SOURCE: “The Masque and the Marvelous,” in Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous, University of Nebraska Press, 1997, pp. 99-129.

[In the following excerpt, Platt contrasts the rational literary aspects of the masque as embodied in Ben Jonson's work with the fantastic and visual qualities of Inigo Jones's contributions.]

To wonder first, and then to excellence,
By virtue of divine intelligence.

—Ben Jonson, Love's Triumph through Callipolis

An examination of the masque necessarily involves encountering staged versions of several conflicts treated in earlier chapters: reason and wonder, word and image, the naturalistic and the marvelous. By investigating wonder in the masque—and especially the tension between verbal and visual that unfolds—I explore from a slightly different angle the mutual dependence of politics and theater, statecraft and stagecraft, that has been covered relentlessly in recent criticism.¹ The very structure of the masque not only revealed wonder and epistemological confusion in the antimasque—the chaotic, discordant, wonderful first part of a masque—but also contained them in the resolutions of the transformation scene.² Formally, then, the masque seems to evince an Aristotelian movement from ignorance or uncertainty to knowledge, from evocation to dissipation of wonder.³ Such a structural principle allows the royal center both to inspire awe through spectacle and to reassure the spectators that, by the end, nothing is left unresolved. Furthermore, both movements exalt the king, for, as Jonathan Goldberg notes, “wonder … in masque after masque [occurs] when the poet's trope realizes itself in the movement to state.”⁴ The marvelous displays underscored royal magnificence and grandeur, which “could be symbolically revealed or made visible in some of its aspects by means of the miraculous discoveries effected by the machinery of the masque, and charged with its full moral grandeur by poetry and fable.”⁵ But the movement toward containment is equally important to the inscription of the monarch's power because the king is shown taming the potential threat to reason and order that the marvelous often brings with it. As Leah Marcus notes, “the monstrous and subversive impulses,” released by the marvelous antimasque, “invariably … are quelled by the intervention of some reforming energy associated with the policy and person of the king.”⁶

This double movement apparently lies at the heart of Ben Jonson's epistemological and aesthetic vision of the masque: wonder is repeatedly evoked—often by a figure of the king himself—only to be domesticated and dissipated by the king's actions; like Wonder in The Vision of Delight (1617), marvelous energies disappear, never to be heard of again. In his early work on the masque, Stephen Orgel views wonder, and the spectacle that accompanies it, as completely in harmony with the reason and poetry that are the other half of the masque; the antimasque, and all its potentially subversive trappings, can be “accommodated to and even included in the ideals of the main masque.”⁷ This vision of harmony is certainly one that Jonson seems to have tried to convey. But Orgel goes further and attempts to smooth over a structural tension of the masque that reflects a major artistic and intellectual conflict of the Renaissance: “It must be stressed that for the Renaissance spectator, the realistic and the marvellous—that which produced wonder, the end of drama—were neither antithetical nor, on the whole, even distinguishable.”⁸ And yet, of course, the perception of difference between the realistic and the marvelous, text and spectacle, word and image was sufficiently apparent in the Renaissance to start literary and aesthetic, not to mention religious and military, conflicts.⁹ By assimilating and therefore defanging wonder, Orgel, like Jonson (and Aristotle) before him, domesticates this figure and hides its subversiveness in the process.¹⁰

The forces of reason could not fully tame the potenza ammirativa that was figured on the masque stage by the scenic marvels of Inigo Jones. Because the quarrel between Jonson and Jones embodies so neatly this tension between poetry and spectacle, reason and marvel, I focus primarily on the Jonsonian masque. The chapter concludes, however, with an examination of two masques by Samuel Daniel, who, I argue, provides an alternative vision of the marvels of the masque. For even though the wondrous and “wayward energies of life were fitted into a controlled vision in which their existence was recognised and their relative power defined and limited by higher authorities,” wonder often eludes this structure—even in the masques of Jonson—and threatens the artistic, epistemological, and political certainties it was meant to confirm.¹¹

The origins of the masque have been located in pagan holidays and festivals that involved processions, cross-dressing, and monstrous masks. Even in its earliest forms, though, the masque involves a structural movement out to the audience, to the community.¹² Orgel claims that this movement inevitably led to a blurring of boundaries between “spectators and actors, so that in effect the viewer became part of the spectacle”; one of the objects of the structure, then, was “to include the whole court in the mimesis—in a sense, what the spectator watched he ultimately became.”¹³ In the Renaissance masque this movement was crucial in establishing both the wonder aroused by the prince and the possibility of his actualizing political ideals: the king was more than human and the masque highly allegorical, but both were also anchored in the real and the present.

Just as important in the structural genealogy of the masque, however, are the Italian intermezzi, which, according to John Shearman, grew out of “secular interruptions in the miracle-plays of the fifteenth century.”¹⁴ In many respects these spectacular interludes posed threats to the harmony and resolution figured in the main play, commedia, or masque. As Allardyce Nicoll explains, there was always something aesthetically eccentric about the intermezzi: “Prevented [by fixed stage sets] within the play from presenting anything more than a single and formal set, tragic or comic or pastoral in accordance with the drama's style, they [scenic artists] sought and found an opportunity in the entertainments presented during periods of intermission. Naturally there was opposition, but in spite of that opposition the intermezzi had by 1572 assumed an overwhelming importance in the Italian theater: that year Piccolomini was forced to complain that ‘nowadays more attention is paid to these intermezzi than to the plays themselves.’”¹⁵ Bursting the scenic confines of—and inevitably competing with—the main body of the play, these spectacles at intermission threatened the integrity and predominance of the text to which they were supposedly appendages. Potentially subversive instead of subservient, the intermezzi seem to have found favor with their audiences at the expense of “the plays themselves.” Moreover, as an observer of an intermedio at Florence noted in 1589, these interludes were linked with wonder: “The grandeur of the spectacle cannot be told; he who did not actually see it must fail to credit its wonders.”¹⁶

The direct descendant of the intermezzo is the antimasque, and Jonson seems to have been aware of the structurally and epistemologically threatening nature of the intermezzo-turned-antimasque and to have coined the term to suggest its oppositional nature.¹⁷ The danger for Jonson is the power of wonder that lies in the spectacle and scenic marvels that Inigo Jones brought into the Jonsonian antimasque and transformation scene. Thomas Greene identifies this tension between antimasque and masque as part of the “double gesture” of humanist art—“first penetrating depths to bring up someone or something from them, and secondly restoring it to being and form, designing, shaping, and structuring a harmonious edifice.” Although Greene recognizes that “threats to this order can be glimpsed that are not fully exorcised,” he rightly claims that most of the masques reveal Jonson's faith in a return to unity.¹⁸ The threats to this order come largely from the wonder that forms such a large part of the antimasque; the threatened include epistemological certainty, aesthetic harmony and closure, and—by extension—the hegemony of James himself.

The implications of the doubleness of the masque structure can be illuminated by considering the connections between the masque and the emblem because both forms consist of an interplay between words and images.¹⁹ In theory, says Rosalie Colie, “no part of the emblem—figure, epigram, caption, or adage—was supposed to translate any other: rather all the elements were by their special means to point inward to a single idea, supported in part by them all.”²⁰ However, as Glynne Wickham notes, the very nature of the emblem, with its visual and verbal components, had tremendous potential for paradox, mystery, and conflict: “for while the visual component was designed to arrest attention and boldly to proclaim an idea, the form in which it was cast was as often designed, like a riddle, to contain a secret. … It could be stretched to incorporate a written text—a “scripture,” a motto, a poem—of an explanatory character: but to be truly itself a device had to be something more (even other) than it seemed to be, and to be fully possessed of its meaning, viewer or reader had to own, or be supplied with, the key that alone would release the secret and reveal its full significance.”²¹ Interpretive difficulty, then, lies at the heart of the emblem, and instead of leading to univocal clarity, the device could evoke uncertainty; instead of working together, the visual and verbal could work against one another, creating confusion, mystery, obscurity.²²

It is not surprising, then, that in the masque, as in the emblem, there is a dynamic play between image and word. Instead of trying to harmonize away the tension between visual and verbal, though, D. J. Gordon notices and outlines a war over primacy in representation, one he sees embodied in the Jonson and Jones dispute. To Gordon, the battle boils down to an assertion on the part of visual artists that they are “artists” instead of “craftsmen,” are practitioners of the liberal instead of the mechanical arts.²³ In stressing this artistic agon, Gordon is pitching a battle of his own, for he questions the certainty with which E. H. Gombrich saw Renaissance visual arts in general and the emblem in particular as revealing “an aspect of the structure of the world which would seem to include the ordered progress of dialectic argument” and offering “an escape from the limitations of discursive speech.”²⁴ To put it at its simplest, Gordon sees the dynamic relationship between the verbal and the visual as perhaps the central issue in Renaissance art.

The role of wonder in the clash cannot be overestimated. Just as it arises from the collision of antimasque and masque, wonder emerges from the visual and verbal fabric of the emblem. As Nicoll claims, “in the impresa and in the masque alike the quality of meraviglia, or wonder, was called for—the exciting of that admiration aimed at in the entire spectacle.”²⁵ Part of the power of wonder in emblems, masques, and art in general comes from the obscurity and strangeness that can emerge from them.

Jonson's writings on the form uncover for us his knowledge of the emblematic tradition, its relation to the masque, and his seeming uneasiness about spectacle and its attendant power of wonder.²⁶ Jonson's preface to Love's Triumph through Callipolis (1631)—headed “To Make Spectators Understanders”—articulates his views on the purpose of the masque. He is very much concerned with the moral and epistemological journey of the viewer (and later reader) of this form:²⁷ “Whereas all representations, especially those of this nature in court, public spectacles, either have been or ought to be the mirrors of man's life, whose ends, for the excellence of their exhibitors (as being the donatives of great princes to their people) ought always to carry a mixture of profit with them no less than delight.”²⁸ Jonson clearly expresses concern that the “spectators” will get lost in the wondrous “delight” of the masques and will forget that the chief purpose of them is moral “profit.” Jonson further addresses this dualism in the preface to his first court masque, The Masque of Blackness (1605). With his “later hand” Jonson attempts to capture the essentially ephemeral event for “posterity” and “redeem” the shows from “oblivion”: “But, when it is the fate even of the greatest and most absolute births to need and borrow a life of posterity, little had been done to the study of magnificence in these if presently with the rage of the people, who, as a part of greatness, are privileged by custom to deface their carcases, the spirits had also perished.”²⁹ Here we see what will become a significant distinction for Jonson: the “carcases” of the spectacle (and its sets) and the “spirits” of the poetry's language (and its connection to the essence of the masque), which is clearly privileged in this description.³⁰ Preserving the spirits, which he seems to fear will otherwise be defaced along with the carcasses, appears to drive Jonson's concern with the posterity of the masque.

His masque theory is developed more fully in the highly significant preface to Hymenaei (1606):

It is a noble and just advantage that the things subjected to understanding have of those which are objected to sense that the one sort are but momentary and merely taking, the other impressing and lasting. Else the glory of all these solemnities had perished like a blaze and gone out in the beholders' eyes. So short lived are the bodies of all things in comparison to their souls. And, though bodies ofttimes have the ill luck to be sensually preferred, they find afterwards the good fortune, when souls live, to be utterly forgotten. This it is hath made the most royal princes and greatest persons, who are commonly the personators of these actions, not only studious of riches and magnificence in the outward celebration or show, which rightly becomes them, but curious after the most high and hearty inventions to furnish the inward parts, and those grounded upon antiquity and solid learnings; which, though their voice be taught to sound to present occasions, their sense or doth or should always lay hold on more removed mysteries.³¹

Returning to the dualism of spirit and carcass, Jonson links “understanding,” the “impressing and lasting,” and the “soul” with verbal and poetic profit. In opposition are “sense,” the “momentary and merely taking,” and the “body,” which he considers part of the transient delight of spectacle. Furthermore, he asserts that royal viewers are—and should be—concerned not only with “riches and magnificence in the outward celebration” but also with “the most high and hearty inventions to furnish the inward parts, and those grounded upon antiquity and solid learning,” those that allow them access to “more removed mysteries.” Here Jonson associates wonder and mystery not with spectacle but with a poetry based on “antiquity and solid learning.”

Like many of the Protestant reformers examined in chapter 2, Jonson wishes not to banish wonder completely but to reclaim it—to relocate it in the verbal realm. For Jonson clearly understands, as he reveals later in this masque, that there is a power of wonder that emanates from the spectacular nature of these shows: “Such was the exquisite performance, as (beside the pomp, splendor, or what we may call apparelling of such presentments) that alone, had all else been absent, was of power to surprise with delight, and steal away the spectators from themselves. Nor was there wanting whatsoever might give to the furniture or complement, either in riches, or strangeness of the habits, delicacy of dances, magnificence of the scene, or divine rapture of music. … Yet that I may not defraud the reader his hope, I am drawn to give it those brief touches which may leave behind some shadow of what it was.”³² While he concedes that he can reproduce only a shadow of what was, there is a very strong sense in Jonson that this verbal effigy is superior to the transient spectacle that enraptures the viewers at the “present occasion,” translated from, as Jonas Barish asserts, “the turbulence of the public arena” into the “still silence of the page.”³³ Wonder, for Jonson, should emerge from the word, for, as he says in the Discoveries, “of the two, the Pen is more noble then the Pencill. For that can speake to the Understanding; the other, but to the Sense.” And later in the same work he uses the language of the emblem to establish the role both of his poetry in the masque and of his “later hand” afterward: “The conceits of the mind are Pictures of things, and the tongue is the Interpreter of those Pictures.”³⁴ Perhaps Jonson's boldest statement of his view of the primacy of poetry comes in the prologue to The Staple of Newes (1626):

Would you were come to heare, not see a Play.
Though we his Actors must provide
for those,
Who are our guests, here, in the way of showes,
The maker hath not so; he'ld haue you wise,
Much rather by your eares, then by your eyes.(35)

Jonson's writings on the issue, then, indicate a deep skepticism toward shows and the wonder that accompanies them. For when this type of wonder dissipates—as wonder, for Jonson, always does—emptiness, and not knowledge, takes its place: “Have not I seen the pompe of a whole Kingdome, and what a forraigne King could bring hither also to make himselfe gaz'd, and wonder'd at, laid forth as it were to the shew, and vanish all away in a day? And shall that which could not fill the expectation of few houres, entertaine, and take up our whole lives? when even it appear'd as superfluous to the Possessors, as to me that was a Spectator. The bravery was shewne, it was not possess'd; while it boasted itselfe, it perish'd. It is vile, and a poor thing to place our happinesse on these desires.”³⁶

While this passage retraces much of the ground covered so far, it takes us into new territory as well because Jonson removes the issues from the aesthetic realm and brings them into the world of royal politics. By placing himself in the role of “Spectator,” he acknowledges that theatricality exists outside the theater and that a king should have his pageants firmly grounded in substance and meaning so that when the ephemeral display is over, there is still something for the viewer—the king's subject—to grasp. To the extent that Jonson helps construct James's spectacles, he tries to effect this marriage of masque and meaning.

Before we look at the way Jonson stages the politics of wonder, an examination of the famous feud with Inigo Jones is essential. This conflict has been thoroughly documented, but the quarrel takes on new power when seen as a contest for control of the marvelous. For, although there are certainly personal and idiosyncratic issues involved, the two men also embody the conflicts over epistemology and art in general and wonder in particular that, I have been arguing, were prevalent in the early modern period.

Gordon gives a detailed list of the “documents of the quarrel,” ranging from epigram 115 (first published in the 1616 Folio) and references in Conversations with Drummond (1619) to A Tale of a Tub (1633).³⁷ Given the limited space here, we will focus on only a few. The supposed origin of the dispute—that Jonson placed his name before Jones on the title page of Love's Triumph through Callipolis—surely must instead be the culmination of a deep-seated aesthetic disagreement.

An important document in the dispute is “An Expostulacion with Inigo Jones” (1631), a portion of which follows:

What is y(e) cause you pompe it soe?
I aske
And all men eccho you haue made a Masque.
I chyme that too: And haue mett w(t)h those
That do cry vp y(e) Machine and y(e) Showes!
The majesty of Iuno in y(e) Cloudes,
And peering forth of Iris in y(e) Shrowdes!
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 w(t)h much adoe
To hold her vp. O Showes! Showes! Mighty Showes!
The Eloquence of Masques! What need of prose
Or Verse, or Sense t'express Immortall you?
You are y(e) Spectacles of State! Tis true
Court Hieroglyphicks! & all Artes affoord
In y(e) mere perspectiue of an Inch board!
You aske noe more then certeyne politique Eyes,
Eyes y(t) can pierce into y(e)
Misteryes
Of many Coulors! read them! & reueale
Mythology there painted on slit deale!
Oh, to make Boardes to speake! There is a taske!
Painting and Carpentry are y(e) Soule of Masque!
Pack w(t)h your pedling Poetry to the Stage!
This is the money-gett, Mechanick Age!(38)

Jonson openly despairs at the prominence that Jones and his “Showes” have begun to receive. Spectators, including royal ones (“certeyne politique Eyes” that watch “Spectacles of State”), have chosen a new aesthetic of the visual that has left behind the verbal—“prose,” “verse,” and “sense”³⁹—and thrives only on scenic wonder. Or, as William Armstrong puts it, Jonson rails against “scenes, lights, and machines which moved before the spectators' eyes; i.e. against those most likely to distract attention from the spoken word, from the ‘soul’ to the ‘body’ of the masque.”⁴⁰ Later in the poem, having mocked various stage constructions as inferior to poetry, Jonson goes a step further and dissects the wonders of Jonesian stagecraft. While prose and verse have anchors in truth that make them substantial and lasting, spectacle—and the false wonders it evokes—is mutable, expendable, interchangeable:

          who can reflect
On y(e) new priming of thy old Signe postes
Reuiuing w(th) fresh coulors y(e) pale Ghosts
Of thy dead Standards? or (w(t)h miracle) see
Thy twice conceyud, thrice payd for Imagery?
And not fall downe before it? and confess
Allmighty Architecture?(41)

Cheap and reusable, Jones's stage wonders are reduced to mere paint and wood, and Jonson mocks any claim to their status as miracles.

Inigo Jones was to fight back, and in several works—but particularly in designs for Albion's Triumph and Tempe Restored—he makes his claim as an inventor and not just a producer or craftsman.⁴² In struggling over “invention,” Gordon argues, the artists were battling for the primacy of their respective forms; the dispute came down to who was responsible for the origin of the idea, the design, the concetto for the work of art—the poet or the artist/architect.⁴³ Gordon suggests that both Jonson and Jones had difficulty accepting the dynamic, Patrizian marea or flow between the two poles that is essential to the art that they made. The irony here is that the power of wonder evoked by Jones's spectacles largely worked against the rational and intellectual elements that the two men were fighting over. As we will see, it was precisely the ability to take the audience out of their rational selves, noted by Jonson in his commentary on Hymenaei, that made Jones's scenic marvels so powerful and posed such a threat to the ordered poetic edifice that Jonson had constructed.⁴⁴

That wonder plays a role in nearly every Jonsonian masque cannot be disputed—from the face “circumfused with light” in The Masque of Blackness to “the spectacle of strangeness” that Jonson dubbed the antimasque in The Masque of Queens; from the “mikrokosmos, or globe, filled with countries” in Hymenaei to the wonder that is James in The Golden Age Restor'd; and from the presence (and disappearance) of Wonder itself in The Vision of Delight to the fountain of light in Pan's Anniversary. But as I have suggested, Jonson's vision of wonder is a very controlled one: the marvelous is evoked, usually with a certain amount of confusion and terror, and then is dissipated when order, knowledge, and certainty are achieved; his masques seem to be perfect models of the Aristotelian sense of wonder. As the chorus describes it in Love's Triumph, the movement is “To wonder first, and then to excellence, / By virtue of divine intelligence.”⁴⁵ Four representative masques—Oberon (1611), The Vision of Delight (1617), Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), and News from the New World (1620)—will illustrate Jonson's aesthetic and epistemological theories and show how he sought to affirm the power and wonder of James. It will be important to explore also, however, how this structured and ordered vision of wonder is destabilized by both the presence of and the spectators' reactions to the marvels that Inigo Jones created to accompany Jonson's poetry.⁴⁶ For even in the masques that reveal the pattern most clearly, there are energies that work against the triumph of reason and order.

Although Oberon certainly evinces the wonder paradigm, the structure has problems embedded in it because there are at least two “wonder figures”: Prince Henry and James. From virtually the outset Henry as Oberon plays an important role as evoker of wonder. While Henry, as royalty, cannot physically be part of the antimasque,⁴⁷ Oberon inspires awe long before the transformation scene: at a glimpse of his palace, “the satyrs [are] wondering,” and Silenus exclaims,

Look! does not his palace show
Like another sky of lights?
Yonder with him live the knights
Once the noblest of the earth,
Quickened by a second birth,
Who for prowess and for truth
There are crowned with lasting youth,
And do hold, by Fate's command,
Seats of bliss in fairyland.(48)

However, this wonder is nothing like what occurs when “the whole palace opened” (213), and Oberon is displayed in all his majesty. Yet it soon becomes clear that the source of wonder is not Oberon/Henry but James:

Melt earth to sea, sea flow to air,
                    And air fly into fire,
Whilst we in tunes to Arthur's chair
                    Bear Oberon's desire,
                    Than which there nothing can be higher,
Save James, to whom it flies:
But he the wonder is of tongues, of ears, of eyes.

(220-26)

In a way, of course, this move makes sense: Arthur—in Stuart mythology—is the source of James, who is the source of Henry. There is a genealogy of wonder; James, the second Arthur, restored England to its original line and greatness.⁴⁹ Furthermore, it seems as if at least part of Henry's interest in the Oberon character came from his knowledge of Spenser's Oberon (fq 2.10.75)—based on Henry VIII—and the suggestions there of the Tudor connection to Arthur. In short, there is a mythic and textual web of support for Jonson's move.⁵⁰

However, as Orgel points out, a structural difficulty results that makes a typical resolution problematic because “James is not at the center of the masque world but outside it.”⁵¹ With James outside of the masque, there is a problem of reference, of the source of wonder; the supreme powers seem to be fiction and history. Even with a perspective theater, James is in danger of being upstaged not, as in later masques, by spectacle, but by a body of texts. To put it at its simplest, Jonson, in his desire to ground his masque on “solid learnings,” has left room for too much questioning. After still more wondering—“Seek you glory, to amaze? / Here let all eyes stand at gaze” (288-89)—Jonson attempts both to put an end to the marvel by demonstrating its final, undisputed source and to leave the audience in a state not of wonder but of knowledge:

Seek you knowledge, to direct?
          Trust to his without suspect.
Seek you piety, to lead?
          In his footsteps only tread.
Every virtue of a king,
And of all in him we sing.
But may none wonder that they [the solemn rites] are
          so bright;
The moon now borrows from a greater light.

(292-97, 305-6)

The wonder that has been evoked—though by whom is still a complicated issue—is tamed, as if to suggest that too much wonder, too many questions, puts in doubt the ultimate authority of the monarch, a fact the masque is supposed to affirm unequivocally.

There is little problem of reference in The Vision of Delight, which presents a uniquely apt version of the pattern: Wonder itself is evoked, makes an appearance, and is virtually laughed offstage for his ignorance, an event dramatizing the proverb mentioned in chapter 1—“Wonder (Marvel, Admiration) is the daughter of ignorance”⁵²—and emphasizing James as the source of what Wonder could not understand. Two visual antimasques are displayed—the first consisting of a shemonster, six burrantines, and six pantaloons, and the second of several phantasms—and in between them Fant'sy presents what Orgel calls an unusual “verbal antimasque”: a verbal copia cataloging human vices and depravities.⁵³ Anticipating the confusion and marveling that this visual and verbal chaos will evoke in both the audience within the masque (including Delight, Grace, Love, Harmony, and Wonder, among others) and the court audience, Fant'sy does not allow time for wonderment:

Why, this you will say was fantastical now,
As the cock and the bull, the whale and the cow;
          But vanish away; I have change to present you,
And such as I hope will more truly content you.

(109-12)

At this point, “the whole scene is changed to the bower of Zephyrus” (117-18), and, appropriately, Wonder steps forward amazed. Indeed, he is the spokesman for the Choir, who are so stunned that Peace says that they look “as if you statues stood” (126). Then “Wonder must speak or break” (132) and proceeds to catalogue the marvelous visual details of the unfolded spectacle in a rich, fecund language that this masque has not to this point displayed:

                                        what is this? Grows
The wealth of nature here, or art? It shows
As if Favonius, father of the spring,
Who in the verdant meads doth reign sole king,
Had roused him here and shook his feathers, wet
With purple-swelling nectar, and had let
The sweet and fruitful dew fall on the ground
To force out all the flowers that might be found;
.....          I have not seen the place could more surprise;
It looks, methinks, like one of nature's eyes,
Or her whole body set in art. Behold!
How the blue bindweed doth itself enfold
With honeysuckle, and both these entwine
Themselves with bryony and jessamine,
To cast a kind and odoriferous shade.

(132-39, 150-56)

Fant'sy, paradoxically, then chides Wonder for embellishing reality and asserts that the next revelation will amaze him even more: “How better than they are are all things made / By Wonder! But awhile refresh thine eye; / I'll put thee to thy oftener what and why” (157-59). As the promise of spring, heretofore unrealized, breaks forth into a masque (“the masquers discovered as the glories of the spring” [160]), Wonder asks seventeen questions, much as Fant'sy predicted, and among them are these:

Whence is it that the air so sudden clears,
And all things in a moment turn so mild?
Whose breath or beams have got proud Earth with
          child
Of all the treasure that great Nature's worth,
And makes her every minute to bring forth?
How comes it winter is so quite forced hence,
And locked up under ground? that every sense
Hath several objects? …
Whose power is this? what god?

(164-71, 189)

The answer, of course, is James, as Fant'sy confidently explains:

                                                                                                                        Behold a king
Whose presence maketh this perpetual spring,
The glories of which spring grow in that bower,
And are the marks and beauties of his power.

(189-92)

Even the chorus, for whom Wonder once spoke, sings in accordance: “'Tis he, 'tis he, and no power else, / That makes all this what Fant'sy tells” (194-95). Moreover, it is not merely what Fant'sy “tells” that is significant here but what he has staged, for the emphasis on sight reveals the importance of the visual and the marvelous to the display of James's power, or as Goldberg would have it, “the instruments of sight become the objects of sight.”⁵⁴ In between dances of the main masque, the choir proclaims:

Again, again; you cannot be
Of such a true delight too free,
          Which who once saw would ever see;
And if they could the object prize
Would, while it lasts, not think to rise,
          But wish their bodies all were eyes.

(205-10)

With these answers and assertions, Wonder disappears, never to be heard from again; its function performed, Wonder must not linger asking any further questions. And yet, while we certainly understand the symbolism and the inscription of James's power in the claim that he is the cause of the transformations on stage, we also know that it is the creators of the masque—and especially Inigo Jones—who are responsible for the air's turning so mild in a moment. “The wealth of … art” displayed here leaves Wonder's awe and questioning impressed upon our minds and threatens the certainty that the normal energies of the masque form would lead us to expect.

Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue also features the pattern of wonder. James here is figured as Hesperus, the only one whose light is brighter than that of Charles, his son, who was the featured dancer in this masque. Further, the reward of those who have renounced the raw pleasure of Comus in the antimasque—the pleasure that Hercules fears will “extinguish man” (98)—is entry into Hesperus's garden. The beautiful garden that figures James's court is the site where pleasure and virtue can be reconciled, where dancing can be linked to reason and order, where Jonson can “interweave the curious knot” (225). Orgel sees a middle realm between pleasure and virtue, misrule and order, that recalls Patrizi's potenza ammirativa.⁵⁵ Wonder, however, seems banished from this middle realm, and the result is actually far from the dynamic marea that Patrizi posited:

Then, as all actions of mankind
          Are but a labyrinth or maze,
So let your dances be entwined,
          Yet not perplex men unto gaze;
But measured, and so numerous too,
          As men may read each act you do,
And when they see the graces meet,
          Admire the wisdom of your feet.
For dancing is an exercise
          Not only shows the mover's wit,
But maketh the beholder wise,
          As he hath power to rise to it.

(232-43)

This song of Daedalus from late in the masque can be read as a paradigm for Jonson's entire masque project: he is desperate to make the spectators understanders. The dances should be intricate but should not provoke the gaze of wonder; they should be “measured” and “numerous” so that they can be clearly “read”; viewers should “admire” the dancing but should be able to note “the wisdom of your [the masquers'] feet,” for the pleasure, beauty, and wonder of the dance exists primarily to make “the beholder wise.” Thus Orgel's “middle realm” claim is made dubious by the privileging of the rational and orderly. Indeed, Daedalus's fourth and final song tells the spectators “To walk with Pleasure, not to dwell” (296). The reconciliation alluded to in the title turns out to be a domestication: of Comus, Pleasure, Marvel.

In News from the New World Jonson takes a slightly different approach to the pattern because wonder is never really let loose in this masque; it is present but is carefully circumscribed. The chief movement is from telling—there is very little showing—what wonder is not to revealing what wonder is. Wonder most definitely is not the marvels contained in wonder pamphlets. In the dispute between the Factor and the Printer over the relative merits of the written and the printed, the Factor expresses his contempt for “your printed conundrums of the serpent in Sussex, or the witches bidding the devil to dinner at Derby—news that, when a man sends them down to the shires where they are said to be done, were never there to be found” (43-47). The Printer defends the pamphlets only by claiming that “they were made for the common people, and why should not they ha' their pleasure in believing of lies are made for them” (48-50). Cheap and mendacious, this popular conception of wonder is mocked.

After this early dispute, both men listen to the Heralds tell of their encounter with moon creatures, and although the Volatees—a lunar breed—perform an antimasque, they clearly evoke neither wonder nor terror. On the contrary, we are told—and the First Herald recognizes how little is shown in this masque when he says, “Yes, faith, 'tis time to exercise their eyes; for their ears begin to be weary” (263-64)—that creatures “rapt above the moon … have remained there entranced certain hours with wonder of the piety, wisdom, majesty reflected by you on them from the divine light to which only you are less” (275-79). These creatures are then presented and continue their marveling ways before being told not to. Having spent all of that time admiring from afar, they must now move to knowledge and certainty:

Howe'er the brightness may amaze,
Move you, and stand not still at gaze,
                              As dazzled with the light;
But with your motions fill the place,
And let their fullness win your grace
                              Till you collect your sight.
So while the warmth you do confess,
And temper of these rays, no less
                              To quicken than refine,
You may be knowledge grow more bold,
And so more able to behold
                              The body whence they shine.

(290-301)

Wonder exists to be dissipated; the creatures must clear amazement from their eyes in preparation for the truth that is James:

Now look and see in yonder throne
How all those beams are cast from one.
                              This is that orb so bright
Has kept your wonder so awake,
Whence you as from a mirror take
                              The sun's reflected light.
Read him as you would do the book
Of all perfection, and but look
                              What his proportions be;
No measure that is thence contrived
Or any motion thence derived,
                              But is pure harmony.

(304-15)

This mostly verbal masque is a fitting one with which to end this consideration of Jonson's model of wonder. We have yet to explain fully the power of spectacle in the masque, and the rest of the chapter explores the threat that it poses to Jonson's model. The impressions of the viewers, the beholders of the shows, serve as our guides as we attempt to determine at least partially the effect that the visual component of the masques had on those who experienced them.⁵⁶

That the audience marveled more at spectacle than at poetry was not a phenomenon restricted to the masque. Jacques Petit, an eyewitness at an Elizabethan performance of Titus Andronicus, reported that “la monstre a plus valeu q[ue] le suiect.”⁵⁷ This type of response seems to be fairly typical of the reactions to Jonsonian masques: the spectators were far more likely to be made marvelers than understanders.⁵⁸ Jonson himself, speaking as a spectator of Hymenaei, emphasized the marvelous: “Such was the exquisite performance, as (beside the pomp, splendor, or what we may call apparelling of such presentments) that alone, had all else been absent, was of power to surprise with delight and steal away the spectators from themselves” (522-26). After seeing The Masque of Beauty, Zorzi Giustiniani noted the “splendour of the spectacle, which was worthy of her Majesty's greatness. The apparatus and the cunning of the stage machinery was a miracle, the abundance and beauty of the lights immense, the music and the dance most sumptuous. But what beggared all else and possibly exceeded the public expectation was the wealth of pearls and jewels that adorned the Queen and her ladies, so abundant and splendid that in everyone's opinion no other court could have displayed such pomp and riches.”⁵⁹ This emphasis on the spectacular and visual is typical of the responses to the masques. In this instance, though, we see that wonder is actually serving the court, so much so that later in Giustiniani's account the Venetian refers to Queen Anne as “the authoress of the whole”;⁶⁰ the marvelous has erased not only Jonson but also Jones.

When the accounts are not describing ambassadorial disputes, however, they are focusing, for the most part, on spectacle. John Pory, in a letter to Sir Robert Cotton about Hymenaei, praises both Jones and Jonson but focuses on dancing patterns, costumes, and machinery. Jonson is noted, not for his poetry, but for his turning “the globe of the earth standing behind the altar.”⁶¹ The structural dilemmas of Oberon noted above seem not to have played a role in the assessment of the masque. From the “Papers of William Turnbull 1611-12” comes this report: “A dozen satyrs and fauns … then danced a ballet, with appropriate music with a thousand strange gestures, affording great pleasures. This done the rock opened discovering a great throne with countless lights and colours all shifting, a lovely thing to see. … When the queen returned to her place the prince took her for a coranta which was something to see and admire.”⁶²

Admiratio seems to have come from the spectacle of the masque and the royalty taking part in it. Occasionally, too, wonder derived from the presence of the spectators: the most marvelous aspect of The Vision of Delight seems to have been that “Pocahuntas” was in attendance.⁶³

It is certainly not too much to say that the intricate wonders of the masque could take the focus away from James, their supposed source and raison d'être. Orazio Busino, the chaplain to the Venetian embassy, describes the king's frustrations with the dances at the end of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue: “Last of all they danced the Spanish dance, one at a time, each with his Lady, and being well nigh tired they began to lag, whereupon the King, who is naturally choleric, got impatient and shouted aloud: ‘Why don't they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance.’”⁶⁴ After attracting attention back to himself, James had his anger abated by the Marquis of Buckingham, who proceeded to dazzle the audience with the marvels of his dancing: “cutting a score of lofty and very minute capers,” “he made everyone admire [ammiror] and love [inamorar] him.”⁶⁵ If Jonson—through Daedalus—had tipped the balance between Pleasure and Virtue toward the latter, James and Buckingham reclaimed prominence for the former and its ally—marvel.

Inigo Jones appears to have sensed that the power of wonder lay in the spectacles that he created and staged. Reading the iconography of Albion's Triumph, Gordon suggests that the figurines of Theory and Practice “celebrate the glory of the architect as well as of the king.”⁶⁶ More specifically, Richard Southern sees Jones as the pioneer of a method of scene-changing that celebrated its ability to create “movement for marvellous effect”:⁶⁷

the changing of scenes was intended to be visible; it was part of the show; it came into existence merely to be watched. … [This is] a story of how a marvellous show grew up to become a suite of shows by presenting not one marvel but a number of successive marvels. … and the more complicated the elements grew the more ways were found to change them all by visible transformation as part of the spectacle, instead of covering the stage … with a curtain. … The Renaissance machinist himself had few such reservations [about breaking illusion]. To him scene-change was an aspect of the theatre.⁶⁸

Jones received praise from his contemporaries and fellow creators—the late Jonson notwithstanding—for being a maker of the marvelous. Extolling Jones for the new scenes he added to Loves Maistresse: or, The Queens Masque (1636), Thomas Heywood expressed awe at Jones's ability to create wonder:

I cannot pretermit to give a due Charractar to that admirable Artist, Mr. Inego Iones, Master surueyor of the Kings worke &c. Who to every Act nay almost to every Sceane, by his excellent Inuentions, gave such an extraordinary Luster; upon every occasion changing the stage, to the admiration of all the Spectators; that, as I must Ingeniously confesse, It was above my apprehension to conceive, so to their sacred Majesties and the rest of the Auditory; It gave so generall a content, that I presume they never parted from any object, presented in that kind, better pleased, or more plenally satisfied.⁶⁹

In this remarkable passage Heywood describes Jones's ability to evoke wonder even from the source of wonder in the Jonsonian scheme: his marvels are “above … apprehension to conceive” not only for Heywood and “the rest of the Auditory” but also for “their sacred Majesties.” Finally, in audience responses to the scenic wonders of Jones and others, there is evidence of what I have called a wonder shift: from the marvels themselves to the mechanics and production of wonder. Frederico Zuccaro, recounting a visit to a performance of Guarini's L'Idropica at Mantua in 1608, marveled at the intermezzi, but admitted that “not less pleasure did I get from seeing the huge engines, the windlasses, the stout cables, the ropes, and the cords by which the machines are manipulated; and the enormous number of men necessary for working them. … One spark from a lamp, be it remembered, might bring all to ruin. Truly it was extraordinary that no disaster occurred, even although care was taken to provide huge jars, vessels, tubs, and pails of water ready for any emergency.”⁷⁰ Unlike Francis Bacon's, Zuccaro's wonder was not at all diminished by his being able to go “behind the curtain and adviseth well of the motion.”⁷¹

An examination of wonder and the masque is incomplete without an exploration of the significantly different vision revealed in the theory and practice of Samuel Daniel. For his work in the masque evinces not only an alternative view of wonder but also, in Tethys' Festival (1610), a different Inigo Jones, liberated from the constraints of Jonson.

Revealed in his prefaces to both The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604) and Tethys' Festival, Daniel's conception of the masque eschews the Jonsonian requirement that masques be “grounded upon antiquity and solid learnings,” posits a fundamental human ignorance, and champions play and delight over profit in these shows. This stance toward learning is interesting given Daniel's virtually antithetical position in Musophilus. Containing A Generall Defense of all Learning (1599), in which Musophilus, the defender of learning, clearly carries the day over Philocosmus. Of further interest is that, in lines 337-90, Musophilus, in a discussion of Stonehenge, links wonder to ignorance. Perhaps, then, Daniel's views of knowledge and wonder expressed in his masque prefaces can only be applied locally—to the masque form itself. It is possible, however, that Daniel's views of knowledge and wonder changed after 1599. In the 1607 and 1611 versions of Musophilus—the last on which Daniel worked personally—most of the Stonehenge description (lines 343-90), including the harshest words on wonder, is omitted.⁷²

In the address to the countess of Bedford that serves as a preface to The Vision, Daniel attacks “whosoeuer striues to shew most wit about these Pun[c]tillos of Dreames and shewes” because they “are sure sicke of a disease they cannot hide, and would faine haue the world to thinke them very deeply learned in all misteries whatsoeuer” (3:196). Similarly, in “The Preface to the Reader” that precedes Tethys' Festival, Daniel asks,

And shall we who are the poore Inginers for shadowes, & frame onely images of no result, thinke to oppresse the rough censures of those, who notwithstanding all our labour will like according to their taste, or seeke to auoid them by flying to an Army of Authors, as idle as our selues? …

And for these figures of mine, if they come not drawn in all proportions to the life of antiquity (from whose tyrranie, I see no reason why we may not emancipate our inuentions, and be as free as they, to vse our owne images) yet I know them such as were proper to the busines, and discharged those parts for which they serued, with as good correspondencie, as our appointed limitations would permit.

(3:306-7)

Daniel's approach to the form is one based on emancipation: because he frames “images of no result,” he asserts his claim to a freedom, like that of the ancients, “to vse our owne images.”

Part of what brings Daniel his sense of liberation is the Socratic and Montaignian sense of “our appointed limitations” that he seems to see pervading both the genre and human reason.⁷³ In what almost certainly is a criticism of Jonson, Daniel, in his address to the countess, claims that those who “thinke them very deeply learned in all misteries whatsoeuer … are in a farre worse case then they imagine; Non potest non indoctus esse qui se doctum credit [he cannot be but ignorant who believes himself to be learned]. And let vs labour to shew neuer so much skill or Arte, our weaknesses and ignorance will be seene, whatsoeuer couering vve cast ouer it” (196). Evincing both a skepticism toward the scholarly roots of the masque and a mistrust of knowledge claims in general, Daniel puts forth a theory of the genre that is the opposite of Jonson's. Stressing the importance of delight, spectacle, and marvel, Daniel tells the countess that “in these matters of shewes (though they be that which most entertaine the vvorld) there needs be no such exact sufficiency in this kind. For, Ludit istis animus, non proficit [the mind plays with these things, does not profit from them]” (196). Masques exist to entertain and to evoke wonder, and in his “Preface to the Reader” Daniel seems to recognize that in this genre the poet plays a secondary role to the maker of the marvelous—the “Architect”: “But in these things wherein the onely life consists in shew; the arte and inuention of the Architect giues the greatest grace, and is of most importance: ours, the least part and of least note in the time of the performance thereof; and therefore haue I interserted the description of the artificiall part, which only speakes M. Inago Jones” (307). While John Pitcher is certainly correct in challenging the notion that this passage represents “a straightforward capitulation to Jones,”⁷⁴ the passage does suggest Daniel's apparent recognition that a destabilizing wonder lies at the heart of the masque and that spectacle is far more likely than poetry to convey the marvelous.

As we might expect from the theory of emancipation and delight examined above, the wonder generated in Daniel's masques comes from within the pieces themselves; while James and the court are to benefit from the wondrous occurrences, they are not the source of the marvelous. It follows, then, that reason and order do not rule here as they do in a Jonsonian masque. In The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, Sybilla is visited in a dream by Iris, the daughter of Wonder, and is left bereft “of all, saue admiration and amazement” (199). Epistemological confusion reigns, and sounding like Wonder in The Vision of Delight, Sybilla tries to account for the marvel she has witnessed: “What haue I seene? where am I or do I see at all? or am I any where? was this Iris (the Messenger of Iuno) or else but a fantasme or imagination? will the diuine Goddesses vouchsafe to visit this poore Temple? it can be but a dreame: yet so great Powers haue blest as humble roofes, and vse, out of no other respect, then their owne gracefulnes, to shine vvhere they will. But what Prospectiue is this? or what shall I herein see? Oh admirable Powers! what sights are these?” (200). The vision that follows makes up the bulk of the masque, with each goddess representing a quality that Sybilla (and Daniel) hopes James's new reign will contain—from “Kingdomes large” to “might / And power by Sea” (203-4). The masque, instead of being a confirmation of certainty, ends up being a prayer of sorts, a benison for the future:

O Powers of powers, grant to our vowes we pray
That these faire blessing which we now erect
In Figures left vs here, in substance may
Be those great props of glory and respect.

(203)

Instead of being laughed offstage as her father was in The Vision of Delight, however, Iris closes the masque with another blessing, hopeful and wondering, but not certain: “And no doubt, but that in respect of the persons vnder whose beautiful couerings they haue thus presented themselues, these Deities will be pleased the rather at their inuocation (knowing all their desires to be such) as euermore to grace this glorious Monarchy with the Reall effects of these blessings represented” (205). Unlike a Jonsonian masque, a masque of Daniel does not necessarily end with an intermingling of ideal/fictive and real. Fiction is very separate, and it clearly remains to be seen in 1604 whether the “Real effects” will match the “blessings represented.”

Tethys' Festival, a masque commemorating the investiture of Prince Henry as Prince of Wales, represents Daniel and Jones's celebration of the power of wonder. The first scene takes place in a port or haven and introduces Zephyrus, played by Charles, then the Duke of York, along with eight Naiads and two Tritons. One of the Tritons announces the imminent arrival of Tethys and her nymphs, a dance follows, and then Tethys and her nymphs are revealed in a scene change so dazzling that Daniel describes it “in the language of their Architector who contriued it, and speakes in his owne mestier to such as are vnderstanders & louers of that design”: “First at the opening of the heauens appeared 3 circles of lights and glasses, one with[in] another, and came downe in a straight motion fiue foote, and then began to mooue circularly: which lights and motion so occupied the eyes of the spectators, that the manner of altering the Scene was scarcely discerned: for in a moment the whole face of it was changed, the Port vanished, and Tethys with her Nymphes appeared in their seuerall cauerns gloriously alone” (315-16). Whether this passage and the next few pages of technical description are Jones's actual words or Daniel's paraphrase is of little significance for our purposes: Daniel has given Jones a voice, a prominent place in the text of the masque—in paradoxical recognition that the essence of the masque lies beyond words.

And this is the theme of the two major songs that follow, in which Daniel seems to recognize both the limitations of the form—and perhaps all representational attempts—and the power of wonder to affect human beings, if only for a fleeting moment:

If ioy had other figure
                    Then soundes, and wordes, and motion,
To intimate the measure,
                    And height of our deuotion;
                    This day it had beene show'd.
                    But what it can, it doth performe,
Since nature hath bestowed
                    No other letter,
                    To expresse it better,
                    Then in this forme;
Our motions, soundes, and wordes,
                    Tun'd to accordes;
Must shew the well-set partes,
Of our affections and our harts.
Are they shadowes that we see?
And can shadowes pleasure giue?
                    Pleasures onely shadowes bee
                    Cast by bodies we conceiue,
                    And are made the thinges we deeme,
                    In those figures which they seeme.
But these pleasures vanish fast,
Which by shadowes are exprest:
                    Pleasures are not, if they last,
                    In their passing, is their best.
                    Glory is most bright and gay
                    In a flash, and so away.
Feed apace then greedy eyes
On the wonder you behold.
                    Take it sodaine as it flies
                    Though you take it not to hold:
When your eyes haue done their part,
Thought must lengthen it in the hart.

(320-21)

While these remarkable songs ally Daniel with Shakespeare's Prospero and with Hymen in As You Like It, they also link Daniel to a Longinian/Patrizian epistemology and poetics, with their appreciation that “Glory is most bright and gay / In a flash, and so away”: instability, flux, and transience are posited as the basis for any aesthetic or intellectual appreciation that we may have.⁷⁵ Limited though it may be to “motions, soundes, and wordes,” staged wonder becomes one of the ways we can have access to passing pleasures and truths.

Daniel closes Tethys' Festival in a way that further separates him from Aristotle and Jonson and further links him to Patrizi and Shakespeare. After Tethys and her nymphs have vanished, a Triton announces that Mercury would like to see them again. Mercury then descends “most artificially” (322) and asks Zephyrus—now referred to as the “Duke of Yorke”—and six noblemen to “bring backe the Queene and her Ladies in their owne forme” (322). When the women are revealed out of costume, they are in the masque's third scene, “a most pleasant and artificiall grove” (323). Although this final move may seem to approach a Jonsonian blending of fictive and real, it is much more stark and illusion-baring. Like the end of Daniel's The Vision, this closing juxtaposes ideal and actual, revealing the difference between them. Moreover, Daniel and Jones make no suggestion that wonder comes from any place but the theatrical experience: the court has a long way to go before it can approach the power of transformation that was displayed before it.⁷⁶

Daniel's work in the masque constitutes an alternative conception of the form in general and of wonder in particular. Instead of evoking wonder only to link it to James and therefore dissipate it into extreme order and certainty, Daniel, like Patrizi, champions the marvelous and the maker of wonders, in this case Inigo Jones. In doing so, he puts forth a vision of art, knowledge, and politics that recognizes wonder, uncertainty, and disequilibrium as the foundations for any lasting insight. Like Patrizi and, as we are about to see, Shakespeare, Daniel seems to suggest that once a marvelous revelation has been witnessed, it can last only as long as “thought length[ens] it in the hart” of the individual spectator.

Notes

1. On pageantry, see Anglo, Spectacle; Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642; Montrose, “‘Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes’”; Yates, Astraea; and Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments. On the relationship between politics and theater, see Geertz, Local Knowledge, 121-46, esp. 121-29; Goldberg, James I; Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations; Marcus, Politics of Mirth; Mullaney, Place of the Stage; Orgel, Illusion of Power; Pye, Regal Phantasm; Strong, Art and Power; and Tennenhouse, Power on Display. For a refreshingly different approach to the Jonsonian masque, see Prescott, “The Stuart Masque and Pantagruel's Dreams.”

2. Jonson himself linked wonder to the antimasque, describing his first one—in the Masque of Queens—as a “spectacle of strangeness, producing multiplicity of gesture.” See Jonson's preface to Masque of Queens, 17-18, in Complete Masques, ed. Orgel, 123. All subsequent citations from Jonson's masques are taken from this edition, which is henceforth referred to as cm.

3. Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 123.

4. Goldberg, James I, 67.

5. Parry, Golden Age Restor'd, 41. See also Orgel, Illusion of Power, 37. Thomas Greene connects “magic and festivity” in a related way: “If magic by definition is the imitation through signs of that which the manipulator wants to bring about, then the recovery of cosmic harmony was the persistent, supreme end of aristocratic magic” (“Magic and Festivity at the Renaissance Court,” 645).

6. Marcus, Politics of Mirth, 9-10.

7. Orgel, in cm, 13.

8. Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 5. In defense of his claim of Jonson's reverence for the image, Orgel cites one passage from the Discoveries: “it doth so enter, and penetrate the inmost affection (being done by an excellent Artificer) as sometimes it orecomes the power of speech and oratory.” See Discoveries, 1526-28, in Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, 8:610; this edition of Jonson's work is henceforth referred to as bj. For more characteristic views of Jonson on words and images, see Discoveries, 1509-21 and 2128-29, in bj 8:609-10, 628.

9. Orgel's recent work, however, suggests that he now recognizes disjunction where he earlier saw harmony; see his “The Poetics of Incomprehensibility.” See also Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm, 9-10.

10. See also Dolora Cunningham, who in “The Jonsonian Masque as a Literary Form” applies the Aristotelian/Jonsonian view of wonder to the masques and, not surprisingly, finds order, containment, and profit to be their realized goals. An interesting note is that, nearly thirty years later, when writing about wonder in Shakespearean comedy (“Wonder and Love in the Romantic Comedies”), Cunningham recognizes wonder as a figure that has an epistemologically destabilizing effect on the audience. In Shakespeare, then, she recognizes a different view of wonder. Time may have altered her vision of the possibilities of the marvelous, or perhaps her two essays are themselves evidence that these two views of wonder—epitomized dramatically by Jonson and Shakespeare—could have existed simultaneously in the Renaissance.

11. Parry, Golden Age Restor'd, 49-50. Orgel discusses the difficulty of theatrical containment in “Making Greatness Familiar” (in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. Bergeron, 19-25, esp. 23-25).

12. Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels, 3-18.

13. Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 6-7.

14. Shearman, Mannerism, 104. Shearman's entire discussion of the intermezzi is helpful (104-12). Helen Cooper sees the origin of such an evolution in both the medieval morality plays and the Elizabethan royal pageants; see her “Location and Meaning,” in Court Masque, ed. Lindley, 135-48.

15. Nicoll, Stuart Masques, 61-62. There is, of course, a contemporary analogy between the intermezzi and both the interludes of the boy theaters and the jigs of the adult stage. See also Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, esp. 212-14.

16. Cited in Nicoll, Stuart Masques, 62. See also Shearman, Mannerism, 105.

17. See Welsford, The Court Masque, 186.

18. Thomas Greene, Light in Troy, 231, 237.

19. I follow Glynne Wickham in considering “emblem” more or less synonymous with “device,” “impresa,” “insignia,” and “ensign” (see his Early English Stages 3:65). In her Protestant Poetics, Barbara Lewalski notes the subtle distinction that sometimes existed in the period between “emblem,” possessing a general application to mankind—and “impresa,” possessing a more esoteric and mysterious quality. She goes on to admit, however, that these distinctions often were blurred, especially in England (181-83). See also Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 87; Grieco, “Georgette de Montenay”; and Hagstrum, Sister Arts, 57-100.

20. Colie, Resources of Kind, ed. Lewalski, 37.

21. Wickham, Early English Stages 3:66. In “The Poetics of Incomprehensibility,” Orgel writes: “The discontinuity between image and text in Renaissance iconographic structures has in recent years become a commonplace; symbolic imagery was not a universal language—on the contrary, it was radically indeterminate and always depended on explanation to establish its meaning” (436). In “Of Experience” (3.13), Montaigne avers: “Apollo revealed this clearly enough, always speaking to us equivocally, obscurely, and obliquely, not satisfying us, but keeping our minds interested and busy” (in Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 818).

    For a classic example of the wondrous potency of the veiled symbol in the Neoplatonic mystical tradition, see Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei (The Vision of God) 6.22, trans. Salter, 26-27. For sustained discussions of this tradition, see Bath, Speaking Pictures, 1-56; Cope, The Theater and the Dream, esp. 14-28; Gombrich, Symbolic Images, 123-95, esp. 146-78; and Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 218-35.

22. On the potential political power inherent in mystery and obscurity, see Yates, Astraea, 29-87, esp. 86-87. More recently see Donaldson, Machiavelli, esp. 141-85; and Hart, Art and Magic, esp. 12-59. See also Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, which explores Giovanni Botero's discussion of the political uses of mystery and the marvelous (75-84).

23. Gordon, Renaissance Imagination, ed. Orgel, 90. Gordon notes in this chapter—titled “The Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones”—that although Alberti and Leonardo had made this argument over a hundred years before, art theorists like Scamozzi and Lomazzo, contemporaries of Inigo Jones, still felt it necessary to support their forebears' defense of the visual arts. See Alberti, On Painting (1435), trans. Grayson, ed. Kemp. For Leonardo's paragone, see Leonardo on Painting, ed. Kemp, 20-46. See also Blunt, Artistic Theory, 48-57.

24. Gombrich, Symbolic Images, 165, 167.

25. Nicoll, Stuart Masques, 155. See also “The Roiall Intertainement of the French Prince at Antwerpe” (1581), in Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland: spectacles of state can “drive the beholder into an astonishment, setting him after a sort besides himselfe” (3:466).

26. Gilman connects Jonson's Epigrammes with a “blind” emblem-book tradition. Emblem books of this kind contained poetry and mottos but no engravings (see Iconoclasm and Poetry, 89-90). Gilman more generally sees Jonson's nondramatic poetry as characterized by an “imperialism of the word” (54).

27. Jonson's obsession with the reception of his Works, published in 1616, is well-known. On Jonson's attempt to control his texts, his readers, and his reputation, see Murray, “From Foul Sheets to Legitimate Model.” See also Loewenstein, Responsive Reading; Newton, “Ben Jonson and the (Re-)Invention of the Book,” in Classic and Cavalier, ed. Summers and Pebworth, 31-55; and Orgel, “What Is a Text?” in Staging the Renaissance, ed. Kastan and Stallybrass, 83-87, esp. 84-85.

28. Jonson, preface to Love's Triumph through Callipolis, in cm, 454.

29. Jonson, preface to Masque of Blackness, 1-12, in cm, 47. The clearest evidence of Jonson's revising in an attempt to save the masque for posterity can be found in his notes to Masque of Queens (1609). In his Oxford master's thesis, “Spectacular Selves,” J. M. Simon notes the intrusive effect of Jonson's marginalia in the 1616 Works version of this masque, as Jonson's learning impinges upon—and threatens to interrupt—his artistic work. To this formal point, I would add a thematic one: chronicling in these notes his sources for the iconographic and verbal portrayal of witchcraft in this masque, Jonson performs an act of domestication, attempting to bind and contain the often inscrutable practice of witchcraft. For Jonson's notes, see cm, 526-47.

30. For an example of Jonson's privileging words over images in the context of the emblem, see Poetaster 5.3.57 and 78-82 (in bj 4:299), where Horace distinguishes between the “imperfect body” (image) and the “soule” (verbal accompaniment or “distich”).

31. Jonson, Hymenaei, 1-17, in cm, 75-76.

32. Hymenaei, 522-29, 533-35, in cm, 94.

33. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 139. Barish's comment comes in a reference to the publication of Jonson's Works, which Barish claims enabled Jonson's theatrical pieces “to transcend the imperfection of performance” (139). Expanding on this point, Murray notes the antitheatricality of Jonson's meticulous care with his texts in the print shop, seemingly concerned with “linguistic and rhetorical clarity, which interests favor literary standards over theatrical wonder” (“From Foul Sheets to Legitimate Model,” 654).

34. Jonson, Discoveries, 1514-16, 2128-29, in bj 8:610, 628.

35. Jonson, prologue to The Staple of Newes, in bj 6:282.

36. Jonson, Discoveries, 1404-13, in bj 8:606.

37. See Gordon, Renaissance Imagination, 294 n.1.

38. Jonson, “An Expostulacion,” 29-52, in bj 8:403-4.

39. Here, presumably, Jonson speaks of “sense” not in reference to the sensual—and thus distinguished from “understanding”—but to meaning, purpose, knowledge.

40. Armstrong, “Ben Jonson and Jacobean Stagecraft,” in Jacobean Theatre, ed. Brown and Harris, 51. See also Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice: “his reform aims precisely to detheatricalize theater, to strip it of … not only its gaudiness and bustle but also its licentious ways with time and space, and its casual recourse to the astounding and the marvellous” (136).

41. Jonson, “An Expostulacion,” 86-92, in bj 8:405-6.

42. See Gordon, Renaissance Imagination, 87-89.

43. Renaissance Imagination, 96.

44. Orgel is unconvincing in his attempt to smooth over these differences. Explaining the lack of stage descriptions in later masques, he claims: “the integration of setting with text in the masques is amply indicated by the fact that descriptions of the stage … are no longer necessary for the masque to express its meaning. But ironically, this is also the first step toward the poet's becoming superfluous” (bj, 25). The second sentence, more than noting irony, points out the fragility of the “integration” mentioned in the first.

45. Jonson, Love's Triumph, 144-45, in cm, 459.

46. In the introduction to his Court Masque Lindley explains: “the [masque] writers [had an] uneasy awareness that the court audience was not, on the whole, ‘studious’ or sensitive to the aspect of the masque genre that later literary critics find most amenable to discussion. It is indeed symptomatic that there is scarcely any contemporary comment on the iconology of masques, but abundant testimony to the splendour of the ‘outward show’” (6).

47. See Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 83.

48. Jonson, Oberon, 100-109, in cm, 163. All subsequent citations from cm are annotated within the text by line numbers only.

49. See Jonson, Prince Henry's Barriers, 21, in cm, 143. Orgel notes that “claimes Arthurs seate” was a commonly cited anagram for “Charles Iames Stuart” (see cm, 143).

50. See Parry, Golden Age Restor'd, 74-75; and Strong, Henry Prince of Wales, 172.

51. Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 89.

52. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs, 749.

53. Orgel, cm, 486.

54. Goldberg, James I, 62.

55. Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 190.

56. On the audience in the age of Shakespeare and Jonson—with a special focus on the tension between “audience” and “spectators,” see Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 85-97. For a recent treatment of the importance of the spectator to Renaissance art, see Shearman, Only Connect, esp. 10-58.

57. Petit, cited in Ungerer, “An Unrecorded Elizabethan Performance,” 102.

58. See Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 86-87.

59. Giustiniani, cited in bj 10:457.

60. Giustiniani, bj 10:457.

61. Pory, cited in bj 10:466.

62. “Papers of William Turnbull,” cited in bj 10:466, 522-23; emphasis mine.

63. See John Chamberlain's letter to Dudley Carleton, letter 257, 18 January 1617, in Letters, ed. McLure, 2:49. McLure incorrectly identifies the masque as Christmas His Masque. Also cited in bj 10:568-69.

64. Busino, cited in Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage 4:670. See also C.S.P. Venetian (1617-19), 113-14.

65. Busino, cited in Jacobean and Caroline Stage 4:671. Also in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 283; Busino's Italian text is in Inigo Jones at 281, and in bj at 10:583.

66. Gordon, Renaissance Imagination, 88.

67. Southern, Changeable Scenery, 32.

68. Changeable Scenery, 17-18. This displaying of scene change is the rule—and Southern gives several examples from the masques of curtains' being used for revelations but not for disguising scene changes (19). In support of Southern's position is Nicola Sabbatini's Practica di fabricar Scene e Machine ne' Teatri (Ravenna, 1638). Lily B. Campbell paraphrases Sabbatini: “the shifting or changing of scenes was a spectacular device, desired because of its showy and startling possibilities” (Scenes and Machines on the English Stage, 151). An exception to this rule can be found in the comments attributed to Inigo Jones, who apparently sought to hide scene changes. See Tethys' Festival, in Daniel, Complete Works, ed. Grosart, 3:315-16; subsequent citations from the works of Daniel that are taken from this edition are annotated in the text by page numbers only. I address this issue in the section on Daniel below.

69. Heywood, Loves Maistresse, A2^r-v.

70. Zuccaro, Il Passagio per Italia, cited in Nicoll, Stuart Masques, 126. For a similar fascination with both stage marvels and their wondrous construction, see Sebastiano Serlio's First Booke of Architecture (1545; English edition, 1611), 24^r. For a helpful discussion of Serlio, see Strong, Art and Power, 39.

71. Bacon, Advancement of Learning 1, in Works 3:268.

72. See Daniel, Musophilus, ed. Himelick, esp. 71-72 and 99-106; and Daniel, Poems and a Defence of Rhyme, ed. Sprague, 206.

73. For a brief discussion of this tradition, see chap. 6 below.

74. Pitcher, “‘In Those Figures Which They Seeme,’” in The Court Masque, ed. Lindley, 45.

75. See also Alberti, who prefers “those in painting which leave more for the mind to discover than is actually apparent to the eye” (On Painting, trans. Grayson, ed. Kemp, 77). For an intriguing recent reading that links both this masque and this second song from Daniel's Tethys' Festival to the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, see Gatti, “Giordano Bruno,” 818-20.

76. Pitcher writes in “‘In Those Figures Which They Seeme’”: “Only by restoring Time, not eliminating it, could the celebration of a prince also contribute to his education. At the moment of his accession, he must accept that he will be replaced. And only by maintaining the distinction between the court and its fictional better selves, or its masques, could the prince acknowledge the mutability of all reigns: an Ideal court was, after all, only an Ideal” (Court Masque, ed. Lindley, 44).