[In the following essay, Orgel interprets Jacobean and Caroline masques as a mirror reflecting the crown as it wanted to be seen. He asserts that for Charles I the masque was an expression of the strength of his royal will—even when, as in Shirley's The Triumph of Peace, it attempted to correct or advise the monarch.]

Hostile critics saw in the royal histrionics only frivolity or hypocrisy, and even sympathic observers regularly referred to masques as “vanities.” This, indeed, is Prospero's term for his own masque, “some vanity of mine art.”¹ The description is exact and the charge irrefutable: these works are totally self-regarding. They are designed to be so. “All representations,” wrote Ben Jonson, “especially those of this nature in court, public spectacles, either have been or ought to be the mirrors of man's life.”² But mirrors, like so many Renaissance symbols, may be viewed in various and contradictory ways, and their moral implications lie in the eye of the beholder. They are emblems of worldliness and pride, frail glasses “which are as easy broke as they make forms.”³ They are also the way to self-knowledge. English didacticism in 1559 could do no better than provide a mirror for magistrates; and Hamlet's player holding the mirror up to nature is not encouraging her self-esteem. For the Jacobean translator of Ovid, the myth of Narcissus embodied the full ambiguity of the power of reflection. The youth's mother, reports George Sandys, “enquiring whether he should live until he were old, Tiresias replied: If he know not himselfe. As strange as obscure; and seeming contradictory to that Oracle of Apollo: To know a mans selfe is the chiefest knowledge. The lacke hereof hath ruined many: but having it must needs ruine our beautiful Narcissus: who only is in love with his owne perfection.”⁴ This is a paradigm for the Stuart court and the mirror of its theater.

Roles in plays, to Puritan observers, were impostures and lies. The very act of imitation, in drama as in art, usurped a divine prerogative, and theatrical productions were therefore often seen to be at the heart of the court's degeneracy and impiety. But from another point of view the parts we choose to play are not impersonations but ideals. They are what we wish to be, and they reveal not so much the way we want others to see us as the way we want to see ourselves.

Here are some ways in which the Stuart court wanted to see itself.

THE MASQUE OF QUEENS

In 1609 Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones created a heroic masque for Queen Anne and her ladies. The Masque of Queens provided a martial context for womanly virtue—whereas King James, we will recall, was an ardent and programmatic pacifist. The production opened on a coven of witches and an ugly hell; infernal dances and charms provided an elaborate and extended antimasque. Suddenly the hall was filled with a blast of loud music, “with which not only the hags themselves but the hell into which they ran quite vanished, and the whole face of the scene altered, scarce suffering the memory of such a thing. But in the place of it appeared a glorious and magnificent building figuring the House of Fame, in the top of which were discovered the twelve masquers sitting upon a throne triumphal erected in form of a pyramid and circled with all store of light.”

Eleven of the masquers had the roles of warrior queens from history. In Jones's costume designs, the Amazonian qualities are expressed through a variety of details: an elegant bodice adapted from armor, a plumed helmet, masculine half-sleeves, bases, and instead of dancing pumps, light boots. For the twelfth queen, Anne of Denmark, Jonson invented the figure of Bel-Anna, Queen of the Ocean. Only the design for her headdress has survived. Jones has crowned her with an armillary sphere, a celestial globe. Just such a model as this had demonstrated to Ficino the power of human knowledge and the essential divinity of the mind.

Jones's drawing of the House of Fame is the earliest surviving design for stage machinery in England. The drawing shows the front of a hexagonal building; it has double doors within a huge central arch, above which sit the twelve masquers on their pyramidal throne. The figures on the roof are probably musicians; the two deities in the clouds on either side of the cornice are identified by Jonson as “eminent figures of Honor and Virtue.” The façade is adorned with statues. Those on the lower tier represent “the most excellent poets, as Homer, Virgil, Lucan, etc., as being the substantial supporters of Fame,” while those on the upper are “Achilles, Aeneas, Caesar, and those great heroes which these poets had celebrated.” The conception, Jonson says, derives from Chaucer.

The architecture of the building is a characteristic amalgam of styles. It has certain Palladian elements—the central arch, the pilasters, the windows of the lower story—but the basic motif of the upper tier is the gothic trefoil. In the same way, the statuary on the façade pays homage to classical heroes, but the house itself is a realization of the work of the greatest English medieval poet. The union of classic and romantic, heroic and chivalric, was a continual ideal of James's reign, and Jones's setting is an architectural assertion of the success of the synthesis. But Jonson also makes it clear that in the House of Fame, heroism is a secondary virtue: the heroes are glorified not by their deeds alone, but by the enduring and transforming power of poetry. Every hero has his poet, and the building is inspired by Chaucer. The whole vision presents the Jacobean court with its own best image. Heroism is the royal consort; but the highest virtue is that of the pacific king, not a warrior, but a classical scholar and poet.

This was the setting for the entry of the masquers. The pyramidal throne suddenly turned around, and in its place the winged figure of Fame appeared. The great gates then opened, and the ladies were borne forth into the hall in three triumphant chariots, drawn respectively by “far-sighted eagles, to note Fame's sharp eye,” griffins, “that design / Swiftness and strength,” and, for the queen's carriage, lions, “that imply / The top of graces, state and majesty.”

OBERON

Like his mother, Henry Prince of Wales was an ardent masquer, and like his father, an antiquarian and patron of the arts. For the two seasons following The Masque of Queens, 1610 and 1611, he commissioned from Jonson and Jones two entertainments designed to restore to life the world of ancient British chivalry. For the first, Prince Henry's Barriers, he chose a role from the Arthurian romances, Meliadus, lover of The Lady of the Lake. In Jonson's fiction, the young prince is summoned by Merlin and King Arthur to revitalize English knighthood—the production centered about feats of arms in which Henry distinguished himself. A contemporary spectator records that “the Prince performed this challenge with wondrous skill and courage, to the great joy and admiration of all the beholders, the Prince not being full sixteene yeeres of age.”⁵

But the martial side of the prince's nature apparently disturbed King James, who vetoed a similar project for the next year. In honor of Henry's creation as Prince of Wales, Jonson and Jones devised instead the masque of Oberon, The Fairy Prince. Spenserian romance joins with classical myth to create a Britain that unites the traditions of chivalry with classical order. Silenus and his satyrs celebrate the accession of Oberon, heir of King Arthur—Greek and British mythology are, for Jonson, part of a single tradition. Indeed, in a gloss Jonson even suggests that the English word “fairy” is cognate with the Greek féras, a late form of théras, satyrs. The synthesis is again apparent in Jones's costume for the young prince. King James's heir is a medieval knight and Roman emperor combined; he also wears recognizable elements of contemporary dress. The Roman skirt, for example, has been transformed into Jacobean trunk hose. Oberon is not an impersonation, but a version of the true prince.

The palace Jones designed for Oberon is another synthesis, an anthology of architectural styles. A rusticated basement seems to grow out of the rocks. The parterre has a Palladian balustrade. A splendid pedimented archway fills the central façade, supported by grotesque Italian terms, and accented by Doric pilasters and Serlian windows. Crenellated English medieval turrets are topped with tiny baroque minarets; two pure Elizabethan chimneys frame an elegant dome in the style of Bramante.

Jones's inspiration here is not merely eclectic. Rather this design makes a programmatic visual statement about the national culture and the sources of its heroism. England becomes great through the imposition of classical order upon British nature; the rough native strength of the castle is remade according to the best models, civilized by the arts of design, by learning and taste. In the same way the Prince of Faery, the new Prince of Wales, comes out of the woods, tames the rough satyrs, and descends to salute his father, the real King James, in the Palladian architecture of the Whitehall Banqueting House.

Such productions reveal a great deal about the age's sense of itself and its intense hopes for this young man. The king, for all his pacific policies (which in any case were not especially popular) was awkward and largely without charm. Henry's untimely death in 1612 robbed England not only of a patron for her poets and artists, but of a romantic hero as well.

NEPTUNE'S TRIUMPH FOR THE RETURN OF ALBION

In 1623 Prince Charles, the Duke of Buckingham, the prince's private secretary Sir Francis Cottington, and an odd assortment of others including the court dwarf Archibald Armstrong, went to Spain to negotiate the prince's marriage with the Infanta Maria, sister of Philip IV. The Spanish match was a favorite project of King James; it represented a major European alliance, and seemed to promise an eventual reconciliation with the Catholic faith and the powers that adhered to it. But it also involved large concessions to the Catholic cause in England, and was therefore understandably unpopular with the British public. The prince and his negotiators were eager for an agreement, and undertook to meet all conditions; but the Spanish court rightly felt that Charles's promises regarding the necessary changes in the English laws of religious conformity were unrealistic, and after almost a year of discussions the plan was abandoned. The prince's party sourly returned home in October 1624, to find their failure greeted with popular rejoicing. To the king, however, the whole episode must have seemed a galling fiasco, and the court provided no celebrations of its own.

Three months later Jonson and Jones prepared a long delayed welcome home. Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion does more than put the best face on a bad situation. It provides a context within which the fiasco may be seen as a victory. Jonson's fiction begins, like so many of his later masques, as fact: it opens in the Banqueting House itself. The stage presents nothing but two pillars dedicated to Neptune; the masque has not yet begun. A poet enters, ostensibly to distribute playbills; the court cook appears, and requests an account of the forthcoming entertainment. The poet expounds his allegory:

The mighty Neptune, mighty in his styles,
And large command of waters and of isles,
Not as the lord and sovereign of the seas,
But chief in the art of riding, late did please
To send his Albion forth …
Through Celtiberia; and to assist his course,
Gave him his powerful Manager of Horse,
With divine Proteus, father of disguise,
To wait upon them with his counsels wise
In all extremes. His great commands being done,
And he desirous to review his son,
He doth dispatch a floating isle from hence
Unto the Hesperian shores to waft him thence.

In this allegory, King James is Neptune, Prince Charles Albion; Buckingham is visible under his title of Master of the King's Horse in the first of Albion's associates; and Cottington, who had served as a secret agent, is Proteus. The journey is “through Celtiberia” because their route took them first to Paris, but the reason for the expedition is carefully glossed over. The floating island is then described. The royal party will make its appearance enthroned beneath a mystical Tree of Harmony, the banyan, first planted in India by the sun himself. The tree becomes a symbol of the harmonious strength of the court; every one of its branches sends out roots, and becomes a new trunk supporting the whole.

The cook demands more entertainment, the comedy of an antimasque. The poet replies that his work is high art, addressed only to the intellect. But the cook then articulates Jonson's own concept of theater at court: these presentations speak to the whole man, and must satisfy all his senses; they are given in the Banqueting House because they are not merely poems but banquets, ravishing sights and sounds, sweet smells; they feed all parts of the observer's sensibility. And the cook himself then produces the comic dancers, in the form of meats and vegetables from his own gigantic cooking pot.

Now the poet's masque begins. The heavens open revealing Apollo and Mercury (patrons respectively of the poetry of the masque and the prose of the antimasque), accompanied by the muses and the goddess Harmony. To their music the floating island appears, and moves forward bearing the masquers. Jones's island is covered with an arbor, as the text requires; but it is an arbor of palms, not a banyan tree. In part, this doubtless reflects merely the architect's ignorance of Asian botany; however the choice of palms can hardly have been accidental. The all-powerful Neptune's island bears emblems of peace; the returning prince appears beneath the branches that heralded Christ's entry into Jerusalem.

The association of James's pacifism with the peace of God, and of his capital with the holy city, formed an important part of Jacobean official imagery from the very beginning of the reign, and as a way of justifying unpopular policies, particularly in ecclesiastical matters, it became increasingly insistent. James was regularly represented as Solomon (for example, he is so depicted by Rubens on the Banqueting House ceiling), and the Anglican church under the Stuart monarchy was held to preserve the pristine purity of Christ and the Apostles. The line of argument ran this way: England was converted by Joseph of Arimathea, long before Constantine and the conversion of Rome. The decay of Christianity began with the advent of Augustine and his popish monks, but the abolition of the English monasteries had allowed the ancient faith to flower again. All of this is implied in Jones's emblematic palms.

But the masque makes a more overt set of claims for the monarchy as well. James is explicitly represented, after all, not as Solomon but as Neptune. With the descent of the masquers the island disappears, and Jones's scene opens to reveal a marine palace. James's Palladian Banqueting House is now translated into the deep perspective of a maritime fantasy. Behind the allegorization of the king as Neptune lies a long tradition. In the same way, Sir Walter Ralegh had sung the Ocean's love to Cynthia, the moon, ruler of the sea; and Jonson and Jones in 1609 had presented Queen Anne not as the sovereign of the realm but as Bel-Anna, Queen of the Ocean. There is, of course, a simple military reality behind this: the strength of an island kingdom depends heavily on its navy. But there are mythographic realities as well that tell us a good deal more about the way the Stuart court saw itself. Neptune appears in the masque “Not as the lord and sovereign of the seas”—he is that in any case—“But chief in the art of riding.”

The connection between these two aspects of the royal persona would not have seemed obscure to a Jacobean audience who knew that King James's favorite sport was riding. But Jonson's allusion goes deeper, to a myth in which Neptune was the creator and tamer of the embodiment of the ocean's energy, the horse. From Plato onward, horsemanship had served as a symbol for the imposition of reason upon the wildness of nature or the violence of the passions. This is why the implications of the term chivalry are so much more complex than its derivation—from chevalerie, horsemanship—would suggest. To bring the destructive energies of nature under control, both within and without, was the end of Renaissance education and science. Every gentleman was thus properly a type of Neptune; and on a larger scale, the myth provided a pattern for the relation between king and commonwealth.

That the pattern was unrealistic goes without saying. The only mind operating in Jonson's allegory is the monarch's. Albion's return is a triumph because it is executed at Neptune's command; the whole action is presented as a serene extension of the royal will. This is a political myth, an accurate record of the way James viewed his government in his last years. His son's autocracy is only a step beyond. But the danger of political myths lies in their tendency to exclude political realities: the mirror of the king's mind allows him to know only himself. By 1624 the commonwealth, unlike the sea or the horse, had developed a very strong mind of its own. And indeed, in this penultimate year of his reign, political realities denied the king even his theatrical triumph. The French and Spanish ambassadors could not be invited to attend together, and each threatened the most dire diplomatic reprisals if the other were given priority. Within two days of the performance, James was forced to cancel the masque.

THE TRIUMPH OF PEACE AND COELUM BRITANNICUM

The development of Charles I's autocracy is one of the most extraordinary chapters in British legal history. In 1629, outraged by what he took to be continual inroads on the crown's authority, frustrated by inadequate revenues and the failure of numerous proposals for new taxes, the king dissolved Parliament and determined to rule without it. He managed to do so for the next eleven years. The 1630s saw the most complete consolidation of royal power in British history; by 1635 the king claimed the rights of direct taxation, the granting of monopolies in all industries, the control of all ecclesiastical offices including those in private households, the enforcement of absolute religious conformity—even the manufacture of soap was declared to be a royal prerogative. No area of the nation's life was too insignificant for Charles to want to regulate it: for example, by royal edict alehouses were forbidden to sell tobacco, and London inns to serve game. (The latter measure was conceived as a way of making town life so unpleasant for country gentlemen that they would be persuaded to return home to manage their estates.)

There were many challenges to the legality of the royal prerogatives. In every case, the basic question was whether laws could be made by royal fiat, without the assent of parliament. Gradually over the decade, usually by the barest possible majority, the courts came to support the king. By 1638, when the Star Chamber handed down its decision in the famous ship-money case⁶ that rex was lex, that king was law, the British monarchy was statutorily the most powerful in Europe. The political realities were, of course, quite different. Only authority can derive from statute. A government's power depends on its ability to enforce its authority. The crown might impose taxes, but people increasingly refused to pay them; and if they could not be persuaded to do so by noble rhetoric and high ideals, the king's only recourse was an army that had to be paid out of uncollected taxes. Such realities produced in Charles only patient bafflement at the stubborn unregeneracy of so ungrateful a populace; he ruled according to a political theory that had the quality of a hermetic allegory. In a very profound way the stage at Whitehall was his truest kingdom, the masque the most accurate expression of his mind.

The legal profession was on the whole uncomfortable about royal prerogatives, and unsympathetic to the crucial principle of Divine Right, which made the king responsible only to God. In 1634 the Inns of Court took the remarkable step of retaining Inigo Jones and James Shirley in an attempt to speak to the king in his own language. The lawyers presented a masque at Whitehall that was, for all its courtly splendor, diplomatically but unequivocally critical of the royal policies, and undertook, through the power of poetry and the marvels of spectacle, to persuade the royal spectator to return to the rule of law.

The impulse to produce The Triumph of Peace came, oddly enough, from a royal command. William Prynne, author of Histrio-Mastrix, with its treasonable attack on court theatricals, had been indicted, and his trial was about to begin. The prisoner was a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, and had dedicated the offending volume to his fellow lawyers. Charles demanded that the legal fraternities definitively repudiate their colleague and publicly declare their loyalty to the crown. What gesture of loyalty could be more appropriate than the presentation of a lawyers' masque at court?

The Inns lavishly complied. Shirley composed his text in consultation with a committee of barristers; the subject of The Triumph of Peace was the relationship between the king and the law. The setting Jones provided for the masque's opening was an Italian piazza. In fact, Shirley had given the architect a choice; the text calls for a scene “representing the Forum or Piazza of Peace.” Jones chose not a classical Roman forum, but the center of the life of an Italian Renaissance city-state, the architectural embodiment of republican principles. In contrast, two years earlier when Jones created a similar setting for the king's masque Albion's Triumph, the architecture had been a clear expression of imperial ideals.

The Roman analogy is carefully avoided in The Triumph of Peace. Extravagantly and with unparallelled splendor the legal profession asserted to the crown their joint responsibilities:

The world shall give prerogative to neither;
We cannot flourish but together.

Not surprisingly, considering the nature of the medium, the message failed to get across. The masque was a huge success; the royal solipsist saw in it nothing but adulation, and was graciously pleased to order it repeated.⁷

Two weeks later the king presented his own view of his place in the commonwealth. Thomas Carew's and Inigo Jones's Coelum Britannicum was the greatest theatrical expression of the Caroline autocracy. Carew's allegory is about the radical reformation of society, the purifying of the mind and passions, the power of language and apparitions to exorcise the rebellious spirit; it even undertakes to create a new body of poetic symbolism, as if to redeem through its imagery the imperfect nature that art imitates. The masque conceives the royal will as central to an unprecedented degree. In its fable, Jove has taken the Caroline court as a model for his own, and has banished licentiousness and ignoble passion from the heavens. The opening scene is a ruined city, the decadent civilization that is to be revitalized and ennobled. Its shutters part, and the gigantic figure of Atlas fills the stage. For the Renaissance, Atlas was the exemplar of cosmic wisdom. Jones's heroic figure, crowned and bearing the heavens on his shoulders, is the link between earth and heaven, an allegory of the monarch described in Basilikon Doron. The great globe opens, revealing the constellations, those glorifications of ancient lust and violence, the mythology of an outworn past. Each in its turn is deposed and extinguished, until heaven at last stands empty, ready to receive a chaste and heroic iconography.

The reformation then begins. Atlas and the sphere vanish and a mountainous landscape appears. From beneath the stage come ancient Britons, the kingdom's history restored to life. (They are the figures shown seated on the rocks.) Above, wild nature is framed by the palms of the royal peace. This setting is to open, revealing first a garden and a princely villa, and then an elegant pastoral perspective with Windsor Castle in the distance, while the heavens will part to show beneficent deities smiling on Charles's reign.

The grandiloquence of the masque's conception lay as much in its engineering as in its poetry. Carew's text gives a vivid sense of the spectator's experience:

… there began to rise out of the earth the top of a hill, which by little and little grew to be a huge mountain that covered all the scene; the underpart of this was wild and craggy, and above somewhat more pleasant and flourishing; about the middle part of this mountain were seated the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, all richly attired in regal habits appropriated to the several nations, with crowns on their heads, and each of them bearing the ancient arms of the kingdoms they represented. At a distance above these sat a young man in a white embroidered robe, upon his fair hair an olive garland, with wings at his shoulders, and holding in his hand a cornucopia filled with corn and fruits, representing the genius of these kingdoms. …

At this the underpart of the rock opens, and out of a cave are seen to come the masquers, richly attired like ancient heroes; the colours yellow embroidered with silver, their antique helms curiously wrought, and great plumes on the top; before them a troop of young lords and noblemen's sons bearing torches of virgin wax; these were apparelled after the old British fashion in white coats embroidered with silver, girt, and full gathered, cut square-collared, and round caps on their heads, with a white feather wreathen about them; first these dance with their lights in their hands, after which the masquers descend into the room and dance their entry.

The dance being past, there appears in the further part of the heaven coming down a pleasant cloud, bright and transparent, which coming softly downwards before the upper part of the mountain, embraceth the genius, but so as through it all his body is seen; and then rising again with a gentle motion bears up the genius of the three kingdoms, and being past the airy region, pierceth the heavens, and is no more seen. At that instant the rock with the three kingdoms on it sinks and is hidden in the earth. This strange spectacle gave great cause of admiration, but especially how so huge a machine, and of that great height, could come from under the stage, which was but six foot high.

The full force of Caroline idealism, the determination to purify, reorder, reform, reconceive a whole culture, is here fully realized in apparitions and marvelous machinery. The most complete expression of the royal will in the age lay not in the promulgation of edicts, erratically obeyed, nor in military power, inadequately furnished, but in Inigo Jones's ability to do the impossible.

Notes

1. The Tempest 4.1.41.

2. Love's Triumph through Callipolis, lines 1-3.

3. Measure for Measure 2.4.123-26.

4. Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished (Oxford, 1632), p. 103.

5. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones (Berkeley, 1973), 1:159.

6. The king had revived an Elizabethan tax on coastal towns for the support of the navy. In 1633 the tax was extended to inland districts, and met with considerable resistance, the opponents arguing that the imposition of ship-money constituted taxation by royal fiat. The test case was Rex v. Hampden, 1637; the decision was overturned by Parliament in 1641.

7. For a detailed discussion of the masque's complex political context, and a full analysis of the allegory, see Inigo Jones 1:63-66.