemen were the king's administrative officials in the country: it was they who were appointed directly by the king to fill such unpaid offices as justice of the peace and high sheriff.¹² Justices of the peace, for example, in addition to their essential role in law enforcement, “were responsible for providing poor relief, some pensions, trade regulations, food supplies, regulation of ale-houses and the collection of local taxes.”¹³ Anything that interfered with such duties would naturally hinder the implementation of royal policy.

In 1631, after two years of bad harvests had impoverished rural areas and threatened to cause uprisings, Charles and his Privy Council made an effort to increase the administrative efficiency of local government by issuing the Book of Orders, “for the better administration of justice and more perfect information of His Majesty, how and by whom the laws and statutes tending to the relief of the poor, the well-ordering and training up of youth in trades, and the reformation of disorders and disordered persons are executed throughout the kingdom.”¹⁴ The Book's directives apparently improved the operation and supervision of local government, at least in the beginning,¹⁵ and on 20 June 1632 it was reinforced by a proclamation that commanded the landowning classes to maintain their country residences. The opening paragraph of the proclamation lists the adverse consequences which the King and his advisers feared would result from the gentry's extended visits to London; since the passage bears a striking resemblance to the antimasque of The Triumph of Peace, it is worth quoting in full:

The Kings Most Excellent Majesty hath observed, That of late yeares a great number of the Nobility and Gentry, and abler sort of his People with their Families have resorted to the Citties of London and Westminster, and places adjoyning, and there made their Residence more then in former tymes, contrary to the ancient usage of the English Nation, which hath occasioned divers inconveniences, for where, by their Residence and Abiding in the severall Countries whence their Meanes ariseth, they served the King in severall places, according to their degrees and ranks in ayde of the Government; whereby their Housekeeping in those parts, the Realme was defended, and the meaner sort of People were guided, directed and relieved: but by their Residence in the said Citties and Parts adjoyning, they have not imployment but live without doing any Service to his Majesty or his People, a great part of their Money and Substance is drawn from the severall Countries whence it ariseth, and is spent in the Citty in excess of Apparell provided from forreigne parts, to the enrichment of other Nations and unnecessary consumption of a great part of the Treasure of this Realme, and in other vain Delights and Expences, even to the wasting of their Estates, which is not issued into the parts from whence it ariseth, nor are the People of them relieved therewith or by their Hospitality, nor yet set on work, as they might and would be, were it not for the absence of the principall Men out of their Countries, and the excessive use of forraigne Commodities; by this occasion also, and of the great Numbers of loose and idle People, that follow them and Live in and about the said Citties, the disorder there groweth so great and the Delinquents become so numerous, as those places are not easily governed by the ordinary Magistrates, as in former tymes; and the said Citties are not onely at excessive charge in relieving a great number of those idle and loose People, that growe to beggery and become diseased and infirm, but also are made more subject to Contagion and Infection; and the prizes of all kinds of Victualls, both in the said Citties are served, are exceedingly encreased, the poorer sort are unrelieved, and not guided or governed as they might be, in case those Persons of Quality and Respect resided among them.¹⁶

This proclamation is quite similar to those that James had repeatedly issued during his reign; in 1626, Charles himself had tried the same means, but to little effect. To insure the success of his latest effort, he ordered that any country gentleman in London who did not hold a court office and did not have legal business was to be prosecuted in Star Chamber, and in November of 1632, the Attorney General brought suits against more than two hundred offenders.¹⁷

The extensive instructions of the Book of Orders and the stringent enforcement of the proclamation suggest that they were intended to do much more than prevent riots in rural areas. In fact, the economic crisis that prompted these measures also offered Charles an excuse to consolidate his political power and strengthen the autocracy he had instituted with his dissolution of Parliament in 1629. Both the Book and the proclamation were attempts to bring about a radical reform of local government and counteract the perennial danger that county officials would discharge their duties as they themselves thought best, independent of the central administration and perhaps in opposition to royal policy.¹⁸ Charles's interventions in local affairs can be regarded as political practice designed to realize his absolutist aspirations or, more specifically, the paternalistic ideology of Divine Right kingship.¹⁹ This becomes more evident when we recognize that his proclamation against the gentry's residence in London seems to have exaggerated the actual situation. The local historian Alan Everitt has pointed out that whereas the nobility may have made a habit of visiting the city, the gentry were much more closely tied to their estates:

In the counties which I have studied most of the peers and a few of the baronets frequented the metropolis fairly regularly for part of the year. The great majority of the knights and virtually all the squires, on the other hand, rarely if ever visited it, except to attend an occasional lawsuit (not a circumstance likely to endear it to them), and virtually never possessed a town house at this date. As is well known there were many proclamations during the early seventeenth century banishing the gentry from London back to their native shires. But what these proclamations do not reveal is that in a large county, such as Suffolk or Kent, there might be 750-1,000 gentry, and that at least three-quarters of them were small parochial squires with an average income of less than £300 a year. Such families could obviously never have afforded a metropolitan establishment. They were essentially provincials, though not necessarily by any means the boozy squires of Whiggish legend.²⁰

Everitt's remarks implicitly contain a warning that Marx made long ago in The German Ideology: we should not be uncritical in our acceptance of the dominant class's construction of contemporary events.²¹ Since only a rather small proportion of the gentry travelled to London with any regularity, it appears unlikely that the administrative machinery of the provinces was markedly impaired at the beginning of the 1630s; on the contrary, the Book of Orders reinvigorated county government at this time and enabled a more strict supervision of local affairs. This clearly implies that Charles's proclamation is an alarmist document primarily designed to achieve a political goal: it constitutes a transformation of a real social trend into a “serious problem” that justifies royal intervention and therefore upholds the King's dominance in English society. The proclamation, like the Book of Orders, was inspired by the fear that the King was losing control over local government and by the ideological conviction that his power should be absolute and “thorough.” In the end, however, the paternalism of Charles's policies seems to have produced the opposite result: it was instrumental in alienating those country gentlemen whose support he desperately needed in his constitutional struggle with the Long Parliament in 1640.²²

II

Shirley's antimasque consists of the interactions of several allegorical characters, one of whom, Fancy, presents a number of dances and changes of scenery. The topical nature of this activity becomes apparent as soon as the characters meet and introduce themselves to one another in the urban setting of the first scene, “a large street with sumptuous palaces, lodges, porticos, and other noble pieces of architecture, with pleasant trees and grounds [which] opens itself into a spacious place, adorned with public and private buildings seen afar off” (p. 263).²³ Opinion, the first antimasquer we see, is a country gentleman visiting London with his wife Novelty and their daughter Admiration. It is Novelty who reveals that they belong to the gentry: she grows infuriated when Opinion calls her his wife, and her retort is, “they can but call / Us so i'th'country” (p. 264). Opinion's costume is another indication of his social status: as we might expect of a gentleman who hails from the country, he does not appear in the latest London styles. In contrast to Confidence, the fashionable man-about-town who wears “a slashed doublet parti-colored [and] a broad-brimmed hat, tied up on one side, banded with a feather,” Opinion is dressed “in an old fashioned doublet of black velvet, and trunk hose, a short cloak of the same with an antique cape, a black velvet cap pinched up, with a white fall, and a staff in his hand” (p. 257).²⁴ The antimasque also contains allusions to some of the entertainments the gentry favored on their stays in the city. Opinion is fond of the theater, and he has come to court to see the masque. Later, when the scene is changed to a tavern, the gallant Confidence persuades the ladies to go inside and “accept the wine” (p. 268). Throughout the antimasque, Opinion and his family are accompanied by Jollity and Laughter, two characters whose names refer to the pursuit of pleasure which sometimes brought the landowning classes to London. Similarly, the names of Opinion's wife and daughter point to the gentry's desire for “novel” experiences that differ from their country routines and so are likely to elicit their wonder or “admiration.” At one point, Opinion explicitly mentions the occasion for the masque and speaks favorably of the Inns of Court, saying,

I am their friend against the crowd that envy 'em,
And since they come with pure devotions
To sacrifice their duties to the king
And queen, I wish 'em prosper.

(p. 266)

This gesture of camaraderie can be taken as yet another historical reference: apart from the glance at the disrepute in which lawyers were generally held during this period, Opinion's remark alludes to the fact that the gentry were closely associated with the legal profession, both because they customarily sent their sons to study at the Inns and because they were occasionally involved in litigation.

Two of the dances in the antimasque are pantomimes that dramatize specific details in Charles's proclamation. When most of the characters enter the tavern, Opinion stays behind with Fancy who presents “a Gentleman, and four Beggars” who walk on crutches: “The Gentleman first danceth alone; to him the Beggars; he bestows his charity; the Cripples, upon his going off, throw away their legs, and dance” (p. 268). This episode illustrates the “divers inconveniences” which the proclamation attributed to the gentry's residence in London. Since the term “gentleman” was virtually synonymous with landownership at this time, the victim of the confidence trick can be seen as a member of the gentry who has left his estate to spend his wealth in the city instead of the country “whence it ariseth,” thereby neglecting his obligation to relieve the rural poor with his generosity. The thieves who pose as beggars, moreover, are apt examples of those “loose and idle People, that follow” country gentlemen to London and either become “Delinquents” or “growe to beggery.” Another dance makes a similar use of the proclamation. Here the performers are dressed as “a Macquerelle, two Wenches, [and] two wanton Gamesters” (p. 268). After a brief dance in which they “expressed their natures,” they leave the stage only to make a later entrance: “The Macquerelle, Wenches, Gentlemen, return, as from the tavern; they dance together; the Gallants are cheated; and left to dance in, with a drunken repentance” (p. 271). Once again we see the gentry attracting criminals in the city, but in this case, there is also the suggestion that the two gentlemen are squandering their wealth on gambling and prostitutes or, in the words of the proclamation, on “vain Delights and Expences, even to the wasting of their Estates.”

The allusions I have identified make clear that Shirley's antimasque is hardly a transparent window onto Caroline England. There are indeed references to a real historical development—the gentry's occasional visits to London, the first signs of a fashionable “season”—but these are allied to a contemporary account of that development—the royal proclamation. As a result, the antimasque has that same inadequacy to the real which we found in the official document: both texts involve an essentially ideological operation that serves the King's interests by transforming a social trend into a cause for alarm which requires his intervention. The antimasque performs this ideological operation in its own way, with distinctively literary and dramatic materials, and consequently, it achieves a much more complex transformation of reality than the social commentary that opens the proclamation. The portrayal of Novelty, for example, suggests not only the gentry's interest in new experiences that cannot be had in the country, but also a questionable fascination with every passing fad, with newness for its own sake; the allusion simultaneously functions as a criticism.²⁵ Thus, when Confidence asks Novelty to drink with him, she replies that “It will be new for ladies / To go to th'tavern; but it may be a fashion” (p. 268). In accordance with the critical element in Novelty's characterization, she angers Opinion by returning drunk, and he reproaches her, “these are / Extremes indeed” (p. 273). The two dances we have considered also complicate the proclamation: they exploit a potential irony inherent in it, but never explicitly stated. The argument set forth in the official document is that when a country gentleman resides in London and fails to relieve the poor or employable workers in his country, he drives these people to the city where they embark on a life of crime, among other things. The irony exposed by Shirley's text is that ultimately this same gentleman may become the victim of the people he has neglected. In this sense, those gentlemen swindled by the beggars and whores in the dances are themselves responsible for the crimes they suffer. For the gentry, the antimasque seems to be saying, living in London is self-destructive, and they have not the slightest awareness of this fact.

A similar lack of self-awareness underlies the interactions between Opinion and Fancy. As a country gentleman, Opinion represents the gentry's attitude toward Charles's personal rule. His somber clothing and the repeated references to him as the “most grave Opinion” who “will like nothing” (pp. 263, 266, 267) further suggest that he stands for the disgruntled Puritan segment of the landowning classes. Not unexpectedly, then, he is critical of the problems he sees in English society under Charles. When Fancy announces that he will present the effects of peace in the antimasque and the dances of urban crime are performed, Opinion launches into a tirade:

OPINION.
I am glad they are off:
Are these effects of peace?
Corruption rather.
CONFIDENCE.
Oh, the beggars shew
The benefit of peace.
OPINION.
Their very breath
Hath stifled all the candles, poison'd the
Perfumes: beggars a fit presentment! how
They cleave still to my nostril! I must tell you,
I do not like such base and sordid persons,
And they become not here.

(pp. 268-69)

Once again there is an irony in Shirley's text which derives from the proclamation. What Opinion does not perceive is that his very presence in London with his family may have caused the “corruption”: as a rural landowner, he should be on his estate relieving the poor with his liberal gifts, not in London berating those people who may have turned to crime because of his own negligence. The fact that Fancy has presented the “corruption” sets up a psychological allegory that likewise disarms Opinion's social commentary. Because Fancy is “the sole presenter of the antimasques” (p. 257), Opinion's failure of perception is implicitly attributed to his faulty imagination, and his criticisms of Charles's reign are reduced to self-delusion. This also occurs when Opinion asks Fancy to create an antimasque of rare curiosities, “some other / Than human shapes” (p. 271). The scene is changed to “a woody Landscape,” and we see

a Merchant a'Horseback with his portmanteau; two Thieves, set upon him and rob him: these by a Constable and Officers are apprehended and carried off. Then four Nymphs enter dancing, with their javelins; three Satyrs spy them and attempt their persons; one of the nymphs escapeth; a noise of hunters and their horns within, as at the fall of a deer; then enter four Huntsmen and one Nymph; these drive away the Satyrs, and having rescued the Nymphs, dance with them.

(p. 272)

In these episodes, another criticism of Caroline society is undercut by an irony drawn from the proclamation and by the allegorical significance of Fancy. Because the constable's apprehension of the criminals is presented as a rarity, the suggestion is that law enforcement is not very effective in the provinces. The analogous scene with the nymphs and satyrs makes this problem even worse by hinting that rural crime is never solved in reality, only in pastoral romances! Since it was the gentry who were responsible for provincial government, Opinion's absence from his county means that he may share the blame for such administrative inefficiency. Opinion, of course, is entirely unaware that he or his class may be derelict in their duties, and the allegory associates his ignorance with Fancy's inventiveness. Thus an implied criticism of Charles's reign is again reduced to a misperception caused by an overactive imagination.

The antimasque of The Triumph of Peace is an especially shifty text, and we should not minimize its subtlety: on the one hand, it registers a criticism of the royal government through Opinion's comments on Caroline society; on the other, however, the interactions between Opinion and Fancy transform this criticism into an attack on that segment of the gentry which frequented London. The work of transformation relies both on the proclamation and Renaissance psychology. The use of Fancy to subvert Opinion's social commentary reveals the suspicion with which the imagination was often regarded during the Renaissance,²⁶ but the text also contains a brief portrait of “the sole presenter” which provides a more specific definition of his function. Significantly, it is Confidence who describes Fancy to Opinion, instilling in the country gentleman an unwise trust in the imagination:

OPINION.
                    is this gentleman, this Signor Fancy,
So rare a thing, so subtle, as men speak him?
CONFIDENCE.
He's a great prince of th'air, believe it, sir,
And yet a bird of night.
OPINION.
A bird!
CONFIDENCE.
Between
An owl and bat, a quaint hermaphrodite,
Begot of Mercury and Venus, Wit and Love:
He's worth your entertainment.
OPINION.
I am most
Ambitious to see him. …

(p. 264)

As a “prince of th'air” with the characteristics of a “bat,” Fancy is likely to create images that are not firmly grounded on an observation of reality. His resemblance to an “owl” increases his unreliability by giving it a political dimension: as we learn later in the masque, the owl symbolizes “faction” (“faction or owl's sight, / Whose trouble is the clearest light” [p. 278]), or what we may define as dissension resulting from a biased perception of the obvious. The inference to be drawn from this “quaint hermaphrodite” is that any product of the imagination which purports to be an accurate representation of society is highly suspect. A similar attitude toward the imagination is expressed in the text when the antimasquer Jollity hurries the other characters into the tavern by remarking, “let's leave Opinion behind us; / Fancy will make him drunk” (p. 268). Fancy's genealogy can be taken as another allusion to the Inns of Court, the producers of the masque who “begot” him and the other characters; it also indicates the reason why he should play so important a role despite his negative connotations. The “Wit and Love” belong to the Inns, who chose a sophisticated court entertainment to convey their devotion to Charles and Henrietta Maria. Fancy is the lawyers' offspring because the allegory he signifies allows them to display their loyalty by wittily exploding any criticism of the King's personal rule. Fancy's genealogy sets up what may be the greatest irony in the antimasque: as an anticipation of the later attack on the gentry, it shows the lawyers' Machiavellian strategy of criticizing a social group with whom they were closely associated in order to save face with the King.

III

The sheer elaborateness of the allegory can only remind us of the ideological operation at work in Shirley's text. Opinion and his family are not mirror images of the Caroline gentry; they rather constitute an ideologeme, a refraction of a real social class determined by another class's values.²⁷ Studying the portrayal of these characters cannot give us any historical knowledge of the gentry, but it can disclose the antimasque's relation to the King's ideology. This relation becomes quite apparent when we observe that the text represses the real conflict between Charles and the landowning classes: the social criticism assigned to Opinion does not have any resemblance to the gentry's actual complaints about his personal rule. In the years immediately before the performance of Shirley's masque, they were perhaps most annoyed by the King's fiscal expedients, the combination of forced loans, fines and taxes which he exploited to increase his revenue without the consent of their parliamentary representatives. In particular it was the gentry who were hardest hit by Charles's decision to revive distraint of knighthood, an ancient usage that permitted him to fine all gentlemen with an annual income of £40 or more who were not knighted at his coronation.²⁸ This was an unpopular measure that could only reinforce the landowners' growing alienation from the central government. The local commissioners who were appointed to compound with offenders faced the undesirable task of pursuing their neighbors, and the fines could be quite stiff, some ranging as high as £70. Although largely successful in raising money for the Crown, the scheme of knighthood did encounter resistance in some counties. Sir David Foulis tried to persuade the Yorkshire gentry to refuse payment; in November of 1633, when the preparations for The Triumph of Peace were already underway, his efforts earned him a conviction in Star Chamber, and he was punished with a fine, imprisonment, and removal from all of his offices.²⁹ Elsewhere the commissioners might be deliberately lax in their collections, going so far as to omit names from their rosters.³⁰

Shirley's text is strategically silent on such developments. The effect of its allusions to the proclamation is to displace a real reason for the gentry's opposition to the King with a criticism of Caroline society which is actually an ironic attack on them. This displacement reveals the operation of the absolutist ideology of Divine Right kingship: it shows that the entire thrust of the antimasque is to discredit the gentry as a political force and ratify the King's autocracy. Since Opinion and the other gentlemen are shown to be utterly incapable of recognizing the “divers inconveniences” which the proclamation imputes to their London visits, it would be imprudent if not pointless for Charles to summon Parliament and submit his policies for the consideration of the provincial MPs; indeed, according to the logic of the allegory, the best course would be for him to intervene solely on the basis of the royal prerogative and restore order in the kingdom. The lack of understanding which the allegory ascribes to the gentry in London is a key factor in the ideological operation of the antimasque: this was the very tactic that Charles himself had used in a proclamation issued in 1629 to explain his dissolution of Parliament:

we shall account it presumption for any to prescribe any time unto us for parliaments, the calling, continuing and dissolving of which is always in our own power; and we shall be more inclinable to meet in parliament again when our people shall see more clearly into our intentions and actions, when such as have bred this interruption shall have received their condign punishment, and those who are misled by them and by such ill reports as are raised upon this occasion shall come to a better understanding of us and themselves.³¹

Like this proclamation, the antimasque insists that the gentry who leave their country estates are “misled,” and thus justifies the King's exclusion of them from the political process.

We can extend these observations by examining the antimasque of projectors who seek royal patents of monopoly for their inventions. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, patents were issued for a variety of reasons, most of which did not benefit the commonwealth. They could be an effective means to promote industrial expansion by protecting new technical processes and assuring fledgling industries a market for their products. More often than not, however, they were used to serve royal financial interests, reward favorites and advance political power through economic centralization.³² During Charles's reign, patents were primarily a fiscal expedient designed to raise money for the crown. Without a Parliament willing to vote him the subsidies he needed to cover his expenses, the king and his ministers developed independent sources of revenue by exploiting loopholes in the Statute of Monopolies, a parliamentary bill which prohibited patents to individuals in 1624. Since the Statute had excluded new inventions and corporations from its provisions, Caroline monopolists pretended technical improvements and formed partnerships or companies, and in return for the lucrative privileges which the patents granted them, they paid into the Exchequer an annual rent or, in some cases, a fee for each product sold.³³ The Company of Soapmakers of Westminster, for instance, the most notorious monopoly under Charles, was incorporated in 1632 to use a new manufacturing method and was gradually given the exclusive right to produce soap in England. For their patent, the monopolists agreed to pay the King £20,000 per annum.³⁴

Because patents were granted for such commonly used products as soap, salt, wine and logwood, they were destined to have far-reaching effects which ultimately alienated large segments of the population from the crown. The interests of consumers were largely ignored. Monopolists knew that their privileges were unlawful and would doubtless be revoked if Parliament ever met again, so they tried to get rich quick by driving up prices for inferior goods. Merchants suffered because patents frequently prohibited the import of certain materials long used in manufacturing and gave the monopolists the right to search cargoes. Patents similarly disrupted established industries by forcing independent manufacturers to use new materials and methods, to submit their products to tests conducted by the monopolists themselves, and to compound with them for infringements of their privileges.³⁵ Throughout the autocratic 1630s Charles “enacted” monopolies through proclamations, an effective strategy which enabled him to discourage infringers by bringing charges against them in Star Chamber for contempt of the royal prerogative. Late in 1632, for example, the government prosecuted several independent soapboilers for violating the patent of the Westminster Company. The offenders were prohibited from engaging in their trade, ordered to pay fines ranging from £500 to £1500 each, and committed to the Fleet. They were still in custody when The Triumph of Peace was first performed.³⁶

Shirley's antimasque introduces six comic projectors. Three of the projectors refer, in their diverting way, to the customary practice of winning patents by pretending technical improvements in existing products or methods: a “jockey” has developed “a rare and cunning bridle” that can so “cool and refresh a horse, he shall ne'er tire”; a “country fellow” has bought a “flail” which can thresh corn “without help of hands”; and a “physician” has contrived “a new way to fatten poultry / With scrapings of carrot” (pp. 269-70). Clearly these inventions are wildly improbable, and they appear to be nothing more than foolish get-rich-quick schemes devised by some rather incompetent projectors. Thus, the countryman “has sold his acres,” giving up his living “to purchase him” the labor-saving flail, while the physician, who adheres to incompatible medical principles (he is “a Galenist, and parcel Paracelsus”), once “thriv'd by diseases, but quite lost his practice” by devoting himself to his bizarre studies in animal husbandry. This note of ridiculousness is repeatedly sounded in the antimasque. We can hear it in the remaining projects which are equally implausible during this period of relatively slow technological development: they include a deep-sea diving suit described as “a case to walk you all day under water,” a kind of double-boiler in which “the very steam / Of the first vessel shall alone be able / To make another pot above seethe over,” and two nautical inventions, one to enable “a ship to sail against the winds,” the other, “on Goodwin sands, to melt huge rocks to jelly” (pp. 270-71).

The ideological operation at work in this antimasque becomes apparent if we consider the different responses it elicited. Whitelocke states that “by it an Information was covertly given to the King, of the unfitness and ridiculousness of these Projects against the Law.”³⁷ The implication, of course, is that the antimasque is imputing illegalities to the King, the source of all patents, and this may well have been the intention of some of the lawyers who produced the entertainment. Yet Charles himself apparently did not perceive this implication; the evidence we have rather suggests that he was quite pleased with the entire masque: he ordered a second performance of it.³⁸ It seems likely, in fact, that the King viewed the antimasque as praise of his wisdom in selecting only those inventions worthy of monopolies. These opposed responses are possible because, once again, Shirley's text registers a potential criticism of the royal government, but so presents that criticism as to defuse it. Here the work of transformation is achieved by the convenient omission of any reference to the many adverse consequences of the monopolies and by the sheer absurdity of the inventions. The descriptions function as a comic displacement of serious issues, whereby the projectors can be seen not as threats to the social order, but as harmless fun. The antimasque does indeed satirize Caroline monopolies, yet in contrast to Whitelocke's statement, the emphasis is on their “ridiculousness” rather than their “unfitness … against the Law.” Moreover, the gentry in London are implicated in the satire. Not only do we see a “country fellow” who has stupidly sold his land to invest in an absurd industrial venture, but Opinion shows his lack of judgment by praising the devices and their inventors with remarks like “A most scholastic project!” and “He will deserve a monument” (p. 270). Opinion's approval again raises doubts about whether Charles should rely on the provincial MPs for advice when he frames his economic policies, and thus its effect is to confirm the King's personal rule.

The final sequence of dances continues to discredit the offending gentry in a way that reflects the King's ideology. These too are pantomimes, and in keeping with the elaborateness that has so far distinguished the antimasque, they are rather indirect in their criticism:

A Landscape, The scene; and enter three Dotterels, and three Dotterel-Catchers. … After the Dotterels are caught by several imitations, enter a Windmill, a fantastic Knight and his Squire armed. The fantastic adventurer with his lance makes many attempts upon the windmill, which his squire imitates: to them enter a Country-Gentleman and his Servant. These are assaulted by the Knight and his Squire, but are sent off lame for their folly. Then enter four Bowlers, who shew much variety of sport in their game and postures, and conclude the Antimasque.

(pp. 272-73)

These dances may be taken as references to diversions enjoyed by the gentry: bird-catching, reading chivalric romances like Don Quixote,³⁹ and bowling.⁴⁰ At the same time, however, each dance seems to satirize members of this class who are socially ambitious, who seek to elevate their status by imitating preoccupations associated with the nobility. This satire is first signified by the dotterels, a species of plover which, it was believed, allowed itself to be caught by mimicking the fowler's actions; accordingly, the term “dotterell” came to be used as a synonym for “silly person” (OED). The allusion to one of the more farcical episodes in Cervantes' work portrays the pretentious gentry as dotterels by showing two gentlemen in ridiculous imitations: a “fantastic” or irrational knight emulates the noble ideal of chivalry by jousting with a windmill, and his squire blindly follows him. These characters are so deluded by their imitations that they assault another country gentleman, perhaps the owner of the windmill who arrives to defend his property. Evidently the point of these dances is that certain gentry are similar to dotterels because they foolishly aspire to nobility but in the end are “caught” in adverse circumstances in which they endanger themselves and other members of their class. This would also explain the apparently unrelated entrance of the bowlers. Bowling was a sport on which noblemen gambled away large sums in early seventeenth-century England.⁴¹ As John Earle noted, a bowling alley “is the place where there are three things throwne away besides Bowls, to wit, time, and money and curses.”⁴² The gentry also indulged in this sort of amusement when they came to London. A few months after the performance of The Triumph of Peace, Charles was responding to another consequence of their visits when he ordered that the bowling green in Spring Garden, a royal park attached to Whitehall, be closed to the public because it had become “common” and disorderly.⁴³ Since the bowlers in Shirley's antimasque follow dances whose theme is social climbing through imitation, “their game and postures” can also be read as a criticism of the gentry who live above their station by participating in the leisure activities of the nobility and consuming their wealth on gambling. The bowlers are thus another illustration of those “vain Delights and Expences” which Charles cited in his proclamation against the gentry's residence in London.

My reading of these dances may appear dubious. After all, their extreme discontinuity seems to resist a neat interpretation, and the text does not provide a very detailed description of the dancers' performances. Yet as Professor Marcus has demonstrated with Jonson, if “we steep ourselves in the immediate political and social milieu of the masques, … incoherent passages will become recognizable as adroit commentary on events.”⁴⁴ What needs to be emphasized about The Triumph of Peace is that the “adroit commentary on events” is the determinate product of the King's ideology. In the context of the entire antimasque, the concluding dances attribute the gentry's London visits to their social pretensions and so reveal the operation of the feudal ideology of degree which informed Charles's political practice. The fact that Charles was guided by this ideology is clear not just in his proclamation to keep the landowning classes in the country, but also in his efforts to strengthen the traditional social hierarchy by stopping the sale of titles and maintaining an overwhelming majority of peers on the Privy Council, among other things.⁴⁵ In view of such developments, the quixotic gentlemen and the bowlers who conclude Shirley's antimasque must be regarded as an ideological representation: in their suggestion of pretense and gambling losses, they express a concern that the gentry's pleasure trips to the city may ultimately blur class distinctions and cause undue social mobility.

IV

The main masque completes the ideological operation we have been examining. When the personifications of peace, law and justice (Irene, Eunomia and Diche respectively) descend from heaven “to wait upon the earth” where Charles and Henrietta Maria reign, the “profane” antimasquers “go off fearfully” (p. 273), and the social problems for which they shared responsibility are magically solved. The heavenly emissaries refer to the monarchs as the gods “Jove and Themis” who are “the parents of us three,” and their descent constitutes nothing more than a move to the earthly part of Charles's kingdom: “The triumph of Jove's upper part abated, / And all the deities translated” (p. 276). This image of the King and Queen expresses the ideology of Divine Right monarchy not only by deifying them, but also by characterizing their power as absolute: they are the sources of the law that “dost beautify increase, / And chain security with peace,” and it is their justice that “giv'st perfection” to the orderly peacefulness which England is said to enjoy under them (p. 275). In this way, the actual grievances of the gentry and the business community are reduced to a mirage, and Charles's autocratic rule is legitimized.

It is important to notice, however, that like the antimasque of projectors, the allegory of the main masque may have elicited different responses from the royal couple and the lawyers who produced the entertainment. At one point, Irene and Eunomia sing, “The world shall give prerogative to neither; We cannot flourish but together” (p. 275), and this can easily be construed as a message from the legal profession to the King asserting that he must cooperate with them. As Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong put it,

Legally, British law is made by the King acting through Parliament, by Parliament acting with the assent of the King. But since Charles's dissolution of the Parliament of 1629, Irene, Peace, was the King's: peace had been maintained by the royal prerogative alone, and laws enacted without the consent of Parliament. Peace and Law sing explicitly of their joint prerogatives because the subject of the masque is prerogative rule; and they make the general point of which Bulstrode Whitelocke says the antimasque of projectors was a particular instance: there can be no peace without law.⁴⁶

It is thus possible to see Eunomia, the personification of law, as a symbol of Parliament and read the song as an assertion that the King's peace (Irene) should not have prerogative over the MPs' contribution to the legislative process (Eunomia). Charles would no doubt have been enraged by this presumption, especially if it were boldly trumpeted in a court masque; given his enthusiasm with The Triumph of Peace, we are justified in assuming that his attention was focused on another, more flattering detail in the text: Eunomia's status as the divine offspring of Jove. Seen in this light, she symbolizes not Parliament's legislative function, but an aspect of Charles's absolute power, his paternalistic control of political and legal practice in English society. Since the King is the divine “father” of peace, law and justice, he can freely exercise the royal prerogative without submitting his policies for parliamentary approval.

This is yet another example of the peculiar indeterminacy of Shirley's text. There are passages whose meaning seems to have been determined by the viewer's politics. Whitelocke's commentary shows that he and his colleagues considered the masque to be an important political statement: it would enable them both to profess their allegiance to Charles and advise him to curb the illegalities of his personal rule. Yet this intention is foiled because the allusions and allegory can occasionally support conflicting readings. The ideological force of this slippage of meaning becomes apparent when we realize that the criticism intended for the royal government is repeatedly deflected onto other social groups, primarily the gentry. Apparently, the merest suggestion that the text criticized the King was enough to give the lawyers the optimistic idea that their position would be heard, even though the dissolution of Parliament had left them without a political institution to represent their interests as well as those of the gentry and the business community. In the end, however, it becomes clear that the masque rather functioned as an apparatus of the absolutist state by presenting the contradictions in Caroline society and resolving them in a way that reinforces the King's domination.

The criticism of the gentry in The Triumph of Peace inevitably raises the question of how they responded to it or, more generally, whether it produced any concrete social effects. We know that the masque was a bestseller: even before it was performed, several thousand copies had been printed, and it went through several editions.⁴⁷ This popularity, however, may have been due not to any intrinsic qualities of the published text, but rather to the spectacular procession that travelled through the streets of London before the performance. The complex nature of the masque, furthermore, makes it seem unlikely that the gentry would have sufficiently grasped the satire on them to be irritated by it; no doubt the subtle allusions and intricate allegory were most fully appreciated by the King and the learned lawyers who created the entertainment. Thus, it is not surprising to find that Sir Humphrey Mildmay, an Essex landowner who violated the proclamation with his frequent visits to London, witnessed the first performance at Whitehall but felt it was little more than “stately.”⁴⁸

A more plausible hypothesis regarding the social reverberations of Shirley's masque is that like the other royal entertainments during Charles's reign, it widened the gap between the insular court and the provincial opposition to the central government. For the country at large, the elaborate procession and the lavish costumes and scenery probably nourished the growing suspicions of the court's frivolity and Popish decadence.⁴⁹ For Charles, the masque reproduced a questionable social representation that had already been disseminated in such official documents as the proclamation, and the sheer pleasure of viewing this theatrical reproduction could easily have encouraged the mistaken idea that his autocracy was more successful than it actually was.⁵⁰ Perhaps the most dangerous illusion fostered by the masque had to do with the loyalty of the legal profession. By attacking a group like the gentry who were already grumbling about Charles's government, the Inns of Court may have allayed his doubts about their political sympathies. If so, they also prevented him from foreseeing that lawyers like Bulstrode Whitelocke would figure prominently among the MPs who reversed his policies in the Long Parliament.

V

The foregoing consideration of The Triumph of Peace confirms the importance of distinguishing between occasions and topical allusions in our study of the Stuart masque. By investigating allusions, we can expose the complex textual process by which a masque works on history, as well as the ideological determinants which shape that process. Once we recognize that allusions do not give us history in an unmediated form, we are better able to define the precise sense in which a masque is a political intervention that advances the interests of a particular class. To my mind, the chief merit of this approach is that it can yield an incisive account of a masque's politics which does not oversimplify the manifold aspects of the production by reducing them to history; on the contrary, our investigation respects the specificity of Shirley's antimasque, its unique literary and dramatic qualities, by indicating how these effect a transformation of historical events. Of course this approach is not in any way limited to the masque or even to topical allusions; it can profitably be applied to other literary and dramatic forms. Yet what remains unchanged in all its applications is a fundamental assumption about writing: the text is determined by the specific conjuncture of social forces in which it was created, and these forces enter it not directly, but through a series of dislocations produced by the text itself. For the literary historian, this seems to be an effective way to mediate between literature and history.⁵¹

Notes

1. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London, 1976), p. 72. See also P. N. Medvedev / M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method of Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore and London, 1978), pp. 21-23; Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York, 1971), pp. 221-27; and Thomas E. Lewis, “Notes toward a Theory of the Referent,” PMLA 94 (1979), 459-75.

2. The seminal studies are Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass., 1965); Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theater of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1973); Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, 1975); and three articles by Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, “‘Present Occasions’ and the Shaping of Ben Jonson's Masques,” ELH 45 (1978), 201-25, “The Occasion of Ben Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 19 (1979), 271-93, and “Masquing Occasions and Masque Structure,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24 (1981), 7-16. Rhodes Dunlap has identified the many topical allusions in Carew's Coelum Britannicum (1634) in his edition of The Poems of Thomas Carew (Oxford, 1949).

3. Marcus, “‘Present Occasions’ and the Shaping of Ben Jonson's Masques,” p. 201. Jonson's remark about court masques is that “though their voice be taught to sound to present occasions, their sense or doth or should always lay hold on more removed mysteries” (Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel [New Haven, Conn., 1969], p. 76).

4. Arthur Marotti has made a similar warning against relying too heavily on seventeenth-century critical concepts in his review of Richard S. Peterson's Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven, Conn., 1981). See Renaissance Quarterly 35 (1982), 526-28.

5. Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (London, 1682), p. 18.

6. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, I, pp. 64-65.

7. James I was also disturbed by this development, and his criticisms of it in a speech delivered in Star Chamber became a source for Jonson's masque The Vision of Delight (1617). See Marcus, “‘Present Occasions’ and the Shaping of Ben Jonson's Masques,” pp. 204-13.

8. F. J. Fisher, “The Development of London as a Center of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Essays in Economic History, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (New York, 1962), II, pp. 197-207; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 386-87; Philip Lee Ralph, Sir Humphrey Mildmay: Royalist Gentleman (New Brunswick, N.J., 1947), pp. 17, 29, 53-57.

9. Stone, pp. 387-92; Ralph, pp. 25-26, 41, 44, 46-52.

10. Stone, pp. 41-44; Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago, 1961), p. 311; Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1929), pp. 88-91; L. A. Clarkson, The Pre-Industrial Economy of England 1500-1750 (London, 1971), pp. 228-32.

11. Stone, pp. 392-93, 397-98; Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 (New York, 1966), pp. 26-28.

12. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government (London, 1906), I, pp. 287, 294; L. M. Hill, “County Government in Caroline England 1625-40,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London, 1973), pp. 66-90.

13. L. M. Hill, p. 70.

14. “The Book of Orders, 5 January 1631,” rpt. in The Stuart Constitution 1603-1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon (Cambridge, 1966), p. 497.

15. Thomas G. Barnes, Somerset 1625-1640: A County's Government during the “Personal Rule” (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 196-202; L. M. Hill, pp. 77-83; Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600-1660 (London, 1975), pp. 224-26; Peter Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent 1500-1640 (Hassocks, Eng., 1977), pp. 350-53; Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: A History of England 1603-1714 (London, 1980), pp. 145-46.

16. “A Proclamation Commaunding the Gentry to keep their Residence at their Mansions in the Country, and forbidding them to make their Habitations in London and places adjoining,” rpt. in Foedera, conventiones, literae et cuiuscunque generis acta publica, ed. Thomas Rymer and Robert Sanderson (1704-32), XIX, 374.

17. Stone, p. 398.

18. Christopher Hill, pp. 71-72; The Stuart Constitution, p. 492; Fletcher, p. 224.

19. J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (London, 1969), pp. 295-96; Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 (New York, 1972), p. 126; J. S. Morrill, Chesire 1630-1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974), p. 26.

20. Alan Everitt, Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century, Leicester University Department of English Local History Occasional Papers, Second Series, No. 1 (Leicester, Eng., 1969), pp. 17-18. See also C. W. Chalkin, Seventeenth-Century Kent (London, 1961), p. 203; Barnes, p. 28; and Everitt, “The County Community,” in The English Revolution 1600-1660, ed. E. W. Ives (London, 1968), pp. 48-63.

21. In The German Ideology Marx observes: “If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honor, loyalty, etc., were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so” (The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. [New York, 1978], p. 173).

22. Fisher, p. 207; Christopher Hill, p. 72; Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, p. 124; Morrill, pp. 26-30; Coward, p. 146. Charles's proclamation may have also been intended to subdue the London merchants and financiers who opposed his fiscal expedients by driving away their most wealthy clients, the nobility and gentry. For the business community's growing opposition to the royal government, see Robert Ashton, The City and the Court 1603-1643 (Cambridge, 1979).

23. All quotations of The Triumph of Peace follow The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, ed. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce (1833; rpt. New York, 1966), VI, 253-85. Page numbers will be given in the text.

24. For the “old fashioned” quality of Opinion's clothing, see C. Willet and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1955), pp. 13-22, 41-54, 65-70.

25. This criticism was shared by conservative segments of the gentry. In The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), for example, the royalist landowner Richard Brathwaite noted that in the city there are “some affecting nothing more than what is most nouell and phantasticke” (p. 11).

26. William Rossky, “The Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic,” Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958), 49-73. Opinion was regarded with the same suspicion. In what became a source book for masque characters, Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, overe descrittione di diverse imagini cavate dall'antichità, e di propria inventione (1603; rpt. Hildesheim and New York, 1970), opinion is defined as follows: “Opinion is perhaps everything in the mind and imagination of man, or at least in the former alone, which is not evident through demonstration” (“Opinion è forse tutto quello che hà luogo nella mente, & nell'imaginazione dell'huomo, ò almeno quello solo, che non è per dimostratione apparente” [p. 369]).

27. I borrow the term “ideologeme” from Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method of Literary Scholarship, p. 21.

28. Frederick C. Dietz, English Public Finance 1558-1641 (1932; rpt. London, 1964), pp. 262-63; Cliffe, p. 296; Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, p. 122.

29. Cliffe, pp. 299-301, 303. The preparations for The Triumph of Peace had begun in October of 1633: see G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1956), V, p. 1154.

30. Barnes, pp. 168-70. See also W. B. Willcox, Gloucestershire: A Study in Local Government 1590-1640 (New Haven, Conn., 1940), pp. 121-22, and Morrill, p. 27.

31. “A proclamation for suppressing of false rumours touching parliaments, 27 March 1629,” rpt. in The Stuart Constitution, p. 86.

32. William H. Price, The English Patents of Monopoly (Boston and New York, 1906), pp. 14-17, 31; Christopher Hill, pp. 31-32; Clarkson, pp. 112, 160-61.

33. Price, pp. 35-42.

34. Price, pp. 119-22; S. R. Gardiner, The History of England 1603-1642 (1883-84; rpt. New York, 1965), VIII, pp. 71-72.

35. Christopher Hill, pp. 33-35; Ashton, pp. 141-47.

36. Price, pp. 43-44, 120; Gardiner, VIII, p. 73.

37. Whitelock, p. 20.

38. Bentley, V, pp. 1158-59.

39. See Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935; rpt. Ithaca, N.Y., 1958), pp. 375-94.

40. Cliffe, pp. 115, 126. See also Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen 1590-1642 (New York, 1968), pp. 154-55.

41. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, pp. 567-72.

42. John Earle, “A Bowle-Alley,” in Microcosmographie, Or, a peece of the world discovered; in essayes and characters (London, 1628), p. 42.

43. Peter Cunningham and Henry B. Wheatley, London Past and Present (London, 1891), III, pp. 293-95; Fisher, pp. 204-05.

44. Marcus, “‘Present Occasions’ and the Shaping of Ben Jonson's Masques,” p. 202.

45. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, pp. 34, 117-19, 397-98, 751; G. E. Aylmer, The King's Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I 1625-1642 (New York, 1961), pp. 20-21.

46. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, I, pp. 65-66.

47. Bentley, V, pp. 1160-62.

48. Ralph, Sir Humphrey Mildmay, pp. 50-51.

49. See P. W. Thomas, “Two Cultures? Court and Country under Charles I,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Russell, pp. 168-93.

50. This reading of Caroline court literature was first put forth by C. W. Wedgwood, Poetry and Politics under the Stuarts (1960; rpt. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964). See also Orgel, The Illusion of Power, pp. 88-89. In a similar vein, Stone has pointed out that Archbishop Laud's reports on religious dissent in the provinces involved misrepresentation: see The Causes of The English Revolution, p. 121.

51. I am pleased to acknowledge that my work on this article was supported in part by a Summer Research Fellowship from Temple University. An earlier version was presented to the Seminar on the Renaissance at Columbia University during the fall of 1984.