SOURCE: “The Reformation of the Masque,” in The Court Masque, edited by David Lindley, Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 94-110.

[In the essay below, Norbrook outlines the efforts made to reform Jacobean and Caroline masques in light of Protestant beliefs.]

At the beginning of Shelley's unfinished tragedy Charles the First, some London citizens are watching a procession of masquers on their way to perform at court. The year is 1634; the masque is James Shirley's The Triumph of Peace, performed by the lawyers of the Inns of Court. A young spectator is dazzled by the sight:

                                                                                'tis like the bright procession
Of skiey visions in a solemn dream
From which men wake as from a Paradise,
And draw new strength to tread the thorns of life.

But the older citizens are less enthusiastic. It is no time for revelry, they say, when the fidelity of the English church to its Protestant traditions seems in question and when the Protestant cause throughout Europe is imperilled. The youth admires the masquers' colourful costumes, but an older man replies that their finery is unjustly maintained at the expense of the poor: the masque is the symbol of the dominance of an unjust ruling class. He points to a group of cripples and beggars in the procession: they serve

                                                                                to point the moral
Of this presentment, and bring up the rear
Of painted pomp with misery!

The youth dislikes any attempt to introduce political considerations which spoil his enjoyment of the procession's beauty: ‘Oh, still those dissonant thoughts!’ He points out that the older man's political bitterness has made him read the procession too simply: he has been watching, not real beggars, but the disguised masquers who appear in the antimasque. They serve as the foil to the main action, like discords in sweet music. The youth wants to keep aesthetic judgements free from politics; the old man's political views make him deny any aesthetic value to the masque.¹

Shelley's play graphically presents problems which have been faced by all writers on the Stuart masque. Historians sympathetic to the Puritan cause have shown a degree of respect for William Prynne, who was in prison when Shirley's masque was performed for his allegedly seditious attacks on plays and court masques in Histrio-Mastix. Prynne's views became embodied in the ‘Whig’ interpretation of seventeenth-century history. In 1698 a Whig writer published an attack on stage-plays which contained a lengthy analysis of one Caroline masque, Davenant's Britannia Triumphans. He argued that this masque was idolatrous, glorifying a tyrannical monarch and mocking the integrity of the godly.² Many later writers have tended to assume that political and artistic decadence must go together: since James and Charles were reactionary absolutists their court masques must have been unworthy of serious consideration. But in the present century a number of scholars and critics have looked more closely at Stuart masques and have argued that the excellence of the scripts by poets like Jonson and Carew, and the scenic designs of Inigo Jones, make them important artistic achievements. Stephen Orgel has argued that ‘Renaissance culture’ valued display and conspicuous consumption as manifestations of princely honour and magnificence. Renaissance court poets did not see panegyric as mere flattery: praise could have a didactic function, holding up to the monarch an image which he or she ought to emulate.³ The idea that Stuart masques involved servile flattery has been further undermined by the work of ‘revisionist’ historians who have questioned the idea that James and Charles were enemies of the traditional constitution and have presented a more favourable view of their political competence.⁴ We are now in a better position to assess the intellectual coherence of Stuart masques.

But the new defenders of the masque have sometimes been in danger of replacing one stereotype by another. Orgel has written of Puritanism as if it were a monolithic force, an uncompromising enemy of ‘Renaissance culture’. He explains Puritan hostility to masques as a manifestation of a new, reductive world-view which was unsympathetic to all forms of ‘role-playing’: he cites Cromwell's actions in closing theatres, selling off the royal picture collections, and ordering religious images to be defaced, as different expressions of the same Puritan world-view. Such a simple polarisation between Puritans and the rest, however, cannot do justice to the complex interaction of political and aesthetic issues in the early seventeenth century. From his reading of the Memoirs of Bulstrode Whitelocke, who helped to organise The Triumph of Peace, Shelley knew that Shirley's antimasque was not merely gloating over the miseries of the poor but trying to persuade the king to act against the monopolists on whom many people blamed economic distresses.⁵ Whitelocke was to become a supporter of Cromwell, while Prynne, like many of the presbyterians who were most vehement in opposition to the theatre, became a staunch legitimist who found Cromwell's regime too radical. Shelley could sympathise with the demand of the Youth in his play for an art that would make experience more bearable by its ‘skiey visions’: the impulse to go beyond everyday experience could be potentially more radical than the crabbed literal-mindedness of a Prynne. In the last act of Prometheus Unbound he presented the apocalyptic transformation of society as a kind of cosmic masque. But Shelley could also sympathise with the Citizens' argument that art could become an anodyne, a way of glossing over political problems. In The Masque of Anarchy he turned masque conventions upside down, presenting the rulers of his day as the real ‘antimasque’ who bore the responsibility for the social unrest they were repressing.⁶ The responses of some seventeenth-century poets to the Stuart masque were no less complex than Shelley's; though they did not necessarily want to abolish masques, they did believe that they needed reformation.

Criticism of the masques of Jonson and Jones goes back to the very beginning of James's reign. In fact, even before James had come to the throne the poet Samuel Daniel had been corresponding with his friend Fulke Greville about the need for a ‘reformation’ of court masques.⁷ Elizabethan royal entertainments did not excite the same kind of public criticism as Stuart masques, but Daniel's belief that they needed ‘reformation’ can perhaps be linked with his and Greville's admiration for Sir Philip Sidney, whose attitude to court festivities had been somewhat ambivalent. Though he had written a masque for the queen and made spectacular appearances in tournaments, he was also anxious to be rather more than a courtier, to fight in defence of the Protestant cause. He and his friends wanted Elizabeth to intervene more actively in what they saw as an apocalyptic struggle on the Continent between Protestants and the forces of Catholic absolutism. The most famous Huguenot manifesto, the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, urged Protestant aristocrats to fight in defence of their traditional liberties instead of being reduced to passive bystanders in royal ceremonies, ‘as if there were some Masque or Interlude to be represented’.⁸ In his Arcadia Sidney presented masques and pastoral entertainments as the pastimes of an effeminate ruler who neglected his political and military responsibilities. Sidney and his circle were great admirers of Tacitus, who explained in his Annals how the Roman emperors had used spectacle as an instrument of political deception: ‘Princes,’ wrote Sidney's brother Robert, ‘may please the people with some shows of their ancient liberties.’⁹ Fulke Greville came to see King James as an equivalent of Sidney's irresponsible Basilius, and in the earlier years of the reign he began work on a Life of Sidney in which he contrasted his hero's Protestant militancy with the idleness and luxury that reigned at most courts. Daniel seems to have believed that the unprecedented scale of public adulation of the monarch in Jonson's masques was a sign of political decadence. He continued, however, to call not for the abolition of masques but for their ‘reformation’; his own masques pointedly refrained from some characteristic Jacobean compliments.¹⁰

After only one season of Jacobean masques, some members of the Privy Council were arguing that economies had to be made. In 1604 they pointed out to the king that Queen Elizabeth had never spent money on such a scale merely to subsidise ephemeral court entertainments. While costly masques might be justifiable on special occasions, it would be wasteful to stage them as a matter of course every year; the Council warned that James was making himself unpopular with his subjects. Moreover, the queen, who loved masquing, was offending a common prejudice against participation by women in theatricals. James's advisers were not noted for their political radicalism but they were already voicing in 1604 the major charges that Prynne was to bring against masques. They acknowledged, however, that the king's dignity would be undermined if he were seen to be reversing his plans and making excessively abrupt economies; the masque should not be cancelled at this stage but economies should be made in the future.¹¹

James disregarded such warnings. He seems to have considered the masque to be an important means of increasing his subjects' reverence for the mystique of monarchical authority. He believed that the apocalyptic world-view which motivated so many radical Protestants, and had influenced courtly figures like Sidney, was a danger to social order and to European peace. While he retained the Calvinist settlement of the English church, he disliked close contacts between English and Continental Calvinists. He feared that some of his subjects were too ‘republicanising’, idolising the Dutch who had rebelled against their sovereign and speaking of the Spanish king in terms which seemed to imply a contempt for all monarchs. James resisted the call from some militant Protestants to join an alliance against Catholic powers, and aimed instead at a policy of peace and balance of power between the opposed religious blocs. To that end he became increasingly anxious to establish closer links with the Spanish monarchy.¹²

Ben Jonson was the right person to glorify James's pacific ideals. At the start of the reign he was a Catholic convert and after his return to the Anglican Church he remained strongly hostile to the more evangelistic and apocalyptic varieties of Protestantism. He was deeply suspicious of claims by individuals to divinely inspired vision: the individual imagination became subversive if it was not subordinated to public authority. He defended ritualism in the church not only on religious grounds but also because cremony helped maintain social order and degree; his second masque, Hymenaei, was an extended apologia for ritual. The increasingly elaborate concluding scenes of Jacobean and Caroline masques, in which Jones's scenery transformed courtiers into images of transcendent truths, formed a secular counterpart to the cult of religious images. It is true that Jonson himself sometimes spoke disparagingly of masques: he had a running quarrel with his collaborator Inigo Jones, culminating in a final breach in the 1630s and a bitter satire against ‘Showes! Mighty Showes!’. But this was a personal rather than a political dispute: Jonson believed that painting and architecture were socially inferior, ‘mechanical’ arts and that he, as a learned poet, should have priority in the partnership. Jonson's political conservatism meant that he did not have any radical ideological disagreements with James or Charles.¹³

With his commitment to the Stuarts' pacific ideals, Jonson did not share the nostalgia of some Jacobeans for the Elizabethan cult of Protestant chivalry. Under Elizabeth tournaments had been as important as masques in the court calendar; under the Stuarts, as Arthur Wilson put it, ‘Bellona put on Masking-attire’.¹⁴ But James's elder son Prince Henry became the focus of a renewed cult of chivalry. Though Henry was probably not as radical as some of his admirers hoped, he does seem to have tried to move court entertainments in a more militant direction.¹⁵ The Barriers heralding his installation as Prince of Wales aroused memories of the Elizabethan age. Henry came to political maturity at a time of intense political excitement. A shift in the balance of power in Europe seemed to be pushing James in the direction of a closer alliance with the Calvinist powers. Princess Elizabeth was betrothed to Frederick V of the Palatinate, the most militant Calvinist state in Europe. Some of Frederick's advisers may already have been dreaming of the possibility that he might become Holy Roman Emperor: commentators on Revelation looked to a climatic struggle between the Emperor and the Papacy as the prelude to the apocalypse. Henry was extremely enthusiastic about this alliance and is said to have helped to plan the wedding masques. It is perhaps significant that Jonson did not write a masque for this occasion. In the speeches he wrote for Henry's Barriers he had struck a cautious note, warning the prince not to become intoxicated with dreams of martial glory, and it is unlikely that he shared the enthusiasm felt by many Puritans for the German allies. But some new voices were now heard at court. The Inns of Court, which had not yet staged any major pageantry for the new king, now presented two elaborate masques. And an anonymous poet drafted a plan for a wedding masque which would have amounted to a systematic Protestant ‘reformation’ of the Jonsonian masque. This project did not get very far—quite apart from its expense, its apocalyptic enthusiasm would not have appealed to the king—but it provides a fascinating vision of an alternative direction in which masques might have developed under different political conditions.¹⁶

It had been a commonplace of Jacobean panegyric—reiterated by Jonson in Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611) that Britain was a world in itself, enjoying a splendid isolation. The 1613 project was to take as its theme the reunification of Britain with Continental Protestantism. Jonson had tried to calm Protestant enthusiasm by using classical symbolism in his masques; the 1613 project involved a mixture of classical and explicitly Biblical symbolism. The setting of Jonson's Hymenaei had been a stage framed by two huge figures, Atlas and Hercules, holding up the cosmic sphere; between them was a globe from which issued the Humours and the Affections, which were eventually reconciled with Reason. The projected 1613 masque was to open with a complaint by a weary Atlas that he could no longer hold up the world because of the weight of sin and was therefore handing it over to Aletheia, Truth: only faith, rather than reason, could sustain the universe. Aletheia was to take the form of a huge recumbent statue, holding a globe in one hand and a Bible in the other. This was not the neo-Stoic Truth of Jonson's writings but the Truth of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition, a figure identified with the woman wandering in the wilderness of Revelation xii. She had appeared in various ‘reformations’ of medieval mystery plays by sixteenth-century Protestant writers and Spenser had introduced her as Una to Book I of The Faerie Queene. Conservatives in the church were not altogether happy with the idea, implicit in this apocalyptic imagery, that the true faith could be preserved by the pure and godly, the ‘invisible church’, independently of established institutions. William Laud had already clashed with the Calvinist George Abbot in the early years of James's reign over the question of the ‘perpetual visibility’ of the true church. The 1613 masque project was to reintroduce explicit apocalyptic imagery to the court. There was to be praise of James for receiving the Truth and ensuring that it was purely preached: this formed a striking contrast with the more conservative emphasis on ritual in Jonson's masques. Significantly, the focus was not to be confined to Britain: the nine muses, led by Urania, were to bring in three ladies representing the three parts of the world to do homage to James, and the different nations and rivers of the world were to perform a series of dances. The governing idea was that the union between Britain and the Palatinate would be an inspiration for the process of preaching the gospel to all parts of the world: when the process had been completed, the apocalypse would be near. The Muses were to call on the different nations to abandon their quarrels and recognise the pure Truth preached in Britain. At this point the globe was to split in two and reveal a vision of Paradise, guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. The Muses would lead the repentant nations into Paradise to the sound of heavenly music, and the gates would shut behind them.

Whoever devised the 1613 project had realised that the conventional masque contained within it the seeds of a more radical form. The final transformation scene represented the monarch and his court as images of perfection; but one more change of scene would show them to be no more than images and reveal the final, transcendent reality. The word ‘apocalypse’ means ‘unveiling’, ‘unmasking’, and several commentators on Revelation had compared the last days of the world to the last scenes of a play; the sudden transformations at the end of a masque formed an even more appropriate symbol. Milton was to compare the apocalyptic descent of Truth and Justice to the climax of a masque in On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. He believed that improvements in the arts of poetry and music could be seen as adumbrations of the apocalypse. In the 1613 project Urania, who was regularly invoked as the Protestant Muse, and the other Muses were to lead the nations into Paradise to the sounds of violins, lutes, and voices. Praise of King James would have been over-shadowed by apocalyptic excitement. It is not surprising that this particular project was never carried out.

The apocalyptic hopes raised by Elizabeth's wedding were soon dissipated, however. Prince Henry had died shortly before the wedding, and it became clear that there would be no shift in the balance of power at court towards the anti-Spanish group. In the latter part of his reign James was increasingly preoccupied with negotiations for a Spanish match for Prince Charles. But this project coincided with a renewed crisis for Continental Protestantism. In 1619 Prince Frederick was elected King of Bohemia and it seemed that there might be a decisive shift in the European balance of power; but he and Elizabeth were soon driven out of their new kingdom by Habsburg forces. Many English Protestants wanted James to give full military aid to help Frederick to regain his territories, but before long the Palatinate had been lost too. James was reluctant to imperil the negotiations with Spain and wanted to achieve a diplomatic rather than military settlement. In 1619, at a time of severe financial difficulties, James began work on an expensive new Banqueting House in Whitehall as a suitable setting for the masques which, he hoped, would celebrate the forthcoming union between the houses of Stuart and Habsburg. This political crisis seems to have helped to revive the traditional hostility of some Puritans towards masques and plays. Attacks on the stage had in fact been relatively infrequent in the earlier part of James's reign, particularly because Sunday performances had been restricted. But towards the end of the reign William Prynne began work on Histrio-Mastix and Alexander Leighton published an attack on stage-plays. Both men were primarily concerned with political and religious issues; criticising plays or masques was a way of indirectly indicating a general discontent with the state of the nation under rulers who seemed unaware of the dangers which Protestantism was confronting. There was topical relevance in Prynne's repeated praise of rulers who had spent their money on wars and tournaments rather than court festivities.¹⁷

Defenders of royal policies tried to neutralise criticism by presenting themselves as champions of all culture and learning against ignorant Puritan fanatics. In August 1620 the Duke of Buckingham staged a rowdy comic masque in which one of the characters was a Puritan who marred the play. The following January a play at court ridiculed a Puritan with long ass's ears who complained that it was no time for masquing when all Europe was in crisis.¹⁸ But to condemn performances under specific circumstances was not necessarily to condemn them absolutely. As Margot Heinemann has shown, people who shared the political outlook of Prynne and Leighton did not necessarily share their view of the stage, and by the 1620s some London Puritans were taking an interest in the theatre. Thomas Middleton was devising pageants for the city fathers which combined elaborate spectacle with strongly Protestant propaganda, and in 1624 he gained popularity amongst the Puritans for his apocalyptic satire A Game at Chess.¹⁹ Had court masques voiced the political anxieties of the anti-Spanish militants they would have aroused less criticism from the Puritans and others. Indeed the Puritan propagandist Thomas Scott compared his pamphlets, which were fictitious dialogues, to the didactic fictions in court masques.²⁰ This was a reference calculated to appeal to his patron Princess Elizabeth, who was now in exile in the Netherlands and trying to encourage support for her cause in England. Elizabeth loved masquing and there were regular festivities in her exiled court. One of her supporters, the German poet Georg Rudolf Weckherlin, had recently dedicated to her a lengthy description of Protestant pageantry at Stuttgart.²¹

What disturbed Elizabeth's supporters about the masques of the 1620s was that they seemed to be distracting the king from his responsibilities: like Basilius in the Arcadia, he was putting off urgent diplomatic interventions in order to pursue his courtly recreations.²² John Fletcher, who hardly corresponded to the stereotype of a Puritan fanatic, wrote to his patron the Countess of Huntingdon that he would not discuss

                                                            whether ytt be true
we shall have warre with Spaine: (I would wee might:)
Nor whoe shall daunce i'th Maske: Nor whoe shall
          write
those brave things done: Nor summe up the Expence;
nor whether ytt be paid for ten yeere hence.(23)

Sir Francis Nethersole, one of Elizabeth's representatives, complained in January 1620 that it was hard to gain access to the king because he spent most of his time watching the rumbustious masques staged by his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, and his young friends. One of these young courtiers was given a large grant of land ‘for masking and fooling’.²⁴ Satirists disliked the company the king was keeping:

At Royston and newmarkett he'le hunt till he be leane
But hee hath merry boys that with masks and toyes
Can make him fatt againe …
But fooles are things for the pastime of kings
ffooles still must be about them
Soe must knaves too, where ever the[y] goe
They seldome goe without them.(25)

Buckingham aroused particular resentment because he was associated with the policy of selling off titles of honour, many of which were brought by members of his own family. The effect was to devalue traditional noble titles, creating a new brand of upstart nobles who came to seem, to those jealous of aristocratic traditions, no more than puppets in the hands of the king and his minion. In the words of one critic, James made ‘the temple of honour a common theater, into which the basest were suffered to enter for their mony’.²⁶ Unlike stage-plays, masques were meant to be exclusive aristocratic pursuits and not open to the public, but especially after the inflation of honours the court seemed to have become a corrupt theatre in which courtiers danced at the king's—or Buckingham's—bidding. The court masque had come to be a symbol of the dissolution, rather than the defence, of the traditional hierarchical order.

Buckingham's ascendancy was contested by an aristocratic ‘opposition’. One of its leaders, the third Earl of Essex, had ample reason to dislike court masques. He had been humiliated when his wife, Frances Howard, divorced him for the king's new favourite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. Jonson had celebrated Frances Howard's first marriage with a wedding masque, Hymenaei, in which he praised marriage as a mystical and indissoluble bond; somewhat inconsistently, he also wrote a wedding masque for her second marriage to the royal favourite. Not long after the wedding it began to be revealed that she had arranged for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, who had advised Carr against the marriage. It is not surprising that Essex tended to shun court festivities; his secretary Arthur Wilson later published a history of James's reign which drew a strong contrast between his patron's virtuous retirement and the idleness of a court that was a ‘continued Maskaradoe’.²⁷ He did not share James's pacific values and after the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War he fought in defence of the Protestant cause in the Netherlands. He was to command the Parliamentary forces in the Civil War.

But Essex's personal and political disillusionment with the Jacobean court did not lead him to reject masquing altogether: on the contrary, when he retired to his country seats at the end of a season's campaigning he was regularly entertained with plays and masques.²⁸ These masques may, however, have been slightly different in content from the court festivities of this period. Only one text has survived; it describes a performance in honour of the marriage of Essex's sister Frances to Sir William Seymour in 1618.²⁹ Given Essex's family associations with Elizabethan chivalry—his grandmother, the widow of the first Earl of Leicester, attended some of these performances—it is interesting to find that the main masque was based on The Faerie Queene, that poetic embodiment of the political ideals of the Leicester and Essex circles. The male masquers took roles based on Spenser's characters, such as Arthur, Arthegall, Guyon, and Calidore. Though there was no direct reference to religious or foreign policy, the Spenserian allusions did recall the values of Elizabethan chivalry which were no longer dramatised in the pacific masques of the court. The performance ended with a compliment to Essex in which praise was slightly more cautious and less hyperbolical than was becoming common in court masques: instead of being celebrated as a deity Essex was praised as ‘Thou who greatnes does not swell thee, / To forgett, thou art a man …’.³⁰ Essex certainly took his commitment to personal and military honour seriously: he was soon to embark on his campaigns in the Netherlands and he was one of the leaders, along with two other participants in the 1618 masque, of the aristocratic ‘opposition’ in the 1621 Parliament.³¹

When Charles I came to the throne in 1625 he tried to reform the royal household and remove the grosser forms of waste and disorder. The Puritan Lucy Hutchinson later commented that Charles's love of paintings and sculptures was a marked improvement over James's enthusiasm for ‘bawdry and profane abusive wit’: she acknowledged the new king to be ‘temperate and chaste and serious’.³² The assassination of Buckingham in 1628 removed a major grievance, and in 1631 Jonson and Jones initiated a new series of masques which celebrated the purity and chastity now reigning at court and epitomised in the marital love of Charles and his queen. (Jonson, it should be said, does not seem to have got on well with Buckingham and wrote no Caroline masques until after his death.)³³ But these reforms were accompanied by a religious reaction: Charles repudiated the Calvinist doctrine that had been part of the Anglican tradition since the days of Elizabeth, and the High Church Laudian party gained ascendency in the church.³⁴ After a brief phase of militancy Charles reverted to a conciliatory foreign policy which seemed to his critics to involve surrender to Spanish interests.

The response of William Prynne to this situation was to publish Histrio-Mastix, indicating his hatred of the court's policies by indicting its cultural preferences. But it would be misleading to generalise from Prynne and expect to find a complete split between royalist ‘court’ and Puritan ‘country’.³⁵ The court was not monolithic: there were many factional disputes. The queen disliked Laud, and some courtiers tried to enlist her aid against the Archbishop.³⁶ Eager to cut down royal expenditure, Laud himself was no great lover of masques. Some opponents of the Laudians retained influential positions in the royal household. Weckherlin was now one of the king's under-secretaries of state. He regarded the Laudian bishops as ‘Papists’ and was to side with Parliament in the Civil War: Milton was to succeed him in his secretarial post. But Weckherlin was prepared to try to gain the Catholic queen's favour by writing a masque for her. The draft of this masque, written in the late 1620s or early 1630s, is not particularly interesting: Weckherlin was imitating one of the conventional themes of Caroline masques, the improvement in morality brought about by the reign of Charles and Henrietta Maria. He did introduce a controversial note, however, by suggesting that two of the figures in his antimasque, Pride and Ambition, should be dressed as gentlemen or Spaniards. The French queen had no special love of the Spanish but the king would not have wanted them to be publicly insulted and Weckherlin's masque was not performed.³⁷

Even the most spectacular Stuart masques, however, retained a certain margin for critical comment. While the antimasque of The Triumph of Peace satirised the hated monopolies, the main masque made the point that the king's peace had to be maintained with the aid of Law—a point that lawyers anxious about the king's constitutional position wanted him to remember.³⁸ This passage was reprinted in 1643 by a Parliamentarian pamphleteer who was urging the royalists to lay down their arms. The first part of the pamphlet parodied Shirley's antimasque, identifying the cavaliers with unruly figures like Fancy and Opinion. Like Shelley's old man, this writer may not have entirely understood the significance of Shirley's allegory but he inverted the relationship between masque and antimasque to make a political point.³⁹ For his part, the king may have failed to see the really very oblique criticisms of his policies in The Triumph of Peace, but participants in Caroline masques were not necessarily uncritical supporters of royal policy. Bulstrode Whitelocke, who organised the masque's music, was to be summoned before the council later in 1634 for being ‘always wont to have a puritanical jerk at the Church’.⁴⁰

It was in the same year that Milton wrote a masque to commemorate the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales at Ludlow Castle. This was an important state occasion, and Milton provided his audience with many of the ingredients that would have been expected in a masque of the 1630s. The theme of chastity had a special relevance to the Earl's family: the Countess's brother-in-law, Lord Castlehaven, had recently been executed for scandalous sexual activities.⁴¹ And the topic of the moral reformation of the court was a standard theme of masques in the 1630s. But Milton criticised these masques as well as imitating them, and took up many of the themes of earlier ‘reformers’ of the masque. Milton may have borrowed the figure of Comus from Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), in which Hercules banished this riotous hedonist and hence implied the need for James to temper the disorder of his court. This was the first masque in which Charles appeared as Prince of Wales—a revised version was called For the Honour of Wales—and would thus have been an appropriate model for Milton's Welsh masque. But Milton went far beyond Jonson or Jones in his criticisms of masque conventions. Though Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue had condemned excessive disorder in revelry, it had also been a sustained defence of properly governed ritual in church and state.⁴² Shortly before its performance, James had issued a proclamation defending the traditional Sunday sports in the countryside which Puritans were attacking as an incitement to irreligion. Jonson's masque implied that under a ruler as wise as James, ritual and godliness, pleasure and virtue, could be reconciled.

Sunday sports were newly topical in the 1630s. Charles had reissued his father's Book of Sports, and Laud was suppressing the lectureships which Puritans regarded as an essential means of combating the idolatry in superstitious ‘dark corners of the land’ like Wales and Northern England.⁴³ Prynne regarded Sabbath masquing and Sabbath sports as similar manifestations of a reversion to idolatry; the whole Calvinist tradition, which James had defended at least until the last years of his reign, now seemed in danger. In Comus Milton imitated certain features of Jonson's masques but introduced oblique allusions to traditions of low-church Protestant symbolism which Jonson had repudiated. Jonson's Comus was a cheerful Bacchic deity; Milton's Comus is the son of Circe, the wicked enchantress who had become associated in Protestant iconography with the Whore of Babylon. The scene in which he tempts the lady with an enchanted cup had many precedents in sixteenth-century Protestant drama, where representatives of the true faith were shown struggling with the magical temptations of idolatry. The lady's wanderings in the dark forest link her with the pure woman of Revelation who had appeared in the 1613 Aletheia masque, Middleton's civic pageants and in Spenserian poetry but not in most Stuart court masques.⁴⁴

Like the 1613 apocalyptic masque project, Comus dramatises the difficulty of defeating evil without divine intervention: in conventional masques the heroes easily routed the forces of evil and even Jonson's Hercules, the symbol of a particularly strenuous form of heroic virtue, found it much easier to defeat Comus than Milton's Lady and her brothers. Jonson had made courtly dancing a central symbol of heroic virtue; in Comus the final dances are merely supplementary to the main action. The Lady's ‘chaste footing’ had disrupted Comus's unruly dance. The spirit's prologue and epilogue transpose the reconciliation between pleasure and virtue to a transcendental plane. As in the 1618 masque for Essex, the epilogue emphasises that the aristocratic audience are human beings, not deities.⁴⁵ The lady is freed from her imprisonment not by a spectacular display of courtiers in divine disguises but by the harmonious collaboration of music and poetry in the invocation of Sabrina. The recurrent emphasis on music rather than visual spectacle can be seen as a formal equivalent of Milton's suspicion of idolatry. Music appealed to many Puritans as an especially spiritual art, and in monodic songs like Lawes's the sound seemed to highlight the sense of the words rather than obscuring them with polyphony.⁴⁶ Music in Comus does not have the directly millenial associations of On the morning of Christ's Nativity—or the 1613 Aletheia masque—but it does offer the listener a promise of happiness, a ‘sober certainty of waking bliss’, which visual spectacle alone could not provide.

In some respects Milton was more radical than any previous ‘reformer’ of masques. Sixteenth-century apocalyptic poetry and drama had often combined calls for religious reform with social criticism: if the end of time was at hand it was essential that society should be justly ordered, and the nobility must distribute their surplus wealth amongst the poor. This vein of social criticism became muted in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and the masque, which embodied the principle of conspicuous waste, was the last place where one would expect a serious call for austerity and economy. Jonson sometimes touched on the problem in his antimasques, only to set it aside: in Love Restored (1612) Plutus's attacks on courtly luxury are shown to be motivated by envy of the masquers' heroic virtue. Milton puts the defence of ‘high solemnities’ in the mouth of the antimasque villain while his heroine calls for the redistribution of wealth. She does not explain exactly what a just distribution might be, and Comus itself, and its noble patron, are presumably felt to be sufficiently godly to avoid the charge of injustice. But Milton is questioning the conventional antithesis between envious, low-born antimasquers and magnanimous masquers.⁴⁷

The examples of Milton, Whitelocke and Weckherlin show that there was no inherent incompatibility between Puritan sympathies and an interest in masques. The political upheavals of the 1640s certainly put an end to masquing in the Whitehall Banqueting House. But in the 1650s, as a certain degree of political stability returned under the Protectorate, masques began to be performed once more. In 1653 a masque by Shirley was presented on a semi-official occasion. The following year a masque by Thomas Jordan was given several performances. In 1656, with Whitelocke's encouragement, Sir William Davenant staged the first of several dramatic entertainments with musical accompaniments. Cromwell himself was beginning to establish what amounted to a court—though it was more economically and efficiently administered than the Stuart royal households.⁴⁸ A masque-like entertainment was staged for the wedding of one of his daughters in 1657.

But these ‘reformed’ masques do not bear comparison with Comus; the devisers did not attempt to rethink masque conventions in the light of an apocalyptic Protestant ideology. On the contrary, these performances were symbols of a return to social normality after the disturbing events of the 1640s when radical sects had preached an apocalyptic egalitarianism in rather less abstract terms than Milton's Lady. When Whitelocke led an embassy to Sweden in 1653 he greatly impressed the queen by his elegant dancing at a ball. She told him that she had always believed the English regicides to be low-born ‘mechanicals’; she could now see that some of them were gentlemen.⁴⁹ Davenant assured the audience of his first Commonwealth entertainment that the ruling classes would be less liable to popular envy if they displayed their wealth generously rather than hoarding it up. Milton had advocated a ‘reformation’ of plays and of popular recreations in the early days of the Long Parliament, but he had had in mind a new moral purity and integrity in art; by now ‘reformation’ was coming to imply little more than the inculcation of traditional aristocratic attitudes and the re-establishment of social distinctions.⁵⁰ Masques were, after all, better than anarchy.

Notes

1. Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (reset edition, London, 1943), pp. 488-92.

2. [George Ridpath], The Stage Condemn'd (London, 1698), pp. 12-31.

3. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1975), pp. 38-44, 60.

4. See, for example, the collection of essays edited by Conrad Russell, The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973).

5. On Shelley's rejection of simpler Whig readings of the Caroline era see R. B. Woodings, ‘“A Devil of a Nut to Crack”: Shelley's Charles the First’, Studia Neophilologica, 40 (1968), pp. 216-37; see also the same author's ‘Shelley's Sources for Charles the First’, MLR, 64 (1968), pp. 267-75.

6. On Shelley and the masque see Richard Cronin, Shelley's Poetic Thoughts (London, 1981), pp. 51-5.

7. Biographia Britannica (London, 1757), 4, p. 2400 (I owe this reference to John Pitcher). The idea of ‘reforming’ a traditional genre was common in the Renaissance: cf. the anonymous Puritan ‘Christian Reformation’ of Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum, British Library M.S. Royal 18A LXIX.

8. Anon. Vindiciae contra tyrannos: A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants (London, 1648), p. 121. The Latin text (Edinburgh, 1579, p. 196) reads ‘ut palliatam quandam fabulam ludant’. ‘Palliatus’ was used by the Romans to describe actors wearing Greek cloaks, and hence had connotations of foreign decadence that the English translator associated with masques. On Sidney's politics see Richard McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (Hassocks, Sussex, 1978).

9. Quoted by Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London, 1981), p. 187.

10. See John Pitcher's essay. Daniel seems to be hitting at the new perspective stage which was used in Jones's masques in the preface to his play The Queenes Arcadia (initially titled Arcadia Reformed): Daniel, Complete Works, ed. A. B. Grosart (5 vols, London and Aylesbury, 1885-96), 3, p. 214. In a later verse epistle (probably to the Countess of Bedford) Daniel used imagery from masquing to describe the corruption of the Jacobean court: Samuel Daniel: The Brotherton Manuscript. A Study in Authorship, ed. John Pitcher (Leeds, 1981), p. 148.

11. I am reconstructing this episode from a letter in H.M.C. Calendar of Hatfield Manuscripts, 16, pp. 388-9. For protests against the extravagance of the Jacobean court in an early masque see David Lindley, ‘Campion's Lord Hay's Masque and Anglo-Scottish Union’, HLQ, 43 (1979-80), pp. 1-12.

12. This analysis is based on S. L. Adams, ‘Spain and the Netherlands: The Dilemma of Early Stuart Foreign Policy’, forthcoming in Before the English Civil War, ed. Howard Tomlinson. I am grateful to Dr Adams for letting me read his article in advance of publication and for reading an earlier version of this essay.

13. D. J. Gordon, ‘Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’, in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1975), pp. 77-101. In Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 149-73, Philip Edwards forcefully argues that Jonson's relations with the court were rather more compromising than has sometimes been acknowledged.

14. Arthur Wilson, The History of Great Britain (London, 1653), p. 91. Jonson seems to have modified his opinions at a later date: see Anne Barton ‘Harking Back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia’, ELH, 48 (1981), pp. 706-31.

15. On the different public images of Prince Henry see Jerry W. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror: Prince Henry Stuart, A Study of Seventeenth-Century Personation (New York, 1978).

16. For a fuller account of this masque project see my article ‘The Masque of Truth’, forthcoming in Paideia, Renaissance Issue. The text appeared in an account of the wedding festivities published by one D. Jocquet at Heidelberg in 1613.

17. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), pp. 320-1, 742, 451. For some suggestive comments on the political implications of attacks on plays see Stephen Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground: Alexander Leighton, the Puritan Triumvirate, and the Laudian Reaction to Nonconformity (Hamden, Conn., 1978), pp. 20-4, 37-42.

18. CSP Venetian 1619-21, p. 390; The Court and Times of James I, ed. T. Birch, 2 vols (London, 1848), 2, p. 228.

19. Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 121-33, 151-71.

20. Heinemann, p. 157.

21. M. A. E. Green, Elizabeth Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia (revised edition, London, 1909), pp. 320, 355. On Weckherlin see n. 35 below: and on Jonson's attitude to the Bohemian propaganda campaign see Sara Pearl's essay.

22. It is interesting that the Puritan lawyer Simonds D'Ewes was reading the Arcadia with enthusiasm at the same time as he was censuring court masques: The Diary of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, 1622-1624, ed. E. Bourcier (Paris, 1974), pp. 70, 76.

23. H.M.C. Hastings, 2, pp. 58-9. About this time Fletcher collaborated with Massinger on the topical anti-Spanish play Sir John Olden Barnavelt.

24. Letters and other Documents Illustrating the Relations between England and Germany at the Commencement of the Thirty Years' War, ed. S. R. Gardiner, 2nd series (London, 1868), pp. 132-4; The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1939), 2, p. 318. For similar complaints from Venetian sources see CSP Venetian 1619-21, p. 534, 1621-23, p. 191.

25. Bodleian M.S. Malone 23, fols 20v, 21r.

26. Francis Osborn, ‘Historical Memoirs’, in Secret History of the Court of King James the First, ed. Sir Walter Scott, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1811), 1, p. 256.

27. Wilson, The History of Great Britain, p. 53.

28. Arthur Wilson, ‘Account of Arthur Wilson written by himself’, in The Inconstant Lady, ed. P. Bliss (Oxford, 1814), p. 119.

29. The text was printed by R. Brotanek (Die Englischen Maskenspiele, Vienna, 1902, pp. 328-37), who attributed it to Jonson; G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford, 1941-68), 5, 1311, suggests Richard Brome; but Arthur Wilson or Thomas Pestell are perhaps more likely candidates for authorship given their associations with Essex: Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre, pp. 221-4, 240-1.

30. Though not drawing directly on Spenser's topical allegory, this masque did continue Spenser's exploration of sexual politics: the female masquers claimed to be superior to men and capable of living perfectly well without them, and at the end of the performance men and women recognised each other as equals.

31. Vernon F. Snow, ‘Essex and the Aristocratic Opposition to the Early Stuarts’, Journal of Modern History, 32 (1960), pp. 224-33.

32. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (London, 1973), p. 46.

33. It has been suggested that the only masque Jonson wrote for Buckingham, The Gypsies Metamorphos'd, in fact ingeniously satirised the favourite: Dale B. J. Randall, Jonson's Gypsies Unmasked (Durham, N.C., 1975). In the antimasque to The Masque of Augurs Jonson seems to be ridiculing the ‘running masques’ of Buckingham and his young friends, which seemed to Jonson to lack the appropriate aristocratic dignity.

34. Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter-Revolution’, in Russell, The Origins of the English Civil War, pp. 119-43.

35. The split is perhaps exaggerated by P. W. Thomas, ‘Two Cultures? Court and Country under Charles I’, in Russell, Origins of the English Civil War, pp. 168-93.

36. R. M. Smuts, ‘The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s’, English Historical Review, 93 (1978), pp. 26-45.

37. Leonard Forster, ‘Two Drafts by Weckherlin for a Masque for the Queen of England’, German Life and Letters, 18 (1964-5), pp. 258-63; the drafts are now in the Trumbull Papers in the Berkshire Record Office. See further Leonard Forster, Georg Rudolf Weckherlin: Zur Kenntnis Seines Lebens in England (Basel, 1944).

38. Orgel and Strong, 1, p. 64, 2, pp. 539 ff.

39. Jean Fuzier, ‘English Political Dialogues 1641-1651: A Suggestion for Research with a Critical Edition of The Tragedy of the Cruell Warre 1643’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 15 (1979), pp. 77-80; Lois Potter, ‘The Triumph of Peace and The Cruel Warr: Masque and Parody’, Notes and Queries, N.S. 27 (1980), pp. 345-8.

40. Ruth Spalding, The Improbable Puritan: A Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605-1676 (London, 1975), p. 96.

41. Barbara Breasted, ‘Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal’, Milton Studies, 3 (1971), pp. 201-24.

42. Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, ‘The Occasion of Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue’, SEL, 19 (1979), pp 271-93: Jonson's masque had not yet been printed, but Marcus's study of Jonson's allegory strengthens the possibility that Milton had read it.

43. Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1974), pp. 3-47.

44. Prynne had had to acknowledge the existence of a tradition of Protestant drama in Histrio-Mastix, pp. 833-4; he argued that the performance of these plays under Henry VIII and Mary had been justifiable as a means of getting round censorship. On Milton's debt to these traditions see Alice-Lyle Scoufos, ‘The Mysteries in Milton's Masque’, Milton Studies, 6 (1974), pp. 113-42. Scoufos reads Comus as a representation of the Anglican episcopacy, but despite Prynne's hint about drama as a way of evading censorship it is unlikely that Milton would have risked this much in a masque performed before a royal official who cannot really be described as a ‘Puritan’. Even if read as a more generalised warning against the dangers of a regression to idolatry, however, the masque is pointed enough.

45. These remarks merely sketch out some links between Comus and previous attempts to ‘reform’ the masque. See also the essays by Helen Cooper, Jennifer Chibnall, and John Creaser.

46. See Percy A. Scholes, The Puritans and Music in England and New England (Oxford, 1934).

47. There was a revival of apocalyptic ideas in the 1630s: see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660 (London, 1975), Chapter 1.

48. Roy Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1977), pp. 141 ff, 149.

49. Spalding, The Improbable Puritan, pp. 167-8, 186.

50. Lois Potter, ‘Towards a “Reformed” Stage’, in The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. IV: 1613-1660, ed. Philip Edwards, Gerald Eades Bentley, Kathleen McLuskie, and Lois Potter (London, 1981), pp. 294-304.

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, New York, 1981.