SOURCE: Shady, Raymond C. “Thomas Heywood's Masque at Court.” Elizabethan Theatre 7 (1980): 147-66.

[In the following essay, Shady contends that in Love's Mistress Heywood created a hybrid dramatic genre that incorporates features of both plays and masques.]

For one dizzy week in mid-November, 1634, Thomas Heywood, at the age of sixty, was the favourite Court Poet. A lively play called Love's Mistress, or The Queen's Masque catapulated him to this royal favour, and in a sense, marks the apex of Heywood's forty-odd year career on the London stage. Within a period of eight days, Love's Mistress was performed three times before Charles and Henrietta Maria—first at a private dress-rehearsal at the Phoenix, and twice again at Denmark House. For the latter two productions, the play was graced with what Heywood calls the “excellent inventions” and “rare decorements” of Inigo Jones, “to every act, nay almost to every scene.”

There is little in the play that touches what Eliot calls “those deeper emotions which shake the veil of Time”; but Love's Mistress possesses a quality that makes it unique within the spectrum of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Heywood has very skillfully incorporated the spectacle of both masques and antimasques into the action and theme of his five-act play, and the result is a hybrid species of drama in which “play” and “masque” are interdependent.

The singularity of this play bears stressing. Jonson and Shirley wrote both plays and masques but rarely combined them structurally or thematically. Cynthia's Revels (1600) and The Poetaster (1601), for example, contain masques, but they are set apart from the whole and simply reflect the action of the play; the allegory of Honor and Riches (1631) and the lyrical grace of Triumph of Beauty (1639), on the other hand, lean rather to the less dramatic masque form. Dekker and Ford's brief play, The Sun's Darling (1623), while it approximates to Love's Mistress in its mythological allegory, falls far short of it in sustained dramatic appeal. Lyly, Dekker, Middleton and Rowley, Webster and Shakespeare all “use” masque elements in their plays; but only Heywood seems to have hit upon or chosen the harmonious combination of the two forms that allowed him to assert modestly in his Preface, that the play “gave so general a content, that I presume … their sacred Majesties … never parted from any object presented in that kind, better pleased, or more plenally satisfied.”

There are three levels of action in Love's Mistress which comprise the play's dramatic structure: the interaction of the characters Apuleius and Midas serves as the main unifying principle of the play, and as a choral framework through which all the major thematic concerns of the play are expressed; the Cupid and Psyche story, adapted from Apuleius' The Golden Ass, provides beauty and elegance, and the chief substance of Heywood's “argument” in the play; the sequence of episodes involving Corydon and the swains are comic interludes, designed to reflect the action of the two other levels. These three separate threads are all intimately related both structurally and thematically. Their inter-relationships are forcibly realized at those few moments in the play when these levels intersect, when characters forgo their functional positions within the structure of the whole play to inter-act with characters at a different level. This juxtaposition and inter-relationship of characters and themes provide a delightful source of dramatic perspective, as well as the basis for understanding and appreciating the play.

I

In The Golden Ass, when Lucius is finally re-metamorphosed into his human shape, he undergoes a series of purification rites to prepare him to be a servant and minister to the great goddess Isis. After fasting, praying and performing sacrifices, he is taken by a high priest to the sacred temple, where he is granted a vision of heaven and hell. He tells us that he can relate only a small portion of his divine vision “for the understanding of the profane,” since to elaborate further on the mysteries of the gods might cause “both thy ears and my tongue [to] incur the like pain of rash curiosity.”

When Apuleius first walks on to the stage in Love's Mistress he is carrying his ass's ears, so lately shaken off, to remind him of his previous “vain ambitions.” Like his counterpart in The Golden Ass, he still smarts from the pain brought about by his rash curiosity. Before his own downfall, he had “a brain aimed at inscrutable things / Beyond the moon,” but now he realizes that it was his overzealous aspirations and pride that had turned him “to so dull a beast”:

That knowing man who keeps not in his bounds,
But pries into heaven's hidden mysteries
Further than leave, his dulness is increased,
Ceaseth to be a man, and so turns beast.

(i. i. 9-12)¹

Apuleius is like Lucius in that he too is a former and once-fallen ass who now clearly sees the vanity of his misguided curiosity. In the same way that Lucius must purify himself in the eyes of the goddess who has restored his true shape, so must Apuleius make a pilgrimage to Aganippe's spring to perform a sacrifice at the temple of the Muses. As Love's Mistress unfolds, it becomes clear that Apuleius has been granted some new-found aesthetic perspective which allows him to act in the role of a representative of the Arts in general, and divine Poetry in particular. In castigating Midas for his covetous desire for the golden touch, Apuleius speaks ex cathedra poetica when he declares,

I'll make thee then ingenuously confess
Thy treason 'gainst the Muses' majesty;
Withal, not only whatsoever's mine,
But all true poets' raptures are divine.

(i. i. 75-78)

So in spite of the fact that Apuleius still carries “folly's crest” about with him, Heywood clearly means him to speak for the cause of the poet, and against the dull and the ignorant who dare “with Arts compare.”

But Apuleius never reaches the Muses' hill. After asking the audience “the way to Helicon” and receiving no response, he attempts to seek direction from Midas. “The Muses?” answers Midas, “Hang the Muses”; and when Apuleius explains that he must perform a sacrifice there, that “most unreverend groom” suggests, “An ass head of thy own thou must perform.” Midas proceeds to make his aesthetic position very clear—he is reasonably content living “A beast among wild beasts”:

I tell thee once again, I know no Muses,
No Muses' hill, no Aganippe's spring;
And what is more, I care for no such toys.

(i. i. 36-38)

Apuleius had been transformed into an ass because he had aspired to the knowledge of heavenly mysteries, but Midas reveals that he has been turned into a beast because of his experiences with the golden touch. The two are quite clearly asses of a different colour: Apuleius, a reformed over-reacher, is an ass only by reason of his vain ambition, since abandoned; while Midas is a dull, unimaginative ass, not only unable to hear the music in the divine raptures of the poetry, but also “A block, a stone, yet learning he'll revile.”

By the end of the first scene, when Apuleius has finally prevailed with Midas to sit and see his story of “Cupid's love to Psyche,” Heywood has very neatly laid the foundation for the basic thematic concern of the play, which incorporates the more aesthetic moments of Neo-platonic exegesis, as well as the grotesquerie of the antimasques. The root of this thematic concern lies in the character of Apuleius, who assures his audience that they shall not “part from hence / With unfeasted ears.” His function is not simply to relate the story of Cupid and Psyche. In fact he declares that his primary purpose has been “To expose to [the audience] the shapes of all those asses / With whom my lost soul wandered in a mist”; while the position of the classical myth is almost an after-thought. The function of the play, then, is not precisely captured in the title, but lies rather in the spectacle and debate of opposing opinions of critical taste. Speaking to the audience of his own relationship with Midas, Apuleius declares:

We two contend—Art here, there Ignorance.
Be you the judges; we invite you all
Unto this banquet academical.

(i. i. 82-84)

The ground for this debate between Art and Ignorance lies in the presentation of the Cupid and Psyche story, in response to which both parties are allowed to express their critical opinions. Midas commences the choral discussion at the end of Act i, after he has seen a fair portion of the story, with his characteristic reserve and moderation:

Hand off, let go my sheep-hook! I'll not stay
I'll hang myself ere I'll see out thy play.
Call you this poetry?

(i. vi. 1-3)

In response to his dissatisfaction, Apuleius suits himself to Midas' common taste, and presents the spectacular antimasque that he had promised in the first scene. Six human asses, representing Pride, Debauchery, Drunkenness, Usury, Fickleness and Ignorance, enter one after another to entertain the obviously thrilled Midas. In response to Apuleius' observation that the Ignorant Ass represents Midas himself, the king of beasts defensively counters by demanding, “where's your Poet Ass among all these?” Midas is talking about those

That let not men lie quiet in their graves,
But haunt their ghosts with ballads and bald rhymes[.]
Do they not teach the very fiends in hell
Speak in blank verse? Do we not daily see
Every dull-witted ass spit poetry?

(i. vi. 47-51)

And then, in a magnificent appeal to reason and common sense, totally devoid of any imagination, Midas condemns Cupid and Psyche with great indignation:

And for thy scene, thou bring'st here on the stage
A young green-sickness baggage to run after
A little ape-faced boy thou term'st a god!
Is not this most absurd?

(i. vi. 52-55)

Apuleius' response is wrought from as much exasperation as Midas' query: “Misunderstanding fool, thus much conceive: / Psyche is Anima, Psyche is the Soul.” The debate proceeds as Apuleius explains the allegorical significance of every detail in his story to the scarcely discerning Midas, who can only half-heartedly assure him, “Thou hast made this somewhat plain.” The two characters respond to the story of Cupid and Psyche in ways which establish a pattern recurring in every act of the play: Midas' first reaction to the story is to escape. Only as the play progresses does he very gradually respond to the story itself by demanding clarification. It is Apuleius' function every time to coax him back to his important position within this debate as both chorus and representative of Ignorance. It is for Midas, then, that the antimasques are introduced into every Act of the play; for without the positive reinforcement of Apuleius' commentary, Midas can see the story as nothing more than “villainous lies.” Apuleius, on the other hand, is forced by Midas to respond to his own story by making clear his “absurdities” for his ignorant companion, and consequently he provides the allegorical commentary for the play.

At the end of Act ii, when Midas again tries to leave, Apuleius allows him to present his own antimasque for the disconcerting reason that “Art must sometimes give way to Ignorance.” At face value, this statement may appear to question Heywood's artistic integrity: is he merely catering to the debased taste of the ignorant, or “to the rather pompous frivolity of the queen and her ladies?”² The conflict between Apuleius and Midas concerning the function of art and entertainment on the stage is very clearly didactic. Midas is a misunderstanding fool, but he is not insidious in his threat against the Arts. In An Apology for Actors (1612), Heywood writes, “To speak my opinion with all indifferency, God hath not enioyned vs to weare all our apparrell solely to defend the cold: Some garments we weare for warmth, others for ornament.”³ In this instance, he is defending the place of the theatre within society, in response to the many “seditious Sectists” of his age who were opposed to the stage; but the analogy is easily adapted to Heywood's concept of the Horatian formula of prodesse and delectare. There is no question that he considered the dulce to be of equal importance with the utile, and it is through the relationship of Art and Ignorance that we see the function of the antimasques in Love's Mistress. This “Ignorance” is not absolutely insipid, nor is it something that Art must aesthetically “give way” to; rather, it represents “ornament” or delectatio, diverting and entertaining to the audience and the reader. Apuleius himself agrees that the dance of Pan, the clown, swains and wenches in Act ii is sport indeed: “My modesty gives thee no reprehension, / For I am well pleased with thy pastoral mirth.”

While spoon-feeding this allegorical commentary to the befuddled Midas, Apuleius constantly echoes his own trangression against the sanctions of the gods. Midas does not understand why Cupid hides himself from Psyche's sight when she first arrives at Cupid's bower, but Apuleius simply answers, “Oh who dares pry into those mysteries / That heaven would have concealed?” Later he remarks that Psyche's predicament grew so extreme because “She aimed to search forbidden mysteries.” Psyche's cheeks are soon to be blasted and deformed in the same manner, and for the same reason, that Apuleius was once turned into a Bottom.

The mythological characteristics of Midas from Ovid's Metamorphoses are again apparent in Act iii but with a twist that fuses two levels of action in the play, and provides a delightful interlude after Psyche's disobedience and tragic fall. Heywood transforms Ovid's account of the musical contest between Pan and Apollo to accommodate his own gallery of unlikely heroes: Midas is chosen to be the judge in a singing contest which sets one of Apollo's minions against Midas' bastard son.⁴ Apollo is apparently aware of the judge's relationship to his opponent's champion, but he is certainly not as aware as the reader of Midas' fierce loyalty to the Arcadian “arts.” Midas is further prejudiced against Apollo on account of the god's last musical confrontation with another Arcadian who was flayed alive for his efforts.⁵ But Midas is confident, and declares that

                                                  though poor Marsyas
For striving with thee had his skin pulled off,
Yet have we swains, and some, too, not far off
(I could have said, some near to me in blood)
Can tickle you for a tone.

(iii. ii. 35-39)

With much of the half-hearted conviction he had betrayed in dealing with Apuleius, Midas acknowledges the song of Apollo's champion to be “somewhat to th' purpose.” But after his bastard son “sets out a throat” with his doggerel sing-song praise for Pan, Midas reveals that he can censure as well as his son can sing, “and that most learnedly.” Midas forsakes his primary role as chorus, which he never wanted in the first place, and enters into the action of the play to which he has formerly been audience. In his new role of actor and critic he again betrays his earthy unimaginative taste, but now there is no Apuleius to call him a fool, and more Arcadians to cheer for his son and Pan than for Apollo. And so he declares:

Thy harp to Pan's pipe yield, god Phoebus,
For 'tis not now as in diebus
Illis; Pan all the year we follow,
But semel in anno ridet Apollo.
Thy quirester cannot come near
The voice of this our Chanticlear.

(iii. ii. 105-10)

The price that Midas pays for his gross indiscretion marks the symbolic transferral of Apuleius' ears to himself. In the very first scene of the play, Midas had warned Apuleius, “take heed, poet, that your rhymes be sound, / Else with thine own ass ears thou shalt be crowned.” Now, the case is altered, and because of his own unsound censure, Midas is newly crowned an ass by Apollo: “Midas, for thee, may thy ears longer grow, / As shorter still thy judgment.”

Midas' one and only foray into another level of action in the play is certainly costly. But like a true ass, he remains unmiffed by Apollo's condemnation, and returns to his original role of chorus, resplendent in his new ears, and proud that he had been able to maintain “our rural music, / Preferring it before Apollo's harp.” He also returns no wiser, as Apuleius is persuaded to arrange another antimasque to keep him awake: “Love's Contrarieties,” in which a king and a beggar, a young man and an old woman, a lean man and a fat woman, all enter and dance together showing that “Love hath power over all.” And for the third time, Apuleius must then explain the allegorical meaning of the story to Midas, who does not understand the significance of Psyche's discovery of Cupid, and the god's subsequent wrath:

One glimpse, one lamp, one spark, one divine thought
Plucks back her arm, and more inflames her breast
With amorous raptures. But because, poor soul,
She aimed to search forbidden mysteries,
Her eyes are blasted, Cupid loathes her sight,
He leaves her ugly and his blessed bower
Is rent in pieces. For heaven seems to fall
When our poor souls turn diabolical.

(iii. iii. 32-39)

This pattern of the interaction between Apuleius and Midas is repeated in the last scene of Act iv, when the latter suddenly finds that he is in need of some “quaint device, / Some kick-shaw or other to keep waking.” Apuleius grudgingly begs the pardon of the audience and agrees to comply with Midas' wishes:

Of Vulcan's cyclops I'll so much entreat,
That thou shalt see them on their anvil beat.
'Tis music fitting thee, for who but knows,
The vulgar are best pleased with noise and shows.

(iv. iii. 7-10)

Act iv marks the last time that Apuleius provides Midas, and “such like drones,” with an analysis and explanation of his allegory, insisting even to the end that the true meaning of the story is “to the wise, perspicuous and most plain.”⁶

The conflict between Art and Ignorance continues through Act v, even after the triumphant conclusion of the Cupid and Psyche story, when all the gods and goddesses have danced in heavenly harmony on Psyche's wedding day. Midas blusters out on to the stage, followed by the exasperated Apuleius, and arrogantly demands:

Is this your moral? this your poetry?
What hast thou done, what spoke, what represented,
Which I with all these cannot justly tax?

(v. iii. 127-29)

Apuleius agrees: anyone as obtuse and stupid as Midas probably could find fault with the story, although he would certainly remain unaware of the “golden truth” which would always be obscured by his “shallow nonsense.”

Cupid must play the role of arbitrator in their strife, and he speaks for both audience and reader in weighing the case between Art and Ignorance. Cupid's decision is one of moderation, and harmonious reconciliation, and further illustrates that “Love hath power over all”:

                                                  One seeks to advance
His Art, the other stands for Ignorance.
Both hope, and both shall have their merits full:
Here's meed for either, both the apt and dull.
Pleased or displeased, this censure I allow:
Keep thou the ass's ears, the laurel thou.

(v. iii. 136-41)

Midas is not condemned for his ignorance. Both he and Apuleius continue to prosper according to their individual merits, the one with the symbol of his true ignorant and earthy metal, the other now wearing the symbol of poetic excellence. The fact that both characters are allowed to have “their merits full,” seems to suggest a structural unity to the play which gladly embraces both the Art of the allegory and the Ignorance of the antimasque. Apuleius and Midas represent a calculated juxtaposition of the Horatian concepts of instruction and entertainment, both of which are integral parts of the dramatic structure of Love's Mistress.

II

Not too deeply submerged beneath Heywood's adaptation of the classical myth is a Christian theme of disobedience, fall and redemption, which parallels the Apuleian allegory in The Golden Ass. Psyche is, at once, a representation of both the Soul and sinful man, who because of his overweening pride, falls and risks damnation, until his sacrifice and penance cleanse him of his sins and make him worthy in the eyes of God. Her story also parallels that of Apuleius, and consequently of Lucius in The Golden Ass, since they are both brought low for having “aimed at inscrutable things, / Beyond the moon,” and for attempting to pry into “heaven's hidden mysteries.”

Psyche's “pride” is actually closer to frivolity, especially since her vain ambitions are regarded as the natural side-effects of her fickle, female nature. Nevertheless, within the allegorical framework of the play, her tragic downfall and expulsion from Cupid's bower of bliss are a direct result of her “pride”; the pride that the off-stage Echoes mock when she presumes to eat the heavenly food at Cupid's board; her pride in styling herself “queen of delight” when she first speaks with her husband; and her pride in dealing with her sisters when she describes Cupid: “Come, come; you shall not be enamoured / On my fair husband. This for all suffice: / He's young and rich.” Ironically, of course, it is Psyche's “high felicity” which sparks her cruel sisters to plot her downfall. When Petrea innocently remarks that it does her good to see her sister marry into money, Astioche, the more vile of the two creatures, responds:

Thou art a fool, Petrea, for I hate
That any's fortune should transcend my state.
She sends us hence in scorn, but we'll return,
And never cease, till by some treachery,
Her pride we make a slave to misery.

(ii. i. 80-84)

The Sisters return shortly and easily trap Psyche when she contradicts herself in speaking about her husband. (She has already admitted that it is very easy for her own tongue to “breed [her] confusion.”) And as they turn Psyche's pride back upon itself to bring about her destruction, Heywood alludes to the Garden of Eden to accentuate Psyche's precarious situation. Astioche reminds her of Apollo's oracle, in which he declared that Psyche would marry a “husband not of human race,” and one whose “serpent face / If she behold, she must see Hell,” She then closes the trap on the unwitting Psyche by saying,

Last night, when we went hence laden with gold,
We spied a serpent gliding on the mead,
Who at the sight of us, writhing his head
Proudly into the air, first hissed at heaven,
Because it did not shade him from our eyes …
In at these gates he rolled.

(ii. iv. 46-50)

Like a Miltonic toad at Psyche's ear, Astioche offers her counsel to relieve her sister's anxiety, promising that if she “behold his horrid shape, / And with the razor cut his scaly throat,” she will “by death gain life.”

In Act iii, the Christian myth is fused with the classical, as Psyche pries into forbidden mysteries, against divine commandment, in the vain anticipation of a new life. When she beholds the divine shape of Cupid for the first time, like Eve, she is intoxicated with her discovery:

Malicious sisters, I your envy see:
This is no serpent, but a deity.
What pretty loves like silken slumbers lie,
Closing the covers of each crystal eye.
Hence, thou prepared instrument of death,
Whilst Psyche sucks new life from his sweet breath.
Churl beauty, beauteous niggard, thus I'll chide;
Why didst thou from mine eyes this glory hide?

(iii. i. 22-29)

As Apuleius had explained before, “Celestial raptures” are “Subject unto no weak and fleshly eye,” and those who transgress these bounds of human understanding must be punished, be the sentence metamorphosis or condemnation to hell. Cupid discovers Psyche's violation of his “dread command” when she accidentally spills some burning oil from her lamp on him as he sleeps; whereupon, to use Midas' description, he “wakes and chafes, / And flings house out at windows,” and proceeds to ravage his own palatial grounds as well as his pregnant wife, bidding Boreas to:

Lay waste and barren this fair flow'ry grove,
And make this paradise a den of snakes.
For I will have it uglier than hell,
And none but ghastly screech-owls here shall dwell.
Breathe winter's storms upon the blushing cheeks
Of beauteous Psyche; with thy boisterous breath,
Rend off her silks, and clothe her in torn rags;
Hang on her loathed locks base deformity,
And bear her to her father; leave her there,
Barren of comfort, great with child of fear.

(iii. i. 66-75)

The Neo-platonic and Christian themes converge as the beauty of the Soul is deformed by the sin of her disobedience, and Psyche finally realizes her shame at the outward level of her physical corruption. As she is swept away from Cupid's ravaged grove by Boreas, Psyche is aware of her metamorphosis in both body and spirit: “Where shall I hide me? Let no human eye / Behold me thus disfigured and ashamed.” Again, the reference to Genesis is appropriate, since Psyche now sees her true “nakedness.”

Psyche's transformation into a “bare anatomy of grief” results in her being scorned by her family and banished from her father's court, but it also reflects her rejection of pride and high felicity in favour of an attitude of humility. Her former pride shifts to her sisters, as Astioche admits that her “great heart” joys in Psyche's fall; and when Petrea scorns their sisterhood, Psyche at last sees that “Pride will not look on base deformity.” Just in case the audience does not comprehend the allegorical framework, both Neo-platonic and Christian, underlying Psyche's fall, Cupid descends on a cloud to reiterate the moral to Psyche:

                                                  Did I not give thee charge
To taste the pleasures of immortal love,
But not to wade too deep in mystery?
Could not my heavenly company suffice
To cheer the soul? But thou with earthly eyes
Must see my face, and view my real beauty
Against my charge, thy love, and human duty.

(iii. ii. 200-206)

But being stripped of her pride is only the first step in Psyche's spiritual and physical rehabilitation. She must then undergo a savage beating and a series of Herculean tasks to appease the wrath of fickle Venus. Only when Psyche is finally sent to Hell to obtain a box of beauty from Proserpina, is the Apollonian oracle ultimately realized: “his serpent's face / If she behold, she must see Hell.” Bereft of all her pleasures and pride, she listens patiently to Cupid's instructions and finally departs submissively on her descent into the Underworld.

Psyche eventually receives the box of beauty and is dismissed from Inigo Jones' spectacle of Hell's “fearful court” with Pluto's observation that she is indeed “worthy to be Cupid's wife.” Psyche's trials are far from over, however, as she still must combat her own vain longing to pry into the hidden mysteries of the gods: in this case, disobey both Proserpina and Cupid by opening the box to gain heavenly beauty for herself (“'tis but the breach of duty, / And who'll not venture to get heavenly beauty?”) Psyche's urge to open the box, claiming “I shall die except I do't,” would appear seriously to undermine the allegorical significance of the cycle of her disobedience, fall, and redemption. But Heywood more or less successfully avoids a straight-forward response to the implications of her second disobedience by identifying her behaviour as typically female:

But, foolish girl! Alas, why blame I thee,
When all thy sex is guilty of like pride,
And ever was?

(v. ii. 35-37)

One of the most striking moments in the dramatic structure of this level of action in the play is Heywood's fusion of Apuleian and Ovidian themes of resurrection and new life, which he achieves by linking Psyche's return from her embassy to Hell with Proserpina's annual return from the Underworld to commemorate the coming of spring. The pregnant Psyche and the fertility goddess Proserpina represent, as they return from Hell, the triumphant conclusion of the Cupid and Psyche story, with its themes of new life after death, and its perpetual richness in physical and spiritual love. Ceres' sowing feast, which traditionally represents the return of fertility at the vernal equinox, is, at once, Psyche's wedding feast, and a celebration of her own fertility. As Cupid's Queen, she will be swept away by Jove and Phoebus to “plenty's bower,” and then to “the bright palace of Eternity,” where the wedding party will be feasted.

The harmony and resolution of the play, portrayed in the fertility-wedding feast, are ultimately realized in the elaborate masquing dance of Cupid, Psyche, the gods and goddesses. In Loues Triumph through Callipolis (1630), Ben Jonson had written, “Where Loue is mutuall, still / All things in order moue.” This order and harmony not only represent the allegorical love of Cupid and Psyche, but also reflect the entire dramatic structure of the play, to which the audience had previously been invited as judges, and are now invited by Cupid as participants:

In honour of our marriage, match yourselves,
And with a measure, grace our nuptials.
But such as do not love to be in motion,
View as spectators how our joy appears
Dancing to the sweet music of the spheres.

(v. iii. 117-21)

III

The third level of action in the play, Corydon and the swains, is not simply a series of comic interludes designed to divert the attention of Midas and the audience. Rather, it too has an integral part in the dramatic structure of Love's Mistress, thematically connected with the Apuleius-Midas debate, as well as with the Cupid and Psyche story. Through the character of Corydon, the Clown, a figure for whom the playwright owes nothing to Apuleius, Ovid, Virgil or Spenser, Heywood juxtaposes the artistic concepts of Love and Poetry with an ignorant rustic perspective. Corydon is, of course, intimately related to Midas' position in the debate of Art and Ignorance, since he happens to be his bastard son; and his passionate affair with the “she-swain,” Amaryllis, parallels the love conventions expressed in the Cupid and Psyche story. But Corydon's most important function in the play is structural: it is only through him that the three levels of action intersect, in those few and brief moments when Heywood dramatizes the humorous side of the clash between Ignorance and Art.

The Clown, for so he is called until we discover in Act v that his name is Corydon, brashly enters the stage for the first time in Act ii, itching for an encounter with the young gentleman swashbuckler “Cupid coxcomb!” He attempts to debase Cupid's reputation in the eyes of the swains by describing him as a perfect fop, a namby-pamby fellow who would shrink before any man armed with a sheep-hook. Anyone who arms himself with “bow and bird-bolts,” the Clown feels, could not present much of a physical threat, and is therefore deserving of little respect. Inspired by his own presence among the other “hoydes” and “illiterates,” the Clown determines to set out Cupid's “style in folio” with a litany of titles that progressively decline in merit:

he is King of cares, cogitations and coxcombs;
Viceroy of vows and vanities; Prince of passions,
prate-apaces, and pickled lovers; Duke of disasters,
dissemblers, and drowned eyes; Marquis of
melancholy and mad folks; Grand Signor of griefs
and groans; Lord of lamentations; Hero of heigh-hos;
Admiral of ay-mes; and Monsieur of mutton-laced.

(ii. iii. 21-27)

One can only respond with the second swain, that “Here's a stile I shall never be able to get over.” But the Clown's distress lies chiefly in “the company of pitiful fellows called Poets,” who “maintain this princox in his pontificalibus.” Heywood balances Apuleius' earlier comment to Midas, that “all true poet's raptures are divine,” with the Clown's description of the trifles from which all poets shape their work. With the same literal-mindedness as his father, who regarded Psyche as a “green-sickness baggage,” and Cupid as a “little ape-faced boy,” the Clown re-tells Homer's Iliad as “the tale of Troy”:

By this Troy ran a small brook that one might stride over. On the other side dwelt Menelaus, a farmer, who had a light wench to his wife called Helen, that kept his sheep, whom Paris, one of Priam's mad lads, seeing and liking, ticeth over the brook, and lies with her in despite of her husband's teeth; for which wrong, he sends for one Agamemnon, his brother, that was then high Constable of the Hundred, and complains to him; he sends to one Ulysses, a fair-spoken fellow, and town clerk, and to divers others, amongst whom was one stout fellow called Ajax, a butcher, who upon a holiday brings a pair of cudgels, and lays them down in the midst, where the two Hundreds were then met, which Hector, a baker, another bold lad of the other side, seeing, steps forth and takes them up; these two had a bout or two for a broken pate, and here was all the circumstance of the Trojan wars.

(ii. iii. 40-55)

The sense behind the word of the poet, as the transmitter of divine raptures, is obliterated as the Clown interprets the word, the phrase and the fable by his own literal and sensual response. Like his father's, the Clown's critical taste is based on simile: while Psyche may look like a “green-sickness baggage” to Midas, several phrases of so-called “deeper philosophy” sound to the Clown like very simple rustic expressions; hence titule tu patule is translated somewhat in the way that it sounds: “titles and pages”; propria que maribus becomes “a proper man loves marrow-bones”; and, best of all, feminno generi tribiuntur is simply the poetical way of saying, “the feminine gender is troublesome.” Unfortunately, though, for both the Clown and his idolizing swains, Cupid will not tolerate such impudence against his deity. And choosing a blunted, lead-tipped bolt, since neither gold nor silver could pierce the Clown's thick skin, Cupid gives him a blow that startles all within him. The Clown's immediate response is to cry foul for being attacked without warning, but Love's arrow quickly takes effect, and the Clown is transformed from an ignorant braggadocio into an ignorant braggadocio “mightily in love”:

The case is altered, for anyone may guess by the hugeness of the blow, that I am mightily in love. Ay-me, that any wench were here, whose name is Amy; now could I be in love with any Madge, though she were an howlet, or with any maid, though she looked like a Malkin. Oh poetry, I find that I am poisoned with thee too, for methinks I could say my prayers in blank verse; nay, let me see, I think I could rhyme for a need:

Cupid, I yield, since so I know thy will is,
And I'll go seek me out some Amaryllis.

(ii. iii. 110-19)

The Ovidian story of the singing contest between Pan and Apollo, as I have already noted, introduces Midas as audience-participant, outside his role of chorus. Midas' intrusion into the action of clowns, swains and gods inevitably carries with it all the implications of his position in the debate between Art and Ignorance. The important twist in the Ovidian framework of the episode lies in Heywood's substitution of the Clown for Pan, as the representative of Arcadian musical taste. This tampering with the original story, as we shall see, better suits the structure of the play, although the literal rationalization for the presence of the Clown is that “Pan hath got a cold, is hoarse, and hath lost his voice.” Apollo's champion, for the great god himself would “take no advantage” by competing with a clown, is the first contender, leaving Pan's representative to “come up with the catastrophe.” Midas regards the first song, an unpretentious ecomium (Phoebus unto thee we sing, / Oh thou great Idalian King.), as “somewhat to th' purpose,” reserving his most learned praise for Pan's champion, his own bastard son. And the Clown's song clearly exceeds his own prediction of a catastrophe:

They call thee son of bright Latona,
But girt thee in thy torrid zona;
Sweat, baste and broil, as best thou can,
Thou art not like our Dripping Pan.

(iii. ii. 72-75)

Inspired by Cupid's bird-bolt, and reeling still in his love for Amaryllis, the poetical Clown reflects the critical judgment of Midas in his relationship with Apuleius, and the connection between these two levels of action is as intimate as father and son.

The Clown never recovers from his rude initiation into the role of the poet-lover. His unprecedented victory over Apollo's champion presses him on to soar even higher on the wings of poesie, and to “reconcile” himself with his new-found colleagues: Homer, Virgil and Ovid. He confides to his most devoted audience, the swains, that “since I played the last prize against Phoebus, in which I may say of myself, veni, vidi, vici, I have been so troubled with a poetical itch that I can scratch you out rhymes and ballads, songs and sonnets, odes and madrigals, till they bleed again” (iv.ii.5-9). The most remarkable effect of Cupid's arrow, however, is to blind him in his love for Amaryllis. Even the swains testify that she is “the veriest dowdy in all Arcadia,” but the Clown remains uncompromising in his devotion, extolling the merits of her every virtue: she is old, but “is not age reverend?” she is wrinkled, but “Doth not the earth show well when 'tis plowed, and the land best when it lies in furrows?” she has a horribly long nose, but “That's to defend her lips.” Blinded by love, he looks on Amaryllis “with the eyes of poetry,” which afford him little better vision than his former literal-minded associative perspective:

Her breasts are like two beds of bliss,
Or rather like two lean-cow's udders;
Which shows that she no changeling is,
Because, they say, such were her mother's.

(iv. ii. 63-66)

And his devoted swains can only respond, “All the Homers in Asia could never have come so near the business.”

The last instance of this structural cross-pollination in Love's Mistress illuminates the relationship between all three levels of action in the play; Apuleius and Midas, Cupid and Psyche, Corydon and the swains. When the Clown first overhears that Psyche has been sent to Hell for a box of beauty, he is determined to steal it from her: “for 'tis my duty, / My mistress being a blowse, to find her beauty.” He follows her when she returns from her mission, and at one point finding her “napping,” takes up the box; but his escape is foiled by Cupid, who charms him asleep, and places a counterfeit box by his side. When he awakens, however, it is interesting to note how quickly he forgets his “duty” to Amaryllis, as he announces to at least half the world, “Rejoice, all mortals that wear smocks, / For I have found rich beauty's box.” His outrageous pride assures him that he has “already got love from Cupid … poetry from Apollo,” and now, having gained beauty from Psyche, he dares to suggest that he should be the “white boy of Arcadia,” and take the place of Adonis as Venus' sweetheart. But as he thickly daubs on the contents of the counterfeit box (“In one cheek I'll plant lilies, in t'other roses.”), we are told that the box “is full of ugly painting.” His erstwhile adoring swains regard his “monstrous” transformation with great delight; but the Clown again remains unmoved, and gently admonishes them in our eyes for their undiscriminating remarks: “This 'tis to be mere mortals, and have no addition of learning or travel; their dull eyes cannot judge of celestial beauty.”

Like both Psyche and Apuleius, the Clown “pries into heaven's hidden mysteries / Further than leave, his dulness is increased, / Ceaseth to be a man, and so turns beast”; as Psyche is transformed into an “infectious strumpet,” and Apuleius metamorphosed into an ass, so the Clown undergoes a “monstrous” change in which he is made to “look like a devil already.” The structure is unified further in that the Clown not only pries into what he thinks is “celestial beauty,” but then proceeds to smear it on his body. This is a precise allusion to the events which immediately precede the transformation of Lucius in The Golden Ass:

And then I put off all my garments and greedily thrust my hand into the box and took out a good deal of ointment, and after that I had well rubbed every part and member of my body, I hovered with mine arms, and moved myself, looking still when I should be changed into a bird as Pamphile was; and behold neither feathers did burgeon out nor appearance of wings, but verily my hair did turn into ruggedness and my tender skin wore tough and hard; my fingers and toes leaving the number of five grew together into hooves, and from the end of my back grew a great tail, and now my face became monstrous and my mouth long and my nostrils wide, my lips hanging down, and mine ears exceedingly increased with the bristles … and so without all help … I perceived that I was no bird, but a plain ass.

(Apuleius, iii, 135, 137)

The most humorous part of the Clown's transformation is that, unlike both Apuleius and Psyche, he never achieves a sense of tragic self-awareness, never one moment of remorse or contrition for his foolishness. Blind, as usual, to sensitivity and good taste, and ignoring the protests of the swains, he immediately departs for his wedding with Amaryllis, assured that he will “dazzle all their eyes that shall look on [him].” His own rustic wedding, of course, parallels the nuptial ceremonies and festivities of Cupid and Psyche in “the bright palace of Eternity.”

As I have pointed out in dealing with the first level of action in Love's Mistress, Cupid's final arbitration in the strife between Apuleius and Midas transcends any pedantic condemnation of the more “ignorant” characters in the play. Instead, we are told that “both shall have their merits full: / Here's meed for either, both the apt and dull.” The “dull” will always be branded with their own foolish behaviour, and that is their meed. Hence, Midas must necessarily wear the ass's ears, for he is no more; while his bastard son, Corydon, must for a time appear as an absurdly painted princox, in as much as his exterior simply reflects his ignorant and aspiring vanity. There is no bitterness in Cupid's decree that Midas must keep the ass's ears while Apuleius is awarded the laurel. In many ways, “Ignorance” is pardoned at the end of the play in the same way that Psyche intercedes for her sisters, when, contrite and purified, she insists, “For had they not my happiness envied, / My love and patience had not so been tried.” So too, both Midas and Corydon, as well as all the antimasques, contribute to the structure of the play in dramatic juxtaposition to the “golden truth” of the Cupid and Psyche story. Through this contrast, as it is particularly manifested in the intersection of the three levels of action, the dialectic on Art and Ignorance reaches its inevitable conclusion in a masque with Cupid, Psyche, and all the gods and goddesses, “Dancing to the sweet music of the spheres.”

Love's Mistress offers “no supernatural music from the wings,” but it does yield an abundance of winsome, light and lyrical verse, some nice comic moments, and several insights on the “Neoplatonic craze” that burdened Court entertainments in the early 1630s. At the same time it reveals another aspect of Heywood's dramatic craftsmanship: a sustained symbiotic relationship of masque and play that is unique in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

Notes

1. Thomas Heywood, Love's Mistress, or The Queen's Masque, edited by R. C. Shady (Salzburg, 1977).

2. See C. V. Wedgwood, Poetry and Politics under the Stuarts (Cambridge, 1960), p. 15.

3. An Apology for Actors (1612) (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1941), sig. C₁^v—C₂^r.

4. In the Ovidian account (Ovid, Metamorphoses, xi, 131ff.), Midas simply overhears the contest between Apollo and Pan, and disagrees with the sacred mountain god Tmolus, who chooses Apollo as the victor. For challenging the judgment of Tmolus, Apollo gives Midas the ass's ears.

5. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, vi, 315.

6. Apuleius' protests that, unlike the misunderstanding Midas, the audience surely understood the allegorical significance of the play, were, no doubt, treated as flattering to the Court. At the same time, however, it is interesting to note what Ben Jonson wrote regarding long-winded explication in The Masque of Queens (1609): “For, to haue made themselues theyr owne decipherers, and each one to haue told, vpon theyr entrance, what they were, and whether they would, had bene a most piteous hearing, and vtterly vnworthy any quality of a Poeme: wherein a Writer should alwayes trust somewhat to the capacity of the Spectator, especially at these Spectacles: Where Men, beside inquiring eyes, are vnderstood to bring quick eares, and not those sluggish ones of Porters, and Mechanicks, that must be bor'd through, at euery act, w^th Narrations” (Ben Jonson, edited by C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson [Oxford, 1961-67], vii, 287).