SOURCE: “The Masque,” in The Essex House Masque of 1621: Viscount Doncaster and the Jacobean Masque, Duquesne University Press, 2000, pp. 70-119.

[In the following excerpt, Raylor discusses the function and sources of the Jacobean masque by examining the specifics of Viscount Doncaster's presentation of The Essex House Masquefor King James and the French Ambassador.]

PERFORMANCE

Having feasted and sampled the delicacies of the first banquet, Doncaster and his guests would have retired upstairs to the “large roome” set aside for the masque. Such retirement—often to the chamber adjoining the hall—was a traditional procedure in the case of an entertainment following a banquet, allowing, in this case, for the supper to be cleared and the second banquet set out.¹ From Chamberlain's remarks and a conjectural plan of Essex House in 1640, we may infer that the supper was held in the Low or Long Gallery on the third floor of the eastern extension of the house and the masque danced in the Great or High Gallery on the floor above it.² The plan shows a long, narrow room about 25 feet wide, while Ogilby and Morgan in their late seventeenth century plan depict one double that size. The latter plan, astonishingly, would yield a masquing space barely inferior to that of the Whitehall Banqueting House itself; but if, as seems reasonable, we presume that the former gives a more accurate depiction of the layout in 1621, we would expect the gallery to have afforded a stage narrower by over a half, and presumably therefore also proportionately shallower, than the norm of 40 by 28 feet—a stage measured, most likely, in the teens.³

Whatever the precise size of the stage, the room could easily have been arranged in the traditional manner, with the royal state facing the stage and dancing area, and the spectators arranged in seats around the walls. Once the king and his guests had taken up their proper places, a master of ceremonies representing the inventors and sponsor probably appeared to read or distribute copies of “The Argument,” which explained the fable or conceit of the masque. This was a conventional prelude, employed by Jonson and other writers to counteract the fact that spectators often had very little idea what it was they were supposed to be watching.⁴ Then the masque began.

Tellus (the earth-spirit), bent upon avenging the defeat of the Titans, vows to plague the gods with a new race of earth-born Giants. Confident of her success, she summons her creatures to a joyful holiday revel with a song: an unspecified number of antimasquers appear and dance (lines 18-34). The song mentions a tree, mines, a lion, an ape, a sheep, a boar, and a stag (although only the mines are referred to in the plural, we might presume, given the presentation of the dance as a revel, that the creatures danced in pairs—either by species, or, to emblematize the disorder of the dance, with one another). After the song and dance they all vanish and a cave appears, out of which rushes the second antimasque: a group of “.9. giants the supposed sonnes and champions of the earth; warlikely arrayed” (lines 37-38). One of them delivers a lengthy speech threatening the beautiful young ladies in the audience (lines 62-64) and vowing vengeance, rape, and murder upon the gods (lines 40-83). A “warrelike dance … performed to loud musicke” follows, after which “they … fall of by degrees, and clime to theire places” (lines 84-86), beginning their assault upon the heavens. That assault is cut short by the entry of Pallas, who turns them to stone through the power of her Gorgon's head. “Thus I locke up your madnesse,” she announces, as she goes about “Returninge Earth her one” (lines 88, 115). Pallas then delivers a speech justifying the reluctance of the gods to intervene in the rebellion. The gods, she claims, had intended to delay the operation of fate, allowing the rebels to run their course and repent of themselves, but the threat to such beauties among the spectators encouraged them to intervene. She warns the audience not to mistake clemency for weakness, reorders the stars, and then vanishes (lines 88-122). A second song is heard, warning any too-forward lover to expect a similar stony fate from his mistress's glance, thereby shifting the ground of the rebellion from the political to the sexual sphere (lines 124-43). What looked at first like an instance of political rebellion becomes an example of ill-mannered courtship. The second antimasque, which might be entitled “Giants Made Stone,” is now over.

Those spectators familiar with the conventions of the court masque would have expected the revelation of the main masque to follow immediately, featuring a new setting and new performers. The situation here was similar to that of The Golden Age Restored (1616), in which Pallas had put paid to the rebellion of the Iron Age by turning the rebels to stone, and had then descended with Astraea as the scene changed. But something very unusual now takes place—something the conventional vocabulary of masque criticism, with its emphasis on the structural opposition of masque and antimasque, does not readily account for. After the song, Prometheus appears bearing his stolen fire: he comments on its heavenly origin, outlines its ingredients (including the lights of both sun and moon: both lust and chastity), and explains that he plans to use it to bring the petrified Giants to life as men, to “Deale soule into cold stone, and raise up man / Out of a punishment” (lines 175-76): to “beget / Obedient life; and manners … refine” (lines 177-78). In a breathtaking extension of the metamorphic technique employed in the earlier masques with which Doncaster was associated, the antimasquers are once more transformed. But this transformation is not to be achieved without assistance. As he makes his exit, Prometheus corrects the traditional version of the legend, and appeals for the approval and aid of the “Divinest powers” in the audience in raising life from the stones. After his departure a third song is heard, urging the spectators to look “with desire,” and fan the heavenly fire with their breath. In a moment of potent magic, heightened by the accompaniment of music and light, the anti-masquers are revealed as the masquers, and Hermione-like, the stones begin to move.

The text is not specific about what exactly happens here, or about what, precisely, was represented in the main masque, but the absence of any accompanying explanation must mean that it was immediately identifiable and unambiguous. The conventional association of the number nine with the Worthies coincides with the appearance of the Worthies in a number of recent masques and with the impeccable character of the reformed antimasquers, to allow us to speculate that the main masque consisted of a tableau in which the masquers were “discovered,” no doubt in a scene of light, as the Nine Worthies: those ancient heroes whom “the young world, / In her unstable youth, did then produce.”⁵ The text that precedes and accompanies the discovery suggests that the masquers are discovered as stones, statue-like in their immobility, and that they are gradually brought to life through the art of Prometheus and the power of the spectators. The gradual and visible animation of the statuesque masquers is (as we shall soon see) an essential part of the meaning of the masque.

The discovery of a masque of Worthies closely parallels that of Middleton's Inner Temple Masque, or Masque of Heroes (1619), in which nine “Heroes deified for their virtues” were discovered “sitting in arches of clouds.”⁶ The Essex House Worthies are not primarily presented as heroic warriors; they are beautiful, obedient, and well-mannered objects of desire—an adjustment that follows the presentation of the Giants' rebellion as a sexual transgression, and prepares the way for their dancing of the main masque and the revels. The main masque being danced, a fourth song “invites them to the Ladyes” (line 216): invites the masquers to pick partners from the audience and dance the revels. Their performance of the measured steps of the dance expresses the smooth, harmonious operation of a universe governed once more by virtuous love (lines 217-34).

What the spectators at Essex House witnessed was not, as in Lord Hay's Masque, The Lords' Masque, or Lovers Made Men, a single transformation following an earlier, reported metamorphosis, but a double transformation: not “Lovers Made Men,” but “Giants Made Stones Made Men.” Doncaster had once more succeeded in providing “something Novel, neat, and unusual, that others might admire.”

SOURCES

The masque possesses the philosophical seriousness and the elevated tone of the most dignified of the court masques; it is far removed from the whimsical inconsequence and bawdiness of the private theatricals. Its fable is manufactured from two distinct myths: the rebellion of the Giants against the gods, and the creation of man by Prometheus. While almost any Renaissance compendium of classical mythology might have served as a source for such material, the prime locus for the association of the two tales appears to be The Library of Apollodorus, where they are narrated in adjacent chapters (1.6-7). But no connection is there established between them other than the implied point that Prometheus was one of the Titans who had earlier rebelled against the gods—a point made more explicitly in the Theogony of Hesiod.

The treatment of the rebellion in the second antimasque reveals a further debt to the Gigantomachia of Claudian. In Apollodorus's version, Earth was so angered by the gods' treatment of the Titans, her offspring, that with the aid of Coelus she produced the Giants to wreak her revenge; the gods with the help of Hercules then defeated them. From Claudian is imported the creation of the Giants by Earth alone, the use of the name “Tellus” to refer to her, and the Giants' defeat by Pallas, using the Gorgon's head. The masque also imitates from Claudian Tellus's rousing speech to the Giants prior to their attack, a loose variation of which is placed in the mouth of one of the Giants themselves.⁷

An iconographic analogue, if not actually a source, for Pallas's petrifaction of the Giants may be found in Barthelemy Aneau's Picta Poesis (Lyon, 1552), which includes an emblem showing Pallas turning men to stone with the Gorgon's head—stupefying them through the combined force of arms and letters.⁸ The employment of this trope in the masque is heavily indebted to Jonson's use of Pallas and her shield to crush the rebellion of the Iron Age in The Golden Age Restored—a scene which was itself closely based upon Claudian's Gigantomachia.⁹ At the time of The Essex House Masque, moreover, Pallas and the Gorgon's head, and possibly the Gigantomachy, were icons of some topicality at court.

During the winter of 1620-21, Anthony Van Dyck was in London, engaged upon projects for the king.¹⁰ During this period he was working on The Continence of Scipio, a painting that entered the collection of the marquess of Buckingham, and which appears to represent Buckingham in the figure of the bridegroom. In the lower left corner of this painting is a fragment of a classical frieze depicting two Gorgon heads (a third adorns a ewer on its lower right side): these heads, with their Minervan associations, clearly allude to the moral and political wisdom of the continent Scipio, who chose to restore a captured bride to her betrothed. In 1972 the very frieze fragment depicted in the painting was discovered during building work on the site of Arundel House, the residence of Lord Arundel, and home to his collection of antique sculpture.¹¹ The discovery prompted a debate over the ownership of the frieze and the commissioning of the portrait—a debate that remains unresolved.¹² For our purposes the value of the frieze lies in the fact that it was clearly a curiosity at court at the time of the masque, and was incorporated into a painting which spoke to the politics of the period.¹³ Just how it did so is arguable; but it seems certain that it appealed to the royal self-presentation, in which the monarch was figured in Minervan terms.¹⁴ More precisely, in its representation of Scipio restoring the captured bride, virtue intact, to her betrothed, the painting appears to allude to the king's part in securing the agreement of the Manners family to a match between Buckingham and their daughter, Katherine, in the summer of 1620.¹⁵ There may, moreover, be an allusion in the three Gorgon heads to the foreign policy of the period. In his 1609 account of the central classical myths, Bacon had interpreted the legend of Perseus and Medusa as a lesson in the handling of warfare: Perseus's journey implied a warning against attacking neighbouring states; his success suggested the need for a just cause in warfare; and the fact that Perseus attacked the only mortal one of the three Gorgons implied a warning against embarking upon wars which could not be won.¹⁶ Such a message would have offered confirmation and support for James's wary approach to the Bohemian problem.

Contemporary understanding of the provenance of the frieze sheds further light upon the genesis and topicality of the fable of The Essex House Masque. Among those who saw the frieze at Arundel House (although we do not know when) was Lord Arundel's longstanding associate in the study of antiquities, Inigo Jones, who noted in the margin of his copy of Vitruvius that “the Antike freeze with gorgons heads” came from “the temble of Pallas” in Smyrna: an identification which brings out the Minervan associations implicit in Van Dyck's portrait.¹⁷ The temple to which Jones refers was the Trajeneum at Pergamon, from which Arundel acquired additional frieze fragments depicting the Gigantomachy—the very topic animated in the first part of The Essex House Masque.¹⁸ Although we should perhaps attribute Arundel's acquisition of these fragments to the efforts of his indefatigable agent William Petty in the mid-1620s, it is clear from Van Dyck's painting that at least one fragment thought to come from the temple was known at court by the winter of 1620, as was its Minervan context: it is therefore possible that its depiction of the Gigantomachy was also known.¹⁹

The second part of The Essex House Masque concerns the creation of man by Prometheus. The version of the legend presented here is highly unusual. In the masque Prometheus creates man not from clay but from rock—the very stone into which the Giants had earlier been transformed. This is an Orphic Prometheus, an Amphion who, to the accompaniment of music, makes stones to move; as a motif, it inverts the wild, anti-Orphic revel of Tellus. The use of such a figure may have been prompted by the appearance of Orpheus in Buckingham's masque of the previous winter, in which he had lamented the loss of Eurydice with the exclamation: “I would Transforme the rest to Stoanes.”²⁰ There may be an iconographic context for the device in an illustration frequently reproduced in early Italian editions of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which depicts Prometheus raising man from a rock.²¹ But there is also perhaps a jokingly competitive compliment to Arundel, whose growing collection of antique sculpture was housed in the long gallery at the nearby Arundel House. This reference suggests that, while Arundel's gallery may have contained an impressive array of ancient statues, Doncaster's, by contrast, contained stones that could dance. As a conceit for a masque, the animation of petrified figures is probably indebted most directly to The Lords' Masque of Campion and Jones (1613), which had featured the animation of eight “women-statues” through the agency of Prometheus and his heavenly fire.²² The French Ballet des Argonautes (1614) had, however, featured rocks (men thus transformed by the enchantress, Circe) moving at the sound of Amphion's music, and yielding up dancers to the king and queen.²³

A further variant on the myth, amounting to a full-scale revision, lies in Prometheus's search for divine approval for his use of the heavenly fire. Contemporary mythographers and masque writers were keen to present Prometheus as a figure of wisdom rather than rebellion, as a benefactor who introduced divine wisdom to humanity (and paid the price through his continued torture).²⁴ In The Lords' Masque, Campion and Jones had even gone so far as to associate Prometheus with the Worthies by presenting him “attyred as one of the ancient Heroes.”²⁵The Essex House Masque, however, takes such revisionism to its conclusion. Despite the implication in “The Argument” that the spectators are witnesses to an act of rebellion (lines 14-16), Prometheus's action, though undertaken furtively and against the wishes of the gods (lines 146-51), is here ultimately given divine sanction (that of the royal spectators), as a result of Prometheus's assurance that “the life I give / Shall weare in servinge you by whom I live” (lines 184-85); incredibly, Prometheus himself goes unpunished. This is no dramatic oversight, but a stunning reversal: “The Argument” reminds the spectators of the conventional interpretation of the legend, thus priming them for the astonishing revision to come. In retrospect, it becomes clear that the warning offered in “The Argument” that man “never should aspire / To such forbidden height” refers not to the work of Prometheus, but to the rebellion of the Giants.

FABLE

In its blending of the Gigantomachy with the revised myth of Prometheus, the masque deftly manufactures a new fable—a fable, it may be added, of considerable intellectual coherence. Its thesis might be expressed as “obedience through wisdom and love.” This thesis operates on both macrocosmic and microcosmic levels, as a fully integrated natural, moral, and political allegory.

In the wild and discordant dance presented in the first antimasque we witness the rampant disorderliness of mere nature, liberated from divine control. In the second antimasque we move from disorder to outright rebellion. The natural philosophical context is provided by Natalis Comes in his account of the Titans:

Quidam elementorum mutationes per hanc fabulam explicasse antiquos crediderunt, ac Titanes vocarunt illa elementa, quae terrestre quiddam & crastum intra se continerent, quae vi corporum superiorum inferius assidue detrudantur. Nam vapores semper sursum vi solis attrahuntur, qui vbi ad superiora peruenerint, virtute diuinorum corporum vel soluuntur in purissima elementa, vel repelluntur inferius, quae dimicatio est sempiterna …²⁶

Certain ones believed that the ancients explained the mutation of elements by this fable, naming Titans those elements which contained within themselves anything earthy and dense, which are continually driven downwards by the force of superior bodies. For exhalations are always attracted upward by the virtue of the sun, which, when they arrive at the upper regions, are either dissolved by the power of the divine bodies into the most refined elements or pushed back lower, which struggle is perpetual.

That the Giants are to be seen as terrestrial exhalations akin to, though not identical with, an earthquake (line 28) is suggested by Tellus, in her injunction to the hollows of the earth to move (line 27). George Sandys noted a similar reading of the Gigantomachy as a volcanic eruption: “the Gyants are those windes that struggle in the cavernes of the Earth; which not finding a way inforce it; vomiting fire, and casting up stones against heaven or Jupiter.”²⁷ It follows from these readings that Pallas's assertion that the rebellion would have burned itself out in its own good time was well grounded in contemporary natural philosophy. The Giants, as exhalations of earth, attracted by the power of the sun, are consigned to the region of air. On meeting the borders of the heavens (represented by Pallas) they are pushed back to earth, cooling and petrifying in the process, and forming mountains. Their assault is doomed to fail.²⁸ The celestial fire of Prometheus creates man from rock by purging it of the dross of earth, its grosser elements (extreme density, moistness, and coldness), and inspiring it with the animating heat and light of the heavens. The result is not a complete purgation of the material, but an apt balance between the terrestrial and the divine.

Prometheus is not concerned just to animate the stones; he is also concerned to explain, for the benefit of the audience, the several ingredients of the stolen fire. His list expresses the harmony of natural and supernatural, super- and sublunary heat and light compounded in the fire. It also reveals the extent to which the masque is steeped in neoplatonic learning. These ingredients are enumerated in descending order, moving from the circumference toward the center of the Ptolemaic universe. Prometheus ranges from the fixed stars, to the sun, then to the planet Venus, and next to the moon. Moving below the sphere of the moon, he enumerates various meteorological phenomena associated with the regions of fire and air: comets (a question is raised about their precise location), thunderbolts, shooting stars, and sparks—phenomena associated with the aerial region, traditionally thought to be governed by Juno (this is the meaning of the reference to the “sparkes of Junoes Jealousy” in line 173).²⁹ The soul is thus composed, in Platonic fashion, of heat and light both material and spiritual, the former serving to allay the purity of the latter.³⁰ Those ingredients are harmoniously blended astrological influences. The excessive heat and dryness of the sun are tempered by the moisture and coolness of “the chast / Light of the winter moone” (lines 166-67). Similarly, the benign influence of Venus offsets the malignity of Mars. The reference to “the lusting lookes of Venus, by which shee / Intreated Mars first to Adultery” (lines 164-65) should be read not morally but astrologically: Venus's “lusting lookes” are those influences by which, in favorable aspect, she attracts Mars. Her coolness, moisture, and temperateness balance his heat, dryness, and ardor; together they fuse the masculine and feminine principles, yielding a harmonious blend of qualities, especially suited to love and procreation.³¹ As Leone Ebreo put it: “although the heat of Mars is excessive in ardour, Venus with her sober coolness tempers and proportions him to these operations.”³² The result of all this mingling of qualities in the soul is the “moderate heat” with which Prometheus can create temperate life, mediating between the extreme ardor of the Giants and the extreme inertia of the stones. Earth, water, air, and fire are now happily blended.

The physical process thus described involves a moral dimension. In the moral sphere, the opening antimasque displays the human psyche ungoverned by divine love and wisdom. It affords a grotesque inversion of the conventional image of Orpheus charming rocks, trees, and beasts with his song—an image taken to refer to the calming of passions by music.³³ This image had earlier been enacted in a harmonious dance of beasts in The Lords' Masque.³⁴ Rather than calming the passions, however, Tellus whips them up, and the hint of golden-age harmoniousness in the lion's dancing with the lamb (or sheep), only emphasizes the topsy-turvy quality of the revel. Traditional number and animal symbolism underscore the materiality of the revelers. The five beasts named as dancers may allude to the five senses. Four of those named were, moreover, conventionally connected with the four temperaments and their associated elements: the lion (fire), the ape (air), the lamb (water), and the pig (earth—though here it is a boar. The rebellion of the Giants was widely conflated with that of the Titans and taken to signify the oppression of knowledge and virtue by the gross, material body.³⁵ Pallas was conventionally thought to represent divine wisdom, the power of which was expressed by the Gorgon's head on her shield.³⁶ Her ability to quash native instincts led to her depiction as the guardian of virgins.³⁷ Her defeat of the Giants thus represented the triumph of divine wisdom or reason over material appetite, and the power of virginity over lust.³⁸ The action of Prometheus brings the masque to its conclusion by illustrating the infusion of wisdom and love into the body by means of the soul.³⁹ This was a conventional reading: according to George Sandys, for example, “Prometheus signifies Providence, and Minerva Heavenly Wisdome: by Gods providence therefore and wisdome Man was created. The celestiall fire is his soule inspired from above.”⁴⁰ The peculiar character of this Prometheus, moreover, establishes a precisely pointed relationship between the anti-Orphic Tellus and the Orphic Prometheus, just as the divine wisdom of Pallas opposed the earthy irrationality of Tellus. Such relationships express the philosophical coherence of the masque.

The political significance of the fable emerges from its natural and moral meanings. The Giants are rebels: “too potent subjects,” as Sandys put it, “or the tumultuary vulgar; rebelling against their Princes, called Gods, as his substitutes: who by their disloyaltie and insolencies violate all lawes both of God and man, and profane whatsoever is sacred.”⁴¹ They are drawn by the attractive light of the royal sun to the forbidden reaches of the sky; deluded by the sun's power into dreaming of an existence beyond their proper sphere.⁴² Their defeat by Pallas represents the inevitable triumph of royal wisdom, and the reestablishment of the natural political order. Rebellion is thus shown to be an inevitable but temporary byproduct of virtuous rule.

A glance at these complementary lines of interpretation makes it clear why the myth of Prometheus should be so readily blended with that of the rebellion of the Giants. In marrying the two myths what has the poet done other than tease out a latent symbolic connection between them? In depicting the creation of man from the petrified Giants, the masque retains its commitment to the view that Prometheus fashioned man out of earth, for that is what the Giants are (“sonnes and champions of the earth,” lines 37-38). In restoring them to life through the infusion into the terrestrial body of a divine soul, Prometheus completes the work of Pallas (with whom he is conventionally associated), so redeeming earth and thereby producing the civilized, obedient, semidivine race of men (lines 177-86). The masquers' dancing with the ladies in the audience expresses the ordering power of divine love: what they had earlier uncivilly attempted (through their assault on the gods and their attempted rape of Pallas), they now lawfully achieve. And their dancing guarantees the continued realization of such plenitude, for the divine fire is rekindled by every lady's touch (lines 223-28), and any potential vacuum is immediately filled by the dancers who, through their motion, merge with the music to become part of the heavenly harmony—“A paire / Like aire” (lines 231-32).⁴³

STRUCTURE

In its structure and spectacle, the masque builds upon the strengths of earlier Doncastrian productions. While Lord Hay's Masque had, with its elaborate scene changes and fantastic costumes, been a triumph of spectacle, its dramatic construction was not as elegantly economical as that of Lovers Made Men. But what the later masque gained in coherence it lost in spectacle, lacking even a rudimentary scene change. The Essex House Masque attempts to outdo these earlier masques; and it does so without losing the structural economy of Lovers Made Men. This achievement is made possible by an unprecedented spectacular innovation: the Doncastrian signature of transforming the antimasquers is used here not once, but twice. The establishment of a credible intellectual and dramatic connection between those two transformations yields a coherent action.

The careful disposition of the parts of the masque reveals a confident and innovative handling of generic convention, and a sensitive response to the constraints and opportunities of the occasion. Its arrangement of parts offers variety within repetition:

Song + Dance (First antimasque)
Speech + Dance (Second antimasque)
Speech (Pallas)
Song
Speech (Prometheus)
Song + Dance (Main masque)
Song + Dance (Revels)

As an interlude between two banquets, the masque needed to be brief; as a prelude to the revels it needed to introduce dancing as an expression of lawful love. The latter requirement is met by the transformation of the performers from fighters to lovers, and therefore dancers (dancing being an expression of the universal ordering power of love). The former is satisfied by the dramatic economy of the masque, and by the exploitation of a structural consequence of the use of the same performers throughout. Instead of performing the usual three masque dances (entry, main dance, and revels), the masquers perform only a main dance that leads directly to the revels.⁴⁴ This elegant compression helps to unify the action by underscoring the point that the second antimasque is in this case the masquers' entry. It also expresses in structural terms the philosophical balance between the two worlds of the masque, with the two masque dances mirroring the two antimasques. Such mirroring extends to the careful balancing of complimentary parts of the masque. The structural antithesis between the rebellious speech of the Giant and the restorative speech of Prometheus is reinforced by the fact the two speeches are of identical length (each is 44 lines long).

Mirroring is, however, too static a term to suggest the fluidity of movement involved in the masque, which exhibits not a static opposition, but a unified progression from the world of the antimasque to that of the masque. It transcends the condition of argument and approaches that of narrative. The narrative proper begins with the entry dance of the Giants; it pivots on their petrifaction by Pallas; and is requited by their subsequent animation by Prometheus. The fact that Tellus's antimasque was not fully integrated into the narrative was noticed by contemporaries, one of whom appeared to regard it as an independent attraction, claiming that the evening's entertainment consisted of a feast “accompanied with a danse, a maske, & a banquet.”⁴⁵ Perhaps the text's reference to the first antimasquers as “Antemaskers,” and the absence of any description of the Giants is significant, suggesting that the first dance is merely an ante-masque: a dance before the masque.⁴⁶ But the first “Antemaske” is nonetheless, like the antimasques of Jonson, fully integrated into the broad thematic and structural sweep of the entertainment, with its movement toward the revels. This movement is clearly signaled by Tellus's topsy-turvy presentation of her antimasque as a victory revel (like Jonson's Oberon, this masque begins and ends with a revel).⁴⁷ The entertainment opens with the animation of stones by Tellus (the mines of the first antimasque) and it concludes with the animation of stones by Prometheus. The action moves from macrocosmic disorder (Tellus's illegitimate and premature holiday “revell,” involving nature's creatures) to microcosmic rebellion (the Giants' rebellion), through the creation of microcosmic order (the petrification and reanimation of the Giants) to the establishment of macrocosmic order (the revels proper, in which the dancing of masquers and spectators communicates the newfound harmony to the court and, by implication, the country at large). It might be expressed thus:

Antirevel—Antimasque—Transformation / Transformation—Masque—Revel.

The amatory trajectory here established was continued beyond the revels in the second banquet, which made lavish use of the aphrodisiac ambergris, from which Venus was reputedly born.⁴⁸

The masque thus appears, in typically Doncastrian manner, to be triadic in structure. A three-step counter movement answers a three-stage opening movement. This triadic principle permeates the masque. Three speakers deliver three speeches at key points in the narrative; that narrative is punctuated by songs. Although there are four, rather than three, songs, the two masque songs (those that accompany the revelation of the masque and the revels) each possess three stanzas and feature three rhymes. As a structuring unit of the cosmos, the triad gives rise to the number nine in which the Giants and ultimately the Worthies appear.⁴⁹ In such a context, the number nine is auspicious in that it suggests both the created universe (with its nine spheres) and the human soul (with its nine senses) and the perfect end of effort (in that it is the last of the digits). It suggests, in sum, the plenitude of creation, brought to fruition by Prometheus.⁵⁰

The retention of the same performers as both Giants and Worthies contributes to the unity of the narrative, as does the construction of roles appropriate to their dignities. While their status might prohibit courtiers from taking speaking roles or appearing in the antimasques of official court productions, in private theatricals they frequently did so.⁵¹ Even in private, however, there were limits to the kind of roles they might adopt: the ghostly lovers of Lovers Made Men are victims and not, like the Giants of The Essex House Masque, rebels. But young gentlemen without official court positions might, on account of their insignificance and relative anonymity, be given greater liberty in role-playing: they might be presented as rebels and then reformed. The precise character of that reformation is once again an index of the liberty of the occasion, demonstrating the extent to which the inventors of The Essex House Masque were not bound to regard the occasion as an official court masque. As in Lovers Made Men, the movement of the masque is a moderate one. The masquers are made men, not gods; the masque moves toward mortal perfection.

SPECTATORS

Although the question of why the masque settles for so moderate a movement may in part be answered by reference to the dignities of the performers, it must also be explained by reference to the way in which the masque responds to and makes use of its spectators. The difficulty here was that although the masque was not presented at court, and could not therefore command the full political and aesthetic weight of an official production, the king was nonetheless present; he could not be ignored. But nor would it be appropriate to center the entire fiction upon him. Doncaster's reception of the embassy was, from the king's point of view, designed to offer unofficial encouragement to the French to advance their marriage proposals without revealing his own involvement in doing so to the Spanish. The inventors finessed this problem with considerable success. Like Lovers Made Men, the transformation of antimasquers into masquers is effected not by direct appeal to the royal presence, but by the action of agents internal to the fiction: Pallas petrifies the rebels and Prometheus animates them. Such agents needed to be figures of sufficient weight to impel the transformations, and that weight is generated in part by their mythic associations and in part by their conventional association with King James. Pallas was widely associated with his wisdom, while the “Promethean fire” of his gaze had been celebrated by Jonson in The Masque of Beauty. But for all that Pallas and Prometheus might be associated with the monarch, they could not, given his presence in the audience, be completely identified with him (even James could not be both spectator and participant). The masque could not therefore rely exclusively upon these conventional associations to provide the justification for its actions.

Given the gender and character of the masquers, it was only apt that the masque should, in its construction of a suitable impetus for the unfolding action, exploit the presence of ladies in the audience. The appearance of Pallas is attributed to the gods' concern for the gathered “Glories” of the court, those fragile beauties who (unlike the gods themselves) are threatened by the intrusion of the lustful rebels. The narrative aptness of this impetus may be gauged by contrasting it with The Golden Age Restored, in which Pallas permits the rebellion of the Iron Age to unfold, and appears only when she decides it is time for the rebels to learn that their adversaries are unconquerable: “‘Twas time t52 In The Golden Age Restored, Pallas's behavior is motivated solely by the dramatist's desire to express a philosophical point;⁵³ in The Essex House Masque that point is prompted by the logic of the occasion—by a just interlocking of the spectators with the fiction.

The credit for the animation of the stony Giants is divided between the art of Prometheus and the power of the spectators. Although his artistry and stolen fire impel the transformation, the masque asserts that art alone is insufficiently powerful to complete it. Prometheus appeals to the “Divinest powers” in the audience to “spare a saving glaunce / This worke of life to reskue; if mischaunce / Dare to attempt it” (lines 186-88). While this appears to offer the spectators only a limited, watchdog role in the process, their centrality is underscored both by Prometheus's departure from the stage prior to the transformation, and by the song announcing it—a song that presumably represents Prometheus's art in operation. The song requires the audience to “Calmely looke and with desire / Ad to the fire,” on the grounds that “all the art / Cannot impart / So much thereof as you” (lines 192-93, 196-98). As the masque is discovered, the song remarks: “Then veiw the spring of man begun / By your one sun” (lines 208-09). What is this life-giving sun?

A productive ambiguity is at work here, which depends upon the openendedness of the referent. Is this sun something every member of the audience possesses? Or is it something singular? The image of the sun is conventionally associated with the eyes. In this respect two different yet complementary sources are implied. Read in a Petrarchan context, the image suggests the life- or death-giving eyes of the beautiful ladies in the audience—the “Divinest powers” to whom Prometheus appeals for support in his quest, and in whose service the newly created lovers will expend themselves. A device of this sort was employed in the French ballet, Les Fées de la Forest de Saint-Germain (1625), in which men begin to dance “comme des demy-Dieux” due to the magical gaze of the ladies in the audience.⁵⁴ But there was another conventional source for such glances—a source that could be implied but not named. In the Jacobean court masque, the impetus for the transformation was invariably the monarch, whose gaze, in the language of Jacobean kingship (absolutist in tone, if not in fact), gave or withdrew life: “So breakes the sunne earths rugged chaines, / Wherein rude winter bound her vaines,” comments the song accompanying the transformation of the Irish ambassadors in The Irish Masque (lines 187-88).⁵⁵ The ladies of the court are not, then, the only ones invited to gaze with desire on the young men performing the masque. The suggestion is not explicit—that would be unthinkably tactless—but it is hinted at in the openended language of the discovery song. The spectators—male monarch and female beauties—are thus dramatically integrated into the action of the masque. They are the impetus for the transformation, which they impel by doing exactly what spectators do naturally—by gazing. The lighting effects accompanying the discovery no doubt demonstrated visually the implicit assertion that heavenly love on earth flows directly from the heart of the Jacobean court, which alone has the power to transform depraved and rebellious monsters into the greatest heroes.

But how, exactly, does the gaze of the spectators help Prometheus to animate the stones? To answer this question, we turn once more to the neoplatonic background of the masque. In order to aid the animation, the spectators are invited to gaze with desire on the masquers, but they are warned to do so calmly:

Calmely looke and with desire
                              Ad to the fire
Which your breathinges must fan higher

(lines 192-94)

This is an important injunction. Although the medium of sight was, in Ficinian terms, one of the most refined and elevated of the senses, it was still a sense; inadequately regulated, it could prompt an appetite to satisfy the baser senses—could lead, that is, to the depravity of lust.⁵⁶ This was what had happened when the Giants saw the beauties of the audience: “no beauty, which youre eyes / Have mark'd content in, but shall proove a prize,” crowed the lead Giant (lines 62-63).⁵⁷ In yet another of the masque's structural parallelisms, the very beauties once threatened by the Giants in the antimasque become the means of the Giants' redemption in the masque. Those beauties are asked to gaze on the masquers calmly, and with desire or, in other words, with love. In neoplatonic terms, this is a natural process: beauty inspires the desire that is love.⁵⁸ The once monstrous Giants, now possessed of a divine soul (the Promethean fire), have become virtuous and therefore beautiful. Love is aroused by the spectators' apprehension of that beauty.⁵⁹ Their love is then expressed, still through the medium of sight, to the beloved.

But why is this necessary to Prometheus's project? Prometheus is concerned lest the heavenly fire be extinguished. He has good reason for concern. The celestial fire has been dragged down to earth from its proper sphere, and is to be merged not even with a beast—as in a regular human birth—but with its opposite—with cold, heavy, and inert stone.⁶⁰ There is a real danger that the stone might prove too recalcitrant for the fire, expunging it. Here the spectators assist, not merely by fanning it with their breath but, more importantly, by stimulating through their gaze a motion to love and therefore heat on the part of the masquers.⁶¹ This is a vital contribution to the animation because Prometheus's quest to vivify the stones through the celestial fire of the soul is nothing more than the stimulation in them of this same motion toward the good, the divine.⁶² The spectators therefore bring the masque to fruition by following their own natures: by gazing lovingly, and with beauty, on the handsome young masquers who return their gaze.

The language of neoplatonic philosophy affords principles to account for this animation of the Giants; but when stones start to move, we know we are in the presence of magic. The only question is—magic of what kind? It has sometimes been suggested that the court entertainments of the Renaissance exhibited a species of astral magic described at length in the third book of Ficino's De Triplici Vita. In such magic, the operator harnessed favorable planetary influences through charms and talismans, gems and odors, through spells and musical incantations.⁶³ Dame Frances Yates argued that the “Magnificences” staged in Paris in 1581 were in fact “a vast moving talisman, formed of figures in different colours moving amongst incantatory scenes designed to draw down favourable influences on the French monarchy.”⁶⁴ She and her followers have advanced the same view of the English court masque; but it has not commanded universal assent.⁶⁵ Stephen Orgel objects that contemporary commentators tended to account for masques in rational or scientific terms; he suggests that we read them as models or metaphors for the natural and supernatural forces they imitate.⁶⁶The Essex House Masque does not provide evidence to settle this debate. We know too little about its performance—about the tone of its music, the shape of its dances, the color of its costumes—to be certain how far it might have been constructed as a talisman. But that some attempt—or at least an allusion to the attempt—to draw down astral forces takes place in the masque seems certain. Pallas concludes her speech by calling on the disordered stars to rearrange themselves in favorable aspects:

                              shine agen
Not cold; and carelessly; but so as when
You courted Nature in your youth; and gave
Thankfull aspects for those faire lookes you have.

(lines 119-22)

In his account of the ingredients of his heavenly fire, Prometheus refers to Venus in her benign aspect countering and attracting Mars: “The lusting lookes of Venus, by which shee / Intreated Mars first to Adultery” (lines 164-65). The reference to Mars seems slightly gratuitous until we contemplate the positions of the stars at the time of the masque and discover that Mars had just entered Scorpio, his mansion, and was thus set to exercise his most malign influence for the coming months.⁶⁷ That this may be an actual appeal to Venus to offset that malignity by adopting a benign aspect on Mars is thus a tantalizing possibility—especially given the fact that Venus was, at the time of the masque, not in favorable aspect with Mars. Perhaps the employment of ambergris in the evening's entertainment should also be seen in this light, as a further attempt to offset the malignity of Mars through its solar and jovial resonances?⁶⁸ Is it possible that the numerological structure of the masque also possesses a talismanic dimension? These are tantalizing prospects, but we lack sufficient evidence to explore them.

If a masque should be judged by the extent to which it unifies its disparate elements into a coherent fiction and breaks down the barrier between performers and spectators, integrating them into a single awe-inspiring action, The Essex House Masque must be allowed to stand high in the annals of achievement. Its spectacular effects—dancing trees, opening caves, masquers coming to life—may have been conventional, but rarely were they so admirably woven together into a single, coherent fable as here. It can stand alongside the unperformed Neptune's Triumph as a model for the genre.⁶⁹ One might object that the moderateness of its movement—toward humanity, rather than divinity—deprives it of the overwhelming emotional power of the greatest court masques. Perhaps. One has to concede, however, that few works combine so delicately, with such narrative aptness, that extraordinary blend of light, music, poetry, and motion, which defines the Stuart court masque.

.....

CONSEQUENCES

The Essex House Masque manages to weave together in a remarkably coherent fashion a number of different, even competing, policy imperatives. It hints at both the desirability of a French marriage alliance and the possibility of English military intervention in defense of European Protestantism. It does so without explicitly undermining either James's pacifism, Louis's desire to suppress the Huguenots, or Spanish priority in the marriage stakes. This does not, however, mean it can be regarded as a diplomatic success. In the short term it may have had some effect in persuading Cadenet that he should urge his monarch to reach a peaceful settlement with the Huguenots; but Cadenet had barely left England with this policy in mind before a rapidly dispatched French mission to Madrid pulled off a settlement of the Valteline conflict, leaving Louis free to turn on the Huguenots.⁷⁰ As Edward Herbert, the English ambassador in Paris, noted in a letter to Buckingham of 15 February 1621, the question was no longer “whether a warre shall be made, but where, when, and how.”⁷¹

From the king's point of view the more important auditors were not the French but the Spanish. The masque needed to persuade them of his resolve with regard to the Palatinate and of the seriousness of his interest in the French proposal. While one or two minor intelligencers may have been thrown into a momentary flutter by the English reception of the embassy and the Spanish ambassador himself “not a litle injealoused” at Cadenet's reception, the wily Gondomar was not fooled for long. He soon reasserted his authority by forcing the king to reprimand or dismiss various loyal servants whom he deemed too sympathetic to French interests: Doncaster was scolded, and Sir Robert Naunton was accused of raising the specter of a French marriage and was hurriedly dismissed—despite the fact that he had been operating under the king's instructions.⁷² Perhaps the most incisive contemporary comment on the evening was that of Girolamo Lando, the Venetian ambassador. Having noted the enormous expense of the entertainment, Lando concluded that, “whereas the French ambassador has enjoyed these airy demonstrations, the Spaniard has what is more solid and important, being more influential then ever over his Majesty or over those who guide him, making use for his own advantage of festivities, masques and all distractions from business.”⁷³ The French themselves soon realized the true state of affairs. Ambassador Tillières noted in his Mémoires that the English plan had all along been “de contenter l'Espagne en choses solides, voulait satisfaire notre légereté avec des apparences sans fruit.”⁷⁴

Just as the masque achieved little or nothing for the king, so it was an expensive diplomatic disaster for Doncaster: it achieved none of his goals, and only served to confirm his already unrivaled position as a host of entertainments of unparalleled extravagance. Indeed, the evening's entertainment was regarded as so stunning that it became, for a time, the standard by which such receptions were judged.⁷⁵ As soon as the embassy departed, the king reverted to his pro-Spanish policy, and no serious intervention on behalf of the Palatinate was forthcoming. Prophetic hopes of the Parliament of 1621 were not realized. It did not, like the reformed antimasquers, keep “within the compass of dutifull subjects,” and the king quickly tired of its intrusive, demanding, and uncooperative spirit, and dissolved it within the year.⁷⁶ Even the noble academy, despite being an idea that genuinely appealed to James, was never formally instituted.⁷⁷ One might, of course, feel that Doncaster had the last laugh; for a French marriage was eventually arranged, and Doncaster was instrumental in negotiating it; but that was years later, and under dramatically changed circumstances—circumstances that Doncaster and his masque had no effect in bringing about. Perhaps the most appropriate judgment on the success of the masque is to note the fact that Doncaster seems never to have sponsored another one.

Finally, the literary politics in which the masque was engaged had their influence, which we may trace in Ben Jonson's royal entertainment of the following summer, The Gypsies Metamorphosed. One of the obstacles to our understanding of that entertainment is the lack of any clear sense of why the gypsies change. Not only does the metamorphosis fail to grow naturally and inevitably out of the action of the masque, but Jonson is at pains to point up its arbitrariness and inexplicability. In an epilogue added to the printed text he drew attention to the problem, suggesting that his own inadequacies were to blame:

You have beheld (and with delight) theire change,
And how they came transformed may thinck it strange,
It being a thing not touched at by our Poet;
Good Ben slept there, or else forgot
to showe it.(78)

Critics have been understandably reluctant to take such a statement at face value, not least because in this work above all others the poet seems so supremely in command of his material, so keenly aware of what he is about.⁷⁹ If we pause to reconsider the problem in the light of both The Essex House Masque and the recently discovered masque text emanating from the Buckingham circle in this period, two things become clear. First, there was at this time an outburst of privately sponsored masquing among leading courtiers (probably as a result of the king's financial difficulties)—an outburst that threatened, or appeared to threaten, Jonson's preeminence as a deviser of court masques. Jonson was scoffed at in the anonymous masque uncovered by James Knowles, and sniped at in The Essex House Masque. Second, these new masques were obsessed with the idea of metamorphosis: the text discovered by Knowles turns upon a metamorphosis of spirits into courtiers, and The Essex House Masque features no less than two transformations. We know that when Jonson felt threatened by rival writers or unwelcome developments in masquing he habitually incorporated critiques or parodies of them into his masques. We think of Vangoose and his ludicrous antimasques in The Masque of Augurs; of Jonson's mockery of Jones in Love's Welcome at Bolsover; of his parody of Campion in The Irish Masque at Court; or, indeed, of his response to Robert White's Cupid's Banishment in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue.⁸⁰ In the light of this practice, it seems reasonable to suggest that the arbitrary metamorphosis of the gypsies and Jonson's comic self-deprecation about it should be interpreted as a parody of current masque fashions. The Gypsies Metamorphosed was Jonson's attempt to brush aside his rivals and reassert his own preeminence in the masque. While he may, in the short term, have lost the commissions for Buckingham's extravaganzas of 1623 and 1624 to John Maynard, if we contemplate the erasure of his rivals from the received history of the masque, and the oblivion from which The Essex House Masque has only now emerged, we must conclude that, in the long run, he did rather a good job.⁸¹

Notes

1. Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300-1660, Vol. 2: 1576-1660 (London: RKP, 1963), 199-200.

2. Kingsford, “Essex House,” 21-30. The other possible locations—the Great Chamber over the Hall in the southern extension of the house and the two-storeyed Banqueting House in the southeastern corner of the garden—are less probable, for Chamberlain employs the term “gallerie” to describe the room. The Banqueting House would in any case have been too small to accommodate the kind of table arrangement described by Chamberlain: in a 1590 inventory it is described as containing only a single round table; Kingsford, “Essex House,” 23, 51. A gallery had likewise been the setting for the 1607 entertainment of the king and queen at Theobalds; Ben Jonson, 7:154.

3. Allardyce Nicoll, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage (London: Harrap, 1938), 33-37; Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 6:263-64; Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300-1600, Vol. 2.2: 1576-1660 (London: RKP, 1972), 155.

4. A prose argument was issued to accompany The Masque of Queens (Ben Jonson, 7:318-19); and the distribution of an argument and its reading by the poet were built into the action of the unperformed Neptune's Triumph; Ben Jonson, 7:682, 685, 686 (lines 7-8, 125-26, 130-57). Thomas Carew issued a “Designe” to accompany the performance of Coelum Britannicum; The Poems of Thomas Carew with his Masque Coelum Britannicum, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 274-75, and Hieronimo presented the more important visitors with an argument of his play in The Spanish Tragedy; Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (London: Methuen, 1959), 110 (4.3.5-6). Such texts are discussed by Martin Butler in “Politics and the Masque: Salmacida Spolia,” in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday, eds. Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59-74 (74, note 35).

5. Middleton and Rowley, A Courtly Masque, lines 252-53.

6. Spencer and Wells, gen. eds., A Book of Masques, 267 (lines 323-24).

7. Cf. Claudian, Gigantomachia, lines 29-32; Essex House Masque, lines 77-81. For further details of parallels and similarities, see the Explanatory Notes to the text of the masque.

8. Aneau's volume was known in England: Jonson imitated a poem from it in The Forest; Ben Jonson, 11:38.

9. Ben Jonson, 10:558 (note on lines 23-24). A burlesque version of the story formed the subject of a college play of the period—Gigantomachia, or Worke for Jupiter; Malone Society, “Jacobean Academic Plays,” Collections 14 (1988): 98-112. In France, an Intramède du Combat des Dieux et des Géants, featuring Jupiter, Pallas, and Mercury, had been presented as an interlude to Nicholas Montreiul's L'Arimene (1596); Henri Prunières, Le Ballet de Cour en France avant Benserade et Lully (1914; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970), 147.

10. Christopher White, Anthony Van Dyck: Thomas Howard The Earl of Arundel (Malibu, Calif.: Getty Museum, 1995), 58-59.

11. It was identified by John Harris, “The Link between a Roman second-century sculptor, Van Dyck, Inigo Jones and Queen Henrietta Maria,” Burlington Magazine 115 (1973): 526-30.

12. Harris concluded that the frieze must have belonged to Buckingham at the time of the portrait. Graham Parry and David Howarth objected that since Buckingham was not interested in collecting antique sculpture in 1620 the frieze must have been owned by Arundel, and that the painting must therefore have been commissioned by him for Buckingham, probably as a wedding gift; Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd, 139; Howarth, Lord Arundel and his Circle, 156-57; Ron Harvie, who presumes that the frieze was in Buckingham's collection at the time, speculates that the painting may have been a present from King James; “A Present from ‘Dear Dad’?: Van Dyck's The Continence of Scipio,” Apollo 138 (1993): 224-26; and Christopher White suggests that the incorporation of his own frieze in a painting destined for a rival collector would have been unthinkably tactless on Arundel's part: he concludes that the frieze must therefore have been Buckingham's at the time, moving to Arundel House after his assassination in 1628, and that the painting was commissioned by Buckingham himself; Anthony Van Dyck: Thomas Howard The Earl of Arundel, 59-62.

13. Howarth, Lord Arundel and his Circle, 197.

14. See, for example, James's dedicatory sonnet to The Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie (1584), in The Poems of James VI. of Scotland, ed. James Craigie, 2 vols., Scottish Text Society, 3d series, 22 and 26 (Edinburgh, 1955 and 1958), 1:3; Francis Bacon's letter to James of 1611; The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857-74), 11:242; and the ceiling of the Whitehall Banqueting House, discussed by D. J. Gordon, “Rubens and the Whitehall Ceiling,” in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1975), 24-50, and Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd, 32-37.

15. Harvie, “A Present from ‘Dear Dad’?”; David Kunzle, “Van Dyck's Continence of Scipio as a Metaphor of Statecraft at the Early Stuart Court,” in John Onians, ed., Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85 (London: Phaidon, 1994), 168-89 (173).

16. Kunzle, “Van Dyck's Continence of Scipio,” 176; Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum (London, 1609), chapter 7.

17. Quoted in Harris, “The Link between a Roman second-century sculptor,” 529. See also the parallel note in Jones's copy of Palladio's I Quattro Libri (1601); Inigo Jones on Palladio, ed. Bruce Allsopp, 2 vols. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Oriel Press, 1970), 2:42. This note postdates the masque: it follows an entry of 23 July 1633.

18. D. E. L. Haynes, The Arundel Marbles (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1975), 38-39; plates 14a-b; Haynes, “The Fawley Court Relief,” Apollo 96 (1972): 6-10.

19. Haynes, The Arundel Marbles, 6; Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, trans. C. A. M. Fennell (Cambridge, 1882), 192, 196. The fragment, in fact, appears to come from another source in Asia Minor; Haynes, The Arundel Marbles, 20; plate 9.

20. Quoted from Knowles, “The ‘Running Masque’ Recovered?”

21. This illustration was reproduced in several Italian editions of the Metamorphoses; see Olga Raggio, “The Myth of Prometheus: Its Survival and Metamorphoses up to the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958): 44-62, plate 8f; Georges Duplessis, Essai Bibliographice sur les Différentes Éditions des Œuvres d'Ovid Ornées de Planches Publiées aux XV^e et XVI^e Siècles (Paris, 1889), 17, 23-24; numbers 17, 59, 62.

22. Works of Campion, 255. See also the animation of statues in Francis Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple (1613).

23. Prunières, Le Ballet de Cour, 149; Lacroix, ed., Ballets et Mascarades, 2:3-4.

24. On the development of the myth and its various versions, see Raggio, “The Myth of Prometheus”; Raymond Trousson, Le Thème de Prométheé dans la Littérature Européenne, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1964), 1:85-141; Carl Kerényi, Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, trans. Ralph Manheim (1963; Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).

25. Works of Campion, 252.

26. Natalis Comitis Mythologiæ sive Explicationum Fabularum Libri X (Venice, 1581), 6.20. Thanks to Jackson Bryce for making sense of my attempt to translate this passage.

27. George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures, ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 62.

28. S. K. Heninger, Jr., A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1960), 37-46.

29. Heninger, Handbook, 45-46, 73-74, 96-97.

30. Plato, Timaeus, 41c-e; cf. Marsilio Ficino, De Amore, 4.4.

31. J. C. Eade, The Forgotten Sky: A Guide to Astrology in English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 66; Marsilio Ficino, De Amore, 5.8; Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton, N. Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989), 270-71, 292-93 (3.6, 11); George Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, lines 298-344; The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York: MLA; London: Oxford UP, 1941), 316-17; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (New York and London: Norton, 1968), 85-96; Raymond B. Waddington, The Mind's Empire: Myth and Form in George Chapman's Narrative Poems (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 201-03.

32. Leone Ebreo, The Philosophy of Love (Dialoghi d'Amore), trans. F. Friedberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes (London: Soncino, 1937), 170, 175-76.

33. Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, 1.23-31; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.86-144.

34. Eyewitness accounts of the masque note that it opened with a dance of animals orchestrated by Orpheus and featuring a camel, a bear, and a hound; Andrew J. Sabol, ed., A Score for The Lords' Masque by Thomas Campion (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993), 24-25, 326-27.

35. Natalis Comitis Mythologiæ, 6.20; Bernardus Silvestris, Commentary on the First Six Books of Virgil's Aeneid, trans. and ed. Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca (Lincoln, Nebr., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 76-77. On the common conflation of the Titans and the Giants, see DeWitt T. Starnes and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries: A Study of Renaissance Dictionaries in their Relation to the Classical Learning of Contemporary English Writers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 154-58.

36. Natalis Comitis Mythologiæ, 4.5.

37. Omnia Andreæ Alciati V. C. Emblemata (Antwerp, 1573), 93-95; number 22.

38. Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, 250.

39. See Raggio, “The Myth of Prometheus”; Trousson, Le Thème de Prométheé, 1:85-141; Boccaccio on Poetry, trans. Charles G. Osgood (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1930), xxiv-xxv; Natalis Comitis Mythologiæ, 4.6; Francis Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, chapter 26; Charles W. Lemmi, The Classic Deities in Bacon: A Study in Mythological Symbolism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), 128-40; Starnes and Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend, 154-58.

40. Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, 58.

41. Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, 61.

42. This political interpretation may be paralleled in other writings of the period: cf. George Chapman, The Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, 5.3.42-50, ed. John B. Gabel, in The Plays of George Chapman. The Tragedies with Sir Gyles Goosecappe: A Critical Edition, gen. ed. Allan Holaday (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987); Heninger, Handbook, 184-85.

43. On the intellectual background of this celebration of the inseparability of motion, dance, music, and love, see Gretchen Ludke Finney, Musical Backgrounds for English Literature: 1580-1650 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, [1962]), 1-139.

44. Andrew J. Sabol, ed., Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque (Providence, R. I.: Brown University Press, 1978), 9-12.

45. Jean Beaulieu to William Trumbull, 11/21 January 1620/21; BL, Trumbull Correspondence, ms vii, number 2.

46. On the distinction between ante- and anti-masque, see Welsford, The Court Masque, 184, 190-91.

47. Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, 86.

48. Jennifer Stead, “Bowers of Bliss: The Banquet Setting,” in C. Anne Wilson, ed., “Banquetting Stuffe”: The Fare and Social Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 115-57 (148); Ben Jonson, 7:698 (Neptune's Triumph, lines 494-95).

49. S. K. Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974), 150-51.

50. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 2.9.22; Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), 55-56, 273-74; Works of Campion, 213, note 13.

51. Butler, “Jonson's News from the New World,” 164-65; Ben Jonson, 2:314; Ben Jonson, Complete Masques, 5.

52. Ben Jonson, 7:423.

53. Jonson, Complete Masques, 26.

54. Lacroix, ed., Ballets et Mascarades, 3:47.

55. See also Jonson's News from the New World (1620), lines 320-62, in which the monarch is figured as the source of light and motion (Ben Jonson, 7:523-24); Vaughan Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 155-59; Meagher, Method and Meaning in Jonson's Masques, chapter 5 (107-24); cf. the manner in which the royal gaze reanimates 12 knights turned into statues by the enchantress Alcina in the Ballet de Monseigneur le duc de Vendome (1610); Lacroix, ed., Ballets et Mascarades, 1:204, 261. The traditional assumption that the king's politics were absolutist has been challenged by Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 40-43. But see also J. P. Sommerville, “James I and the divine right of kings: English politics and continental theory,” and Paul Christianson, “Royal and parliamentary voices on the ancient constitution, c. 1604-1621,” in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55-70, 71-95.

56. Ficino, De Amore, 1.4.

57. The gustatory and tactile imagery that laces his speech registers his sensual depravity: see, for example, “Make temperance drunke,” “Binde truth apprentise” (lines 71-72).

58. De Amore, 1.4.

59. Ficino, De Amore, 6.6, 7.10; Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of His Phaedrus Commentary, Its Sources and Genesis (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1984), 56-57, 191.

60. On the difficulty of the soul's descent, see Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, 165-84.

61. Plato, Phaedrus, 255c; Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer, ed. and trans. Michael J. B. Allen (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1981), 188; Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, 195.

62. Plato, Phaedrus, 245c-246a; Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer, 86-97.

63. D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958), 3-24; Ficino, Three Books on Life.

64. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London and New York: RKP, 1975), 159-62.

65. Yates advanced this view of the Stuart masque in Theatre of the World (London and New York: RKP, 1969), 86; Douglas Brooks-Davies elaborated on it in The Mercurian Monarch: Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), chapter 2 (85-123); and Vaughan Hart reiterated it almost verbatim in Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts, 187 (cf. 17, 20).

66. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1975), 55-58; cf. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 120.

67. William D. Stahlman and Owen Gingerich, Solar and Planetary Longitudes for Years-2500 to +2000 by 10-Day Intervals (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 504; Eade, The Forgotten Sky, 61.

68. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 248 (3.1), 296 (3.11).

69. Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, 99.

70. Carter, Secret Diplomacy, 211-12. Cadenet was clearly impressed by his reception in England; PRO, SP 78/69, fols. 4r, 37r; SP 84/99, fol. 95r.

71. British Library, Harleian ms 1581, fol. 17v. See also Chamberlain, 2:339.

72. Schreiber, 35-36; Schreiber, The Political Career of Sir Robert Naunton, 68-84; Butler, “Ben Jonson's Pan's Anniversary,” 389, note 38; PRO, SP 84/99, fol. 4r; BL, Trumbull Correspondence, ms vii, number 2.

73. CSPVen. 1619-1621, 533-34.

74. Mémoires Inédits du Comte Leveneur de Tillières, 31; quoted in Canova-Green, 43.

75. Chamberlain, 2:432.

76. Zaller, The Parliament of 1621, 37, et passim; Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621-1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 85-144; Adams, “Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624,” 159-64.

77. The scheme did not die completely, however: a similar academy, the Musaeum Minervae, was established by Sir Francis Kynaston in 1635; G. H. Turnbull, “Samuel Hartlib's Connection with Sir Francis Kynaston's ‘Musaeum Minervae,’” Notes & Queries 197 (1952): 33-37.

78. Ben Jonson, 7:615 (lines 1475-78).

79. Ben Jonson, 2:315; Dale J. B. Randall, Jonson's Gypsies Unmasked: Background and Theme of The Gypsies Metamorphos'd (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1975), 143-52.

80. On the response to Campion, see David Lindley, “Embarrassing Ben: The Masques for Francis Howard,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 343-59; on that to White, see Robert C. Evans, Jonson and the Contexts of His Time (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 95-115.

81. McGee and Meagher, “Preliminary Checklist,” 115, 121. See also Knowles, “Change Partners and Dance”; John Orrell, “Buckingham's Patronage of the Dramatic Arts: The Crowe Accounts,” Records of the Early English Drama Newsletter 2 (1980): 8-17.

Note on Dates, Transcriptions, and Abbreviations

In the body of the text all dates are given in Old Style, but the year is taken to begin on 1 January. In the notes, in references to documents where confusion might exist (letters sent from the continent and dated both Old and New Style, or documents dated between 1 January and 25 March), both forms are given.

Except where indicated, the following conventions apply to my handling of quotations from seventeenth century texts: the interchangeable letters i/j and u/v are regularized according to modern usage; long and short “s” are not distinguished; brevigraphs and conventional contractions are silently expanded; other abbreviations are expanded in square brackets. Titles of masques by Jonson and Campion are presented in their familiar, modernized forms.

The following abbreviations are employed throughout the work:

BL: British Library

Canova-Green: Marie-Claude Canova-Green. La politique-spectacle au grand siècle: les rapports franco-anglais. Paris, Seattle, and Tübingen: Biblio 17, 1993.

Chamberlain: The Letters of John Chamberlain. Ed. Norman Egbert McClure. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 12. 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939.

CSPVen.: Calendar of State Papers, Venetian Series

Ben Jonson: Ben Jonson. Ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52.

Orgel and Strong: Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong. Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. 2 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973.

PRO: Public Record Office

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