SOURCE: Introduction to Ben Jonson's Antimasques: A History of Growth and Decline, Ashgate Publishing, 1999, pp. 1-25.

[In the following excerpt from a larger study of Jonson's antimasques, Mickel provides an abstract of his argument that Jonson's antimasque is a complex, dialectical response to political and cultural events and thus helps to enforce the ideal of the masque.]

This book focuses on the court masques of Ben Jonson, but the sheer number of these masques (there are twenty-eight) makes a selective discussion of them necessary, although I have tried to pick out those masques that seem to be particularly significant for a study of the genre's development. My primary objective in this book is to chart the growth and demise of the antimasque in Jonson's court entertainments, and to explore the way in which they respond to both his poetic aims and their historico-political conditions of production. I will suggest that the Jonsonian court entertainment develops into a dialectical investigation of contemporary affairs and is far more complex than the simple act of homage that it has sometimes been assumed to be.¹ Two distinctive aspects of this book are its broadly chronological approach and an acute consciousness of the court entertainment as a fundamentally hybrid form. This diachronic emphasis is occasioned by my concern to explore the growth of the antimasque within the context of the masque entertainment as a whole. The generic melange that is the antimasque dictates a consideration of Jonson's handling of other literary modes, and how the hybridisation of these contributed to the evolution of the antimasque. It will soon become apparent in the main body of this book that I am primarily interested in the antimasque/masque as a discursive form and I explore the ways in which it was shaped by contemporary cultural and socio-political practices. Thus, one of the most obvious facts about the masque that we should remember is that it was created for an aristocratic elite of courtiers who were directly involved with it, both as masquers and as participants in the revels at the end of the entertainment. The court masque was a symbolic form used by the aristocracy to represent themselves to themselves, and as such, it was a vital constituent in the social and personal formation of their identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the identity that such masquers sought to confirm was one at the top of the hierarchical ladder, surpassed only by the King himself, whom the masque figured as God's representative on earth. Viewed in these terms, the court masque would seem to be little more than a propaganda exercise that sought to rehearse and consolidate the dominant ideology of an increasingly absolutist monarchy supported by a powerful aristocracy. However, this book is intended to demonstrate that Jonson's version of the court masque is far more interesting and complex than such a description implies. This is chiefly because he was responsible for the creation of the antimasque, which introduced elements of dramatic dialogue and plot to the emblematic tableau that was the court masque. Moreover, much of this book rests on the central belief that the antimasque itself harnessed and evolved out of the subtle contradictions and ironic anomalies manifest in the early Jonsonian masques, and developed these into significant textual structures of dissent that go against the grain of the royalist masque. This dissent is both formal and ideological; in the antimasque formal dissonance manifests itself through the combination of inverted dance steps and ludicrous, nonsensical prose, producing a disruption of the ideals of harmony, unity and order that are eulogised in the masque proper.² And because ideological values are asserted or challenged in and through language and gesture, this formal dissonance questions the motivating ideology of the following masque. Although the nonsensical, punning language and twisted movement of the antimasque are ultimately usurped by the orderly poetry and dance of the masque, the whiff of dissonance hangs in the air like smoke and remains as a set of implied values to counterbalance those voiced in the rest of the entertainment.³ Even in early masques where the antimasque has not yet evolved into a separate structure, ironies and contradictions are embedded in the official discourse of panegyric and unbalance the confident assertions of monarchical rule. Furthermore, the topicality of the antimasque may be shown to reveal the historical and political contingency of the court entertainment, rather than sharing in the masque's practice of obscuring its material base and motivation. Yet we should remember that the masque also addressed matters of political and social concern to the Crown, but unlike the antimasque, it did so in order to confirm the status quo and mystify the state as a universal and divine order.

In my discussion of the antimasque I wish to suggest that it has a history of evolution and decay, with the fully developed version of the form emerging roughly at a mid-point in this process. The antimasque develops, as I have said, out of inconsistencies in the masque itself and becomes an important and dominant part of the court entertainment. In fact, it evolves and expands to the point where it seems to threaten the masque it was originally designed merely to prelude, and to destabilise the traditional structure of the form. The antimasque's implicit questioning of the masque's assertions sets up a dialectic within the court entertainment, or we could say that the whole structure of the court masque becomes dialogic. In manipulating the court entertainment in this way, Jonson demonstrates his desire to be a public educator on political and moral issues, and this didactic impulse is also often revealed in his poetic pronouncements. In the court entertainment the antimasque explores the extremes of chaotic ‘democracy’, while the masque offers a vision of all powerful absolutism. Yet it is crucially significant that the masque also shows how the agents of absolutism might deal with popular unrest. In the ideal world of masque, the monarch is shown to create peace and happiness because he treats unruly subjects with mercy and justice. In Jonson's view, effective rule is inherently moral, and the state can only achieve prosperity if a via media is steered between the possible extremes of imperious tyranny and anarchic democracy.

A further point that needs to be stressed at the outset is that this study primarily focuses on the textual and literary nature of the antimasque/masque, while acknowledging that other elements of the form, iconography, dance and music, are all crucial to its significance. This approach is justified by the fact that I am interested in the masques composed by Jonson, an author who sought to give these works a definitively literary spin and textual longevity that allowed them to outlast their temporal moment. Jonson achieved this by publishing his masque texts, first in quarto form and then as constituent parts of his 1616 folio of Works. This approach counters certain critics proposing that the court masque's significance lies solely in its visual display and music; a view which is simply not tenable when we are considering the Jonsonian masque, with its barrage of literary allusion and annotation—Jonson meant these texts to be read after their original performance. In a recent book Peter Walls has argued that the determining factor of masques is their music and that the antimasques are a minor element within the entertainment as a whole. Jerzy Limon takes a similar view, dismissing ‘so-called antimasques’ and differentiating between the masque in performance and the masque as literature, to the latter's detriment. However, this may be counterbalanced by attention to what Joseph Loewenstein has terme the ‘semiotic plenitude’ of the masque text, which bristles with allusion and textual authority, oscillating between languages and type face. Loewenstein argues that while Jonson seeks to preserve his status as author, the masque text itself preserves something of the instability of performance. While I agree that Jonson does not possess the ultimate authority over these works, he certainly attempte to dominate them, and with the addition of prefaces and notes to the masque texts he sought to create a space for his own voice to be heard. Those who wish to sideline the literary nature of the antimasque/masque seek to displace Jonson from the form, a manoeuvre which attention to the masque text cannot allow us to perform.⁴

The Masque of Queens (1609) is usually cited as the first example of the Jonsonian antimasque, but there may be grounds to regard this as a false start. Jonson's unhappiness with his first attempt at this literary mode may be inferred from the fact that he omitted to incorporate an antimasque into his next court entertainment, Prince Henry's Barriers (1610). Although the antimasque of Queens is distinguished by the inversion of orthodox dance and song that characterises the antimasque (in the form of rhyming incantations and backward dance steps), it appears to lack any significant rhetorical or dramatic strategy to offset the dominant discourse of the masque. Consequently, the resulting antimasque is one-dimensional in its expression of formal chaos, whereas later antimasques would have a more fully developed strategy of dissent expressed through chaotic language and movement. The combination of formal and ideological dissonance is the signature of the evolved Jonsonian antimasque, and on these grounds it is arguable that Oberon the Fairy Prince (1611) provides the earliest proper example of the form, because its representation of unruly and often vicious satyrs and sylvans debunks the orthodox pastoral myth of bucolic innocence. However, a refrain running through this book emphasises that although the antimasque develops thereafter to a point where it threatens to consume the masque, this process is never completed, as the masque is always reinstated at the end of the court entertainment. It will soon become apparent that my primary interest is the socio-political nature of the expanded antimasque and the poetic ideals behind it, and I discuss in some detail those entertainments that feature this type of antimasque; these include, Oberon (1611), Love Freed From Ignorance and Folly (1611), Love Restored (1612), The Irish Masque at Court (1613/14) and Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1616). The trajectory of the full-blown antimasque does not end here, however, but continues for some years to come, although in the late 1620s and early 1630s it becomes enfeebled and shrinks from its former dominant position in the court entertainment. Moreover, the antimasque is stripped of its dialogue and returns to its prototype, that is, a court entertainment that merely manifests latent anomalies and anxieties that Jonson had later exploited to create the fully evolved antimasque. The silencing of the Caroline antimasque is related to the suppression of any significant structure of dissent within the masque form as a whole, and what was the dialogic Jonsonian court entertainment seems to collapse into royal monologism. The demise of the antimasque can be related both to a change in the monarchy and in the leading figures at court and in government, and to aesthetic developments. The intensified interest in neo-platonism, sponsored by Charles and Henrietta-Maria, identified the conduit to philosophical truth and virtue in the beauty of visual forms, thereby trivialising the importance of the spoken or written word, the medium in which Jonson excelled. James I had responded to Jonson's primarily verbal art as he viewed himself as a royal litterateur; conversely, the Caroline masques reflect Charles's overriding interest in the visual arts. This aesthetic sea-change was compounded by the fact that Jonson's antimasques often depend on topicality for much of their impact, a feature which made them seem even more outdated to a Caroline court experimenting with a more metaphysical mode of understanding and to a King who actively discouraged public discussion on matters of state.

While my priority in this book is to reach an understanding of the ephemeral antimasque, and the reasons for its evolution and decay, I hold the view that this can only be achieved by comparing these entertainments with Jonson's other works. Accordingly, Chapter 1 involves an extensive discussion of his poetry, while Chapters 2 and 4 draw on the Roman tragedies and the dramatic comedy, Bartholomew Fair, respectively. It would clearly be inappropriate to study Jonson's masques in isolation, and a study of the poetry enables the reader to glean some idea of Jonson's view of the relationship between satire and panegyric, a relationship of crucial relevance for any study of the antimasque/masque entertainment. Attention to the poetry is also vital as it reveals the semiotic network within which Jonson operated and the received humanist poetic ideals that he also espoused, as well as demonstrating his very personal way of combining satire and panegyric in a single didactic purpose. It seems to me that the Roman tragedies particularly complement the masques as both are stylised expressions of the state and its political mechanisms; the former offers a dark and pessimistic view of the Realpolitik that lies behind the complacent public image propagated by the governing powers, whereas the latter offers an ultimately optimistic and symbolic celebration of the monarchist state. Moreover, while the impulse towards chaos and anarchy that emerges in the Roman plays may be viewed as a consequence of the corrupting nature of power, the court entertainment explicitly relates anarchy to the antimasque, whereas the masque figures the monarch's absolute power and demonstrates the order and morality that are the natural consequences of Kingship. Thus, Jonson's work within different genres demonstrates two oppositional but profoundly related views of state power, where a corrupt Roman leader escalates the collapse of a great empire, and a virtuous King ensures his island's prosperity—clearly the belief that emerges in these portraits of power is that the monarch is morally responsible for the prosperity of his nation, and we can extrapolate from this Jonson's often repeated belief that only a morally upright individual can be an effective ruler or poet. Returning to the question of genre, the antimasque also shares common ground with the dramatic comedies; Jonson's treatment of both these genres includes a festive inversion of received hierarchies, and a bawdy, often scatological humour; the prose dialogue is fast paced, incorporating vivid detail in the form of incongruous lists of disparate objects. Thus Chapter 4 looks at Bartholomew Fair in conjunction with the antimasque and uses Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque carnival to suggest how these anarchic comic elements work to elide traditional social and cultural categories.

THE ANTIMASQUE: A HISTORY OF GROWTH AND DECLINE

Given that the central axis of my argument is the principle that the antimasque was an innovative performative and literary mode growing out of sixteenth-century European court entertainments, that it became fashionable for a short while in the brief history of the ephemeral masque, and died out thereafter, I am obliged to take a largely chronological approach in this book; however, in tracing the history of the antimasque I am interested in its synchronic impact, as well as its diachronic evolution, that is to say, I examine in depth certain entertainments, exploring how they generate meaning in relation to their precise historico-political moments, in addition to charting the history of a steadily evolving form. Somewhat predictably, therefore, Chapter 1 considers Jonson's first court masques, while Chapter 5 and the postscript discuss his final masques and those composed by later writers who were significantly influenced by Jonson. This structure means that each chapter springs out of the previous one, and that they are inextricably linked rather than separate units. Any consideration of the antimasque and masque, and the relation between them, requires an understanding of Jonson's use of satire and panegyric. Accordingly, Chapter 1 draws on his non-dramatic poetry to explore these questions and attempts to link the deployment of satire and panegyric in poetry and the court masque. Jonson was accused of hypocrisy in his own day, and many current students of his panegyric voice similar accusations; indeed, Jonson himself often expressed a fear that panegyric may degenerate into flattery, but he defuses this fear with the view that praise bestowed where it is undeserved actually works as covert satire. A latent irony springs up in the gap between historical reality and its poeticised image, and a dynamic operates in certain poems where overt praise becomes so hyperbolic that it collapses into irony. This kind of ironic interpretation is made available not only by Jonson's rhetorical strategies but also by reading the poem in its historical, synchronic context, where discrepancies between poetic assertion and historical actuality can be measured. The irony running through such a text does not, however, demolish its standing as panegyric; rather, it constitutes a voice of dissent that contradicts and destabilises the poem's overt meaning. In a textual criticism of the well known poem, ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ I show how covert irony might work in tandem with the poem's more obvious panegyric towards a single didactic purpose of reform. This manipulation of irony and panegyric in the poetry is clearly related to their function in the mature Jonsonian masque where antimasque/masque form a dialogic structure. I extend my discussion of the dialectic impulse within the poetry to a consideration of Jonson's first court masques, The Masque of Blackness (1605) and The Masque of Beauty (1608), where it is directed at reforming the monarch and the court. Blackness is the earliest example of Jonson's court masques and lacks an antimasque, a separate form which has yet to develop within the genre. That is not to say, however, that this masque is an unalloyed celebration of the state, for, as I try to show, it features certain inconsistencies and anomalies that subtly permeate the masque as a whole. Rather than seeking to eradicate such ‘faultlines’ within the masque, Jonson proceeds in his later court entertainments to develop these anomalies into fully worked out strategies of dissent within the antimasque. These elements of dissent are not contained by the formal boundaries of the antimasque, as some critics have argued, but permeate the entertainment as a whole and interrogate the assertions of the masque, producing a dialectical exploration of the state of the contemporary monarchy. This mature phase of the Jonsonian court masque indisputably develops out of the ‘fractured’ nature of Blackness and Beauty, and is clearly related to the kind of dialectic at work in much of Jonson's poetry.

Chapter 2 explores the next phase of the Jonsonian court masque, those mythopoeic entertainments that appear to embody a Humanist rewriting of history, so that it becomes an edifying and didactic exemplum rather than a simple list of events lacking moral form or purpose. This chapter focuses on the chivalric masques of 1610/11, Prince Henry's Barriers and Oberon, The Fairy Prince. These masques are fascinating in the way they attempt to negotiate between competing historical traditions or myths; for example, the Stuart espousal of a chivalric tradition became associated with Prince Henry and militant Protestant values, whereas King James had his own version of the historical myth, that of the Rex Pacificus or Roman Emperor, a role obviously more suited to his conciliatory foreign policy. It is immediately obvious that these mythic discourses are potentially incompatible, and constructed around clashing political ideals. Yet in these masques Jonson mounts a valiant and ingenious attempt to mediate between these historical myths, and to reintegrate them as they had been under the Tudors. This project to integrate rhetorically polarised myths is visually mirrored in the set designs provided by Inigo Jones, making attention to the visual dimension of these masques imperative. The strategy of negotiation we find in the chivalric masques is a dialectic approach that Jonson developed and centred on the relationship of antimasque to masque, yet a vital caveat to such an assertion is the point that whereas the chivalric masques seek to integrate conflicting elements into a coherent discourse, the later antimasque/masque structure does not result in this kind of harmonised integration, it is rather moulded into an open and dynamic dialectic. Thus, the chivalric masques are important because they are an early example of the dialogic impulse that is both responsible for and emphasised by the growth of the Jonsonian antimasque, producing the dialectical court entertainments that are the main focus of this book. The last section of this chapter turns to Jonson's use of historical myth in his drama for the public stage, and just as the poetry illuminates the dynamic of satire and panegyric in the masques, so the drama, in conjunction with the masques, reveals a long term project on Jonson's part to anatomise the fundamental structure and nature of political power. Whereas the chivalric masques seek to integrate competing genealogies in order to legitimate the monarchy, the Roman plays put such claims to authority under pressure and reveal them to be a spurious public image far from the political reality of Rome. Analysis of Poetaster (1601), Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611) shows that Jonson's Rome has much in common with Jacobean London and its court, thereby representing covert criticism of the early modern British state. This project of covert criticism clearly aligns the Roman tragedies with the later antimasques, but whereas the anarchy of the antimasque is offset by the masque's confirmation of the monarchy, Catiline, the last of the Roman plays, ends in the dissolution of Rome. While the antimasques and the Roman plays may be said to share much common ground, one vital difference between the chaos they depict is that the antimasque places it in an essentially comic context and, although the claims of masque are destabilised, they are not completely negated or eroded. But the masque's symbolic confirmation of the state is not available in the Roman plays, which finally result in the disintegration of the body politic; this collapse is the logical outcome when the antimasque elements of dissent and anarchy are played out to the bitter end. Therefore, it is possible to read the chivalric masques and the Roman tragedies together as parts of a dialogic enquiry in to the nature of authority (the contiguous dates of these works encourage this view). Although the Roman plays and the chivalric masques embody very different historical myths as a means of analysing the modern state, it may be argued that, when juxtaposed, they represent an early version of the dialectic which characterises Jonson's later court entertainments, where the antimasque ironically comments on the state while the masque unequivocally lauds it.

Chapters 1 and 2 are largely sustained by the belief that Jonson's poetry and court entertainments are fundamentally dialectical in nature, and this view is in turn generated by an historical reading of the texts. Accordingly, Chapter 3 examines and justifies some of the principles behind this historicism before going on to demonstrate why an historical perspective is essential for an understanding of the court entertainment. I draw on particular masques (Hymenaei (1606), Love Restored (1612) and Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1616)) to reveal the historicity and contingency of the antimasque in particular, and I show how the antimasque is directly engaged with its historico-political moment of production. I then develop some of the more pressing implications of this historical approach; for example, if the antimasque was a vehicle for irony, as I argue, how is it that the contemporary audience did not object to some of its more risque suggestions? This apparently intractable problem is resolved by a theory of literary interpretation determined by genre, and made more intelligible by the fact that Jonson counted upon understanding readers and viewers of his work, whilst assuming them to be a rare commodity.

Chapter 4 maintains the historical perspective and I develop my argument by drawing comparisons between the antimasque and carnival; both as actual events and as aesthetic forms they share ambivalent relations with the structures of socio-political authority, and I am particularly interested in the way in which the now enlarged and well established ironic antimasque destabilises the masque. In a discussion of the comic drama, Bartholomew Fair, I suggests that it shares the anarchic qualities of the antimasque and I draw upon Bakhtin's theory of the Carnivalesque in demonstrating how this play and the antimasque symbolically invert received structures of authority. In my view, the social and cultural instability provoked by the fair is similar to the antimasque's effect on the masque, as both question the ‘truths’ espoused by the dominant hegemony. This discussion leads to a detailed analysis of two antimasques, Love Freed From Ignorance and Folly (1611) and The Irish Masque at Court (1613/14); these antimasques not only destabilise the masques they preface, but even threaten to consume them, although as I have noted before this consumption is never complete as the masque and its values are automatically reinstated at the end of a court entertainment, albeit such a reinstatement may seem wooden and rather unconvincing—it is a ritual that has been emptied of much of its traditional significance by the expanded and encroaching antimasque.

The closing chapter of this book considers Jonson's Caroline masques, which, like his late plays, have often been dismissed as ‘dotages’. And indeed, after the full-blooded and expanded antimasque, these late masques appear to be a watery dilution of a richer dish. But the late plays are being rehabilitated by contemporary critics, which is perhaps an indication that these masques should not be dismissed too lightly. In terms of the evolution of the court entertainment these masques do represent a collapse of dialogism into monologism, and this must surely be connected with the new political climate and shift in aesthetic taste. I examine Love's Triumph Through Callipolis (1631), and suggest that the antimasque's edge of dissent is blunted to such a degree that it occludes any significant contradiction of monarchical values. And yet, the masque itself in this entertainment does express certain anxieties about the nature of monarchy. Love's Triumph also represents a departure in form as well as content because both the King and Queen perform in it, thus eliminating the need for all lines of perspective to meet in one focal point where the King is seated in the audience. Moreover, the traditional focus of the entertainment shifts from the King to the Queen and expresses certain concerns about the gender and role of the Queen and her excessive influence over royal authority. These anxieties are, however, embedded deep within the royalist discourse of the masque, rather than being part of an evolved structure of dissent of the kind that we find in the antimasque of The Irish Masque; it is for this reason that Love's Triumph appears to be rather like a pantomine embodying the monarchy's political agenda, rather than the dynamic examination of authority based on the relationship of antimasque to masque that distinguishes earlier court entertainments.

My assertion that Love's Triumph witnesses the marginalisation of the antimasque must be qualified by the fact that the Caroline antimasque is never completely disabled by the renewed dominance of the masque, just as the main masque in earlier court entertainments was not totally undermined by the expanded antimasque. Cultural Materialist critics would argue that the antimasque is never completely disempowered by the masque because in order to occlude dissent the court entertainment must first represent it in the antimasque and thus perversely empower it to some extent. In terms of the evolution of the form, we might say that the Caroline court entertainment thus reverses an earlier pattern of development where the expanded antimasque threatened to consume the masque. Rather than closing this book with a set of conclusions, I am more interested in stimulating debate around the topic of the court entertainment, so I offer a postscript instead. Here I try to show that the Caroline antimasque did indeed survive attempts to erase it, and this assertion is borne out by later masques such as Milton's Comus (1634) and Shirley's Triumph of Peace (1633); although these masques were written during Jonson's last declining years, they are clearly successors to his dialogic court entertainments.

JONSON AND BARTHES

Jonson and Barthes make anachronistic and uncomfortable bedfellows, but in the age of literary theory it is virtually impossible for a writer or academic to lay out an argument without subjecting its methodology to close analysis. Such analysis is perhaps even more important in this book as I draw on a melange of critical approaches in producing an overview of the antimasque and its evolution. For example, I combine formalist, historicist, reader-centred and author-centred theories of writing, but rather than including all of these in an overpowering and confusing mix, it is my intention to draw on selected elements of these separate theories where it best suits my argument. While I may be accused of theoretical promiscuity, I have no wish to pin Jonson down on the rack of theory, and to twist the antimasque to fit a particular methodology in all respects. The formalism of this book manifests itself in my concentration upon the way in which the antimasque is shaped by Jonson's poetic ideals and use of genre, and in the close study of particular masque and poetic texts. This formalist approach, including textual and rhetorical analysis, is accompanied by an historicist emphasis that locates individual court entertainments in their political and cultural contexts. This combination of formalist and historicist approaches reflects a view of texts as cultural productions, and literature as a system of signs embedded in a wider culture. On the one hand, attention to the formal properties of masque texts is imperative in order to avoid relegating them to the function of mere historical reflection or to the exclusive expression of ideology. But on the other hand, the meaning of the masque is largely contingent upon its historical moment. Moreover, these court entertainments have at times a strident ideological message as a result of their being commissioned by the King and the court. What may be described as a cultural approach to the masque text seeks to juggle all these perspectives, viewing the court masque as a heterogeneous production. This heterogeneity expresses itself in the generic hybridisation that is found in the masque, that is, it possesses elements that we also find in Jonson's tragic and comic drama, as well as his epideictic and satirical poetry. Furthermore, the court entertainment answers the propaganda requirements of the monarch as well as responding to Jonson's very personal sense of poetics; it simultaneously seizes hold of philosophical ‘universal truths’ and deliberately addresses topical issues, engaging energetically in contemporary debate. The very nature of the Jonsonian masque is also mixed or heterogeneous in that it was designed to be an ephemeral and exclusive celebration of the court, of which no trace should remain (the masque set was ritually torn down as part of the revels), yet Jonson preserved his masque texts, altering and annotating them for the market-place. Even before they were preserved in his stately volume of works (thus becoming his property rather than the monarch's), many of these elite texts were released to the public in the humble quarto edition.

The historicism in this book is based on a view of the text as directly engaged in its moment of production rather than as a passive reflector of its historical period. This approach empowers the text and can be extended to suggest that the relationship between text and history is interactive, each shaping and determining the other; this is certainly true in Jonson's case, as he self-consciously sought the role of the Horatian poet, whose work actively shaped royal policy.⁵ This historical emphasis necessitates my engagement with various historically based critical theories such as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism and the broadening of focus from text to historical context not only highlights the discursive practices within which Jonson worked, but also the importance of Jonson as an individual writer among his contemporaries. The masques, poetry and plays reflect his self-appointed role as social educator and moral commentator on the times, and can only be brought into perspective when placed within this wider historical context. Furthermore, the argument for an historicist approach is strengthened by the fact that Jonson often used his work as a platform from which to address contemporary literary debate, involving him in vigorous and often vicious attack and defence.

I have already referred to the manner in which I draw on a variety of literary theories in this book, and while this approach may encourage a more sensitive engagement with the complexities of much of Jonson's work, it does mean that I need to articulate clearly my position on certain major critical issues such as the role of the author and the relationship between text and context. The very fact that in the main body of this book I often cite ‘Jonson’ as the originator or manipulator of texts shows that I accept (with some qualification) the notion of intentionality, the author's authority over his text, although many of the theories deployed in this thesis generally work to displace or decentre the author. It seems to me that this multivalent approach is dictated by Jonson's conscious erudition and meticulous craftsmanship; while contemporary theory can illuminate some of Jonson's more difficult texts, it should not be allowed to drown out the author's distinctive and often strident voice. His self-conscious fashioning of a poetic voice and persona demands attention to his authorial aims, and this attention is often given where I refer to his recurring proclamations of poetic intent and principle that preface many of his masques as well as his plays and collections of poetry. However, it must also be recognised that such authority is limited, a limitation that seems to have irked Jonson from time to time. My reliance on text - or reader - based theories of interpretation is demonstrated at the beginning of Chapter 1, where I quote Catherine Belsey's appeal for, ‘A radical criticism … not to replace one authoritative interpretation of a text with another, but to suggest a plurality of ways in which texts might be read’.⁶ Clearly, Belsey displaces the authority of the writer in favour of the self-generating significance of the text, but while my use of Belsey's critical injunction as a starting point for a textual analysis of Jonson's poem, ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, may appear to contradict and undermine assumptions about intentionality I employed earlier in Chapter 2, I want to argue that such inconsistencies can be resolved by a dialogic emphasis on both the author and the text. (Such dialogism could be regarded as a typically Jonsonian strategy). The writer does author a text with clear aims in mind, but any notion of total authority is limited by the text's power to become self-divided and autonomous in its production of meaning. In writing of the death of the author, Roland Barthes famously declares:

The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable ‘distancing’, the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text.⁷

In my view, it is significant that what Barthes is describing here is not so much the death of the author, as is often assumed, but the distancing of the author, whereby the author is relieved of his/her privileged status and becomes another textual element. This is not to deny, however, that the author is the one responsible for the arrangement of the words on the page or the pages in the text despite the fact that he or she cannot possibly account for the proliferation of different readings of the text, produced by intentional and unintentional ambiguities within it.⁸ Jonson seems to have been acutely aware of this aspect of the author's position and his extensive redrafting of work prior to publication may be seen as partly a demonstration of the author's attempt to maximise his control over words and their meaning and to minimise ambiguity within the text, although it would perhaps be more accurate to assert that Jonson wanted only specific ambiguities that he had deliberately built into his texts to manifest themselves, rather than the more arbitrary ambiguities produced by the uninformed readings of others. This paradoxical attempt to fix the ambiguity of the text stems from the fact that Jonson often relied on and exploited ambiguity for his own purposes, for example, to protect himself from the wrath of his censors when they detected what was thought to be subversive material in his work. The attempt to expel from the text random ambiguities not sanctioned by the author is, of course, impossible—a fact of which Jonson seems to have been well aware and which is signalled in the first poem in his collection of epigrams. Pointedly, the poem is addressed to the reader,

Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my book in hand,
To read it well: that is, to understand.

In exhorting the reader to read well, that is, to understand his poems, Jonson implicitly acknowledges that there will be many who misunderstand or read his poems badly. The poet cannot prevent such alternative readings, and can only warn against them, but such a warning is ineffective because there is no prescription laid out for a good reading, and because Jonson cannot tell how bad readings may take shape in the future after he has relinquished control over his epigrams by releasing them into the market-place. Jonson effectively articulates the author's bind (this time with an air of resignation) in a poem dedicated to Alphonso Ferrabosco on the publication of his book of music:

When we do give, Alphonso, to the light,
A work of ours, we part with our own right;
For, then, all mouths will judge, and their own way:
The learned have no more privilege, than the lay.

(Epigrams, CXXXI)

Jonson, however, attempts to reclaim an authentic text by exhorting Ferrabosco to remain true to the text within himself in the face of misinterpretations of his book:

Then stand unto thyself, not seek without
For fame, with breath soon kindled, soon blown out.

In resorting to an authentic text of the self Jonson's poem resists the spiralling relativity of competing readings, however, as my emphasis on Jonson's dialectical approach suggests, he was well aware of the possibilities inherent in the polysemic qualities of language and exploited them to produce dialogic texts where a doubleness of meaning is crucial to their significance. A criticism that searches for alternative readings embedded in the overt content of a poem or a masque (see my treatment of ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ in Chapter 2) is justified by Jonson's practice of exploiting a doubleness in meaning for deliberate and obvious satirical or sarcastic effect. Perhaps the best example of such a poem is the ironically acidic and amusing ‘On Giles and Joan’:

Who says that Giles and Joan at discord be?
The observing neighbours no such mood can see.
Indeed, poor Giles repents he married ever.
But that his Joan doth too. And Giles would never,
By his free will be in Joan's company.
No more would Joan he should. Giles riseth early,
And having got him out of door is glad.
The like is Joan. Oft-times, when Giles doth find
Harsh sights at home, Giles wisheth he were blind.
All this doth Joan. Or that his long-yarned life
Were quite out-spun. The like wish hath his wife.
The children, that he keeps, Giles swears are none
Of his begetting. And so swears his Joan.
In all affections she concurreth still.
If, now, with man and wife, to will, and nill
The self-same things, a note of concord be:
I know no better couple better can agree!

(Epigrams, XLII)

Playful equivocation is perhaps the most outstanding of Jonson's poetic ‘voices’; he mobilises polarised extremes to produce, paradoxically, the neo-classical ideal of the rational via media.

If the relationship between text and author is one potential methodological problem arising out of the combination of critical theories in this book, another is thrown up by the variations in emphasis within the historicist critical approach upon which I draw widely in my study of the antimasque. New Historicists are especially interested in the court masque as a topical and occasional event, viewing it as the prevailing hegemony's symbolic confirmation of power, and as a text/occasion that merely rehearses discontent or dissent in order to contain or banish it. Stephen Orgel is one well known critic who espouses this view; he emphasises the masque's power to aestheticise and codify the monarchy as a divine principle and its ability to contain and disable any dissent expressed in the antimasque. However, there are other critics writing under the broad umbrella of New Historicism who manifest some discomfort with such a totalised view of royal power in the masque and emphasise the masque as a site of contestation, which then results in the royal containment of dissent. In shying away from this totalising concept of royal power, exponents of what might be called the ‘contestation to containment’ theory, such as Leah Marcus, suggest that the operations of power are not monolithic but contingent and prone to instability and flux. Such contingency is seized upon by Cultural Materialists who view the dominant ideology's attempt to reproduce dissent for its own ends, and to disable it in ritual, as often backfiring. These critics assert that a dominant ideology and its cultural vehicle are liable to appropriation, and incapable of protecting themselves against a potentially subversive adoption of their discourse. Such a view would posit that the antimasque appropriates the monarchical discourse of the masque only to subvert it radically. I broadly agree with the last supposition; for example, the antimasque is distinguished by dance and song just like the masque, but the former celebrates disintegration and chaos, whereas the latter extols harmony and national unity presided over by the divine monarch. But I would like to add an important caveat to the Cultural Materialist position, and suggest that the antimasque does not completely subvert the masque, but the juxtaposition of antimasque to masque enables a dialectical exploration of the nature of royal authority. In my view, the function of the court entertainment is far more complex than simple subversion or containment, and it does seem that in focusing on one or other of these options New Historicist and Cultural Materialist critics have become locked into a theoretical and confrontational binarism. Indeed, Theodore B. Leinwand has detected that both these critiques are grounded in a Foucauldian analysis of power that depends on conflict, and that they are propelled by a view of critical debate based on polarity and clear-cut opposition. In his rejection of this zero/sum approach Leinwand writes, ‘Implicit in the subversion-containment binarism … is the conviction that sociopolitical and cultural practices have conflict as their operator.’⁹ In Chapter 3, while making use of a New Historicist/Cultural Materialist frame of reference to discuss the ideological strategies of the antimasque, I have tried to avoid the reductionism of the containment/subversion debate. Moving away from this essentialist view of texts as either inherently conservative or subversive, I turn to the work of the Marxist critic, Pierre Macherey, who asserts the polyvalency of the text. Macherey emphasises the contingency and instability of the text as opposed to Foucault's stress on entrenched power relations that predetermine the production of the text; such instabilities are, he argues, generated not only by the text but also by its interaction with its socio-political context. Macherey's theory can be used to liberate the court masque from the essentialist subversion/containment options and enables it to be considered a site for the articulation of contingent power relations and negotiation. With these points in mind we can view the court masque as reproducing an absolutist discourse while destabilising it at the same time. Moreover, according to this theory of textual production, it is impossible for such instability to be fully recuperated or resolved by the absolutist masque. In this book I have borrowed the key term ‘negotiation’ from Leinwand, who justifies his rejection of the reductive binarism of recent historicist theory thus:

Perhaps we can reconceive the binarisms of social process as other than conflict leading to one-sided victory. Compromise, negotiation, exchange, accommodation, give and take—these bases for social relations are as recognizable as those mentioned thus far … I am not interested in throwing out insights and interpretations generated by the binarism of conflict; rather, I believe that a model based on negotiation and exchange may prove useful where now familiar paradigms seem unsatisfactory. In particular I want to attribute change to something other than subversion. While it may be argued that forces of containment perceive all change, in the last instance, as subversive, change has, I think, been effected through the efforts of ostensibly antagonistic parties negotiating toward settlement, adjustment, even alteration. It is a thorough falsification of historical processes to argue that subversion offers the only alternative to the status quo. And it is a comparative falsification to argue that anything short of authentic subversion is but another instance of discipline.¹⁰

This view of power relations and their cultural expressions as contingent and shifting is, I suggest, a more useful historicist methodology for discussing the growth of the antimasque. Leinwand points a way out of the stalemate inherent in the containment/subversion debate that has dogged New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, and his emphasis on the social processes of negotiation and accommodation is consistent with the dialogism within Jonson's work as a whole for which I argue throughout this book. The antimasque's appropriation and inversion of the traditional terms of masque, followed by the official reassertion of these values in the masque proper sets up the dialectic that is, in essence, a process of negotiation and this form of Jonsonian dialectic seeks neither to undermine the state nor to laud it without qualification, but to produce a conditional endorsement of the monarchy. Such an endorsement is dependent upon the monarch following the model of rule laid out in the masque, where the King is seen to administer mercy and justice and to eschew tyranny as a means of quelling the disruptive elements of the ‘democratic’ antimasque; Jonson's ideal of monarchical government embodies a golden mean between extremes of tyranny and anarchic democracy. Significantly, the court entertainment is not monolithic in either its subversion or containment of the ideal of monarchy, but rather a dynamic text/event that initiates and depends on change, movement, and alternative formulations of power. The very dynamism of the Jonsonian masque lies in the fact that the balance for or against the Crown is never predetermined, but a contingent process that can appear to favour one set of ideologies and then another in different masques; and we should remember that such contingency is inherent in the structure and history of the antimasque as well as in its ideological processes. For example, while the Jacobean antimasque expanded and threatened the masque, it later became marginalised by the Caroline masque and virtually disappeared. There is no better example of the ebb and flow, the shifting nature of power relations than the history of the antimasque; it experienced an expansion, followed by decay and a tentative renewal. The history of this most courtly of texts is not only determined by the poetics and political leanings of its author but, undeniably, also by its conditions of production.

READERS AS UNDERSTANDERS: JONSONIAN MASQUE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Jonson's reputation as a whole has been rehabilitated in recent years, resulting in no less than three major conferences devoted to him in the UK alone in 1995/6 and an academic journal solely devoted to Jonson recently established. But this process was started many years ago and has been gradual to say the least. For example, if Jonson the poet and dramatist enjoyed a new climate of admiration, Jonson the masque maker was treated with some suspicion until recently, and his court entertainments are still seen as problematic in many ways, particularly in relation to questions of authorial intention and integrity, audience reception, and the interactive balance between the masque as a visual as well as a written event. Moreover, Feminist critics are beginning to struggle with the masque, and to ponder issues such as the meaning involved in female costume design, where the female masquers appear to be bare breasted in certain entertainments when the plot neither requires such a device nor alludes to it, and when the performers are aristocrats who presumably placed a value on decorum and status. Unfortunately, these questions lie outwith the scope of this book, but I include them to indicate the ways in which masque criticism is likely to develop in the future before outlining a history of twentieth-century masque criticism to date.

No work on the Jonsonian masque can omit to mention Enid Welsford, whose seminal book, The Court Masque (1927), was the first serious work to examine the origins of the court entertainment, and its structure and function under the Stuart monarchs. Welsford takes great pains to trace the embryonic development of the masque in the folk customs and literary traditions of medieval Europe, themselves indebted to Roman saturnalia. Perhaps her most important contribution to the study of Jonson's masques is her emphasis on them as part of a major European tradition, and she indicates where Jonson may have taken his inspiration from contemporary Italian or French examples of the form, thereby counteracting the influence of those critics who stress the Stuart masque as an introspective and claustrophobic event. Whereas Welsford painted a grand perspective of the masque, another British critic, D. J. Gordon, attended to the intricate details of various entertainments. Gordon's importance rests in the fact that he was the first to decode the iconology of Jonsonian masque in a comprehensive and comprehensible manner, and his analyses of The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Beauty, and Hymenaei remain text book examples of a fine tradition of criticism that rests on close reading and painstaking analysis. Perhaps the most monumental contribution to the twentieth-century study of Jonson was the publication of his complete works in eleven volumes (1925-52), edited by Charles Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson. The major significance of these volumes lies in the fact that they made available for the first time the whole body of Jonson's work, rather than the few plays and volumes of poetry that he was mostly known for. This meant that academics and students could actually read the masques for the first time in many years, and even attempt to stage them.¹¹ Herford and Simpson's volumes are still vital reference points, perhaps not so much for their editorial comment, but for their comprehensive coverage of accounts of the masques' original reception, and documents relating to their performance. A new edition of Jonson's complete works is currently being prepared by the British scolars Ian Donaldson and Martin Butler, a welcome development which will doubtless enhance masque criticism.

It may be argued that the efforts of Welsford, Gordon, Herford and Simpson made the achievement of the American critic, Stephen Orgel, possible and that, while these earlier British critics laid the foundations of current masque criticism, it was really Orgel who first brought the Jonsonian masque to the serious attention of students of Renaissance literature. His work, The Jonsonian Masque (1965) made an impact partly because it completely disregarded certain aspects of the court entertainment that plainly made the British critics uncomfortable and shuffle around their subject from time to time, that is, the masque's status as unqualified flattery of the King and the philosopher-poet's function as royal servant. Such a view sees the authorial integrity of the masque maker as unavoidably compromised, and Jonson's apparent political and poetic compromise dictated that the masque would always be considered a degenerate and lesser art form by certain critics. Orgel, however, proclaimed the folly of burdening the public and epideictic literature of the Renaissance with the literary values of the Romantics, and placed the masque within the context of royal panegyric where issues of flattery or integrity are completely irrelevant. His triumph in terms of Jonsonian masque was that he demonstrated how it had to be viewed in its literary and historical contexts to be understood properly. Contemporary with Orgel's efforts on behalf of Jonson is John C. Meagher's book, Method and Meaning in Jonson's Masques (1966); he also re-evaluated the masque and examined its structure and function, although his perspective seems to lack Orgel's clarity. Orgel also explored the visual aspects of the court masque, and in conjunction with Roy Strong produced, Inigo Jones. The Theatre of the Stuart Court (1973). Strong has produced and continues to produce independently significant work relating to masques, but this book is the most important record of the visual impact of the masque in terms of set design and costume, replicating many of Inigo Jones's original sketches. The text of this book largely reworks the hypothesis of Orgel's earlier book, but in addition to the emphasis on the masque as panegyric, it stresses the importance of platonic philosophy in shaping the masque's content and form. There is no doubt that between them Orgel and Strong have made a great contribution to the study of Jonson's masques, but my major reservation relating to their work is that the emphasis on panegyric and philosophy fails to take into account adequately the evolution and role of the antimasque. More recently, critics such as Leah Marcus, Martin Butler, David Lindley and Graham Parry have expressed discomfort with such a totalised view of masque, but while they may pay attention to elements within the masque that do not fit with the panegyrical model they generally subsume them in the masque's greater goal of monarchical praise. However, just as masque criticism seemed to change gear in 1965, so it seems to be shifting again today thanks to the impact of critical theory on the masque. Anne Lake Prescott reflects a growing interest in the related cultural paradigms of the classical and the grotesque in her examination of Jonson's antimasques and their debt to Rabelais. Furthermore, Anthony Barthelemy, Suzanne Gosset, Kim Hall and Hardin Aasand have charted the discourses of race and gender at work in the court masque, and shown how the masque harnesses certain assumptions in these areas to legitimate and celebrate a nascent British imperialism. These American critics represent a new wave in masque criticism and are united in an interest in unravelling the masque and highlighting those elements that resist the masque's wider project of totalising panegyric. Similarly, I believe that the impact of the antimasque has been too easily dismissed and in this book I draw upon many of the insights generated by recent critical theory in an attempt to understand it and its relationship with the court entertainment as a whole. Critics are now listening to what is spoken beyond or behind the panegyric of masque, to the murmuring voice of dissent within the chorus of praise and examining the ideologies masque negotiates in relation to issues of class, politics, sexuality, gender and race. In this way the Jonsonian masque becomes the truly dynamic text/event that I suspect its author intended it to be.¹²

SOME SPECULATIVE CONCLUSIONS ON THE GROWTH OF THE ANTIMASQUE

I realise that an introduction is an odd place in a book to offer conclusions, but as I have been concerned thus far to outline some of the problems involved in examining the rise of the antimasque, and some of the theoretical issues involved, it may be useful to sum up here the direction of my argument as far as it has developed. I have already asserted that the antimasque developed out of anomalies and discrepancies within the more orthodox court masque, and in Chapter 1 I discuss The Masque of Blackness (1605) at some length as an example of an early masque permeated with inconsistencies that give rise to certain subtextual ironies which go against the grain of a royalist reading. The way in which the antimasque developed is in keeping with a dialogic impulse found in much of Jonson's other work and as an early example of Jonson's impulse towards dialogism I discuss the chivalric masques, Prince Henry's Barriers (1610) and Oberon (1611), in Chapter 2. The antimasque proceeded to evolve into the full-blown strategies of dissent typified by The Irish Masque at Court (1613) and Mercury Vindicated From the Alchemists at Court (1616), which I discuss in Chapter 3. If the subtle ironies in the earlier masques pointed out flaws within royalist ideology, these developed antimasques overtly articulate values which contradict and invert those of the following royalist masque.

This emphatic expansion of the dissenting antimasque resulted in a destabilising of the masque and its values. The question that needs to be asked here is what was the point of such a radical restructuring of the court entertainment. The answer to this lies, I suggest, in both Jonson's very personal brand of poetics and the masque's socio-political context. Both Jonson and King James immersed themselves in Roman culture, and used classical precedent as a model for their own roles within the state. James promoted himself as the Augustan king who presided over a political and artistic golden age, the Rex Pacificus. In his plays Jonson also recognised the value of this version of the classical ruler and portrayed the ideal state structure in Poetaster (1601) where Caesar is the just and merciful ruler, advised by the philosopher poet Virgil. In the same play the poet Horace is vindicated as commentator on and arbiter of social values. Jonson sought to take on the roles of both these poets and become a Virgil to James's Caesar. He readily recognised James's claims to a classical heritage and presented the monarch with a reflection of them in the accession day entertainments that he helped to create. In according James imperial status, Jonson simultaneously empowered himself, and upgraded himself from lowly playwright to royal advisor and keeper of public morals. Jonson's desire to monitor and comment on private and political morality is partly responsible for his distinctive manipulation of the court masque into a dialectic structure, that addresses both the private behaviour of courtiers and the impact of royal policy on the nation as a whole. The role of moral arbiter entailed dissent from time to time, as the poet thought it appropriate to criticise public fashion or even royal policy. Such an apparently daring and risky strategy was implicit in his chosen function because a philosopher poet in the Virgilian/Horatian mode was expected to maintain a critical independence and a distinctive poetic voice that responded to individual conscience rather than merely echoing imperial policy. This emphasis on poetic integrity dictates that dissent is an essential function of the poet.

Importantly, the ironies of the masques and antimasques embody this dissent without overturning the absolutist discourse that is present; so that these entertainments are neither simply subversive nor conservative but enact both these discursive strategies as a means of exploring exactly what constitutes secure and just government. Moreover, this dialogic aspect of the court entertainment was a means of defence against the many accusations Jonson incurred through his position as the unofficial poet laureate. As a philosopher poet Jonson could take the King's shilling and maintain his poetic integrity, because he was not involved in unalloyed flattery in his creation of the antimasque/masque. Furthermore, his dialogism often involves an equivocality that can slip into deliberate ambiguity, again protecting Jonson from those detractors who wished to pin on him accusations of subversion or royal flattery. The dialogic tendency of the court entertainments is not, however, chiefly a self-protective measure, but, more significantly, the embodiment of Jonson's political and poetic values. It seems to me that the fundamental motivation behind the Jonsonian antimasque/masque is the desire to produce a conditional and didactic endorsement of the monarchical ideal, and to represent a negotiation of extremes through a counterbalancing of oppositional formulations of royal authority, arriving at a classical via media.

The development and growth of the antimasque not only promotes the poet as both critic and eulogist of the monarchy but can also be viewed as a response to the socio-political climate. As I will show in the following chapters, historical documentation seems to demonstrate that there was a definite increase in public scandals throughout the reign of James I, or, at the very least, a heightened public consciousness of such matters. Predictably, such scandals involved members of the aristocracy, whose fall from grace, then as now, attracted the prurient interest of their less elevated contemporaries. However, the very genuine horror expressed by Stuart society at matters such as the Howard-Essex divorce stems from the fact that the dominant ideology of the period attributed to the aristocracy an unassailable authority within the divinely appointed social hierarchy surmounted by the monarch.¹³ In behaving badly, the aristocracy violated this assumption, destabilising those ‘norms’ of power and status so central to the ideology of early modern Britain. Furthermore, if the aristocracy's position was undermined in this way, what was to prevent this instability radiating up the hierarchical ladder and putting the monarch's position at risk? Because the security of the monarch and the security of the state were seen to be indissoluble, the questioning of status occasioned by scandals at court has wider implications than is first apparent. Many of Jonson's antimasques tackle this crisis at court and ridicule such behaviour in an attempt to reform it. This is the kind of human folly that the antimasques, plays and poetry feed on. It appears that, as the court increasingly seemed to lack the virtues it was expected to have, Jonson expanded the antimasque in order to comment on this situation. Additionally, constitutional issues were the subject of intellectual enquiry during this period.¹⁴ Many of Jonson's antimasques address the effects of real and potential social instability, and yet despite these crises, the political status quo was relatively secure. On the whole, those who criticised court society or sought to curtail the monarch's prerogative did not express a wish for the abolition of the state and its rulers but for reform. These reformists included Jonson as well as more marginal pampleteers and playwrights such Gascoigne and Deloney.¹⁵ Thus, the relative security of the state meant that the dialogism of the court masque was not felt to be a danger by the monarch. It is most important to remember that the antimasque developed in response to a monarchy which was sufficiently secure to tolerate oblique criticism. It is in what we might term these fertile conditions that the antimasque thrived, its dissent protected by a veil of antic humour. However, a change of monarch and leading personnel at court in 1625 led to the antimasque experiencing a reversal in fortune. There is no doubt that the demise of the antimasque is attributable in part to the fact that Charles I introduced to the court a new, inward-focusing aesthetic. As royal productions, Jonson's masques were called upon to reflect the fashionable cult of neo-platonism, and, in doing so, they focused on the royal couple more than on any note of dissent in the antimasque. In fulfilling the new royal agenda the poet marginalised himself from the entertainment. Rather than the advising poet-philosopher, who exploited the antimasque to contradict royal policy where appropriate, Jonson became the royal servant whose only task was to provide a suitable vehicle to display royal splendour. Nevertheless, we should not dismiss the Caroline masques too readily, or overlook the fact that they express anomalies similar to those that feature in the early Jacobean masques, flaws that resist the total recuperation of the masque as a monolithic confirmation of the state.

Notes

1. It may be appropriate to clarify my use of the terms ‘antimasque’ and ‘masque’. ‘Masque’ refers to the Court entertainment as a whole, but it is also used to describe a constituent part. Critics also refer to the ‘masque’ when alluding to the courtly component of the court entertainment, which was often prefaced by an ‘antimasque’. I have tried to make my use of the term ‘masque’ clear from the context of the sentence in which it appears. Exponents of the view that the court masque is a simple act of homage to the Crown include Jonson's contemporaries as well as recent critics. The masque maker Samuel Daniel declared his view that the most significant aspect of masque entertainment was ‘pomp and splendour’, and covertly attacked Jonson's more intellectually ambitious entertainments: ‘And whosoever strives to show most wit about these punctilios of dreams and shows are sure sick of a disease they cannot hide and would fain have the world to think them very deeply learned in all mysteries whatsoever. And peradventure they think themselves so, which if they do, they are in a far worse case than they imagine’. Philip Edwards is a recent critic who dismisses masques in terms similar to Daniel, but also brands them as distasteful displays of egregious flattery on the part of the poet and as an outstanding example of royal vanity. See Daniel, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, in Spencer and Wells (eds) (1967), 30; and Edwards (1979).

2. There is a clearly defined tradition of this type of nonsensical, punning language, which is outlined by Rhodes (1980). Also see Weimann and Shwartz (1978).

3. My interest in the literary nature of the antimasque and its conditions of production unfortunately precludes a consideration in any depth of other formal characteristics of the court masque, such as music, set design and the use of perspective. Informative works considering these aspects of masque include Chan (1980); Walls (1996); Orgel and Strong (1973); Peacock (1995).

4. Walls (1996); Limon (1991), 212; Loewenstein (1991), 180.

5. For an excellent rehearsal of the New Historicist view of the interactive relationship between text and history see Howard (1987).

6. Belsey (1985a), 167.

7. Barthes (1977), 145.

8. In an excellent essay, however, Stephen Orgel shows how this notion of the author is made even more complex by the conditions of textual production in the Renaissance period, and that the book seller, the printer, and the theatrical company all exerted a measure of authority over the text in addition to its writer. See Orgel (1991), ‘What is a text?’, in Kastan and Stallybrass (1991).

9. Leinwand (1990), 478.

10. Leinwand (1990), 479.

11. While there may have been more recent amateur efforts to stage a Jonsonian masque, the last courtly production was in 1911 as part of the coronation festivities for George V. For details see Herford & Simpson (1925-52), vol. X, 570.

12. See Welsford (1927); Gordon, D.J., in Orgel (1975b); Herford and Simpson (1925-52); Orgel (1965); Orgel (1969); Orgel (1975a and b); Orgel and Strong (1973); Meagher (1966); Marcus (1986); Butler and Lindley (1994); Prescott (1984); Gossett (1988); Barthelemy (1987); Hall (1991); Aasand (1992).

13. Lindley (1994).

14. This shift in power away from the monarch and towards the Commons is demonstrated in Wooton (1988). This book is an anthology of political writing in Stuart England, with an excellent introduction describing the political wrangling and competition between the House of Commons and the monarchy.

15. Gascoigne's prose fiction The Adventures of Master F. J. satirises the aristocratic pose of courtly love and reveals it to be the pastime of bored and licentious nobles. Gascoigne does not, however, suggest that the social hierarchy should be abolished, but satirically hints that aristocratic behaviour may benefit from some reformation. In Jack of Newbury, Thomas Deloney also examines and puts pressure on the concepts of gentility and courtly behaviour. Jack makes his fortune through his trade as a merchant, and becomes a prince. Deloney apparently suggests that princeliness may depend on industrial service rather than aristocratic birth and values. For both these pamphlets see Salzman (1987).