SOURCE: “The Queen's Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque,” in Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1992, pp. 79-104.

[In the following essay, Wynne-Davies discusses gender politics and the masque of the Jacobean court, examining the masques written for Queen Anne and those written by Lady Mary Wroth.]

I

At Night we had the Queen's Maske in the Banquetting-House, or rather her Pagent.¹

These are the words Dudley Carleton chose to describe ‘The Masque of Blackness’ (1605) in a letter to his friend Sir Ralph Winwood, who had unfortunately missed the show. Today, a glance through the catalogue of any research library would reveal that this masque is closeted neatly amongst the entries relating to the dramatist Ben Jonson. It does not appear under ‘Queen Anne’, the eponymous monarch of Carleton's epistle. However, closer investigation would uncover the fact that the masque titles chosen for publication by Jonson himself concur with the seventeenth- rather than the twentieth-century attribution. The titles in both the Quarto (1608) and the First Folio (1616), and the title page of the earlier text, which are contained in Herford and Simpson's eleven-volume edition of Jonson's works, refer to ‘The Qveenes Masqves. The first, of Blacknesse’.² There is no suggestion of misplaced appropriation or textual error. Everyone knew that Ben Jonson had written the words of the masque; but like his fellow courtiers, even he complied with the persistent allocation to the Queen. The Venetian secretary, who was present at the performance, went still further, reporting that ‘her Majesty [was] the authoress of the whole’.³

On one level, of course, we are talking about simple lexical mutation, since the word ‘author’ has come to mean the setting forth of written statements with a concurrent claim to the sole ownership of that text. This change was already occurring during the seventeenth century and can be seen in Jonson's alteration of the title page, which in the Quarto text referred, as we have seen, to the Queen, but became in the First Folio simply ‘Masques at Court. The Author B.I.’.⁴ The earlier definition was much looser, allowing the ‘author’ to be the initiator or instigator of a work, someone who gave existence to something in any number of ways. What the Venetian secretary is suggesting, then, is that the masque was a production by diverse people of whom the Queen was the most politically notable force.

There is an insidious acceptability about this diachronic developmental theory, which offers the seductively neat possibility of a final and complete verbal definition. But the shift of signification around the term ‘author’ occurs within eleven years and is caught in a much more complex web of interpretative elements. The masque allowed for an almost unique interplay of creative and imaginative faculties and these had, in turn, to jostle with the economic demands and court tensions endemic upon the genre's political identity. Rather than accepting the idea of single authorship without question, however, an archaeological analysis of the masque offers us a multidimensional discourse which opens up ‘authorship’ to women. As Michel Foucault writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge, archaeology's purpose is to diversify, not to unify, and

to discover that whole domain of institutions, economic processes, and social relations on which a discursive formation can be articulated … to uncover … the particular level in which history can give place to definite types of discourse, which have their own type of historicity, and which are related to a whole set of various historicities.⁵

The court masque was a collective cultural construct which allowed the women of the court, and specifically the Queen, access to a politically resonant discourse. Their penetration into this exclusively masculine field disrupted the court, for the Queen's masque not only challenged the gendered preserves of authorship but questioned the legitimacy of absolute male power as symbolised by the Stuart King.

When I entitled this essay ‘The Queen's Masque’, however, I intended to suggest a further diversification. Not only does the term occur in early seventeenth-century discourse referring to Queen Anne, but it also suggests Ben Jonson's ‘The Masque of Queens’ (1609).⁶ As in ‘Blackness’, Anne was the chief masquer of the later entertainment and her eleven attendants on stage were all ladies of the court. They included Lucy, Countess of Bedford, a well-known literary patron, Lady Anne Clifford, the diarist, and Alice Countess of Derby, a booklover and patron of several dramatists. Jonson had written the conventional panegyric to these powerful and influential women:

Penthesilea, the braue Amazon,
Swift-foote Camilla, Queene of Volscia,
Victorious Thomyris of Scythia,
Chast Artemisia, the Carian Dame,
And fayre-hayr'd Beronice, ægipts fame,
Hypsicratea, Glory of Asia,
Candace, pride of æthiopia
The Britanne honor, Voadicea,
The vertuous Palmyrene Zenobia,
The wise, and warlike Goth, Amalasunta,
And bold Valasca of Bohemia.(7)

The last masquer to be described is the Queen herself: ‘Belanna … alone, Possest [of] all vertues’. One element of the masque discourse as it pertains to Renaissance women must, of course, be the retention of her position as object (as opposed to subject) in the dramatic excerpts of the performance. Thus she is contained within the formal elements of the entertainment, as well as by the ideological values the masque purported to sustain.⁸

The other possible transference of signification elided by the title is ‘the masque written by a Queen’ and, indeed, there is such a masque. Queen Henrietta Maria composed, directed and acted in her own masque in 1626; this uncovers the possibility of women's participation in the textual composition of these court entertainments.⁹ However, although a number of women were involved in the production processes, there is only one extant text written by a woman of the Jacobean court which includes masques: Lady Mary Wroth's Urania.¹⁰ Through this text it is possible to locate a genuinely female voice in the discursive practices of a feminised masque.

II

In order to understand why the masque form, rather than the public theatre for example, was able to facilitate female involvement, its origins and structure must be taken into consideration. The masque was, above all, a political construct. It was developed in the Burgundian court and rapidly came to be seen by the monarchies of Renaissance Europe as an essential display of power.¹¹ In England these shows were imported by Henry VII as part of his propagandistic commandeering of the crown, but they reached their zenith in the Jacobean and Caroline courts.¹² The frequent involvement of noblewomen in patronage is widely documented, but the masque proffered the opportunity for personal artistic participation.¹³ Not only were the ladies of the court able to commission the text they desired, they were also able to share the planning for its performance and act in its presentation. Every stage of the masque's production offered fresh possibilities for the insertion of female authorisation and creativity.

If court entertainments simply encoded a eulogy of the monarchy and his or her court, then this female involvement would be nugatory, merely reasserting the dominant order with unrestrained praise. But masques rarely succumbed to this harmonious function. Stephen Orgel and David Lindley have signalled more than adequately the more serious responses predicated by the genre, the latter writing:

It [the masque] is at once the last expression of a full-blown Renaissance idealism in the service of a hierarchical and ordered view of the world and a form which permitted the evolution of musical and theatrical techniques that look forward to the post-Restoration era. It is at the same time an art which aspires to translate its participants into an ideal contemplative vision and a kind intimately related to the flux of political reality. Its confident celebration and triumphant assertion are couched in a literary form that is full of inner tension.¹⁴

It is through these fissures in the official court discourse, indicated by Lindley, that the female voice was able to escape, so that the tensions in the masque often became those of gender, replete with political as well as sexual signification.

The ‘inner tension’ of the masque form is manifest in its tripartite structure (the masque, the antimasque and the dance), the speaking parts of which were assigned to professional players.¹⁵ The masque proper centred on some idealised theme such as Truth or Honour, elucidating these values through a series of speeches and songs performed by allegorical or mythical characters. The antimasque provided the antithesis to the main didactic argument, and the roles for this section of the performance, which generally occurred first, were also taken by professionals. The dance was performed at the end of the evening by the ladies and gentlemen of the court, who were always associated with the triumphant moral values espoused in the masque. These dancers did not speak; but at the conclusion of the formal performance they descended into the hall and invited the audience to dance, thereby allowing them to participate in the fulfilment of an idealised subject position. The central figure in the orchestration, however, was often the monarch. He or she rarely performed in the masque, but sat on an elevated and protruding dais to which all action on the stage was directed. The necessity for a perpetual and simultaneous recognition of the material and fictive worlds, together with the thematic antithesis of masque and antimasque, threw an almost unbearable pressure upon the supposedly harmonising function of the entertainments.

Ben Jonson's masques are prefaced by long descriptive passages, which were an essential part of the discursive practice of the masque genre and appear to elucidate the masque components already discussed. The following statement by Jonson anatomises the plan for ‘The Masque of Queens’:

It encreasing, now, to the third time of my being vs'd in these seruices to her Ma.^ties personall presentatio's, w^th the Ladyes whom she pleaseth to honor; it was my first, and speciall reguard, to see that the Nobilyty of the Invention should be answerable to the dignity of they^r persons. For w^ch reason, I chose the Argument, to be, A Celebration of honorable, & true Fame, bred out of Vertue: obseruing that rule of the best Artist, to suffer no obiect of delight to passe w^thout his mixture of profit, & example.

And because her Ma.^tie (best knowing, that a principall part of life in these Spectacles lay in they^r variety) had commaunded mee to think on some Daunce, or shew, that might præcede hers, and haue the place of a foyle, or false-Masque; I was carefull to decline not only from others, but mine owne stepps in that kind, since the last years I had an Anti-Masque of Boyes: and therefore, now, deuis'd that twelve Women, in the habite of Haggs or Witches, sustayning the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, &c. the opposites to good Fame, should fill that part; not as a Masque, but a spectacle of strangenesse, producing multiplicity of Gesture, and not vnaptly sorting w^th the current, and whole fall of the Deuise.¹⁶

There are several points worth noting: Jonson mentions that the purpose of the masque is to be an ‘object of delight’ as well as an ‘example’, thereby according with the Renaissance humanist interpretation of art as being for both pleasure and profit.¹⁷ Set against this higher purpose of the ‘best Artist’ is the Queen's desire for ‘variety’, which carries the implicit condemnation of lightness as opposed to Jonson's own gravitas. However, the ‘foyle, or false-Masque’ which Anne requires is an essential ingredient of the whole performance, throwing virtue into sharp relief by its antic ‘otherness’. In the case of ‘The Masque of Queens’ the contrasting show is performed by hags and witches, characterised similarly, one supposes, to those Inigo Jones also designed for William Davenant's ‘Salmacidia Spolia’ (1640).¹⁸ The twelve hags supply a dialectical interpretation of the whole, opposing as they do the twelve noble ladies described earlier in this essay.

The polarisation of the hags is emphasised still further in Jonson's introduction. They are:

full of præposterous change, and gesticulation, but most applying to they^r property: who, at they^r meetings, do all thinges contrary to the custome of Men, dauncing, back to back, hip to hip, they^r handes ioyn'd and making they^rcircles backward, to the left hand, w^th strange phantastique motions of they^r heads, and bodyes.¹⁹

As grotesques, they present an absolute opposite to the female ideal of the court world, and especially to the lady masquers who stood immobile and speechless at the back of the stage until released towards the end of the performance for their allowed function in the formal, prescribed pattern of the dance. Thus, the courtly ladies' compound identity is located by their very difference from the hags—who are presented first—and centred upon their silence and containment, until the male voice of Heroique Virtue sets them free. Even then, they are allowed their limited autonomy only after Heroique Virtue has firmly reasserted the political hierarchies of the court, by placing the Queen securely within the King's control;

She this embracing w(t)h a vertuous
ioy,
Farre from selfe-loue, as humbling
all her Worth
To him that gaue it, hath agayne brought forth
They(r) Names to Memory, and meanes this night
To make her, once more, visible to light.
And to that light, from whence her truth of spirit
Confesseth all the lustre of her Merit.
To you, most royall, and most happy King.(20)

The tenor of this speech, which affirms the gender relations in the court, is further consolidated by the female figure of Fame, who contributes an affirmation of the privileging of paternity in Jacobean ideology: ‘Virtue, my Father, and my Honour; Thou / That mad'st mee good, as great’.²¹ These speeches finally conclude by reaffirming for the audience the conventional Jacobean value system in which the King/Man dominates the Queen/Woman; and at this point, in order to underline the already obvious power structures, the hags are bound and led off stage. Their free movement and challenging speech—their very actions and language—are constrained and denied in a final reassertion of the containment of women.

Of course, the hags were given speaking parts and would therefore have been played by boys, not women. The most authoritative writing on women and the court masque to date is Suzanne Gossett's article ‘Man-maid, begone!: Women in masques’, in which she endows this gender substitution with great significance, although it was, after all, common enough on the public stage.²² But Jonson explicitly called attention to the fact that the hags were ‘twelue Women’ and not ‘an Anti-Masque of Boyes’, which he had used the previous year. Although the actors could not alter their gender, becoming female, Jonson could suggest the feminine through them, and thereby comment, not upon gender, but upon the social construction of women as seen in the figures of the queens. Still, what we, as readers, appear to be left with is an overt challenge to the ideologically acceptable formulation of woman, which can be, and is, contained. As Jonathan Dollimore suggests in Radical Tragedy, what is perceived in the dialectic of masque and antimasque might be thought of as a ‘ritual inversion’. He concludes:

the disorder in question took many forms but dealt especially with the reversal of relationships of authority, sexuality and status generally—for example women over men, father over son [sic], subject over prince.

Nevertheless, the masque was also ‘an ideological legitimation of the power structure’.²³ In this commentary Dollimore is discussing a masque-within-a-play, not the politically potent entertainments of the early modern court. Consequently, he does not take into account the dramatic origins of the court masque, which are unnecessary in an analysis of The Revenger's Tragedy but inevitably leave traces of a darker and more generative folk tradition in masques such as ‘Queens’.

Jonson's hags belong to a weirdly mutated ‘other world’ which is efflorescent with bodily force and energy, and cannot be entirely circumscribed by the formal structures set against it. They may be seen in the light of the Bakhtinian ‘grotesque’, which

discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. It leads men out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of the indisputable and stable.²⁴

What the hags offer is not a neatly formulated dialectic but a diverse world in which Otherness is multiple, contrary and ‘phantastique’.

Yet the mutual opposition implied between masque and antimasque figures is not sustained. The defeat of the hags cannot finally suppress the linguistic and physical freedom of the women in the masque, as these qualities have already emerged in the characters of the queens. A close examination of the speech—already quoted—describing the noblewomen discloses that each is endowed with a glorifying attribute—no surprises there. But of the eleven queens, only two are endowed with ideologically acceptable feminine qualities: chastity and being ‘fayre-hayr'd’.²⁵ Two have androgynous values: virtue itself and being swift of foot (although this latter quality would have been more redolent of masculine, rather than feminine, strength). There remain seven queens who are ascribed attributes which were almost exclusively considered to be more specific to men in Jacobean ideology. These women were brave, victorious, glorious, proud, honourable and bold, while Amalsunta the Goth is said to be both wise and warlike. The qualities said to be shared by these queens are more appropriate to the traditional active public role expected of men, while the ideal of silence and immobility being visually presented appears to uphold the feminine ideal. Confronted with this dislocation between spoken text and ocular evidence, the audience must perceive the inadequacy of allowing the feminine to be determined by a single signifier, whether courtly lady or hags played by boys. The field of play which ‘The Masque of Queens’ opens up at this point of schism is focused upon gender, and it is through these processes of perpetuating difference that women were able to impregnate the masque with a radical feminine voice.

Like the thematic power of the masque form, women's involvement in these entertainments was essentially political. It was Queen Anne, not Ben Jonson, who instigated and enacted the negotiation between court show and court politics. The intricate diplomatic manoeuvrings about ‘The Masque of Queens’ is one of many examples of the international significance of the masques and the power the Queen had, or determined to have, over them. The Spanish ambassador, Don Fernandez de Girone, was in London to thank James I for helping to formulate a truce in the Netherlands war. He was favoured by Anne, and she obtained several invitations for the Spanish contingent to see ‘The Masque of Queens’. This action, however, upset the French ambassador, La Boderie, who was a favourite of the King. Finally, after much negotiation, James prevailed upon Anne to wait until de Girone had left before showing the masque, and they invited La Boderie on his own. Through all of this, yet another ambassador had been offended—the Venetian, Marc Antonio Correr—and the Queen, perhaps attempting to reassert her political control, invited him to attend the masque in disguise. Correr reported to his prince:

The Queen let it be understood that she would be pleased if I came incognito to the Masque, and … let me know that she regretted I had not been invited and pleaded that, as the King paid the bill, he desired to be the host. She says she is resolved to trouble herself no more with Masques, and that she would rather have had your Serenity's Ambassador invited than the representative of any other Prince.²⁶

Far from being ‘but toys’, as Francis Bacon suggests in his essay ‘On Masques’, these entertainments were of a delicate and crucial nature in political terms. More importantly, they were not the King's lone concern.²⁷ The Queen used her masques to participate in foreign diplomacy, and she became annoyed with the King when her plans were thwarted. The political involvement both ran parallel to and cross-fertilised with her active participation in the imaginative authorship of the shows themselves. Moreover, Anne utilised the masque form to act contrary to the King's wishes, as surely as the hags danced ‘contrary to the custome of Men’.

Queen Anne's disruptive deployment of the masque was echoed by her encouragement of political subversion in other theatrical performances at court. Another French ambassador, Beaumont, wrote in 1604:

Consider for pity's sake what must be the state and condition of a prince, whom the preachers publicly from the pulpit assail, whom the comedians of the metropolis bring upon the stage, whose wife attends these representations in order to enjoy the laugh against her husband.²⁸

A feminised discourse of political subversion and factional division between King and Queen was as evident in the plays performed before Anne as in those in which she herself participated.

III

The first decade of Jacobean rule is scattered with reports of these incidents: ‘The Masque of Queens’ was not, for example, the first time Anne had aroused a flurry of consternation through her involvement in a masque. The most sensational of the Queen's performances was in ‘The Masque of Blackness’, on Twelfth Night 1605, in Whitehall. The responses to it suggest that the English court was scandalised: for example, Dudley Carleton wrote to Ralph Winwood:

At the further end was a great Shell in form of a Skallop, wherein were four Seats; on the lowest sat the Queen with my Lady Bedford; on the rest were placed the Ladies Suffolk, Darby, Rich, Effingham, Ann Herbert, Susan Herbert, Elizabeth Howard, Walsingham and Bevil. Their Apparell was rich, but too light and Curtizan-like for such great ones. Instead of Vizzards, their Faces and Arms up to the Elbows, were painted black, which was Disguise sufficient, for they were hard to be known; but it became them nothing so well as their red and white, and you cannot imagine a more ugly Sight, then a Troop of lean-cheek'd Moors.

Carleton commented again, this time to Chamberlain:

The maske at night requires much labor to be well described; but there is a pamflet in press w^ch will saue me that paynes. meane time you shall onely knowe that the Actors were the Q: the Ladies Bedford, Suffolke, Darby, Rich, Harbert, Effingham Susan, El: Howard, Beuell, Walsingham and Wroth. The presentacion of the maske at the first drawing of the trauers was very fayre, and theyr apparel rich, but too light and curtisan-like; Theyr black faces, and hands w^ch were painted and bare vp to the elbowes, was a very lothsome sight, and I am sorry that strangers should see owr court so strangely disguised.

Lastly, Vincent wrote to Benson:

At night was there a sumptuous shew represented by y^e Q. and some dozen Ladyes all paynted like Blackamores face and neck bare and for y^e rest strangely attired in Barbaresque mantells to y^e halfe legge, having buskins all to be sett w^th iewells, w^ch a waue of y^e Sea as it weare very artificially made and brought to y^e stage by secrett ingines cast forth of a skallop shell to performe y^e residue of y^e devise of dansing etc. W^ch I saw not, nor harkened after further. But tell it you only for this y^t you discerne y^e humor of y^e tyme.²⁹

What shocked the Jacobean courtiers was that the lady masquers had painted themselves black; we have extant an Inigo Jones design as evidence of their appearance.³⁰ Part of the reason for the furore was that the ideal female subject was considered to be not only silent and immobile but fair in the traditional Petrarchan manner. But this was not the first time English court ladies had disguised themselves as ‘Blackamores’.

On Shrove Tuesday 1510, at the court of Henry VIII, the King suddenly disappeared from the Queen's chambers, where a banquet was being held for foreign ambassadors. He then reappeared with his nobles, all disguised as Moors, and they proceeded to play at dice with the guests. When the game was over, the ladies entered:

their faces, neckes, armes & handes, couered with fyne pleasaunce blacke, … so that the same ladies semed to be nygrost or blacke Mores.³¹

It is interesting to recognise the similar configuration of Queen, foreign ambassadors and a court entertainment, suggesting that such occasions were often held under feminine auspices. In addition, the combination of dice and Moors in the 1510 masque gives us access to the traces of a cultural antecedent for this ‘blacking-up’, which suggests a more transgressive and amoral interpretation of the 1605 display.

Disguising, and a game of chance, were part of a long-standing tradition described as ‘mommerie’. One of its earliest but most succinct definitions occurs in Enid Welsford's The Court Masque (1927):

a procession of people disguised by masks, beast-heads, or discoloured faces, who enter their neighbours' houses to dance or play at dice—often in complete silence.³²

Welsford goes on to describe how mommerie was a medieval ritual of a symbolic game of chance played with demon spirits who were defeated, and thus exorcised for the coming year.³³ But the practice also has a more extended and diverse genealogy. Playing at dice was originally a Roman New Year or ‘Kalends’ custom, which developed along several avenues.³⁴ Under the Catholic Church it metamorphosed into the Feast of Fools, which involved a symbolic role reversal between the lower and higher clergy, and the mocking of religious celebrations by dicing on the altar. In lay entertainments the mommers who played at dice visited their neighbours disguised as underworld spirits or demons, with blackened faces and wild-men's costumes. By 1377 it had also become a court entertainment, for in that year the Commons of London diced with the young Richard II, enabling him, through the use of a loaded dice, to win a golden cup, ball and ring.³⁵ In each case the mommers are meant to be overcome; they are simply allowed one day a year in which to invert hierarchies and ridicule convention. The lower clergy, visitors and commoners, like the hags in the Jacobean masque, are symbolically defeated, signifying the destruction of anarchy and the restoration of the dominant ideology. What we are confronting is a contained challenge, an acceptable form of radicalism, which Stephen Greenblatt describes as follows:

The subversive voices are produced by and within the affirmations of order; they are powerfully registered, but they do not undermine that order. Indeed … the order is neither possible nor fully convincing without both the presence and perception of betrayal.³⁶

Greenblatt privileges the order of authority over subversion, and while it is perfectly possible to perceive Henry VIII's delight in shocking his court as within this definition, Queen Anne's masques are not so readily fixed.

The Queen is characterised not only by her sovereignty, but also by her gender; thus, she may dislocate her royal identity from that of the King in a bilateral challenge to masculine authority. Anne's self-conscious manipulation of her subject role is evident from the history of her political intrigues and from her dominant control of the masque's thematic content. Significantly, it was her own idea that the women should be black. Jonson writes:

(because it was her Maiesties will, to haue them Blackmores at first) the inuention was deriued by me, and presented thus.³⁷

Moreover, Anne adopted, for her challenge to gender hierarchies, the powerfully mythical discourse of mommerie which, with its diachronic elements, denies obligations to contemporary applicability. This resistance to circumscription suggests a carnivalesque spirit, which was innate to mommerie and the antimasque. As Bakhtin writes:

As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.³⁸

By calling upon this pan-chronological symbol of blackened faces—with its magical power of complete ludic aptness—the 1605 masque breaches the ideological constructs of the Jacobean court. It becomes impossible to perceive Queen Anne's court masques as defined by a simple dialectic power structure. The web of subject relations is too complex and multidimensional for that. The masque exists at a point of convergence for many lines of interpretation: of gender, of class, of politics, of artistic construction, and of the carnivalesque. Like the signification of ‘authorship’, a feminised masque discourse adjusts the lens of our attention so as to focus sharply upon these threads of tension, revealing diversity rather than unity. Through an extension of the canon with texts written by women, it is now possible to perceive still more strands within the discursive practices, which have until now been invisible.

IV

The term ‘voice’ is used to signify a collective and cumulative discourse; yet it carries within it a subtextual assumption of a privileged literacy and orality which has often excluded women. For example, the role of women on the private stage in the Jacobean and Caroline courts has received surprisingly little attention considering that we have ample evidence for their involvement—that concerning Henrietta Maria, for example. These feminine voices of performance, although recognised, are not always ‘heard’; they are muted.³⁹ The theory of female mutedness is discussed by Shirley Ardener:

The theory of mutedness, therefore, does not require that the muted be actually silent. They may speak a great deal. The important issue is whether they are able to say all that they would wish to say, where and when they wish to say it.⁴⁰

The material empowering of language is as important as the linguistic skill itself, and when the theory is applied to the execution of texts, what becomes startlingly apparent is the mutuality of this mutedness—a mutuality which exists between writer, text and reader/critic. The ideological suppression of voice affects the seventeenth-century court lady and the twentieth-century critic alike. Without a self-conscious recognition of our own positioning within a critical tradition, it remains impossible to acknowledge a voice which might challenge our presuppositions and, in this case, allow for the emergence of many previously muted women writers. Thus, in order to liberate the female voice from a mutedness within a theoretical discourse, it is essential to examine women writers/creators, as well as the role women played in the literature written by men.

The court's relationship with literary productivity was sometimes parental, offering the nurturing support of patronage and providing the economic facilities for dramatic, and especially masque, output. The alliance between patron and artist is a far more complex power balance than can be accommodated here, and it must suffice to indicate the importance of female patronage in early modern Europe as an acceptable way for women to participate in literary creativity.⁴¹ But the seductive power for women of this maternal patronage system occasionally overbalanced when their involvement became more insistent—as, for example, in the case of Queen Anne and Jonson's masques. What the court masque offered aristocratic women was the ‘where and when’ for their own voice.

One of the women courtiers who acted in the masques of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Queens’ was Lucy Countess of Bedford, who is usually identified as the patron of John Donne, a canonical male poet.⁴² Yet she had works dedicated to her by other poets (Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson); she wrote poems herself, although none to our knowledge survives; and she organised masques. Rather than acting as an adjunct to a single male poet, she appears to have been one of the multiple centres of patronage about which Renaissance writers orbited. The two masques she directed personally are ‘Cupid's Banishment’ (1617), held at the Ladies' Hall in Deptford, and ‘Lovers Made Men’, which was presented to Lord Hay, also in 1617.⁴³ Other women involved in the writing of dramas or masques include the Countess of Pembroke, Elizabeth Cary and Margaret Cavendish.⁴⁴ However, it is another of the court ladies, acting as Baryte in ‘Blackness’, who produced the most significant contribution to the Jacobean masque—Lady Mary Wroth.

Wroth was born into the culturally distinguished Sidney family in 1587; she was the daughter of Sir Robert Sidney, brother of the Countess of Pembroke and Sir Philip Sidney, and she was brought up at Penshurst.⁴⁵ In 1604 she married Sir Robert Wroth, even though she continued to be identified with the Sidney family. Around the same time Wroth became a close friend of Queen Anne and participated in the masques of ‘Blackness’ and of ‘Beauty’. She was also, like Lucy Countess of Bedford, a patron, and she received dedications from Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Wither and Joshua Sylvester. Her own literary productivity was prodigious and innovative; she was the first English woman to write a full-length work of prose fiction and the first woman to write a sonnet sequence. She composed, in poetry, Pamphilia and Amphilanthus (1621); in prose, Urania I (1621) and Urania II (1620s); and in drama, Love's Victory (1620s).⁴⁶ The extent of Wroth's literary involvement was unusual for a lady of the Jacobean court, but she was hardly someone to be bound by convention, as her personal life suggests. In 1614 Robert Wroth died, leaving Lady Mary in debt. Dudley Carleton (the contemporary critic of ‘The Masque of Blackness’) wrote to his wife that the cause of Wroth's demise was

a gangrene in pudendis [in his private parts] leaving a young widow with 1200^li joynter, and a young sonne not a moneth old: and his estate charged with 23,000^li debt.⁴⁷

Wroth had to struggle to pay off this debt for the rest of her life, and the prospect of earning money from her writing must have appeared attractive. However, on the death of her son she entered into a scandalous liaison with her cousin, William Herbert Earl of Pembroke, and bore him two illegitimate children. She was forced to leave court; consequently, her performances in the masques ceased. Nevertheless, she seems to have retained a lively involvement in the masque discourse by including court entertainments in the second part of Urania. Wroth's life, in itself, threw the inadequacies of the court's ideological identification of women into disarray. Her literary career and her allegiance to a natal (rather than a nuptial) bond, especially through her love affair with William Herbert, disrupted the court's expectations as much as did her darkened face when she appeared on stage in ‘The Masque of Blackness’.

The Countess of Montgomery's Urania was written in two parts and dedicated to Susan Herbert, who was related through marriage to the Sidney family, and a masquer in ‘Blackness’. The prose romance tells the story of the constant Queen Pamphilia and her love for the fickle Emperor Amphilanthus. The main theme of both parts is the constancy of women in comparison to the inconstancy of the world; of its civil strife, political unrest and the instability of the court. Wroth draws upon the works of Sidney, Spenser and Ariosto, although it is significant that she does not transform her central character into an Amazon such as Cleophilia, Britomart and Bradamante, but combines the personal and public within the unambiguously female character of Pamphilia.⁴⁸ Rather than compounding sexuality and gender in the hermaphroditic ideal of neo-Platonism, she draws the political, poetic and romantic roles of the Queen into an exclusively feminine construct which denies conventional limitations. Pamphilia privileges her public and political duty over her personal desire. She explains that she is married to

the kingdome of Pamphilia from which Husband shee could not bee divorced, nor ever would have other, if it might please him to give her leave, to enjoy that happinesse; and besides besought his permission, for my Lord (said shee) my people looke for me, and I must needs be with them.

Elaine V. Beilin, who quotes this passage in Redeeming Eve, links it to Elizabeth I's positioning herself as espoused to the Kingdom of England.⁴⁹ Wroth initiates her protagonist into the feminised discourse of autonomous rulership which had been epitomised by Elizabeth I and was revered nostalgically in the Jacobean period as a golden age of monarchy.⁵⁰

Urania's political import extends well beyond Pamphilia, since it is a roman à clef. That Wroth's romance belonged to this genre was recognised at the time; the Earl of Rutland, for example, wrote to Lady Mary asking her to identify the characters.⁵¹ Texts of this nature were becoming popular in the early seventeenth century: John Barclay's Argenis (1621) was published with just such a clavis, or key, as the Earl of Rutland requested.⁵² Indeed, Wroth probably had to withdraw the text from publication because of the libellous material in Part i, where she depicts Lord Denny, his daughter Honora, and her husband Lord Hay. The slander precipitated an insulting exchange of poems between Denny and Wroth, where he refers to her as a ‘Hirmophradite in show, in deed a monster’.⁵³ The incident provoked condemnatory epistles against Wroth, recalling those directed against the women in ‘The Masque of Blackness’. One of the recipients of Dudley Carleton's scandalised letters about ‘Blackness’, John Chamberlain, found time to reciprocate with further court gossip; he wrote to Carleton:

[I enclose] certain bitter verses of the Lord Dennies upon the Ladie Marie Wroth, for that in her books of Urania she doth palpablie and grossely play upon him and his late daughter the Lady Hayes, besides many others she makes bold with, and they say takes great libertie or rather licence to traduce whom she please, and thincks she daunces in a net: I have seen an aunswer of hers to these rimes, but I thought yt not worth the writing out.⁵⁴

Chamberlain enclosed the verses of Denny but not of Wroth, enabling an extension of the criticism not only of Wroth's traducing text but also of her very act of writing and her commandeering of a politically potent literary form.

The Denny incidents in Urania make for fascinating reading. Wroth refers through the allegory to ‘Lord Hay's Masque’ (1607), written by Thomas Campion:

the time of marryage came, which was solemnized by the Kings command at the Court, where great tryumphs were, Masques and banquets, and such Court delights, never man with greater joy received a wife, nor any woman expressed more comfort in a match.⁵⁵

Despite this delightful wedding, however, two years later the couple had disagreements and Wroth implied that Honora had had illicit affairs of which her husband was jealous:

Her Cabinets hee [her husband] broke open, threatned her servants to make them confesse; letters he found, but only such as between frends might passe in complement, yet they appeared to jealousie to be amorous. He was so distemperd, as he used her ill; her father a phantastical thing, vaine as Courtiers, rash as mad-men, & ignorant as women, would needs (out of folly, ill nature, and waywardnesse, which hee cald care of his honour, and his friends quiet) kill his daughter, and so cut off the blame, or spot, this her offence may lay upon his noble bloud, as he termed it … the Lord, left to his pride, wherewith he pufft himself up, & was fild with it like a dropsie, or a blad[d]er blowne with wind.⁵⁶

It seems hardly surprising that Denny, having been called a ‘bladder blowne with wind’, took to writing his own slanderous verses in return.

Wroth persisted in her representations of court intrigue, and also refers to the Overbury affair and to her own expectations and treatment. Lady Mary becomes Lady Lindamira, who at first was always at court,

which indeed was the fittest place for her, being a Lady of great spirit, excellent qualities, and beautifull enough to make many in love with her.⁵⁷

But later she loses the Queen's favour and has to retire from court because of the gossip of a ‘malicious lady’:

Lindamira remaining like one in a gay Masque, the night pass'd, they are in their old clothes againe, and no appearance of what was.⁵⁸

Wroth chooses the metaphor of a masque to represent the transience of the court world, its dreamlike splendour and hollow promises, and she repeats this idea later in relation to her own masque construction. There are also more international political allusions in Urania, such as to the downfall of King Christian III of Denmark in 1534 and the overthrow of the Italian communes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁵⁹ Political and personal elements are inextricably linked, particularly through the one persistent, ominous theme of inconstancy, with the trouble and disorder that it brings.

V

There are three masques in Urania, all located in Part ii: the central masque is presented to Pamphilia, the first to Rodomandro, who woos the Queen and finally wins her, and the last to Amphilanthus, her true love. Like Ben Jonson's masques, they are meant to teach and to delight, as well as to contain detailed instructions governing the performance. Rodomandro's masque establishes this convention. The descriptions of costumes, scenery and music are reminiscent of the Jonsonian passages quoted at the beginning of this essay. For example:

att last Rodomandro would needs present the Court w^t a show of theire Country fashion, in manner of a maske w^ch indeed was very pretty and pleasant, him-selfe beeing one of the twelve maskers. And four and twenty torchbearers hee had all aparelled like horse-men in counterfett armes, bases and boots w^t great longe spurrs, faire plumes of feathers, visards they had non, the most of them having faces grim, and hard enough to bee counted visards, the maskers had a pretty kinde of visards or slight coverings of their faces, their apparell after the Tartarian fashion was all alike[.] their uper parts of a rich white clothe of gold made in fashion of an armoure and trimd w^t Gold as if the joints of the armour, ther bases of Carnation velvett laced all over w^t Gold[;] their boots white leather laced att the tops as the baces were, and spurrs of pure golde, butt nott soe longe as their torchbearers['] were, butt convenient to daunce w^t, and nott to bee offensive to the ladys when they would honor them w^t dauncing w^t them.⁶⁰

The practical detail of the spurs, which were shorter for the masquers than for the torchbearers so that they were ‘convenient to daunce w^t’, suggests the material awareness of someone very familiar with the court masque. Similar conventions occur in the presentation to Pamphilia, where the enchantress Melissea appears in court surrounded by

a strange darknes, and in that darknes a fearfull fire w^ch presented a chariott drawne w^t four fi[e]ry dragons, the Chariott fire, yett in the body of itt (all the parts beeing howsoever fire) satt an aged Lady.

(fol. 21 iv)

This recalls numerous chariot entries in the masques, and more especially ‘The Masque of Queens’, where

that w^ch presented it selfe was an ougly Hell; w^ch, flaming beneath, smoaked vnto the top of the Roofe.⁶¹

Amphilanthus' masque also recalls ‘Queens’ with its display of anti-masque characters, who resemble the hags with their ‘strange phantastique motions’:

rather rusht in, then came in[,] in strange habitt, and farr stranger fashion, having such scarcetie of good civilitie as little, ore non[e,] was sane in them. (fol. 28 i)

The professional ease with which Wroth commands the basic elements of the masque—her description of mechanics, entries and antimasque—defines the feminine voice within the masque discourse.

The three masques in Urania, however, not only prove the perfect competence of Wroth in that genre but, through their contrasting qualities, offer a perception of specifically gendered responses to the courtly shows. Rodomandro's masque sets the tone for the denial of love and the triumph of the more public virtue, honour, which is emphasised by the hierarchical allocation of ruler and ruled subject positions to Honour and Cupid:

Honor like the brightest morne
Shines while clowded love is worne
                    And consum'd to dust,
Like faire flowrs long beeing pull[e]d
Dy, and wither if nott cull[e]d
                    slightest[,] like the wurst.
But lett harts, and voices singe
Honor's Cupid[']s just borne kinge.

(fol. 8 i)

Thematically, the dominance of political values over personal desires conforms exactly to Urania's central tenet, but it belongs more exclusively to a formal masque convention where its reasserted authority is both royal and male. The entertainment's reception, by Rodomandro's court and his visitors, is one of delight and admiration. The main protagonists learn nothing, and Wroth comments ironically on their thoughtless pursuit of pleasurable adventure:

Then for this night every one went to ther lodgings to expect what the next morning would bring forthe.

(fol. 8 ii)

The masque presented to Pamphilia offers a more covert and mutable response. The witch, Melissea, who creates the fantastical masque, belongs to the literary tradition of the ‘loathly lady’. She is old yet ‘sage’ and ‘grave’; she is also capable of advising the Queen, of weaving deceptive spells and of foretelling the future.⁶² The enchantress enters in a ‘strange darknes’; she creates the illusion that the Queen is in the court while, in reality, the two women are engaged in a ‘privatt conference’; while to Rodomandro ‘she closely gave a paper telling him his beeleefe in that would make him hapyest[,] next to that whether the purpose was intended’ (fol. 22 iii). All Melissea's actions are veiled in this manner, and contrary to the sage's own words—‘the more obscured the less mist’—the glimpse proffered leaves us unsatisfied and desirous for more information. Indeed, Wroth would have been well aware of the ambiguity promulgated by the word ‘mist’.

The lesson of the masque fittingly combines uncertainty with sadness, for it teaches that love is an illusion; the shepherd sings:

Love butt a phantesie light, and vaine
Fluttering butt in poorest braine[;]
Birds in Chimnies make a thunder
Putting silly soules in wounder,
Soe doth this love, this all comaunder
To a weake poore understander[.]
Slight him, and hee'le your servant bee
Adore him, you his slave must bee,
Scorne him, O how hee will pray you,
Please him, and hee'lle sure beetray you[.]
Lett nott his faulshood bee esteemd
Least your selfe bee disesteemed[.]

(fol. 2 ii)

At the conclusion of the entertainment Wroth intrudes with an authorial confirmation of Melissea's tenet, which is then echoed by Pamphilia's response:

The instabilitie of this world is such as nott many minutes can bee left free in certaintie to any[.] noe more could itt bee to this excelling lady, who now for this instant of little twilight content, must have present troubles againe, for business of what kinde soever can have noe better name, nor any fitter.

(fol. 22 iii)

Obscurity, veilings, fantasy, inconstancy—all belong to the ‘twilight content’, things which are half seen, not fully understood and delightful, perhaps because of that insubstantial quality, yet at the same time illusory, passing and mutable.⁶³ Wroth's authorial second self, Lindamira, was caught at the same point of tension between a desire for stasis and the inevitability of flux; she remained in her ‘gay’ clothes, even though the night had passed and there was ‘no appearance of what was’. Pamphilia's response to the masque, which acts as a fulcrum in her evaluation of her own role as a royal and gendered subject, sees her accepting the political necessity of an alliance with Rodomandro, instead of her personal and sexual desire for Amphilanthus. She accepts the transience of love and asserts her public role as a responsible monarch. For her the artificial delights of the court world are over, and political manoeuvring takes their place.

Not so for Amphilanthus. In an almost stereotypical assessment of the male subject, Wroth parallels Rodomandro's staid but stable offer of love with Amphilanthus' fickle but exciting desirability. He is presented, fittingly, with an antimasque of fools, apes and a shepherd, who offer poems to the Emperor and his royal companions.⁶⁴ The epistolary message promises hope in love, which Amphilanthus finds cheering:

entertaining hope gave the Emperour[']s dispairing hart, a little comfort, like a glorious butt setting farewell of the sun.

(fol. 28 ii)

Still, Wroth emphasises the insubstantial nature of the Emperor's constancy in love by comparing him to that symbol of mutability, the moon:

w^t this twy-light of hope Amphilanthus was as much pleased for a while as the Moone is to play w^t her owne shadow in the water[.] butt soone she is weary and soone had hee new sentiments, that thes were butt moone shine thoughts, ore (as hee never so old bee w^t-out hope) the time was nott yett come; Thus they all retired till supper.

(fol. 28 iii)

The motif of twilight is repeated both lexically and in the metaphor of the setting and rising sun, yet Amphilanthus' response is very different to that of Pamphilia. He sees the prospect of change as a continual promise of hope, and throughout the narrative he remains within the construction of a pleasant and optimistic assertion of self. His personal will and desire become paramount in his formulation as a masculine subject—hedonistic, self-centred and politically expedient.

In Urania the masque acts as a sign of personal pleasure and political success which is simultaneously compelling and mutable. The three characters to whom these entertainments are presented offer up gender-specific responses which are applicable to the Jacobean court as well as within the confines of the narrative. Rodomandro signifies the conventional ideology with a reassertion of masculinity, royalty and public show. There is no recognition of the possible tensions endemic in a masque performance. Amphilanthus suggests another dominant masculine response, but one which is located in pleasure rather than virtue. Nevertheless, his belief in his own unassailable noble and essentially masculine subject role makes change challenging, not threatening. Both men perceive the masque as an imaginative extension of their own unquestioned and unquestioning position. For them it acts, as Dollimore suggests, as ‘a ritualized ideological legitimation of the court’. Pamphilia's response to her masque is different. In itself, the narrative focuses upon powerful women—the Queen, the sage enchantress and the seductive mermaid—but it also carries a weighty narrative purpose in that it changes the direction Pamphilia will take in her choice between personal and public identities, between love as desire and love as duty, and between Amphilanthus and Rodomandro. For women, then, the masque has a potent significance which allows them active and independent involvement in the court world. It opens up a valid political purpose, and Urania's genre and authorship, as befits a roman à clef, conform to this juxtaposing of women and politics. Still, the masque is transient, like the female voice it empowers, and indeed when Pamphilia recognises its limitations she sadly accepts the renewed conformity of her gendered role and the twilight nature of a feminised masque discourse. Female involvement in the political world was as fragile as the masque form which conveyed it; and for women like Pamphilia—Wroth, Lucy Countess of Bedford and Queen Anne—it appeared to offer only loss and a renewed containment.

VI

The interpretation of the masque form which has come to be accepted over the last twenty years suggests that it reinforces the dominant hierarchy of the power it encodes: monarch over subject, King over Queen, parent over child, man over woman, and the conservation of order over the usurping forces of chaos.⁶⁵ Although it permits inversions of this authority—the allowed subversions of hags, blackened faces and gender conflations—each time the threat is circumscribed, allowing a triumphant re-emergence of the accepted ideologies. In order for this hypothesis to be sustained, however, a basic synchronic structure has to be projected, so that the masque becomes understandable only within the double-bind of thematic dialecticism and chronological cross-sectioning. Yet it is clear that the genre draws upon diachronic material, more evocative of myth, as well as other diverse cultural discourses such as carnival, mommerie, the grotesque and misrule. Rather than privileging a hierarchy of neatly alignable pairs, each mirroring the other, we are instead presented with a mass of conflicting asymmetrical lines of power. These forces may intersect, but they can hardly be said to determine each other's existence through a mutually closeting refraction.

It sheds further light on these matters to extend the argument for a feminised masque discourse by recalling one of the interpretations of ‘The Queen's Masque’—a masque written by a Queen. As I suggested earlier, there was such a composition: ‘Queen Henrietta's Masque’ (1626).⁶⁶ Together with Henrietta's other involvements in court performances, this work elicited the by-now-familiar litany of praise/outrage. For Salvetti, a foreign ambassador, it was ‘a beautiful pastoral of her own composition’, while the Stuart nobleman Henry Manners wrote:

I heare no much honor of the Queene's maske, for, if they were not all, soome were in men's apparell.⁶⁷

Indeed, Henrietta's appearance in William Montagu's The Shepherd's Paradise (1633) provoked William Prynne's infamous attack against actresses:

S. Paul prohibites women to speake publikely in the Church. … And dare then any Christian women be so more then whorishly impudent, as to act, to speake publikely on a Stage (perchance in mans apparell), and cut haire, here proved sinfull and abominable) in the presence of sundry-men and women?⁶⁸

Prynne was voicing the public's growing discontent with the monarchy and succeeding in relocating Henrietta's feminised masque discourse in an explosive political arena. Wroth's bleak intuitions of instability proved surprisingly prophetic, for the Stuart Queen's masques, ironically and unconsciously, became part of the twilight of the court's dominance.

By allowing our gaze to dwell, momentarily, beyond the perimeter of the essay—that is, the Jacobean court—it becomes possible to envision the feminised masque discourse in yet another fashion. In the 1630s it provided a persistent—although at times invisible—thread of subversive power, which was woven, together with the other potent forces for change, into the destructive web of revolution. None the less this must, for the time being, remain a shadowed glimpse. The explicit focus has been the multiple diagrammatical formulations—of contained subversion or triumphant misrule—in the masques of Queen Anne and Lady Mary Wroth. As either twentieth-century readers or earlier spectators, these diverse elements draw us in through their unceasing mutability and their evocation of twilight worlds. What Wroth offers us is not simply one gendered response, but several—a reaffirmation of order, a pleasure in novelty, the fear of change. The ‘Queen’ and her ‘masque’ manoeuvred in a constantly shifting field of play, waiting for that one moment of incandescent ignition when they met. Then, like the playgoer of today who peers in the gloom of the auditorium in order to see her or his watch, they focused upon that ‘phantastique’ gleam—not because they wished to preempt the conclusion, but because they could hardly bear the pleasure of the show to end.

Notes

1. Carleton, ‘The Masque of Blackness’, in C.H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds, Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), vol. X, p. 448. Further references to the ‘Queen's masque’ may be found in Herford and Simpson's notes to ‘Blackness’, where they comment—revealingly—of ‘Beauty’ that ‘the fiction that the Queene was “authoress of the whole” masque was well kept up’ (p. 457).

2. Jonson, vol. VII, p. 164-9.

3. Ibid., vol. X, p. 457.

4. Ibid., vol. VII, p. 168.

5. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 164-5.

6. Jonson, vol. VII, pp. 277-317.

7. Ibid., vol. VII, p. 303. For Lucy Countess of Bedford, see Pearl Hogrefe, Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975), pp. 138-9; Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Lucy Countess of Bedford: Images of a Jacobean courtier and patroness’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds, Politics of Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 52-77; and J.H. Wiffen, Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell (London: Longman, 1833), vol. II, pp. 63-123. For Lady Anne Clifford, see V. Sackville-West, ed., The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford (London: Heinemann, 1923) and Retha M. Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 75. On Alice Countess of Derby, see William Rees-Mogg, ‘A poor player, a proud patroness and a library in California’, The Independent, 26 April 1988; and James Knowles, ‘WS MS’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 May 1988.

8. This argument is given ample coverage by Suzanne Gossett, ‘“Man-maid, begone!”: Women in masques’, English Literary Renaissance, 18 (1988), pp. 96-113.

9. A more detailed discussion of bibliographical evidence may be found in Notes 38-9 and 66; an undisputed reference to Henrietta Maria's masque may be found in Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama (New York: MLA Publications, 1936), pp. 10-21.

10. Lady Mary Wroth, The Countesse of Montgomery's Urania, Part i (London: John Marriott and John Grismand, 1621) and Part ii (Newberry M.S. fy1565 w95).

11. Gordon Kipling, The Triumph of Honour (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1977).

12. Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 26-32; Sidney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

13. David M. Bergeron, ‘Women as patrons of English Renaissance drama’, in Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel, eds, Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981) pp. 274-90.

14. Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, passim; Lindley, The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 13.

15. Enid Welsford, The Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), pp. 184-6.

16. Jonson, vol. VII, p. 282.

17. For example, Jonson's own masque ‘Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue’ (1618), ibid., vol. VII, pp. 473-91, and theorised by Philip Sidney in A Defence of Poetry (c. 1579-80) in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten, eds, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 99.

18. Percy Simpson and C.F. Bell, eds, Designs of Inigo Jones For Masques and Plays at Court (Oxford: The University Press, 1924), Plate XLIII.

19. Jonson, vol. VII, p. 301.

20. Ibid., vol. VII, pp. 304-5.

21. Ibid., vol. VII, p. 305. For a discussion of James I's attitude to women, see Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 81; and Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Fatherly authority: The politics of Stuart family images’, in M. Ferguson, M. Quilligan and N. Vickers, eds, Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 3-32.

22. Gossett, ‘“Man-maid, begone!”’, p. 99.

23. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 26-7.

24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, transl. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 48.

25. It is significant that in his annotation—conducted not under the orders of the Queen, but rather at the instigation of Prince Henry—Jonson endows Zenobia and Hypsicratea with more traditional feminine qualities: Jonson, vol. VII, pp. 309, 311.

26. Ibid., vol.X, p. 499.

27. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Masques and Triumphs’, in Michael Kiernan, ed., The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 117-18.

28. Quoted in Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers in Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 115. For a more complex treatment of the royal factions at the Jacobean court, see Leeds Barroll, ‘A new history for Shakespeare and his time’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), pp. 441-64.

29. Jonson, vol. X, pp. 448-9. For the general condemnation of women in court masques, see also Sir John Harington in H. Harington, ed., Nugæ Antiquæ (London: Vernor & Hood, Poultry and Cuthell & Martin, 1804), pp. 349-52.

30. Simpson and Bell, eds, Designs by Inigo Jones, Plate I.

31. Edward Hall, Chronicle (London: J. Johnson, 1809), p. 514. The Chronicle was certainly known at the time, since Shakespeare uses one of the masque sequences described by Hall as the source for a scene in King Henry the Eighth (1613), i. iv. 53-108, which corresponds to Hall, p. 719.

32. Welsford, The Court Masque, pp. 81-115.

33. Ibid., pp. 20, 30-41; Richard Huizinga, Homo Ludens (London: Routledge, 1949), pp. 13, 56-8.

34. Welsford, The Court Masque, pp. 19-22; Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 59-60, 80; Elliot Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama 1550-1688 (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1982), pp. 54-5.

35. Welsford, The Court Masque, pp. 38-40; Harleian MS. 247.

36. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1988), p. 52.

37. Jonson, vol. vii, p. 169.

38. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 10.

39. Nancy Cotton, Women Playwrights in England c. 1363-1750 (London: Associated University Presses, 1980), which lists women acting as well as writing; for Henrietta Maria, see p. 37. I am also indebted to Sophie Tomlinson, a doctoral student at Cambridge, who gave a paper on this topic at a conference on ‘Feminism and New Historicism’ at Cambridge in the summer of 1988. See also Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), pp. 418-39.

40. Shirley Ardener, Defining Females, The Nature of Women in Society (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 21.

41. See above, Note 13. The mutual benefits, to the patron and the author, of the patronage system, and the political implications of this relationship, is discussed in Robert C. Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989), pp. 31-88.

42. See above, Note 7.

43. Wiffen, Historical Memoirs, pp. 74-84.

44. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: Antonie (1590: a translation of Garnier) and Thenot and Piers in Praise of Astraea (1592) in Cotton, Women Playwrights, p. 15. Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland: The Tragedie of Mariam (London: Thomas Creede for Richard Hawkins, 1613); see also David Lunn, Elizabeth Cary (Ilford: The Royal Stuart Society, 1977) and Cotton, Women Playwrights, p. 15. Margaret Cavendish: ‘The Claspe’, in Poems and Fancies, a facsimile of the 1653 edition (Yorkshire, Scholar Press, 1972), pp. 155-60.

45. Lady Mary Wroth (1587-c. 1651-3): the biographical information comes from the few available criticisms on Wroth: Hannah Witten, ‘Lady Mary Wroth's Urania: The work and the tradition’ (unpublished PhD thesis, at University of Auckland, December 1978); Mary Nelson Paulissen, ed., The Love Sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1982); Josephine Roberts, ed., The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve. Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 208-43. For the most recent investigative material I am grateful to Josephine Roberts for conversations and preliminary notes—Roberts is, at present, editing Urania Part ii—and to Mary Beth Rose, of the Newberry Library, for her generous assistance.

    There are three probable pictures of Wroth, all at Penshurst. Two of them may be seen in reproduction: (1) Barbara Gamage, Countess of Leicester, and her children (1596) by Marcus Gheeraerts; and (2) Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (c. 1620), attributed to John De Critz. Both are in Roy Strong, The English Icon (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), Plates 254 and 263.

46. Pamphilia and Amphilanthus in Roberts, The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Urania Parts i and ii, Love's Victorie (Huntington MS. HM 600 f5); an edited version of the play is now available: Michael Brennan, ed., Lady Mary Wroth's Love's Victory, The Penshurst Manuscript (London: The Roxburghe Club, 1989). Only 250 copies were made, and the cost is a somewhat prohibitive £160.

47. Norman McClure, ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), p. 519, also Beilin, Redeeming Eve, p. 209.

48. Sidney, in Jean Robertson, ed., The Old Arcadia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 26-7. Spenser, in A.C. Hamilton, The Faerie Queene (London: Longman, 1977), Book iii. Ariosto, in Barbara Reynolds, transl. and ed., Orlando Furioso, i, 68-70 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).

49. Beilin, Redeeming Eve, pp. 211, 217, 228.

50. Ann Barton, ‘Harking back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline nostalgia’, English Literary History, 48 (1981), p. 715.

51. Josephine Roberts, ‘An unpublished literary quarrel concerning the suppression of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (1621)’, Notes & Queries, 222 (1977), pp. 532-5; Paul Salzman, ‘Contemporary references in Mary Wroth's Urania’, Review of English Studies, 29 (1978), pp. 178-81; Beilin, Redeeming Eve, p. 211.

52. John Barclay, Argenis (Oxford: John Lichfield, 1634); this later edition also contains the clavis.

53. The MS. poem is at the Hallward Library, the University of Nottingham (Cl. Lm. 85/3). I should like to acknowledge the University of Nottingham Library and Colonel P.T. Clifton, the owner of the MS., for allowing me to quote the first line of the poem.

54. Letters of John Chamberlain, p. 427.

55. Thomas Campion, in Walter R. Davis, ed., The Works of Thomas Campion (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), pp. 203-30. Wroth depicts the masque in Urania i, p. 438.

56. Wroth, Urania i, p. 439.

57. Ibid., pp. 242, 478.

58. Ibid., p. 242.

59. Wroth, Urania ii, fols 37-8; 48.

60. Fol. 7 iv; all ensuing references to Urania ii will be made in the text.

61. Jonson, vol. VII, p. 282.

62. Loathly ladies are common in medieval romances, for example in Chaucer's ‘Wife of Bath's Tale’ in F.N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 84-8. The Renaissance romance epic adopted and remodelled the figures as enchantresses—for example, Melissa in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Urganda in Edwin B. Place and Herbert C. Behm, transl. and ed, Amadis de Gaul (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974).

63. The use of veiling was a common device in Renaissance texts—for example in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, iv. x. 41, and in Sidney's A Defence of Poetry, p. 103. The device is given a more contemporary treatment by Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

64. This recalls Sidney, ‘Certain Sonnets 28’, in William A. Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 157-8.

65. Ben Jonson's masque ‘Prince Oberon’ (Jonson, vol. VII, pp. 336-56), participates in the dissent between father and son as it was politically, and contentiously, enacted by James I and Prince Henry.

66. Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama (New York: MLA Publications, 1936), pp. 10-21; Cotton, Women Playwrights, p. 37; Mary Prior, Women in English Society 1500-1800 (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 247; W.R. Streitberger, ed., Jacobean and Court Revels Accounts (Oxford: Malone Society, 1986), pp. 119-22; Tomlinson: see Note 39.

67. The quotations from Salvetti and Manners may be found in Harbage, Cavalier Drama, p. 12.

68. Montagu, The Shepherd's Paradise; Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London: Printed by E.A. and W.I. for Michael Sparke, 1633), in Table under ‘Women-Actors’.