SOURCE: “‘Man-maid, begone!’: Women in Masque,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 96-113.

[In the following essay, Gossett explores the role of women in the masque, arguing that the views of royalty had a profound influence on how women were portrayed.]

The distance between an actor and the person he represents varies throughout theatrical history. At some times the relation is close: the actor is typecast or methodically lives the part. At other times the relation is remote. Brecht urged his actors not to identify with their roles; Greek actors wore masks. On the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage potentially different relations existed simultaneously. The theaters of the time employed all male casts, with boys taking the roles of women. Therefore Kemp may have been a “real” clown, or Burbage a convincing Hamlet, but the boys could only be women according to an understood convention. The audience was expected to ignore defects in their presentation—Cleopatra does not want to be played by a squeaking boy—and to supply the necessary imaginative effort to dissociate the part from the player. Occasionally, as in Shakespeare's comedies, the dramatist would make a series of jokes based on the sex disguise, jokes which assumed that on one level the audience knew all along that Rosalind, for example, was “really” a boy. Usually, however, the plays did not encourage conscious comparison between the actor, man or boy, and his part.¹ The boy-player-queen and the man-player-king existed in the same fictive realm; their personal identity and their physical sex were irrelevant.

In Jacobean and Caroline masques, however, the conventions governing audience response were more complex. The performance of a masque regularly required two different kinds of audience consciousness, one for the professional singers, speakers, or antimasquers whose personal identities were to be ignored, and one for the masquers, recognition of whose identity was central to the meaning of the masque. The audience was asked to perform a kind of mental gymnastics, finding “the relationship between the reality and the symbol, the impersonators and the impersonation … of crucial importance” for the masquers, while keeping in mind that should the professional actor remove his disguise the revelation would be “trivial.”² The presence of women masquers, including Queens Anne and Henrietta Maria, called for particular awareness of this distinction, since it meant that there might be both women and men taking the roles of women within the same performance. Any misplaced audience interest in the person behind the role could injure the total effect: one must recognize that the queen is playing Bel-Anna, and one must ignore any ridiculous overtones created by the boy playing the moon goddess. The normal stage solution, of treating the whole as a consistent illusion, was not possible.

During the Elizabethan and Jacobean period the audience received fairly consistent signals aiding them in interpreting the presence of women. Real women participated only as silent dancing masquers, thus forming primarily a physical contrast to the disguised men, especially the antimasquers who, like the female masquers, usually danced. Such a contrast was present even in the masques with male masquers, since every masque ended with mixed dancing in the revels and hence drew in real women. During the Caroline period, however, two significant innovations exacerbated the inherent difficulties. First of all, by 1632 women's voices had been heard on the masque stage. Once women were actively involved throughout the performance, comparisons would more naturally arise between the female singers or masquers and the men speaking or singing the roles of personified female abstractions or goddesses. In addition, as Charles' reign continued, courtiers were scattered throughout the performances, instead of appearing only as masquers. Eventually they took speaking or dancing parts previously reserved for professional performers. The dual consciousness implicitly demanded by the earlier masques broke down. It became reasonable, or even necessary, for an audience to consider the identity, including the sex, of all participants in a masque.

The treatment of women in masques can best be traced in the queens' masques of the Jacobean and Caroline period. This is the period when the masque, in the hands of Ben Jonson and a few other poets, and with the significant collaboration of Inigo Jones, developed into a complex literary and spectacular form. Its effects depended partly upon audience acceptance of its governing conventions. Yet from the comments on the decorum of Anne's and Henrietta Maria's early masques, from the ambivalent literary treatment of both queens, from the incidental commentary on women, and from the renewed experimentation in the late Caroline masques, it appears that neither poets nor audience could always make the necessary dissociations between actor and part, or adjust to having real women on the stage. The most notorious objection to women acting, Prynne's Histriomastix (1633), was just one of a number of possible responses to the innovation; the masques themselves constitute a more interesting commentary on the new developments.

Anne's earliest dramatic offenses arose from the decorum, or indecorum, of her costuming. Dudley Carleton's comments are instructive. In Anne's first masque, Samuel Daniel's Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604), she played Pallas in a costume which differed from those of the other ladies: “Only Pallas … had a trick by herself, for her clothes were not so much below the knee that we might see a woman had both feet and legs which I never knew before.”³ Carleton no doubt understood that “allegory, symbol and myth are the substance of masques,”⁴ but he chose to react instead to the physical presence of a female in the masque. He ignored the appropriateness of the costume to Pallas in observing its inappropriateness to Anne.

Carleton was even more horrified by the queen's appearance a year later in Jonson's first masque, The Masque of Blackness. At Anne's own suggestion the women were disguised as blackamoors:

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. … [The Spanish Ambassador danced with] the queen, and forgot not to kiss her Hand, though there was Danger it would have left a Mark on his Lips.⁵

Carleton could pretend to stupidity when he wished: for instance, he refused to see more than a “great Engine” in the scenery of The Masque of Blackness (I, 89). Nevertheless no parallel objections exist to the parts or costuming of the princes in James' reign, or later of King Charles himself.

Reaction to these two masques was educational for Anne, who apparently learned that her costume could not even temporarily demean her royal dignity. Thereafter she took parts which effectively eliminated any discrepancy between her historical and dramatic roles: Bel-Anna, Tethys, the Queen of the Orient. Blackness was also educational for Jonson. If the queen could not appear briefly as a figure requiring improvement or transcendence, then transformation would have to involve two groups of characters, masquers and antimasquers. The reaction to The Masque of Blackness partly explains the necessity for the two-part form: it also suggests why Jonson's first real venture into that form is The Masque of Queens.⁶

Even as it initiates the clear division between masque and antimasque, The Masque of Queens also neatly reveals Jonson's own divided feelings about women. Again Jonson gives Anne partial directorial credit, this time for shaping the masque into its two-part form: “her majesty … commanded me to think on some dance or show that might precede hers and have the place of a foil or false masque” (I, 132). From this point on women in masques must be either true or false, queens or hags. The new method called for men or boy actors to play female roles in the antimasques, embodying the distorted vision of women, and for aristocratic women to play the masquers. The message conveyed to the audience is that “real women” are, or should be, like the masquers. Jonson's allegory was thus supported by the sex discrepancy between the boys and the female masquers. If the audience were to glance behind the fiction to the players' reality in both parts rather than just in the masque proper, the meaning of the masque would only be reinforced.

Jonson's attitude toward women, an ambivalence verging on antipathy, is evident in the structure and commentary of his masques from Blackness on.⁷ Surface compliment in the early queens' masques only slightly conceals fear and dislike of women. In Blackness the audience sees that the black daughters of Niger are ugly, petulant, and frivolous, “as women always are.” Despite the sun's fervent love, which “shows / That in their black the perfect'st beauty grows” the women are “as women are / Most jealous of their beauties,” and unreasonable: they have “a settled thought / As women's are” (I, 91). The confirmation of their desires by Aetheopia, the moon goddess, is not reassuring, since the moon itself is traditionally identified with women, instability, and lunacy. The recurrent phrase, “as women are,” suggests that women are an unchanging, possibly unteachable, essence.

Jonson is compelled by his allegory to transform the black daughters for The Masque of Beautie, but even there the structure denigrates their new perfection. Repeatedly criticism of the women precedes excuse. For instance, they are accused of “coarse and most unfit neglect,” for not coming at their appointed time two years earlier (I, 93). This, Boreas explains, was not their fault but caused by envious, and female, Night. The women are potentially dangerous: “say the dames should, with their eyes, / Upon the hearts here mean surprise, / Were not the men like harmed?” Yet here, “no such deceit is mixed” (I, 96). Finally Jonson audaciously raises the accusation:

Had those that dwell in error foul,
And hold that women have no soul,
But seen these move, they would have then
Said women were the souls of men.

(I, 96)

The last line refutes the error, but even to suggest in a queen's masque that women have no souls is astonishing. And the reply, while it passes in the song and the rhyme, does not assert that women have souls. The compliment is addressed to the men, who aspire neoplatonically. The women are without separate identities.

Even in The Masque of Queens, where male actors emphasize the symbolic distance between the antimasque witches and the masque queens, Jonson did not present the queens as the active agents he knew they were. His new formula idealized the masquers but also made them passive. A comparison of Jonson's notes about the queens to what the spectators saw is instructive. Inigo Jones' designs and Jonson's poetry give little hint that many of these women were historically or traditionally powerful, dangerous, even masculine. The only suggestions are Heroic Virtue's references to Penthesilea as “the brave Amazon,” whom Jones shows with a sword (I, 140); to “Victorious Thomyrsis,” whom he shows with a scepter (I, 143); and to “the wise and warlike Goth, Amalasunta,” for whom no design survives unless it is the very feminine figure of the unidentified queen (I, 153). But in the commentary which Jonson wrote at Prince Henry's request and published in the quarto he tells the reader that Camilla led “a squadron of horse … a virgin warrior”; that of Artemisia, Xerxes wrote, “men have shown themselves to me women, yet women have shown themselves men”; that Hypsicratea was assistant to her husband “in all labours and hazards of the war, in a masculine habit,” and therefore cut her hair; that Bonduca “managed the whole war, and [her] mind was a man's rather than a woman's”; and that the Bohemian queen Valasca “to redeem herself and her sex from the tyranny of men which they lived in under Primislaus, on a night and an hour appointed led on the women to the slaughter of their barbarous husbands and lords … [and] lived many years after with the liberty and fortitude of Amazons” (I, 136-37).

Jonson is at pains to suppress these attributes on the stage for two reasons. First, the presence of the male actors representing the hags required a contrasting emphasis on the more delicate femininity of the “real” female masquers—in this masque, to be too masculine could mean to be male. Second, The Masque of Queens is an allegory which strips the actual queen of political significance, depicting her, quite accurately, in the dependent position of a consort-queen. The witches are chased away by “Fame's loud sound and Virtue's sight,” that is, by the appearance of the House of Fame in which sit the Queens, and by the descent of Perseus, “expressing heroic and masculine virtue.” Perseus is the active agent. He is the father of fame, whose house is built of “Men-making poets, and those well made men / Whose strife it was to have the happiest pen / Renown them to an after-life,” that is, the heroes Achilles, Aeneas, and Caesar. Perseus represents King James, whose fame rested in part on his poetry; Bel-Anna is only a reflection of his masculine virtue. “Far from self-love, as humbling all her worth / To him that gave it,” from him she passively receives “the lustre of her merit” (I, 135). It is true that masques conventionally turn their compliments to the king, but, by contast, in the nearly contemporary Oberon, The Fairy Prince, the prince is directly praised, “the height of all our race” (I, 207), who will be the heir “to Arthur's crowns and chair” (I, 209). In the Masque of Queens Bel-Anna has no individual merit except as a projection of James. Thus Jonson has succeeded in reducing the significance both of the power-wielding queens like Bonduca and of the ceremonial queen Anne, even while praising them.

This pattern is repeated in Love Freed From Ignorance and Folly, where the antimasque is she-fools (played by men) and the masquers are daughters of the morn who are freed from the Sphinx when Love, not they, solves the Sphinx's riddle by looking in the king's face. In The Lord's Masque, Campion follows Jonson's lead. This was not a queen's masque but was offered by eight lords and eight ladies at the Princess Elizabeth's marriage. Presented by Mania, who is ugly like the Sphinx in Love Freed, the antimasquers are twelve frantics, six men and six women. These were, of course, all played by male dancers. Campion specifies five of the six male frantics: “the lover, the self-lover, the melancholic man … the schoolman … the over-watched usurer” (I, 243). The undifferentiated women make up the rest of the “medley of madness,” presumably resembling the she-fools in Love Freed and gathering impact in performance from the sex disguise. The allegory of the main masque accentuates ideal female passivity in contrast both to the men and to the antimasquers. The male masquers are stars who become “men fit for wars”; the female masquers are statues, made by Prometheus and twice transformed until they become “women fit for love” (I, 245).

The remaining years of James' reign saw no more queen's masques or masques for women. As a result, Jonson avoided the complications of having male and female “women” in the same fiction. He wrote either masques with no female parts at all (for instance Love Restored, The Irish Masque, News from the New World, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue) or masques with comic antimasques whose female characters might have been imported from the London stage. Among these are the deaf tire woman in Christmas his Masque, the Welshwomen in For the Honor of Wales, the wenches in Gypsies Metamorphosed, the Lady Alewife and two women in The Masque of Augurs, the “laced mutton” and poulterer's wife in Neptune's Triumph, and Eleanor Rumming, Mary Ambree, and Long Meg in The Fortunate Isles. These women occasionally have a line or two; frequently they only dance. The emphasis is on their comic or ridiculous qualities, which male dancers would have accentuated.

That Jonson nonetheless found the issue of sex disguise both persistent and annoying we can infer from the debate between Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy and the puppet Dionysius at the end of Bartholomew Fair. By 1614 Jonson had completed all of his masques for Queen Anne. He had recently written Epicoene, which can be interpreted as a self-referential theatrical statement that it is possible for a boy to pass convincingly as a woman. In Bartholomew Fair the puppet's response to the Puritan's “old stale argument against the Players” that “the Male among you, putteth on the apparell of the Female, and the Female of the Male” is to take up his garment and show that “we haue neyther Male nor Female amongst vs.”⁸ While a perfect gesture of contempt and a proper reductio ad absurdum of Busy's complaints, the response is false when applied to the masque stage. In his comedy Jonson can argue for the primacy of the dramatic illusion and the irrelevance of the players. In masques, however, the “players” contain the central meaning of the performance. Furthermore, the frequent attention to the proper behavior of women traceable in the queen's masques requires the audience to recognize and separate the male and female performers, not to confound them. Although the problem became dormant for the remainder of the Jacobean period, it revived as soon as Charles came to the throne. From then on questions of women as performers and of “woman” as idea persisted on the masque stage until the masquing itself stopped because the Puritans' “old stale arguments” prevailed.

Jacobean methods for the inclusion of women in masques proved inadequate to the new queen, Henrietta Maria. Only fifteen when she arrived in England, she was a fun-loving adolescent with the habits of the Catholic French court. Her problems were similar to Anne's but more intense: her ideas of decorum caused scandal, her notions of appropriate masquing roles for men and women courtiers broke down the traditional divisions of awareness which separated masque from antimasque, and the fad for Platonic love which she encouraged made the symbolism of the later masques extreme and occasionally incoherent. The greatly increased importance of the queen at court meant that women had to be taken seriously; this very importance was one cause of the notorious political controversy which her acting eventually provoked. It is no wonder that the final masque in which both she and the king danced has been taken as a symbol of the entire Caroline court.⁹

Henrietta Maria began her English dramatic career by presenting a pastoral which she had seen at the French court seven years earlier. She and her ladies took all the parts. Although the performance was “conducted as privately as possible,” it gave offense on two counts of decorum: the Venetian report says “the English objected to the first part … being declaimed by the queen,” and Chamberlain wrote to Carleton that the queen “herself acted a part, and some of the rest were disguised like men with beards” (I, 384-85). Henrietta, who was used to actresses, apparently assumed that if the English accepted men dressed as women on the public stage, they would not object to women dressed as men in a private presentation.

She appeared equally oblivious of violating class distinctions in the court performances of the next year. Although the masque of November, 1626 is lost, we know that it was danced by the queen and ten ladies, and that the antimasque, based on Rabelais, featured the tall porter (a court notable) as Gargantua, being instructed by the Duke of Buckingham as a fencing master, the Earl of Holland as a school master, and George Goring as a dancing master. Predictably there were private protests: “His grace [i.e., Buckingham] took a shape … which many thought too histrionical to become him … never before then did any privy counsellor appear in a masque.”¹⁰

For Henrietta Maria performing was a game; at this point in her life she did not worry much about allegorical significance. She was more concerned with amusing herself, and possibly with maintaining an appropriate distance between the queen and professional actors, than she was with the symbolic coherence of the performances. She and Buckingham, defying expectations of decorum by casting great lords in the antimasque, either did not notice or did not care that such casting violated the two levels of consciousness which had previously organized the masque. If the Duke is to be recognized in the antimasque—and what is the fun if he isn't—then the audience is alerted to consider the identity of all the players. No clear literary separation tells the spectators when to accept the illusion and when to look behind it for a meaningful relation of actor and part. As a result the audience becomes actively, rather than subconsciously, aware of the sex disguises. (The antimasque in 1626 included “double women,” matrons, nurses, and Gargamella, Gargantua's mother.) Soon this innovation became common; courtiers began playing a variety of parts, including comic or even repugnant ones such as furies. Once again, masque writers were compelled to adapt their styles to royal whim.

Jonson was first called upon to write for the new king and queen in 1631. There had been only one masque, now lost, since the offending performance of 1626.¹¹ By 1631 the marriage of Henrietta Maria and Charles was firmly cemented: Buckingham was dead and the queen was her husband's closest friend. Jonson's masques show his attempt to adjust to the very different relations between this king and queen and the preceding pair. For the first time he allows a masque for male masquers to move towards a central female focus. In Love's Triumph Through Callipolis Charles, representing heroic love, presents his triumph to “the queen of what is wonder in the place! / Pure object of heroic love alone!” (I, 406). Although the queen, representing beauty, does nothing, she is allegorically more significant than Anne had been in her own masques. Henrietta's presence is essential to complete the “mysterial” union of Beauty and Love, rose and lily, Mary and Charles with which the masque ends. Otherwise Jonson uses the divisions of his earlier masques: the audience is required only to recognize the king and his companion lovers and can ignore the personal identity of the depraved lovers of the antimasque and the gods and goddesses of the remainder, most or all of which was sung.¹² So far no conflict arises between the implied new attitude toward women and the casting.

Chloridia proved more intractable. All of Jonson's masques for Queen Anne had emphasized the passivity of the queen and her ladies, and he had difficulty breaking with that pattern. In Chloridia the queen plays the nymph Chloris, who, once transformed into Flora, will enrich the earth with flowers. Yet Chloris is essentially decorative. Juno, goddess of marriage, is the real power. She can stop the havoc caused by Cupid, or love, in rebellion: “Here, by the providence of Juno, the tempest on an instant ceaseth” (II, 421). The flowers are “Preserved by the Hours / At Juno's soft command”; she employs Iris “to guard the Spring” (II, 421-22). Meanwhile “Chloris sits, a shining star / To crown and grace our jolly song” (II, 421). Jonson's motives were both practical and allegorical. Juno must speak, and therefore could not be played by the queen. (Although Henrietta recited in private pastorals, masquers were invariably silent). Additionally, attributing female power to the goddess of marriage was one way to emphasize that Henrietta Maria acquired her significance from her marriage to the king. Chloridia ends with a compliment to Henrietta Maria which with each succeeding line more closely confines her within her sexual identity as the king's wife:

Chloris the queen of flowers
The sweetness of all showers,
The ornament of bowers,
The top of paramours!

(II, 422)

In Chloridia the bi-polar opposition between male and female, antimasque and masque of Jonson's earlier queen's masques is complicated by the large number of female parts played by men. Some of these characters, such as Jealousy, Disdain, Fear, Dissimulation, and Tempest, come from Hell; masculine awkwardness in these parts would be appropriate. Others, however, like Spring, Juno, Iris, the Naiades, Fame, and Fame's four supports, Poesy, Architecture, Sculpture, and History, are from the world of the masque. Dressed as women, they would gain from femininity.¹³ The Naiades, who are identified as “the nymphs, fountains and servants of the season” (II, 420), dance. Nothing in the text inhibits the audience from contrasting the dance of the queen and her ladies, who are also called “nymphs” (II, 421), with the dance of these Naiades as well as with the absurd dances of the antimasquers. Yet the allegory would not be enhanced by a failure of the Naiades to be as feminine as the queen and her ladies. Audience response to the presence of the “real” and acted women is not sufficiently delimited by the masque itself, and the full implications of having so many female figures are not worked through.

For the conclusion of his masque Jonson recalled an earlier masque for a different queen. The Masque of Queens reached a climax in the appearance of Fama Bona from the machina versatilis, and Chloridia ends with the flight of Fame. But where Fame in The Masque of Queens was the daughter of Heroic and Masculine Virtue and central to the allegory, this section of Chloridia is merely recapitulation: “Who hath not heard of Chloris and her bower, / Fair Iris' act, employed by Juno's power” (II, 422). It is this part of the masque whose performance Jonson criticized in his “expostulation” with Jones. His lines spread contempt on Jones' machinery and on the female figures who, instead of the man-making poets of the Masque of Queens, accompanied Fame in Chloridia:

Th' ascent of Lady Fame which none could spy
Not they that sided her, Dame Poetry,
Dame History, Dame Architecture too,
And Goody Sculpture, brought wth much adoe
To hold her vp.(14)

Though Orgel defends the mythological coherence of Chloridia (I, 56-57), for Jonson himself the masque was not a success. The multiple antimasques based on the ballet de cour were foreign to his style, he broke with Jones over the title page attribution, and he complained that masques had become shows whose soul was “Painting & Carpentry.” The court had changed, the old formulas did not work. The next year the commission went to Aurelian Townshend.

Like Jonson, Townshend was to write a pair of masques, the first for the king at Twelfth Night, the second for the queen a month later. In the first, Albion's Triumph, he is groping for the form and closely imitates Jonson's Love's Triumph of the previous year. The triumph itself, the group of gods on the cloud (Jonson's “Constellation”), and the final compliment to Mary-Charles are all copied. The masque falls into sections with different kinds of performers for each part: singers for the gods, male or female; actors for Publius and Platonicus; dancers for the seven antimasques; and the king and his companions for the masquers. One change Townshend did make elevated the symbolic significance of the queen. Where in Love's Triumph the queen is passive, only “reflecting” the “lines of love” (I, 406-07), in Albion's Triumph she is Alba, goddess of the island. Albanactus is originally mortal. When he is “subdued to love and chastity by Cupid and Diana … they show him the Queen. The King yields, and presents himself a suppliant to the goddess Alba. She embraces him, and makes him co-partner of her deity” (II, 454).

Townshend also reflected the queen's interest in neo-platonism in the interlude between the patrician and the plebian, Platonicus and Publius. Platonicus, who has seen Albanactus Caesar “with the eyes of understanding,” represents the ideal courtier. Although there are some jokes at his expense (as there are jokes about the Platonic Persian youths in Davenant's Temple of Love three years later), it is Platonicus' way of thinking—the queen's way of thinking—which shapes the entire masque. In fact, Orgel calls Albion's Triumph “a Platonic fable about the creation of a sacred monarch” (I, 61).

Five weeks later, in Tempe Restored, the English court saw one of the most experimental masques of the period. It is not clear to whom we can attribute the innovations: “All the verses were written by Master Aurelian Townshend. The subject and allegory of the masque, with the descriptions and apparatus of the scenes, were invented by Inigo Jones” (I, 61-62).¹⁵ In the poetry of this masque the tensions generated by the new court attitudes towards casting and towards women finally rose to the literary surface.

Tempe Restored is about transformation, the central subject and action of most Jacobean and Caroline masques. Rarely had the complexities of the issue been so fully explored. The masque begins with the Fugitive Favorite, a young gentleman who was changed by Circe into a beast and now, restored to his former shape, is escaping from her. Circe is unable to recapture him because “it is consent that makes a perfect slave” and he has decided to “fly to virtue” (II, 480). The king of course represents this virtue, but the re-transformation has already occurred and is sustained by the favorite's will. For consolation, Circe is amused by the antimasquers, who are divided into “Indians and barbarians, who are naturally bestial, and others which are voluntaries, and but half transformed into beasts” (II, 481). Once again emphasis falls upon the function of the will in transformation; those half-transformed should be more grotesque than those naturally bestial. The attitude conveyed in this entire section is opposed to transformation.

Jones and Townshend underlined their point by the casting, which formed the natural climax to Henrietta Maria's theatrical experiments since her arrival in England. The young gentleman was played by twenty-year-old Thomas Killigrew, at this time a court page, and Circe was played by the first woman singer on the English stage, Madame Coniack. In other words, the court watched an action in which the major performers were not transformed by sex or class: in a sense they played themselves, as the masquers always had. All court gentlemen had to exercise their wills to overcome the temptations of female Circes. Even the actors who took the parts of the transformed and partially transformed antimasquers were in a sense representing the actor's art.

The next part of the masque continues the extraordinary emphasis on non-transformation. The antimasquers, according to the text, simply pass off the stage; presumably they are vanquished by the appearance of Harmony and the fourteen “influences” of the stars that are to come. Harmony was another woman singer, Mistress Shepherd, and the influences, who danced, were fourteen noble children, seven boys and seven girls. These were the literal as well as metaphorical “products” of the stars, Henrietta Maria's ladies. In the main masque, which follows, the queen, Divine Beauty, is surrounded by these ladies costumed as stars. Their descent is accompanied by the music of the spheres, sung by the court musicians. The allegory, in which Divine Beauty is attracted by Heroic Virtue, is transparent and conventional, merely reversing the allegory of Love's Triumph. Orgel examines Jones' use of lighting and machinery and concludes “the work makes its moral point far more significantly through Jones' engineering than through the action of Circe and her erstwhile lover” (I, 61). Indeed, the entire production might seem naïve and unself-conscious were it not for the final section. But this last conversation, between Cupid, Jupiter, Circe, and Pallas, instead signifies that the authors were aware of their innovations, and used them to further the meaning of their masque.

The appearance of a final group of singers after the main masque had become standard by 1632. Here Jupiter, Pallas, and Cupid consider what should be done with Circe.¹⁶ She has injured Cupid's subjects and usurped Jupiter's “soil”; these two want to torment her. Yet, as the allegory states, “Circe here signifies desire in general, the which hath power on all living creatures, and being mixed of the divine and the sensible, hath divers effects, leading some to virtue and others to vice” (II, 482). Transformation, in other words, can raise men up the Platonic ladder as well as reduce them to beasts. Circe, not entirely evil, cannot be condemned outright. She herself reminds her companions that “the gods more freedom did allow / When Jove turned Io to a cow.” Her example, chosen to equate her own actions with Jupiter's, ignores his condemnation of “the hecatombs she brings” which “scent of earth”; in the new world created by Divine Beauty and Heroic Virtue only the “pure incense” arising from virtue is acceptable. Irate at Circe's analogy, Pallas dismisses Jupiter's past errors: “Are mortal creatures grown so proud / To tax the sky for every cloud?” To her Circe indignantly replies, “Man-maid, begone!” (II, 482).

At this point in the masque—and in masque history—the casting and the masque subject intersect. Circe, who is a female singer, turns on the male singer dressed as a woman and condemns him/her for the very transformation which has been forbidden to Circe. Masque tradition gave uncertain directives about who should play Pallas. When Anne of Denmark took the role in Daniel's Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, her martial appearance exposed her to Carleton's contempt. In The Golden Age Restored the part was played by a professional actor from the King's Men. The goddess was a perfect locus for conflict between the attitudes frequently articulated in masques, attitudes extolling beautiful passivity in women, and the classical praise for the goddess' wisdom and martial prowess. In Tempe Restored Pallas is the only significant character who embodies a sex-transformation, and there is a kind of logic in Circe's attitude that she does not belong in the newly established “age of gold” if transformation is banished from it.

The masque is consistent in assuming that throughout the performance the audience might look behind the roles to see who the performers are. Influences, stars, and gentleman are all significantly related to their parts: even Nicholas Lanier, Master of the King's Music, performs as the “highest sphere.” Pallas' threat (“I could turn thee to a stone”) shows that she does not understand the character of this newly stable world. Circe knows better: she yields all she has to “this matchless pair,” Charles and Henrietta Maria. Although Jones' allegory requires that Circe “voluntarily deliver her golden rod to Minerva,” in Townshend's verses this does not happen. Pallas, like Circe, is corrected (Jupiter says, “Dear daughter, cease!”), and Cupid and Jupiter debate who has brought Circe to resign. Male and masculine Pallas is transcended in the final reconciliation.¹⁷

Townshend's point was apparently lost on Henrietta Maria. The very next year the queen and her ladies again performed at court, this time in Walter Montague's pastoral The Shepherd's Paradise. The queen herself played the Princess of Navarre, but some of her ladies played in “men's apparell,” as Prynne phrased it in Histriomastix. The outraged response accentuated the basic conflict between those who thought the person behind the performer was paramount and those who thought the players insignificant. For Prynne, women actors were always women (and notorious whores), and men actors playing women were compromising their masculinity. Tempe Restored had toyed with realistic casting, but under attack the masque retreated to its original position, that the whole was a perfect fiction except for the relation between the masquers and their roles. As far as we know, the experimental use of female singers was not repeated. Townshend's non-transformation was not suited to the court because the question it raised was indirectly related to such larger issues as the dispute between Puritans and Anglicans over the significance of ceremony and symbols; these issues could not be resolved within the confines of the stage.

The masques following Tempe Restored mix two possible methods of dealing with female roles or real women on the masque stage: an intense platonizing which implies that the sex of all performers is ultimately irrelevant, and the older technique which allows some of the comedy of the antimasques to come from the partially recognized sex disguise when men play women's roles. One last attempt to bring the masque up to date without modifying casting methods was The Temple of Love. Here Davenant took the dichotomous vision of women which had been constant in masques since The Masque of Queens and reworked it to fit the new Platonic mold. The queen and her ladies are the influences who will reestablish the temple of chaste love; they “raise strange doctrines and new sects of love, / Which must not woo or court the person, but / The mind” (II, 601). The magicians who oppose them attempt to hinder destiny by presenting antimasques of the elemental spirits. The female figures among these, such as “amorous women” or “witches,” had all been seen on the masque stage before and could all be recognizably men to add to their comic disorder. Indamora and her ladies have “all / That wise enamoured poets beauty call,” but they use their beauty to lead “unto the virtues of the mind.” The masque's implied ladder from the (male) unchaste women of the antimasque to the (female) chaste queen at the top simply ignores questions of the sex of the speaking or singing figures, Divine Poesy, “a beautiful woman,” “Sunesis a man of a noble aspect,” “Thelema a young woman,” and the group of ancient Greek poets including “Sappho (a poetess)” (II, 600-04). Davenant assumes that the audience has not been misled by masques like Tempe Restored into trying to identify anyone but the masquers.

An incidental difficulty of the Platonic sexless vision which Charles and Henrietta Maria came to prefer in their masques was that the royal couple nevertheless had to be praised for prolifically producing heirs to the English throne. The Temple of Love ends with a wish for the king and queen: “May youthful blessings still increase, / And in their offspring never cease” (II, 604), just as if the anti-Platonic magician had not said that Platonic lovers practice generation “not / Of bodies, but of souls” (II, 601). Luminalia, which gives the queen a disembodied role as “queen of brightness,” still admits:

Though men the blessed estate of angels praise
'Cause not perplexed with what we sexes call,
Yet you by such a human difference raise
Your virtue more because 'tis conjugal.

(II, 709)

In Luminalia and Salmacida Spolia, the last two masques in which the queen took part, growing incoherence prevented definitive answers to questions about woman's place in masques and about the relation between actor and character. Because the queen and her ladies were intensely platonized, little could be done to vary their roles: having been a queen of brightness in Luminalia, Henrietta became the “chief heroine” full of brightness in Salmacida Spolia. The use of courtiers throughout the masques increased: in Luminalia “most of the antimasques were presented by gentlemen of quality” (II, 707). Talent, rather than appropriateness, determined roles. No systematic comparison of performers to roles in these masques was possible, since the courtiers were haphazardly mixed with professionals. For example, in Luminalia one antimasque was described as follows:

A cavalier in a dream being enamoured of a beautiful gentlewoman seeks by his page to win her to his love, which she seems to entertain, but he coming near to court her, suddenly is turned into a fury, which much affrights them. Represented by the Earl of Antrim and Master Bartholomew de Mountaint, his page.

(II, 708)

The beautiful lady turned fury must have been a professional actor or dancer. Similarly, the female fury whose “breasts hung bagging down to her waist” who opens Salmacida Spolia was an actor; he/she was joined by three additional furies played by Mr. Charles Murray, Mr. Seymour, and Mr. Tartareau (II, 731).¹⁸ Only the queen, masqued as a heroine sent from heaven by Pallas, was to be identified with her role. But the ultimate sign of growing indifference to coherence is that the masque as performed had no indication of who sent the queen. Only a reader could follow the logic of the allegory.

The gradual disappearance of the neat formula which had differentiated masquers and antimasquers put the greatest strain on the women's parts. The complications, even absurdities, arising from having male and female “women” in one performance could be ignored so long as the audience received consistent signals for interpretation. Once these signals disappear, an entire range of possibilities emerges: professional male actors or singers may play women with no significance attached to the sex disguises, or according to the Jonsonian mode, the male performers may be used to reveal the falseness of the women they represent; courtiers may play women (William Murray, later the first Earl of Dysart, was the mistress of an old-fashioned Englishman, Mr. Ashton the wife of a country gentleman, Mr. Rimes the wife of a Dutchman, in Salmacida Spolia), in which case recognition of the actor seems called for but we don't know whether the actor's sex was trivial or part of the meaning; and finally the women may be represented by women singers, whose sex under the circumstances was itself very conspicuous. With its symbolic adjuration, “Man-maid, begone!” Tempe Restored is the climax of Caroline attempts to find a systematic method for including women. It was not only Puritan abhorrence of sex disguises but the internal logic of the masque itself which demanded changes. The line must have echoed in the ears of Killigrew and Davenant when they undertook to recreate English theatrical life in the Restoration.

The difficulty which masque writers had in presenting women in their masques, their uncertainty about the relationship between divine beauty and the wife of the jealous Dutchman, did not result exclusively from the internal theatrical situation. The writers lived in a world profoundly ambivalent about women. Although the political forms of patriarchy were still in place, family relationships were changing, rapidly for the middle class, more slowly for the aristocracy.¹⁹ For fifty years before the accession of James, England had been ruled by queens, and the polite lies about Queen Anne's importance to her husband were true in the case of Henrietta Maria and Charles I. Prynne's book reveals not only an abhorrence of sex disguises and of the stage, but a deep distrust of women themselves. He too would banish the man-maid, but offers no substitute; female actresses are as “abominable” and intolerable as male actors in female clothes. The masque, which is a codified expression of the values of society, could not continue to exist in a world prepared to take its disagreement over those values into civil war. Thus the tensions which had grown within the masques themselves merged with the general social malaise of the 1630s. By the time solutions were found, the masque in its Jacobean and Caroline form had ceased to exist.

Notes

1. Lisa Jardine notes that “the taking of female parts by boy players actually occasioned a good deal of contemporary comment, and created considerably moral uneasiness,” and argues that the appeal of the allusions to the boy players' actual sex was homoerotic. She suggests there was more awareness of the performers in comedy “where role-playing and disguise is part of the genre” than in tragedy, where “the willing suspension of disbelief does customarily extend … to the taking of the female parts by boy players.” Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex, Eng., 1983), pp. 9-36. For further discussion of these issues, see Phyllis Rackin, “The Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” PMLA 102 (1987), 29-41, which appeared after this article was completed.

2. Stephen Orgel, ed. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New Haven and London, 1969), p. 5; Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 118.

3. Samuel Daniel, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, ed. Joan Rees, in A Book of Masques in Honour of Alardyce Nicoll, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Cambridge, 1967), p. 41.

4. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (London and Berkeley, 1973), I, 11. All further citations from this work will be given in the text by volume and page. The text of the masques of Ben Jonson is that established by Orgel for the Yale Ben Jonson.

5. Orgel, ed. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, p. 4.

6. In The Gypsies Metamorphosed Jonson returned to the type of transformation he had attempted in Beautie and Blackness. The Duke of Buckingham and other noblemen were dyed brown with an ointment, and they reappeared changed at the end. This masque was King James' favorite and was performed three times. However, it was not produced at court, and Jonson never again tried this kind of transformation using women.

7. Anne Barton addresses the question of Jonson's changing treatment of women and notes that Mistress Fitzdottrel, in The Devil is an Ass (1616), is the “first woman in a Jonson comedy who can fairly be described as a heroine.” Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984), p. 224.

8. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1925-1952), VI, 135-36.

9. C. V. Wedgwood, “The Last Masque,” in Truth and Opinion (London, 1969), pp. 139-56.

10. Anonymous letter to the Rev. Joseph Mead (I, 389). The writer either had not heard of or ignored The Gypsies Metamorphosed. He also did not known that “at Salisbury, August 5, 1620, Buckingham spoke the lines of an Irish footman in an entertainment in which the Marquis Hamilton was a pirate and Sir William Fielding a Puritan.” Under James, however, such performances did not take place at court. Harbage traces the cavalier taste for private theatricals to Buckingham, noting “the tendency of the courtiers to appear in [interludes and masques] so conspicuously was the ostentation of a privileged clique, and was neither highly approved nor widely imitated” Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama (New York, 1936), p. 192.

11. Apparently there was a queen's masque performed, perhaps at Denmark House, in January, 1627; a king's masque for Shrovetide, 1628, seems to have been cancelled: see Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1941-1968), VII, 63, 66-67. In their Calendar of Masques Orgel and Strong indicate uncertainty about both of these masques (I, 86).

12. All of the sections are identified as sung except one poem of Amphitrite. Willa McClung Evans points out that “among the characters of the masque-world were four, sometimes five, allegorical personages, such as those forming the Constellation in Love's Triumph, making their entry for the final scene, seated on clouds, in chariots, or on spheres suspended in mid-air. Professional musicians played these parts.” Henry Lawes, Musician and Friend of Poets (New York, 1941), p. 60. It is difficult to determine whether the singing made the sex change more or less obvious.

13. The sexes can be determined from the text, from Jones' designs, especially those reprinted in Orgel and Strong, II, 437-38, and from Jonson's “Expostulacon wth Inigo Jones,” quoted below. Jones changed Fear from a male figure in his model, Vico's Pavor, into a female figure (II, 438).

14. Ben Jonson, VIII, 403.

15. Paul Reyher points out that much of the masque is borrowed—Reyher says plagiarized—from Beaujoyeulx's Ballet Comique de la Reine; Reyher objects both to the copying and to the changes that Townshend and Jones introduced. Les Masques Anglais (Paris, 1909), pp. 201-02.

16. This discussion has no parallel in the Ballet Comique, where Circe is instead first overcome by Jove's thunder and then escorted to the king by a silent Pallas.

17. The phrase “man-maid” for Pallas appears to be conventional. In The Forrest, 10, Jonson writes: “PALLAS, nor thee I call on, mankinde maid, / That, at thy birth, mad'st the poore Smith affraid, / Who, with his axe, thy fathers mid-wife plaid.” (Ben Jonson, VIII, 107) Jonson's poem first appeared in an appendix to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr in 1601. But in Tempe Restored the presence of the first female singers and the theme of transformation give the phrase a force particular to the context.

18. Some of the antimasquers in Luminalia and Salmacida Spolia are identified by Reyher, who notes that the first included more “hommes de qualité” and the second “des pages et des valets de la cour” (pp. 89-90).

19. Lawrence Stone dates the beginning of the shift from the open lineage family to the closed domesticated nuclear family to the period 1630-1640. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Abridged Edition (New York, 1979).