SOURCE: Davis, Walter R. “Masques.” In Thomas Campion, pp. 118-53. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.

[In the following excerpt, Davis argues that masques bring together Campion's diverse skills, discusses how they were staged, and surveys critical responses to them.]

THE LORD HAY'S MASQUE

James I and his Revels Office took an old form that had existed in England for at least a century and made it serve a new and intense political purpose, that of solidifying James's kingdom, which, by the Act of Union, was to combine England, Scotland, and Wales into Great Britain. Campion was chosen to compose the masque celebrating the first of the major political weddings James was to sponsor between Scots lords and English ladies; it took place 6 January 1607, it being Twelfth night, and it was between his favorite, James Hay, first earl of Carlisle and Baron Hay, and Honora Denny, daughter of the high sheriff of Hertfordshire who had welcomed James to England back in 1603. There seems to have been some difficulty in arranging the match, for James had to create Denny a baron and grant his daughter Strixton Manor in order to gain his consent. But it must have seemed worth the trouble, for James's full intention—as it was lauded both by Campion and by Robert Wilkinson in the wedding sermon—was to strengthen the ties between his two kingdoms (see [The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R Davis; hereafter cited as] D, 204).

The published souvenir program moves from the visual to the auditory: it contains an engraving of one of the knights masquers as a frontispiece and five pieces of music—two songs and three dances (to which Campion wrote new words for singing)—at the back. The art of writing out an account of a masque for publication was something quite new: Daniel in The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604) did it in two parts, a description with explanations and comments, then the script with the speeches; Jonson tended to start with his idea, then the “body” as he called it, a physical description, then the “soul” or the words. Campion sees the piece as narrative and takes his model from military history, first describing the place and then the action:

As in battailes, so in all other actions that are to bee reported, the first, and most necessary part is the discription of the place, with his opportunities, and properties, whether they be naturall or artificiall. The greate hall (wherein the Maske was presented) received this division and order: The upper part, where the cloth and chaire of State were plac't, had scaffoldes and seates on eyther side continued to the skreene; right before it was made a partition for the dauncing place … eighteen foote from the skreene, an other Stage was raised higher by a yearde then that which was prepared for dancing. This higher Stage was all enclosed with a double vale, so artificially painted, that it seemed as if darke cloudes had hung before it: within that shrowde was concealed a greene valley, with greene trees round about it, and in the midst of them nine golden trees of fifteene foote high, with armes and braunches very glorious to behold. From the which grove toward the State was made a broade descent to the dauncing place, just in the midst of it; on either hand were two ascents, like the sides of two hilles, drest with shrubbes and trees; that on the right hand leading to the bowre of Flora, the other to the house of Night; which bowre and house were plac't opposite at either end of the skreene, and betweene them both was raised a hill, hanging like a cliffe over the grove belowe, and on the top of it a goodly large tree was set, supposed to be the tree of Diana; behind the which toward the window was a small descent, with an other spreading hill that climed up to the toppe of the window, with many trees on the height of it, whereby those that played on the Hoboyes at the Kings entrance into the hall were shadowed. The bowre of Flora was very spacious, garnisht with all kind of flowers, and flowrie branches with lights in them; the house of Night ample, and stately, with blacke pillors, whereon many starres of gold were fixt: within it, when it was emptie, appeared nothing but cloudes and starres, and on the top of it stood three Turrets underpropt with small blacke starred pillers, the middlemost being highest and greatest, the other two of equall proportion: about it were plac't on wyer artificial Battes and Owles, continually moving: with many other inventions, the which for brevitie sake I passe by with silence.

(D, 211-12)

It was the great hall at whitehall Palace (the usual Banqueting House was being reconstructed). At one end was James's throne providing the point of view from which it will all be seen in perspective, before it the dancing area that filled the bulk of the hall; at the other end a curtain or “skreene” painted as dark clouds. The stage behind the curtain had two levels: on the lower, a yard above the dancing area, the main stage of a green valley; then above that (connected by ramps) three small stages, the bower of Flora on the right, the house of Night on the left, and between them the hill of Diana with her sacred tree.¹ From the place Campion proceeds to the persons: four speaking parts and nine dancers, including the powerful Howards: Theophilus Howard, Lord Walden; Sir Thomas Howard; and others of the king's officers:² “Their number Nine, the best and amplest of numbers, for as in Musicke seven notes containe all varietie, the eight being in nature the same with the first, so in numbring after the ninth we begin again, the tenth beeing as it were the Diappason in Arithmetick. The number of 9 is famed by the Muses and Worthies, and it is of all the most apt for chaunge and diversitie of proportion. The chiefe habit which the Maskers did use is set forth to your view in the first leafe: they presented in their fayned persons the Knights of Apollo, who is the father of heat and youth, and consequently of amorous affections” (D, 213). Now for the action. It begins with music and song: Flora and Zephirus the West Wind (a pair immortalized in Botticelli's “Primavera”) are plucking and strewing flowers all over the stage while a tenor and a soprano clothed as “Silvans” or fauns and Zephirus sing a three-part song accompanied by three lutes and a bandora. It is a lovely song, in dance form of aabaab though they are not dancing.³ It directs the action, its refrain being the command to “strowe aboute” (D, 215); and it links spreading flowers to singing, as if the two can blend: “Strowe aboute, strowe aboute, / And mixe them with fit melodie.” The song is about the marriage this action prepares for, and marriage is related to the political mingling of the “princely” white and red roses—the flowers of York and Lancaster that Henry VIII and then Elizabeth brought together, and that James, in seeking to unite England and Scotland, continues together.⁴ The song being ended, Flora speaks of the sacred occasion of marriage marked by flowers “figuring” beauty and youth, and explains that these flowers are not subject “To winters wrath and cold mortalitie” (D, 216). Zephirus echoes her in the male mode, relating marriage to the time when Venus brings “Into the naked world the greene-leav'd spring” and promising fertility. Then the Silvans sing a three-part dialogue-song on maidenhood versus marriage, ending on a classical wedding chorus, “Sing Io, Hymen: Io, Io, Hymen” (D, 217).

The masque begins with a mythological version, by female and male deities of nature, of a wedding preparation. But it is ruddely interrupted by a sudden spectacular revelation: “This song being ended the whole vale is sodainly drawne, the grove and trees of gold, and the hill with Dianas tree, are at once discovered. Night appears in her house with her 9 houres” (D, 217). Night threatens to take over the plot and thwart the marriage: she represents Diana “The Moone and Queen of Virginitie,” who forbids that one of her chaste nymphs be pressed into marriage and further magnifies the depredation by pointing to the nine golden trees that are Apollo's knights transformed because they tried to seduce Diana's nymphs:

Here they are fixt, and never may remove
But by Dianaes power that stucke them here.
Apollos love to them doth yet appeare,
In that his beames hath guilt them as they grow,
To make their miserie yeeld the greater show.
But they shall tremble when sad Night doth speake,
And at her stormy words their boughes shall breake.

(D, 218)

Speech and stasis, things as they are resisting change, threaten to take over from lively song and fertile movement in this debate. The strife is soon resolved, however, by a god from the machine, Hesperus, “The Evening starre foreshews that the wisht marriage night is at hand.” He explains to Night that Apollo has pacified Diana who is now

                                        well content her Nymph is made a Bride,
Since the faire match was by that Phoebus grac't
Which in this happie Westerne Ile is plac't
As he in heaven, one lampe enlightning all
That under his benigne aspect doth fall

(D, 219)

—that is, King James has sponsored the marriage. He further commands that the nine knights be released from their spell.

Night will obey, and rather suddenly changes her tune:

If all seeme glad, why should we onely lowre?
Since t'expresse gladnes we have now most power.
Frolike, grac't Captives, we present you here
This glasse, wherein your liberties appeare:
Cynthia is pacified, and now blithe Night
Begins to shake off melancholy quite.

(D, 219)

The interruption has been conceived as a clash in tone or feeling, Night at first complaining that the tragic loss of a virgin has become “sport” for Flora, Zephirus responding by words that seem to her “wanton.” Now with this change of heart (like Kafka's leopards in the temple) Night becomes (naturally) the friend to lovers and will direct the remaining action of the masque, as if she were its dancing-master.⁵ She asserts a wonder: the trees will dance, for “joy mountaines moves,” and it is joy that will cause dancing, while “Dancing and musicke must prepare the way” for their retransformation into living, sentient beings:

Move now with measured sound,
                              You charmed grove of gould,
Trace forth the sacred ground
                              That shall your formes unfold.

(D, 221)

The song accompanies the dance in question—probably the “measures” or a slow pavane—and directs its movement, impelling the nine golden trees toward King James and the couple:

Yet neerer Phoebus throne
                                        Mete on your winding waies,
Your Brydall mirth make knowne
                                        In your high-graced Hayes.

The song is set to the same music as “The peacefull westerne winde” (Second Booke, 12), and beneath both one hears the traditional “Westron wynde” melody that alludes to Zephirus and his power to revive natural heat.⁶ The dancing long wished-for is beginning: first dance of trees setting life in motion, then transformation:

Presently the Silvans with their foure instruments and five voices began to play and sing together the song following, at the beginning whereof that part of the stage whereon the first trees stoode began to yeeld, and the three formost trees gently to sincke, and this was effected by an Ingin plac't under the stage. When the trees had sunke a yarde they cleft in three parts, and the Maskers appeared out of the tops of them; the trees were sodainly convayed away, and the first three Maskers were raysed againe by the Ingin. They appeared then in a false habit, yet very faire, and in forme not much unlike their principall, and true robe. It was made of greene taffatie cut into leaves, and laid upon cloth of silver, and their hats were sutable to the same.

(D, 221-22)

Campion's marginal note indicates that they had some difficulty removing the trees: apparently a stage hand had forgotten to reattach the trees to an engine after displaying them to the nobility the day before (see D, 222, n. 44). At any rate, the transformation proceeds by stages. First Night's feelings and the nature of her involvement were changed, then the trees by her natural magic become more human, in the intermediate appearance of leafy men. The second stage is accomplished by a “Song of transformation”:

Night and Diana charge,
                                                            And th' Earth obayes,
Opening large
                                                            Her secret waies,
While Apollos charmed men
                                                            Their formes receive againe.
Give gratious Phoebus honour then,
And so fall downe, and rest behinde the traine.

(D, 222)

This song is repeated three times, as Night transforms trees into leafy men three by three (in doing so breaking down the mystic 9 into the “best of numbers … contained in three”), ending in a great chorus to James: “Againe this song revive and sound it hie: / Long live Apollo, Brittaines glorious eye” (D, 223). To song succeeds dancing: “as soone as the Chorus ended, the violins, or consorte of twelve, began to play the second new daunce, which was taken in form of an Eccho by the cornetts, and then catch't in like manner by the consort of ten; sometime they mingled two musickes together, sometime plaid all at once; which kind of ecchoing musicke rarely became their Silvan attire, and was so truely mixed together, that no daunce could ever bee better grac't then that, as (in such distraction of musicke) it was performed by the maskers” (D, 223-24). The dance is a slow measure, probably the same sort of dance as “Move now with measured sound” was.⁷

The third stage of transformation must be achieved by human action of the nine men themselves, who must make obeisance to Diana's tree and make an offering of their leaves to her. This religious procession is accompanied by “a sollemne motet” in six parts sung by six “Chappell voices” with six cornets. It is a new kind of music in the masque, sacred polyphonic music, the text celebrating chastity and temperance, its movement appropriately upward:

With spotles mindes now mount we to the tree
                                                                                                                        Of single chastitie.
The roote is temperance grounded deepe,
Which the coldjewc't earth doth steepe:
                                                                                                                        Water it desires alone,
                                                                                                                        Other drinke it thirsts for none:
Therewith the sober branches it doth feede,
                                                                                                                        Which though they fruitlesse be,
Yet comely leaves they breede,
                                                                                                                        To beautifie the tree.
Cynthia protectresse is, and for her sake
We this grave procession make.
Chast eies and eares, pure heartes and voices
Are graces wherein Phoebe most rejoyces.

(D, 225)

This interprets allegorically as it expresses purposeful human action. In its religious moment it fully reestablishes the wedding context, as something both in nature (as it was before the interruption) and now, also, above it in transcendence. The men can now appear in their proper ceremonial attire as Knights of Apollo in crimson satin doublets and robes “layd thicke with broad silver lace” (D, 224), inserted spangles reflecting the light, which was centered in the sparkling jewel of their elaborate helmets with turrets and plumes, all light and feathers swaying.⁸ After a third “lively” dance, with the strong trochaic beat characteristic of a galliard,⁹ they move out to blend audience and pageant: “they tooke forth the Ladies, and danc't the measures with them” (the measures being a slow and stately dance, probably a pavane: see D, 225, n. 55).

The piece ends with Hesperus defining “this golden dreame which I report” (D, 210) as a moment of “new birth,” after which an elaborate farewell is given to Hesperus, the evening vanishing while full night takes over with her revels, “That th'ecclipst revels maie shine forth againe” (D, 226). The social occasion takes over with common dancing of pavanes, galliards, courantes, allemandes, la voltas, etc., after which Night announces an end, the chorus closes with music meant to recall the song of transformation, and all go off: “This Chorus was performed with severall Ecchoes of musicke and voices, in manner as the great Chorus before. At the end whereof the Maskers, putting off their visards and helmets, made a low honour to the King, and attended his Majestie to the banquetting place” (D, 227).

There survive three masques that preceeded Campion's in the new reign, one per year, it seems, each Twelfth Night. Samuel Daniel's Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604), a tentative effort in the masque form, is little more than a pageant like those performed before Elizabeth I in the 1570s: he first sets a frame for his vision by having Night rouse Somnus to create a dream, then presents the dream, Sybilla first seeing the twelve goddesses with their gifts far off and then having them appear and dance while presenting their gifts to her and the kingdom, as at Christmas. There is no conflict, and very little music or dance. Daniel in his description is concerned that his speeches be printed because attention to the spectacle might have distracted the viewers, and he is concerned to establish only one extended sense for each goddess, as Thetis is meant to symbolize only power by sea.¹⁰

Jonson's Masque of Blackness (Twelfth Night, 1605) is much more theatrical, and in it Jonson shows that he had incorporated the model of Davison and Campion's Masque of Proteus and the Adamantine Rock at Gray's Inn back in 1594. That masque, we may remember,¹¹ helped set the form exploited in King James's reign: an introductory song and dialogue that lays out the myth or “device,” the entry of the masquers amid spectacle, a debate ending in a song to the monarch. Blackness is built on this frame: the appearance of twelve Ethiopian nymphs in their seashell, the song, Niger's explanation to Oceanus that they are seeking a land that will turn them white, their landing and presenting of gifts, and their dance and the revels. There is no transformation, for Blackness was to be completed by Beauty two years later (Jonson was already thinking in terms of antimasque and masque). Speeches take up the bulk of the text, while song and dance are not integrated into the action.

Hymenaei derives its great unity from its occasion, that being the wedding of the earl of Essex and Frances Howard (the same woman whose scandalous second marriage Campion was to celebrate in 1613) on Twelfth Night, 5 January 1606. It begins as a Roman wedding ritual, with personated bride and groom, that is broken by the eruption of eight men “out of a microcosm, or globe, figuring man,”¹² representing the four humors and four affections. Reason quells the disturbance and explicates the wedding ceremony (with an extensive disquisition on the number 5 as the union of odd and even), at which point the great world dominated by Juno or order appears, the eight men join in dance with eight women representing marital virtues, and the ceremony resumes and proceeds to its end (which blends with the participants in the wedding going to bed). Here ceremony derived from the occasion creates a total form for the action.

Campion derived many elements of his first masque from these previous productions. We can trace a direct line from Daniel's procession of twelve goddesses with their gifts to Jonson's twelve Ethiopian nymphs to Campion's nine male masquers making offering to Diana. Jonson's Hymenaei influenced Campion especially, with its device of the interrupted ritual and its reestablishment as beginning and end, its matching of knights and ladies, even its number symbolism—Campion's disquisition on 9 almost seems a self-conscious answer to Jonson's on 5. But when compared with Campion's predecessors, three elements of difference stand out: the great increase of ritual interest, the predominant use of music and with it dance, and the considerable extension of significance into allegorical senses.

The Lord Hay's Masque develops from Hymenaei the device of a wedding preparation first interrupted and finally reestablished, and here and there we can even hear an echo.¹³ The descent of Hesperus performs the same function of harmonizing as Reason's descent in Jonson. But in Campion's masque the forces are those of nature—flowers, night, the evening star—and so the action becomes expressive of natural change; when Hesperus descends we see at one time a message from the god and the simple coming of evening. On this natural change is founded ritual, and Campion's masque develops a full sense of ritual as the human reproduction of natural forces; it becomes, in fact, one large ritual. The progress from interruption to reestablishment is accomplished by ritual: the song of transformation that brings green men out of the shell of golden trees, and then the ceremony of dedication to Diana that brings them further into full human shape. The device is permeated by transformation, and that transformation becomes the central action of the whole masque, which finally demonstrates how we achieve our proper humanity and harmonize our universe by means of religious dedication.

It is music and dance, rather than speech, that belong to ritual, and that in fact bring about transformation. The action Night sets out starts with joy producing the external movement of dance (by analogy and by cause from the internal increased flow of blood in joy), dance leading to song of transformation, the accomplishment of which is marked by a new dance. It is not so much that music and dance are integrated into the device, as that they carry it through, they are the main vehicles. The Lord Hay's is a musician's masque. When we quoted Campion's opening description earlier, we left out a portion. Here it is restored:

The upper part, where the cloth and chaire of State were plac't, had scaffoldes and seates on eyther side continued to the skreene; right before it was made a partition for the dauncing place; on the right hand whereof were consorted ten Musitions, with Basse and Meane lutes, a Bandora, double Sackbott, and an Harpsicord, with two treble Violins; on the other side somewhat neerer the skreene were plac't 9 Violins and three Lutes; and to answer both the Consorts (as it were in a triangle) sixe Cornets, and sixe Chappell voyces, were seated almost right against them, in a place raised higher in respect of the pearcing sound of those Instruments; eighteen foote from the skreene, an other Stage was raised higher by a yearde then that which was prepared for dancing.

(D, 211)

Eleven violins, six cornets, at least five lutes strung low and high, a pandora (a flat-backed instrument like a guitar), a double sackbut or bass trombone, a harpsichord: this is a large orchestra; later we hear of oboes (or “hoboys”), and Campion tells us that he employed a total of forty-two voices and instruments (D, 223). We do not know whether or not it was typical because no other masque composer mentions it. The musicians are made an integral part of the set: they are placed directly on stage to the left, right, and front of the dancing area, and they carry through the numerological design of the piece by being set in three.

Moreover, the music carries through the theme of the masque. Andrew Sabol points out that “the most effective musical devices he describes in Lord Hay's Masque are those used to gain contrast.”¹⁴ One form contrast takes is the three dialogue songs where two, three, or four voices come together. Another is antiphonal music, when choirs of voices and instruments in different parts of the hall echo each other. This is suggested by the account of the chorus at the end of the song of transformation:

This Chorus was in manner of an Eccho seconded by the Cornets, then by the consort of ten, then by the consort of twelve, and by a double Chorus of voices standing on either side, the one against the other, bearing five voices a peece, and sometime every Chorus was heard severally, sometime mixt, but in the end altogether; which kinde of harmony so distinguisht by the place, and by the severall nature of instruments, and changeable conveyance of the song, and performed by so many excellent masters as were actors in that musicke (their number in all amounting to fortie two voyces and instruments) could not but yeeld great satisfaction to the hearers.

(D, 223)

It is not difficult to see how these antiphonal pieces (that accompanying the dance following this song being another example: D, 223-24) and dialogues mime out the theme of the diverse coming together in the masque. Moreover, it is echo that takes a part in binding the whole together, the final chorus after the revels being in itself an echo of the echoing music of transformation (D, 227, 223).

An unusual feature is to mark the final stage action—before it moves off stage into the audience in the common measures—by the solemn six-part motet sung by the chapel choir that was normally heard in church services (D, 225). The text is allegorical, it interprets the religious goal while it directs the dancers to it. The music is religious, that is, church music; we may recall that Campion thought of the motet as the musical equivalent of the epic poem, for “in Musicke we yeeld the chiefe place to the grave and well invented Motet” (D, 15-16). The action of the masque moves to the religious level as the masquers make offering to Diana, and it is the motet that takes them there. Here toward the end we see religious ritual as the base of dramatic ritual, expressed in the music.

Finally, Campion is unusual and influential as well in making the symbolic media that comprise a masque—traditional iconography, number symbolism, the use of music to transform emotion, and dance as an emblem of order—come together to produce a variety of significances. Daniel had been quite insistent on establishing one meaning only in 1604: “And though these images have oftentimes diverse significations, … we took them only to serve as heiroglyphics for our present intention, according to some one property that befitted our occasion, without observing other their mystical interpretations.” Pallas was for him “armed policy” and nothing else, and he bound in his single interpretations by his verse descriptions.¹⁵ Similarly Jonson in Blackness chose to label his twelve nymphs pair-by-pair by means of having each pair carry “a mute hieroglyhic” or a single symbol, such as the golden tree carried by Euphoris and Aglaia signifying fertility.¹⁶ Though Jonson moved toward the polyseimous in Hymenaei,¹⁷ it was Campion who first brought it out fully.

We know of his early admiration of The Faerie Queene with its multiple allegorical extensions of significance, and his use of Spenser in the allegorical houses of his early Latin poem “Ad Thamesin.” In his more mature Latin poem “Umbra” he imitated the Garden of Adonis in book 3, canto 6, of The Faerie Queene where form and substance, male and female, the changing and the permanent come together in the various senses of exposition. And perhaps from that Spenserian moment he derived his own myth in that poem of the paradoxical union of the cold, dark, wet female center of earth and the hot, dry, male inseminating principle in the sky.¹⁸ Later, too, in 1609 he was to express admiration for Francis Bacon's similar exfoliation of natural myth in moral and cosmological interpretations in The Wisdom of the Ancients (D, 418-19). That is the background to his creation of a myth for the Lord Hay and his wife with its many extensions of significance. On stage we have the action of Flora and Night; but Flora is the agent of Apollo, Night of Diana, and such agency immediately suggests extended meanings, each visible deity being an agent of an invisible deity that is both natural and transcendent.

Most immediately, we understand this action as a psychological figure that exploits the minds of the bride and groom, who see in the masque a heightened image of their moment in time: the wedding day itself, betokening joy and fruitfulness with its scattered flowers; the coming of cool, chaste Night, which seems to destroy the aura of goodness around the wedding (perhaps because the virgin bride is fearful); and, finally, the transformation of night by the light of the occasion into a time of joy and fruitfulness. When Hesperus departs, the golden moment of the masque will dissolve and the bride and groom will depart from the hall to begin that night that will be unlike any other. To this sense belong the transformations—the change of Night herself, the reduction of discord to concord by harmonious music, and the gradual change of the masquers from golden trees to green leafy men to Knights of Apollo resplendent in crimson.

In the most general sense, Campion asks his audience to enter a “golden dreame” in which marriage is seen as the human analogue of cosmic creation, for his myth, like his “Umbra,” deals with the original opposition of principles in nature, female potential (the earth, dark, cold and wet, governed by Diana the moon, tending to stasis) and male passion (the heavens, light, hot and dry, governed by Apollo the sun, eager to move), the act of mutual love and grace by which they are reconciled, and the cosmic growth that results. Over this union rules the divine triad and its self-multiple nine, the first union of the female-even and the male-odd.

The uppermost sense of the masque in the minds of the general audience (if not the bride and groom) was the Anglo-Scottish Union James was arguing in Parliament that very year. The fact that James, the “Phoebus” of this Western Isle, has sponsored this wedding is enough to pacify Diana and Night; the fact that his nine knights have to embrace the values of chastity and temperance indicates something like advice to the Scots of his entourage. He has united chastity and love by the ceremony of marriage. He has reconciled two kingdoms—that of the hot male daylight and that of the cool female darkness that is reluctant to enter the ceremony but eventually does. If Night and night represent England in one sense, Flora and daylight Scotland, then, too, historical continuity is suggested. David Lindley reminds us that Elizabeth I throughout her career was associated with Diana goddess of chastity, and if in this masque Diana and Apollo reach concord, so too their kingdoms form a continuity that helps solidify in the minds of the audience this new reign, with all its problems and desires.¹⁹

THE LORDS' MASQUE

When, in The Lords' Masque of 1613, Entheus is released from the crowd of madmen, there is a strong suggestion that the palates of the masque audience have been cloyed with vanity for a while and that Entheus the poet, having regained his “libertie and fiery scope againe,” will create “Inventions rare” to repair the lack. This smacks of a composer's advertisement, a heralding of Thomas Campion's return to the stage after six years' absence, with the fiery scope of his genius intact (there may even be a suggestion that his immersion in the practice of medicine was like being tossed to and fro by madmen). We know nothing of the reasons why he stayed away from the court stage for so long. His self-advertisement may have irritated Ben Jonson, who from 1607 to 1613 had dominated the masquing scene with his Beauty (1608), Queens (1609), Oberon (1611), Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611), and Love Restored (1612). We do not know the circumstances, nor the nature and degree of rivalry, that might have been involved, but we do know that Jonson made fun of Campion's next masque with his Irish Masque.²⁰

The suggestion surrounding Entheus seems a little uncharitable of Campion, for when he returned to the court stage after his six years of absence, the form had advanced tremendously, and he took full advantage of it. Under the hands of Jonson and Jones, it had acquired the structure of antimasque (which both contrasted and gave a foundation to the masque), masque, and revels; and it had accumulated a vast amount of theatrical technique in the forms of stage sets, machines, lighting effects, and such. Into The Lords' Masque Campion incorporated these elements. If in his first masque he had been a musician facing the masque, here he appears as a masque composer, in full control of the idiom that was emerging in this new genre itself.

If you were a typical Englishman, the performance on St. Valentine's Day 1613 for the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine would have given you occasion for rejoicing. It was true that the groom was ruler of a tiny kingdom within Germany, and it might have been difficult for you to locate on a map the place along the Rhine where the borders of the Palatinate began, or its center in Heidelberg. But the Elector Palatine or the Palgrave (the name derives from palatium, and is related to “paladin” or palace guard) had a power that far exceeded his physical realm, having traditionally supervised the election of the Holy Roman Emperor who governed Germany and much of central Europe, and having recently become a leader of continental Protestantism. That was important. Ever since the 1580s advisors had been trying to persuade first Elizabeth and then James to make common cause with their co-religionists across the channel, joining them militarily to create something of a Protestant league against Spain and her allies. Sidney got in trouble trying to dissuade Elizabeth from marrying a French Roman Catholic, and he had died defending the Dutch against Spain. Now, after more than thirty years' delay, James was seen by many as making that much-desired move. From the eleventh century the Palgrave had been the Holy Roman Emperor's closest aide; but the role was no longer proper for Protestants, and the groom's father, Frederick IV, who ruled from 1583 to 1610 (his early death hastened by that common disease of royalty, acute alcoholism), had cast himself in the role of leader of the Protestants, establishing the Evangelical Union to combat the aggressive tendencies of Catholics within the Empire. The young Frederick V, whose uncle was the powerful Dutch Protestant leader Maurice of Nassau, continued his father's work.²¹

The masque celebrating the marriage begins as a double consort strikes up a lively tune and the curtain is raised to reveal the lower half of a perspective setting. It is a forest in deep perspective, the sides slanting inward painted with trees, the trees at the back in relief or whole round. On the left is the entrance to a cave, on the right an artificial thicket. Suddenly there emerges from the thicket the figure of Orpheus followed by tame animals. He is dressed in an antique cuirass with bases, with a robe over his shoulder, his hair long and curled with a laurel wreath on his head and a small silver bird in his hand (see D, 249). The consort ceases and he speaks, calling “Mania” from her dark and earthy den. The consort sounds again, and she appears out of the cave, a wild and mad old crone dressed in black, a long robe with double sleeves and a petticoat, gesturing wildly in antic fashion.²²

He tells her that Jove (read “James,” the Jove mentioned throughout as ordering the action these people accomplish for him on stage) has ordered that she set free one “Entheus” or “Poetic Fury” from the crowd of the insane she has in her charge, and that he will control the babble with the music he commands: “Let Musicke put on Protean changes now; / Wilde beasts it once tam'd, now let Franticks bow” (D, 250). And suddenly, to the tune of strange music on high wind instruments, twelve lunatics tumble out of the cave: “there was the Lover, the Selfe-lover, the melancholicke-man full of feare, the Schoole-man over-come with phantasie, the over-watched Usurer, with others that made an absolute medley of madnesse” (D, 250). With a change in the music, the madmen fall into a frenzied dance that exhausts them, but after a while Orpheus raises his hand and the music changes again into a soft and solemn air which quiets them. Orpheus is raising and quelling madness in them by music, and it ends when they meekly trail off the stage, back to the cave. While they were whirling about they were jostling a thirteenth figure, “Entheus (or Poeticke furie),” one classically dressed and very bewildered, as if he were not one of them. As they leave, he is left on stage with Orpheus. His costume shows the relation he bears to the great singer of civilization: he wears a close cuirass of the antique fashion like Orpheus's, the skin-tight sculpted cuirass that reveals the musculature of chest and shoulders like a Greco-Roman bust; he has a robe fastened to his shoulders and hanging down behind. Like Orpheus his head is encircled with laurel, but out of that wreath grows a pair of wings, and at its front it has a clasp in the shape of a star. His left arm encircles a large book, a bound folio, while he raises his right hand with a quill pen in it.²³

These two figures face each other like person and mirror across the stage. There is a feeling of great dignity in their speeches as Orpheus explains that he has called Entheus forth at Jove's (James's) request to compose an invention to celebrate this night. Entheus replies,

                                                                      Orpheus, I feele the fires
Are reddy in my braine, which Jove enspires.
Loe, through that vaile, I see Prometheus stand
Before those glorious lights, which his false hand
Stole out of heav'n, the dull earth to enflame
With the affects of Love, and honor'd Fame.

(D, 251-52)

The singers burst into a song, “Come away,” and after the first strophe the upper part of the curtain falls away suddenly to reveal the heavens—eight huge stars fiery on top and silver in the middle burning in the midst of varicolored clouds, in front of the scene Prometheus standing attired in cuirass, greaves, and plumed helmet like an antique hero.

Orpheus and Entheus have provided a frame. What the audience is witnessing is the process of inventing a wedding masque: what is happening on the upper stage is what those on the lower stage are imagining. The masque proper, presided over by these three great classical figures that image eternity, now begins. Prometheus has actually ordered the stars to dance. As a song urging the “musick-loving lights” to dance in honor of the confluence of the Rhine and the Thames and then to descend to human shape is sung, apparently the stars do dance: “According to the humour of this Song, the Starres mooved in an exceeding strange and delightful maner; and I suppose fewe have ever seene more neate artifice then Master Innigoe Jones shewed in contriving their Motion, who in all the rest of the workmanship which belong'd to the whole invention shewed extraordinary industrie and skill; which if it be not as lively exprest in writing as it appeared in view, robbe not him of his due, but lay the blame on my want of right apprehending his instructions for the adoring of his Arte” (D, 254).

The stars then vanish, as if drowned among the colored clouds, and eight masquers appear from the wings of the upper stage, while a curtain behind them resembling clouds is drawn up to reveal circles of light in motion further off in the heavens. The masquers are the transformed stars. They are dressed in cloth of silver, combining the classical cuirasses of the three presiding heroes with the more modest contemporary round breeches with bases. Around their waists are flame-shaped green leaves. What seem flames sprout from the wrists and shoulders and around their small ruffs. But their heads seem on fire, for they wear crowns of gold plate and orange enameling that seem to blend in with their hair, and a silken feather that looks like smoke emerges at the top.²⁴

These are the lords who will give this entertainment its name: Lord James Hay, the king's former favorite; Philip Herbert, Sidney's nephew, now earl of Montgomery (and to be honored with his brother William as patron of Shakespeare's First Folio); and William Cecil, earl of Salisbury, son of Elizabeth's and James's secretary of state and married to one of the powerful Howard women.

Prometheus speaks again of sparks from the earth to attend the lords, and suddenly sixteen pages dart out on the lower stage. They seem half naked and all aflame, being clothed only in skin-tight cuirasses with skirts colored orange tawney like flames, wings of flame, a circlet with flames about their heads.²⁵ They carry large wax torches which they swing about rather dangerously, as they break into a wild and vigorous dance. Light and fire fill the room and smoke rises to the rafters.

Now a new wonder: a cloud that covers the whole stage, top to bottom, appears, and Prometheus leads the masquers down on stairs concealed within it, at the end of which procession the cloud splits in two. The lower scene has suddenly been changed, and instead of the woods there is now a two-dimensional architectural flat. It is a gorgeous facade, all gold set with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and opals. It is Greco-Roman architecture, as if a space Orpheus and the other two have finally evoked for their exclusive use (and it may also form a compliment to the Holy Roman Empire of which Frederick is a part). There are four niches separated by gold pilasters, their capitals of the Roman composite order. Over them runs a mixed order featuring reverse scrollwork, and at the top a cornice arched slightly and touching every pilaster. In the niches stand four female statues of silver, and above each is a bas-relief in gold that seems to present part of the history of Prometheus. The statues are transformed ladies who must be awakened to love and life by the men.

The action is once more directed to the throne, where the earthly Jove sits and nods approval. Prometheus, Entheus, and Orpheus invoke Jove to release the ladies, in a brief hymn; the statues move slightly, and the men pantomime courtship of them in a galliard. It is danced to a courtly syncopated song, a rather popular contemporary cavalier piece that gives a nice sophistication to the usually less open matters of female coyness and male aggression:

Wooe her, and win her, he that can:
                                        Each woman hath two lovers,
So shee must take and leave a man,
                                        Till time more grace discovers;
This doth Jove to shew that want
                                        Makes beautie most respected;
If faire women were more skant,
                                        They would be more affected.
Courtship and Musicke suite with love,
                                        They both are workes of passion;
Happie is he whose words can move,
                                        Yet sweete notes helpe perswasion.
Mixe your words with Musicke then,
                                        That they the more may enter;
Bold assaults are fit for men,
                                        That on strange beauties venture.

(D, 257)

The four women are transformed, and four more statues appear in their places; another invocation and courting, and all is complete. It is like rhyme. The eight ladies transformed from statues wear beautiful loose, silver dresses, with flowing gossamer veils, large fluffy ruffs, and mantles looped up on one side at the shoulder.²⁶

The entertainment is moving out of the land of classical myth into the audience's world: the song is a contemporary courtly song in the meter of a galliard, and the masquers wear costumes like the clothes the fashionable audience is wearing. It becomes directed at the wedding party at this stage, for while the lords and ladies rest between dances a dialogue song with chorus wishes good luck to the bride and groom (D, 258-59). Also, the dancing has moved down the ramp into the dancing area of the banqueting room. The staged entertainment starts to blend with its viewers. The eight lords and eight ladies take partners from the audience, and the revels begin.

An hour passes in this social dancing. Then a brief song calls a halt, and the curtains that had been closed during the dancing rise to reveal a whole new scene—a long Greco-Roman perspective with porticos receding into the distance, in its center a large silver obelisk whose top is lost in clouds with its lights, on either side statues of the bride and groom, now mirrored in gold (D, 259). Now that love has been celebrated, it is time for fame. A sage old woman, the Roman Sybil, in a golden robe, and veiled, pulls the obelisk forward on the stage with a single thread of gold. She chants in a high voice after the fashion of the time a long poem in Latin about joining Great Britain and Germany in unity (D, 260). Then a dance, and she prophesies again, in Latin; this time Orpheus and Prometheus paraphrase her blessing of bride and groom with a large progeny. There is a song (reminiscent of one of the corontos in the revels) and a final new dance as all sixteen masquers go out (D, 262).

James went to great expense for his daughter's wedding. The cloth for wedding and masque was extensive, over 700 yards of satin, over 230 pounds of lace, 204 yards of copper stuffs, 318 yards of tinsel, etc. It is known that Campion was paid slightly over sixty-six pounds for his libretto, Jones fifty pounds for his designs, thirty or forty pounds each to the dancing masters Jerome Herne, Thomas Giles, one Buchan, and one Confess, ten or twenty pounds apiece to the composers Giovanni Coperario, Robert Johnson, and Thomas Giles for music, a pound apiece to the ten members of the king's violins, a pound apiece to the twelve “Madfolkes” and the five speakers of parts.

Sir John Finett, master of the ceremonies, thought that the masque “was performed with exceeding charge and commendable discharge, … the devyse was ingeniously cast, the dances well figured.” But John Chamberlain was impatient: “That night was the Lords maske whereof I heare no great commendation, save only for riches, theyre devises beeing long and tedious, and more like a play than a maske”—he liked dancing more than dialogue. But the Venetian ambassador Antonio Foscarini focussed on the sets; for him the masque “was very beautiful, with three changes of scene. … certain stars danced in the heavens by a most ingenious device.”²⁷

It is Stephen Orgel's opinion that “the effects that Jones created for this production comprise almost an anthology of scenic machinery of that time,”²⁸ and we have heard how much the Venetian ambassador, who must have witnessed much sophisticated staging in his native Italy, admired its changes of setting and the “most ingenious device” by which stars were made to dance in the heavens. The first setting is divided in half horizontally, and the antimasque takes place against the lower half alone, that being a setting in depth, “a wood in prospective, the innermost part being of releave or whole round, the rest painted” (D, 249). It is all horizontal. When Entheus is freed from the limited perspective of madness and imagines for his poem the presiding figure of Prometheus, his vision is both literally and metaphorically true. The veil of imagination is the curtain of the stage, because after the first strophe of the song of invocation, “In the end of the first part of this Song, the upper part of the Scene was discovered by the sodaine fall of a curtaine; then in clowdes of severall colours (the upper part of them being fierie, and the middle heightned with silver) appeared eight Starres of extraordinarie bignesse, which so were placed as that they seemed to be fixed betweene the Firmament and the Earth; in the front of the Scene stood Prometheus, attyred as one of the ancient Heroes” (D, 252). Prometheus is the surrogate figure of the poet within his fiction, the stars a reification of his fiery brain. It is a mirror and a complement. The release of imagination with its light and fire completes the lower world of earth by evoking the upper world of the heavens in imagination and then producing it.

The world is now whole. The triad of power and poetry sets out the ceremony whose essence is bringing the stellar into human life. The Orphic song first makes the “musick-loving lights” of eight stars dance in the heavens “in an exceeding strange and delightful maner” that so impressed the Venetian ambassador. Then—probably on flats—the scene of clouds was drawn aside to reveal “an Element of artificiall fires, with severall circles of lights, in continuous motion, representing the house of Prometheus” (254); this scenic change accompanies the transformation of the stars into eight masquers in costume that recall their wedding apparel.

Action now turns vertical. Prometheus from above invokes fiery spirits that “Breake forth the earth like sparks” from below (D, 255), and the fires of heaven and earth now combine as the fiery masquers descend to join with the fires of earth on a huge transparent cloud that fills the stage from top to bottom. The cloud—probably composed of a flat surrounded by smoke from a cloud machine—breaks in two and reveals the second setting. In place of the woods in the lower half of the set we now have classical architecture with four female statues in niches. The set is glittering and two-dimensional. The geography is deliberately ambiguous, for this should be the House of Prometheus in the heavens but it seems to have been transferred to earth, in order to be palpable. This is the scene of corresponding transformation, when eight female statues and eight male stars become human and dance together.

The varied and ingenious scenes have taken us from wild nature to civilization with its complex and harmonious architecture; it is here that the revels of the court take place. When the revels are ended we have our third setting. Gone are the divisions between upper and lower, for now the scene is one from floor to ceiling. It is a perspective scene signifying unity, “a prospective with Porticoes on each side, which seemed to go in a great way” as had the woods before (D, 259). It is about depth, reaching into the past—a Palladian perspective on a Roman piazza with the obelisk of Egypt and Rome at its center. It is here that Sybilla prophesies in Latin, evoking fame, continuity, and the permanent values.

The structure of the masque, formed on the Jonsonian model, likewise stresses evolution. It begins with Mania, a nightmare vision of mankind dominated by a chaos of passions and delusions. This antimasque is the basis of the rest, so it is not so much dispersed as purified. For Entheus or “poetic fury” or “the imagination” is filtered out of the crowd. Orpheus the primordial poet and orderer of nature purges from the primordial flux of emotions the most valuable passion placed in mankind. “Poetic Fury” creates a fiction that comes to life (as the fire in his brain leads to stars and lights): Prometheus the man of fire and power is the reification of his words, it is he who is imagined to unite heaven and earth, to bring down ethereal virtuous man from heaven and unite him with the earthly art of the beautiful female element. Gone is the original opposition of Mania-earth-low-dark and Orpheus-heaven-high-light, for they are now united in a fertility imaged as constructing a world. The poet having had a vision of reasonable, virtuous, and loving mankind and then created it as real, his work is over; it is taken up and given permanence by a female, the prophetess Sybilla, under whose aegis the masque moves from its social revels to its transcendent conclusion out of time.

What is this about? It is about language; it is about poetry; it is about civilization. It builds on the ancient myth of Orpheus to show the magical language of the poet divinely inspired bringing about a progressively more continuous and permanent civilization. It moves from the dim past to a classical present, out to a deep-resounding future. It is an ever-fuller evocation of completeness: “The number's now complete,” cries Entheus (D, 258). A. Leigh DeNeef presents this masque as “a formal celebration of the nature and function of poetry.”²⁹ For him, the four central characters represent an analysis, as in a spectrum, of four elements of poetry. Orpheus, mover of trees and tamer of beasts, represents the form-giving or shaping power of poetry, the way it makes the chaos of life's experiences yield a vision of order. Entheus, who has been released from flux by this shaping activity, is poetic inspiration, the divine spark from above that gives life to shape. His creature Prometheus represents ornament, by which DeNeef means not only the attractive surface but the principles of symmetry, completeness, and measure that control the actual poem with its encapsuled vision.³⁰ Finally, Sybilla represents the prophetic function of poetry when all three previous elements are in place, the power of poetry not only to embody but to extend life. From form to inspiration to a formed whole that has prophecy as its most ambitious function: this is what Elizabeth Sewell in The Orphic Voice calls “poetry thinking about itself,”³¹ and in tracing such thought it is also tracing the progress of the civilization it sponsors. The element of ritual is strong though less overt than it was in the Lord Hay piece, but now it is shown to have power. Ritual speech creates things.

THE CAVERSHAM ENTERTAINMENT

When he came to publish his description of The Lords' Masque later in the spring, Campion included with it an account of the outdoor entertainment given to Queen Anne by Lord Knollys at Caversham near Reading on 27 and 28 April. It forms a fitting conclusion to the festivities of the wedding, for it marks the royal lady's return to private life. Two months after the marriage, Anne and James bade farewell to Elizabeth and Frederick at Gravesend; and ten days later, on 24 April, Queen Anne began her progress toward Bath, which she repeatedly visited for the gout. Of this progress, John Chamberlain wrote, “The King brought her on her way to Hampton Court; her next move was to Windsor, then to Causham, a house of the Lord Knolles not far from Reading, where she was entertained with Revells, and a gallant mask performed by the Lord Chamberlain's four sons, the Earl of Dorset, the Lord North, Sir Henry Rich, and Sir Henry Carie, and at her parting presented with a dainty coverlet or quilt, a rich carrquenet, and a curious cabinet, to the value in all of 1500 l” (D, 234).³²

It is a much simpler piece than the masque, naturally employing no theatrical effects, having no governing device but only a continued cast of characters. Instead of an opening description of the scene, there is a brief description of the estate, and the bulk of the text is taken up with the speeches that were presented. Campion's goal seems to have been to surround the two-day visit with a light fiction. It falls into three parts: an outdoor piece performing a ceremony of welcome on Tuesday, an indoor piece celebrating the queen's transforming presence in a revels after supper, and a farewell ceremony with gifts on Wednesday morning.

The first piece takes Queen Anne through three stages, with pauses at the approach, at the park gate, and at the gardens before the house. For the first: “it shall be convenient, in this generall publication, a little to touch at the description and situation of Cawsome seate. The house is fairely built of bricke, mounted on the hill-side of a Parke within view of Redding, they being severed about the space of two miles. Before the Parke-gate, directly opposite to the House, a new passage was forced through earable-land, that was lately paled in, it being from the Parke about two flight-shots in length, at the further end whereof, upon the Queenes approach, a Cynick appeared out of a Bower” (D, 235). The Cynic presents a speech in favor of solitude, which is countered by “a fantastick Traveller” who has been secretly inserted into the queen's party on horseback. After the Traveller has converted the Cynic to the values of society, they go on together with the party to the park gate, where two Keepers and two “Robin-Hood-men in sutes of greene” (D, 237) meet the queen and offer her formal greeting, with a five-part song and a “Silvan-dance of six persons.” Song and dance have succeeded to dialogue and involve the queen, and when she and her party are met in the lower garden by the Gardener and his boy language flourishes. There has been a progression in language: the Cynic had been plain and boorish—“Naked I am, and so is truth; plaine, and so is honestie” (D, 236)—the Traveller fantastic in his mock-logic. The Keeper and Robin-Hood-men had been plain but well intentioned—“accept such rude intertainment as a rough Wood-man can yeeld” (D, 238). The Gardener speaks in a homespun country version of the Euphuism that had been popular back in the 1580s: “Most magnificient and peerelesse Diety, loe, I the surveyer of Lady Floras workes, welcome your grace with fragrant phrases into her Bowers, beseeching your greatnesse to beare with the late woodden entertainment of the Wood-men; for Woods are more full of weeds then wits, but gardens are weeded, and Gardeners witty, as may appeare by me” (D, 240).

As language becomes more “flowery,” it traces a rustic vision of the progress of civilization, from wilderness to forest to garden, whence Anne is guided to the door of the house. The second part of the entertainment takes place in the hall of the estate, the seat of its full civilization, and it is a miniature masque. The antimasque collects the characters of the welcoming ceremony: Traveller, Gardener, and Cynic appear, all appropriately drunk, and utter ridiculous speeches. The Traveller's mock-logic turns in on himself—“if we presse past good manners, laugh at our follies, for you cannot shew us more favour, then to laugh at us” (D, 243)—the Gardener becomes fulsomely self-satisfied, the Cynic rubbing his eyes in wonder at the combined effects of wine and the royal personage (D, 243-44). The three harmonize in a song betokening fellowship and the union of the different, and then they disperse—“Let us give place, for this place is fitter for Dieties then us” (D, 245). The indoor scene dominated by the presence of the queen resets rustic harmony as ridiculous.

What caused them to disperse was the appearance of a deity, the god “Silvanus, shapt after the description of the ancient Writers. His lower parts like a Goate, and his upper parts in an anticke habit of rich Taffetie, cut into Leaves” (D, 244-45). He represents myth, perhaps the myth of the world like Bacon's Pan, the lower parts linking him to earth while the upper parts reach to the sky.³³ It is his duty to present transcendence, and in his speech we observe for the first time a change from prose to verse. He praises the power of Queen Anne that transcends his, and then presents the masquers. They enter to “a great noise of drums and phifes” (D, 245), dance their entry, and then proceed to the little masque's third part, the revels that consume the rest of the night, the gouty queen deigning “graciously to adorne the place with her personall dancing” (D, 246).

The third part of the entertainment consists of a brief farewell speech by the Gardener, now speaking dignified verse about his “flowrie incantation” (D, 247), and the presentation of gifts, while a final three-part song is performed by three handsome country maidens. The action of transcendence that took place within the house the evening before leaves everything simple, dignified, and generous at its threshold.

The two pieces of this publication came out together printed in reverse chronological order, first The Caversham Entertainment of April, then The Lords' Masque of the preceding February. That arrangement seems designed to highlight a progression in tone from clowning in the country to stately action at court. These two tones (each of which rises, within its limitations, by deliberate modulations of style, one from rustic pretentiousness to the high style in verse, the other from mad babble to Latin verse) correspond to their respective occasions. The entertainment is designed to raise the spirits of a queen who has just lost her daughter to a husband, while the masque celebrates great affairs of state. What the two have in common is the theme of language and its power to trace and influence the evolution of civilization. The way they go together redoubles that evolution.

THE SQUIRES' MASQUE

In the court masque, that form that pulled together the skills he was master of, Campion was exploring questions of meaning or significance: his technique settled, he could plumb the problems of what it all meant. In his first masque he was an interpreter of nature: by evoking the allegorical senses he unfolded for his audience the nature of nature as conjunctions of opposites in the cosmic, human, and political realms. In The Lords' Masque he used the nature of poetic creation as its own scaffolding, the foundation of a suggestive device about the power of poetic language to create and make stable. His progress is analogous to what Michel Foucault finds as a great turn from sixteenth-century interpretation of a divinely ordered world by finding analogies, to the seventeenth-century representation of a world in which differences and distinctions play a major part.³⁴ And in his final masque he assays a direct representation of this-our-world as it exists, first in appearance and then in reality. This was a bold stroke: masques never before had been dedicated to mimesis.

Campion begins his description of The Squires' Masque with a theoretical statement:

In ancient times, when any man sought to shadowe or heighten his Invention, he had store of feyned persons readie for his purpose, as Satyres, Nymphes, and their like: such were then in request and beliefe among the vulgar. But in our dayes, although they have not utterly lost their use, yet finde they so litle credit, that our moderne writers have rather transfered their fictions to the persons of Enchaunters and Commaunders of Spirits, as that excellent Poet Torquato Tasso hath done, and many others.

In imitation of them (having a presentation in hand for Persons of high State) I grounded my whole Invention upon Inchauntments and several transformations.

(D, 268)

For him, the age of myth and fiction was over—as it was for Donne, who, Carew asserted, had banished the Ovidian trains of gods and goddesses from verse.³⁵ He is making a statement about Jacobean society: it is much more likely to be confused by rumor and false appearance than it is to be raised to a level of vision by myth as in Elizabeth's day. Enchantment and illusion are false myths; they distort rather than ennoble life. What is needed is an accurate rendering of the life we experience—as well as the necessary appreciation of such a rendering. The change involves a stress on the psychological perception of reality rather than interpreting reality in absolute metaphysical terms.

The realism of this masque consists in its depiction of myth as falsehood and in its coasting so near the actual occasion it celebrates: for the device of the twelve Knights enchanted by the evil illusions of Rumor and freed by the sufferance of Queen Anne seems deliberately designed as a tactful attempt to lift opprobrium from the countess of Essex's remarriage. We have recounted the sordid background to the occasion before, in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.³⁶ Rumors about the actual murder did not surface until the following spring and summer, but as of 26 December 1613 there was suspicion enough. People knew that the wedding was a culmination of the attempt of the Howard family to gain influence over Robert Car, earl of Somerset, the successor to James Hay as King James's favorite. To that end they encouraged Car's passion for Frances Howard and finally even managed to have her marriage to Essex annulled in order to pave the way for Car. The annulment proceedings, which concluded on 25 September, were a messy business: it had to be proved that Essex was impotent. Furthermore, court gossips knew that the two had been sleeping together since the previous spring: no matter of cool chaste Diana opposing Flora, this. The Yuletide wedding was an unabashed and even shameless Howard triumph: four of the dancers were Howards, and four others may have been pressed into duty in order to guarantee legitimacy, since they had danced in Jonson's Hymenaei celebrating the countess's first marriage, that had just been so scandalously dissolved, back in 1606 (see D, 264, 284).

For a masque, the setting is doggedly mundane. Instead of bowers of goddesses or the heavens with moving stars which become the House of Prometheus, we have a triumphal arch as proscenium with a familiar landscape or seascape within it:

The place wherein the Maske was presented, being the Banquetting house at White Hall, the upper part, where the State is placed, was Theatred with Pillars, Scaffolds, and all things answerable to the sides of the Roome. At the lower end of the Hall, before the Sceane, was made an Arch Tryumphall, passing beautifull, which enclosed the whole Workes. The Sceane it selfe (the Curtaine being drawne) was in this manner divided.

On the upper part there was formed a Skye with Clowdes very arteficially shadowed. On either side of the Sceane belowe was set a high Promontory, and on either of them stood three large pillars of golde; the one Promontory was bounded with a Rocke standing in the Sea, the other with a Wood. In the midst betwene them apeared a Sea in perspective with ships, some cunningly painted, some arteficially sayling. On the front of the Sceane, on either side, was a beautifull garden, with sixe seates a peece to receave the Maskers; behinde them the mayne Land, and in the middest a payre of stayres made exceeding curiously in the form of a Schalop shell. And in this manner was the eye first of all entertayned.

(D, 268-69)

This is representation. It is notable that the setting is made to include the auditorium, the pillars near the chairs of state partaking of the architectural motif set by the arch, all “Theatred.” That is important, for Queen Anne will take a central part in the masque, and that will signify to the onlookers that she has overcome her initial opposition to the wedding. And instead of a ceremony—or any music or dance—the piece opens with a bare narrative report. Four Squires (hence the alternative title, The Squires' Masque, as well as The Somerset Masque) who have narrowly escaped shipwreck tell how twelve Knights who had set sail to attend the wedding have been baffled by a storm at sea caused by Error, Rumor, Curiosity, and Credulity: six of the Knights vanished into the air at sea, while the other six were transformed into the pillars the audience sees on land (and sees reflected about them in the “theatred” room). The relation is dramatized: the first Squire can scarcely finish his account to King James because of exhaustion, while the fourth breaks out in fear at the arrival of Error and his train.

The antimasque is a bit unusual in that it is concluded entirely in pantomime. The four enchanters the Squires have mentioned—Error like a serpent (from book 1 of The Faerie Queene), Rumor clothed in tongues, Curiosity in eyes, and Credulity in ears—enter and whisper a while “as if they had rejoyced at the wrongs which they had done to the Knights” (D, 271) and then begin to dance. They are joined by three quaternities: “strait forth rusht the foure Windes confusedly,” “After them in confusion came the foure Elements,” “Then entred the four parts of the earth in a confused measure” (D, 271). The antimasque of the world in mute confusion is dispersed by the arrival of the delegation of value: Eternity, the three Destinies carrying a golden tree, and Harmony with nine musicians. Mere bodily action is replaced by song, song moreover that has as its goal direction of purposeful action:

CHORUS.
Vanish, vanish hence, confusion;
Dimme not Hymens goulden light
                                                            With false illusion.
The Fates shall doe him right,
And faire Eternitie,
                                        Who passe through all enchantements free.
ETERNITIE Singes Alone.
Bring away this Sacred Tree,
The Tree of Grace and Bountie,
                                                                      Set it in Bel-Annas eye,
For she, she, only she
                                                                      Can all Knotted spels unty.
Pull'd from the Stocke, let her blest Hands convay
                                                                      To any suppliant Hand, a bough,
                                                                      And let that Hand advance it now
Against a Charme, that Charme shall fade away.
Toward the end of this Song the three destinies set the Tree of Golde before the Queene.

(D, 272)

Eternity's solo song is a celebrated piece: it was set by Nicholas Lanier in the new declamatory or monodic style, thus making the music partake of the realism of this masque by being reduced to heightened unmelodic speech.³⁷ The musical setting gives the song a feeling of personal urgency (one that contrasts with the dance melody of the next song when the purpose has been happily achieved), and so in brief space we have shifted, from a choric exorcism in the ceremonial mode, to a feeling personal persuasive lyric, to the action of setting the tree before the queen.

When “the Queene puld a branch from the Tree and gave it to a Nobleman, who delivered it to one of the Squires” (D, 273), the enchantments dissolve to a new melodic song in dance meter, “Goe, happy man, like th'Evening Starre”: six Knights appear in a cloud, the other six are suddenly transformed out of the pillars of gold. And the wedding can now be celebrated in a combination of song and dance: the masquers perform their first dance in three sections, between them appearing three strophes of a hymn “While dancing rests” (D, 274). That hymn, deliberately separate from the dance mode in its religious elements, expresses marriage by an echo-effect signifying meeting and bringing in other voices that modulate from nature's meetings to the religious chorus “Io, Io Hymen.” The main masque is very short, little more than an interlude between the grotesque antimasque of illusion that the world has no order, and the revels with their planned combination of social order and disorder.

The revels conclude with the entrance of twelve sailors who dance a hornpipe and then convey the twelve Knights away to their waiting ships. It is notable that the revels are brought to an end by a set of characters from the lower classes who would normally be part of the antimasque, and they have come not for a ceremonial but a practical purpose, to row people back to their ships before the tide turns. Their music, like that of “Bring away this Sacred Tree,” is close to sounds the audience actually heard in life: heightened speech, a sailor's dance.³⁸

The Golden Bough that is the pivot of the plot does not merely dissolve enchantments; it was the traditional guide through the underworld, but as “Grace and Bountie” it also guides us through an upper world that often seems confusing. It brings the audience into the actual world they inhabit, for at the moment when the Knights appear, “on the sodaine the whole Sceane is changed: for whereas before all seemed to be done at the sea and sea coast, now the Promontories are sodainly remooved, and London with the Thames is very arteficially presented in their place” (D, 273). To dissolve enchantment is not only to release the Knights but also to release us, to bring us into reality and activate the wedding celebration. In place of the confusion of the elements, we now have the natural cycle of the seasons—“Sweete springs, and Autumn's fill'd with due increase” (D, 275)—that frames love's ceremony. What had been miraculous elements become mundane: in a wedding dialogue the miraculous golden tree of Destiny is caught up in an image and becomes a natural tree serving as an emblem of fertility: “Set is that Tree in ill houre / That yeilds neither fruite nor flowre” (D, 275). And “Eternity” becomes a matter of blessing the couple with hopes of children so as to leave “a living Joy behind” (D, 275). The sailors who announce the end of the revels are ordinary sailors—“Straight in the Thames appeared foure Barges with skippers in them” (D, 275)—and they sing a colloquial song—“Come a shore, come, merrie mates”—while dancing a hornpipe. It ends as realistic representation: the myth was the illusion.

This is the bare bones of a masque entertainment. The text we have is one of the shortest of those publications, yet we know that it began at 11:00 p.m. and ended at 2:00 a.m.³⁹ One reason for its slightness is that the bulk of the action is contained and carried by music and dance, which are indicated rather than narrated in full. Another is that it is compressed, because much of the action is not explained in speeches but incorporated into the song and dance. For example, we know from their song that the sailors have come to tell the Knights it is time to embark. It was so compressed as to cause misunderstanding. The agent of Savoy attended, and to him the four Squires were merely “four men dressed poorly” who spoke in a funereal accent unsuited to a wedding, the tree “signifying the olive” of peace, the confused antimasque “a masque of twelve devils.”⁴⁰ It was not simply that the agent Gabaleoni's English was at fault, for he did not attend to the visual iconography of the antimasque (iconography being in fact a science that grew up in his native Italy). The antimasque is compressed, and demands interpretation. The four enchanters form a solipsistic pattern among themselves. Credulity's ears lie open to receive the messages of Rumor's tongues, Curiosity's eyes are dazzled by the serpent Error, and the four form two couples, two men and two women for completeness. The elements of the world that enter to dance to their dance, Gabaleoni's twelve devils, represent Error's distortion of reality as something confused and chaotic. Error and Rumor not only throw one off course, but make the world seem frightening and threatening. The personified values that disperse them are abstract, but they are not so much virtues of the mind as representatives of what is—Eternity or how things have always been and will be, the three Destinies or how things must be, Harmony with nine musicians the elements of nature as it really exists with the nine spheres, and so forth. Number symbolism is involved as it was in 1607; 4 as the mundane sphere superseded by the divine number 3 and its multiples, then 12 Knights the product of their multiplication, and so on. Land and sea are disjoined by Error and his troop and rejoined by Queene Anne, under whose aegis the symbolism of 3 continues into the three sections of the wedding hymn.

The masque celebrates the reality it represents on many planes. But reality, we say, is a tricky business, by definition beyond our control. One thing Campion did not count on was the incompetence of the Florentine designer Constantine de Servi: as Gabaleoni recounts it with the relish of an Italian rival state, the device for lowering the cloud with six of the Knights in it was constructed as one makes a portcullis, and when the cloud came down the audience could see the ropes and hear the pulleys groaning away as they do when you raise the mast of a ship. The Savoyard concludes, “Apart from having seen their Majesties in good order and with great majesty, and also the great number of ladies, one could see nothing that came anywhere near meriting the inconvenience of the thousands of people who waited twelve hours without dinner.”⁴¹ Then of course the whole occasion blew up next autumn, when Campion was examined and his great patron Monson imprisoned under suspicion of having taken part in the conspiracy to murder Overbury.

Campion's big year was 1613: it was the year he published three books of songs in two volumes and composed three masque entertainments. It was marked, as we have seen, by an embracement of the psychological, of perception, of the actual. In the texts of the songs of that year he developed contrast, the literal and factual, and he was developing a style that would culminate in a dry realistic tone that encouraged a vibrant complexity of attitude. In his music he was incorporating many different voices, and was moving toward heightened speech rather than suggestive dance melody as a model for what music should be. These tendencies were to flower in his last song book in 1617. In the masques he kept throughout the overall theme of chaos yielding to order, but his means became progressively more spare, from the complex allegory of The Lord Hay's Masque to a naked presentation of the civilizing power of language to make a masque or a world in The Lords' Masque. Here in The Squires' Masque he stripped down the form to a spare diagram consisting of little more than an antimasque in pantomime followed by a spectacular but brief transformation scene. But the transformation did not catapult him or his audience into the wonderful; rather, it landed them in the world. What they all saw at the beginning was a tumult of elements, continents, and other personifications of the world—an illusion—and what they saw at its end was a crew of sailors coming up the Thames, disembarking, dancing a hornpipe. The masque became for Campion a means of clarifying what in fact quotidian London life was, rather than an ennoblement of it. And when the year of reality, 1613, was over, he had seen enough of it. He left the stage.

Notes

1. See the conjectural diagram in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 1:120.

2. For details, see Works, ed. Davis, 212-13.

3. For the music, see Sabol, Four Hundred Songs, no. 2.

4. See Works, ed. Davis, 207, for the epigram to James prefixed to the masque, in which he is compared to King Arthur, as Henry VIII was.

5. See Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken Books, 1947), 92-93.

6. See Sabol, Four Hundred Songs, no. 3.

7. I assume that this is the third piece of music printed with the masque, the first being a song, the second the first new dance with its lyrics, the third, fourth, and fifth being the second, third, and fourth new dances; for the music, see ibid., no. 4.

8. See the illustration in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 1:121.

9. See Sabol, Four Hundred Songs, no. 5.

10. See Joan Rees, ed., “Samuel Daniel, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses,” in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 26, 33-35.

11. See chapter 1, above.

12. Jonson, Complete Masques, ed. Orgel, 79.

13. “This sacred place, let none profane” (Works, ed. Davis, 216) and “Bid all profane away” (Jonson, Complete Masques, 77), for example.

14. Sabol, Four Hundred Songs, 25.

15. See Rees in A Booke of Masques, 26, 36.

16. Jonson, Complete Masques, ed. Orgel, 56-57.

17. See D. J. Gordon, “Hymenei: Ben Jonson's Masque of Union,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8 (1945):107-45.

18. See chapter 5, above.

19. See David Lindley, “Campion's Lord Hay's Masque and Anglo-Scottish Union,” Huntington Library Quarterly 43 (1979):1-11.

20. See Works, ed. Davis, 264, 267, n., 269, n., 270, n.

21. On Elizabeth and Frederick, see Josephine Ross, The Winter Queen: The Story of Elizabeth Stuart (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979).

22. See Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones; 1:242.

23. See the illustration in ibid., 1:248.

24. See the illustrations in ibid., 1:249, and color plate of no. 80.

25. See the illustrations in ibid., 1:250, and color plate of no. 81, reproduced as the frontispiece to the present text.

26. See ibid., 1:44, and illustrations on 1:247, 251.

27. These accounts of expenses and opinions appear in ibid., 1:241-42.

28. Jonson, Complete Masques, ed. Orgel, 22.

29. A. Leigh DeNeef, “Structure and Theme in Campion's Lords Maske,” Studies in English Literature 17 (1977):95.

30. Ibid., 101.

31. Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 60.

32. On the entertainment as a genre, see Mary Ann McGuire, “Milton's Arcades and the Entertainment Tradition,“Studies in Philology 75 (1978):451-71.

33. Francis Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, chap. 6, “Pan sive Natura,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 15 vols. (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1863), 13:92-101.

34. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 17-76.

35. Thomas Carew, “An Elegie on the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. Iohn Donne,” in The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 71-74.

36. See chapter 1, above.

37. For the music, see Sabol, Four Hundred Songs, no. 20; on the song, see Works, ed. Davis, 266.

38. See ibid., no. 23.

39. John Orrell, “The Agent of Savoy at The Somerset Masque,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 28 (1977):304.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., 304-5.

Select Bibliography

Orgel, Stephen, and Strong, Roy. Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. 2 vols. London: Sotheby Park Bernet Publications, Ltd., 1973. Collects all of Jones's designs and other documents for The Lord Hay's Masque and The Lords' Masque.