Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

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Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

Kevin Curran

Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama General Editor’s Preface

Helen Ostovich, McMaster University Performance assumes a string of creative, analytical, and collaborative acts that, in defiance of theatrical ephemerality, live on through records, manuscripts, and printed books. The monographs and essay collections in this series offer original research which addresses theatre histories and performance histories in the context of the sixteenth and seventeenth century life. Of especial interest are studies in which women’s activities are a central feature of discussion as financial or technical supporters (patrons, musicians, dancers, seamstresses, wigmakers, or ‘gatherers’), if not authors or performers per se. Welcome too are critiques of early modern drama that not only take into account the production values of the plays, but also speculate on how intellectual advances or popular culture affect the theatre. The series logo, selected by my colleague Mary V. Silcox, derives from Thomas Combe’s duodecimo volume, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1592), Emblem VI, sig. B. The emblem of four masks has a verse which makes claims for the increasing complexity of early modern experience, a complexity that makes interpretation difficult. Hence the corresponding perhaps uneasy rise in sophistication: Masks will be more hereafter in request, And grow more deare than they did heretofore. No longer simply signs of performance ‘in play and jest’, the mask has become the ‘double face’ worn ‘in earnest’ even by ‘the best’ of people, in order to manipulate or profit from the world around them. The books stamped with this design attempt to understand the complications of performance produced on stage and interpreted by the audience, whose experiences outside the theatre may reflect the emblem’s argument: Most men do use some colour’d shift For to conceal their craftie drift. Centuries after their first presentations, the possible performance choices and meanings they engender still stir the imaginations of actors, audiences, and readers of early plays. The products of scholarly creativity in this series, I hope, will also stir imaginations to new ways of thinking about performance.

Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

Kevin Curran University of North Texas, USA

© Kevin Curran 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Kevin Curran has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Curran, Kevin. Marriage, performance, and politics at the Jacobean court. – (Studies in performance and early modern drama) 1. Great Britain – Court and courtiers – History – 17th century. 2. Marriages of royalty and nobility – Great Britain – History – 17th century. 3. English drama – 17th century – History and criticism. 4. Command performances – Great Britain – History – 17th century. 5. Theater – Political aspects – Great Britain – History – 17th century. 6. Great Britain – History – James I, 1603–1625. I. Title II. Series 822.3’09-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Curran, Kevin. Marriage, performance, and politics at the Jacobean court / by Kevin Curran. p. cm. — (Studies in performance and early modern drama) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6351-5 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. English drama—17th century—History and criticism. 2. Masques, English—History and criticism. 3. Marriage in literature. 4. Weddings in literature. 5. Marriage—Political aspects—Great Britain—History—17th century. 6. Weddings—Great Britain—History— 17th century. 7. Political culture—Great Britain—History—17th century. 8. Rhetoric— Political aspects—Great Britain—History—17th century. I. Title. PR678.M3C87 2009 822’.3’09—dc22 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6351-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4094-0142-1 (ebk.V)

2009012111

For Pauline and Stone

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Contents Acknowledgments   Note on Texts   Introduction  

viii ix 1

1

Inventing a Language of Union  

17

2

Erotic Policy:The Rhetoric of Anglo-Scottish Marriage  

57

3

Competing Fictions and Fictional Authority at the Palatine Wedding Celebrations  

89

4

Relocating Monarchical Rhetoric:The Entertainments for Robert Carr and Frances Howard   129

Afterword  

161

Bibliography   Index  

165 183

Acknowledgments I have carried this book around with me across two continents, four countries, and through several institutions. Not surprisingly, I have accrued a number of debts along the way and it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge them here. Janet Clare, a model of precision and diligence, was this project’s first and most committed critic. Martin Butler gave much needed encouragement early on and asked important questions that stayed with me throughout the writing process. His seminal study, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), came out just as Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court was going into press. Paul Yachnin must also be singled out, not only for his help with this book, but for his ongoing intellectual generosity, more generally, and for his uncanny ability to quickly (and correctly) see the “big picture” lurking behind even the most embryonic work-in-progress. I have also benefitted from the kindness and expertise of David Bevington, Richard Dutton, Lisa Hopkins, Lloyd Kermode, David Lindley, Jennifer Nevile, Philip Schwyzer, Linda Troost, and Robert Watson. The amazing students in my 2006 seminar at McGill University, “Elite Identities, 1550–1700,” contributed to this book in more ways than they probably realize (or I expected). To all of my colleagues in the “McGill Shakespeare and Performance Research Team,” the “Making Publics” group, and the “Pittsburgh Medieval and Renaissance Consortium” I owe a great deal of thanks. I am very fortunate to have been able to refine my thinking on court culture in such wonderfully collaborative environments. Generous financial and institutional support was provided to me by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, McGill University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the University of North Texas. At Ashgate, Erika Gaffney and Whitney Feininger were models of editorial efficiency and wisdom. It has been a pleasure to work with them. A portion of Chapter 2 appeared as “Erotic Policy: King James, Thomas Campion, and the Rhetoric of Anglo-Scottish Marriage,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7.1 (2007): 55–77, reproduced by permission of Indiana University Press. Part of Chapter 3 was published as “James I and Fictional Authority at the Palatine Wedding Celebrations,” Renaissance Studies 20.1 (2006): 51–67, reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishing. I am grateful for permission to reprint these materials as part of this book. Finally, a big “thank you” to all of my colleagues at UNT, especially my comrades in early British literature—Robert Upchurch, Nicole Smith, Jacque Vanhoutte, Diana Benet, Deb Armintor, and Alex Pettit—and our fearless Chair, David Holdeman. My chief debts are to my family, especially Pauline and Stone, and it is to them that this book is dedicated.

Note on Texts Quotations from primary works have been transcribed as they appear in the editions cited, with the exception that in sixteenth and seventeenth-century texts and oldspelling editions in English, u/v and i/j have been distinguished in accordance with modern usage and archaic characters such as “ſ” and “VV” have been silently substituted with their modern equivalents.

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Introduction In early modern England, marriage was never far from the minds of the social elite. Even a cursory look at the period’s diaries and personal correspondences shows marriage to be a consistent matter of curiosity, speculation, concern, and sometimes even resentment or outrage. Writing from the Jacobean court to the Doge of Venice in 1605, Venetian Ambassador Nicolo Molin felt it appropriate to give a detailed account of the marriage plans being undertaken by Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, for his children: “The marriage of a daughter of the Chamberlain [Howard] to the Earl of Essex,” Molin reports, “is to be celebrated on New Year’s Day; and his majesty intends to be present. Six months later another daughter of the Chamberlain is to marry a son of Lord Salisbury. The object is to reconcile the young Earl of Essex to Lord Salisbury if possible.” A less politically inflected evocation of wedding fever in the Jacobean court comes from inveterate letter writer and elite newsmonger John Chamberlain, who declares in a letter to his friend, Dudley Carleton, “all the talke now is of masking and feasting at these towardly marriages.” The court’s intense interest in marriage is hardly surprising. Marriage catalyzed transfers of economic capital, established religious and political alliances, and legitimized the production of offspring who were expected to maintain these alliances. Indeed, the institution of marriage acted as a point of intersection for many of early modern England’s most fundamental ideas about social organization, political identity, and sexuality. Thomas Ridgeway puts it succinctly in a letter written from Ireland in 1610 on the topic of his daughter’s marriage: “None ... be properly in the world,” he says, “till they be married, before which time they only go about the world.” Similarly, clergyman William Whately avers, “The hope of posteritie, the stay of old age, the comfort of weaknesse, the support of every man’s house and name, together with the flourishing and populous estate of every Church and Common-weale, doth even hang upon the fruit of matrimony.” There were, however, some rather more epicurean reasons 

For an impressively wide-ranging array of personal commentaries on marriage, both elite and non-elite, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 285–376. Another useful source is David Booy, (ed.), Personal Disclosures: An Anthology of Self-Writings from the Seventeenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 29–90.  Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, vol. 10, 1603–1607, (ed.) Horatio F. Brown (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1900), 308.  Chamberlain to Carleton, 25 November 1613, The Letters of John Chamberlain, (ed.) Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:487.  Quoted in Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 290.  William Whately, A Bride-bush: or, a direction for married persons (London, 1619), 17.

Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court



for marriage being such a hot topic, as well. As Chamberlain’s letter makes clear, weddings, then as now, were occasions for extravagant festivity. In the court on which Chamberlain was reporting, that of King James I, this meant banquets, dancing, and, above all, spectacular masques and entertainments which served simultaneously as theatrical diversion and political eulogy. This book is the first study of these Jacobean nuptial performances, a hitherto neglected branch of elite theatricals which quickly came to be the standard format for high-profile wedding celebrations at the court of James I. Like so many projects, this one started with a series of questions. Some were relatively simple: did the entertainments included in early modern wedding celebrations respond at all to the political and sexual ideologies surrounding the institution of marriage? And if so, how? Other questions were more complex: what happened, for example, if there were different, even conflicting, ways of viewing the politics of a given wedding? Did the marriage entertainments choose sides or did they attempt to negotiate between the different positions? Anyone who begins seeking answers to these questions will very quickly be struck by how unevenly spread the archival resources for doing so are. Although we know that there were various kinds of private performances, disguisings and pageantry mounted for high-profile weddings from the fifteenth century onwards, in the vast majority of cases, these events survive as no more than an entry in an account book or a comment in a letter or diary. Weddings like those of Henry Knollys and Margaret Cave in 1565, Henry Wriothesley and Mary Browne in 1566, and Thomas Mildmay and Francis Radcliffe, also in 1566, all included theatrical entertainments. But our understanding of what went on in those entertainments is severely limited by the lack of substantial contemporary description. With the exception of a handful of notable instances—such as the spectacular festivities for the royal marriage of Henry VII’s son, Prince Arthur, to Katherine of Aragon in 1501, or the double marriage of the son and daughter of Anthony Browne to the son and daughter of William Dormer in 1572, which included a masque written by George Gascoigne— we have very little in the way of in-depth textual witnesses to pre-Stuart marriage entertainments in England. This is frustrating, but not terribly surprising. With regard to scripts and performance texts, it is doubtful that many existed in the first place. Private entertainments in the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries—wedding entertainments included—did not typically feature speaking parts, but consisted predominantly of mime and dancing. Another factor to bear in mind, especially in reference to the 1580s and 90s, is Queen Elizabeth’s attitude towards wedlock. Fearing the formation of subversive political coteries, Elizabeth tried to guarantee E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 1:159–63.  Gordon Kipling’s The Receyte of the Ladie Katheryne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) includes an edition of the most detailed contemporary account of the wedding celebrations and an insightful discussion of the event as a whole. On the Browne/Dormer wedding, see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 1:163–4. 

Introduction



the neutrality of those close to her by making it difficult for them to marry. If such individuals did want to take a husband or wife, they either had to do so secretly or, at the very least, hold the celebrations at a private residence outside the court. These conditions, no doubt, led to the enrichment of an already-thriving tradition of aristocratic nuptial festivity in the country. In particular, it would have opened up lines of communication between courtly and non-courtly cultures of performance, leading eventually to such hybrid entertainments as The Entertainment at Ashby (1607) and The Coleorton Masque (1618). However, the royal apprehension that underpinned this development in nuptial performance also would have greatly decreased the possibility of any kind of textual memorialization. All of this changed in 1603 when King James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as King James I. If, in the famous words of Lawrence Stone, “Things were not easy for lovers at the Court of Elizabeth,”10 they were considerably better at the court of James. Not only did weddings re-enter the world of court ritual and royal approbation, the masques and other entertainments mounted to celebrate these events began for the first time to be executed by well-known writers, such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont.11 There is, as a result, an extraordinary increase after 1603 in the information available on nuptial performance; most striking is the proliferation of readily accessible performance texts. Involving professional writers in the creation of wedding entertainments resulted in masques with much larger verbal apparatuses than we find in comparable performances from the sixteenth century. Moreover, in line Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), 6. See also, Pam Wright, “A Change in Direction: The Ramifications of a Female Household, 1558–1603,” in The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, (eds) David Starkey et al. (Harlow: Longman, 1987), 47–172.  On non-courtly entertainment, and the relationship between courtly and non-courtly performance milieus, see especially the work of James Knowles: “Marston, Skipwith, and The Entertainment at Ashby,” English Manuscript Studies 3 (1992): 137–93; “Insubstantial Pageants: The Tempest and Masquing Culture,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, (eds) Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 108–25; and “The ‘Running Masque’ Recovered?: A Masque for the Marquess of Buckingham (c.1619–20),” English Manuscript Studies 8 (2000): 79–135. Other important studies are, David Norbrook, “The Reformation of the Masque,” in The Court Masque, (ed.) David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 94–110; Cedric Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Martin Butler, “A Provincial Masque of Comus, 1636,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 17 (1986): 149–73; and Timothy Raylor, The Essex House Masque of 1621: Viscount Doncaster and the Jacobean Masque (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000), 48–59, 70–137. 10 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 606. 11 See Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Orgel argues that under the influence of Ben Jonson the court masque shifted from a predominantly spectacular form of entertainment to one that could also be thought of as literature. 

Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court



with the growing literary aspirations of these entertainments, as well as their everincreasing theatrical sophistication, it became habitual for the performance texts to be preserved as printed books, often with some descriptions of scenery, costume, and dance included. In the early years of James’s reign, marriage played a key role in fashioning the king’s identity as a royal peacemaker.12 Between 1603 and 1615, the Jacobean court was host to a flurry of high-profile marriages, all of which were aimed in some way at stabilizing political tensions. In certain cases, these tensions were specifically courtbased. The 1606 marriage of Frances Howard and Robert Devereux, for instance, was designed to defuse animosity between two rival factions, the Howards and the Essex clan. In other cases, it was national tensions that were being addressed. This is true, for example, of the Anglo-Scottish marriages celebrated in the Jacobean court in 1607 and 1608. These matches were organized to link together members of the nobility from James’s two kingdoms, something the king hoped would help bring to fruition his cherished project of uniting England and Scotland into one Great Britain. James also viewed matrimony as a means to play a mediating role on the international stage. The 1613 marriage of his daughter, Elizabeth, to Frederick the Elector Palatine was considered by the king to be a crucial step in securing a balanced, non-partisan relationship with Europe’s religiously volatile leading powers. The masques and entertainments commissioned for the Jacobean court weddings, then, were giving voice to an ideologically potent concept when they praised union.13 By mediating artistically between these nuptial events and their elite audiences, nuptial performances presented ways of imagining an early Stuart national identity. Their fictions provided a vocabulary through which the weddings they celebrated could be understood politically and culturally, a vocabulary that I will be referring to collectively as the “language of union.” In the chapters that follow I will be discussing in chronological order each of the six major wedding celebrations that took place at the Jacobean court: the marriage James’s motto was beati pacifici, blessed are the peacemakers: we see these words written above the king’s head on the frontispiece of his 1616 Workes folio. Notable contemporary promulgations of James’s pacifist image include Thomas Middleton’s The Peace-Maker: or, Great Brittaines blessing (London, 1619) and the sermon preached by John Williams at the king’s funeral, Great Britains Salomon (London, 1625). For discussion, see David Harris Wilson, King James VI and I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 271–87; Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603–42 (Harlow: Longman, 1989), 12–17; and Pauline Croft, King James (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 82–6. W.B. Patterson considers James’s pacifist policies from a specifically religious point of view in, King James and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31–74. 13 Following the lead of R.C. Munden, I will be capitalizing “Union” only when indicating King James’s political project of merging England and Scotland into one kingdom (“James I and ‘The Growth of Mutual Distrust’: Kings, Commons, and Reform, 1603–1604,” in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, (ed.) Kevin Sharpe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978], 43–72). Unless referring specifically to this project, the lower-case form, “union,” will be used. 12

Introduction



of Philip Herbert to Susan de Vere (1604), Frances Howard to Robert Devereux (1606), James Hay to Honora Denny (1607), John Ramsay to Elizabeth Radcliffe (1608), Princess Elizabeth to Frederick the Elector Palatine (1613), and Frances Howard to Robert Carr (1613/14). My aim will be to show how the marriage masques and other entertainments commissioned for these weddings collectively turned the idea of union into a versatile category of political representation. If in the first place “union” served as a catch-word for James’s Great Britain project, the concept eventually came to express more wide-ranging cultural aspirations, the most important being a movement from an isolationist to a more a European national identity, which we see being played out in the entertainments for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth. In all cases, the idea of union offered a metaphorical alternative to the images of virginity that characterized so much national eulogy from the last twenty years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Marriage entertainments were thus transforming established conventions of national tribute when they deployed union imagery. Equally important, however, is the way the marriage entertainments allow us to observe the limitations of union rhetoric, moments when it was problematic or inappropriate as a political idiom. We frequently find union imagery juxtaposed with conflicting topoi, of enclosure, of virginity, or of militarism, for instance. By incorporating this iconographical uncertainty into their fictions, marriage entertainments display the process of debate and compromise through which national myth was produced. They encourage us to think about monarchical rhetoric as a system of representation that was changeable, invented, and very often contested, not as something static, inherited, and reproduced. As I hope to demonstrate, marriage entertainments not only illustrate the complex intersections between political, cultural, and sexual definitions of union in the Jacobean period, they also provide an instructive case study in how monarchical rhetoric was formulated. My emphasis on verbal rhetoric in this study—monarchical rhetoric in particular—deserves some comment. What we gain by looking at court theatricals as participating in a larger field of rhetorical production are new insights into the linguistic dimension of James I’s reign in England, something I feel is essential for understanding post-Elizabethan political culture.14 At the same time, such an approach could be said to present a skewed picture of Jacobean court performance culture as something that gravitated solely around the king when this was most certainly not the case. Many of the marriage entertainments that I consider in these pages engage closely with issues of monarchical concern, either because they were sponsored by the king or because they celebrated marriages which the king strongly supported; but it was Queen Anna who exerted the strongest influence on Jacobean masque culture.15 She is credited with devising masque themes and 14

Jane Rickard has recently addressed the linguistic dimension of Jacobean kingship from the perspective of James’s own writings, in Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 15 The major studies are Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 74–116; Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in



Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

with initiating innovations in formal masque conventions.16 Her most visible contribution to masques, however, was in the realm of performance. Anna and her ladies danced in six masques between 1603 and 1619, the year of the queen’s death: Samuel Daniel’s The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604) and Tethys’ Festival (1610) and Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605), The Masque of Beauty (1608), The Masque of Queens (1609), and Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611). Masquing provided Anna with a way to rehearse publicly her autonomy as a political and cultural agent at the Jacobean court. In the masques, Anna and her ladies displayed their unity as an elite coterie and their independence from the king and his supporters. This was consistent with the reality of the royal situation in Jacobean England: Anna kept her own court, populated by artists and influential women and men of her choice, and eventually inhabited her own physically separate residences, as well, such as Somerset House and Greenwich Palace.17 James’s oldest son, Prince Henry, used court entertainment in a similar way. In the shows mounted for the prince (Ben Jonson’s Prince Henry’s Barriers [1610] and Oberon, The Fairy Prince [1611]) one can detect a political agenda different from James’s, one that reflects the militant Protestantism and Elizabethan nostalgia nurtured at Prince Henry’s court.18 Gravitating around Oatlands and St the Stuart Court, 1590–1619 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); and Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 18–48. 16 For instance, Ben Jonson credits Anna with providing the basic concepts for both The Masque of Blackness (1605) and The Masque of Queens (1609) in his printed texts. It also is in The Masque of Queens that Ben Jonson attributes to Anna his first fully-fledged “antimasque,” a theatrical passage characterized by disruption, subversion, or peculiarity of some sort, and which serves to contrast with the orderliness and gravitas typically presented in the main masque: “And because her Majesty, best knowing that a principal part of life in these spectacles lay in their variety, had commanded me to think on some dance or show that might precede hers, and have the place of a foil or false masque, I was careful to decline, not only from others’, but mine own steps in that kind, since the last year I had an antimasque of boys; and therefore now devised that 12 women in the habit of hags or witches, sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc., the opposites of good Fame, should fill that part, not as a masque but a spectacle of strangeness, producing multiplicity of gesture, and not unaptly sorting with the current and whole fall of the device” (The Masque of Queens, in Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605–1640, (ed.) David Lindley [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 35). 17 Anna’s role as a cultural and political patron beyond the realm of masquing has been addressed most thoroughly by Leeds Barroll in Anna of Denmark, especially 36–73, and “The Court of the First Stuart Queen,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, (ed.) Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 191–208. See also James Knowles, “‘To Enlight the Darksome Night, Pale Cinthia Doth Arise’: Anna of Denmark, Elizabeth I, and the Images of Royalty,” in Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, (ed.) Clare McManus (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 24–33. 18 The seminal study is Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 138–74. Other useful discussions can be found in Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court,

Introduction



James palaces, the court of Prince Henry was, once again, physically separate from that of his father, which centered on Whitehall. Thus, in contrast to the court performance culture of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the political geography of Jacobean court performance culture was extremely heterogeneous.19 All court masques had to pay tribute to the king, but this was frequently done as part of a larger negotiation of interests that included other agents of influence: the queen, the prince, non-royal sponsors and patrons, and any number of powerful visitors to the court who were often invited to attend masque events.20 What should be made clear here, then, is that this book’s focus on King James and monarchical rhetoric is a necessary condition of its central interest in union, both generally as a political idea and more specifically as a distinct strand of national myth. In Jacobean England, the political idea of union grew directly out of James’s policies and aspirations, especially his British Union project.21 The 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 64–94; Ryula Minami, “Prince Henry and the Revival of the Chivalric Tradition in Early Stuart England: A Study of Prince Henry’s Barriers (1610),” Shakespeare Studies 28 (1990): 47–74; and Richard Badenhausen, “Disarming the Infant Warrior: Prince Henry, King James, and the Chivalric Revival,” Papers on Language and Literature 31 (1995): 20–37. 19 This has been remarked by a number of critics, but the most rigorous discussion is Martin Butler’s in “Courtly Negotiations,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, (eds) David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20–40. See also Knowles, “‘To Enlight the Darksome Night’,” 23, and, for an excellent overview of “cultural diversity” at the Jacobean court beyond the realm of performance, Malcolm Smuts, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Change at the Court of James I,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, 99–113. 20 Butler, “Courtly Negotiations,” especially 26. 21 There has been a great a great deal of work done on British Union from a variety of different perspectives. Some standard studies of the political, legal, and constitutional dimension of the project are: David Harris Wilson, “King James and Anglo-Scottish Unity,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Essays in Honour of Wallace Notestein, (eds) William Appleton Aikon and Basil Duke Henning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), 41–55; Joel J. Epstein, “Francis Bacon and the Issue of Union, 1603–8,” Huntington Library Quarterly 33 (1970): 121–32; Brian P. Levack, “Toward a More Perfect Union: England, Scotland, and the Constitution,” in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H. Hexter, (ed.) Barbara Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 55–72; “English Law, Scots Law and the Union,” in Law-Making and Law-Makers in British History, (ed.) Alan Harding (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980), 107–19; The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 31–101; Jenny Wormald, “James VI and I: Two Kings or One?,” History 68 (1983): 187–209; Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986); Conrad Russell, “The Anglo-Scottish Union 1603–1643: A Success?,” in Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, (eds) Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 238–56; Andrew D. Nicholls, The Jacobean Union: A Reconsideration of British Civil Policies Under the Early Stuarts (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 47–76.



Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

seeds of this idea may very well have been planted earlier, in Scotland,22 but it is in England that we see it develop into something approaching an applied political philosophy, one which was, in the first place, distinctly monarchical in its ideological orientation. The court marriage masques—commissioned for monarchically-endorsed weddings and making explicit links between personal and political forms of union—were to a large extent “king’s masques,” even if, as I also argue, their ability to occupy that category became increasingly problematic as the reign progressed. A concentration on nuptial entertainment will inevitably obviate some of the complexity of court performance culture in Jacobean England. However, it has not been my goal in this study to give a thorough and balanced account of this culture. Other scholars have undertaken this task admirably.23 Though I endeavor to situate all my claims about the relationship between nuptial performance and monarchical rhetoric within a larger field of political and cultural activity, my primary aim is to show how court marriage and the new styles of eulogistic performance that developed around it functioned as occasions for royal mythmaking. What, I ask, does the thematic framework of marriage offer masque writers at this specific historical moment, and what might masque writers’ treatment of this theme be able to tell us about the viability of union as a mode of monarchical discourse in the early seventeenth century? Verbal rhetoric in Jacobean masques can tell us a great deal about how court entertainments took part in the construction of a new political imaginary. Yet verbal rhetoric has also been approached with wariness in much recent masque criticism. As Barbara Ravelhofer shows in her magisterial The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music, people engaged with masques primarily as visual,

22 John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558) envisions a “Davidic” kingdom in which England and Scotland will be united in the cause of Protestant reform, an idea which resurfaces in early religious writings by James, such as Ane Fruitful Meditation (1588) and Ane Meditation (1589). Arthur Williamson has gone so far as to call Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet “a treatise on behalf of the Anglo-Scottish Union” and James during the 1580s and 1590s “the greatest Knoxian in all Scotland” (Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The Apocalypse, the Union, and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture [Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979], 11 and 42). Other (more measured) treatments of the topic include Jane E.A. Dawson, “The Two John Knoxes: England, Scotland, and the 1558 Tracts,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 42 (1991): 555–76 and Roger A. Mason, “The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism,” in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, (ed.) Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 161–86. In terms of style, tone, and even purpose, the union rhetoric that emerged from the Jacobean court in England veered sharply away from Knox’s apocalyptic fervor and prophetic exhortation. Nevertheless, the Scottish context bears noting in so far as it shows the idea of union to have been available to James even before he came to the English throne. 23 Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); James Knowles, Politics and Political Culture in the Masque (Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming 2010).

Introduction



kinetic, and aural events.24 Ravelhofer’s concern is to recover how seventeenthcentury audiences actually experienced masques and she turns, appropriately, to non-verbal performance to do so.25 Recent work on issues of gender and female participation in masques, by critics such as Karen Britland, James Knowles, Clare McManus, and Sophie Tomlinson, have also found performance to be a more fruitful ground for inquiry than poetry.26 Given that women did not have speaking parts in masques, this makes good sense. Indeed, any account of Queen Anna’s masquing career would be severely crippled by a focus on verbal rhetoric. Thus McManus shows how Queen Anna and her ladies found other, silent modes of expression when they danced in court masques, such as costume, emblematic display, and dance patterns.27 Similarly, Tomlinson locates women’s “persuasive agency” in masques in “a dynamic language of action and motion” while Knowles has highlighted how choosing a certain kind of performance practice could carry very specific cultural and political associations.28 Britland, concentrating on the Caroline court, expertly reveals how Queen Henrietta Maria’s sponsorship of French pastoral theater helped her to maintain a politicized French identity despite her more immediate role as Queen of England.29 I have benefited greatly from the scholarship of all these critics and have tried to include discussions of performance issues—props, movement, visual codes—wherever relevant. If verbal rhetoric nevertheless forms the focus of this study it is because whatever other functions marriage masques happened to serve, they were also panegyrical rituals—praise in motion—and here, as in all other instances of encomiastic mythmaking, words mattered. It is true that these multimedia spectacles were in the first place sensory experiences. But, as mentioned above, it is also true that in Jacobean England court entertainment became for the first time the domain of professional litterateurs, and the scripts they produced were routinely printed, purchased and read. The words of masques may not have been terribly important on performance night, but they were important before and, as Lauren Shohet’s groundbreaking work on masques and print has demonstrated, they were certainly important after.30 24 Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 25 Ravelhofer’s closing injunction is that “[The masque] was once a living spectacle, and we must not lose our sense that it was beautiful” (269). 26 See McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage; Knowles, “‘To Enlight the Darksome Night’”; Tomlinson, Women on Stage; and Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 27 McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage, 7–17, 36–46 and 122–35. 28 Tomlinson, Women on Stage, 19; Knowles, “‘To Enlight the Darksome Night’,” 33–41. 29 Britland, Queen Henrietta Maria, especially 53–73. 30 Lauren Shohet, “The Masque in/as Print,” in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, (ed.) Marta Straznicky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 176–202; and, more broadly, Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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One of the most exciting things about the recent spate of masque criticism devoted to issues of gender and performance is that it has freed masque studies from a methodological conundrum that has characterized the field since the 1980s. The majority of scholarship devoted to masques and other forms of occasional performance between 1980 and the early 2000s tended to split between two diametrically opposed kinds of enquiry: New Historicist masque criticism and what I call “micropolitical” masque criticism. Since neither of these approaches has proven particularly useful for exploring the dynamic verbal relationship that existed between marriage masques and the wider political culture in which they participated, it has been necessary in this study to rethink these two still-influential methodologies. New Historicist masque criticism, heavily dependent on the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz and the model of state power developed by Michel Foucault,31 has emphasized how court performance served to reinforce the supremacy of the monarch over his subjects.32 Court performance is seen as a means of putting royal authority on display in symbolic terms. It assures the king of his own power by reflecting it back at him allegorically. On the other hand, we have a body of masque scholarship that refutes this regicentric model of court performance. These critics have argued that we need to shift the focus away from large, abstract notions of “state power” and “royal ideology” to examine instead the precise micropolitical context of individual masque occasions.33 Turning attention towards such factors as the commissioning history of masques, the political relationships between the courtiers who participated in them, and the local politics of the court at the time of individual performances, this line of criticism contends that the power relationships hosted by masques were far more complex and varied than suggested in New Historicist readings. 31

Key texts include, Clifford Geertz’s “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Culture and Its Creators: Essays in Honour of Edward Shils, (eds) Joseph Ben David and Terry Nichols Clark (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 150–71, and Negra: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and, by Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. anonymous (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977). 32 See, for example, Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) and Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). 33 For some early outcroppings of this critical position, see Leah Marcus, “‘Present Occasions’ and the Shaping of Ben Jonson’s Masques,” English Literary History 45 (1978): 201–23, and “Masquing Occasion and Masque Structure,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24 (1981): 7–16; David Lindley, “Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque and Anglo-Scottish Union,” Huntington Library Quarterly 43 (1979): 1–11; Sara Pearl, “Sounding to Present Occasions: Jonson’s Masques of 1620–5,” in The Court Masque, 60–77; and David Norbrook, “The Reformation of the Masque.”

Introduction

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The New Historicist line on masques finds its most elegant and fully elaborated expression in Jonathan Goldberg’s book, James I and the Politics of Literature, itself heavily influenced by Stephen Orgel’s proto-New Historicist study, The Illusion of Power. In Goldberg’s model of Jacobean power relations, masque performances are always an extension of the royal will. They ritualize the king’s ascendancy, making the courtiers dancing in them collaborators in their own subjugation to monarchical authority. As he explains, “The masque presents its ‘more removed mysteries’ for the king, holding up a mirror of his mind.” In Goldberg’s view, these “two shows”—the masque and the king watching the masque—“bear a single meaning.”34 Political power and aesthetic production are in seamless continuity, a mirror image of one another. Within such a model, the meaning of any masque is already to a large extent fixed: all court fictions are shackled to the operations of royal supremacy. Goldberg’s discussion of court performance in James I and The Politics of Literature is part of a larger argument which posits a reciprocal and reinforcing relationship between royal and verbal power in the Jacobean period. He states, “The underlying thesis of this study is that language and politics—broadly construed— are mutually constitutive.”35 As one of many examples of this, Goldberg cites the sculpture of King James presenting his written Works folio on The Tower of the Five Orders (1619) at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The sculpture, Goldberg contends, “Translates James’s royal power into verbal power.”36 The Tower certainly serves as an apt expression of what appears to have been King James’s acute sense of the links between linguistic prowess and political control. But how well does the image measure up to actual royal practice? Goldberg is tantalized by the idea of James as an omnipotent self-author, a king who inscribed himself into English culture textually, verbally and physically, adopting the “stile of Gods” that he claimed to possess in his 1598 Basilicon Doron to do so.37 Speaking of his 1604 entry into London, Goldberg says, “As he arrived, like the sun giving life, like the groom entering the bride, like a king in court, the city sprang alive, acting in word and deed to show what the royal presence contains in itself and gives merely by being present and being seen.”38 Goldberg’s King James is a ruler who arrived in England with a system of self-affirming rhetoric ready for use. It was a system of rhetoric that was thrust upon James’s subjects from the moment of his magnificent entry, and then performed at court over and over again in the form of masques, constantly reinforcing and entrenching the king’s will. In marked Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, 57. Ibid., xi. 36 Ibid., 39. 37 The phrase comes from a sonnet that prefaces Basilicon Doron: “God gives not Kings the stile of Gods in vaine, / For on his Throne his Scepter doe they swey” (King James VI and I: Selected Writings, (eds) Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003], 200). 38 Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, 31. 34 35

Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

12

contrast to the young Elizabeth I, Goldberg says, “James’s entrance into London bore his mature stamp upon it.”39 Yet if we look closer at Jacobean monarchical rhetoric, I think a different picture will emerge. Whether in the king’s own governmental transactions or as represented in the masques, the relationship between rhetorical and political authority was not always parallel. In fact, both were quite often highly provisional. When James, in frustration, puts an end to the 1606/7 and the 1610 parliamentary sessions, we are witnessing a failure of rhetorical authority—the limits of verbal persuasion. Procedural authority—in this case, the right of the king to terminate parliamentary debate—comes in as a feeble substitute, a form of compensatory vengeance for the MPs’ resistance to the Anglo-Scottish Union (1606/7) and their stubbornness on the conditions of the Great Contract (1610). Similarly, in 1604, the change of royal style (from “King of England” to “King of Great Britain”) had to be instated by royal proclamation rather than through Parliament, because James could not convince its members that it was a good idea. And although the act of proclamation is itself an expression of verbal authority, the king was led to it by an inability to coax Parliament to his position in the first place. It is true that James did to some extent arrive in England with a royal iconography, a verbal style, and a system of rhetoric already established. His clash with Scottish theologian and reformer Andrew Melville over the proper relationship between religious and secular authority in the mid-1580s formed the foundation on which James built a wholly autonomous and divinely ordained model of kingship.40 He maintained this credo throughout the 1580s and 1590s and took it south with him in 1603. It receives its most full elaboration in Basilicon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), both of which (though especially the former) helped introduce James to his new subjects in England while remaining in the first place the philosophical products of a long struggle with Scottish Presbyterianism.41 In practice, however, James’s carefully formulated style of kingly self-presentation did not provide an adequate sign system for him to articulate some of his most cherished political policies. As the marriage entertainments will show, monarchical rhetoric was highly improvised at the Jacobean court in England, an institution which was characterized above all by its social and political disjointedness. Even when occurring within ostensibly propagandist spectacles, monarchical rhetoric was very often subject to compromise and debate. Indeed, the theatrical convention of splitting masque performances into a main masque and an antagonistic, or otherwise oppositional, antimasque invited such contention. In The Lord Hay’s Masque, for example, James is represented as possessing god-like verbal ascendancy, but only after overcoming the challenge posed by Night and Cynthia, 39

Ibid., 33. J.H. Burns. The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 222–54. 41 Burns, 223 and 231; King James VI and I: Selected Writings, (eds) Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 12. 40

Introduction

13

who attempt to impose a different mode of panegyric on the nuptial performance. At the Palatine wedding celebrations we see dramatizations of James’s divine vocality under threat, by the Frantics of The Lords’ Masque, by Capriccio in The Memorable Masque, and by Iris and Juno in The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn. In The Somerset Masque James’s rhetoric has to compete with the rival authority of Queen Anna who, though silent, presides over the performance’s dramatic climax of ritual transformation. The value of New Historicism’s contribution to masque studies should not be underestimated. By drawing attention for the first time to the intensely ideological operations being undertaken in masques, critics like Jonathan Goldberg drastically revised the received account of masques as spectacular escapism, ephemeral testaments to the financial extravagance of the early Stuart kings.42 However, New Historicism has also been justifiably criticized for its often static and totalizing vision of Renaissance culture. The New Historicist account of court performance, for instance, has assumed that there was a pre-established rhetoric of Jacobean kingship for masques to reproduce. On the contrary, it seems to me that marriage masques were, in fact, constructing a Jacobean political idiom, not being determined by one that was already there. A central contention of this study is that there was no readily available language through which James’s new kingdom could be promoted. When the Scottish king came to the English throne in 1603, the idea of a “British” nation,43 the political condition of dual monarchy, and (after 42 See, in particular, William McElwee, The Wisest Fool in Christendom: The Reign of King James VI and I (London: Faber & Faber, 1958), 172–76. A similar line is taken by Glynn Wickham in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage: Collected Studies in Medaeval, Tudor, and Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 103–18. Francis Bacon himself commented on masques, “These things are but toys” (Francis Bacon, The Major Works, (ed.) Brian Vickers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 416). 43 It was not the term “Britain” that was new; rather, it was the cultural and political reality into which James wanted to translate that term that was uncomfortably alien for many. Since J.G.A. Pocock’s seminal essay, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975): 601–28, there has been extensive work done on the interrelatedness of English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish histories in the early modern period. In the domain of literary studies, this has resulted in increased critical interest in the way literature and drama participated in the destabilization of a fixed account of Britishness by constructing multiple forms of national and regional identity. Some of the more important studies to deal with the idea of Britishness in recent years, from literary and historical perspectives, are Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds., The British Problem, c.1534– 1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, (eds), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David J. Baker and Willy Maley, (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); and Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor, (eds), Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Early Modern Atlantic Archipelago (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

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the long reign of Elizabeth I) even the presence of a male monarch with a queen consort and royal children were all unfamiliar concepts to the nation’s political community. New Historicists have overestimated the availability of a systematized vocabulary of nationhood for the masques to draw from, and have consequently downplayed the problematic linguistic dimension of James’s English accession. Jacobean monarchical rhetoric may be more usefully understood as a process in which the masques took part, rather than as a script that the masques replicated. Within this dynamic, both court entertainment and monarchical rhetoric are always open systems of representation: nonfixed in their meanings, highly improvised in content, and, most of all, always unfinished products. The micropolitical masque criticism that developed over the course of the 1980s and 1990s has provided an exemplary methodological model for querying the New Historicist line on court entertainment. Although the respective approaches of scholars like Leeds Barroll, Martin Butler, David Lindley, and Leah Marcus differ in several respects, they have all at some stage reacted against the inability of New Historicism’s broad cultural brush stokes to render accurately the crucial relationship between a masque and the local politics of its occasion.44 In a critique of Jonathan Goldberg’s monologic account of the relationship between masque and monarch, Martin Butler has suggested that “other kinds of negotiations may also have been hosted by the masques, scenarios which did not simply reproduce an ineluctable oscillation between resistance and authority, but which were more in the nature of symbolic transactions between those who were competing for position in and around the courtly arena.”45 Butler describes these symbolic transactions as “give and take between differently empowered participants in the political process.”46 For Butler, then, the masque is a far more intricate, varied, and competitive ritual than it is for Goldberg. Butler expands Goldberg’s monarchical paradigm into a more detailed and dynamic model of court power relations, one that includes individuals with a range of interests and different degrees of influence. Butler’s stated aim is to approach the masque event as a multi-vocal negotiation between different individuals and institutions, rather than as a royal monologue within a statically configured court. 44 Since New Historicism did not begin to emerge as an identifiable critical practice until the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), to say that Leah Marcus’s “‘Present Occasions’ and the Shaping of Ben Jonson’s Masques” was reacting against it is a bit premature. However, in taking issue with Stephen Orgel, a definite proto-New Historicist, she was setting the scene for a future debate. David Lindley’s work of the 1980s has always stood slightly outside of New Historicist assumptions. He discusses its methodological advantages and disadvantages in The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London: Routledge, 1993), 1–3. Martin Butler explains the problematic aspects of New Historicist masque criticism in “Courtly Negotiations,” 20–29, as does Leeds Barroll in Anna of Denmark, 10. 45 Butler, “Courtly Negotiations,” 26. 46 Ibid.

Introduction

15

It was to a large extent David Lindley who first gave currency to the micropolitical masque criticism which was then developed so shrewdly by Martin Butler in the 1990s. As early as 1984, Lindley asserted that “historical detail is not merely a ‘background’ which the literary student has to recover in order to footnote his text before turning back to aesthetic judgment; instead, the masques themselves encode and express a particular historical moment in a complex and often revealing way.”47 David Lindley has written on many of the masques that will be considered in this study and his pioneering work is drawn on regularly in the chapters that follow. Where I take issue with Lindley’s readings, our differences arise from an essential divergence in approach. The very precise socio-political contextualization to which Lindley subjects individual masques inevitably jars with this book’s attempt to situate nuptial performances collectively in relation to larger processes of change in Jacobean England. Lindley has contended that to take masques “out of their particular social and political context ... is to falsify their contemporary aim and effect.”48 To me this sounds far too rigid. Surely court performances functioned in several socio-political contexts. The local event is simply one of these, and although it needs our critical attention, it need not, as a result, eclipse our vision of how masques took part in verbal developments that were less occasion-bound, such as the transformation of monarchical rhetoric. More stringent than Lindley, Leeds Barroll has championed a hermeneutic that avoids verbal and visual rhetoric altogether. Instead, Barroll zeros in on the courtiers who participated in individual masques. This, for him, is the only way to map out reliably “the social and political court relations that these spectacles displayed and enhanced.”49 But Barroll’s extraction of elite social ritual from the poetry and theater of masques obscures the complex relationship between politics and fiction that was such a fundamental part of court culture in early modern Europe. Moreover, silencing masques in this way, disallowing them to be more than the sum of their interpersonal political parts, mandates that each masque be viewed in isolation. They become meaningful only in their precise political moment and we are, consequently, denied access to the macropolitical processes that masques contributed to collectively and which intersected in important ways with the micropolitics of the court. I would like to move past the methodological polarization that has characterized so much masque criticism since the 1980s, even as I continue to explore the questions of power and authority that have been of such central concern to both critical camps. Towards that end, this book will be adopting an eclectic methodological position, combining close-readings with both old and new historicist critique, as well as current theorizations of the body and social space. In the marriage masques, the political tensions of James’s early to middle reign translate themselves into discernable representational dilemmas. As such, they invite us to view some of Lindley, (ed.), The Court Masque, 9. David Lindley, “Embarrassing Ben: The Masques for Frances Howard,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 358. 49 Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 10. 47 48

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the major impasses of Jacobean politics as crises of language—challenges to, or problematizations of, existing vocabularies of nationhood. How the marriage masques responded to these challenges cannot be fully appreciated if we restrict our discussion to the micropolitics of the court. Attention must be turned as well to the way entertainments communicated with one another, how they departed from and intersected with monarchical discourse such as speeches and proclamations, and how, precisely, they were using and transforming their literary sources. We can observe in the construction (and deconstruction) of a language of union in the marriage entertainments, the process through which new national myths are contrived. Scrutinizing this process will allow us to gauge the extent to which a coherent national idiom was established in Jacobean England and should, moreover, allow us to draw some broader conclusions about the political function of occasional performance at the Jacobean court. Chapter one will set the scene for the rest of this study by outlining the cultural contexts within which union rhetoric was formulated. Focusing on parliamentary speeches, royal proclamations, and other political documents, as well as Ben Jonson’s first three court entertainments, the chapter will discuss some of the representational challenges that confronted the king and his panegyrists in the early years of the reign. Chapter two is devoted to the two Anglo-Scottish marriage celebrations that took place at court in 1607 and 1608. Reading the masques organized for these events against the backdrop of contemporary debates over Scottish naturalization, this chapter will show how the consistently invoked theme of erotic desire functioned to communicate a positive image of British nationhood for James and his supporters. Chapter three turns to what was by far the largest wedding event of the Jacobean period, the 1613 marriage of the king’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to the staunchly Protestant prince, Frederick the Elector Palatine. Nuptial performances mounted both inside and outside the court will be examined here in an attempt to recover the competing forms of national myth that the marriage gave rise to across England’s ideologically diverse political communities. Particular attention will be given to the way union rhetoric, developed in the first place as a specific response to the Great Britain project, signified in this new pan-European context. Chapter four deals with the last wedding event to be celebrated at the Jacobean court, the marriage of King James’s Scottish favorite, Robert Carr, to Frances Howard. The chapter argues that the political conditions of 1613/14 transformed nuptial entertainment into a performance practice that was ideologically and dramaturgically more varied than the regicentric spectacles conceived between 1603 and 1608. It considers the curious ways in which panegyrical rhetoric operated in the Carr/Howard entertainments as a result of these changes and suggests how we might think of these last court wedding entertainments historically in relation to the wider corpus of court performance that unfolded over the course of James’s reign in England.

Chapter 1

Inventing a Language of Union In 1603 King James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as King James I. The new monarch was determined to implement a series of administrative and political changes that would allow his two kingdoms to be merged into one united Great Britain. Some of these, like the reorganization of the privy council to include both Scots and Englishmen, were immediately realized. Others, like the reconciliation of the legal systems of the two kingdoms, never became a reality. What will be of primary interest to us in this study are the new pressures measures like these placed on monarchical rhetoric. The Union that James’s accession to the English throne ushered in changed the terms in which national propaganda was set. As one historian put it, “Soon after the Union of the Crowns James VI and I began to speak the language of national union.” This statement raises some important questions. What was the nature of this language of national union? Did it exist before James used it? Was anyone else speaking this language, and if so where did they learn it? In this chapter it will be argued that the language of union was not available to Jacobean England in an established form. Rather, it was improvised through the appropriation and reconfiguration of preexisting rhetorical paradigms. This process may be observed not only in the arbitrary (and at times even contradictory) nature of the images in James’s own early speeches and proclamations (1603–1607), but also in the literature which sought to project the new political space of Britain into the imaginations and vocabularies of its audiences. Marriage masques provide some of the most suggestive examples of such literary engagement. Coalescing at the beginning of the Union debates in Parliament and tapering out as those debates became less urgent, the marriage masques developed directly out of a need to solve the representational challenges posed by the Jacobean Union. Marriage masques were also, of course, commissioned for the event of a personal union, lending them a metaphorical auspiciousness that was not missed out on in the opening years of James’s reign. James’s early speeches and proclamations highlight many of the verbal problems that attend celebrating union. The political rhetoric that James inherited from Elizabeth’s reign promoted an England that was closed and inviolable, an England characterized by a singleness reflected in the queen herself. The most frequently recurring metaphors in late Elizabethan encomia drew on the theme of chastity or the bodily state of virginity, and could not, therefore, be easily mapped onto the idea 

See Introduction, n. 21. Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 179. 

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of union—political or personal. In her final address to Parliament, 19 December 1601, Elizabeth attributed the survival and strength of England to a constant and coterminous defense of both her kingdom and her body from intruders: The strange devices, practices, and strategems (never heard nor written of before) that have been attempted not only against my own person, in which so many as acknowledge themselves beholding to my care and happy in my government have a interest, but by invasion of the state itself by those that did not only threaten to come, but came at the very last in very deed with their whole fleet, have been in number many and by preparation dangerous. Though it hath pleased God, to whose honor it is spoken without arrogation of any praise of merit to myself, by many hard escapes and hazards both of diverse and strange natures, to make me an instrument in His holy will in delivering the state from danger and myself from dishonor, all that I challenge to myself is that I have been studious and industrious, in confidence of His grace and goodness, as a careful head to defend the body, which I would have you receive from my own mouth for the better acknowledging and recognizing of so great a benefit.

In announcing to Parliament after 43 years of rule that she has kept “the state from danger and [herself] from dishonor,” Elizabeth proves the mystical synchronism between the purity of her body and the purity of her nation. The two are emphatically fused when she describes her service to England “as a careful head to defend the body.” Later in the speech, reference to the continued threat of a Spanish “penetration” of England hovers somewhere between sexual advance and military assault when Elizabeth complains of “that potent prince the king of Spain ... that hath so many ways assailed both my realm and me.” Spain, for England, is the archetypal enemy, not only in military terms but in terms simultaneously religious and sexual, as well. As the preeminent Catholic nation, a successful invasion of England by Spain would translate Elizabeth from the chaste bride of Christ, virgin defender of the Church of England, to tainted papal whore. In the Elizabethan political imagination, corporeality was a field in which both the fear of invasion and the successful resistance of invasion could be played out. Thomas Heywood’s very popular and very nostalgic Jacobean play, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 (c. 1606) revisits this idea in a dramatization of England’s 1588 Armada victory. Don Pedro, the Spanish admiral, declares mockingly:  Elizabeth I: Collected Works, (eds) Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 347–8.  Ibid., 348.  Catholic and Protestant polemic in England, especially in the 1570s (after the 1569 Northern Rebellion), was explicitly lauded in the sexually polarized terms of virgin and whore, good mother and bad mother. Queen Elizabeth, on one hand, and Mary Queen of Scots, on the other, provided real Protestant and Catholic females through which to fashion such allegorical oppositions. See Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1995), 73–8.

Inventing a Language of Union

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I thinke in stead of military men, Garnish’d with Armes and martiall Discipline, She [Elizabeth] with a feminine Traine Of her bright Ladyes beautifull’st and best, Will meete us in their smocks, willing to pay Their Maiden-heads for Ransome. (2579–84)

Don Pedro’s military venture degenerates into a fantasy of sexual assault and, in doing so, clearly figures English national security and purity through the female body of the queen. Within this system of signification, any threat to the political and cultural borders of England becomes tantamount to rape. Unfortunately for Don Pedro, Elizabeth does finally arrive on stage, not with “a feminine Traine,” but with an armed retinue of soldiers. Rapidly becoming the victim of his own sexual metaphor, Don Pedro’s defeat takes on the characteristics of a symbolic castration. Elizabethan political propaganda of this sort described the unity of the interior, the defensive exclusion of the exterior: nation and queen were, as one poem put it, “All and whole, and ever alone, / Single, sans peere, simple, and one.” This was not a language through which the Jacobean Union’s dissolution of English borders could be lauded. And yet despite the discrepancies between Elizabethan rhetoric and Jacobean policy, James did, during the first few years of his reign, use the images of nationhood that he had inherited from his predecessor. Like Elizabeth, he consistently fashioned his body as a figuration of the nation, as “the head wherein that great Body [Britain] is united.” In addition, James often cast the relationship between himself and his kingdom in familial or specifically maternal terms. As early as 1559, Elizabeth is recorded to have told Parliament, “Reproach me so no more ... that I have no children: for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children and kinsfolk, of whom, so long as I am not deprived and God shall preserve me, you cannot charge me, without offense, to be destitute.” Along similar lines, James had advised his son, Prince Henry, in Basilicon Doron that a king should act as “a loving nourish-father.”10 Perceptive panegyrists like If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II, (ed.) Madeline Doran in consultation with W.W. Greg, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935).  From the anonymously authored poem, “A General Resemblance of the Roundel to God, the World, and the Queen,” in The Progresses and Public Processions of Elizabeth I, (ed.) John Nichols, 3 vols (London: J. Nichols and Son, 1823), 3:53.  The Political Works of James I, (ed.) Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 271.  Elizabeth I, (eds) Marcus et al., 59. As late as 1603, Thomas Dekker described England as “a nation that was almost begotten and born under her [Elizabeth]” (The Wonderful Year 1603, in Three Elizabethan Pamphlets, (ed.) G.R. Hibbard (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1951), 167. 10 King James VI and I: Selected Writings, (eds) Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 225. 

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Lady Anne Southwell duplicated the image of masculine nurturance, praising James as “the nursing father of all pietye” (21).11 Of course, this form of monarchical self-presentation did not begin with Elizabeth. The use of the body and its regenerative functions was common throughout the rhetoric of early modern kingship and has deeper roots in the Bible and in classical writing from Plato to Seneca.12 A transvestite portrait of Francois I (c. 1545) by Niccolò Bellin da Modena, for instance, shows the French king with female anatomy and dress from the neck down. The poem beneath the image explains that while Francois is a Mars in war, he is a Minerva or Diana during peacetime, providing bounty and sustenance to his subjects.13 We find the same kind of message being conveyed on a sixteenth-century medal bearing a similarly cross-dressed image of Francois’s son, Henri II.14 Underpinning these Renaissance motifs of royal nurturance is the Medieval religious concept of the corpus mysticum Christi, a principle which imagined the Church as a mystical body with a nurturing, pelican-like Christ as the head.15 Queen Elizabeth, however, having the rather uncommon status of being a single female monarch, brought quite specific cultural meanings to these conventional royal tropes. James’s adoption of this language could not escape its local resonances. The images that he used in his early speeches and proclamations referred his audience to the very different reign and cultural ethos of his immediate predecessor, not to a wider tradition of European Lady Anne Southwell, “To the kinges most excellent Majestye,” in Early Modern Women Poets, (eds) Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 119–20. 12 See Isaiah 49. 23: “And kings shall be thy nursing fathers” (The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, (eds) Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997]). State/body analogies of various ilks also appear in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Cicero’s De Officiis, and Seneca’s De Ira. For discussion, see Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 61–6. 13 “Francoys en guerre est un Mars furieux / En paix Minerve & diane a la chasse” (Engraving by P. Chenu after Niccolò Bellin da Modena. Paris: Bibiothèque Nationale). This portrait has been analyzed by Raymond Waddington, “The Bisexual Portrait of Francois I,” in Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit, (eds) Jean Brink, Maryanne C. Horowitz, and Allison Coudert (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 99–132, and Stephen Orgel, “Gendering the Crown,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, (eds) Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 136–41. 14 This medal is currently housed at the British Museum in London, Department of Coins and Medals. See Orgel, “Gendering the Crown,” 136–7. 15 I am not referring here to the strictly Eucharistic meaning of corpus mysticum, but rather to its more broadly socio-political usage, dogmatized by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302 in the bull Unam sanctum. Ernst Kantorowicz traces the evolution of the idea of corpus mysticum in The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 193–272. On the typological significance of the pelican myth for Renaissance Christians, see Orgel, “Gendering the Crown,” 133–4. 11

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kingship. As a result, James’s recital of inherited forms of self-presentation, while familiar, ultimately highlighted the new and potentially threatening nature of his accession, rather than smoothing out the transition between him and Elizabeth. The entertainments that are dealt with in this chapter begin to offer solutions to these linguistic problems. Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605), Hymenaei (1606), and Barriers (1606), grapple with the same categories of national and sexual representation as James does in his speeches. The three performances stand as the first examples in the king’s English court of sustained fictions of union. The first section of this chapter concentrates on some of James’s early discourses on the Great Britain project, paying particular attention to how the king reproduces corporeal and familial images that are normally associated with Elizabeth. Moving on to the entertainments, The Masque of Blackness is examined for the way it delineates a new paradigm through which Britain as a nation and James as a British king could be endorsed. Blackness calls attention to the necessity of pushing beyond Elizabethan formulations of nationhood and asserts the key role that the masque may play in this project. My reading of Hymenaei focuses more specifically on the representational crux presented by the sexual body. Hymenaei provides an excellent view into the tension that existed between the residual rhetoric of virginity and the emergent rhetoric of union.16 Jonson’s masque splits between a desire to exorcize virginity from the performance and, conversely, to incorporate it somehow into a language of union. The Barriers externalizes the conflict that underpins Hymenaei, approaching it through a debate format. Taken together, these three entertainments direct us towards some of the key issues that emerged from theatrical mythmaking in the early Jacobean court. Introducing British Union: James I and Verbal Reconfiguration Critics will argue over the level of success that James had in instilling a British consciousness amongst his subjects. However, most would agree that he demonstrated a firm belief in the political and psychological power of language to enact this consciousness, regardless of how correct in this belief he proved to be.17 As the editors of a recent collection of King James’s writings put it, “James was 16 The notion of residual vs. emergent cultural phenomena is derived from Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–8. 17 In The Formation of the British State, for example, Brian Levack sees James’s attempts to build an Anglo-Scottish national identity amongst his subjects as superficial and unsuccessful, precisely because of the purely symbolic nature of these attempts. Tristan Marshall’s Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages Under James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) comes to very different conclusions. Marshall argues that the popularity of Britain on the London stages—exemplified by plays such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and Cymbeline, Thomas Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, and William Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin—indicates the successful implementation of cultural Britishness.

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always a compulsive communicator, and sought endlessly for new ways to articulate his understanding of his position.”18 The verbal dimension of James’s method of governance can be traced in the early speeches and proclamations through which the new king sought to introduce the idea of Great Britain to the nation. One of the first steps James took in his project to unite England and Scotland was performed at the linguistic level: he changed his title, or “Stile,” to “King of Great Britaine.”19 This was conceived of as a critical stage in the political process of Union, “Unitie in name being so fit a meanes to imprint in the hearts of people, a Character and memoriall of that Unitie, which ought to be amongst them indeede.”20 This kind of verbal re-coding played a crucial role in the early stages of James’s new British policy. While the administrative and legal aspects of the Union consistently turned into political stalemates between king and Parliament, the linguistic aspect of the project appeared to be moving relentlessly forward. In addition to changing his own title, James performed naming acts that sought to undo current geopolitical realities and replace them with an imagined cultural geography of Britishness.21 About a year before the king’s official announcement of the change in royal style, for example, a proclamation was delivered at Greenwich which undertook a verbal conquest of the border that divided James’s island into England and Scotland: The bounds possest by those rebellious people, being in fertilitie and all other benefits nothing inferiour to many of the best parts of the whole Ile, shall be no more the extremities, but the middle, and the Inhabitants thereof reduced to perfect obedience.22

This proclamation announces James’s measure to change the name of the Borderlands—those areas in both England and Scotland that clustered around the Anglo-Scottish border—to the Middle-shires.23 The change in name is carried out under the conviction that it will effect a larger change in the political space of the island, from England and Scotland to Great Britain, “Border” to “Middle.” Moreover, James asserts that as a result of this shift in spatial organization “the inhabitants” of the former Borderlands will inevitably be “reduced to perfect obedience.” The change in name, like the change in royal style, exemplifies the central role played by representation in the Great Britain project. Amending the way northern England and southern Scotland collectively signify is deemed a sufficient means to replace the skirmishing and disorder on the Anglo-Scottish King James VI and I, (eds) Rhodes et al., 15. Stuart Royal Proclamations: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625, (eds) James F. Larkin and Paul F. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 94. 20 Ibid., 96. 21 My phrase “naming acts” is derived from J.L. Austin’s “speech acts.” See How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 22 Stuart Royal Proclamations, (eds) Larkin and Hughes, 18. 23 See Levack, The Formation of the British State, 192. 18

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border with a political cohesiveness founded on shared British allegiance. James’s verbal reconfiguration purports not only to redefine the nation physically, but also to transform it culturally. As much as this rhetorical strategy invests James’s utterances with seemingly magical properties, the king also plays down the revolutionary and mystical dimensions of British Union by appealing to precedent. James suggests that the revision of terms like “Borderlands” is justified by a long tradition of viewing Britain as one unified island: Nor that We covet any new affected Name devised at Our pleasure, but out of undoubted knowledge doe use the true and ancient Name, which God and Time have imposed upon this Isle, extant, and received in Histories, in all Mappes and Cartes, wherein this Isle is described.24

Citing the geographical authority of “all Mappes and Cartes,” James argues for the naturalness and inevitability of a British Union. Union is imaged as a return to the island’s original, God-ordained, and most glorious state, rather than as a radical break from the past. Of crucial importance is the fact that the British Union, as well as being endorsed by God himself, is not emerging from a representational vacuum. There is a language through which Britain may be understood as an entity. It has both an historical and geographical foundation in the past, on which its political and cultural integrity may be built in James’s present. James often used geographical paradigms as a mode of argument for the Union project, insisting that seeing the island as two separate kingdoms was an interpretive fallacy. The deduction ignored the natural reality of the space in which those two kingdoms existed. The point is stressed in the king’s first speech to Parliament when he explains that, “These two Countries [are] separated neither by Sea, nor great River, Mountaine, nor other strength of nature, but only by little brookes, or demolished little walles, so as rather they were divided in apprehension, then in effect.”25 As in the proclamation on the change in royal style, geographical evidence is invoked to disengage an Anglo-centric vision of the island’s political space(s). By making direct and public interventions into the way his kingdom was represented, James initiated a project that was no less rhetorical in nature than it was legal, economic, or administrative. The early marriage entertainments took part in this project, sometimes engaging directly with the Union of the Crowns, other times approaching it at the metaphorical level through the union of the bride and groom. In many ways, the monarch and the masque poet confronted some of the same challenges at the beginning of James’s reign in England. Both needed to find verbal formulas that could laud the dissolution of boundaries— political or sexual—as something positive and culturally fruitful. James’s use of a geographical paradigm to discuss the Union aimed at dissolving national thresholds and articulating a new sense of political space. The union of a couple 24 25

Stuart Royal Proclamations, (eds) Larkin and Hughes, 97. Political Works, (ed.) McIlwain, 272.

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implied, among other things, the dissolution of the hymeneal boundary between virginity and maternity. Since Elizabeth had constructed the English nation and her own body as closed off and defensively protected, the celebration of both marital and political union required a reworking of the dominant strains of national rhetoric. The invention of a language of union demanded that late Elizabethan forms of national representation be adapted to meet the cultural requirements of Great Britain. The most consistently used signifier through which residual monarchical rhetoric was engaged is the body. James employed the body in a variety of ways in his early speeches and proclamations. The most commonplace was the use of the monarch’s own body to represent the nation, as in the often-quoted passage from James’s first address to Parliament: “What God hath conjoyned then, let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the Head, and it is my Body.”26 Queen Elizabeth had also conflated her body natural with the English body politic. Two years before this speech by James, Elizabeth declared to the same Parliament that she had acted towards England as “a careful head to defend the body.” The bodily paradigm of authority was relied upon heavily throughout Elizabeth’s reign, but particularly during her first decade on the English throne when pressure from Church and Parliament to marry was the most forceful. In 1566 she refuted their behests, saying, “It is monstrous that the feet should direct the head.”27 Descriptions of the queen as married to the kingdom were also common, appearing both in Elizabeth’s own speeches and in the verses of those who praised her. In a song from very early in Elizabeth’s reign, William Birch constructs a courtship between the queen and England that results in marriage. Elizabeth says: Here is my hand, my dere lover Englande I am thine both with mind and hart For ever to endure, Thou maiest be sure Untill death us two depart. (19–24)28

In the same year that this poem was entered in the Stationers’s Register (1558–9), Elizabeth herself responded to the House of Commons’s petition for her to marry by pointing out that she was “already bound unto an husband, which is the kingdom of England.”29 Elizabeth’s chaste body presented a convenient signifier for the cultural purity of the land over which she ruled. This is exploited 26

Ibid. Elizabeth I, (eds) Marcus et al., 98. 28 William Birch, “A songe betwene the Quenes majestie and Englande,” in The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509–1659, (eds) David Norbrook and H.R. Woudhuysen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), 92–4. 29 Elizabeth I, (eds) Marcus et al., 59. 27

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when she fuses her body natural and body politic to occupy the role of a head to the national body. Metaphorical marriage to England functioned as a guarantee of that chaste and pure condition since it figuratively legitimized the unmarried state that the queen occupied in reality. The Elizabethan marriage metaphor was also useful in that it clearly placed England on the masculine side of its representational equation.30 What happens, then, when, as in the 1603 Parliament, a male monarch like James uses his body as an icon of nationhood? In the case of the marriage metaphor, the relationship between the ruler and the kingdom changes. There is a gender switch. Rather than being the husband, England becomes the wife.31 This is not unprecedented. In the Henrician play, King Johan (1538), John Bale establishes an intimate bond between the character Englande and the king by invoking the language of the wedding service.32 Englande declares, “I wyll not awaye from myn owne lawfull kyng, / Appoyntyd of God tyll deth us departe” (2.1622).33 Bale’s England/monarch relationship is an inversion of the one Birch would contrive 20 years later in his “songe” about Elizabeth. In King Johan, it is Englande who is the steadfast and resolute wife, Englande who cites death as the sole deal-breaker of marital obligation. King James, then, was not the first to imagine England as wed to a male ruler. However, his marriage metaphor’s configuration of gender did mark a break from standard Elizabethan practice, and in this respect it would have felt new. A similar mixture of custom and innovation is mobilized when James says, “I am the Head, and it [the kingdom] is my Body.” With this locution, the king was reproducing a form of self-presentation that had been well established, not only in Elizabeth’s reign, but across Medieval and Renaissance kingship more generally. As discussed above, it was highly conventional for a political territory—the “body politic”—to be described in terms of the physical body of the 30

The political implications of this kind of monarchical imagery have, by necessity, been simplified here. Some of the more notable studies devoted to the cultural contexts of Elizabethan iconography are Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); Robin Headlam-Wells, Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and the Cult of Elizabeth (Tottowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983); Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen; Carole Levin, “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 31 In a discussion of Thomas Dekker’s account of James’s entry into London, Jonathan Goldberg has even suggested that the pervasive references to London as a bride and James as the groom figures a relationship of sexual domination between ruler and ruled. See James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 30. 32 I owe this observation to Jacqueline Vanhoutte, Strange Communion: Motherland and Masculinity in Tudor Plays, Pamphlets, and Politics (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 49. 33 John Bale, King Johan, (ed.) Barry B. Adams (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1969). My italics.

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monarch who ruled over it. Yet as conventional as it was, James’s use of the bodyas-nation trope to argue for Anglo-Scottish Union may have seemed alarmingly alien to the ears of Elizabethans.34 Claire McEachern remarks of James’s opening address to Parliament, “When the speech at last reached its intended audience, they heard a rehearsal of familiar metaphors put to new and strange uses.”35 For James, on the other hand, the body/nation link was perfectly unambiguous. As far as he was concerned, the Anglo-Scottish Union was already manifest in his body natural since he was descended from the bloodlines of both Scottish and English royalty. This in itself demanded that the body politic follow suit. Political and legal adjustments were expected to rise naturally from what James referred to as “peace in my Person.”36 The inability, or refusal, of Parliament to see the matter in equally straightforward terms was to prove a persistent source of aggravation for the king between 1603 and 1608. Discomfort bred by James’s use of body metaphors must be attributed to the specific historical moment at which they were being spoken; not, that is, to a clash between an essentially Elizabethan and essentially Jacobean political idiom. The queen’s corporeal rhetoric, we must remember, was initially just as improvised as James’s. It developed over time, largely in response to political pressures to marry that continued throughout the 1570s and even early 1580s.37 James himself was working within a Western tradition of monarchical self-presentation as “nourishfather” when he used his body to image his kingdom. There is little distinctively Jacobean about it. But because of the moment at which James’s body rhetoric is deployed (right on the heels of Elizabeth’s long reign) and as a result of the particular ends for which he was using it (the dissolution of English political thresholds), the king’s coporealisms produce an almost dialectical cultural tension between his own reign and that of his predecessor. Moreover, James’s body metaphors were being used to evoke a less than conventional political unit. In contrast to traditional applications of Medieval “two-body” theory, James was not using the royal “body natural” to figure an actual nation as such, but, rather, an imminent nation. His body signaled a Great Britain that, at the moment of utterance, was yet to be politically secured. It was a kingdom in theory but not in practice. The 34 The Medieval context of “two-body” theory is discussed thoroughly in Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. For a study that considers how the theory was refashioned when Elizabeth came to the English throne, see Mary Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the English Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). 35 Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 147–8. 36 Political Works, (ed.) McIlwain, 270. 37 The most complete examination of the marriage negotiations for Queen Elizabeth is Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996). Another useful study, also by Doran, is “Why Did Elizabeth Not Marry?” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, (ed.) Julia M. Walker (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 30–59. See, in addition, Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, 95–8.

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representational difficulties that this situation gives rise to are alluded to when James says, “I hope therefore that no man will be so unreasonable as to thinke that I that am a Christian King under the Gospel, should be a Polygamist and husband to two wives; that I being the Head, should have a divided and monstrous Body.”38 James uses the image of bodily division to insist upon the cultural and political abjection of an un-unified island. In doing so, however, he also gestures towards the awkwardness of the rhetorical paradigm into which he is clumsily trying to fit the irregular circumstances of his accession. The development of a Jacobean language of union required the rewriting of these awkward rhetorical paradigms. James’s speeches and proclamations move in this direction, proposing a range of different uses for the body as a political signifier. Britain’s familiar role as wife is maintained between 1603 and 1607, but by no means exclusively. It occurs alongside other images of Britain that place the king, England, and Scotland in new kinds of relationships, sometimes to the point of perplexing incongruity. James’s 1607 speech to Parliament alone contains several examples of the various ways gender and corporeality could function within union rhetoric. The passage below, for instance, describes England and Scotland in a way markedly different from the speeches of 1603 and 1604: No more possible is it for one King to governe two Countreys Contiguous, the one a great, the other a lesse, a richer and a poorer, the greater drawing like an Adament the lesser to the Commodities thereof, then for one head to governe two bodies, or one man to be husband to two wives.39

James seems to have regressed from his optimism of 1603. He now admits that for the moment he in fact has two wives, although it is clear that he is not pleased with this predicament. As wives, neither kingdom is particularly empowered in terms of gender roles, despite the overt pandering to the English by allowing them to occupy “the greater” country. This passage, then, sits uncomfortably with the logic of the conventional marriage metaphor. For before James can be wed to Britain, England and Scotland must be wed to one another, and under the current terms this would involve a marriage between two wives. When, later in the speech, James returns to the idea of a national marriage, there is an attempt made at alleviating the sexual unease of this double-wife image: Union is a marriage: would he not bee thought absurd that for the furthering of a marriage betweene two friends of his, would make his first motion to have the two parties be laid in bedde together, and performe the other turnes of marriage?40

England and Scotland are now no longer wife and wife or even husband and wife. They are just friends—genderless friends. The marriage metaphor is finally Political Works, (ed.) McIlwain, 272. Ibid., 292. 40 Ibid., 293. 38 39

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dephysicalized in order to make it as unthreatening as possible. James reassures his audience that even though Union is a marriage of sorts, it does not follow that the two parties concerned must be put into bed together right away. What precisely James means by this is difficult to say. The more the marriage metaphor gets stretched and qualified, the more elusive it becomes. What we can say with some confidence is that underlying the king’s shifts in tone and image is a fundamental uncertainly as to what role the body and eroticism are supposed to play in the rhetoric of Union. James himself never seems to have solved this problem. The speech to the 1607 parliament was the king’s last address on the topic of the Great Britain project. The issue does, however, take on an increasingly central position in the marriage masques produced between 1606 and 1608, all of which, as we will see, display a deep interest in the politics and poetics of Anglo-Scottish Union. The variations in corporeal imagery that occur during the opening years of James’s English reign evidence a process of rhetorical transition, a shift in the vocabulary of national myth that I will continue to illustrate in this chapter and the following one. The Anglo-Scottish Union, and the British nation that would result from it, not only modified the way the body had traditionally functioned within English monarchical rhetoric, it also called into question how that body, or bodies, should be gendered. Since this Union was not founded upon conquest, the conventional paradigm of masculine conquering (or penetrating) nation, and passive feminine conquered nation was untenable. The metaphor of marriage offers some solutions to this in so far as it replaces masculine aggression with an androgynous conception of love. But even under these auspices, a choice had to be made concerning how to gender those involved in the marriage. The other option is simply to desexualize the two political bodies altogether, and we do find in both James’s speeches and the early marriage masques a recurring tension, a discursive balancing act, between sexualizing and desexualizing the idea of union. Hymenaei, in particular, is striking for the way it oscillates between an emergent erotic idiom and austere sexual constraint. For all the departures that Jacobean monarchical rhetoric makes from the conventions of the previous reign, it is also important not to loose sight of lines of communication with the past. The rhetorical shift that I find being played out in national propaganda does not manifest itself as complete originality or innovation. On the contrary, the developments that took place within Jacobean monarchical rhetoric most often involved putting familiar topoi to new uses. The body metaphors that I have just discussed are a perfect example of this. Another example is the portrayal of Britain as a “world divided from the world,” which James extended from a long mythographic tradition. The idea goes back to ancient geography and pseudo-historical lore. Virgil, most famously, described Britain as “toto divisos orbe Britannos” (wholly sundered from all the world) (Eclogue 1. 66),41 and similar comments can be found in texts by Horace, Claudian and Solinus. Ancient writers’ depictions of Britain as a privileged island space were, in turn, regularly quoted by early modern encyclopaedists and antiquarians, 41 Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 28.

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such as Charles Etienne in France and John Norden in England.42 In the lateElizabethan period, expressions of this island motif began to take on very specific characteristics. In the first place, the idea of Britain being a world divided from the world was frequently replaced by England being a world divided from the world. The other British spaces—Scotland, Wales and Ireland—were routinely excluded from a geographically fraudulent image of island-England.43 Moreover, the nature of the island image became one in which Edenic idealization was combined with suggestions of defensive exclusivity and militant vigilance. In Robert Greene’s 1589 play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, King Henry III greets the King of Castile and the Emperor of Germany with a telling salutation: “Welcome, my lords, welcome, brave western kings, / To England’s shore, whose promontory cleeves / Shows Albion is another little world” (4. 5–7).44 Albion (according to some an even more ancient name than “Britain”)45 is within three lines conflated with the political territory of England, the thresholds of which—its “cleeves” (cliffs)—are given a plainly military and defensive significance through their description as promontories. A similar use of world-divided-from-the-world imagery may be found in John of Gaunt’s famous “sceptred isle” speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595). Gaunt’s “sceptred isle,” “This England,” is not only an “other Eden,” but the “seat of Mars” (2. 1. 40, 50, 42, 41)46 god of war. “This England” is also “this fortress” (2. 1. 43). The sea which surrounds it is cast as “a moat defensive to a house / Against the envy of less happier lands” (2. 1. 48–9). John of Gaunt’s speech is characteristic of late-Elizabethan configurations of island rhetoric, especially in the way the image of the “demi-paradise” (2. 1. 42) is so quickly subsumed within a larger fantasy of militant insularity.47

42

The most detailed survey of this representational tradition is still Josephine Waters Bennett, “Britain Among the Fortunate Isles,” Studies in Philology 53 (1956): 114–40. She provides copious examples of island imagery taken from classical, biblical and early modern sources. 43 See further, two essays by Alan MacColl: “The Construction of England as a Protestant ‘British’ Nation in the Sixteenth Century,” Renaissance Studies 18 (2004): 582– 608, and “The Meaning of ‘Britain’ in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 248–69, especially 259–68. 44 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, (ed.) J.A. Lavin, New Mermaids (London: A & C Black, 1969). 45 See Bennett, “Britain Among the Fortunate Isles,” 121. 46 All references to Shakespeare are from The Norton Shakespeare, (eds) Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), and will henceforth be cited parenthetically. 47 For further discussions of Gaunt’s speech in a British/English context, see: Willy Maley, “‘This Sceptred Isle’: Shakespeare and the British Problem,” in Shakespeare and National Culture, (ed.) John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 83–108; and Kate Chedgzoy, “This Pleasant and Sceptred Isle: Insular Fantasies of National Identity in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie and William Shakespeare’s Richard II,” in Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Early Modern Atlantic Archipelago, (eds) Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 25–42.

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King James also invoked the world-divided-from-the-world paradigm when presenting the Great Britain project to his English subjects. But his use of this topos has a very different effect than it would have had for London audiences watching Richard II in the 1590s. In the 1604 proclamation on the royal style, James states that “the Isle within it selfe hath almost none but imaginarie bounds of separation without, but one common limit or rather Gard of the Ocean Sea, making the whole a little world within it selfe, the Nations an uniformitie of constitutions both of body and minde.”48 Like Shakespeare’s Gaunt and Greene’s Henry III, James chooses to present his kingdom through an image that bases its definition of political space on external borders and geographical location, rather than internal consensus. What would have been jarring about James’s deployment of the island topos is its retrogressive Britishness. His is an island in which the “fortress” of England is cracked open to make way for Scotland and, consequently, “The envy of less happier lands.” For James, world-divided-from-the-world rhetoric offered a vehicle for Union to be portrayed as a logical condition of Britain’s island geography. This kind of propaganda, moreover, allowed the king to gloss over the internal aspects of union, the legal, administrative, and political dilemmas that posed the real challenges. Although James’s use of received verbal formulas to present his dual-monarchy aimed at smoothing the transition between two ideologically different reigns, recycled tropes more often served to highlight the discomfited relationship between English national rhetoric and British cultural politics. One major reason for this appears to be that most of the established forms of political rhetoric did not allow for concrete engagement with what were the actual anxieties surrounding the Union project. Internal issues of Anglo-Scottish integration, for instance, are rarely addressed in James’s speeches. Britain’s geographical position as a world divided form the world or its metaphysical status as an incarnation of the king’s body are deemed sufficient arguments for the project. James often saves practical explication for describing the function of Britain at an international level—that is, the Union’s external meanings. The topics of defense and European commerce are elaborated upon in a factual and empirical fashion: “If twentie thousand men be a strong Armie, is not the double thereof, fourtie thousand, a double the stronger Armie.”49 The assumption that the internal realization of union could be sufficiently expressed through standard political tropes was a significant miscalculation. The anxieties that attended the Anglo-Scottish Union were of an overwhelmingly local, even personal, nature. Britain, as a concept, threatened not only the political boundaries of England and Scotland, but also the cultural boundaries of Englishness and Scottishness. Francis Bacon’s collation of objections to the nominal change from England and Scotland to Great Britain allows us one opportunity to reconstruct contemporary parliamentary anxiety, and to decipher what the nature of that anxiety was. The 48 49

Stuart Royal Proclamations, (eds) Larkin and Hughes, 95. Political Works, (ed.) McIlwain, 271.

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document was reported to the House of Commons by Bacon himself on 27 April 1604. The list of objections is divided into four sections: “Matter of generality or common reason,” “Matter of estate inward, or matter of law,” “Matter of estate foreign, or matter of intercourse,” and “Matter of honour or reputation.”50 Objections appearing under the heading “Matter of estate foreign, or matter of intercourse” comprise the smallest section on the list. The largest section, by far, is “Matter of estate inward, or matter of law.” It lists a range of “confusions, incongruities, and mischiefs”51 that would arise from the Union project, all of which became recurring themes of opposition in the debates that took place over the next three years. The “confusions, incongruities, and mischiefs” include grievances about the legal integration of the two kingdoms, questions about how (or if) to merge the two Parliaments, and discontent rising from the ever present English fear of Scots taking all the high-ranking positions in the kingdom. This was not an unfounded apprehension given the already disproportionate number of Scots in the king’s Bedchamber. Indeed, the fear that is listed last in the collation may very well have been first in the minds of many Englishmen: the “possibility of alienation of the Crown of England to the line of Scotland.”52 Similarly, the complaint with which this section of the collation opens would perhaps have functioned better as a concluding remark. It sums up what many of the more minute objections collectively imply. The nominal shift from England and Scotland to Great Britain, it says, would “be full of repugnancy and ambiguity, and subject to much variety and danger of construction.”53 There were very real economic and political reasons why Englishmen might not have wanted the dissolution of the Anglo-Scottish border. Commercially speaking, the dangers posed by Union with Scotland vastly outweighed the incentives.54 Furthermore, the Union, from an English point of view, placed an unwelcome question mark over the future ascendancy of English Common Law. But there is, in addition, a more general problem of representation at stake, as the quotation above suggests. Despite James’s invocations of “Histories” and the authority of old “Mappes and Cartes,” for opponents of the Union the rhetorical precedent for describing Britain was no more apparent than the political precedent for enacting it. The re-scripting of nationhood is viewed warily, as “subject to much variety and danger of construction.” James’s uncertain use of corporeal imagery to describe Britain evidences this “variety” and “ambiguity.” The nuptial performances, likewise, produce contradictions in their improvised This collation is reprinted as an appendix to Bruce Galloway’s The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), 28–29. 51 Ibid., 28. 52 Ibid., 29. 53 Ibid., 28. 54 England and Scotland were more or less parallel markets. In terms of domestic trade, there was little that Scotland could offer England. In addition, some feared that Scotland would be able to monopolize the foreign market by selling the same commodities as England at lower trading costs. 50

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attempts to formulate an appropriate mode of eulogy. For those opposed to the Britain project, neither nationhood nor national rhetoric were things that should be subjected to innovation or improvisation. As the collation states in its very first section, “We find no grief of our present estate, and foresee no advancement to a better condition by this change.”55 That is, we like things the way they are. Bacon’s collation is an important document. It brings into sharp focus the terms through which Britain would be debated. Most importantly, it allows us to see the major points of resistance to the Union in a condensed format. These objections changed very little in the years following it. They were the basis of the oppositional rhetoric against which a language of union would attempt to define itself. The numerous political tracts written on the Union, both for and against, are quite remarkable for how closely and consistently they reproduce the issues laid out in the collation. There were 28 of these tracts written between 1603 and 1608 alone.56 Though the adversaries of Union would continue to highlight the lack of political and historical precedents for the Great Britain project, King James and other proponents continued trying to find a representational tradition through which they could effectively argue their position. The entertainments considered below intervene in this debate. By experimenting with how conventional mythographies could be made to signify, they begin to assemble a vocabulary for celebrating union and, by extension, new ways of imagining nationhood. Re-thinking Political Space in The Masque of Blackness The Jacobean court’s first Christmas at Whitehall set a lavish precedent for the next 20 years of holiday festivity.57 Masques, banquets, and other events announced the new king’s financial liberality and his taste for opulent merrymaking. There were, however, some very good reasons for celebration in 1604/5, apart from general seasonal jollity. James’s youngest son, Prince Charles, was created Duke of York on 6 January 1605, and the king’s then favorite, Sir Philip Herbert, was married to Lady Susan de Vere, daughter of the earl of Oxford, at Whitehall palace on 27 December 1604. James’s propensity for bestowing extravagant wedding celebrations on royal favorites would become almost paradigmatic over the next 10 years, but while later weddings, for courtiers like James Hay and Robert Carr, are very well documented, surprisingly little is known of the festivities attending the Herbert/de Vere wedding. There was certainly a performance mounted on the couple’s wedding night, but apart from its description as a masque of Juno and Hymenaeus nothing is known of the precise nature of the entertainment: Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 28. For a discussion of these tracts, as well as modern editions of six of them, see The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604, (eds) Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack (Edinburgh: Clarke Constable, 1985). 57 Severe plague in London kept James and his court outside of the city during the first 10 months of his reign in England, first at Winchester and then at Hampton Court. 55 56

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accounts and records are scarce, no text has survived, and the authorship remains indeterminate.58 The obscurity of Juno and Hymenaeus is frustrating in itself, but it may also have affected the critical afterlife of another masque performed as part of the 1604/5 holiday festivities, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, mounted only 10 days after the Herbert/de Vere wedding on 6 January 1605. Most well known as Queen Anna’s first Whitehall performance and as the first collaboration between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, The Masque of Blackness’s fundamental interest in the idea of union is largely left out of critical discussion; it is perhaps the loss of Juno and Hymenaeus as an occasional reference point that is at least in part to blame for this. The most impressive critical work to be produced on The Masque of Blackness over the last 15 years has concentrated on constructions of race and the implications of female performance in the early Stuart court.59 The latter context is particularly important for us to bear in mind, for if The Masque of Blackness is a “union masque,” it is also a key instance of Queen Anna’s cultural agency. As Ben Jonson tells us in the printed text, the central conceit of the queen and eleven of her ladies appearing in blackface and exotic attire originated with Anna. He remarks, “it was her Majesty’s will to have them blackamoors at first” (18).60 Of the six court masques in which Anna danced between 1603 and 1611, The Masque of Blackness was certainly the most controversial. Sir Dudley Carleton, who attended the masque, commented in a letter to Sir Ralph Winwood, “Their Apparell was rich but too light and Curtizan-like for such great ones. Instead of Vizards, their Faces, and Arms, up to the Elbows, were painted black ... but it became them nothing so well as their red and white, and you cannot imagine a more ugly sight than 58 E.K. Chambers gathers the extant evidence and some contemporary commentary relating to the wedding-night masque for Herbert and de Vere in The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) 3:377–8. 59 See, for example, Hardin Aasand, “‘To Blanch an Ethiop, and Revive a Corse’: Queen Anne and The Masque of Blackness,” Studies in English Literature 32 (1992): 271–85; Marion Wynne-Davis, “The Queen’s Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque,” in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, (eds) S.R. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davis (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 79–104; Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 128–41; Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Temperature, Temperance, and Racial Difference in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness,” English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998): 183–209; Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 100–104; Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 1–17; Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 18–48. 60 Line references for The Masque of Blackness are from Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments 1605–1640, (ed.) David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1–10.

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a Troop of lean-cheek’d Moors.”61 On the simplest level, Carleton’s objections target female aesthetics: “it became them nothing so well as their red and white” sardonically juxtaposes the ladies’ blackface with the conventional cosmetic color scheme for elite women. Additionally, there is an issue of class decorum at stake in Carleton’s comments. The risqué costumes were inappropriate not necessarily in themselves, but because they were being worn by “such great ones.” However, the most unsettling aspect of this performance may have been the simple portrayal of African women, who were frequently associated with the mythical race of females known as the Amazons. Typically located in Africa or the Americas, the Amazons lived in isolation from men, raised their daughters to be warriors, and reputedly burned off their right breasts so as to better draw the bow. The Amazon woman was, in all of these respects, an unnatural figure who inverted gender roles and repudiated domestic (and by analogy, political) hierarchy as institutionalized in marriage.62 Similar associations crop up in another of Anna’s masques, The Masque of Queens (1609), where the legendary matriarchs portrayed by Anna and her ladies “harbor husband slayers in their midst.”63 The female militancy implicit in The Masque of Blackness jostles uncomfortably against the poetics of union. It creates an ideological tension characteristic of the Jacobean court itself, a court which, as Martin Butler has shown, was orchestrated by several “royal powerbrokers,” rather than one allpowerful king. “James’s authority,” Butler explains, “was never an uncontested monopoly but was constantly in balance, constantly being renegotiated with figures who had their own advisors, clients and followers, and who exerted significant sovereign pressures of their own.”64 Having successfully opposed her husband on more than one political issue, Queen Anna was most certainly one of these figures.65 Masques publicly displayed this political role, showcasing the queen’s 61 Carleton to Winwood, 1605, Ben Jonson, (eds) C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925­–52), 10:448. 62 See further, Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981) and, for a corrective to Shepherd, Kathryn Schwartz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 63 Tomlinson, Women on Stage, 35. Other important discussions of gender dynamics in The Masque of Queens can be found in Suzanne Gossett, “‘Man-maid, Begone!’: Women in Masques,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 96–113; Wynne-Davis, “The Queen’s Masque”; and Kathryn Schwartz, “Amazon Reflections in the Jacobean Queen’s Masque,” Studies in English Literature 35 (1995): 293–319. 64 Martin Butler, “Courtly Negotiations,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, (eds) David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27. 65 For instance, between 1595 and 1603 Anna was involved in an ongoing battle with the countess and earl of Mar for custody of Prince Henry, a struggle which she eventually won. It was James who had, in line with Scottish tradition, entrusted the countess and earl of Mar with rearing the young Prince. Anna’s refutation of the king in this important

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alignment with other influential women and acting as performative corollaries to her independent “queen’s court.” 66 By the 1630s, court masques were consciously casting the marriage of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria as an emblem of political stability;67 not so at the Jacobean court. Underwriting any investigation of union myth in Jacobean England must be an awareness of the less-than-ideal royal union that always threatened to ironize it. Given this context, it is all the more striking that court writers in the early years of James’s English reign relentlessly pursued the development of a language of union. Though the conditions of the Jacobean court would eventually put major strains on union rhetoric (as I will show in chapters three and four), early Jacobean marriage masques display a remarkable degree of investment in this new monarchical idiom. The Masque of Blackness is an excellent example of this, and though it is not itself a marriage masque, the themes it explores and the conflicts it dramatizes are essential for understanding the subsequently performed series of nuptial entertainments at the Jacobean court. The encounter between cultural familiarity and cultural difference that The Masque of Blackness stages could easily have been mapped onto the proposed Union of England and Scotland. The Union theme had been aired once before in the Jacobean court, in another masque in which Anna and her ladies danced: Samuel Daniel’s The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604). Amongst the pageant-like entrées in Daniel’s entertainment, there appeared an allegorical figure of Concordia dressed “in a parti-coloured mantle of crimson and white (the colours of England and Scotland)” (86–7).68 However, the way Union is figured in Daniel’s entertainment matter served to establish her political clout before she even arrived in England. See further Leeds Barroll, “The Court of the First Stuart Queen,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, (ed.) Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 191–208, and McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage, 81–2, 91–2. Another notable instance of the queen’s political agency unfolded between 1613 and 1616, roughly, with what appears to have been her participation in the promotion of George Villiers as a new royal favorite in opposition to the king’s beloved Robert Carr. For discussion see Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 143–61 and Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65–71. 66 The notion of a “queen’s court” is not merely the invention of later cultural historians. Dudley Carleton refers to “the Queen’s court” in a letter dated 1605 (Carleton to Sir Ralph Winwood, January 1605, Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James I, (ed.) Edmund Sawyer, 3 vols [London, 1725], 3:403); and, nine years later, John Chamberlain does the same (Chamberlain to Carleton, 10 February 1614, The Letters of John Chamberlain, (ed.) Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols [Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939], 1:507). 67 Tomlinson, Women on Stage, 7, 11; Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 66–73. 68 Line references for The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses are from Joan Rees’s edition in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, (eds) T.J.B. Spencer and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 17–42.

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is quite different from what we find in The Masque of Blackness. The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses performs a semiotic evocation of Union through its display of Concordia dressed in England and Scotland’s national colors. But this symbolism does not cohere into purposeful national mythmaking. As Martin Butler observes of Daniel’s juxtaposition of Concordia with Elizabethan personae such as Diana and Astraea, “The underlying objective of Daniel’s action was not so much that of propagandizing for Union as ameliorating the trauma which James’s succession involved by displaying in symbolic gestures the continuities between his reign and his predecessor’s.”69 The Masque of Blackness, on the other hand, as we shall see, organizes its semiotics of union into an articulate system of national panegyric. Unlike Daniel’s entertainment, it posits a sustained argument for how to celebrate the idea of union, and in this way makes an exceptionally direct intervention into monarchical rhetoric. By staging the English court’s encounter with geographical, aesthetic, and racial otherness (in the form of the daughters of Niger) Jonson’s entertainment opens a performative space in which changing definitions of nationhood can be explored. It dramatizes the temporary dissolution of cultural and national boundaries and seeks to create a language through which this dissolution may be celebrated. In this capacity, The Masque of Blackness contributes to the linguistic project of Union, the encomiastic counterpart to the political and legal merger being discussed in Parliament. What is more, The Masque of Blackness offers an alternative construction of Britain to that formulated by James during the first few years of his reign. Instead of imaging the island as closed off, Jonson’s performance opens it up, allowing difference to infiltrate the court, a place which in masques always refers beyond itself to the nation at large. Britain, like the borders of England, becomes permeable, and the aesthetically and geographically alien daughters of Niger function as an exaggeration of the threat of cultural otherness posed by the Scots. By permitting the daughters of Niger to gain access to the court, the masque can also exaggerate James’s transformative power to make them unproblematically British. From its opening moments, The Masque of Blackness challenges the received way of understanding British political space. Rather than using island imagery that separates James’s kingdom(s) from the rest of the world, Jonson’s text projects the world onto Britain: “Sound, sound aloud / The welcome of the orient flood / Into the west” (77–9). Our entry into the Britain of Blackness defies both cartographic and rhetorical expectation by conflating east and west. In the printed text, this impossible geography is emphasized through its juxtaposition with the empirical detail supplied by Jonson in the introduction to the masque. He explains that the River Niger “taketh spring out of a certain lake, eastward, and after a long race, falleth into the western ocean” (16–17). This introduction creates a textual 69 Martin Butler, “The Invention of Britain and the Early Stuart Masque,” in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, (ed.) R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72.

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backdrop of precise geographical explication, with Pliny, Solinus, and Ptolemy cited as authoritative sources (13). But the empiricism through which Jonson asks us to enter his device is immediately dismantled. The opening song demonstrates how this same River Niger has somehow managed to flow into the west, here meaning Britain. From the beginning it is evident that The Masque of Blackness is not going to conform to a conventional world-divided-from-the-world approach to nationhood. The masque opens by announcing and, more importantly, welcoming an external incursion. If, for readers of the printed text, the masque’s reorganization of political space is first suggested by the disparity between the geographical scholarship of the introduction and the first song’s “welcome of the orient flood / Into the west,” this reorganization becomes apparent only slightly later for those attending the performance. Directly following the song of welcome, Oceanus demands an explanation for Niger’s seemingly impossible feat: Be silent, now the ceremony’s done, And Niger, say, how comes it, lovely son, That thou, the Ethiop’s river, so far east, Art seen to fall into th’extremest west Of me, the king of floods, Oceanus, And in mine empire’s heart salute me thus? (89–94)

Oceanus’s question draws attention to the interpretive fissure that Niger’s strange presence in the Jacobean court opens up between geographical understandings of Britain and the masque’s disorienting alternative. Oceanus himself adheres to the traditional, isolationist representation of island Britain by referring to it as “in mine empire’s heart”—that is, in the middle of the ocean. This is not the only reference to Britain as a world divided from the world in The Masque of Blackness. Later, the character Aethiopia declares, “With that great name, Britannia, this blest isle / Hath won her ancient dignity and style, / A world divided from the world” (217– 19). As this suggests, Jonson’s entertainment does not undertake a confrontational deconstruction of residual national rhetoric. It does not seek to banish familiar tropes. The masque tries instead to change the way these tropes signify, shifting the focus from England to Britain and, also, from the island’s external borders to its internal unification. Just one year earlier, Jonson was already beginning to rework the world-divided-from-the-world paradigm in Epigram V, “On the Union”: When was there contract better driven by Fate? Or celebrated with more truth of state? The world the temple was, the priest a king, The spousèd pair two realms, the sea the ring.70

70 Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, (ed.) George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 36.

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In its closing emphasis on the ocean’s circumscription of privileged political space, Epigram V duplicates the isolationism that characterized the island imagery in panegyric of the 1580s and 1590s. Yet in order to reach this final clause we must pass through images of internal de-insularization. The king is not cast as a defender of national borders, but as a marital priest—a national matchmaker. Moreover, the sea embraces “two realms,” which are figured as “the spoused pair,” not just England. As a metaphorical marriage ring, the sea in Epigram V participates in a celebration of political amalgamation, which is a major departure from its traditional role as a guarantor of national enclosure. In Niger’s reply to Oceanus, Jonson again debunks the notion of the sea as a defensive bulwark: Divine Oceanus, ‘tis not strange at all That, since the immortal souls of creatures mortal Mix with their bodies, yet reserve for ever A power of separation, I should sever My fresh streams from thy brackish, like things fixed, Though with thy powerful saltness thus far mixed. (101–6)

Even though Niger grants Oceanus his “powerful saltness” and does not attempt to rewrite his encompassing geographical relationship to Britain, the body/soul metaphor ultimately denies Oceanus the impermeable status he traditionally enjoys. Britain is indeed a world divided from the world, but it is not inaccessible on account of that. Jonson’s entertainment attempts to change the cultural associations of the world divided from the world, from defensive isolationism to mystical transformability. This becomes increasingly evident as the masque progresses. In a long speech, consisting of almost 180 lines, Niger justifies his journey to Britain. He explains that the privileging of fairness, or whiteness, as the epitome of beauty has left his daughters (represented by Anna and her ladies dressed as African women) in a rather regrettable position. Niger blames this imbalance in aesthetic taste on the values propagated by the western poetic tradition, those “poor brain-sick men, styled poets here with you” (132). Still, in the name of doing “a kind and careful father’s part” (111), Niger has agreed to bring his daughters to be bleached white by James, the monarchical sun. The speech initiates a larger argument within the masque for the value of the poet to the Great Britain project: The fabulous voices of some few Poor brain-sick men, styled poets here with you, Have, with such envy of their graces, sung The painted beauties other empires sprung, Letting their loose and wingèd fictions fly To infect all climates, yea, our purity (131–6)

As Niger suggests through his berating of “loose and wingèd fictions,” the aesthetic and cultural gap between the daughters of Niger and “the painted beauties other empires sprung” exists exclusively at the level of representation. It is, like the separation between England and Scotland, a product of perception.

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But poetry, as Jonson’s masque aims to show, can dissolve difference as easily as it creates it. If the collapse of geographical distance was the entertainment’s first representational priority, the erasure of cultural and aesthetic disparity will be the next step. By creating a language that celebrates this process of homogenization, The Masque of Blackness makes a claim for the centrality of the poetic endeavor to the Great Britain project. Poetry—and masque poetry in particular—is shown to supersede the geographical modes of persuasion that James uses in his speeches and proclamations, and with which Jonson prefaces his own masque in the introduction to the text. Although the passage above casts the poet’s craft in terms of its culturally damaging potential, this disparagement also serves as a backdrop against which The Masque of Blackness’s redirection of that power into politically productive national mythmaking can be emphasized. As Niger’s speech continues, poetry shifts from being the “loose and wingèd” encomiastic entity that created the daughters’ aesthetic inferiority, to being the means by which that aesthetic inferiority can be erased. The appearance of an oracle in a lake, manifesting itself as a poetic text, becomes the catalyst for the daughters’ journey to Britain: In the lake where their first spring they gained, As they sat cooling their soft limbs one night, Appeared a face all circumfused with light; (And sure they saw’t, for Ethiops never dream) Wherein they might decipher through the stream These words: That they a land must forthwith seek, Whose termination (of the Greek) Sounds –tania; where bright Sol, that heat Their bloods, doth never rise or set, But in his journey passeth by, And leaves that climate of the sky To comfort of a greater light, Who forms all beauty with his sight. (158–71)

The land which “sounds—tania” is, of course, Britannia: James is figured as the Sun, or “bright Sol.” Niger’s chorographical description of “the lake wherein their first spring they gained” moves from being a neutral geographical feature to being a readable text. With this shift from mute geography to poetic inscription, Niger and his daughters break free from the usual constraints of spatial organization and are led to Britain. This is confirmed by Oceanus, who reassures Niger that “this land, that lifts into the temperate air / His snowy cliff, is Albion the fair” (180–81). What was geographically impossible has been textually permitted. With the arrival of Niger and his daughters in the Jacobean court, aesthetic and cultural difference become far more negotiable predicaments. King James— Britain incarnate—can resolve such incongruities. He can turn what is two into one. Jonson’s entertainment insists on the ability of masque poetry to eulogize this paradox credibly, a claim that could be usefully extended to the challenges of the real Union contemporaneously under discussion.

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The action of the masque has shifted from a narrative recounting of both how and why Niger and his tributary daughters have come to Britain, to a real-time present in which they are actually located on the island and, more specifically, in the very court which functions as the masque’s performative venue. This transfer from past to present and from abstract to specific location will establish itself as a conventional movement in court masques, one which commences the masque revels, that climactic moment when the fictional world of the entertainment and the real world of the courtiers are collapsed in the social ritual of dancing. But before the revels have time to get underway in Blackness there is an unexpected god-like intervention in the upper part of the room. One may reasonably expect this to be some kind of James-figure (the Sun or Jove, for example), especially considering the masquers have come all this way to be bleached white by the king. Yet the character that appears in the sky is not Jove, but Aethiopia—a moon goddess and a figure that is clearly meant to be associated with Queen Elizabeth before King James. The moon had become an increasingly common symbol for Elizabeth during the last 10 to 15 years of her reign. At a later point in the masque, Aethiopia is even referred to as “Dian” (322), another conventional Elizabethan persona, and one that, again, flourished in the 1590s.71 Why does this Elizabeth-figure intervene rather than a James-figure? Is it in order to warn against the cultural politics of Britishness? Is the image of the moon goddess meant to covertly remind the audience of the isolationist political values symbolized by Elizabeth I? I would argue the contrary. Close attention to Aethiopia’s ensuing address to Niger suggests that her character is, in fact, essential to the masque’s formulation of British rhetoric. Through the character of Aethiopia, the masque confronts the Elizabethan body and its virginal configuration of nationhood, a trope that we have seen James struggle with in his speeches and proclamations on the Union. Aethiopia begins her speech with a confession to Niger: “I was that bright face / Reflected in the lake, in which thy race / Read mystic lines” (205–7). In other words, Aethiopia was the oracular messenger who appeared to the daughters of Niger. It seems significant that in occupying the role of oracle Aethiopia is entirely disembodied. As she appears in the lake, she is just “a face all circumfused with light” and an encomiastic text describing Britain. If, as we have seen, the Elizabethan body was a rhetorical stumbling block in the early linguistic project of Jacobean mythmaking, Jonson’s solution appears to be to cancel that body altogether and to replace it with a text that catalyzes a foreign union. Through Aethiopia, the Elizabethan body is appropriated and inscribed with British rhetoric, a poetic invitation for the outsider to enter, rather than an elaboration of the virgin body politic which keeps the intruder out. What is less clear in this part of Blackness is whether we are to view Elizabethan symbolism as being aggressively erased by, or positively co-opted into, the masque 71 There are instances of the moon and Diana being used as images of Elizabeth in the earlier part of the queen’s reign, but both appear with a marked consistency during the last decade of the sixteenth century. See Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, 174–6.

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fiction. The ambiguity is expressive of the doubt that must have been experienced by many early Jacobean panegyrists: what should be done with the complex vocabulary of praise that had amassed over the previous two decades under Queen Elizabeth? Poetic indecision over whether to exorcize the rhetoric of virginity or incorporate it into a new political idiom becomes a characteristic tension in early Jacobean court entertainments. It is telling that, of all the ways Elizabeth could be evinced in The Masque of Blackness, Jonson opted for a character associated with the moon, the most dualistic image within Elizabethan iconography, and one that would have freed the poet from having to choose explicitly between confrontation and compliment. While the moon is a standard motif for the empowered female, the moon wanes as well as waxes: it always has one side that is as dark as the other is bright.72 The double association produced by moon imagery is exploited in texts such as Edmund Spenser’s “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie.” Spenser uses Cynthia to suggest the mortality and decay of England’s Virgin Queen. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream also makes use of the multiple meanings of lunar imagery. Diana, the moon goddess of marital chastity, is praised at the end of the play. It is “Dian’s bud” (4. 1. 70) which paves the way for three marriages by reversing the chaotic and licentious effects of Oberon’s drug. Yet lunar imagery also takes on a darker hue. At the beginning of the play Theseus calls Hermia a “barren sister” who chants “hymns to the cold and fruitless moon” (1. 1. 72–3). In the forest at night, bathed in moonlight, the lovers of the play experience lunacy and drug-induced inconstancy. Jonson latches on to this representational ambivalence in The Masque of Blackness. Consequently, Aethiopia may be viewed either as a positive expression of Elizabeth’s cultural legacy or as an image of that legacy’s rhetorically subservient devaluation. Jean MacIntyre has argued convincingly that the incorporation of an Elizabeth-figure in this masque could be for the purpose of showing the queen favoring the new regime. According to this view, Elizabeth would be simultaneously honored in her own right and used as propaganda for Jacobean policy.73 Indeed, the memory of Queen Elizabeth appears more frequently to have been invoked than suppressed in Jacobean England. James Knowles has shown how Queen Anna, in particular, adapted Elizabethan imagery in order to project an autonomous queenly image.74 King James, too, calls upon his predecessor, referring to Elizabeth more than once in his early speeches and proclamations. In 1603, for instance, he reminded Parliament of their “late Soveraigne of famous memory, full of dayes, but fuller of immortall trophes of Honour.”75 Still, the aggressiveness with which 72

Ibid., 176. Jean MacIntyre, “Queen Elizabeth’s Ghost at the Court of James I: The Masque of Blackness, The Lord Hay’s Masque, and Oberon,” Ben Jonson Journal 5 (1998): 81–100. 74 See James Knowles, “‘To Enlight the Darksome Night, Pale Cinthia Doth Arise’: Anna of Denmark, Elizabeth I, and the Images of Royalty,” in Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, (ed.) Clare McManus (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). 75 Political Works, (ed.) McIlwain, 269. 73

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the Elizabeth-figure’s body is cancelled in The Masque of Blackness cannot be ignored. If the Aethiopia character is to be seen as a walk-on appearance of the late queen in the Jacobean court, then we must also acknowledge the extent to which her memory is being tampered with. The performance and text of the masque place sharp strictures on how she may signify. Elizabeth’s body, a sign through which her monarchical authority was endorsed and her nation projected, is not even permitted to feature in the masque. This corporeal erasure, I would suggest, places The Masque of Blackness in a slightly more antagonistic relationship with residual Elizabethanism than may at first appear to be the case. It posits a vision of British nationhood that cannot be communicated through an Elizabethan vocabulary of political symbols. Instead, Jonson’s emergent language of union erases and replaces the iconography of virginal insularity. The rhetorical boldness that lies just below the surface of The Masque of Blackness sets the tone for later marriage entertainments, such as The Lord Hay’s Masque, which is discussed in the following chapter. In itself, however, The Masque of Blackness remains an unfinished piece of national mythmaking in one major respect: the promised transformation from blackness to whiteness is never actually enacted. To witness the aesthetic metamorphosis of the daughters of Niger, the audience would have to wait for the sequel to Blackness, The Masque of Beauty. Even if the revels that take place after Aethiopia’s speech facilitate a kind of social union between the men of the court and the daughters of Niger, the daughters are called back to sea before they can receive the physical benefits of this merger. Aethiopia explains that they will have to maintain one year of ritual penance before they can be bleached white (302–19). In actual fact, it was almost three years before the bleaching took place. As a result of the marriage entertainments that occupied the next two Christmas seasons (Hymenaei, the Barriers, The Lord Hay’s Masque, and The Haddington Masque) there was no slot available for The Masque of Beauty to be performed until 10 January 1608. In an ironic turn of events, the continued experiments with a language of union in these marriage entertainments of 1606 to 1608 prevented the original experiment of The Masque of Blackness from reaching immediate completion. Despite both its abortive fiction and the ironizing presence of Queen Anna and her ladies, Jonson’s first Whitehall entertainment initiated themes and raised questions that would prove central to the development of the marriage masque. In its reappraisal of the world-divided-from-the-world topos, The Masque of Blackness provided a model for celebrating Britain that shifted the focus away from the island’s defensive borders towards its internal cohesion and the transformative forces exerted by its king, attributes far more applicable to the conditions of political union. The idea of James possessing quasi-divine powers of transformation would be revisited again and again in Jacobean court entertainment, and the marriage masques in particular; and while it was highly conventional for monarchs to be associated with miraculous metamorphoses, both in English court masques and French ballet de cour, the conceit took on a rare degree of topicality against the backdrop of James’s Anglo-Scottish Union project. By rethinking British political

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space in this way, The Masque of Blackness asserts the value of the masque genre to the formulation of a specifically Jacobean national idiom. What is more, The Masque of Blackness begins to confront (rather than simply reproduce) the potent political signifier of the Elizabethan virgin body. This initiates a contentious dialogue between residual and emergent cultural iconographies that would be continued in court entertainments over the next five years. Negotiating the Sexual Body in Hymenaei and the Barriers Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei was performed one year after The Masque of Blackness, on 5 January 1606. Written to celebrate the marriage of the young Robert Devereux, third earl of Essex (just under 15 years old) to the even younger Frances Howard (about 13 years old). As part of the wedding celebrations, Ben Jonson also composed dramatic dialogues for a Barriers, a ritualized military exercise which took place on the evening following the masque. The Howard/Devereux marriage constituted a major intervention into the political world of the Jacobean court. It cut across factional lines and, temporarily at least, seemed to unite two traditionally opposed families. Understanding the social and political background to this wedding is crucial not only for establishing a local context for the festivities, but also for gauging how politically loaded the trope of union was becoming. In the wedding entertainments, this trope was worked out in Jonson’s careful and deliberative verses and, in Hymenaei, in the use of the rare double-masque form, which involved the use of both male and female masquers. Tellingly, this mixedsex style of masquing was a feature specific to the entertainments of the king’s court. The only other example in the Jacobean period, Thomas Campion’s The Lord’s Masque, was also performed for a politically-charged wedding, that of James’s daughter, Elizabeth, to Frederick the Elector Palatine. Frances Howard came from a formidable family. She was the daughter of the earl of Suffolk, Thomas Howard, and great niece of the earl of Northampton, Henry Howard. Between 1603 and his death in 1614, Northampton established himself as a powerful figure at the Jacobean court. He was at the center of a loose conglomerate of courtiers, often referred to as the Howard faction.76 Northampton had spent the better part of Elizabeth’s reign trying unsuccessfully to recover from the blow dealt to his family’s reputation by his older brother, Norfolk, who had been engaged in suspect political dealings with Mary, Queen of Scots, a liaison that resulted in his execution. Despite this family stigma, Northampton dealt cleverly with the politics surrounding the Elizabethan succession, entering into a secret correspondence with James VI in the late 1590s. Northampton managed to secure the king’s favor and was made a privy councilor soon after James came 76

Linda Levy Peck has done detailed work on Northampton and his political milieu. See Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982); “The Mentality of a Jacobean Grandee,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, 148–68.

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to the English throne. The Howard faction of the Jacobean court was comprised primarily, though not exclusively, of members of the Howard family. Thomas Howard, Frances’s father, was one of Northampton’s closest allies. However, non-Howards also bore close connections with Northampton on many political issues. Robert Cecil, the secretary of state, had links with him going back to the 1590s, and some prominent Scotsmen of James’s Bedchamber, such as George Home, were closely affiliated with Northampton as well. The Howards were perceived by contemporaries to be united on a few basic points: they were strong believers in monarchical prerogative, they were generally in favor of a tolerant and reconciliatory policy with Spain, and they had well-known Catholic leanings.77 On all of these points the Howard faction was in ideological conflict with another increasingly identifiable group in the early Jacobean court, the Essex faction. In 1601 the groom’s father, the second earl of Essex, was executed for high treason after a failed insurrection. Though the plot itself was thwarted, the ideals and political policies of Essex and his co-conspirators were alive and well amongst a certain circle of Jacobean courtiers. Many of these courtiers, such as Philip Herbert and the third earl of Essex himself, were significantly younger than the men in the Howard faction and would not become politically active until the middle to later Jacobean period. Others, like Henry Neville, Ralph Winwood, and Henry Wriothesley, were veterans of the Essex circle of the 1590s. Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton, was Essex’s second-in-command when he marched on London.78 The Essex faction, sometimes referred to as the Southampton group when discussed in a Jacobean context, argued for an interventionist foreign policy and vested significant value in the country’s navy and in colonial expansion. 77

The Howard faction was a less unified group than their name implies. The normal Howard qualifications of being Catholic, sympathetic to Spain, and politically aligned with James were not all always fulfilled by everyone allied with Northampton between 1603 and 1614. In addition, one could be a “Howard” on one political issue and a “non-Howard” on another. Robert Cecil is a case in point, being variously linked with Northampton and with his opponents depending on the given issue and the moment at which it was raised. For more nuanced considerations of Jacobean court politics than I have space to give here, see Linda Levy Peck, Northampton; “The Mentality of a Jacobean Grandee”; Pauline Croft, “Robert Cecil and the Early Jacobean Court,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, 134–47; Neil Cuddy, “The Conflicting Loyalties of a ‘Vulgar Counselor’: The Third Earl of Southampton, 1597–1624,” in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer, (eds) John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 121–50; “Anglo-Scottish Union and the Court of King James, 1603–25,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser, 39 (1989): 107–24. 78 For discussions of the court politics of the 1590s—the background, in certain respects, to Jacobean factionalism—see Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 453–536; The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, (ed.) John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Paul E.J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially 341–88.

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Most of all, however, they were identified with a staunch, militaristic brand of Protestantism. As James would find out during the first five years of his reign, it was also followers of Southampton who would lead the resistance to the Union project in Parliament. The English court that James inherited was riddled with ideological and political divisions of the sort encapsulated by the tension between the Howard and Essex groups. Addressing this problem was one of the new king’s first orders of business when he came to London. In its bid to link the Howards and the Essexians, the marriage between Frances Howard and Robert Devereux was specifically designed to neutralize the factional contention that I have just sketched out. However, the match could also be viewed in less diplomatic terms as an attempt to orient the young Devereux’s family loyalties towards the Howards, thereby absorbing the potential political threat posed by the son of the executed second earl before he came of age. But whether perceived as unbiased reconciliation or manipulation, the marriage was meant to result in at least a partial erasure of political tensions within the court, and in this capacity it would have been extremely satisfying to King James.79 With hindsight, we know that this marriage was the starting point for a series of legal allegations that would lead to the re-intensification of the political problems it had initially tried to repair. The accusations of impotence that Frances Howard leveled at Essex, their ensuing divorce, and Howard’s remarriage to the king’s favorite, Robert Carr, all of which took place between 1612 and 1614, will be discussed in chapter four. If for the moment, though, we stay focused on 1606, this marriage appears as it would have to many of its contemporaries, as a constructive and positive act of marriage brokering and an important political statement for reconciliation at court made at the beginning of the new king’s reign. The Howard/Devereux match initiated a series of politic high-profile marriages, all aimed at the integration and pacification of the nation’s political elite. Frances’s marriage to Devereux was just one nuptial event in a string of Howard unions that took place between 1605 and 1608. Frances’s older sister married Lord Knollys in 1605; her younger sister was married to Robert Cecil’s son, William, in 1608; and in the same year as Frances’s own marriage, her brother, Theophilus, was contracted to the daughter of the Scottish earl of Dunbar, only six years old at the time.80 This flurry of marriages at the beginning of James’s reign was calculated to secure influence and power for the families involved. The matches could also be viewed—at least by the king—as key strategic precursors to gaining support for the Great Britain project. Not only 79 One of James’s first orders as king of England, delivered while still in Scotland, was to release Southampton and his co-conspirators from the Tower. This may be viewed as a symbolic act of reconciliation and forgiveness similar to the marriage. It functions as a counterweight of royal benefice to the appointment of Northampton and Scottish nobles to privy council positions. 80 David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London: Routledge, 1993), 13–14. There were no masques commissioned for these other Howard weddings.

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did they create opportunities for metaphorical British propaganda, marriages like that between Howard and Devereux also aimed at establishing a politically stable and monarchically loyal court, a helpful precondition for carrying out any act of policy making, especially one as momentous as national Union. Both Hymenaei and the Barriers were, then, extremely important commissions for Jonson. The marriage of Essex and Howard was the first large-scale manifestation of the king’s policy of political reconciliation. More significantly, though, in symbolic terms the wedding presented the first clear-cut opportunity to link a personal union with the British national Union, and to see the cohesion at court in terms of the hoped-for domestic cohesion within the isle as a whole. Jonson’s entertainments attempt to address these different levels of meaning. In the process, they continue to develop the language of union that we find emerging in The Masque of Blackness of the previous year. One way in which we can chart this panegyrical trajectory is by scrutinizing the very different approach that Hymenaei takes to the representational problem of the virgin body. Unlike The Masque of Blackness, there is no actual Elizabeth-figure in Hymenaei. Virginity manifests itself poetically and thematically, rather than physically, as a character. A central issue in Hymenaei is the nature of the relationship between virginity and chastity, and what role these two concepts should play in a language of union. Does chastity refer to the bride’s pre-consummative virgin state only, or can it—as in the clerical literature on marriage—articulate sexual union too? And if the latter, can union as a concept have an erotic aspect, or does its political dimension require that it remain purely metaphysical? Unlike the more confident Anglo-Scottish marriage masques of 1607 and 1608, Jonson’s Howard/Devereux entertainments never give a definite answer to these questions. They offer instead a variety of solutions. Martin Butler has argued that in The Masque of Blackness and Hymenaei, “Britain and Union were presented as revolutionary rather than evolutionary concepts.”81 In his reading, Jonson’s masques take a “radical line”82 on Jacobean nationhood, while Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque (1607) takes a more restrained stance, imaging Anglo-Scottish Union as something that must be carried out with sensitivity and caution if it is to succeed.83 This section’s focus on the uncertain treatment of the erotics of marriage in Hymenaei should, I hope, serve to query Butler’s appraisal of Jonson’s first two court masques as radical performances that “made few concessions, if any, to the past.”84 Although this may be true of The Masque of Blackness, especially when we witness its appropriative use of the moon-goddess, Hymenaei presents an altogether different situation. Jonson’s tentativeness over how chastity and virginity should function in his 1606 masque arises precisely from the uncomfortable residual associations of those categories of representation. Jonson is, consequently, forced into a negotiative position in which Elizabethan 81

83 84 82

Butler, “The Invention of Britain,” 74. Ibid., 73–4. Ibid., 72–3. Ibid., 74.

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forms of bodily and national codification are engaged in poetic dialogue. Rather than deciding upon one strategy for dealing with this symbolic tension, Jonson’s entertainments display a process of continual experimentation. The short song with which Hymenaei opens establishes the masque’s initial argument for how the relationship between the sexual body and the virgin body should figure in a poetics of union. It is by far the most aggressive treatment of the subject that we find in the entertainment: Bid all profane away; None here may stay To view our mysteries But who themselves have been, Or will in time be seen The self same sacrifice. For Union, mistress of these rites Will be observed with eyes As simple as her nights. (57–65)85

The passage is extremely clear in dictating who shall, and who shall not, be included in the rituals and celebration that the masque has to offer. Union is “mistress of these rites” and, as the song states, those who have no intentions of committing themselves to the precepts of union are not welcome. These are the “profane” that the song bids away. Read in the context of Protestant marriage, this banishment of profanity may be understood as an indictment of the profane love of those who engage in sexual activity outside the proscribed institutional sanctification of wedlock.86 Yet in drawing such a strict line between those who have and those who have not made the “self-same sacrifice” to union, Jonson’s text is also banishing perpetual virginity. In its direct conceptual opposition to union, this state of complete singleness and enclosure is a logical object of censure within the song’s dialectically categorical scheme, signaled by the “all”/“none” emphasis of the opening, which effectively closes off any possibility of negotiation. English Line references for Hymenaei are from Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, (ed.) Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 47–78. 86 The Protestant line on marital sex was overwhelmingly positive. In the conduct books, sexual activity was condoned and in some places even encouraged, regardless of whether or not it was done for the purpose of procreation. On the other hand, sexual activity outside marriage was all the more vilified, being perceived as a threat not only to the given household, but to the larger moral order of society which that household represented on a smaller scale. See Anthony Fletcher, “The Protestant Idea of Marriage in Early Modern England,” in Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, (eds) Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 175–9. A more detailed background to the role of sex in marriage, discussing both ecclesiastical law and social practice, can be found in Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 125–67. 85

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clergymen maintained a very similar attitude towards marriage and virginity in sermons and conduct books. In a sermon preached in 1620, John Wing asserts that virgins are “opposed as incompatible to her that is fully married.”87 Many others took this idea one step further, directly castigating Catholic defenses of virginity as a state superior to marriage: Thomas Taylor complains about those who “opposeth marriage to virginitie as chaffe to wheate, or as evil to good,” and Roland du Jardin says of marriage, “Never was there anything so perfectly good, that by traducing tongues hath not been made to seeme evil.”88 For English clergymen writing on wedlock, virginity is no less an object of censure than illicit fornication, and Ben Jonson’s first two masques are alert to this. Just as The Masque of Blackness prevented the perpetually virgin Elizabethan body from signifying, the opening song of Hymenaei can be read as an attempt to exorcize that same body before the masque even gets underway. Yet the hostility of this attempt to clear a representational space for a poetics of union is short-lived. The speech by Hymen, the god of marriage, which directly follows the song, begins to undermine its vision. In addition to making the crucial link between the nuptial union and the king’s Union of countries, the first two verses of this song introduce the theme of marital progeny. The progeny-topos, as I will explain in more detail below, presents a way for the poet to circumvent the rhetorical disruption of the virginal body and acts as an alternative strategy to the more bellicose denunciation performed in the opening song: What more than usual light, Throughout the place extended, Makes Juno’s fane so bright! Is there some greater deity descended? Or reign on earth those powers So rich, as with their beams Grace Union more than ours, And bound her influence in their happier streams? (72–9)

At the end of this passage, attention is turned towards the image of “their [James and Anna’s] happier streams,” a reference to the royal children: Henry, Elizabeth, and Charles. It was not only a commonly expressed epithalamic convention, but also a standard social belief, that children were the natural outcome of a healthy and productive marriage. Having just emerged from the long, childless reign of Elizabeth, with all of its attendant succession anxieties, early Jacobean panegyrists were especially keen to stress the fact that James had children. The theme of progeny also bore a particular applicability to the representation of marital union after 1603. Celebrating the idea of union through the offspring it John Wing, The Crowne Conjugall or, The Spouse Royall (Middleburgh, 1620), B3r. Thomas Taylor, A good husband and a good wife layd open in a sermon ... (London, 1625), 7; Roland du Jardin, A Discourse of the Married and Single Life ... (London, 1621), A3r. 87

88

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produces presented a convenient way to avoid discussing the merger itself. For while children refer us to the sexual act through which they were conceived, they also exist outside it and, in temporal terms, occur after it. The progeny-topos, accordingly, removes the stumbling block of the virgin body by excluding it from the metaphorical equation. As Hymen’s speech continues, union is placed in yet another kind of relationship with the idea of sexual purity. The fourth verse displays a peculiarly composite vocabulary, continuing to praise the royal couple, but doing so though a language that neither denounces nor entirely evades the virgin body: O you, whose better blisses Have proved the strict embrace Of Union with chaste kisses, And seen it flow so in your happy race (84–7)

The king and queen are being cast as icons of ideal union, a model on which all other unions may be based. Immediately noticeable is the way in which their fruitfulness—signaled by their “happy race”—is portrayed with a physicality entirely absent in the second verse. In these lines, the production of offspring is written as a plainly sexual act. This physicalization of marital fertility also harbors a more subtle rhetorical operation. The increasingly sexual rendering of biological reproduction is described, paradoxically, through a vocabulary of bodily purity. The word “strict” is conspicuously juxtaposed with “embrace,” while “chaste” is used to describe the “kisses.” This makes sense in the context of clerical writing on marriage, which presented sexual pleasure as an important aspect of marital chastity, but it jars noticeably with the typical treatment of chastity in political panegyric, especially late Elizabethan panegyric, where chastity was most often confusingly conflated with virginity. Book 3 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the most famous piece of late-Elizabethan eulogistic writing, is very untypical in that it portrays its paragon of chastity, Britomart, as destined for marriage and childbirth, thus conforming to the clerical understanding of chastity as an attribute of wedlock. In general, it is important to distinguish between clerical and panegyrical treatments of chastity in the later Elizabethan period. As Mary Axton asserts, the politicization of Queen Elizabeth’s pure bodily state meant that “chastity was a virtue which could hardly admit of compromise.”89 Far more representative of late-Elizabethan panegyric is John Lyly’s Euphues and His England (1580), in which Queen Elizabeth is said to have “the chastitie also to refuse all, accounting it no lesse praise to be called a Virgin, then to be esteemed a Venus.” It is chastity that allows the queen “to be called a Virgin” here, leaving no room for the clerical notion of chastity as an ideal attained within marriage. Later in the text, Euphues celebrates the sexual security of women in England: “Their wives without daunger, when others are defamed, their daughters

89

Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, 66

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chast, when others are defloured.”90 In this passage, the “chast” condition is the same thing as the virgin condition, a corporeal classification that is diametrically opposed to the “defloured” body. What we find in Hymenaei, as opposed to Euphues and His England, is that chastity is being disentangled from virginity. The verse from Hymen’s song quoted above posits the possibility of writing the act of sexual union through a language of bodily purity. It adapts the rhetoric of sexual enclosure to the theme of sexual (and political) union. Rather than being a form of physical and national corruption, the sexual encounter becomes socially, politically, and morally productive, something that the double-masque form would have emphasized through performance with the union of male and female masquers. Jonson builds on this idea in the next stanza where marriage becomes not only chaste, but an ordering force of cosmic proportions: It binds The fighting seeds of things, Wins natures, sexes, minds, And every discord in true music brings (88–91)

In these lines, the sexual consummation that Jonson passed over in the second verse to focus on progeny is rewritten—not as unruly natural passion, but as passion’s antithesis. Hymen’s speech acts as a starting point from which the entertainment makes an increasingly daring argument for the physicalization of union, a physicalization that will eventually develop into outright eroticization in later marriage masques. Reason, Hymenaei’s master of ceremonies, maintains the thematic engagement with physical union. This time, direct reference is made to Frances Howard and Robert Devereux: The pair which do each other side, Though yet some space doth them divide, This happy night must both make one Blest sacrifice to Union. Nor is this altar but a sign Of one more soft and more divine, The genial bed, where Hymen keeps The solemn orgies, void of sleeps (143–50)

These lines voice an unequivocal concern with the physical activities of the wedding night, “The solemn orgies, void of sleeps.” In reality, the young couple would not be permitted to consummate their marriage until some time later when they came of age, but the epithalamic convention of allusive eroticism here takes precedent over the facts of the occasion. The use of the altar of Juno in these lines is revealing of the masque’s attempt to fashion union into a sexual topos. The 90 The Complete Works of John Lyly, (ed.) R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 2:209, 211.

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altar is the physical prop around which the various meanings of union cluster in the masque. It projects union as a spiritual and, therefore, metaphysical concept that can operate in either a personal or political context. When Reason announces the couple’s imminent “sacrifice to Union,” the symbol of the altar is being called upon to turn the marriage into a mystical rite of passage. Elsewhere, however, the metaphysicality of the altar-symbol is pointedly negated. In the second half of the quotation, Reason refuses to bury sexual consummation beneath the altar’s layered significances as marital, political, and spiritual union: “Nor is this altar but a sign / Of one more soft and more divine.” By denying the altar its normal role as a “sign,” Reason collapses the space between signifier and signified. As a result, Juno’s altar momentarily is the wedding bed, not just an ambiguous “sign” for that bed. Reason’s attempt to disentangle the physicality of the wedding night from obscuring metaphor contributes to the text’s persistent experimentation with unmediated celebration of the sexual body. Reason’s monologue in praise of Union culminates in an impressive stage spectacle: Juno, accompanied by Jupiter, Iris, and eight ladies “who represented her powers” (205), descend from the sky. The song performed during this descent brings Hymenaei’s extolment of the sexual body to its climax: These, these are they Whom humor and affection must obey; Who come to deck the genial bower, And bring with them the grateful hour That crowns such meetings and excites The married pair to fresh delights, As courtings, kissings, coyings, oaths and vows, Soft whisperings, embracements, all the joys And melting toys That chaster love allows. (233–42)

Juno’s powers are cast as heralds of eroticism, bringing with them “the grateful hour / That crowns such meetings and excites / The married pair to fresh delights.” It is, moreover, these “fresh delights” that keep humankind’s disruptive passions—their humors and affections—under control. Biological order and biological reproduction are mutually dependent in this song. This stands in marked contrast to so much late Elizabethan body rhetoric in which, to use one example, “barrennesse / Is the true fruite of vertue, that may get, / Beare and bring foorth anew in all perfection, / What heretofore savage corruption held / In barbarous Chaos” (24–8; my italics).91 In this poem by George Chapman, the barren virgin body is the antithesis of chaos. Jonson’s text not only reverses this kind of trope, but even itemizes what sexual order might entail. There are, for example, “kissings, 91 The lines are from George Chapman’s 1595 poem, “De Guiana,” in The Poems of George Chapman, (ed.) Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1941), 353–7.

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coyings, oaths and vows,” not to mention “soft whisperings” and “embracements.” The song concludes by referring to these “fresh delights” of Juno’s as “melting toys / That chaster love allows.” The yoking together of “chaster love” and “fresh delights” displaces the kind of body rhetoric we find in something like Lyly’s Euphues and His England, where chastity and virginity are combined and both kept on one side of the hymeneal divide. Hymenaei displays an unwillingness to disengage entirely with the terminology of Elizabethan panegyric, and as a result the masque pushes together words which would traditionally be kept separate in political rhetoric, allowing “chaste” and “kisses,” “strict” and “embrace,” “chaster love” and “fresh delights” to qualify each other. These terms are, consequently, made to signify in new, more flexible ways. Only one year later, in The Lord Hay’s Masque, a tree of chastity would be featured as the central prop in the celebration of a marriage between a Scottish man and an English woman. This sort of iconographical transfer finds a precedent in the poetics of Hymenaei. Adopting retrogressive body rhetoric as a counterweight to the celebration of physical desire is not the only technique used to contain the threatening associations of the sexual body. Another persistent theme in Jonson’s masque is that of progeny. Like the idea of orderly sexuality, the progeny-topos begins to be deployed in Hymen’s opening speech. As we have seen, celebrating the prospect of children deflects attention away from actual marital consummation. Progeny provides an escape, a way to celebrate a sexual and physical version of union without having to represent the consummative moment itself. As an example, let us return to the passage in which Reason denies the metaphorical qualities of the altar of Juno: “Nor is this altar but a sign / Of one more soft and more divine.” In his attempt to trade metaphorical for literal representation, Reason prepares us for complete access to “the solemn orgies, void of sleeps.” However, the speech quickly changes course and our gaze is drawn away from these “solemn orgies.” Just as Cupid begins to hover “with adoration twixt the lovers” (152), the verse becomes crowded with images of childbirth: The tede of white and blooming thorn In token of increase is borne, As also with the ominous light To fright all malice from the night. Like are the fire and water set, That, even as moisture mixed with heat Helps every natural birth to life, So, for their race, join man and wife. (153–60)

The moment Reason suggests consummation she promptly desexualizes it. Physical intimacy is hidden from our view, relayed instead through a clinical, Copernican account of the mixture of moisture and heat. Sexual union is, ultimately, cast as a social and familial duty, rather than as the fulfillment of licensed desire: “So, for their race, join man and wife.” Shifting the focus from bodily union to bodily offspring is no less useful in a national context. Celebrating Great Britain as a glorious “birth” sidesteps that birth’s necessary precondition: the fruitful merger of

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England and Scotland. In both personal and political unions, representing children is less problematic than representing the conception thereof. As the thematic discrepancy between eroticism and progeny suggests, Hymenaei never actually settles on one poetics of union. On one hand, we are presented with a type of nuptial celebration that tries to respond creatively to the conditions of the new reign by exploiting the metaphorical possibilities of marriage. Within this approach, the sexual body and marital consummation are articulated in ways that contribute productively to a political rhetoric of Union. At the same time, there is throughout the masque an identifiable tendency towards evading the physical or sexual associations of marriage. Accordingly, we have passages in which the idea of union is broached through the theme of its political or human offspring. A strategic ambivalence similar to that in Hymenaei can be identified in King James’s own discourses on the Anglo-Scottish Union. In 1607, we recall, James declared that “union is a marriage,” only to discard the metaphor at a later stage in the speech to image Great Britain as an as-of-yet unborn child, with the Borderlands representing “the Navell or Umbilick of both Kingdomes.” Although at many points Jonson’s masque involves itself innovatively with the formulation of monarchical rhetoric, at other moments it simply mirrors the king’s own oratorical shifts between the act of consummation and the product of consummation. There is in much of Jonson’s work, both dramatic and non-dramatic, a tendency to prioritize familial and communal values over individual pleasure.92 But the particular representational tension that is displayed in Hymenaei between progeny and sexual union is far less pervasive in the author’s canon. It rises, I would suggest, from the very specific set of residual and emergent cultural pressures within which Jonson was attempting to assemble a language of union; in particular, the necessity of having to reappraise how the body should function in national myth. Before concluding, some comment needs to be made on Jonson’s Barriers which was performed on the evening following Hymenaei, 6 January 1606. D.J. Gordon noted in 1945 that Jonson purposely chose to recapitulate certain topics in his Barriers that he addressed in his masque the night before.93 There is, indeed, much thematic continuity between the two entertainments. However, the relationship that the Barriers has with Hymenaei is more complex than that of simple recapitulation. The Barriers also assists in processing some of the tensions in the masque’s poetry by schematically externalizing them. Hymenaei is indecisive as to how union should be represented. It prevaricates between physicality and metaphysicality; between wedding night consummation and future progeny; between exorcizing the virgin body (as in the masque’s opening song) and incorporating it (as in 92 On this point see Heather Dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 201–58; and Katharine Eisaman Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 111–51. 93 D.J. Gordon, “Hymenaei: Ben Jonson’s Masque of Union,” in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D.J Gordon, (ed.) Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 179.

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Hymen’s celebration of the royal couple’s “strict embrace”). By integrating these uncertainties into the poetry of the masque, Hymenaei’s celebration of Union also implicitly encodes the arguments against Union. In the Barriers we find a similar tension. This time, however, the cultural anxiety that was implicit in the masque is made explicit. Arguments for and against union—political and personal—are intentionally polarized through the adoption of a debate format: Truth argues in favor of marriage, while Opinion argues in favor of the virgin state. During this dispute, the eulogistic discordances contained in the masque are thrown into sharp relief. Examining how these themes are re-approached in the Barriers will, I believe, help us to draw some conclusions about Hymenaei. The debate format provides a convenient way to explore both positive and negative accounts of union. It also relieves the author of the responsibility of reconciling these two ideological camps. As in most tournament performances, the contention of Truth and Opinion in the Barriers is settled through divine intervention: an angel descends “to grace the nuptial part in this debate” (797). In the absence of this intervening angel, however, there would be no clear winner in the argument. Opinion’s lines are just as persuasive as Truth’s: Virgins in their sweet and peaceful state Have all things perfect, spin their own free fate, Depend on no proud second, are their own Center and circle, now and always one. (717–20)

Opinion’s argument reproduces the conventional late-Elizabethan line on virginity, with “always one” summoning up Elizabeth’s motto, semper eadum. The last two lines demonstrate how bodily virginity could be used to call to mind the national virtues of independence, completeness, and strength. The implication is that union with another party (nation or person) would threaten this self-sustainable state of perfection. This was a commonly expressed sentiment in the 1580s and 1590s. Francis Bacon’s proto-dramatic entertainment, Of Tribute (1592), for example, includes a lengthy speech in which the queen’s virginity and lack of children is portrayed as a divine attribute essential to maintaining the security of the nation: Let no man object to me as a defect in her fortune ... that she liveth a virgin and hath no children ... Should a man have children to be slain by his vassals, as the posthumus of Alexander the Great was? or to call them his impostumes, as Augustus Caesar called his? Peruse the catalogue: Cornelius Sulla, Julius Caesar, Flavius Vespasianus, Septimius Severus, Constantinus the Great, and many more. And the rule holdeth: “Generare et liberi, humana: creare et opera, divina” (Procreation and children are things human; creation and works are things divine).94

Bacon’s text stands out amongst late-Elizabethan defenses of virginity in its precision of argument. Opinion’s lines in the Barriers could be thought of as a 94 Francis Bacon: The Major Works, (ed.) Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48–9.

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more theoretical and meditative version of Bacon’s explicitly political approbation of the aging queen’s singleness. Thinly veiled references to James’s kingship and the reign of his predecessor lurk throughout the Barriers. Earlier in the debate Opinion declares, “The moon when farthest from the sun she shines / Is most refulgent; nearest, most declines” (703–4). These lines invite a very basic allegorical reading. If the Moon is Elizabeth and the Sun is James, the suggestion is that James (or, more precisely, the Union his kingship represents) is a menace to the cultural luminosity of Tudor England. It is, after all, James who was seeking to introduce a “proud second” to English nationhood. In the eyes of some, the Scottish king was even a “proud second” himself in the English court. Hymenaei tried to find ways to recast the cultural affront posed by Union as a form of national renewal. In the Barriers that affront can be articulated directly, as long as it remains contained within the voice of Opinion. If we turn to Truth’s argument, we find it to be no less lucid than Opinion’s. But the specific mode of exhortation Truth adopts hints at a lingering discomfort with the sexual dimension of marital union: The golden tree of marriage began In paradise, and bore the fruit of man, On whose sweet branches angels sat and sung, And from whose firm root all society sprung. (655–8)

Truth’s marriage propaganda extrapolates the progeny theme from Hymenaei, giving us a distinctly social account of the benefits of wedlock. Marriage is described as the bond that ties “subjects to sovereigns” (729), or, as above, the institution “from whose firm root all society sprung.” There is no mention of the two people actually involved in the union, let alone of consummation or the wedding bed. Truth’s de-physicalized defense of wedlock substantiates the similar tendency towards erotic evasion that we have seen displayed in the masque. Hymenaei’s praises for marital sexuality are persistently qualified by sociodomestic constructions of marriage centering on offspring. Although Hymenaei is characterized above all by representational vacillation, there is a sense that by the end of the Howard/Devereux entertainments, the progeny-topos has secured a poetic pride of place in the author’s emergent rhetoric of union. As conventional as Jonson’s debate between Truth and Opinion is, there are important choices being made in it. Truth’s defense of marriage in the Barriers does not, for example, draw upon the erotic formulations of union that we find in Hymenaei. There is no revisitation of marriage’s “fresh delights,” such as “kissings, coyings, oaths and vows.” When actually confronted by Opinion’s fully articulated exaltation of bodily and cultural virginity, Jonson deemed a desexualized and social account of union to be the surest form of retaliation for Truth. Jonson’s entertainments for the marriage of Frances Howard and Robert Devereux begin with more confidence than they end with. It is at the opening of Hymenaei, for instance, that the view put forward in Martin Butler’s essay, that the masque took a “radical line” on the idea of British Union, appears most justifiable. The first song in Hymenaei bids “all profane away”—all those not

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presently or imminently committed to the precepts of union. This song attempts to clear a discursive space in which a language of union can be spoken, free from the ideological entanglements of late-Elizabethan political encomia. It promises to rewrite the received paradigmatic relationship between the body and the nation. However, as I have argued, this revolutionary break from the panegyrical past very quickly disintegrates into uncertainty and equivocation. The politicized celebration of marital sexuality competes with the post-sexual praise of progeny. And it is this latter theme that eventually wins the day in the Barriers. The 1606 marriage entertainments explore how the sexual body could be made to signify politically in the absence of a readily available language through which to do so. We see in the “strict embrace” and “chaste kisses” of Hymenaei, the Elizabethan vocabulary of virginity being adapted to the praise of physical union. At other times, as in the Barriers, we find the topic of marital sexuality being avoided altogether. By fluctuating in this way between confrontation with and evasion of established rhetoric, Hymenaei evidences the markedly improvised nature of the early Jacobean language of union. The formulation of a coherent system of union rhetoric started with King James. The Union of the Crowns, which came into effect the moment the Scottish king succeeded to the English throne, demanded a new form of national myth, one in which the legal, political, and administrative changes that the king sought could be most alluringly embedded. As witnessed in the early speeches and proclamations, rehearsing inherited forms of English monarchical rhetoric highlighted what was unfamiliar and menacing about James’s reign, rather than easing the political transition between the new king and Elizabeth I. Accordingly, to return to the quote with which I opened, James “began to speak the language of national union,” to employ, that is, a system of verbal coercion aimed specifically at convincing his nation of the viability and desirability of living in a united Great Britain. What I have been trying to illustrate in this chapter is that this language of union was not accessible to James or anyone else in early Jacobean England in a pre-established form. Rather, it was devised by rewriting existing encomiastic formulas. The language of union had to be constructed out of a patchwork of various received rhetorical devices. Marriage entertainments contributed significantly to this process. Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness, Hymenaei, and Barriers, explore the same political and corporeal themes as James does in his parliamentary addresses. In doing so, the masques imagine solutions to problems of national representation that the king himself had not arrived at. Many of the rhetorical and theatrical conventions of nuptial performance, therefore, developed in reaction to the historically specific pressures of the AngloScottish Union project. The motif of foreign visitors to the Jacobean court; the idea of James possessing transformative powers; the eroticization of the bride’s body: all of these things were used as part of an attempt to find an appropriate sign system through which the new conditions of Jacobean monarchy could be propagandized. It is the fundamentally open-ended and always unfinished character of this sign system that would allow for it to be redeployed in other political contexts in the marriage entertainments written over the next 10 years.

Chapter 2

Erotic Policy: The Rhetoric of Anglo-Scottish Marriage Elite marriage celebrations like those for Frances Howard and Robert Devereux contributed to the rhetorical development of the Great Britain project. This was matched, however, by more practical attempts at Anglo-Scottish integration. Throughout James’s reign, the English court was a testing ground for British Union. James had arrived in the south with a retinue of Scottish noblemen with whom English officials now had to work in unison. In order to integrate fellow Scots into the English governmental apparatus, the king effectively altered the bureaucratic structure of the court. First, the number of privy council positions was expanded to accommodate James’s countrymen. Second, a new Bedchamber was organized which was occupied almost exclusively by Scots. Prior to George Villiers in 1615, Philip Herbert was the only Englishman to hold a Bedchamber position. Unlike its Elizabethan equivalent, the Jacobean Bedchamber would afford its members rich opportunities in the realm of political patronage and power. The third important integration measure, and the topic of this chapter, was the king’s active encouragement of intermarriage between English and Scottish nobility, most often between Scottish men and English women. In 1607 James and Anna ceased to co-habit, severely undercutting the efficacy of the royal marriage as an ideal symbol of union at court. Elite Anglo-Scottish marriages served as a symbolic counterweight to this domestic rift at the very top of the political hierarchy and may also have harkened back to the marriage of James’s grandfather, James IV, to the English Margaret Tudor in 1503, the mixed union that paved the way for James’s English accession 100 years later. 

See further, Neil Cuddy, “The Revival of the Entourage: The Bedchamber of James I, 1603–25,” in The English Court from the War of the Roses to the Civil War, (eds) David Starkey et al. (Harlow: Longman, 1987), 173–225; “Anglo-Scottish Union and the Court of James I, 1603–25”; and Keith M. Brown, “The Scottish Aristocracy, Anglicization, and the Court, 1603–38,” The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 543–76.  There were some exceptions to this. I have already mentioned the six-year-old daughter of the Earl of Dunbar being contracted to marry Theophilus Howard in 1606 (00). Another example is the marriage between William Cavendish and Christina Bruce, the daughter of Lord Kinloss, in 1608. For this latter marriage, see The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, (ed.) John Nichols, 4 vols (London: J.B. Nichols, 1828), 2:193–5. The marriage is also mentioned by Brown, “The Scottish Aristocracy, Anglicization, and the Court,” 569.  See Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 26.

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This famous royal nuptial notwithstanding, high-profile Anglo-Scottish marriage was extremely uncommon and James’s policy of elite integration was nothing if not novel. As Brian Levack points out, “Prior to 1603 Anglo-Scottish marriages had been rare, except in the Borderlands, where they took place frequently and illegally.” Moving the practice of Anglo-Scottish marriage from a status that was peripheral and illegal to one that was royally sanctioned and institutionally central highlighted the socio-political implications of James’s new kingship in a very tangible way. As Lori Anne Ferrell puts it in her deft account of the liturgical politics of mixed marriage, “What might be seen as the least politically substantial of the king’s personal initiatives had the potential to wield the strongest cultural impress: James worked to unite his dual kingdoms one couple at a time.” This chapter is concerned with the nature of the political rhetoric occasioned by elite miscegenation. How did wedding celebrations at court attempt to translate these politically potent nuptial events into an expressly Jacobean form of national myth? In seeking to answer this question, I shall be focusing on the entertainments mounted for the two most prominent Anglo-Scottish marriages of James’s reign: Thomas Campion’s The Lord Hay’s Masque (1607), performed for the marriage of James Hay and Honora Denny, and Ben Jonson’s The Haddington Masque (1608), performed for the marriage of John Ramsay and Elizabeth Radcliffe. My aim, specifically, will be to show how eroticism emerges as a key concept within the language of union. The Anglo-Scottish marriage masques extend and inflate the tentative explorations of marital sexuality that we have seen taking place in Hymenaei. They situate the theme of erotic desire at the center of their fictions and use this theme to communicate a monarchically gratifying vision of British nationhood. The clear metaphorical link between the Anglo-Scottish marriages and their national analogue endowed the conventional celebration of the wedding night with a heightened political significance. Since the British Union is figured through the persons of the bride and groom in these performances, their sexual consummation represented not just the physical climax of their wedding, but also the political climax of national merger. As this suggests, the eulogizing of marriage between Scots and English involved navigating an imaginative space in which the relationship between sexual and political representation asserted itself with particular urgency. Campion and Jonson’s entertainments reveal the representational challenge that mixed marriage posed to received ways of imagining English nationhood, but they also indicate the large extent to which eroticism assisted in meeting those challenges. In adopting a mode of celebration that was diametrically opposed to the twinned values of sexual and political insularity, Campion and Jonson used the occasion of Anglo-Scottish marriage to counter xenophobic resistance to the Great Britain project. Brian Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 186–7.  Lori Anne Ferrell, “The Sacred, the Profane, and the Union: Politics of Sermon and Masque at the Court Wedding of Lord and Lady Hay,” in Politics, Religion, and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell, (eds) Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 49. 

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The parliamentary session of 1606/7 stands as an important context for understanding the rhetoric of the Anglo-Scottish marriage masques. For James’s part, the fostering of marriages between English and Scottish nobility may be seen not only as part of a general policy of assimilation, but also as a more specific reaction to the debates on British naturalization which took place in Parliament between February and April 1607. The Anglo-Scottish Union Commission had proposed in their Instrument of 1604 that both “ante-nati” and “post-nati” Scots and Englishmen—those born both before and after James’s official accession to the English throne on 24 March 1603—be naturalized as British citizens. However, only post-nati citizens were finally approved by Parliament three years later. This decision had significant consequences. It meant that, for the time being, the only legally British citizens (besides perhaps James himself) were very young children. What is more, it meant that further realization of a legitimate British national identity was dependent on the birth of more children. In this context, Anglo-Scottish marriage takes on a vital role, both symbolically and quite literally. The wedding enacts the political Union of England and Scotland on an individual scale, while the offspring resulting from the marriage contribute to a growing body of legally British subjects. These children would have Britishness running in their very veins, a condition that James insistently claimed for himself as well, describing the Anglo-Scottish merger as “that Union which is made in my blood.” Masque poets who were given the task of celebrating Anglo-Scottish weddings were, therefore, mythologizing events with a great deal of political immediacy. The 1607 naturalization debates also interrogated the sustainability of arguing for British Union based on the political authority of the king’s body. From James’s point of view, the naturalization of all Scots and Englishmen as British citizens was a logical and necessary administrative extension of his own mixed bloods. His hybrid body natural demanded a single British allegiance, and that allegiance, he maintained, should be reproduced in the legal structure of the body politic: “There is over both [countries] but unus Rex, so there may be in both but unus Grex & una Lex.” There is one king, so there should be one flock, and one law that protects this unity. Opponents of the Union, however, were not so convinced by James’s  Though unfortunately neglected by historians, the activities of the Anglo-Scottish Union Commission, between July and December 1604, comprise a critical stage in British policymaking. A rare in-depth discussion of the role of the Commission in early Jacobean political history can be found in Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), 58–78. The Commission’s journal is preserved in British Library Additional ms. 26635 fols. 1–29.  The Political Works of James I, (ed.) Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 271.  Ibid., 292.  James believed that the authority of the king superseded the authority of the law. He therefore found parliamentary opposition to the Union based upon the precepts of the English legal system infuriating. His insistence on the idea of “unus Rex ... unus Grex & unus Lex,” and on the king as “Lex loquens” (a speaking law) (Political Works, [ed.] McIlwain, 299) should be viewed in this context. James argues his position on this issue

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political theology. The Commons’ strategy for refuting the king’s stubbornness on the issue of naturalization involved reformulating Medieval two-body theory so that it could be used against him. The lawyers in the House broke the theoretical cotermineity of the king’s natural and political bodies, giving allegiance to the body politic priority over allegiance to the body natural. This was a radical alteration. For English anti-Unionists it meant that adherence was owed to the Crown of England as a concept and, even more importantly, to the laws of England as an institution, before it was owed to the physical body natural of James in particular. Bruce Galloway summarizes this interpretive revision succinctly: “James, as king of two nations, had one body natural but two bodies politic, and two allegiances.”10 Englishmen were only subject to James as king of England, and Scotsmen only owed him allegiance as king of Scotland. In the 1603 parliament, James had tried to bypass opposition to his Great Britain project by announcing a union “which God hath in my Person already established,”11 the implication being that it was too late to do anything about it. The king was attempting to safeguard the Union by mooring it to the fact of his “Person.” What he was not counting on was the devaluation of that person’s political viability by the Commons four years later. The intensely corporeal nature of James’s authority in The Lord Hay’s Masque and The Haddington Masque gains an acute political topicality when we look at it in the light of the 1607 naturalization debates. There is, for example, in both masques, considerable emphasis placed on the king’s sexual fruitfulness. At certain moments he is even represented as co-opting the maternal capacities of the bride. By lending symbolic potency to James’s body natural, the Anglo-Scottish marriage masques offset the attempts to cancel that body altogether in the House of Commons. What the parliamentary session of 1606/7 should alert us to is that at this precise historical moment bodily representation carried very high political stakes: the body had moved beyond its conventional political status as national metaphor or synecdoche to become an actual object of British policy making. In denying ante-nati Jacobean subjects the right to British citizenship, Parliament turned the future of British identity into a sexual issue. The procreative bodies of Anglo-Scottish newly-weds, in particular, acquired compelling symbolic import. In addition, by challenging the political relevance of James’s body natural, the 1606/7 parliament exposed a weakness in the rhetoric of monarchical corporeality. It is precisely in this newly opened space between the body and the realm that the Anglo-Scottish marriage masques assert their erotic rhetoric of nationhood.

in detail in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, insisting that “the kings were the authors and makers of the Lawes, and not the Lawes of the kings” (King James VI and I: Selected Writings, (eds) Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003], 269). 10 Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 107. 11 Political Works, (ed.) McIlwain, 272.

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Eroticizing National Rhetoric: The Lord Hay’s Masque Thomas Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque was performed on 6 January 1607 to celebrate the marriage of James’s Hay and Honora Denny. James Hay, like Philip Herbert, was one of the king’s favored courtiers, and though James’s infatuation never reached the intensity that characterized his later relationships with Robert Carr and George Villiers, James Hay was still one of the most successful Scotsmen to come to the English court, receiving a number of honors and titles between 1603 and 1625. He was one of the nobles chosen by James to accompany him on his journey southwards in 1603, and, shortly thereafter, in England, he was made a gentleman of the Bedchamber.12 By 1604, James had set about trying to organize a marriage contract for Hay with the English heiress, Honora Denny. For both James Hay and the king, the match with Honora Denny had much to offer. From the king’s point of view it constituted a major step in Anglo-Scottish integration at court, and for Hay it offered an increase in wealth and stronger connections to both the Cecil and Howard families.13 The bride’s father, on the other hand, Sir Edward Denny, was not so readily convinced. It took 18 months of negotiations and bribes for Denny to consent to a Scottish husband for his daughter.14 Between 1604 and 1606, James granted Strixton Manor and other lands to Hay, his wife, and all of their future offspring; he raised Hay’s profile in the marriage market by creating him a baron for life; and even made Edward Denny himself a baron for good measure.15 Yet the awkward conditions of his daughter’s wedding would remain a thorn in Denny’s side even after Honora’s death in 1614.16 He became outraged in 1621/22 at what he felt was 12

Later in the reign, Hay was created Viscount Doncaster (5 July 1618) and earl of Carlisle (30 September 1622). See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (eds) H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25:1007–8; The Scots Peerage, (ed.) James Balfour Paul, 9 vols (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1904–14), 5:218–19. I have drawn on both the old and new Dictionary of National Biography in this study. In short references, the old dictionary will be designated “Dictionary of National Biography,” the new one will be referred to as “Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.” 13 Honora’s father, Sir Edward Denny, was a friend of Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, and a kinsman of Thomas Cecil, earl of Exeter. See David Lindley, “Who Paid For Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque?” Notes and Queries 26 (1979): 144. 14 Brown, “The Scottish Aristocracy, Anglicization, and the Court,” 570. 15 Dictionary of National Biography, (eds) Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 66 vols (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1885–1903), 25:265. 16 Three years later, in 1617, Hay took another English wife, Lucy Percy. Again, Hay’s Scottishness was a problem for the father of the bride-to-be, the earl of Northumberland. He apparently offered his daughter £20,000 if she would refuse Hay and is also reported to have said that he “could not indure that his daughter shold daunce any Scottish giggs.” See The Letters of John Chamberlain, (ed.) Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 2:85, 58.

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a series of malicious allusions to the circumstances of Honora’s marriage in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania.17 The Hay/Denny match was, in the end, not only shortlived, but a perpetual source of doubt and aggravation for the bride’s father. Be that as it may, King James had made every attempt to ensure that the marriage was a complete success and rewarding to everyone concerned. He had even tried to get the couple off to a good start by settling all of Hay’s debts for him.18 The financial lengths that James went to for Hay and Denny cannot be written off entirely as the traits of a spendthrift king. It is also, I believe, a testament to the importance that this marital union held for him. As negotiations over the Union in Parliament were sliding deeper into deadlock, the symbolic value of this first high-profile AngloScottish marriage must have become increasingly intensified. Campion’s masque was assigned the task of conveying that symbolic value. When the king had been seated in the Hall of Whitehall Palace on the evening of the wedding, the curtain was drawn to reveal a hill where Flora and Zephyrus were picking flowers. Once their baskets were filled, they descended towards the audience, followed by a group of sylvans; two carrying the flowers and four others with instruments. As they approached, they performed a song: Now hath Flora robbed her bowers To befriend this place with flowers; Strew about, strew about, The sky rained never kindlier showers. Flowers with bridals well agree, Fresh as brides and bridegrooms be; Strew about, strew about, And mix them with fit melody. (191–8)

This is markedly different from the opening of a marriage masque like Hymenaei, in which “Union” is designated “mistress of these rites,” with James promptly recognized as Union’s authoritative overseer. Hymenaei begins with an immediate acknowledgment of the political context in which it is being performed. The Lord Hay’s Masque, on the other hand, creates a sexually regenerative landscape in which politics are ostensibly effaced. This has led some critics to think of the masque as lacking gravitas or topical relevance. Stephen Orgel, for instance, feels

The passage in question is the story of Sirelius in Book 4. See The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, (ed.) Josephine A. Roberts, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol 40 (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1995), 515–17. The contemporary topicality of the Sirelius story has been commented upon in J. O’Connor, “James Hay and the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,” Notes & Queries 200 (1955): 150–52; Paul Salzman, “Contemporary References in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” Review of English Studies 29 (1978): 178–81; and Josephine A. Roberts, “An Unpublished Literary Quarrel Concerning the Suppression of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621),” Notes and Queries 21 (1977): 532–5. 18 Dictionary of National Biography, 25:265. 17

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that Campion uses pastoralism with “no dramatic or symbolic purpose.”19 More recently, Graham Parry has claimed that “the political dimension of the masque” only became apparent through the introductory poems in the printed text, whereas in the performance itself, “Pleasure and festivity predominated.”20 I think, however, that we need to reassess the relative politicization of Campion’s aesthetics. As pleasurable and festive as it is, the erotic pastoralism of The Lord Hay’s Masque also constitutes a highly polemical language.21 The fruitful landscape of Campion’s entertainment acts as a trope for the political and cultural regenerativity of a united Great Britain. It is only through the repression of Cynthia and Night, who attempt to impede the erotic celebration, that the masque’s fertile national topography can be maintained. The overtly conflictual nature of this narrative makes The Lord Hay’s Masque the most rhetorically confrontational of the early Jacobean masques. And yet, the opening scene displays none of this impending conflict. Instead, Anglo-Scottish marriage occupies an Edenic space of consensual pleasure. Through the suggestive ritual of flower reaping, we are asked to view the nuptial event in essentially sexual terms. The opening song begins by pointing out that these flowers “with bridals well agree,” moving, in the last two lines of the first verse, to a more explicit account of their emblematic significance: “as a rose new plucked from Venus’ thorn, / So doth a bride her bridegroom’s bed adorn” (202–3). Here, the motif of the flowers represents the eroticized and sexually complicit body of the bride who “adorn[s]” her husband’s bed. It is this eroticized bridal body that Campion pinpoints as the iconographic axis of the nuptial festivities. The activity of flower gathering becomes, in effect, a festive ritualization of the de-flowering of the bride. This use of eroticism could, in one sense, be viewed as a relatively straightforward promulgation of one of the basic precepts of Protestant marriage. The official ecclesiastical line on marriage presented the institution as a morally and socially safe container for sexual desire.22 Yet The Lord Hay’s Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 101. 20 Graham Parry, “The Politics of the Jacobean Masque,” in Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts, (eds) J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 90. 21 In an important article on early Stuart pastoral, Martin Butler dubbed Ben Jonson’s masque, Pan’s Anniversary (1621), “The text which first fully appropriated the pastoral mode in the service of the court’s ideological needs” (“Ben Jonson’s Pan’s Anniversary and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral,” English Literary Renaissance 22 [1992]: 370). However, as the present discussion should show, Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque presents a considerably earlier example of ideologically attuned pastoral performed in the Jacobean court. The seminal of study of the politics of pastoral in the early modern period (and beyond) is Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 22 On the role of sex in English Protestant marriage, see chapter one, n. 86. The Protestant construction of the virgin body, on the other hand, informs Marie H. Loughlin’s essay, “‘Love’s Friend and Stranger to Virginitie’: The Politics of the Virginal Body in Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei and Thomas Campion’s The Lord Hay’s Masque,” English Literary History 63 (1996): 833–49. 19

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Masque’s regenerative bower of Flora also marks a poetic readjustment to the representation of sexual bodies in wedlock. This is suggested in the speech that follows the first song. Flora comments on the sexually charged imagery presented at the opening of the masque with a conspicuous disclaimer: Let none profane Think that these fruits from common hills are ta’en, Or vulgar valleys which do subject lie To winter’s wrath, and cold mortality. (222–5)

Having located marriage, and more particularly the body of the bride, in a landscape of sexual complicity, the disclaimer above serves as a reassurance that this garden is prelapsarian and, therefore, innocent. The inclusion of these lines in an otherwise unabashed celebration of sexual profligacy refers us to another strand in the early modern account of marriage, one which ran parallel to its formulation as a container of sexual desire. Representations of matrimony were very often dominated by the danger and death associated with the very first marriage, that between Adam and Eve. Catherine Belsey has examined this phenomenon in detail in her study of Shakespeare and family values, noting that “if the clerical accounts of the first marriage turn out to be overshadowed by a knowledge of the short-lived character of the innocence they invoke, Shakespeare’s plays, it seems, are still less optimistic about the stability of the institution in a fallen world, repeatedly linking conjugal desire with danger and sorrow.”23 Whether it is through the unfounded rages of Posthumus, Othello, and Leontes, or the wedding beds, chests, and other nuptial gifts that consistently depict the first temptation and the loss of paradise, the representation of marriage in early modern England frequently reveals the institution to be fraught with submerged fears of sexuality that threaten to destroy the ideal of nuptial union. In the pessimistic words of one churchman (ironically, from a treatise written in favor of the married state), “If the Paradise of God may (possibly) yield a bad wife, what probability is there that any prohibited place can yield a good? And if the first man did fall there, how can any hope to stand upon this unholy ground?”24 Taking this strand of marriage representation under consideration, the passage of The Lord Hay’s Masque quoted above stands out as an interesting point of comparison with the general celebratory tone of the rest of the masque’s opening. Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999), 55–84 (p. 60). 24 John Wing, The Crowne Conjugall or, The Spouse Royall (Middleburgh, 1620), M4r-v. The idea that all marriages are subject to perpetual threat manifests itself in Samuel Daniel’s play, Hymen’s Triumph (1614), performed on the occasion of Lady Jane Drummond’s marriage to Robert Kerr, Lord Roxborough. In the Prologue to the play Hymen is harassed by Avarice, Envy, and Jealousy, who declare, “How long as thou mak’st marriages, / So long will we produce incumbrances” (57–8). I discuss Hymen’s Triumph in more depth in Chapter 4. 23

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Flora’s disclaimer tries to circumvent the darker associations of marital sexuality by insisting that the garden presented by the masque does not “subject lie / To winter’s wrath, and cold mortality.” The prelapsarian landscape in which Campion positions marriage holds no waiting serpents. The masque’s eroticization of personal and political union is a departure not only from Old Testament foreboding about marriage, but also from a major strand of late Elizabethan panegyric. Campion’s sexual landscape is a place void of dewinter, devoid of death. Immortality and purity is, therefore, firmly rooted in marriage and the erotics through which, in this masque, it is constructed. In late Elizabethan panegyric, on the other hand, immortality, or at least longevity, was most often linked to the queen’s virginal sexual purity, what Helen Hackett has described as Elizabeth’s “double triumph over the flesh.”25 Elizabeth, that is, triumphs over the mortal decay of the body by sealing herself off from the taint of sexual penetration. By relocating both innocent erotic pleasure and longevity in marriage, Campion’s masque uses the Denny/ Hay wedding to foster a fruitful and regenerative portrayal of British nationhood. It discounts the more ominous cultural associations of marital union and, more specifically, marital sexuality. Since it is the projected births resulting from this marriage that are of prime symbolic consequence, the celebration of sexual proclivity needs to be carried out through a sign system that is as unproblematic as possible. These disclaiming lines in Flora’s speech seek to assure that, by exorcizing a representational tradition that could adversely affect political interpretation. Nevertheless, about midway through the masque a new setting is unveiled. The image of Flora’s garden gives way to a second vista. We are now shown a hill mounted by Diana’s tree of chastity. Surrounding the hill is a grove with trees of gold. The action that will unfold in this part of the masque challenges the erotic iconography that had been developed up to this point. Once the scenery is presented, Night descends from her house and delivers the following speech: Vanish, dark veils, let Night in glory shine As she doth burn in rage; come, leave our shrine You black-haired Hours, and guide us with your lights: Flora hath wakened wide our drowsy sprights. See where she triumphs, see her flowers are thrown, And all about the seeds of malice sown. Despiteful Flora, is’t not enough of grief That Cynthia’s robbed, but thou must grace the thief? Or didst not hear Night’s sovereign queen complain Hymen had stol’n a nymph out of her train And matched her here, plighted henceforth to be Love’s friend, and stranger to virginity? (267–78)

25 Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1995), 97.

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Although earlier in the masque Flora had staunchly denied a reading of her bower as “vulgar valleys which do subject lie / To winter’s wrath, and cold mortality,” Night’s accusation introduces the possibility of just such an interpretation. Flora’s garden of innocent sexuality has now become a place where one finds “the seeds of malice sown.” In Night’s speech, sexual complicity represents the downfall of innocence and purity. What is more, Night directly condemns the erotic celebration of male desire prominent in the first part of the masque: “Is’t not enough of grief / That Cynthia’s robbed, but thou must grace the thief?” The thief to whom Night refers is the Scottish James Hay, who has pillaged, as it were, the virgin ladies of England by taking Honora Denny as a bride. This is the first of two instances in The Lord Hay’s Masque in which Scottish men are implicitly referred to as thieves. At a later point in the altercation, Night reiterates that Cynthia’s “holy forests are by thieves profaned” (297). In his edition of the masque, David Lindley glosses these thief references as manifestations of “very frequently expressed English fears of the Scots’ pillaging the riches of the kingdom—and seizing the marriageable women.”26 This concurrently economic and sexual English apprehension of the Scots is aptly expressed in one widely circulated contemporary verse libel that complains, “They beg our goods, our lands, and our lives, / They whip our Nobles and lie with their wives.”27 Within two short lines, the public fears of Scots monopolizing England’s economic and political resources morphs into a private sexual fear of the Scottish male libido. Night’s condemnation of male desire summons up these anxieties, which the first part of the masque had attempted to convert into erotic celebration. Through Night’s sinister recasting of male desire, the Denny/Hay marriage is placed within a new sexual topography. Flora and Zephyrus, of course, fervently defend the taking of a nymph for marriage. Their arguments remind us of Truth in Jonson’s Barriers. Flora explains that “virginity is a voluntary power, / Free from constraint, even like an untouched flower / Meet to be gathered when ‘tis throughly blown” (281–3). Zephyrus then adopts a naturalistic argument, asserting that “Nature ordained not men to live alone; / Where there are two, a woman should be one” (293–4). These rejoinders attempt to extend the sexual rhetoric of the first part of the masque, but Night’s retort maintains a menacing vision of marital desire: Thou breath’st sweet poison, wanton Zephyrus, But Cynthia must not be deluded thus. 26 Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments 1605–1640, (ed.) David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 223 n. 297. 27 “Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources,” (eds) Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae, E1. Early Modern Literary Studies Text Series I (2005). . Jenny Wormald gives us a sense of just how intense English xenophobia against the Scots was in the early Jacobean period, arguing that the 1605 Gunpowder Plot was motivated by anti-Scottishness far more than anti-Protestantism: see “Gunpowder, Treason, Scots,” Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 141–68.

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Her holy forests are by thieves profaned, Her virgins frighted; and lo, where they stand That late were Phoebus’ knights, turned now to trees By Cynthia’s vengement for their injuries In seeking to seduce her nymphs with love. (295–301)

The sexual Eden described in the first part of the masque is now being represented as a fallen world, a garden of raped nymphs. Sexual complicity has given way to sexual violation. Implicit throughout the conflict between Night/Cynthia and Flora/Zephyrus is a question concerning how the English body politic signifies in the context of Anglo-Scottish marriage. In accordance with the reality of the wedding, England is represented as a female body in this masque. What the contrasting sexual topographies should suggest is the cultural dilemma of deciding how to imagine the transformation that body undergoes when subjected to union. Does Anglo-Scottish Union lead the English body politic into a process of cultural regeneration—a rebirth into a former more glorious state of Britishness? Or does it, rather, represent a form of cultural rape to the English body politic—a threat to cultural purity? This uncertain tension also lurks in the rhetoric of Francis Bacon’s pro-Union tract, A Brief Discourse Touching the Happy Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland (1603). Bacon describes the British Union as enacting as process of mistio (or consensual mingling), as opposed to the politically dangerous compositio unions, which are enforced “conjunction[s] of bodies in place.”28 The British mistio is cast as politically and culturally regenerative, a union “of peace and continuance.”29 However, Bacon’s closing wish is that “the happy union of your Majesty’s two kingdoms of England and Scotland may be in as good an hour and under the like divine providence, as that was between the Romans and the Sabines.”30 What Bacon does not say is that in the history of early Rome, the reconciliation between the Sabines and the Romans was preceded by the Roman army’s rape of the Sabine women, an act of collective brutality that led to war between the two nations.31 Bacon, like most of his readers, surely would have known this. The rape of the Sabine women was a central story in the legendary account of how the city of Rome formed and was frequently represented in the visual arts of early modern Europe.32 The metaphor of the Roman-Sabini union 28 The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, (ed.) James Spedding, 7 vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1861–74), 3:94. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 99. 31 The Oxford Classical Dictionary, (eds) Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1342. 32 The rape of the Sabine women is represented, for example, in paintings by Il Sodoma (1506–7), now at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome; Peter Paul Rubens (1635–40), now at the National Gallery in London; and Nicholas Poussin (c.1637), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. There is also Giovanni da Bologna’s famous sculpture of the rape of the Sabine women (1583) in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence.

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disrupts the consensual and naturalistic rhetoric that Bacon had used throughout his Discourse in much the same way that Night’s unexpected invocation of rape and destruction disrupts the erotic festivity of the first part of The Lord Hay’s Masque. Campion’s contrasting sexual topographies alert us, then, to the duplicitous sexual associations of the idea of union and the resultantly unstable way that the body becomes politicized when discussing it. The dispute over the theft of Cynthia’s nymph not only helps to delineate competing perceptions of the de-insularized English body politic, it also posits how such discrepancies may be categorized historically. On one hand, there are the explicitly Elizabethan associations of Night. She is a servant of Cynthia—who, like Aethiopia, is a figure associated with the moon and the virtue of chastity. Cynthia’s tree of chastity even adorns the masquing area when Night first appears.33 Soon thereafter, when Night reveals that the golden grove is composed of “Phoebus’ knights, turned now to tress”—a punishment for “seeking to seduce her nymphs with love”—we are confronted with an oppositional Jacobean topos. Phoebus was one of James’s standard personae. Although neither Cynthia (Elizabeth) nor Phoebus (James) appear in person at any point in the masque, the presences of both are encoded verbally and through a range of visual symbols. Cynthia is associated with the tree of chastity and Night’s rhetoric of sexual violation, while Phoebus is linked with the regenerative sexual topography of the first part of the masque and, of course, with his knights who are initially introduced in an Ovidian state of arboreal paralysis. Through this framework of associations, The Lord Hay’s Masque dramatizes conflicting perceptions of Anglo-Scottish marriage as a collision between residual and emergent rhetorics of the body. If we continue reading Night’s retort to Flora and Zephyrus, the contrast between her dark Anglo-Scottish topography and their flower-strewn bower becomes more and more severe. Night’s condemnation of the knights’ amorous advances is carried out in increasingly violent terms as their immobilized state is described: Apollo’s love to them doth yet appear, In that his beams hath gilt them as they grow, To make their misery yield the greater show. But they shall tremble when sad Night doth speak, And at her stormy words her boughs shall break. (304–8)

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The association of Night and Cynthia/Diana with Queen Elizabeth is accepted across the board: Lindley, “Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque and Anglo-Scottish Union,” Huntington Library Quarterly 43 (1979): 11; Martin Butler, “The Invention of Britain and the Early Stuart Masque,” in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, (ed.) R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 73; Loughlin, “‘Love’s Friend and Stranger to Virginitie’,” 843; Jean MacIntyre, “Queen Elizabeth’s Ghost at the Court of James I: The Masque of Blackness, The Lord Hay’s Masque, and Oberon,” Ben Jonson Journal 5 (1998): 88.

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This is the pinnacle of Night’s vengeance. If the immobilization of male desire through the enclosing trees represents the enforced impotence dealt out to the knights by Cynthia, then Night’s threat that “at her stormy words their boughs shall break” enacts a further fantasy of castration. In the world of Night and Cynthia, Great Britain represents the false fruit that brings about the downfall of the lusting Scottish knights. Campion’s strategy of eroticization, as seen in the first part of the masque (and revisited again later), proposes a substitute for such fictions. The bower of Flora presents a royally pleasing political metaphor in which the English female body is oriented towards a British birth. Night and Cynthia, on the contrary, preempt this birth, casting the union itself as sexual violation, something from which nothing positive could spring. Reassessing Cynthia David Lindley has read Night’s antipathy towards the knights as a critique of James’s Union project. “Campion’s masque,” Lindley explains, “by presenting the celebration of the marriage as dependent upon the Knights’ learning the value of temperance, clearly warns the king and court that the greater marriage of the two countries will only be celebrated if the reckless liberality and loose behaviour which characterised the first years of the new reign are curbed.”34 In Lindley’s account of The Lord Hay’s Masque, it is the Elizabeth-figure who is in control of the fiction. He identifies an “insistence throughout the masque on the dominant position of the temperate goddess, Diana,” symbolized in part by the centralized placement of her tree of chastity.35 Lindley also refers to “the relative powerlessness of Apollo [Phoebus],” commenting that Diana’s “mythological opponent ... has little power to influence the course of events.”36 It is Cynthia/Diana who eventually allows the celebration of the marriage to proceed, but only on the condition that the re-transformed knights pay homage to her tree. Lindley concludes by stressing the balanced and discerning character of Campion’s masque. Its message, he maintains, is that “Union can only be possible if certain conditions are met, chief among them a greater moderation of life, and greater respect for the English values symbolized by the late Queen Elizabeth.”37 Martin Butler is not far off from Lindley’s position when he comments that The Lord Hay’s Masque “was seeking to devise a consensual imagery of negotiation, a language representing a middle way in which the hostility between the nations could be seen to be discharged.”38 This kind of reading of The Lord Hay’s Masque, as a performance of cultural compromise or as a balanced political critique, dominates the relatively small Lindley, “Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque and Anglo-Scottish Union,” 6. Ibid. 36 Ibid., 7. 37 Ibid., 11. 38 Butler, “The Invention of Britain,” 73. 34 35

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body of criticism devoted to the masque.39 The entertainment is, however, far more confrontational and far more monarchical than is generally recognized. Criticism of The Lord Hay’s Masque has, I believe, been too quick to register Cynthia’s symbolic presence in the masque without paying close enough attention to the precise ways in which she is being used. In the case of Lindley’s essay, both Cynthia’s empowerment and the masque-poet’s ability to offer very specific advice on the king’s policies are overstated. This appears to be due in part to Lindley’s own critical priorities of rescuing Campion from Stephen Orgel’s description of him as a poet who “evidently considered blatant flattery indispensable to the form.”40 Lindley is quick to point out that “if Orgel’s assertion that ‘Campion considered blatant flattery indispensable to the form’ were true, then we should surely expect to see the figure of James/Apollo ... assume a much more vigorous role within the masque.” That this is not the case is, for Lindley, proof of “Campion’s freedom from servility and his success in representing the realities of the debate about the Union.”41 I find Orgel’s negative estimation of Campion equally contestable, but I think there are other ways to argue against him. One might begin with the caveat that blatant flattery was indispensable to the form and that, in this kind of context, the skillful poet was the one who could deploy conventional forms of flattery in ways that were fresh and politically attuned. Campion, in conjunction with the masque designer and the masque choreographer, does this, and he does so with a particular eye towards flattering the monarch. James/Apollo does, indeed, assume the “vigorous role within the masque” that Lindley’s essay would deny him, but seeing this requires that we reassess the nature of the power relations between the James-figure and the Elizabeth-figure in the entertainment. Night’s violent castigation of the marriage celebrations ends almost as abruptly as it began, with Hesperus entering unexpectedly to announce, “Cynthia is now by Phoebus pacified” (316). From this point forward, there is a shift in symbolic authority away from Cynthia towards Phoebus, played out through a carefully ritualized exchange. At the end of Hesperus’s declaration of peace, he presents a trinket as evidence of his sincerity: “Let this my credence be, / View it, and know it for the highest gem / That hung on her imperial diadem” (327–9). Hesperus is presenting a lunar stone. Again, there are clear links with Queen Elizabeth who we 39 See further, MacIntyre “Queen Elizabeth’s Ghost at the Court of James I,” 90. MacIntyre sees James (Phoebus) and Elizabeth (Cynthia) as sharing cultural authority in the masque. Through Cynthia, Elizabeth returns to give her blessing to James’s Union project. Two essays that depart from this consensual view of The Lord Hay’s Masque are Loughlin “‘Love’s Friend and Stranger to Virginitie’” and Ferrell “The Sacred, the Profane, and the Union.” Loughlin’s essay shows how Campion’s masque replaces the symbolism of perpetual virginity with the politically more useful notion of transitional, or temporary, virginity. Ferrell, reading The Lord Hay’s Masque alongside Robert Wilkinson’s sermon, The Merchant Royall (1607), demonstrates how the Denny/Hay marriage celebrations issued a firm reprimand to those who were not actively supporting the king’s Union project. 40 Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, 101. 41 Lindley, “Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque and Anglo-Scottish Union,” 7.

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find adorned with such ornaments in portraits.42 Unlike The Masque of Blackness, which eventually brings an Elizabeth-figure physically into the masquing area, here the queen is objectified in the form of a talismanic stone, and in a brazen departure from Elizabeth’s former associations with sexual protectiveness and fear of Anglo-Scottish marriage, the stone is used to license union, in both its sexual and political senses. Hesperus even uses the authority of the stone to enlist Night’s aid in the reanimation of the Phoeban knights: Your Sovereign, from the virtuous gem she sends Bids you take power to retransform the friends Of Phoebus, metamorphosed here to trees, And give them straight the shapes which they did leese. This is her pleasure. (332–6)

David Lindley sees the lunar-stone passage as another instance of the queen’s empowerment in the fiction—an “operation of her influence.” Yet such a reading overlooks how this objectification of Elizabeth completely reverses the role she had played in the masque up to this point. Having paralyzed the knights in order to condemn Anglo-Scottish Union and male desire, she now occupies the operative position in “retransform[ing] the friends / Of Phoebus” back to their human state. The stone serves as the objective site through which a transfer of symbolic power is played out. Although it initially represents Cynthia’s presence synecdochally, it ultimately becomes the source for a restoration of sexual profligacy to Phoebus’s knights. Even if we chose to read this passage as Jean MacIntyre has, as a dramatization of the Denny/Hay marriage and British Union being blessed by the spirit of Queen Elizabeth,43 it is also evident that the utterance of this blessing is at every stage ventriloquized. Cynthia’s voice is constantly mediated by either Night or Hesperus. And it is troped finally as the lunar stone, an object that signifies Elizabeth but issues Phoebus’s commands. The Lord Hay’s Masque may stage an Elizabethan blessing upon Jacobean policy, but this should not avert our critical attention from the appropriative textual strategies through which this Elizabethan blessing is exacted.44 42 As Roy Strong points out, “The earliest reference in the portraits to Elizabeth as the moon goddess, Cynthia or Diana, occurs in a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard. It takes the form of a crescent-moon-shaped jewel in her hair.” Though this miniature is undated, it is thought to have been executed around 1586/87. This date corresponds to the appearance of moon jewelry on the New Year’s gifts lists. From this point onwards, jewels featuring moons recur consistently until the end of Elizabeth’s reign, both in portraiture and as gifts. See Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Elizabeth I (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 125. 43 MacIntyre, “Queen Elizabeth’s Ghost at the Court of James I,” 90. 44 Male ventriloquism of the female voice in early modern English texts has been examined most profoundly by Elizabeth D. Harvey in, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992). Harvey’s study engages closely with feminist thinking on the female voice by critics such as Elaine Showalter, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, among others.

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The Lord Hay’s Masque clearly includes within its fiction the official Elizabethan ideology that the Denny/Hay marriage violates. But it does not follow that the masque is balanced or admonitory as a result. At the very heart of this entertainment is a vision not of cultural concord, but of rhetorical conflict. This has been the case throughout the masque. Sharp contrasts and collisions are presented from the beginning: Flora’s bower in contrast to Night’s forest; the fruitful garden claiming ascendancy over “vulgar valleys”; sexual proclivity giving way to the threat of castration; and Phoeban rebirth overcoming Cynthia’s strictures of sexual enclosure. The Lord Hay’s Masque plays different representational paradigms off of each other, allowing both the hopes and the fears produced by British Union to state their case in the performance. The celebration of Anglo-Scottish marriage that the masque offers is not achieved by reconciling these different camps. Rather, Campion’s language of union is formulated through a process of rhetorical exclusion and appropriation. Night’s dark account of marital sexuality is silenced by the entry of Hesperus just as Flora denies the relevance of the Eden-topos to her erotic bower. She rejects the familiar narrative in which “winter’s wrath, and cold mortality” are always close at hand. The lunar stone, on the other hand, that canonical image of Elizabethan virginity and female empowerment, is appropriated and reused as a Phoeban charm to reanimate the lustful knights. Campion’s text exploits the malleability of early modern mythographies, turning “Elizabethan” symbols into “Jacobean” ones and showing through these means how a language of union could be constructed from the iconographical raw materials that were culturally available. The Rhetoric of Transformation Nowhere is Campion’s rhetorical revisionism more apparent than in the masque’s climactic passage of metamorphosis, in which the knights of Phoebus regain their human form. During the “Song of Transformation” and its accompanying dance, the golden trees fall away in pieces, revealing the male masquers underneath: Night and Diana charge, And th’earth obeys, Opening large Her secret ways, While Apollo’s charmèd men Their forms receive again. Give gracious Phoebus honour then, And so fall down, and rest behind the train. Give gracious Phoebus honour then And so fall, etc., (416–25)

This song parallels the transformation of the knights with a distinctly sexual narrative. Previously, the poetics associated with Cynthia/Diana had described a closing of the body. This was displayed most concretely in the enforced

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impotence, or sexual paralysis, of the male masquers turned to trees. The “Song of Transformation,” conversely, describes an opening of the body. The knights are restored to their former state through the earth’s “opening large / Her secret ways.” The erotic overtones of these lines announce a change in sexual setting, or, more accurately, a return to the former locale of Flora’s regenerative bower. Cynthia’s landscape had deployed nature as a kind of chastity belt, the trees paralyzing the sexual fervor of the Scottish men. Now, by “opening large / Her secret ways” and freeing the knights, nature allows for the fulfillment of the nuptial celebration for James Hay and Honora Denny. Through the textual opening of the Elizabethan body we are returned again to the landscape of sexual complicity presented at the beginning of the masque. If we think of the transformation passage as a process of sexualization whereby verbally a closed and chaste body is replaced by an eroticized and fruitful one, then the physical conversion of the trees into human form brings this same idea to its performative apotheosis. In its movement from tree to human, the transformation stages a reversal of Ovid’s Apollo and Daphne story. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Daphne’s metamorphosis into a tree was commonly read as a moment at which chastity was being protected and preserved.45 Daphne’s enclosure in the bark and branches of the laurel tree rendered her body inaccessible to the sexual fervor of Apollo. John Brinsley’s school-text translation of Book I of the Metamorphoses, which ends (unlike Ovid’s original) with Apollo and Daphne, provides a typical example of the way the story would have been taught. Brinsley’s marginal glosses present the narrative as an essay on the rewards of chastity. In his view, Daphne’s arboreal transformation was a gift from the gods guaranteeing perpetual purity. This was a standard interpretation (with an obvious moral function), and one that Brinsley shared with the most influential Ovidian commentator of the sixteenth century, Raphael Regius. Yet Brinsley’s reading of the Apollo and Daphne story was not always conformed to in a straightforward way. The literature of the period presents more than one case of revision. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, Shakespeare memorably draws attention to Helena’s erotic ardor in the forest by having her drastically rewrite Ovid’s supposed tale of chastity: “Run when you will,” she cries after Demetrius, “The story shall be changed: / Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase” (2. 1. 230– 31). A different, far more grisly, sort of inversion occurs in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus when Marcus, finding the raped Lavinia with her hands cut off, gasps, “What stern ungentle hands / Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare / Of her two branches” (2. 4. 16–18). Marcus uses the image of Daphne-as-tree to figure the former, chaste, and inviolate body of Lavinia. He revises Ovid’s story by introducing the dismemberment of Daphne’s arboreal form into the traditional

45 On this point, see Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body From Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 19–20. This paragraph draws heavily on Enterline’s discussion.

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narrative. The revision signifies corporeal violation and, as Marcus will soon find out, silence as well; for Lavinia’s tongue too has been removed.46 These passages from Shakespeare suggest that while the story of Daphne’s transformation was most frequently seized upon as a metaphor for protective chastity, it could also be used as a way to imagine chastity’s undoing. It is significant that Campion’s masque also reverses the topos of Daphne’s arboreal transformation. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare modified the Apollo and Daphne story in such a way so as to make it signify corporeal destruction rather than protection. Without reaching the same extremities of violence, the “Song of Transformation” does operate in a similar way. The rebirth of the knights enacts a verbal violation of the Elizabethan body which at the same time silences the rhetoric culturally associated with it. Ovidian commentators like Brinsley and Regius insist that Daphne’s chastity wins the day when she turns into a tree. In the reversal of The Lord Hay’s Masque it is Apollo who triumphs. (And it is worth emphasizing here that James is figured as Apollo in the masque.)47 The transformation passage is a crucial moment in the process of rhetorical adjustment through which Campion’s language of union coheres. The conversion from immobilized trees into dancing knights of Phoebus signals the triumph of one rhetoric of the body over another, a literal reversal of a received (Elizabethan) representational paradigm. During the concluding revels, all attention is turned towards the sexual activities of the wedding night and we are thus returned to the poetic world first encountered in the masque; the tree of chastity, which occupies center-stage throughout these revels, is, accordingly, moved from being a symbol of Elizabethan virginity to an emblem of conjugal fruitfulness. The Lord Hay’s Masque exemplifies the kinds of rhetorical challenges that were faced by early Jacobean panegyrists. The masque’s fiction charts the process through which a successful celebration of Anglo-Scottish union is created, overcoming along the way the representational strictures of residual national ideology. Unlike Jonson’s more uncertain Union masques of 1605–6, Campion’s masque confronts cultural Elizabethanism: virginity is quashed and expelled as an inadequate category of representation for Anglo-Scottish marriage; chastity is rewritten and appropriated as part of a vocabulary of union. The inclusion of Elizabethan iconography in the masque has often been misunderstood as a gesture of compromise or critique. This perception, as I have suggested, seems to be the result of a critical tendency to react to masques emblematically instead of scrutinizing their rhetorical strategies. The lunar stone, the immobilized sexual assailants, and the tree of chastity all allude to Elizabethan political culture; but they are all absorbed into the celebration of Anglo-Scottish marriage where they are adjusted and transformed to signify in new ways. Campion’s masque shows how this residual vocabulary of Englishness could be subsumed within a language 46

Ibid., 8. The text jumps between identifying James as Phoebus and as Apollo, just as Night’s master is referred to as either Cynthia or Diana. 47

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of Britishness. A lunar stone can usher in sexual profligacy just as well as it can symbolize virginity; a tree of chastity can be translated from an anti-union icon to a sign of marital regenerativity. The politically inflected eroticism of The Lord Hay’s Masque formed a remarkably coherent aspect of Jacobean monarchical discourse, one that would recur in later masques. It provided an idiom through which marriage and its political analogue could be promoted, even in the face of rhetorical opposition. Domesticating Eroticism: The Haddington Masque Ben Jonson’s Haddington Masque was performed at Whitehall on the evening of 9 February 1608 for the marriage of John Ramsay, Viscount Haddington, and Elizabeth Radcliffe. John Ramsay was another of James’s favored Scotsman and, like Hay, he traveled south with James when he acceded to the English throne. However, John Ramsay had a slightly different kind of relationship with the king than Hay had. Ramsay came into favor for very specific political and personal reasons; namely, his role in the series of events known as the Gowrie conspiracy. The episode is still shrouded in mystery, but the official version of the story was that on 5 August 1600, the earl of Gowrie and his brother, Alexander Ruthven, lured James to their house at St. Johnstone and then tried to kill him. John Ramsay, hearing James’s shouts, entered the house and killed both of the Ruthven brothers, thus saving the king.48 James was greatly indebted to Ramsay and for the rest of his reign showered him with pensions, titles, and grants of land. The year before his marriage, Ramsay was created Viscount Haddington and Lord Ramsay of Barns, and the year after he was given the lordship of Melrose. In 1621 he was even created an English Peer, a considerable accolade for someone who was not English.49 Ramsay’s bride, Elizabeth Radcliffe, was the daughter of a prominent figure in both the late Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, Robert Radcliffe, fifth earl of Sussex. He had been sent to Scotland as an ambassador-extraordinary in 1594 to assist in the baptism of Prince Henry, and in 1616 he had the honor of carrying the purple ermined robe at the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales.50 His daughter’s marriage to Ramsay in 1608 would have been yet another public 48

For a dated but still useful review of the muddled evidence surrounding the Gowrie conspiracy, see Andrew Lang, James VI and the Gowrie Mystery (London: Longman, Green, & Co., 1902). More recently, Alan Stewart has recounted the incident (though with little historical analysis) in The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), 150–59. 49 In 1621 it was also decided that every year, on the anniversary of the Gowrie conspiracy, John Ramsay and all of his male heirs after him could bear the sword of state before the king. See further, Dictionary of National Biography, 47:258; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 45:946; The Scots Peerage, 4:300–302. 50 Dictionary of National Biography, 47:144; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 45:749.

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expression of Sussex’s intimacy with the king. For James himself, Ramsay’s marriage served as another step in the British Union project. That same year, as a further contribution to this program, the king had managed to cajole William Cavendish, heir of the earl of Devonshire, into marrying Christina Bruce, the 13-year-old daughter of the Scottish Lord Kinloss.51 Within a year of the Union project’s major setback in the 1606/7 Parliament, we see James organizing these two Anglo-Scottish marriages as an alternative political strategy. The Haddington Masque serves as a mouthpiece for this retaliatory moment in the Union project, as well as for the Ramsay/Radcliffe marriage in particular. In his seminal essay on elite Anglo-Scottish politics, “The Scottish Aristocracy, Anglicization and the Court,” Keith Brown makes some brief comments on the early Jacobean court masques. Hymenaei, he observes, “Was full of unionist ideas and imagery.”52 The Haddington Masque, on the other hand, receives no more than a dismissive footnote, in which Brown remarks, “Strangely the Haddington Masque which did celebrate an Anglo-Scottish marriage had little to say on this subject [i.e., the British Union].”53 Yet if we attend closely to the verbal and symbolic structuring of Jonson’s fiction I think a good deal of internal evidence can be found to suggest the contrary. Brown’s comment is a justifiable reaction to the fact that there are no overt references to the Union project or to contemporary politics in the masque. Indeed, one would have expected these issues to be far more explicitly engaged at an Anglo-Scottish wedding. Campion, for example, insisted on the national significance of his masque when, in his prefatory dedication to the king, he mused, “Who can wonder then / If he that marries kingdoms, marries men?” (19–20). Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to view The Haddington Masque as unresponsive to its political context. Although there are no direct references made to Great Britain, the language of praise that Jonson deploys for the Ramsay/ Radcliffe marriage is hypersensitive to the cultural anxieties provoked by the Union project. The Haddington Masque transforms its mythological sources in order to articulate a more moderate vision of British cultural politics than that espoused in The Lord Hay’s Masque. Jonson’s use of erotic rhetoric strives just as much to conceal the discomfort aroused by mixed marriage as it does to celebrate its political implications. In this respect, The Haddington Masque reveals itself to be attuned not only to British propaganda, but also to the misgivings and fears that were voiced in the debate over Union. Some general similarities can be identified between the treatment of AngloScottish union in The Haddington Masque and in The Lord Hay’s Masque. Jonson’s entertainment, like Campion’s, is concerned with the procreative aspect of marriage and the role of that procreativity in British identity formation. In addition, both masques make King James the source of this politically suggestive fruitfulness. However, Jonson’s approach to celebrating personal and national 51

Brown, “The Scottish Aristocracy, Anglicization, and the Court,” 569. Ibid., 569. 53 Ibid., n. 106. 52

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fertility is notably different from that taken in The Lord Hay’s Masque. The fiction of Jonson’s masque gravitates around the notion of the family, a social institution that encourages the production of offspring, but which also keeps the sexual desire implied in that production safely contained. Campion’s eroticism, in contrast, brings his masque into conflict with competing, residual accounts of marriage and of nationhood. As a result, The Lord Hay’s Masque depicts Anglo-Scottish union as a concept that is linguistically and culturally revolutionary, while The Haddington Masque reminds us of the possibility of using a more negotiative form of celebration. Jonson’s text modifies the language of Campion’s entertainment, creating a fiction for Anglo-Scottish marriage that does not demand explicit rhetorical conflict. It aims at reconciling different eulogistic vocabularies rather than staging clashes between them. One of Jonson’s primary techniques for avoiding these clashes in The Haddington Masque is to conflate seemingly incompatible topoi. The opening scene presents a visual model of this device. Jonson explains the setting in his notes: “The scene to this masque was a high, steep, red cliff advancing itself into the clouds, figuring the place from whence (as I have been, not fabulously, informed) the honorable family of the Radcliffes first took their name (a clivo rubro)” (20– 23).54 On either side of this cliff “were erected two pilasters charged with spoils and trophies of Love and his mother, consecrate to marriage; amongst which were old and young persons figured, bound with roses, the wedding garments, rocks and spindles, hearts transfixed with arrows, others flaming” (26–9). The final visual elements of this opening scene are to be found mounted on top of the pilasters: “Two personages, Triumph and Victory, in flying postures, and twice so big as the life, in place of the arch, and holding a garland of myrtle for the key” (31–2). The array of symbols presented in the opening scene can be divided into three groups, and each deserves some comment: there is the cliff; the figures of Cupid and Venus, along with the pierced hearts, flaming hearts, and other related “spoils and trophies”; and the figures of Triumph and Victory. The choice of the “red cliff” as the masque’s setting gives the bride, Elizabeth Radcliffe, a distinct prominence in the entertainment. This may very well have been a calculated choice, made to flatter the English side of the marriage. But prioritizing Elizabeth Radcliffe also has a broader symbolic utility since it was the maternal, bridal body onto which the political hopes invested in AngloScottish marriage were projected. The idea gains currency when we observe the iconography of the pilasters that frame the cliff. As well as foreshadowing the roles played by Venus and Cupid in the masque, the symbols associated with these two, such as the flaming and pierced hearts, establish a conceptual affiliation between the bride and sexual desire: Radcliffe, objectified in the form of the cliff, is literally framed by an iconography of love. The effect is a tableau comparable to the bower of Flora in Campion’s masque, in which the bride is directly oriented towards 54 Line references for The Haddington Masque are from Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, (ed.) Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 107–21.

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amorous activity from the outset. The iconographical interaction of the cliff and the pilasters is complicated, however, by the figures perched on top of them, Triumph and Victory. Traditionally, these two allegorical figures are hallmarks of Roman military triumphs, an association that functions to temper the erotic imagery framing the cliff with a more soberly masculine mode of eulogy. The elevated forms of Triumph and Victory create a semiotic link between the occasion of Anglo-Scottish Union and national strength. A similar kind of duplicity is detectable in the king’s own commentary on the Great Britain project. James’s vision of a peaceable national union was not a notion ideologically familiar to the English Parliament. As Bacon’s collation of objections states, “We find no precedent, at home or abroad, of uniting or contracting of the names of two several kingdoms or states into one name, where the union hath grown by marriage or blood; and that those examples that may be alleged, as far as we can find, are but in the case of conquest.”55 Perhaps in reaction to this qualm, James can be found endorsing the Union through jargon that shifts conspicuously between vocabularies of war and vocabularies of love.56 In the 1606/7 session of parliament the king promises “such an Union, as if you had got it by Conquest, but such a Conquest as may be cemented by love, the onely sure bond of subjection or friendship.”57 Later in the speech, the point is reiterated: “London must bee the Seate of your King, and Scotland joyned to this kingdome by a Golden conquest, but cymented with love.”58 In both cases, describing Union as a “conquest ... cymented with love” serves to convey the project in terms familiar to its audience while simultaneously diffusing the more bellicose associations of those terms. The juxtaposition of love and war effectively alters how militarism signifies within Union propaganda. The Haddington Masque, likewise, retains iconographical elements of conquest in a montage designed to commemorate the nuptial union of an English woman and a Scottish man. The figures of Triumph and Victory qualify the erotic imagery of the pilasters just as, conversely, they are qualified by Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 28. As Bacon’s collation indicates, a good deal of resistance to the Union project was organized around historical precedent (or lack thereof). Examples such as Castile and Leon, the Netherlands and Austria, and Poland and Lithuania were used to show that while some unions by conquest have worked, unions that demanded legal and institutional reconciliation between the two nations were virtually impossible. 56 Ovid’s Amores 1. 2, in which Cupid is cast as the hero of a military triumph, provided a repository of motifs through which the seemingly incompatible topoi of love and war could be expressed simultaneously. See Ovid I: Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 321–5. For critical discussion, see Leslie Cahoon, “The Bed as Battlefield: Erotic Conquest and Military Metaphor in Ovid’s Amores,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 118 (1988): 293–307; and Anthony Miller, Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 28–32. 57 Political Works, (ed.) McIlwain, 292. 58 Ibid., 305. 55

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it. This negotiative approach to celebrating Anglo-Scottish marriage is a persistent characteristic of The Haddington Masque. In a scene appropriate to the imagery of the masque setting, the action begins with Venus and her three Graces descending from the sky. As Venus approaches the masquing area, the Graces throw garlands of flowers, again reminding us of Flora and Zephyrus strewing roses in the bower. However, the similarities between these two opening scenes remain purely visual. There is nothing of Campion’s festive eroticism in Venus’s urgent opening announcement: It is no common cause, ye will conceive, My lovely Graces, makes your goddess leave Her state in heaven tonight to visit earth. Love late is fled away, my eldest birth, Cupid, whom I did joy to call my son, And whom long absent, Venus is undone (44–9)

Instead of proclaiming the nuptial occasion, Venus’s speech announces a domestic separation—the separation of mother and son. This narrative device is based on a story by the Roman poet Moschus, known to early modern audiences as Amor Fugitivus. The story had been widely adapted before Jonson, most notably by Spenser in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene.59 When Venus finally acknowledges the wedding occasion, she does so through her own domestic crisis: Spy, if you can, his footsteps on this green; For here, as I am told, he late hath been With divers of his brethren, lending light From their best flames to gild a glorious night; Which I not grudge at, being done for her Whose honors to my own I still prefer. But he not yet returning, I’m in fear Some gentle Grace or innocent beauty here Be taken with him; or he hath surprised A second Psyche, and lives here disguised. (50–59)

Venus engages with the social occasion indirectly. She acknowledges the fact that there is a wedding celebration of some sort taking place, but this acknowledgement is no more than a digression in her suspicious conjecture that Cupid may be lurking at court. The marriage event is referred to simply as the “glorious night.” So, while Venus does in some sense initiate the nuptial festivity, her oblique reference to the “glorious night” is subordinated to her main concern, which is to announce two concurrent problems: first, the domestic rupture that has taken place and, second, that Cupid and his erotic powers are apparently running rampant in the Jacobean court/nation. 59 For more information on adaptations, see James Hutton, “The First Idyll of Moschus in Imitations to the Year 1800,” American Journal of Philology 49 (1928): 105–36.

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The alarmist nature of Venus’s entry immediately calls into question her character’s mythographical appropriateness to the event of Anglo-Scottish marriage. Though we had assumed her to be the chosen herald of the wedding, she now seems more of an unexpected guest. What is more, Cupid’s possible presence at the festivities appears to be more a cause for alarm than joy: the story of Cupid and Psyche is recalled with palpable apprehension. Although the idea of sexual fertility will come to play an important role in this masque, there is uncertainty as to whether the erotic desire represented by Venus and Cupid provides a satisfactory theme through which to praise that fertility. This ambivalence can be viewed as an extension of the opening scenery, in which Venus and Cupid are offset by images of Victory, Triumph, and, not least, “virgins’ girdles.” Venus even contributes to her own questionable status in the masque when she comments self-effacingly that she holds no grudges against her son for taking part in the wedding celebrations, “Being done for her / Whose honors to my own I still prefer.” The reference is to Juno, the goddess of marriage. This emphatic differentiation in the text between the functions of Venus and Juno effectively separates their respective spheres of influence, sexual desire and marital union. Venus apparently prefers marital union to her own “honors,” and in accordance with her preference, The Haddington Masque will increasingly stress that both fruitfulness and its preconditional sexual desire need to be placed firmly within the control of the domestic unit initiated by marriage. The moral hierarchy being constructed here extends directly out of Hymenaei, which ended with the image of fertility being used to reinforce the domestic and social benefits of marital union. Along similar ideological lines, The Haddington Masque will show Venus’s fears of unmonitored sexual desire being allayed through the reunion of her mythological family. Jonson’s entertainment thus modifies the rhetoric established by The Lord Hay’s Masque: while Campion eroticizes Anglo-Scottish union, The Haddington Masque attempts to domesticate eroticism. As an aesthetic mode, eroticism is placed under subtle representational strictures in Jonson’s entertainment. The bodies of the court ladies, for example, are described by way of a paradoxical narrative technique in which desire is elicited through Venus’s claim to be, in fact, monitoring their sexual activity. Rousing all present to search out Cupid, the goddess instructs, Look all these ladies’ eyes, And see if there he not concealèd lies, Or in their bosoms ‘twixt their swelling breasts; The wag affects to make himself such nests. (62–5)

Under the premise of finding Cupid, of quelling unbridled sexual desire, Venus is able to itemize erotically the female body. In the search for Cupid, the focus of the wedding celebration is suddenly turned towards the “eyes” and “swelling breasts” of all the court ladies. In these lines the erotic gaze is the same as the gaze of sexual surveillance. Venus’s rally call allows the masque to become a site for erotic play, drawing the audience’s attention to the vulnerability (and availability) of the

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bodies of the English court ladies; but it does so under the auspices of alleviating the threat to this vulnerability. We see this again when the second Grace lays out the conditions of the Cupid hunt. Sexual desire is simultaneously condemned and endorsed: She that will but now discover Where the wingèd wag doth hover Shall tonight receive a kiss How or where herself would wish; But who brings him to his mother Shall have that kiss and another. (80–85)

The curtailing of sexual desire is encouraged through the promise of fulfilling it, by letting the lucky woman choose as her reward at least one kiss in the manner and place she so desires. The paradox of at the same time encouraging and discouraging the sexual complicity of the female body is indicative of the masque’s sustained attempt to mix different, and often traditionally adverse, modes of representing marital union. While the sexual themes relate to James’s notion of a personal and political “union of love,” the premise of containment and surveillance functions to alleviate the cultural anxiety that such emergent rhetoric may feed. By employing two dissimilar ways of praising marriage, the text can qualify both. The sexually regenerative account of Anglo-Scottish marriage must always give way to an idiom of sexual enclosure, and vice versa. This paradox corresponds logically with the idea of domesticism, since the family, by definition, depends upon sexual desire, even if it also attempts to curb it through institutionalization. In order for domesticism to become thematically operative in the masque, the mythological family of the entertainment has to be reunited. The first steps in this direction are taken when Cupid finally appears on stage. He is armed and attended by twelve boys whom, as Jonson tells us, represent “the sports and pretty lightnesses that accompany Love” (135–6). Cupid and his boys begin by performing a “capricious dance” (144), after which he steps forward and triumphantly bears forth his quiver and bow, That these beauties here may know By what arms this feat was done That hath so much honor won Unto Venus and her son (150–53)

The “feat” to which Cupid refers is bringing Ramsay and Radcliffe together in loving union. Venus’s son appears to have played a key role in the nuptials being celebrated. And yet, because of Cupid’s unceremonious, antimasque-type entry, it remains somewhat unclear whether we are to perceive his involvement as a problem or a cause for merriment.60 Venus’s prompt seizure of Cupid would have 60 The genesis of the antimasque is normally located with The Masque of Queens (1609). However, the dramatic structure of The Haddington Masque presents the possibility

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us view him as some kind of menace. She apprehends him immediately, furious at his departure and uncomprehending of the announcement he has just made: “What feat, what honor is it that you boast, / My little straggler? I had given you lost / With all your games here” (156–8). Venus’s interrogation of Cupid places him in the conventional literary role of amorous mischief-maker. Against the backdrop of his past adventures, Venus encourages us to interpret Cupid’s intervention into the Ramsay/Radcliffe marriage as inherently disruptive: What might your glorious cause of triumph be? Ha’ you shot Minerva or the Thespian dames? Heat agèd Ops again with youthful flames? Or have you made the colder moon to visit Once more a sheep-cote? Say, what conquest is it Can make you hope such a renown to win? Is there a second Hercules brought to spin? Or for some new disguise leaves Jove his thunder? (159–66)

The cumulative effect of these lines is to image Cupid and his powers of sexual desire as chaos manifest, antithetical to Reason. This version of Love constituted one of the most prominent strands of Cupid’s diverse representational history.61 It is based on a sizable body of literary precedents, from Greek epics to English sonnets.62 Hesiod described Eros in his Theogeny as emerging from “the first Chaos,” a deity “who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all the gods and all men within them.”63 Even Ovid, Cupid’s most famous apologist, says in Amores 1. 2, “possessa ferus pectora versat Amor” (Love torments the breast where he is lord) (8).64 George Turbevile, in 1567, maintains the notion of Cupid as a disruptive and potentially destructive deity by setting him in explicit opposition to Reason: “Reason and Love have ever yet beene twaine. / They are by kinde of such contrarie mould / As one mislikes the others lewde devise, / What Reason willes Cupido never would” (6–9).65 Venus’s reproving of dating Jonson’s first use of antimasque one year earlier. Cornelia Emilia Baehrens recognized this in The Origin of the Masque (Groningen: Drukkerij Dijkhuizen & Van Zanten, 1929), 56, and D.J. Gordon concurs (see “Ben Jonson’s Haddington Masque: The Story and the Fable,” in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D J. Gordon, [ed.] Stephen Orgel [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975], 185). 61 Thomas Hyde gives a good overview of the multiplicity of Cupid traditions in, The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 13–28. 62 Jonson cites as his direct source for lines 159–66, Natale Conti’s Mythologiae (1551), the most influential mythography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 63 Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 87. 64 Ovid I: Heroides and Amores, trans. Showerman, rev. Goold, 321–5. 65 “To his Love that sent him a Ring wherein was gravde, ‘Let Reason rule’,” in The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509–1659, (eds) David Norbrook and H.R. Woudhuysen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, Books, 1992), 186–7.

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interrogation continues this account of Cupid as at best a rogue, at worst a force of cosmic chaos. Nevertheless, Cupid is attributed with a foundational role in the Anglo-Scottish marriage between Ramsay and Radcliffe. And because of this, we can assume that, despite Venus’s ranting, he will be refashioned into a politically more responsible character. Cupid’s defense consists of disassociating himself from the stories his mother has recounted. He aligns himself instead with Hymen and, therefore, with the politically constructive institution of marriage: “Nor that, nor those, and yet no less a wonder; / Which to tell I may not stay; / Hymen’s presence bids away” (167– 9). With this, Cupid wriggles free of his mother and Hymen enters to confirm that they have indeed acted in league. During this pivotal passage in the masque, Jonson undertakes to adjust established Cupid-topoi, presenting a version of the character specifically designed to celebrate Anglo-Scottish union. Unconventionally, it is not Cupid, the unruly son, who is condemned in Hymen’s arbitration of the domestic dispute, but Venus, the meddling mother, who is accused of obliviousness and neglect: “Venus, is this a time to quit your car? / To stoop to earth? to leave alone your star / ... As you were ignorant of what were done / By Cupid’s hand, your all-triumphing son?” (174–5, 178–9). In condemning Venus rather than her “alltriumphing son,” Hymen verifies that Cupid and his powers of sexual desire are to be seen as a positive, even essential, force at the Ramsay/Radcliffe marriage. The socially and politically productive Cupid of The Haddington Masque marks a departure from the English treatment of the Amor Fugitivus story as typified in translations by George Turbevile (1576) and Barnabe Barnes (1593); in William Drummond’s madrigal, “Love Vagabonding” (1614); in James Shirley’s play, The Witty Fair One (1628); and in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene, where Spenser shows Venus searching for her son at court, in the city, and in the country.66 Spenser’s description of the court search, in particular, offers a striking contrast to Jonson’s masque: First she him sought in Court, where most he us’d Whylome to haunt, but there she found him not; But many there she found, which sore accus’d His falsehood, and with fowle infamous blot His cruell deedes and wicked wyles did spot: Ladies and Lordes she everywhere mote heare Complayning, how with his empoysned shot Their wofull harts he wounded had whyleare, And so had left them languishing twixt hope and feare. (3.6.13) A similar story is told in George Peele’s The Hunting of Cupid (1591), a masque which survives only in fragmentary form in William Drummond’s commonplace book (see W.W. Greg, (ed.), “The Hunting of Cupid, A Lost Play by George Peele,” in Collections I, Parts 4 and 5, (ed.) W.W. Greg, The Malone Society Reprints [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911], 307–14). However, Peele’s masque does not appear to bear any direct debts to Moschus. A number of other early modern adaptations of Amor Fugitivus were produced in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Germany (Hutton, “The First Idyll of Moschus,” 114–26). 66

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The inventory of “falsehood,” “cruell deedes,” and “wicked wyles” yields a far more sinister account of Cupid than that in either the song of the three Graces or Venus’s parental castigations. This menacing Cupid is precisely what makes the Amor Fugitivus story an effective motif in The Haddington Masque. The conventional associations of the tale allow Jonson to refer to one perception of sexual desire so that the refashioning of that perception for the purpose of Anglo-Scottish marriage can be highlighted. In Spenser’s text, Cupid activates the symptoms of Petrarchan love. Desire takes the form of physical illness and mental derangement (witness the courtiers “languishing twixt hope and fear”). In the rhetoric of AngloScottish union, on the other hand, sexual desire has a positive part to play, as The Lord Hay’s Masque has shown. By assigning Cupid a constructive role in marriage, The Haddington Masque works towards rhetorically de-Petrarchizing the Jacobean court. Whitehall becomes a place where Cupid’s powers of sexual desire are conscripted into the political and cultural project of fostering fruitful Anglo-Scottish marriages. They do not sully James’s court with “fowle infamous blot.” Hymen’s entry in the masque, therefore, initiates a reworking of one of the most standard associations of the Cupid/Venus duo. Sexual desire is shifted from its Petrarchan status as emotional and physical disease, to its Jacobean status as facilitator of domestic order and referent to British Union. Jonson has quickly moved his masque from a state of chaos and sexual alarm to an orderly celebration of the king’s most treasured political venture. The entertainment comes into even tighter monarchical focus when Hymen, continuing to upbraid Venus, directs her attention towards James: “Look on this state, and if you yet not know / What crown there shines, whose sceptre here doth grow, / Think on thy loved Aeneas” (180–82). James is described as a prince who, like Aeneas, “Draws / By example more than others do by laws, / That is so just in his great act and thought, / To do not what kings may, but what kings ought” (184–7). In Campion’s entertainment of the previous year, Phoebus was invoked to appease the punitive sexual anxiety of Cynthia. Similarly, here in Jonson’s masque, Venus’s anxiety about Cupid’s unmonitored erotic powers is placated by Hymen’s invocation of James, the king whose royal presence translates sexual desire into British fruitfulness. In The Haddington Masque, as in The Lord Hay’s Masque, monarchical authority is sexual as well as political. Through the king, mother and son are reunited in the common cause of AngloScottish union. But there is still one element missing in the completed domestic unit that the masque strives for: the father. Accordingly, in a curious passage towards the end of the entertainment, Vulcan is inserted to complete the domestic triangle. This episode is important as a final and forceful image of the conflation of eroticism and domesticism, sexual profligacy and control. Hymen attributes the pilasters discussed at the beginning of this section to Vulcan’s workmanship, adding that he and his Cyclopes “are forging still / Some strange and curious piece t’adorn the night / And give these gracèd nuptials greater light” (217–19). This “strange and curious piece” is an 18-foot sphere featuring the zodiac in gold, what Vulcan describes as the “twelve sacred powers / That are presiding

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at all nuptial hours” (242–3). He assures Hymen that the creation is “the best of all my life; / And have my end, if it but please my wife, / And she commend it” (223–5). Vulcan here confirms that he is husband to Venus and, therefore, a facilitator of domestic symmetry in the masque fiction. However, this character also serves another purpose; D.J. Gordon’s insights are particularly useful here. Gordon explains that, Vulcan is the heat without which procreation cannot take place; and—adopting the same mode of interpretation—Venus is nothing else than the hidden desire for copulation grafted in human nature in order that procreation may ensue. For procreation, then, the conjunction of Vulcan and Venus is necessary. This is why they are represented as being man and wife.67

Gordon’s conclusions have important implications in the context of the present analysis of The Haddington Masque. Viewing Vulcan as a symbol of sexual procreation, as Gordon asserts, is entirely conducive with a view of Vulcan as an agent of domestic symmetry, as I have posited above. Indeed, that Vulcan can play both of these roles at the same time is consistent with the masque’s general tendency towards coupling eroticism and sexual regulation. Vulcan should, therefore, be understood in a dual sense. That is, he emblematizes the thematic centrality of sexual profligacy and domestic containment in the masque concurrently. Vulcan is the missing symbolic piece in the masque’s iconography of eroticism and, simultaneously, in its iconography of domesticism. His unexpected appearance in The Haddington Masque constitutes a final amalgamation of sexuality and the social control thereof, a final demonstration of the masque-poet’s domestication of eroticism. Although The Haddington Masque extends Campion’s use of poetic eroticism, it also makes a critical departure from the 1607 masque by showing that AngloScottish marriage could be celebrated without staging overt ideological conflict. Rather than pitting different national idioms against each other, Jonson’s text juxtaposes them (as in the opening scenery) or combines them (as in Venus’s call for a search for Cupid). The Haddington Masque refuses to decide between the themes of sexual surveillance and eroticization, concepts which in The Lord Hay’s Masque are mutually exclusive, polarized through the contending figures of Cynthia and Phoebus. Jonson’s domestic motif facilitates this thematic duplicity by referring us to a social institution that monitors, controls, and contains the very sexual complicity it encourages. Domesticism, for Jonson, neutralizes the contention between residual and emergent uses of the body in political discourse, the same contention that Campion was at pains to dramatize. It allows Jonson to script a celebration of sexual procreation without adopting the strategies of rhetorical appropriation deployed in The Lord Hay’s Masque. Rather than using Venus and Cupid to castigate cultural fears of Anglo-Scottish Union, these characters are written so as to allay those fears. Cupid, for example, is placed 67

Gordon, “Ben Jonson’s Haddington Masque,” 190.

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firmly in the service of Hymen and King James, and is therefore permitted, under the specific political auspices of the Union project, to use his erotic powers in the Jacobean court—not for mischief or disruption, but for the productive and stabilizing ends of elite integration. By the end of the masque, we are encouraged to view Venus and Cupid as guarantors of political and domestic order just as much as guarantors of fruitful love. While The Haddington Masque certainly demonstrates the usefulness of eroticism in Union propaganda, it also remains sensitive to the cultural misgivings that such eroticization could provoke. In the panegyrical verses that prefaced the printed text of The Lord Hay’s Masque, Thomas Campion raised some pressing questions about the function of the body in monarchical rhetoric: “Angliae, et unanimis Scotiae pater, anne maritus / Sis dubito, an neuter (Rex) vel uterque simul” (I am uncertain, O King, whether you be the father of England and of united Scotland, or the husband, or neither, or both at once)68 (30–31). The confusion intensifies when Campion considers: Uxores pariter binas sibi iungat ut unus, Credimus hoc ipso te prohibente nephas. Atque maritali natas violare parentem Complexu, quis non cogitat esse scelus? That one man should join to himself a pair of wives at the same time, this, by your own prohibition, we believe unlawful. And further, for a parent to violate daughters in a marital embrace, who does not think this to be a sin? (32–5)

Campion’s reservations map onto a wider network of representational indeterminacy outside his verse. The poet’s interpretative crux mirrors the indecisive variations in monarchical self-presentation that we have witnessed in the king’s own political speeches. Yet in its extremity of representational doubt, Campion’s prefatory verse does more than simply point toward the ambiguity that persisted in Jacobean national myth; it also signals the need to clarify these ambiguities if AngloScottish union—personal and national—is to be convincingly advocated. The mixed marriages that took place at court in 1607 and 1608 supplied a politically charged context in which to do this; they created an opportunity to refine the language of union that had begun to be put together in Jonson’s entertainments of 1605 and 1606. In their subtle transformations of their mythological sources, The Lord Hay’s Masque and The Haddington Masque stand as the most ideologically focused of the British-themed entertainments in the early Jacobean court. Their various uses of eroticism, in particular, contributed to a system of panegyric that was remarkably astute in the way it responded to the politically uncertain period of 1607–8, as well as to the widening domestic rift between James and Anna. What will become apparent in the following chapters is that, despite its embeddedness in a very specific historical moment, the erotic rhetoric of the Anglo-Scottish marriage 68 Translations of Latin from The Lord Hay’s Masque follow David Lindley’s edition.

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masques had a discernable stylistic impact on later court marriage entertainments as well, even when those entertainments had no ostensible thematic links with the Great Britain project. Imagery of fruitfulness and regenerativity persists in elite Jacobean performance as a way to convey monarchical authority, whether or not that authority is coded as British. The transfer of British tropes into new political contexts, such as the 1613 Palatine marriage, evidences a process whereby the language of union that was narrowly conceived in response to the Anglo-Scottish Union project between 1603 and 1608 converted into a politically more fluid aspect of monarchical rhetoric.

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Chapter 3

Competing Fictions and Fictional Authority at the Palatine Wedding Celebrations On 14 February 1613, after prolonged negotiations with several European countries, James’s daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, married the German prince, Frederick the Elector Palatine. Unlike the court weddings I have been discussing in the previous two chapters, Elizabeth’s marriage was an international event. Celebrations were mounted both inside Whitehall and in the city for the public to view. The festivities continued in the Netherlands and Germany as Elizabeth made the long voyage to her new court in Heidelberg. This was the first royal wedding to take place in England since the marriage of Mary Tudor to Philip of Spain in 1554, and such magnificence had not been witnessed for a nuptial event since the even earlier marriage of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Aragon in 1501. The total cost of the Palatine wedding—ceremony and festivities included—came to an astounding £93,293. The wedding elicited a vast panegyrical response, the amount of poetry produced for the occasion surpassing that offered in reaction to



An earlier consideration was a double marriage in the French royal household, but this idea fell apart when the French king was assassinated in 1610. Anna, all the while, was pushing for a Spanish match (Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619 [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002], 136). In addition to suitors from other German states and from Sweden, there were rumors at court that the Scottish faction was attempting to negotiate a match between the princess and the marquis of Hamilton (see Chamberlain to Carleton, 31 December 1612, in The Letters of John Chamberlain, [ed.] Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols [Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939], 1:399).  In addition to the three marriage masques that I will be discussing in this chapter, there were up to 20 plays performed at court during the 1612/13 season, including The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Philaster, and The Maid’s Tragedy. See W.R. Streitberger, (ed.), Collections XIII: Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts, 1603–1642, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 55–6; and Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 100–101. For an informative discussion of some of the entertainments mounted in Heidelberg, see J.R. Mulryne, “Marriage Entertainments in the Palatinate for Princess Elizabeth Stuart and the Elector Palatine,” in Italian Renaissance Festivals and Their European Influence, (ed.) J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 173–96.  For an itemized breakdown of this figure, see British Library Additional ms. 58833.

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the death of Prince Henry in 1612. Pamphlets describing the marriage circulated in several different languages, both within Britain and on the continent. Even at Whitehall we find new voices emerging: the Inns of Court, who, after 10 years of James’s English reign, had not mounted any entertainments for the king at court, now manifested themselves vigorously, providing two out of the three marriage masques. In both its scale and its political significance, this was a very different kind of event from the marriages of Philip Herbert and Susan de Vere, Frances Howard and Robert Devereux, James Hay and Honora Denny, or Elizabeth Radcliffe and John Ramsay. As a theatrical event, the Palatine wedding festivities emerge in the wake of one of the most rich and pluralistic periods in the history of Jacobean court entertainment. It is during this period that we find Queen Anna at the apex of her masquing activity. Between 1608 and 1611 she danced in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Beauty (1608), The Masque of Queens (1609), and Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611), and Samuel Daniel’s Tethys’ Festival (1610). Clare McManus has shown that, collectively, these masques challenged the gender dynamics of the Jacobean court through their politicized display of the courtly female body. The years between the Anglo-Scottish marriage celebrations and the Palatine wedding also saw the performative debut of Prince Henry. He appeared in Ben Jonson’s Prince Henry’s Barriers (1610) and Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611), both of which traffic in a neo-chivalric brand of mythmaking more in line with the symbolic accoutrements of England’s Tudor rulers than with the “British” King James. The entertainments mounted for the Palatine wedding grow out of a culture of elite performance that was, like the Jacobean court itself, becoming increasingly diverse ideologically. At the same time, within that culture of performance, nuptial entertainments were becoming more and more focused on the monarchical ideology of union. If, as I will show, the Palatine wedding entertainments mark a break from this mounting ideological focus, this can to some extent be ascribed to the inability of nuptial mythmaking to continue papering over the political conditions of the Jacobean court. More specifically, though, we need to turn to the politics of the Palatine wedding itself in order to understand the 1613 marriage entertainments. Ideological heterogeneity was a characteristic of the Jacobean court from the outset, but the marriage of Elizabeth and Frederick intensified these divisions in unique ways. It required that different kinds of political aspirations be voiced through a common framework of marriage. As a result, the language of union invented in response to the Great Britain project between 1603 and 1608 splinters into competing languages of union. Like the Union of England and Scotland, James viewed the Anglo-German match as one step in a larger process of achieving domestic and European concord.  The 1613 Oxford anthology, Epithalamia Sive Lusus Palatine, alone contained 242 poems (Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d, 107 n. 17).  McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage, 97–135.  See Introduction, n. 18.

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The king’s longterm plan was to balance off Elizabeth’s Protestant marriage with a Catholic match for Prince Henry (and after Henry’s death, for Prince Charles). However, for many, the Protestant dimension of the Palatine wedding presented an opportunity to refashion British national identity as religiously interventionist, to move away from a form of national rhetoric narcissistically focused on the internal cohesion of Great Britain. Elizabeth’s marriage to Frederick punctuated four years of growing tension between the religious powers of Europe. In 1609, the Cleves-Jülich crisis sidelined the issue of Anglo-Scottish Union, demanding instead that England define its relationship to continental Protestantism. Henry IV of France, infuriated by the Catholic Habsburgs’ seizure of the duchy of Cleves in the Netherlands, insisted that he and James shared the responsibility for countering the act of political insolence. Faced with the imperative of choosing between loyalty to France and loyalty to Spain, James’s hopes of playing a mediating role in Europe’s religious conflicts seemed to be crumbling before his eyes. While the English king prevaricated, Europe teetered on the brink of all-out war. Conveniently for James, the issue was deferred on 4 May 1610 when, in the midst of mounting French pressure for English military intervention, Henry IV was assassinated. Nevertheless, by exposing just how volatile the religious tensions on the continent were, this series of events (described by one scholar as a contemporary equivalent to the Cuban missile crisis) inscribed itself deeply into the English political psyche. It supplied an overtly ideological context for the formation of an identifiably Protestant literary culture in the Jacobean court, gravitating around Prince Henry. Under the young prince’s patronage, writers like George Chapman, Michael Drayton, and Joshua Sylvester nurtured an ethos of militarism, colonial expansion, and Elizabethan nostalgia which the ClevesJülich crisis had lent an acute topical relevance. With Prince Henry’s unexpected death in 1612 and the ensuing dissipation of his court, the ideology of militant Protestantism became more sharply focused on Princess Elizabeth’s marriage.10 Prince Henry had been an enthusiastic supporter of his sister’s match with the Palatine Prince, and Roy Strong has shown that he was closely involved in the

See Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603–1642 (Harlow: Longman, 1989), 15–17.  The Cleves-Jülich crisis, and England’s role therein, is discussed in detail by Maurice Lee, Jr., James I and Henry IV: An Essay in Foreign Policy, 1603–1610 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 142–67.  The Cuban missile crisis analogy is made by Hans Werner, “The Hector of Germany or the Palsgrave Prime Elector and Anglo-German Relations in Early Stuart England: The View from the Popular Stage,” in The Stuart Court and Europe, (ed.) Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113–32. 10 Barbara Lewalski comments on how, after 1612, Princess Elizabeth was portrayed by some reformist Protestants as the incarnation of Prince Henry’s spirit. See Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 51. 

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planning of the marriage festivities.11 As a result of his untimely death, however, Henry’s religiously prophetic vision of the wedding was only partially realized in the celebrations that actually occurred. We find residual manifestations of the prince’s Protestant ideology in public entertainment such as the fireworks and the mock sea-battle on the Thames, in parts of George Chapman’s Memorable Masque and Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, and certainly in the surviving description of the unperformed (and brazenly apocalyptic) Masque of Truth.12 There are also tantalizingly suggestive references in contemporary personal correspondences to military tournaments and other religiously enthusiastic entertainments that Henry had apparently planned, but which, in the end, never took place.13 As consistent as the militant Protestant discourse is in the Palatine marriage celebrations, it is also fragmented and muffled. It has to compete with Thomas Campion’s Lords’ Masque, for instance, which was commissioned by the king himself for performance on the wedding night. The fiction we encounter in Campion’s masque praises the individual regal authority of James rather than the collective triumph of Protestantism. The Memorable Masque and The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, moreover, are ambiguous in their portrayal of the marriage. They oscillate between different kinds of rhetoric. Sometimes they do clearly expound Henry’s values through imperial or chivalric imagery. Yet this often dissolves into the eroticism familiar from the Anglo-Scottish marriage masques, an idiom we should associate with James rather than his son. At the heart of each of the three masques is a common series of questions: to who does this marriage belong? to which set of political values? Where does fictional authority lie in the Palatine wedding celebrations? Each of the marriage entertainments answers differently, but all encode this same basic indeterminacy. This chapter analyzes the disjunctions within national mythmaking that were highlighted by Elizabeth’s marriage. In doing so, it rethinks what has come to be the established reading of the Palatine festivities as a thematically unified event, a position first presented in the opening chapter of Frances Yates’s The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Though Yates gives a characteristically insightful summary of the repeated use of Protestant chivalric imagery at the wedding celebrations, the one page she dedicates to court entertainment remains silent on the issue of the masques’ rhetorical hybridity, a hybridity that renders their ideological and

11 Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 175–83; Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d, 64–94. 12 This masque was brought to light by David Norbrook and, in two articles, he supplies the most complete discussion of it. See “The Reformation of the Masque,” in The Court Masque, (ed.) David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 94–110 and “The Masque of Truth: Court Entertainments and International Protestant Politics in the Early Stuart Period,” The Seventeenth Century 1 (1986): 81–110. 13 See Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 176–7.

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thematic relationship to the public festivities only tenuous.14 Jerzy Limon, in the next significant study of the Palatine festivities, likewise overlooks the complex political posturing of the wedding entertainments. He sees the various public and private performances organized for Elizabeth’s wedding “as parts of one text,” a thematically coherent “text-in-performance” whose celebration coalesces around the benefits of a strengthened “Protestant union.”15 One result of Limon’s critical focus on the “inner logic and consistence” of the nuptial event is that conventional similarities between the wedding entertainments are overemphasized to the detriment of important variations in the kinds of rhetoric each of them were using.16 In what follows, I wish to re-account for these disparities, by paying closer attention to the representational strategies used in the wedding entertainments and by being more sensitive to the historical and political contexts in which they were performed. My aim is to show how the marriage masques registered competing accounts of Princess Elizabeth’s marriage and incorporated those competing accounts into their fictions. Along the way, I will be showing how the eroticism discussed in the previous chapter is again used to voice monarchical authority, but this time in a political context very different from that of the 1607 and 1608 court weddings. Following this line of enquiry should permit us to make two broader observations about nuptial performance in Jacobean England. First, that the historical moment of 1613 put discernable pressures on the marriage masque form as it had evolved up to that point, both in terms of dramatic structure and rhetorical content. Secondly, the Palatine masques show how the language of union, improvised in the first place in response to the Great Britain project, came to be mapped onto the very different cultural circumstances of Anglo-German union. Princess Elizabeth’s wedding raised new, un-British questions about England’s political identity, and consequently acted as a destabilizing force in the development of the marriage masque. With unfamiliar political themes needing to be addressed, the function of monarchical rhetoric within court entertainment began to change. Rhetoric and Authority at the Public Festivities Our discussion of the Palatine festivities begins in the city streets of London rather than the English court at Whitehall. This section considers printed accounts of the fireworks show that was mounted on 11 February and the mock sea-battle of 13 February. Approaching the masques by way of the public festivities is useful for two reasons. To begin with, it allows us to see what kinds of fictions 14 Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 5–6. 15 Jerzy Limon, The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 125, 133. 16 Ibid., 169.

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were being produced for the wedding outside of the court. The narratives used to describe the fireworks and sea-battle illustrate how the public may have imagined Elizabeth Stuart’s marriage politically and culturally. In addition, these accounts refer to the royal family in ways that are markedly different from the marriage masques. In masques, James is generally incited as an authority at key moments in the performance. Whether it is to enact a transformation or quell an antimasque, the monarchical presence is crucial to moving the entertainment forward. In this sense, the king’s role is, at least in theory, authorial: he “produces” the fiction by removing the impediments and disruptions that threaten it. The king is, ideally, supposed to be the fount of national mythmaking. In the descriptions of the public festivities, on the other hand, the king and even Princess Elizabeth herself are entirely disempowered, scripted instead as passive spectators to a fiction outside their control. The accounts of the public festivities thus act as useful counterpoints to the rhetorical operations that we will see being undertaken in the masques. A good place to start is with John Taylor’s description of the fireworks show in London. According to John Chamberlain, this part of the festivities was an accident-ridden failure; it even succeeded in boring the king.17 But in Taylor’s text the spectacle is imagined as the centerpiece of an elaborate national narrative involving the archetypal figure of English Protestant virtue and patron saint of England’s prestigious Order of the Garter (into which Fredrick had recently been inducted), Saint George. The description opens with the familiar romance topos of the captive lady: The imperiall and beautious Lady Lucida, Queene of the feminine territories of the man-hating Amazonians, with whose bright eye-dazeling coruscancie, and whose refulgent feature, the black-sould, hell-commanding magitian Mango (a Tartarian borne) was so ensnared and captivated, that for her love, and to be assured to enjoy her, he would set all hell in an uprore, and pluck Don Belzebub by the beard.18

Yet Lucida, “Having vowed herself ever to be one of Vesta’s votaries, always kept Cupid out at the arme’s end.” Outraged at her steadfastness, Mango “raises a strong impregnable pavilion, in which he immures and encloses this beautiful Amazonian Queene.”19 In due course, the spectators witness the arrival of Saint George who, after being entertained by fireworks, promptly defeats Mango and releases Lady Lucida. It is doubtful that the audience would have been able to follow all the details of the plot as Taylor relates them, but they very likely would have been able to Chamberlain to Alice Carleton, 18 February 1613, in The Letters of John Chamberlain, (ed.) McClure, 1:423. 18 John Taylor, Heaven’s Blessing and Earth’s Joy ... (London, 1613), in The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First., (ed.) John Nicols, 4 vols (London: J.B. Nichols, 1828), 2:530. 19 Ibid. 17

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recognize the figure of Saint George entering in his usual role as the champion of honor and female chastity. The fiction is extremely nostalgic in its Elizabethan resonances. The triumph of the virgin is, of course, a standard Elizabethan literary device, with obvious correspondences to the queen’s own strategies of selfpresentation. To those watching the victory of Saint George at the fireworks display, and certainly to those reading Taylor’s account of it, Princess Elizabeth’s marriage becomes associated with a return to the cultural ethos of the recent past, not with James’s forward-looking vision of the marriage as part of an ongoing process of political reconciliation.20 Taylor’s fiction takes the Protestant dimension of the Palatine match as its point of departure, using it as an opportunity to refer back to the literary culture of a religiously more militant England. In this respect, the motif of the fireworks takes part in a larger vocalization of idealized Elizabethan culture found in the work of contemporaneously active Spenserian poets such as George Wither, William Browne, and Christopher Brooke.21 The mock sea-battle, which took place on the Thames two days after the fireworks, is even more direct in its portrayal of Protestant militarism. An enemy harbor was constructed in the river for the occasion. Taylor describes it as “belonging to a supposed Turkish or Barbarian Castle of Tunis, Algiers, or some other Mahometan fortification.”22 Geographical specificity is not a concern here. Taylor’s reading of the mock sea-battle is not as England warring against any particular political entity. Religious specificity, on the other hand, is very much a concern. England, representing the True Faith, is being pitted against a conglomerate of infidels. This conglomerate is, ostensibly, Islam—at least this is how it would have appeared at the event itself. In Taylor’s textual witness things are less straightforward. Taylor, in fact, offers two distinct historical narratives for the reader to choose from as interpretive options: the mock-battle was executed in “the manner of the happy and famous battell of Lepanto, fought betwixt the Turks and the Christians in the yeare of grace 1571; or in this bloody manner was the memorable battaile betwixt us and the invincible (as it was thought) Spanish Armada in the yeare 1588.”23 By including the Armada victory as a possible imaginative lens through which to view the public performance, Taylor’s text casts the sea20 A number of sermons and eulogies seized upon the name, “Elizabeth,” as a way to link the princess and the late queen. See William Leigh, Queene Elizabeth, paraleld in her princely vertues ... (London, 1612); John King, Vitis Palatina, A sermon appointed to be preached at Whitehall upon the Tuesday after the marriage of the Ladie Elizabeth her Grace (London, 1614); and Robert Allyne, Teares of joy shed at the happy departure from Great Britaine, of the two paragons of the Christian world. Fredericke and Elizabeth ... (London, 1613). 21 On the Spenserians, see further, Michelle O’Callaghan, The “Shepherds Nation”: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 195–215. 22 The Progresses of James I, (ed.) Nichols, 2:528. 23 Ibid., 529.

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battle as an extension of the Elizabethan nostalgia elicited at the fireworks display. Furthermore, in using the spectacle as a vehicle for anti-Habsburg sentiment, readers of the account are reminded that they need not look as far as Turkey or the Levant for infidels. Indeed, Catholic powers posed a much more immediate threat to England than did the Islamic east, with whom the English at least maintained friendly and mutually-beneficial commercial links, as well as a firm agreement on the error of religious idolatry.24 The link between Elizabeth’s marriage and antiCatholic military victory resurfaces the following day at the wedding ceremony itself. The New Banqueting House—the starting point of the nuptial procession and venue for the post-ceremony banquet—was specially decorated with wallhangings depicting, once again, the 1588 Armada victory.25 Taylor’s anti-Catholic gestures remain relatively understated. It would not have been in his interests to incite the disapproval of the tolerance-espousing James who had engineered a peace treaty with Spain in 1604. Nevertheless, there is certainly the suggestion in his account that the public celebration of English naval power expressed a desire to use the Anglo-German union as a springboard for launching a more interventionist military policy. The indecision that James had displayed during the Cleves-Jülich crisis was seen by some as a missed opportunity. The 1613 wedding offered a second chance to imagine the revival of a chivalric political culture. The evidence of the commercial stage helps us to construct a context for this. Between the outbreak of the Cleves-Jülich crisis in 1609 and 1614, the year after Elizabeth departed for Heidelberg, there is consistent engagement with military nostalgia in the drama.26 In 1608, the First Servingman of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus complains, “This peace is nothing but to rust iron, increase tailors, and breed ballad-makers,” to which the Second Servingman adds, “Let me have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night” (4. 5. 216–19). In Webster’s 1612 The White Devil, Francisco curses “the misery of peace” (5. 1. 117), pointing out how “some men i’ th’ court seem Colossuses in a chamber, who if they came into the field would appear pitiful pigmies” (5. 1. 119–21).27 Melantius, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1610/11), envisions a fruitful marriage as one

24 See Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996); Jerry Brotton and Lisa Jardine, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (London: Reaktion, 2000); Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Matthew Dimmock, New Turks: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 25 The Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, vol. 13, 1610–1613, (ed.) Horatio F. Brown (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1905), 499. 26 A useful article on this topic is Tristan Marshall, “‘That’s the Misery of Peace’: Representations of Martialism in the Jacobean Public Theatre, 1608–1613,” The Seventeenth Century 13 (1998): 1–21. 27 The White Devil, (ed.) Christina Luckyj, New Mermaids (London: A & C Black, 1996).

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which “may fill the world / Successively with soldiers!” (1. 1. 62–3).28 And in 1614, the citizen-produced play, The Hector of Germanie or the Palsgrave Prime Elector, went to the extent of staging a continental war in Germany.29 Although these plays offer only limited access to how Londoners might have imagined the Palatine wedding, they still suggest that the fictions described in Taylor’s account should not be understood as the interpretive agenda of a single author. There is a discernable artistic impetus towards renewing England’s military values; Taylor’s text, by connecting the semiotics of the entertainments to a larger network of Protestant history and myth, is operating very much within that context. Had The Masque of Truth been performed, the theme of national militancy would have manifested itself more forcefully at court as well. This masque promised to be the wedding celebrations’ most polemical expression of Protestant national myth. A description of the entertainment is included in a narrative of the Palatine marriage written in French by one D. Jocquet and published in 1613 in Heidelberg.30 The masque is recounted as if it had taken place, with all mention of Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn left out. However, English sources confirm that Beaumont’s masque was performed and that The Masque of Truth was not. If Prince Henry had commissioned the entertainment (and based on the thematic content this seems likely) his death in 1612 would account for its cancellation.31 As Jocquet’s description makes clear, The Masque of Truth would have been unprecedented in magnificence. It required an unusually large cast, gigantic sets, and impressively complex machinery. The Masque of Truth also marked a rhetorical point of departure from the masques that had been performed in the Jacobean court up to that point. It swaps classical mythology for purely Biblical imagery, staging a worldwide conversion to Protestantism. Masquers representing the princes and princesses of each continent dance forth and pay tribute to James and to the married couple as champions of true religion. They enter through a large globe held by the colossal, reclining figure of Althea who reads from a Bible. The description of Europe’s submissive entry into the Jacobean court gives a sense of this production’s unusually apocalyptic panegyrical tone: 28 The Maid’s Tragedy, (ed.) T.W. Craik, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 29 See Werner, “The Hector of Germany.” 30 D. Jocquet, Les Triomphes, entrées, cartels, tournois, cérémonies, et aultres Magnificences, fait en Angleterre, & au Palatinat ... (Heidelberg, 1613). The section pertaining to The Masque of Truth is transcribed by Norbrook in an appendix to “The Masque of Truth.” All of my comments on this masque are heavily indebted to Norbrook’s work on it (see n. 12, above). 31 The case for Prince Henry as patron is based exclusively on circumstantial evidence. He is still, however, the most likely candidate, although Princess Elizabeth herself is another (though less likely) possibility. Not only does the masque mirror what we know of Henry’s religious and political views, the prince would also have had a number of militant Protestant poets within his close circle of friends capable of composing the songs and speeches. See Norbrook, “The Masque of Truth,” 89–95, especially 93.

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L’on vit sortir une Reyne, habillée comme les peintres ont depeint l’EUROPE, ayant avec elle cinq Princesses, ses Filles: qui se nommoyent, France, Espagne, Allemagne, Italie, & Grece; avec ung Admiral & sa femme (nommez l’Ocean & la Mer Mediterranée) avec leur vassaux; le Loire, le Boete, le Rhin, le Tibre, & Achelous; portant chacun, dans une Corne d’Abondance, des fruits, qui croissent sur leurs rivages; desquels ilz vont faire offrande a l’Espouse & l’Espoux.32 A Queen appears, dressed in the way that painters depict EUROPE, with her five Princesses, her daughters, named, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, & Greece; along with an Admiral & his wife (named the Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea) and their vassals; the Loire, the Boedo, the Rhine, the Tiber, and the Acheloös; in a Cornucopia each one carries fruits that grow on their river banks, which they make as an offering to the Bride and Bridegroom.33

The iconographical dissonance between this scene and the aesthetics of other court marriage masques is aptly identified by David Norbrook, who remarks, “The wedding of Frederick and Elizabeth is viewed primarily not in dynastic terms, as the union of two royal houses, but in ideological terms as a confessional alliance.”34 Later in the entertainment, during “le grand Balet,” the Muses sing, “Vous Affrique, Europe, & Asie, / Delaissez vostre Idolatrie, / Pour recognoistre l’Eternel”35 (You Africa, Europe, & Asia / Leave your Idolatry, / And come to know Eternity). The apocalyptic associations of this worldwide Protestant conversion reach a climax when the princes and princesses are led into the garden of Paradise. The gates swing closed behind them and the masque ends.36 This surely was not the kind of entertainment that would have appealed to James’s sensibilities, and it is not surprising that in the absence of Henry’s initiative it fell off the agenda. But even though it was not actually performed, The Masque of Truth did achieve a textual afterlife in Jocquet’s book and, in this way, still took part in shaping public understandings of Elizabeth and Frederick’s marriage. As far as the continental readers of Jocquet’s account were concerned, this masque was performed and was a monarchically sanctioned statement on the religious significance of the marriage. Jocquet’s text, then, makes its intervention into English national myth in a slightly different way than the printed accounts of the fireworks and sea-battle. Not only does it contribute forcefully to a discourse of religious militancy, it also performs a unique act of ideological revision by deliberately rewriting the court celebrations as they had really taken place. Jacobean monarchical rhetoric did not integrate well with the language of chivalric or apocalyptic Protestantism. The fact that James never followed through with the plans for a Masque of Truth could be read as a testimony to this. The 32

Ibid., 102–3. My translation. 34 Norbrook, “The Masque of Truth,” 83. 35 Ibid., 105. 36 Ibid. 33

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fictions of the London entertainments, though not quite as ideologically brazen as the cancelled masque, were still from a different iconographical milieu than most royal encomia in the Jacobean period. This is reflected not only in the choice of imagery in the public entertainments, but also in the printed accounts’ relegation of the royal family to passive, spectatorial positions, something strikingly dissimilar to the animating royal presence we associate with court masques. A good example of this appears in the anonymously authored text, The Magnificent Marriage of the Two Great Princes Frederick Count Palatine, &c. And the Lady Elizabeth. This account opens its description of the fireworks by detailing the location of the spectacle’s most privileged viewers: His Highnes, the Queene’s Majestie, Prince Charles, Prince Frederick, with the Princess Elizabeth his Royall Bride, and the rest of the Nobilitie of England, upon Thursday the eleventh of Februarie in the evening, being placed in the galleries and windows about his Highnes’ Court of Whitehall, where, in the sight of many thousands of people many artificial conclusions in Fire-workes were upon the Thames performed.37

The text is keen to emphasize the separation between royalty and the shows presented to them. The division between the space of the court and the public performance of marriage fictions is inscribed textually through the positioning of the royal entourage at a threshold, “The galleries and windows about his Highnes’ Court of Whitehall.” Such references are made throughout the account. In the description of the sea-battle, the royal company again maintains a threshold position, this time “upon the Privie Staires of Whitehall, where after a while expecting the beginning of the desired Fire-workes, the Lord Admirall sent forth two or three Gentlemen in a whirrie with a flagge or banner to signifie the King and the Nobilitie’s tarriance for the representations.”38 Here, occupying the court threshold space of the privy stairs corresponds to the viewing of performance: James is in “tariance for the representations” that will be produced outside Whitehall’s periphery. The court space, on the border of which James and his family wait, is constructed as interpretive. In masques, on the other hand, James and his court are most often established as the source of national fictions. To put the disparity in Henri Lefebvre’s terminology, the public festivities and masques constitute different kinds of “representational spaces,” each with its own particular set of power relations.39 What we will find in The Lords’ Masque is a revision of 37 The Magnificent Marriage of the Two Great Princes Frederick Count Palatine, &c. And the Lady Elizabeth ... (London, 1613), in The Progresses of James I, (ed.) Nichols, 2:537. 38 Ibid., 539. 39 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 39–46. Lefebvre defines representational space as, “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’ ... It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (39).

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the public festivities’ de-hierarchicalized schema. Thomas Campion’s weddingnight entertainment makes a concerted attempt to resituate fictional authority with James, at court, and in the masque genre. Monarchical Monologue: Divine Vocality in The Lords’ Masque The Lords’ Masque was the first of the three masques produced for Elizabeth’s wedding. It was Thomas Campion’s second court entertainment and certainly his most important commission, being mounted on the very evening of the marriage ceremony, 14 February 1613.40 Unlike the other two masques (sponsored by the Inns of Court), The Lords’ Masque was commissioned directly by King James and, as such, is the most monarchical statement we get on the wedding at any point in the festivities. In view of this, it is perhaps fitting that the entertainment is so overtly concerned with the idea of fictional authority and from where that authority issues. The primary aim of The Lords’ Masque is to designate the court as the source of national myth, with King James as its vocal center point. The narrative of the masque moves from a chaotic multiplicity of voices, symbolized by the Frantics of the antimasque, to a single monarchical fiction produced by Prometheus. In tone, Prometheus’s main masque is predominantly sexual. Tropes of regeneration and fertility dominate the poetry and the double-masque form— the same used in Hymenaei seven years earlier—would have lent these tropes a corresponding visual and performative dimension. Sexual imagery of this sort was familiar enough from the Anglo-Scottish marriage celebrations, but Campion’s 1613 performance puts it to different use. The Lords’ Masque detaches the erotic language of union from its usual referent, the Great Britain project, so that it may encode instead the king’s authority over the politics of the Palatine marriage. The first figure to appear in the masque is Orpheus, a character commonly associated with the quasi-divine power of the voice. Close on his heels, Mania, the goddess of madness, “Appears wildly out of her cave” (19).41 Orpheus beckons Mania to “approach yet nearer, and thou then shalt know / The will of Jove, which he will breathe from me” (28–9). In these lines we learn that Orpheus is James’s messenger (Jove being one of the king’s conventional personae). During the dialogue that follows, Orpheus delineates the central issue of the masque: the question of who holds fictional authority over the Palatine wedding celebrations: 40

With regard to Campion’s attaining this commission, David Lindley comments that he was probably quite lucky Ben Jonson was away on the continent at the time of the marriage (Thomas Campion [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986], 191). Frances Yates suggests that this absence was a deliberate expression of Jonson’s disapproval of Elizabeth’s marriage. See Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 116–17. 41 Line references for The Lords’ Masque are from I.A. Shapiro’s edition in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, (ed.) T.J.B. Spencer and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 95–123.

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Though several power to thee and charge he gave T’enclose in thy dominions such as rave Through blood’s distemper, how durst thou attempt T’imprison Entheus, whose rage is exempt From vulgar censure? It is all divine, Full of celestial rapture, that can shine Through darkest shadows: therefore Jove by me Commands thy power straight to set Entheus free. (33–40)

Entheus is another name for Poetic Inspiration, who, as we are led to understand, has been imprisoned by Mania. Jove is seeking to free Entheus in order to re-enlist him in his service, and Orpheus is the messenger assigned to carry out the task. The choice of characters is important here. The use of Orpheus as royal messenger, rather than a more conventional figure (like Mercury, for example) could only be calculated. Orpheus’s common associations with vocal potency, especially aesthetically superior poetry or music, makes him particularly useful for linking James with rhetorical empowerment. This is clearly displayed in allegorical terms when Orpheus succeeds in freeing Entheus (Poetic Inspiration), whom he places in the service of Jove/James. Campion’s fictional framework is extremely clever as panegyric. What the masque is developing is a narrative in which James can be positioned as ascendant in a network of specifically poetic power relations: Entheus, freed on Jove’s behalf, is “exempt / From vulgar censure.” Entheus’s liberation is not, however, immediately realized. According to Mania, Poetic Inspiration cannot be separated from the plethora of other ignoble voices—the Frantics—that she keeps imprisoned. While acknowledging the supremacy of Entheus, this rebuke also positions him within a troubled and competitive context, one that signals the numerous textual responses to Elizabeth’s marriage. Mania says: How can I? Frantics with him [Entheus] many more In one cave are lock’d up; ope once the door, All will fly out and through the world disturb The peace of Jove. (41–4)

The various encomiastic voices mythologizing the wedding are troped vividly as Mania’s Frantics flying through the door of her cave. Their disturbance of “the peace of Jove” suggests not only a general threat to James as privileged national mythmaker, but also the more specific rhetorical disruption of Protestant militancy that we have seen recurring in the public festivities. Mania’s assertion is that Jove will not be able to speak without the attendant voices of “such as rave / Through blood’s distemper.” However, Orpheus explains that he can tame the Frantics. Like the Ovidian Orpheus taming the trees in the wilderness, or the medieval Orfeo domesticating the wild beasts, Campion’s Orpheus will use music (this time inspired by Jove) to force the Frantics “To any form or motion we intend” (51). Accordingly, Mania agrees to release her captives and the antimasque begins. The 12 Frantics, comprised of six men and six women, enter “at the sound of a strange

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music” (56). Included are “the Lover, the Self Lover, the Melancholic Man full of fear, the School Man overcome with fantasy, the over-watched Usurer, with others” (57–9). Also amongst this group is “Entheus (or Poetic Fury) ... tossed up and down” (60–61). As was promised, Orpheus initiates a change in the music which subdues the Frantics, announcing afterwards that “Entheus alone / Must do Jove’s bidding now, all else be gone” (67–8). With that, Mania and the Frantics depart. Very early on, Campion’s masque is allowing James to take part in a fantasy of rhetorical authority, one that grants him the ability to intervene in the circulation of fictions around his daughter’s marriage, and to hold absolute power over them. With the dispersal of the antimasque, the image the audience is left with is a telling one. Entheus stands alone, attired in antique garbs, wearing a wreath of laurels. In his hands he holds both a book and a pen. This emblematic figure, having been released and claimed by Jove, plainly signifies poetic preeminence. The exclusivity of this vision of mythmaking is reinforced by the peculiar antimasque dispersal which, as David Lindley notes, contrasts with Jonsonian conventions. Rather than having the court masquers counter the onslaught of disruption together, The Lords’ Masque has Jove’s messenger Orpheus carry out the task alone.42 The result is that Jove’s power comes to be defined not only through creative ascendancy (as represented by Entheus) but also through censorial control, the ability to suppress other fictional voices (as represented by the dispersal of the Frantics). The Masque of Truth may very well have met with just such censorship. Appropriately, Orpheus’s celebratory proclamation on the retrieval of Entheus, in addition to praising true poetry, castigates the age’s rampant misuses of the public voice: Too too long, Alas, good Entheus, hast thou brook’d this wrong. What! number thee with madmen! O mad age, Senseless of thee, and thy celestial rage. For thy excelling rapture, ev’n through things That seem most light, is borne with sacred wings: Nor are these musics, shows, or revels vain, When thou adorn’st them with thy Phoebean brain. They’re palate-sick of much more vanity, That cannot taste them in their dignity. Jove therefore lets thy prison’d sprite obtain Her liberty and fiery scope again; And here by me commands thee to create Inventions rare, this night to celebrate, Such as become a nuptial by his will Begun and ended. (77–92)

The beginning of Orpheus’s speech points out the dangers of losing a quasi-divine center from which national celebration may spring. With so many claiming to 42

Lindley, Thomas Campion, 201.

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speak for the nation in this “mad age,” the “celestial rage” of Entheus has become homogenized with the utterings of madmen. In making this claim, the speech is performing a dual role. It flatters James by locating poetic authority in his court, while at the same time making a more specific case for the importance of the masque form in the assertion of Crown ideology. When Orpheus says, “Nor are these musics, shows, or revels vain, / When thou adorn’st them with thy Phoebean brain,” masques are being ascribed a function that goes beyond the visual pleasures of costume and scenic design. In addition to granting James, as patron of the masque, control over the marriage celebrations, the speech also nods back to Campion himself as author. Through this simultaneous praise of author and patron, the court-based system of rhetorical production is privileged over all other channels of national eulogy, the constituents of which have been represented in the antimasque as a horde of nonsensical madmen, raving due to various humoural imbalances. The theme of Entheus’s main masque is the Promethean myth of creation.43 The story is played out through a series of transformations in which the stars, or Promethean fire, metamorphose into male masquers, after which they breathe life into the female masquers, themselves initially appearing as statues. Though Prometheus is not conventional in marriage celebrations—Entheus tells us that he has been inserted “In Hymen’s place” (132)—the character’s capacity for parthenogenetic creation presents an apt corollary to Jove’s singular monopoly on fictional creation. As Clare McManus observes of The Lords’ Masque, “Campion figured the creative impulse as a masculine quality,” a decision that served to link Prometheus, Entheus, and Jove.44 The poetic fecundity of the two latter characters finds a sexual equivalent in the figure of Prometheus, who miraculously generates human offspring. In this way, Hymen’s replacement introduces an important variation into the masque’s general theme of quasi-divine fictionmaking. This can be observed, for example, in the song performed for the Promethean stars: See how fair, O how fair they shine! What yields more pomp beneath the skies? Their birth is yet divine, And such their form implies. (115–18)

The “birth” mentioned in this song is double: it refers to the masquers issuing from the stars (a human birth) and also to the birth of Entheus’s fiction which, as he tells us, “Jove inspires.” This double rendering of “birth” demonstrates how the 43 Prometheus features in several different strands of myth. The most well-known version of the Prometheus story originates in Hesiod’s Theogeny, which tells of Prometheus being punished for stealing fire from the gods. Campion, however, seems to be thinking of a different, but related, myth in which Prometheus uses the fire of the gods to bring life to clay, thus creating mankind. This is described in Horace’s Carmina and Aristophanes’s Aves, among others. 44 McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage, 152.

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theme of Promethean creation lends a distinctly maternal quality to Jove’s role as privileged national fictionmaker. Katharine Eisaman Maus has shown that, despite French feminists’ Lacanian elaborations on the creation of texts as a phalocentric, male paradigm, English Renaissance poets often used the female body and, in particular, the female body’s capacity to give birth as a metaphor for poetic and rhetorical conception.45 In so doing, however, these poets had to cope with the female body’s defectiveness as an emblem of closed subjectivity. For, as Maus points out, “The birth process, both in reality and as a metaphor for rhetorical production, involves the permeability of boundaries ... the sensational transfer from inside to outside through an orifice.”46 What is striking about The Lords’ Masque’s construction of fictional authority is that it does not fit comfortably into either the phalocentric Lacanian model or that of female birth, discussed by Maus. Although the birth metaphor is, indeed, retained in the masque, the female body itself is entirely evaded. The Promethean body provides an alternative maternalism. Masculine and parthenogenetic, it seals James’s rhetorical ascendancy over the marriage event through a metaphor of creation that is closed, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Campion had a similar idea in The Lord Hay’s Masque, figuring the re-animation of the knights of Apollo as a mystical rebirth instigated by James. In the 1607 masque, this maternal topos reinforced the notion that Anglo-Scottish Union found its locus in James’s body. Re-using this device in an un-British context marks a crucial transmutation in the language of union. It shows its characteristic tropes being disengaged from a specific political project to contribute, instead, to a more flexibly applied rhetorical authority for the monarch. Language, Reification, Regicentrism: Campion’s Sibylla Scene I want to move swiftly on to one of the final scenes in The Lords’ Masque, that in which Sibylla enters to deliver a prophecy on the marriage. This passage issues the most deliberate and visually striking assertion of royal fictional authority. Directly following a lengthy series of dances in which Elizabeth, Frederick, and other courtiers participated, Entheus announces the entry of the prophetess, who drags behind her a large statue of the married couple: Make clear the passage to Sibylla’s sight, Who with her trophy comes to crown this night; And, as her self with music shall be led, So shall she pull on with a golden thread A high vast obelisk, dedicate to fame, Which immortality itself did frame. (331–6) 45

Katharine Eisaman Maus, “‘A Womb of His Own’: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, (ed.) James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 266–89. 46 Ibid., 274.

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Campion gives a description of the “trophy” Entheus refers to: “In the middle was erected an obelisk, all of silver, and in it lights of several colours; on the side of this obelisk, standing on pedestals, were the statues of the Bridegroom and Bride, all of gold, in gracious postures” (340–43). Jerzy Limon has called this passage “a typical emblematic scene, so characteristic of the masques.”47 He links the tableau to Henry Peacham’s emblem, “Glorie of Princes,” and reinforces this visual correlation verbally by drawing attention to the dynastic tone adopted in Sibylla’s prophecy: “Sybilla not only tells that the great race of kings and emperors will spring from this union, but also that all the peoples of the world will unite in one true religion and in love.”48 It is this latter prediction of Sibylla’s that provides a basis for Limon to link The Lords’ Masque with the Protestant themes of the public festivities.49 But if we look closer at this sequence a quite different reading seems to emerge. Limon bases his thematic linkage of the public festivities and the masque on one uncharacteristic passage in Sibylla’s speech: Utramque iunget una mens gentem, fides, Deique cultus unus, et simplex amor. Idem erit utrique hostis, sodalis idem, idem Votum periclitantium, atque eadum manus. One mind will join the two nations, one set of loyalties, One worship of God, and one love. Each will have the same enemy, the same friend, The same prayer when in danger and the same valour in war.50 (366–9)

As The Lords’ Masque’s unique testament to the prophetic Protestantism of the unperformed Masque of Truth, these lines are fascinating. Yet taken in the context of the entertainment as a whole, they do not on their own provide adequate evidence for the existence of thematic continuity between the public festivities and Campion’s masque. Moreover, Limon’s general appraisal of Sibylla’s entry as “a typical emblematic scene” is itself potentially occlusive. By stressing the conventionality of the motif, this reading sidesteps discussion of the specific rhetorical operation being undertaken in the Sibylla scene. Campion may very well have considered an allusion to Peacham’s “Glorie of Princes” to be a detail appropriate for a royal wedding celebration. All the same, the use of emblem book imagery should be thought of as a representational strategy as well as an iconographic reference. Campion’s masque, it seems to me, is exploiting the reifying potential of the static emblematic image. The statue allows the masque to objectify Elizabeth and Frederick, to consign them to a state of representational inertia in which they will be described by Sibylla’s prophecy. This passage Limon, The Masque of Stuart Culture, 140. Ibid., 141. 49 Ibid. 50 My gratitude to Grainne Mclaughlin for assistance with the Latin translations in this section. 47 48

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plays out the final step in the assertion of James’s fictional authority. For as the prophetess states from the outset, “Debetur alto iure principium Iovi, / Votis det ipse vim meis, dictis fidem” (The beginning by right belongs to great Jove, / Let he himself give force to my prayers and fidelity to my words) (356–7). James, as linguistic and spiritual source, presides over both the political prophecy and the mute statues that it speaks for. Sibylla continues her speech with a description of the statue of Princess Elizabeth. Personal praise quickly evolves into prophetic national celebration: Quam pulchra pulchro sponsa respondet viro! Quam plena numinis! Patrem vultu exprimit, Parens futura masculae prolis, parens Regum, imperatorum: additur Germaniae Robur Britannicum; ecquid esse par potest? How the beautiful bride answers her handsome husband! How full of divine grace she is! She has her father’s features, She, the future parent of male offspring, the parent of Kings, generals: British strength is added To German strength: could anything be the equal of this? (361–5)

The power of the Anglo-German union is vested in Elizabeth and Frederick’s natural bodies, rather than the religious or even political bodies they represent. So forceful is the rhetoric of monarchical fruitfulness here that Elizabeth is barely allowed her own subjectivity. Before celebrating Elizabeth’s fertility, we are told “she has her father’s feature,” giving us an image of the princess’s maternal body onto which James’s head has been grafted. These lines correspond with a very similar representational strategy found in the royal portraiture of Robert Peake. After the long reign of a childless “virgin” queen, Peake emphasized the continuity of the Stuart line by exaggeratedly inscribing the dark heavy circles under James’s eyes onto the faces of his children. This tendency is especially marked in two portraits of Princess Elizabeth, from 1603 and 1610.51 Like Peake’s royal portraiture, Sibylla’s prophecy uses Elizabeth to portray the extension of the Stuart dynasty as a condition of James’s political procreativity. In its recasting of the princess’s maternity as monarchical self-regeneration—as James’s ability to reproduce himself symbolically—the Sibylla scene is the masque’s most salient image of national mythmaking as a quasi-divine act.52 The whole device allows the king to take part in a verbal fantasy, a rhetorical equivalent to Pygmalion’s erotic fantasy of creation. In his mythical role as both Jove and Prometheus, 51 The 1603 portrait is housed at the National Maritime Museum, London; the 1610 portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Dark bags appear on the king’s face in portraits by a number of artists in the Jacobean court, but only Peake transferred them onto the faces of the royal children, suggesting that it was more likely an act of strategic artistic license than a reflection of what really was a highly noticeable common physical feature. 52 The quasi-divine aspect is given added emphasis through the prophecy’s sanctification in the Latin tongue.

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the king is shown rewriting the married couple in accordance with his own political vision, and reducing the event’s international representational response to a royal monologue in the process. The Lords’ Masque opens the court festivities by engaging with some very basic questions about national mythmaking. Even before it describes how the politics of the marriage should be understood, the antimasque asks who has the fictional authority to proffer such descriptions. Campion’s text answers by placing Poetic Inspiration exclusively in the service of the monarch, thereby locating the production of political rhetoric unambiguously in the court. The Prometheus myth that ensues casts the king’s verbal fruitfulness as a form of god-like parthenogenetic creation. This idea of complete political and poetic centralization is repeatedly played out in the masque through the dramatic containment of multiplicity. The masque opens with the imprisonment of the Frantics in Mania’s cave, leaving the single voice of Entheus to speak for the nuptials. At the end, any discrepancy in the meaning of Anglo-German union is metaphorically frozen by the reification of the bride and groom in statue form. This time it is the single voice of Sibylla that dictates political signification. But in both cases the first words uttered designate the monarch as divine vocal origin: Entheus—“The fires / are ready in my brain, which Jove inspires”; Sibylla—“Debetur alto iure principium Iovi, / Votis det ipse vim meis, dictis fidem” (The beginning by right belongs to great Jove, / Let he himself give force to my prayers and fidelity to my words). The Lords’ Masque performs a carefully structured elaboration of James’s fictional ascendancy over the Palatine marriage, one that is closely attuned to the shifting political topography of mid-Jacobean national mythmaking. Using a mode of panegyric that is both outward looking and highly regicentric, the entertainment signals its position within a wider network of representation only to forcefully disassociate itself from that network. The Memorable Masque: Protestantism, Panegyric, and the Social Production of Praise The evening following Campion’s masque, 15 February, the court was presented with George Chapman’s The Memorable Masque. Having been jointly funded by Lincoln’s Inn and the Middle Temple, this entertainment finds its source in a different socio-political community than Campion’s royally commissioned performance. The Inns of Court were long established as a training ground for those who sought parliamentary careers, with an educational program focusing on law and rhetoric. Both Chapman’s and Beaumont’s masques appear to have been ordered into production by Prince Henry.53 They certainly act as strong expressions of his interests. The Memorable Masque deals with the English colonial endeavor while The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn features a short passage of chivalric display that may have been much more fully elaborated in an earlier 53

Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 178.

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version.54 Henry had well-established patronage links both with the Inns of Court and Chapman himself. Sir Edward Phelips, formerly of the Middle Temple and, by 1613, master of the rolls, had been chancellor to Henry.55 George Chapman completed his monumental translation of Homer’s Iliad for the prince shortly before he fell fatally ill.56 By using the first performances mounted by the Inns of Court at Whitehall as an opportunity to broadcast Henry’s tastes, Chapman and Beaumont’s masques would have served as a public statement of the political links between the prince’s court and the Inns. It is possible to connect The Memorable Masque to an even more specific social circle. Inigo Jones, the stage designer, Richard Martin and William Hakewill, financial contributors, and Edward Phelips, dedicatee of the masque and most direct sponsor, were all members of the Sireniacs, an Inns of Court club that would meet on the first Friday of every month at the Mermaid tavern. The group appears to have been conceived as a social forum for discussion, the particular focus being on current political issues and writing.57 Other members of the Sireniacs included Ben Jonson, John Donne, Robert Cotton, and Christopher Brooke, MP of York. As even this short list of names indicates, The Sireniacs were a politically heterogeneous group. Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones had strong connections to a courtly milieu. Robert Cotton, as well, would have been largely sympathetic to James’s pacifist policies.58 But there was definitely a large number of Sireniacs 54

Ibid., 180. Phelips joined the Middle Temple in 1596 and went on to have a successful parliamentary career, being elected as Speaker of the House of Commons in 1604. He was noted for being actively anti-Catholic. See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (eds) H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 43:994. 56 On Chapman’s artistic relationship to the prince, see Parry’s summary in The Golden Age Restor’d, 67–9. 57 For discussions of the Sireniacs, see I.A. Shapiro, “The Mermaid Club,” Modern Language Review 45 (1950): 6–17; David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 192–3; and Michelle O’Callaghan, The “Shepherds Nation,” 73–7. More broadly, the influence of tavern clubs on late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century literary and political culture is examined in detail in Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 58 At Henry Howard’s request, Cotton had composed a tract which proved, as it were, the genealogical irrefutability of James VI’s claim to the English throne. Thereafter, Cotton wrote on behalf of Howard (Northampton after 1604) and the king in relation to a number of key issues, not least the Union of England and Scotland. See Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 113–50. To avoid oversimplification, however, I should stress that neither Ben Jonson nor Robert Cotton can be tied down to an exclusively monarchical political community. Cotton had, for instance, urged England to join the Netherlands in their resistance against Spain in 1603 (Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 115). Ben Jonson’s career provides a striking model of how a writer could amass a politically diverse ensemble 55

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whose sympathies were not aligned with official Crown policy. Brooke, Hoskyns, Martin, Hakewill and Phelips had opposed almost every proposition made by James in the parliaments that took place between 1603 and 1614.59 Also, many Sireniacs, including Edward Phelips, had close ties with the Virginia Company, one of Henry’s chief areas of interest, but not one of James’s. Those closely involved in the colonial enterprise were often fervently committed Protestants as well. Part of this can be attributed to a missionary zeal for converting the indigenous people of the New World, but another (and probably larger) part was an anti-Catholicism directed at England’s major colonial rival, Spain. Taking into account the political community out of which The Memorable Masque rose, it is not surprising that we find the entertainment presenting a fiction which is about as different from The Lords’ Masque as possible. The themes of the main masque are unabashedly colonial and blatantly Protestant. Roy Strong has conjectured that, before his death, Prince Henry may even have been the one to urge Chapman to deal with these topics.60 It is, without a doubt, the colonial theme that has received the majority of the relatively scanty critical attention given to The Memorable Masque.61 Visually, we are confronted with persistent images of gold, a clear reference to the economic gain that the New World offered (with perhaps a specific allusion to Sir Walter Ralegh’s propaganda for Guiana).62 It should be stressed, though, that the colonial theme in Chapman’s masque is otherwise presented in almost exclusively religious terms. When the Virginian priests of the sun, called Phoebades, are converted to Christianity, we witness a transformation that is the religious equivalent of the aesthetic transformation of the Blackness/ Beauty masque sequence. The characters of the Virginians presented a way to celebrate the Palatine marriage in religious terms without performing the largescale conversion of the apocalyptic Masque of Truth. Chapman’s entertainment of patrons. Comparing texts such as Hymenaei, “The Forest,” and the Entertainment at Britain’s Burse will yield three very different political agendas. Two particularly influential studies of the complexity of Jacobean patronage and political culture are Linda Levy Peck, “Court Patronage and Government Policy: The Jacobean Dilemma,” in Patronage in the Renaissance, (ed.) Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 27–47; and Malcolm Smuts, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Change at the Court of James I,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, (ed.) Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 99–113. 59 Richard Martin, though, was not a member of the 1614 Parliament (O’Callaghan, The “Shepherds Nation,” 75). 60 Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 180–83. 61 See, for example, John Gillies, “Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque,” English Literary History 53 (1986): 673–707; David Lindley, “Courtly Play: The Politics of Chapman’s Memorable Masque,” in The Stuart Courts, (ed.) Eveline Cruickshanks (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 43–58. 62 See Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, (ed.) Neil L. Whitehead (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Lindley, “Courtly Play,” 52–6.

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voices the religious enthusiasm of the cancelled masque, but does so on a smaller and less polemical scale. Furthermore, it displaces religious enthusiasm into the context of the New World missionary endeavor where it only implies (rather than actually performs) Protestant domination in Europe. The colonial theme is not one that intersects well with monarchical sympathies. But I think the degree to which The Memorable Masque urges actual reforms upon the king can be overstated as well. Given colonialism’s close associations with an interventionist foreign policy, references to New World wealth could easily imply opposition to James’s political strategies. However, the use of the theme in The Memorable Masque also works to soften Protestant rhetoric by placing it within an exotic and spectacular narrative. While I certainly agree with David Lindley that “Chapman’s masque ... might be held to represent a view closer to that of Prince Henry and the anti-Spanish faction,”63 I am not convinced that it is issuing a warning as specific and calculated as Lindley suggests: that is, that in light of the dire state of Crown finance, James should reconsider Ralegh’s offer to return to Guiana in search of gold.64 Lindley’s essay on The Memorable Masque focuses on how Chapman constructs a “double discourse” on the colonial enterprise, a result of the dual pressure to write for the king as audience, and for the Inns of Court and, originally, Prince Henry as patrons.65 I believe Lindley is right in identifying a great deal of ambiguity in the masque fiction, but I do not see anything more than tenuous circumstantial evidence to suggest this is the result of Sir Walter Ralegh’s covert thematic presence. To begin with, Elizabeth’s marriage linked England with the most militantly Calvinist of the German states. The occasion, therefore, provided Chapman with abundant ways to celebrate the political and ideological aspirations of his patrons without trafficking in a topic as politically hazardous as the imprisoned Sir Walter Ralegh. Put frankly, I do not think Chapman’s celebration of English Protestantism needs Ralegh to be effective; especially if one considers the personal risk such references would pose to Chapman who, in 1613, after the prince’s death, was by no means in a secure position in terms of patronage. Staging a celebration that possibly falls outside the king’s tastes in its religious enthusiasm is one thing, arguing the case of a man he had imprisoned as a political troublemaker—no matter how obliquely—is quite another. Besides, there is a much more basic explanation for the fictional doubleness that Lindley identifies. In my view, the main masque displays a genuine uncertainty as to how King James should be positioned within a Protestant fiction. It highlights a tropological gap between monarchical panegyric and Protestant rhetoric that did not exist in the later Elizabethan period. Verbally, the result is that Chapman’s attempts to valorize the politics of both the patrons and the royal audience will never be fully integrated. Unlike The Lords’ Masque, where James is always empowered, in The Memorable Masque the king swings between the center and the margins of the fiction. In this 63

“Courtly Play,” 50. Ibid., 52–6. 65 Ibid., 50. 64

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way, Chapman’s performance registers not only the contested nature of James’s rhetorical authority at the Palatine wedding, but its own divided political status as a Whitehall entertainment for the king, conceived within a predominantly anticourtly milieu. Like The Masque of Blackness, The Memorable Masque is predicated upon an overseas voyage. The Virginian priests have crossed “the Briton ocean / To this most famèd isle of all the world / To do due homage to the sacred nuptials” (466–8).66 In both Jonson and Chapman’s masques, James’s Britain is fashioned as a privileged island space which also happens to possess a political geography stretching far beyond its shores. Although removed from the rest of the world, Britain exerts a cultural magnetism that draws forth Africans and Virginians alike and transforms them out of their state of otherness. There is, though, a key difference between the two masques. For in The Masque of Blackness, it was James specifically who was sought and whose presence led to the transformation. In Chapman’s masque, it is the marriage, possessing its own independent authority, which attracts the Virginians. As Honour’s herald makes clear, Elizabeth and Frederick—not James—are the principal spectators to this fiction: “The princely bridegroom and the bride’s bright eyes / Sparkle with grace to your discoveries” (483–4). The king does, however, receive a good deal of attention during the opening of the main masque. Chapman images him as an imperial Protestant monarch. Honour, the master of ceremonies in the entertainment, scolds the Virginian priests for performing a song of worship to the sun, directing their devotion instead towards James, Britain’s sun: This superstitious hymn, sung to the Sun, Let us encounter with fit duties done To our clear Phoebus, whose true piety Enjoys from heaven an earthly deity. (520–23)

The lines reiterate James’s own frequent assertions of the divine right of kings.67 The Virginian priests follow suit and even go one step further in their tribute, describing James as he “whose arms shall all the earth embrace” (566). The motif of the pious king embracing the earth summons up The Masque of Truth, where 66 Line references for The Memorable Masque are from Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments 1605–1640, (ed.) David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 74–91. 67 James argues at length for the divine right of kings in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, explaining that “kings are called Gods by the propheticall King David, because they sit upon GOD his Throne in the earth.” He insists further that “the dutie, and alegeance of the people to their lawfull king, their obedience, I say, ought to be to him, as to Gods Lieutenant in earth, obeying his commands in all things, except directly against God, as the commands of Gods Minister, acknowledging him a Judge set by GOD over them, having power to judge them, but to be judged only by GOD” (King James VI and I: Selected Writings, [eds] Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003], 261, 268).

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the whole world, allegorically presented, really would have come to proclaim allegiance to James and the Protestant faith. The problem with this kind of fiction is that the king can never function with complete autonomy within it. As I have argued, part of the reason The Lords’ Masque is able to grant James a monopoly on fictional power is because it largely eschews religious rhetoric and the communal forms of authority which that rhetoric articulates. Conversely, in the passages cited above, we witness the displacement of royal praise onto a separate and self-sufficient entity: universal religious reformation. Chapman’s masque gradually moves away from a general vision of monarchy as divinely ordained towards a more specific vision in which divine ordinance translates into Protestant domination. It shifts from an image of kingship in which James cast himself, to one which he specifically denounced. The ambiguity found in the opening of the main masque is indicative of a dilemma that would have lain at the heart of any panegyrist’s attempt to stage an overt Protestant fiction at the Jacobean court. One of the key questions that emerges from Chapman’s performance texts is, should the Protestant golden age be described as issuing directly from James as monarch (even though he saw the marriage as a means to religious reconciliation), or would it be more accurately represented as issuing from the marriage itself and the new set of political relations it introduced between Britain and the continent? The Memorable Masque appears to walk a middle course, with the religious conversion of the Virginian priests acting as the seam on which two kinds of authority meet: Virginian princes, ye must now renounce Your superstitious worship of these Suns, Subject to cloudy darkenings and descents, And of your fit devotions turn the events To this our Briton Phoebus, whose bright sky, Enlightened with a Christian piety, Is never subject to black Error’s night. (568–74)

The speaker here is Eunomia, the priest of Honour. The lines up to and including this command to convert maintain a portrayal of James as an upholder of true religion. The Virginians are told to renounce their gods and worship instead “our Briton Phoebus,” who is defined through his Christian enlightenment. But in addition to being the climax of James’s glorification, this enforced religious conversion also marks a point of departure from it. From this point onwards, our attention is turned fully and exclusively to the married couple, Elizabeth and Frederick, who are praised at length in the “Song of Love and Beauty” that follows the transformation of the New World holy men. The Virginians’ renunciation of paganism, then, acts as both thematic apex and thematic turning point in The Memorable Masque. It is, on one hand, the pinnacle of the Protestant fiction. It gestures towards the prophetic vision of a worldwide conversion that The Masque of Truth would have performed much more boldly. It also marks the point at which an exchange in representational authority takes

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place. James’s ascendancy is maintained throughout the conversion and the action leading up to it, but the Protestant golden age which that conversion gives way to is associated with Elizabeth and Frederick. There is no mention of James. When the song of Love and Beauty concludes its mythologized account of the AngloGerman union with the line, “And thus the golden world was made” (622), we are being referred to the role of the wedding in extending the Protestant faith and in ushering in the spiritual golden age that The Memorable Masque performs. The connection between the marriage and religious renewal is restated even more forcefully after the song when Honour comments, “Now may the blessings of the golden age / Swim in these nuptials, even to holy rage” (624–5). The fiction of a Protestant golden age is located specifically “in these nuptials.” There is no assertion of James’s role as father, author, or monarch. Chapman’s text is thus characterized by an attempt simultaneously to panegyrize James as the center of Britain’s power and to celebrate the hopes that were being invested quite independently in the married couple’s future role in Europe. While the king’s authority is by no means entirely erased, neither is it, as in The Lords’ Masque, absolute. It is, rather, always conditional, always shared, and, by the end of the performance, noticeably obscured. The encomiastic doubleness of Chapman’s main masque is a direct indicator of the tangled political and economic networks through which the entertainment emerged. It was commanded by Prince Henry, funded by the Inns of Court, written and designed by men involved with the Sireniacs, but performed at court as part of a royal occasion whose primary audience member was the king. The various themes of Protestant golden age, colonial expansion, and James’s divine kingship correspond to the disparate interests that collided in the creation of this marriage fiction. The Memorable Masque demonstrates the extent to which the pressures of social context can impinge on a performance’s rhetorical content. This is precisely the theme explored in Chapman’s antimasque, and it is to that part of the entertainment that I would like to turn now. The extended antimasque, what Chapman calls, “This low induction” (442), reappraises the notion of national mythmaking as a centralized and royally mediated enterprise. By exposing the economic side of commendatory poetry, the Palatine marriage fictions are portrayed as the products of a combination of social and institutional forces, rather than as exclusively courtly or monarchical texts. In doing so, the antimasque qualifies the idealized Protestant myth that would follow. In addition, by insisting on an account of national rhetoric as materially produced rather than divinely inspired, it serves as a particularly cutting critique of The Lords’ Masque. In the printed text, Chapman prefaces the antimasque with a defense of “the length of my speeches and narrations” (188–9). In what ultimately turns into a harangue on the ebb of writing’s “truth and worth” (205), this preface posits a similar diagnosis of the age’s misuse of poetry as does Orpheus in The Lords’ Masque. Chapman complains that “every vulgarly esteemed upstart dares break the dreadful dignity of ancient and authentical poesy, and presume luciferously to proclaim in place thereof repugnant precepts of their own spawn” (202–5). We are again reminded of Campion’s masque when, continuing his chastisement,

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Chapman differentiates between insania and divinus furor, a dichotomy akin to Mania and Poetic Inspiration in The Lords’ Masque: The Hill of the Muses (which all men must climb in the regular way to Truth) is said of old to be forked. And the two points of it, parting at the top, are insania and divinus furor. Insania is that which every rank-brained writer and judge of poetical writing is rapt withal, when he presumes either to write or censure the height of poesy, and that transports him with humour, vainglory, and pride, most profane and sacrilegious; when divinus furor makes gentle and noble the neverso-truly inspired writer. (215–23)

Chapman’s text, like Campion’s, approaches the narrative of the masque by way of a broader interrogation of the integrity of poetic production. As text, Chapman’s main masque fiction is betrayed by these prefatory passages. For they de-isolate the main masque from an ideal court locale, re-presenting it as one voice within a wider arena of largely debased literary production. Through the characters of Plutus (or Riches) and Capriccio, “a man of wit,” the antimasque explores the relationship between entertainment, encomia, and economics in more detail. From the moment of Plutus’s entry, a metatheatrical standpoint is established. His first words are, “Rocks? Nothing but rocks in these masquing devices? Is Invention so poor she must needs ever dwell amongst rocks?” (252–3). He then makes a specific allusion to Prometheus’s statues in The Lords’ Masque, recalling “some stoney-hearted ladies courted in former masques” (256–7). The reference to Campion’s entertainment of the previous evening positions The Memorable Masque within the context of a larger panegyrical event. It also establishes that this is to be an antimasque essentially concerned with the process of creating a court performance and, even more particularly, of creating an antimasque. Capriccio later declares, “I come hither with a charge to do these nuptials ... my charge is a company of accomplished travellers that are excellent at antimasques” (375–7). Capriccio arrives in what is a parody of typical masque fashion. Plutus’s cynical invectives against the over-used masquing device of magically opening rocks is interrupted by a fissure suddenly appearing in those very rocks he his censuring: “Excellent!” he cries, “This metamorphosis I intend to overhear” (262–3). However, Plutus is not greeted by the entry of elegant masquers. Instead, a fictionmaker of sorts, Capriccio, appears. In this “man of wit” we find Entheus’s cleverly conceived alter-ego: a comic inversion of Entheus who, like Capriccio, had emerged from a cave the previous evening to offer his services to the celebration of Elizabeth’s nuptials. The explanation Capriccio gives Plutus for his sudden arrival establishes his metacritical function in what will quickly turn into a comic send-up of the production of national myth: This breach of rocks I have made in needy pursuit of the blind deity, Riches, who is miraculously arrived here. For (according to our rare men of wit) heaven standing, and earth moving, her motion (being circular) hath brought one of the most remote parts of the world to touch at this all-exceeding Island, which a man of wit would imagine must needs move circularly with the rest of the world, and

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so ever maintain an equal distance. But poets (our chief men of wit) answer that point directly, most ingeniously affirming that this isle is, for the excellency of it, divided from the world (divisus ab orbe Brittanus) and that, though the whole world besides moves, yet this isle stands fixed on her own feet and defies the world’s mutability, which this rare accident of the arrival of Riches in one of his furthest-off-situate dominions most demonstratively proves. (286–99)

Two main points need to be made about this passage. First, and on the simplest level, Capriccio is explaining that it is his search for money, represented by Plutus, which has brought him to court. He is seeking artistic patronage. Capriccio gives a long-winded explanation for how the riches he desires have come to be situated in Britain (and specifically the British court). This leads to the second point. For here we may observe that Capriccio, in fact, possesses a keen understanding of Union rhetoric. Like Jonson in his 1605 Masque of Blackness, Capriccio voices a particularly British version of the world-divided-from-the-world conceit. Its xenophobic implications are offset by emphasizing the island’s properties of attraction rather than those of enclosure and resistance. Yet while displaying an impressive air of rhetorical sprezzatura, Capriccio also manages to demystify the very national myth he is regurgitating, revealing Britain’s immutable superiority to be a propagandistic construct devised by “our chief men of wit”—poets. In addition, Capriccio’s knowledge and linguistic dexterity are being used to track down monetary reward, presenting us with the first of many references to national mythmaking having become a trade, rhetorical skill a service exchanged for money, rather than a divinely inspired vocation as it is portrayed in The Lords’ Masque. When, later in the antimasque, Capriccio tells Plutus that “a man may sooner win your reward for pleasing you, than deserving you” (391–2), he undercuts the sanctity of national myth and, by extension, the nation itself. The idea of gaining something without deserving it not only exposes the injustice of the patronage system, but could also function as a veiled denigration of such culturally corrosive measures as the 1611 installation of the saleable title of “baronet.”68 The antimasque interrogates the court’s position as fountain of honor, as well as those networks of panegyrical production through which that position was celebrated. Chapman’s concern with the materially determined nature of elite performance comes across strongly in the dialogue between Capriccio and Plutus. The execution of Capriccio’s entertainment is entirely dependent on Plutus’s financial goodwill: PLUTUS: ...What are you? CAPRICCIO: I am, sir, a kind of man, a man of wit; with whom your worship has nothing to do, I think.

68 The idea was to use status-hungry gentlemen as a means of rectifying the Crown’s deplorable financial state. See Derek Hirst, England in Conflict, 1603–1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London: Arnold, 1999), 71–2, 92.

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Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court PLUTUS: No sir, nor will have anything to do with him. A man of wit—what’s that? A beggar! CAPRICCIO: And yet no devil, sir. (320–25)

The would-be court poet, the man of wit, is represented as little more than a beggar, trying to peddle his wares for a small reward. The conversation between Plutus and Capriccio is carried out in a dramatic style familiar from the city comedies of the public stage, making the creative voice of Capriccio more in line with Jonson’s Lantern Leatherhead than an Orpheus or an Entheus.69 Indeed, Plutus asks whether he is “a buffoon, a jester?” (339). Capriccio denies neither of these identities, arguing that “I have heard of some courtiers that have run themselves out of their states with jousting, and why may not I then raise my self in the state with jesting?” (349–51). Describing his antic contributions to the court marriage celebrations as “wild weeds in a rank soil” (355), Capriccio stands as a veritable anti-Entheus. His entry into Whitehall, to peddle his wit, dethrones the magisterial gravitas of court festivities. Semiotically, Capriccio is designed to debunk the quasi-divine topos of panegyric practice. He arrives at court with the tools of his trade; not a book and a pen like Entheus, but, rather, a bellows and a spur. He explains, “I wear these bellows on my head to show that I can puff up with glory all those that affect me, and besides, bear this spur to show I can spur-gall even the best that condemn me” (369–72). Capriccio’s tools indicate the process of making national fictions to be one of puffing up the subject rather than of reflecting any true worth. The image of the poet is of someone who, to use a modern derivation of the image, is full of hot air.70 Entheus’s tools avoid such interpretation, indicating instead the apotheosis of his fictions in authoritative textual form. The poetic voice is subject to harsh deprecation in this antimasque. But the critique of fiction making is not confined to the poet. If Capriccio is a degraded entertainer, this is represented as being the result of a social and economic system which is unjust. Plutus’s first reaction to the antimasque of dancing baboons that Capriccio finally stages is to renege on the financial reward he had promised. He tells Capriccio to “take thy men of complement and travel with them to other marriages” (417–18); “I have employed you, and the grace of that is reward enough” (421–2). Although Capriccio finally convinces Plutus to give him a small wedge of gold, this backstabbing personification of artistic patronage is already revealed as ignoble. Furthermore, a close look at the character of Capriccio tells 69 Lantern Leatherhead is the hobby-horse seller in Bartholomew Fair (1614). The play also features a ballad seller, Nightingale, with whom Capriccio may also be compared. 70 In the anonymous Coleorton Masque (1618), performed as a private domestic entertainment for the marriage of the third earl of Essex’s sister, Frances Devereux, we find a calculated reversal of this image of courtly panegyric. Essex is described as “thou whose greatness does not swell thee / To forget thou art a man” (338–9) (Court Masques, [ed.] Lindley, 126–35). The entertainment distances itself from court masque rhetoric, which habitually constructs personal worth through divine characteristics.

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us that any criticism that can be leveled against him must be extended beyond his role as masque-poet. Capriccio is, after all, not only a deviser of masque fictions, but also, with regard to the position he occupies in The Memorable Masque, a performer. Plutus embodies a similarly fluid persona: he represents the economic determinants of masque production, but he is a spectator of masques too. He makes reference both to The Lords’ Masque and possibly to Jonson’s Oberon, as well.71 What I am suggesting is that we need to see the critique buried in the exchange between Capriccio and Plutus as extending beyond just the poet-patron relationship. Through their multiple character associations, Capriccio and Plutus image an even larger grouping of the social networks through which meaning is generated. The antimasque thereby shatters any notion of national myth as a centralized, unified, and coherently vocalized entity. In Chapman’s entertainment, the creative voice is presented as inextricably bound up with social and economic determinants. Unlike Entheus, there is no Orpheus to free Capriccio from this system to allow him to pay homage to the Palatine marriage in a cultural vacuum. The masque induction is placed in a useful critical position, between the performance of The Lords’ Masque and Chapman’s own main masque. Whereas Campion had mounted an entertainment that sought specifically to exorcize competing encomiasts and to mystify its own material inception, the first part of The Memorable Masque does just the opposite. It dramatizes the penetration of the court by an external fiction-maker and displays his complete economic dependency. This is not unconnected with the pointedly ideological content of the main masque. The deliberative version of fiction-making dramatized in the exchange between Capriccio and Plutus, in effect, prepares us for the authoritative indeterminacy that will follow. In the end, both Capriccio with his dancing baboons and Chapman with his Virginian priests are mounting marriage fictions aimed at pleasing the various tastes of their audiences and sponsors. In criticizing the degradation of poetry within an economically determined system, Chapman’s text is also consciously placing itself within this system. By contrast, The Lords’ Masque, which acknowledged the same network of competing voices, made a concerted effort to place itself outside it. Competing Fictions in The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn The last masque to be performed for Elizabeth’s wedding was The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, by Francis Beaumont. Beaumont had not previously written any court masques, but he may have seemed like an appropriate choice to the Inns of Court all the same. He was a former member of the Inner Temple and had even contributed verse to their revels earlier in his career.72 Additionally, while 71 Lindley sees Plutus’s sarcastic comments on the use of rocks in masque sets as a jibe aimed particularly at Jonson’s Oberon (1610) (Court Masques, [ed.] Lindley, 239 n. 252). 72 Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 179.

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Beaumont had no experience with masque production at court, he had adeptly dramatized a marriage masque in The Maid’s Tragedy, written with John Fletcher (1. 2. 118–290), the first documented performance of which was the one mounted at court as part of these same wedding celebrations. Like The Memorable Masque, Beaumont’s entertainment originated under the initiative of Prince Henry. Traces of this link with the prince manifest themselves both visually and thematically in the performance. We may note, for example, the chivalric imagery of the main masque and the preceding water triumph by which the masquers arrived at court, the latter organized by master naval shipbuilder and servant of the prince, Phineas Pett. The chivalric ethos is not, however, a constant presence in Beaumont’s entertainment. Even the main masque of Olympian knights tapers out into a series of eroticized revels rather than culminating in a military display of athleticism. Though discernibly suggested, martial display is just as pointedly negated in The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn. This residual outcropping of Henrican values is characteristic of the Palatine festivities as a whole. Roy Strong has proposed that under the original direction of Prince Henry, Beaumont’s entertainment may have been designed as the dramatic apparatus of a game of barriers, and only reworked into a masque format (catering more to the king’s tastes) after the prince’s death.73 If this were the case, the generic mutation would provide one apt explanation for the masque’s stylistic incongruity. Unfortunately, the precise nature of Prince Henry’s contribution to The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn can only be conjectured. There is another name closely associated with The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, that of Francis Bacon. Bacon had long-standing connections with Gray’s Inn, having moved through the ranks of utter barrister, bencher, reader, double reader, and treasurer between his entry in 1576 and 1613. Like Prince Henry, the exact nature of Francis Bacon’s involvement with the masque is not entirely clear. He was certainly the patron of Beaumont’s entertainment, though a letter by John Chamberlain, referring to Bacon as the masque’s “chiefe contriver,” suggests that he may also have contributed creatively to the performance.74 Francis Bacon’s artistic participation is further signaled (at least indirectly) in the masque’s early print history. The original title page of the quarto of The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn clearly designates Beaumont as the author. However, a cancel was printed of this title page, and the only modification was the removal of Beaumont’s name.75 There are a number of possible explanations for this. Perhaps Bacon, if he was “chiefe contriver” in an authorial sense, actually helped to devise 73

Ibid., 180. The full quote is, “On Tewdays yt came to Grayes Ynne and the Inner Temples turne to come with theyr maske, whereof Sir Fra: Bacon was the chiefe contriver” (Chamberlain to Alice Carleton, 18 February 1613, in The Letters of John Chamberlain, [ed.] McClure, 1:425). 75 See Philip Edwards’s introduction to The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, in A Book of Masques, 127. 74

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the masque’s thematic content. Having scripted entertainments for both the Inns of Court and Queen Elizabeth in 1595, he was certainly qualified for such a task.76 Indeed, with Beaumont’s name removed from the title-page, Bacon’s is the only one left that is in any way connected to the production of the masque. Philip Edwards, on the other hand, suggests that Beaumont (in a most un-Jonsonian frame of mind) may simply have felt uncomfortable taking sole credit for a performance that was brought into being by a number of different people, especially since the text included substantial descriptions of scene and costume designs.77 What interests me in this puzzle is that the masque’s print history, like its commission history, foils our attempts to locate a single voice for the masque fiction. This type of uncertainty is, to some extent, symptomatic of the highly collaborative nature of the masque form itself, which always depended on the input of a wide range of individuals: musicians, choreographers, designers, artisans, as well as authors.78 Whatever the reason for the authorial elision in the text of The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, the removal of Beaumont’s name contributes to a larger network of indeterminacy which characterizes this masque’s documented context and which, I will be arguing, is borne out in the masque performance as well. There is still the question of King James, though. How will he figure in this masque? In spite of the vexed context from which Beaumont’s entertainment seems to have risen, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn does at least attempt to assert James’s fictional ascendancy over competitors. The disintegration of chivalric martialism into eroticized revels is an important example of this, which will be discussed in more detail below. Yet the most forceful manifestations of the monarch’s fictional authority unfolded outside the masque itself. In three notable instances, James intervened in the performance of The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn. In the process, he acted out an ascendancy over the practice of masquing that surpassed the scripted word. The first and most important of these interventions was James’s postponement of the performance. On 16 February, the day after The Memorable Masque, the participants in Beaumont’s entertainment, along with attendants from the Inns of Court and a number of noble spectators, traveled up the Thames in barges as part of a water-triumph. When they had arrived at Whitehall and organized themselves for the beginning of the masque, James called for a postponement of the festivities. Then, on 20 February, when the masque was finally performed, the king interceded twice, each time commanding a second performance of antimasques that had particularly pleased him. These three interventions actively assert James’s position as omnipotent narrator of the Palatine fictions, and they do so in a way that would have jarred with the more Bacon’s contribution to the 1594/95 Gesta Grayorum was A Device for the Gray’s Inn Revels, performed 3 January 1595. On 17 November of the same year he provided Of Love and Self-Love as part of the Accession Day festivities for the queen. 77 A Book of Masques, (eds) Spencer and Wells, 127. 78 See especially Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 76

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negotiative approach taken to monarchical authority within the masque itself. My primary concern in this section will be to assess the extent to which such royal claims to fictional and ceremonial privilege were borne out in the actual performance; to determine how a monarchical idiom functions in an entertainment as structurally sprawled and generically composite as Beaumont’s is. Our first contact with the masque raises little expectation for an articulate monarchical idiom to function at all in the performance. Nowhere is the idea of “competing fictions” dramatized more literally than in the opening of The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, in which we find Mercury, sent by Jove, and Iris, sent by Juno, vying for the right to celebrate Elizabeth’s marriage: “I only come / To celebrate the long-wish’d nuptials, / Here in Olympia” (112–14), Iris insists, to which Mercury retorts, “Jove’s message is the same” (123).79 Each then proceeds to execute an antimasque as evidence of their skill in wedding festivities. This opening scene begins a commentary that has two main emphases. The first has to do with the enormous scale of the wedding event. Iris says, “I need not name them [Elizabeth and Frederick], for the sound is loud / In heaven and earth” (118–19). The second emphasis is on the potential subversion that this sort of event poses to the king’s preeminence in the matter of national identity. That the monarchical voice, symbolized by Jove, should sound the loudest “In heaven and earth” is in no way self-evident. To be sure, Iris is the stronger of the two messenger-characters and the one who maintains leverage in the dispute: “Away, / Dissembling Mercury,” she shouts upon seeing her rival, “My messages / Ask honest haste, not like those wanton ones / Your thund’ring father sends” (96–9). Venturing a chiding provocation, she asks sarcastically, “Is great Jove jealous that I am employ’d / On her [Juno’s] love-errands?” (109–10). In Beaumont’s masque, celebrating Elizabeth’s nuptials is a privilege, and the quarrel between Mercury and Iris suggests that no one, not even Jove/James, has exclusive access to it. This should by now be recognizable as a recurring theme in the Palatine masques. Although Iris and Juno pose a considerable challenge to Mercury, he is adamant in affirming his master’s omnipotence. Jove is described as he “whose eyes are lightning, and whose voice is thunder” (124). Iris rejects the very premise of this kind of power, more suited to “fright poor mortals” (129) than to celebrate weddings. This critique has cutting implications. By drawing attention to the inappropriateness of Mercury’s rhetoric, Iris is also highlighting a very basic weakness in Jove’s claim to ascendancy over the nuptials. Namely, that Jove does not belong to the traditional iconography of marriage whereas Juno, obviously, does. Iris raises a destabilizing question about Jacobean marriage-masque mythography when, putting it bluntly, she asks, “What hath he to do with nuptial rites?” (127). Mercury’s response is equally direct. He asserts that securing a representational monopoly over Elizabeth’s wedding is simply a political necessity:

79 Line references for The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn are from Philip Edwards’s edition in A Book of Masques, 125–48.

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Alas, when ever offer’d he t’abridge Your lady’s power, but only now in these, Whose match concerns his general government? (131–3)

These lines do acknowledge the fact that wedding celebrations normally fall under the iconographical aegis of Juno; but, as we have seen, such conventions are always malleable in the masques. They can easily be adjusted to meet the political demands of the occasion, as in Campion’s reversal of the Apollo and Daphne topos in The Lord Hay’s Masque. In Beaumont’s masque, convention is being altered again. Jove must “abridge” Juno’s usual authority, for this wedding “concerns his general government” and, as Mercury adds, Jove “foresaw, and to himself reserv’d / The honour of this marriage” (139–40). This is not the first time in the court festivities that a familiar master of ceremonies is asked to step down so that the monarch can be verbally empowered: Hymen, we recall, was replaced by the James-figure Prometheus in The Lords’ Masque. The difference lies in the fact that whereas The Lords’ Masque secures the king’s centrality by way of a simple and uncontested decree, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn forces Jove to earn his position of authority. His messenger, Mercury, mounts four successive antimasques in an attempt to display his prowess in spectacular mythmaking. Iris, playing the role of critic, rejects them all in turn as inappropriate. Before an agreement is finally reached, she even executes her own antimasque as a final rebuttal.80 Mercury starts with two consecutive antimasques, the first of Naiads, or waternymphs, the second of Hyades, their fairy counterparts of the clouds. The spectacle is straightforward enough. It begins with the Naiads performing a dance on their own, and then turns into a more complex combined dance when the Hyades arrive. Iris is prompt in her censure: “Great wit and power hath Hermes, to contrive / A lifeless dance, which of one sex consists” (183–4).81 Immediately locating the absence of a regenerativity motif, Iris proclaims Mercury’s failure to conform to the precepts of either marriage masque convention or monarchical rhetoric. The response is a third antimasque entry, specifically aimed at rectifying the gender imbalance. Mercury announces, “Venus hath in store / A secret ambush of her winged boys” (185–6). The arrival of these cupids heteroeroticize Mercury’s spectacle. They set up the same semiotics of fruitfulness that had been used to communicate James’s political and rhetorical fertility in the Anglo-Scottish marriage masques. The significance of this display, however, lies less in its extension of a familiar motif than in the particular way in which that motif was 80 The text identifies only two antimasques in Beaumont’s entertainment, counting Mercury’s series of shows collectively as one. However, for the sake of clarity, I have chosen to refer to each of Mercury’s spectacles separately as antimasques in their own right. This makes five antimasques in all when we include Iris’s. Apart from allowing me to be more precise in my description, this splicing also seems formally justified since each of these spectacles is initiated by a separate entry. 81 The names Hermes and Mercury are used interchangeably to designate the messenger of Jove.

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arrived at. This erotic imagery—the ambush of a group of unsuspecting nymphs by an enclave of cupids—is not produced spontaneously; rather, it is the outcome to a process of debate and critique. It is achieved incrementally, as part of an improvised effort to posit Jove’s authority effectively. The movement of Mercury’s first three antimasques serves as a dramatization of how a language of union is contrived, imaging it as a negotiative response to the threat of panegyrical rivalry. The competition for representation that is staged in Beaumont’s masque stands in stark contrast to the verbal economy of The Lords’ Masque, in which the vocal act of declaring Jove’s authority is coterminous with actually securing it. In a last ditch effort to silence Iris permanently, Mercury summons forth his final antimasque, a group of dancing statues. This spectacle, like all the others, is thoroughly disparaged by Iris who proceeds to stage her own antimasque. Iris’s show is calculated to mock Mercury’s sundry performances by exaggerating their collective disarray. Moving from the baroque spectacle of the dancing statues to the antics of holiday festivity, Iris commands, “Send hither all the rural company, / Which deck the May-games with their country sports” (226–7). Thirteen archetypal figures of misrule clamor on stage, including the clown, the country wench, the he-baboon and the she-baboon. Beaumont comments in his notes that during this passage of the entertainment, “The perpetual laughter and applause was above the music” (241–2). It was, in fact, this very spectacle, along with the preceding dance of Olympian statues, which James asked to be performed a second time.82 The success of Iris’s antimasque may even have had an artistic impact on the commercial stage. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsman, a play which appears to have been written shortly after the Palatine marriage, features a closely cognate morris dance that includes the same cast of characters (3. 5).83 Beaumont’s theatrical display of country sports may also have functioned as a celebratory nod towards the king’s official encouragement of traditional holiday pastimes.84 All things considered, for many attending The Masque of the Inner 82

Slapstick and antic comedy were seemingly more to James’s tastes than austere mythology. Among his favorite entertainments were The Irish Masque (1614) and The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621). We may also note the deliberate buffoonery of For The Honour of Wales (1618), Jonson’s revision of the extremely unsuccessful masque, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618). 83 Lois Potter looks at the links between the political events of 1612–1613 and The Two Noble Kinsmen in her edition of the play (The Two Noble Kinsmen, [ed.] Lois Potter, The Arden Shakespeare [Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997], 35–7). 84 Strict Protestants viewed traditions of holiday misrule as persisting forms of pagan ritual and condemned them as popery. James, in contrast, had expressed approval of such traditions early on. In Basilicon Doron he advised Prince Henry to support the practice of rural holiday festivities (King James VI and I, [ed.] Rhodes et al., 228–9). He also issued proclamations in 1603, 1614 and 1615, ordering all noblemen to leave London and return to their country seats, so as to maintain the practice of rural hospitality (see Stuart Royal Proclamations: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625, [eds] James F. Larkin and Paul F. Hughes [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], 14–16, 44–5, 323–4, 356–8). James’s lengthiest defense of country traditions can be found in his Book of Sports, published in 1618.

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Temple and Gray’s Inn, Iris’s show would have been the most memorable part of the entertainment, with the result that the climax of Beaumont’s highly varied performance would not have been Mercury’s assertion of monarchical authority, but Iris’s comic send-up of it. The May-games antimasque marks the formal end of Mercury and Iris’s competition for representation, and though there is no real justification for Jove’s securing control over the nuptial celebration, this is precisely what happens. Mercury initiates a resolution, Iris promptly complies, and with this new hierarchy secured the main masque—taking as its theme the Olympian games—begins. The main masque promises to end the entertainment’s authoritative ambiguities. Mercury stresses the spectacle’s monarchical origins, insisting on the fact that it was commanded into being by “the mouth of Jove himself” (264). The scene that is presented when the second traverse is drawn, however, does not reproduce royal ideology in the way we may have expected: The higher ascent of the mountain is discovered, wherein, upon a level after a great rise of the hill, were placed two pavilions, open in the front of them; the pavilions were to sight as of cloth of gold, and they were trimmed on the inside with rich armour and military furniture hanged up as upon the walls, and behind the tents there were represented in perspective the tops of divers other tents, as if it had been a camp. (280–86)

This tableau jars with the imagery seen so far in the court festivities. The explicitly military setting has more in common with the chivalric displays of the public entertainments than with The Lords’ Masque or even The Memorable Masque. Beaumont describes the Olympian knights in the pavilion as “consecrated persons, all in veils” (288–9), and refers as well to “Jupiter’s Priests in white robes” (296–7) who are gathered around an altar. Such a combination of military and religious ornamentation was never a feature of James’s iconography. It stems, rather, from the aesthetic tastes and political leanings of Prince Henry. Roy Strong, commenting on the setting of the main masque, explains, “What we are seeing is a vision of Protestant Henrician chivalry, reforming missionary knights and zealous clergy presented in allegorical terms.”85 If The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn had indeed been conceived originally as a barriers, this may have been the backdrop against which it was to take place. It would certainly have acted as a fitting display of the religious and military hopes that Henry and his circle invested in the Palatine marriage. The opening of the main masque thus presents an interesting anomaly. It grants the monarch fictional authority over a device which promulgates someone else’s political agenda and does so in a language of union which is not his own. Still, it would be a mistake to view the main masque as unconditionally Henrician. The presence of the knights and a military camp certainly leads us to expect a barriers or some other kind of tournament. However, neither this nor any 85

Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, 179.

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other version of the Olympian games actually takes place. Rather than engaging in a display of military athleticism, the priests descend and perform a series of five songs which the knights accompany with dances. In two revealing notes, Beaumont tells us that before their first dance, the knights are seen “laying aside their veils, belts, and swords” (319–20), and that after “the Knights dance their parting measure and ascend,” they “put on their swords and belts” (361–2). This is a small detail, but an important one. For it provides a clear semioticization of the displacement of martial chivalry. The gesture would have underlined the symbolic transition between military display and erotic revels, between the fiction that the setting prepares us for and the one that is actually performed. This switch in iconography is also hinted at in the Priests’ second song: On blessed youths, for Jove doth pause, Laying aside his graver laws For this device; And at the wedding such a pair, Each dance is taken for a prayer, Each song a sacrifice. (331–6)

This is the closest we get to an explanation for the aborted Olympian games. The priests say that Jove is “laying aside his graver laws,” those which would have been honored through military ritual and holy devotion around the altar of Jupiter. Instead, we are to enjoy “this device.”86 As the last two lines explain, dancing will take the place of prayers, and songs will substitute for holy sacrifice. The Jove who emerges from the main masque is not the one that we are initially prepared for. The festivities he instigates do not celebrate reforming militant Protestantism, but, rather, the familiar regenerativity of the Jacobean court. By the third song, the priests are instructing the dancing knights to choose ladies from the audience: Single. More pleasing were these sweet delights, If ladies mov’d as well as knights; Run ev’ry one of you and catch A nymph, in honour of this match, And whisper boldly in her ear. Jove will but laugh, if you forswear. All. And this day’s sins he doth resolve That we his priests should all absolve. (339–46)

We are a long way from chivalric athleticism: the knights have turned to nymphcatching. There is no attempt made to suppress the incongruity between the tone of the revels and the pious military camp we were first presented with. The priests go so far as to refer to the revels as “this day’s sins,” promising, however, that they “should all absolve” and that “Jove will but laugh if [the knights] forswear.” 86

My italics.

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The rhetoric of Protestant chivalry through which Henry had intended to celebrate his sister’s wedding is clearly projected into the representational apparatus of Beaumont’s masque, but ultimately the performance stages the literal laying aside of a military ethos. Like the knights of Phoebus in The Lord Hay’s Masque, Beaumont’s knights get scripted into a display of sexual prowess, and the allegory of Tudor chivalry gives way to a Jacobean language of union.87 By the end of The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, we recognize Beaumont’s Jove as the same one who presided over The Lords’ Masque. He is a figure who produces pacifist spectacles of sexual regenerativity, reinforced through the animating and unifying power of dance. In his ability to silence the militant rhetoric that lurked within the main masque, he is a figure who is a fitting counterpart to the real monarch who exercised absolute control over the entertainment at three different points in its performance. What we must not lose sight of, though, is that this empowered version of Jove, as well as the spectacle he initiates, were both arrived at through an array of challenges and impediments. They were constructed improvisationally in response to Iris’s criticisms and counter-fictions. When Jove finally executes his main masque show, it is against the backdrop of a military camp, using a cast of characters that were probably intended for a performance more suited to it. While Beaumont’s masque features Jove in a position of poetic authority, it also dramatizes that authority’s contested position within a larger matrix of marriage fictions and fiction-makers. And although that does not correspond well with the absolutist control James displayed when whimsically intervening in its performance schedule, it is an appropriate fictional embodiment of the authoritative ambiguity that characterizes the masque’s commission history. All masques were collaborative enterprises, but The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn actually stages the frictions inherent to such a system of theatrical production. It suggests that, in some cases, “competition” may be a more suitable conceptual paradigm than “collaboration.” Accordingly, if James’s voice resounds at the end of the court masque cycle for the Palatine wedding, Beaumont’s masque insists just as strongly on the contested representational space from which that voice issues. The marriage of Elizabeth and Frederick promised a new role for Britain in European religious affairs. Though we know with hindsight that a Protestant utopia was not to be realized, the historical moment of 1612–1613 offered a genuine window of opportunity to imagine a more interventionist British foreign policy. This vision of revived Protestant chivalry can be glimpsed throughout the public festivities and in much of the encomiastic poetry written for the occasion of the wedding. By extending the practice of British identity formation far beyond the court at Whitehall, the Palatine marriage re-mapped the topography of Jacobean national mythmaking. It made public the incongruities between monarchical and 87 One wonders if there were any readers of the recent editions of The Faerie Queene (1609 and 1611) in the audience who might have recalled the Bower of Bliss episode and the fate dealt out to knights who succumb to sensual temptation (2. 12).

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extra-monarchical accounts of nationhood, and it drew particular attention to the alternative political culture that had been developing around Prince Henry before his death. These circumstances resulted in shifts, both poetic and dramatic, in marriage masque conventions. Unlike the Union masques, which were the primary vehicles for mythologizing the personal and political mergers they celebrated, the masques for the Palatine wedding refer emphatically to their position within a much wider aggregation of texts and performances, all of which were seeking to articulate a new international identity. Although all three of the masques I have discussed stress the king’s representational authority, they also consistently gesture outwards towards other competing marriage fictions. Any power James attains in these masques is arrived at through contention and negotiation. This not only deconstructs a court-centered model of national mythmaking, it also raises more specific questions about the political function of masques. From The Masque of Blackness’s confident assertion of the dramatic form’s value as a monarchical mouthpiece, we have moved to a group of entertainments that are far more multivocal rhetorically, and, in this way, for more redolent of the actual political conditions of the Jacobean court. Perhaps the most compelling explanation for this shift has to do with the nature of the wedding event itself. The Palatine marriage presented an opportunity for James’s kingdom to be something more than just English or British. It could now be Protestant, European, anti-Habsburg, and hold a privileged position within that larger classification. This aspect of the Palatine marriage upset the relationship between monarchical rhetoric and national identity. James had, in a sense, a monopoly on the language of British Union. The rhetoric used in the king’s own self-presentation was closely bound up with that of British propaganda. To be sure, the very substance of James’s royal identity was overwhelmingly defined by his special status as a dual monarch. On the other hand, James did not have a monopoly on the rhetoric of pan-European Protestantism. There was, in fact, very little verbal or iconographic overlap between the two mythographies. As a result, the marriage masques are forced into the awkward position of having to negotiate between a royal account of Anglo-German union and other competing fictions. Whether this takes the form of a promptly suppressed group of Frantics or a more credible and developed character like Iris, the effect is in a basic way the same. Royal propaganda is exposed as a process of persuasion rather than a reflection of power. The conditions of the Palatine wedding had two important effects on masquing practice. First, the language of union became deployed as a politically nonspecific sign system, one that expressed the king’s authority generally, without referring us to the Great Britain project. The successful extension of this form of British propaganda into a new ideological context evidences the increasing flexibility of union as a category of political representation in the Jacobean period. The Palatine masques also catalyzed a rupture in the formal conventions of masquing. This is especially true of the Inns of Court entertainments which possess a far more episodic structure than we have seen in earlier court performances. Beaumont’s

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masque is certainly the best example of this. Here we witness five consecutive antimasques, each one presented through an entirely different aesthetic. A similar observation can be made of The Memorable Masque, whose incongruities of poetic tone and dramatic style leave little basis for linking the induction passage and the main masque. As I have suggested, this may have been caused by the attempts of the masque-poets to meet the conflicting expectations of patron and audience. But even more interesting to me than what caused Chapman and Beaumont’s disjointed and varied performances are the results that accrued from them. For by responding creatively to the political pressures of the Palatine marriage, the 1613 Inns of Court entertainments proved highly influential to court masquing in the long term. They revealed the range of theatrical possibilities that could be incorporated by the masque form, something that was developed further in the entertainments for Frances Howard’s second marriage, and in the masques produced in the latter half of James’s reign.

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Chapter 4

Relocating Monarchical Rhetoric: The Entertainments for Robert Carr and Frances Howard Frances Howard’s second marriage, to James’s Scottish favorite, Robert Carr, took place on 26 December 1613 and was the last high-profile wedding celebrated at court with masques in the Jacobean period. After the Palatine entertainments, the poets employed for the occasion had a less than stable array of precedents to build upon. Nuptial performance had been pushed to its limits. It had moved from a predominantly mythological and monarchical form of display to one that incorporated a broader gamut of theatrical modes, including comedy and chivalric spectacle. A little over a week’s worth of masques and entertainments graced the wedding of Carr and Howard. The wedding night performance was Thomas Campion’s The Somerset Masque. Ben Jonson’s A Challenge at Tilt followed, the “challenge” being staged on 27 December and the actual tilting on 1 January 1614. Between these two parts, on 29 December, was Jonson’s other contribution to the festivities, The Irish Masque. This was performed a second time on 3 January. On the evening of 4 January, the court proceeded to the Merchants Tailors’ Hall where they were presented with a masque by Thomas Middleton, a performance for which, unfortunately, no text has survived. The final entertainment, the anonymously authored Masque of Flowers, was performed at court on 6 January. The Carr/Howard entertainments not only maintain the theatrical variety found in the Palatine masques (in particular the Inns of Court performances), they also extend their equivocal construction of monarchical power. The major difference between the two nuptial celebrations lies in the dissimilar way these common characteristics signify. The authoritative prevarications of the Inns of Court masques can be attributed to the different political communities out of which they rose. At the festivities for the marriage of Howard and Carr, on the other hand, there is not such a readily definable correspondence between the precise political context of the masques and their dramatic structure. The failure of the Carr/Howard masques to produce monarchically centered national myth has less to do with the particular circumstances of the wedding than with more general shifts in the social configuration of the mid-Jacobean court. Prince Henry’s separate household complicated the structure of artistic patronage in a way that was identifiable in the fictions of the Palatine masques, and although his unexpected death in 1612 

Middleton apparently had only four days to prepare this masque. David Lindley has suggested that these rushed circumstances may have resulted in a masque with very few spoken lines, offering one explanation for our lack of a text. See The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London: Routledge, 1993), 128.

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resulted in the disbandment of this household, Queen Anna’s initiatives continued to rupture the institutional contours of elite culture. Following her departure from Whitehall in 1607, Anna started a refurbishment project on her residence on the London Strand, Somerset House (renamed Denmark House), which reached formal completion in 1613. At the newly-refurbished Somerset House, Anna maintained a sphere of artistic patronage that was not only socially and politically distinct from the king’s (as it had always been), but physically dislocated as well. Like her son’s activities at Oatlands and St James Palaces, Queen Anna’s cultural activities at Somerset House—and, later, Greenwich—increasingly challenged the dual notions of “the court” as a single locale and the king as its unique and privileged overseer. The Carr/Howard wedding entertainments respond to this by resisting ideological symmetry and, even more than earlier nuptial performances, by emphasizing the variable correlations that can exist between court space, monarchical authority, and masque fiction. In seeking to elucidate these intersections between the panegyrical strategies of the masques and the court’s changing social configuration, this chapter departs from previous examinations of the nuptial encomia produced for Frances Howard’s second marriage. The majority of critical responses to texts written for the occasion have used the famous series of events leading up to and following the wedding—often referred to collectively as the Overbury affair—as an interpretive point of entry. In the early summer of 1613, France Howard officially requested the nullification of her first marriage to Robert Devereux, third earl of Essex, on the grounds of impotence. In September 1613, after a series of trials, Howard was granted her annulment and three months later she wedded Robert Carr. For those who were morally or politically opposed to the Essex nullity, the fact that Carr was James’s favorite just served to perpetuate their indignation at what appeared to be barefaced power-brokering on the part of the Howard family. The shock  History of the King’s Works, 1485–1660, (gen. ed.) Howard Colvin, 6 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1963–82), 4:254–9; John H. Astington, English Court Theatre, 1558–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 69–70.  See, for example, David Lindley, “Embarrassing Ben: The Masques for Frances Howard.” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 343–59; Thomas Campion (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986), 216–34; The Trials of Frances Howard, 123–44; William A. McClung and Rodney Simard, “Donne’s Somerset Epithalamion and the Erotics of Criticism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 95–106; Patricia G. Pinka, “Donne, Idios, and the Somerset Epithalamion,” Studies in Philology 90 (1993): 58–73.  Carr was the chief broker of influence with the king when the death of Robert Cecil in 1612 left open key political offices, including lord treasurer, master of the wards and the secretaryship. Henry Wriothesley, William Herbert, Henry Neville and Ralph Winwood all desired the vacant offices and saw Carr’s friendship as a way of securing them. The subsequent officialization of Carr’s marital bond to the Howards was a major political setback for these men, all of whom had connections with, or sympathies toward, the third earl of Essex and his late father. For discussions of factional politics between 1612 and 1614, see Clayton Roberts and Owen Duncan, “The Parliamentary Undertaking of 1614,” English Historical Review 368 (1978): 481–98; Neil Cuddy, “Conflicting Loyalties of a ‘Vulgar Counselor,’” in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century

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caused by the nullity and remarriage grew into full-blown scandal two years later when both Frances Howard and Robert Carr became implicated in the murder of Carr’s friend, Thomas Overbury, who had died in the Tower shortly before the Essex nullity was issued. The fact that Overbury had, in his final months, come to oppose the relationship between Carr and Howard was used as evidence against the couple. Nine public murder trials were held in 1615 and 1616, and though Howard and Carr fared better than some of the other accused in escaping execution, they both spent time in the Tower and neither of them ever returned to a position of royal favor again. Not surprisingly, this series of events has provided a rich backdrop against which to read the Carr/Howard entertainments’ evocation of gender ideologies and their codification of the political factionalism that underlay the nullity and the remarriage. Although I think it would be overdetermined to ignore entirely this clearly important context, I do want to greatly reduce the emphasis that is usually placed on the Overbury-affair narrative. As I have been trying to show throughout this book, breaking out of the hermeneutic stranglehold of local politics can open up a critical space where masques and other forms of nuptial performance may be appraised for how they signal larger changes in the social and eulogistic practices of the Jacobean court. Shifting the focus away from how the Carr/Howard entertainments participate in the nullity scandal expands their cultural context and issues a valuable reminder that even the most occasional and transitory of artistic forms were implicated in historical processes that extended beyond the temporal and political boundaries of the events for which they were written. Adopting a less micropolitically focused critical perspective will expose how the entertainments mounted for the Carr/Howard marriage were collectively rethinking the role of the monarch within court panegyric, allowing us to gain a better sense of the key position they occupy in the evolution of Jacobean masquing. The Somerset Masque: Themes and Anomalies The success of Thomas Campion’s first two court masques no doubt contributed to his securing the commission for The Somerset Masque, though the links he had maintained with the Howard family surely played a part as well. And yet despite England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer, (eds) John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 121–50; Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36–50.  There have been a number of studies concerned with Frances Howard’s nullity, remarriage, and especially her ensuing implication in the murder of Thomas Overbury in 1615/16. See, for example, William McElwee, The Murder of Sir Thomas Overbury (London: Faber & Faber, 1952); Beatrice White, Cast of Ravens: The Strange Case of Sir Thomas Overbury (London: John Murray, 1965); Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard; Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal.  See Lindley, Thomas Campion, 66, 210–11.

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the author’s continued connections with both the Howards and the king, The Somerset Masque represents a break from the regicentrism that had characterized his previous wedding entertainments. Campion opens the Carr/Howard festivities with an unexpectedly inhibited portrayal of monarchical authority. James is made to share his normally exclusive power over nuptial ritual with Anna. The queen is asked to participate during the entertainment’s pivotal metamorphosis scene, in which a group knights who had been turned into golden columns are restored to their human form. The masque’s strategic substitution of queenly for kingly authority at this key moment gestures towards some of the real ways in which Anna was able to complicate royal prerogative by intervening in and disrupting the festivities for James’s favorite. By refusing to link the metamorphosis scene to the king or even the magical court space of Whitehall, Campion’s masque unsettles the mutually reinforcing relationship between monarchical empowerment and encomiastic theater that had been a standard emphasis of marriage masques up to that point. The narrative device of The Somerset Masque centers on two basic ideas: first, the power of unlicensed censure, or False Fame, to impede official panegyric, and, second, the even stronger power of Jacobean royalty to expel False Fame and facilitate nuptial celebration. The performance opens with the arrival of four squires who immediately approach the king. The squires explain that after embarking on an overseas journey to pay tribute to the Carr/Howard wedding, they were beset by an enchanted storm which resulted in six of their knights being lost at sea and another six being transformed into golden pillars. The First Squire blames their misfortune on the machinations of Error, Rumor, and their cohorts of discursive malice: Deformed Errour, that enchaunting fiend, And wing-tongu’d Rumor, his infernall friend, With Curiositie and Credulitie, Both Sorceresses, all in hate agree Our purpose to divert. (150, 30–34)

The obstacle that confronts the celebration of the Carr/Howard marriage is the misplaced verbal authority of slander. The figures of Error, Rumor, Curiosity and Credulity allegorically reconstruct the socio-linguistic networks through which slander circulates. This serves as a covert reference to the unmonitored critical discussion of Frances Howard’s nullity and remarriage that was, for the king and members of the Howard faction, a cause for considerable aggravation. Line references for The Somerset Masque are from Campion’s Works, (ed.) Percival Vivian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 147–56, and will henceforth be cited parenthetically. Because Vivian uses noncontinuous line numbering, I have included the page number before each line reference.  As Alastair Bellany comments, “Criticism of the nullity was too close to criticism of the king and the prevailing faction to be ignored. Yet the court lacked the policing resources to control discussion in newsletters, separates, libels or illicitly printed books” (The Politics of Court Scandal, 133). 

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The six golden pillars—formerly knights—lining either side of the masquing scene offer a striking image of how linguistic vice could immobilize celebration and paralyze just praise. The performance of the antimasque, which follows the squires’ speeches, dramatizes the chaos that ensues when a society loses its ability to order and control public opinion. Through a series of choreographed entrées, the disruptive power of slander is magnified to a cosmic level. Close on the heels of Error, Rumor, Curiosity and Credulity, are masquers representing the winds, the elements, and finally Europe, Asia, Africa and America, who all join a tumultuous dance, presenting a scene of complete social disorder. Convention, of course, tells us that since the domination of Rumor and his cronies is contained within a prefatory antimasque, the proponents of nuptial celebration—the squires and the knights—will eventually prevail. This is indeed what happens; but it does so in a rather unusual way. While the forces of slander are certainly expelled from the entertainment, the monarch’s authority over this process is far less clearly indicated than is normally the case. In Campion’s own Lord Hay’s Masque, for example, it is the James-figure, Jove, who is immediately called upon to release the imprisoned knights of Apollo and appease their assailants. And in The Lords’ Masque, when Frantics threaten to drown out the voice of Poetic Inspiration, Jove is invoked to dispel the Frantics and free Poetic Inspiration from Mania’s cave. Here, in The Somerset Masque, tribute-bearing masquers are once more under threat by antimasque forces, but this time rescuing them is far less dependent on the king. Instead, it is Queen Anna who dominates the ritual of antimasque dispersal and knightly retransformation. Once Eternity and the three Destinies have placed their “Tree of Golde” (152, 30) in front of the queen, thereby signaling the end of the antimasque, a song announces the queen’s impending role in the metamorphosis of the knights: “Since Knightly valour rescues Dames distressed, / By Vertuous Dames let charm’d Knights be released” (153, 10–11). One of the squires explains to Anna that “we crave / A branche, pull’d by your Sacred Hand” (153, 17–18). The queen follows the instructions and then hands the branch to an unnamed “Nobleman” (153, 24) who in turn gives it to one of the squires. As the squires descend with the branch in solemn procession, the nine musicians perform a song of exorcism—“Away, Enchauntments, Vanish quite” (153, 32)—causing the transformation to take place. A cloud descends from above, out of which the six knights lost at sea appear, followed promptly by the other six knights (those who were turned into pillars of gold) regaining their human form. James’s surprising absence from this metamorphosis passage is an anomaly in masque convention that deserves closer attention. Clare McManus provides the most thorough investigation of The Somerset Masque, but her focus on the female 

According to the agent of Savoy, Giovanni Battista Gabaleoni, who was present at the masque and included a lengthy description of it in a diplomatic dispatch, this nobleman was William Herbert, earl of Pembroke—“fu portato al Conte di Pambroch.” See John Orrell, “The Agent of Savoy at The Somerset Masque,” Review of English Studies 28 (1977): 304.

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performance tradition in the Jacobean court leads her to view the entertainment as an overtly monarchical entertainment.10 She comments, “If masques can be assigned to various of the rival Jacobean courts, then The Somerset Masque certainly came from the court of James I.” She sees it as “echoing the theme of reanimation found in Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque and The Lords’ Masque,” arguing that “the conceit complimented James’s protection of the court by having the King free the masquing lords from the paralysis of false fame which it claimed had surrounded the Carr/Howard marriage.”11 Viewed from this perspective, Anna’s role becomes a form of submission to royal authority, what McManus identifies as “an enforced performance.”12 Since Anna’s disapproval of the Carr/ Howard marriage was general knowledge to the court, “The implications of her performance undermined rather than exalted her.” The transformation passage, then, becomes a kind of mimetic degradation, “A forceful reminder of [the queen’s] necessary dependence upon the King.”13 McManus is right to highlight the way The Somerset Masque registers the king and queen’s disagreement over the Carr/Howard marriage, but she exaggerates the efficacy of monarchical authority in the entertainment. One could reasonably question whether The Somerset Masque is strongly associated with the king at all, particularly with regard to the transformation scene. After all, James is in no way explicitly involved with reversing the knights’ paralysis. Although there are latent rhetorical traces of monarchical ideology built into the transformation songs (I will discuss these later), it is Anna who is the most ostensible liberator of the knights. Because The Somerset Masque is at the same time Anna’s last Whitehall performance and the wedding night masque for James’s favorite, there may be a critical temptation to choose sides, to determine whose ideological agenda was being advanced and whose compromised at this crucial moment in the mid-Jacobean court. However, there is no reason to think that Campion would have had to restrict himself in this way when devising the verbal apparatus of the entertainment. As has been shown, political differences between Jacobean court circles were more often projected into single masques than divided neatly between them; and although the nature of the queen’s participation in The Somerset Masque is markedly different from that of her earlier, more overtly oppositional Whitehall masques, such as The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Queens, it does not necessarily follow that “Somerset was unmistakably opposed to the policies and performances of Anna and her court.”14 I do not believe The Somerset Masque possessed such a clearly defined ideological agenda. While it certainly registers 10 Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 164–79. 11 Ibid., 167. 12 Ibid., 166. 13 Ibid., 169. 14 Ibid., 178.

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the divisions in Jacobean court culture, it does not choose sides. Instead, The Somerset Masque should be thought of as a theatrical inscription of the variable and pluralistic structure of authority that was so characteristic of the Jacobean court. Queen Anna and The Somerset Masque Queen Anna’s personal maneuverings around the time of The Somerset Masque may have provided Campion with real-life scenarios against which to model his fictional enactment of queenly authority. Anna had initially refused even to attend the wedding celebrations. Her dislike of Robert Carr had already been made public. In 1611 she had accused Carr and Overbury of taunting her in the gardens, an incident that led to the latter’s temporary banishment from court.15 Since the queen’s absence from a Whitehall event would have been embarrassingly conspicuous, the marriage celebrations were originally planned as a smaller domestic event. The venue was to be Audley End, the home of Frances Howard’s father. Plans changed, however, when Anna finally conceded to taking part in the celebrations. The venue was switched back to Whitehall and the festivities delayed so that new preparations could be made.16 This stands as a very concrete example of the queen’s ability to exercise influence over court ritual and the Carr/Howard festivities in particular. It was Anna’s act of concession that allowed the marriage to be a Whitehall event. And Campion’s decision to script Anna into the action of his masque—a decision that could only have been made after the queen’s change of mind—serves as an enactment of this authority. In so far as it re-mobilizes the celebration of marriage at court, Anna’s performative intervention in The Somerset Masque may be viewed as a dramatic equivalent to her real intervention into the logistics of the wedding in late 1613. Another politically suggestive incident through which we may read the queen’s unusually large amount of control over nuptial ritual in The Somerset Masque occurred on 3 February 1614. Anna mounted a wedding celebration for the marriage of her own favorite, Lady Jane Drummond to Robert Kerr, Lord Roxborough. Although the two wedding festivities were, in the end, separated by a month, both were made public around the same time, November 1613, and for the subsequent two months there was a good deal of wrangling over the scheduling

15 Chamberlain to Carleton, 13 November 1611, in The Letters of John Chamberlain, (ed.) Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:314; Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal, 47. As mentioned above (chapter one, n. 66), Queen Anna was involved in the political strategies of Carr’s opponents to promote George Villiers as the new royal favorite (see Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001], 143–61 and Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal, 65–71). 16 This series of events is recounted in Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 139.

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of the two events.17 Several critics have interpreted the Roxborough wedding as a rival social occasion that challenged the cultural authority of James and his court.18 Indeed, to host a high-profile wedding so close in time to the marriage of Carr and Howard could easily be construed as competitive. This impression would have been amplified by the fact that Anna’s event was held at the queen’s own personal residence, Somerset House, instead of Whitehall.19 The Roxborough wedding celebrations were organized in such a way so as to make them stylistically distinct, as well as just physically removed, from comparable nuptial events held at the king’s court. James was invited to Somerset House as a guest and instead of seeing a marriage masque he saw Samuel Daniel’s pastoral play, Hymen’s Triumph. This kind of court theater, heavily laden with borrowings from Tasso and Guarini,20 never became popular with James at Whitehall. It corresponded, rather, to the Italianate tastes of Anna and her court.21 This was, in fact, the second pastoral play Daniel had presented to Anna. The first, Arcadia Reformed, was performed in 1605 at Christ Church during a royal visit to Oxford. James did not attend the play, making Anna its default spectator of honor,22 and in 1606 it appeared in print under the new title, The Queen’s Arcadia, with a lengthy prefatory dedication to the queen. Daniel’s proven ability in this genre surely led to his receiving the 1614 commission. He had, moreover, already established himself as one of Anna’s theatrical favorites. Not only had he been licenser for her theater company, the Children of the Queen’s Revels, from 1604 to 1605, he also had helped the queen assert herself at key political moments through the medium of performance. He had authored Anna’s first court masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, and Tethys’ Festival, her contribution to the celebrations for Henry’s investiture as Prince of Wales in 1610. As Leeds Barroll notes, Samuel Daniel was “the writer [the queen] called on when she wanted to mount a spectacle of great personal significance.”23 17 See Samuel Daniel, Hymen’s Triumph, (ed.) John Pitcher, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), v–vi. 18 Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 139–42; McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage, 166; Hymen’s Triumph, (ed.) Pitcher, v–vi. 19 Alison Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 118–19. 20 See Johanna Procter, “The Queenes Arcadia (1606) and Hymen’s Triumph (1615): Samuel Daniel’s Court Pastoral Plays,” in The Renaissance in Ferrara and Its European Horizons, (eds) J. Salmons and W. Moretti (Cardiff: The University of Wales Press, 1984), 83–109; Jason Lawrence, “‘The Whole Complection of Arcadia Chang’d’: Samuel Daniel and Italian Lyrical Drama,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 11 (1999): 143–71. 21 Pitcher comments that since 1603, Anna “had been acquiring a taste for all things Italian—books, music, gardens, and architecture” (Hymen’s Triumph, x). 22 Joan Rees, Samuel Daniel: A Critical and Biographical Study (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), 112. 23 Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 123.

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Hymen’s Triumph is without a doubt a personal statement. It is both formally and rhetorically dissimilar to the corpus of Jacobean marriage entertainments that had been performed between 1603 and 1613, including Campion’s Somerset Masque. Interestingly, though, Hymen’s Triumph at least opens by positioning itself firmly within this group of performances. It features a prologue in which Hymen is briefly harassed by “the disturbers of quiet marriage” (3),24 Avarice, Envy and Jealousy. This mixture of allegorical types and classical deities places us in the imaginative world of the Whitehall masques. Furthermore, the particular choice of characters, symbolizing unjust censure and interference, seems more appropriate to the circumstances of the Carr/Howard marriage than those of the Roxborough marriage. Campion stages a similar onslaught of vice through the characters of Error, Rumor, Credulity and Curiosity. Both authors open their performances by placing marital union under threat. As Envy warns at the end of Daniel’s prologue, “How long as thou mak’st marriages, / So long will we produce incumbrances” (57–8). But here the similarities end. The prologue of Hymen’s Triumph is not followed by a spectacular reversal of Envy’s onslaught. Instead, the ensuing fiveact play has the effect of generically disassociating the Roxborough festivities from the wedding events at Whitehall. Moreover, it constructs an entirely different model of linguistic authority from that of earlier marriage masques. Although the two main protagonists, Silvia and Thirsis, are finally united at the end of Hymen’s Triumph, the various lovers of Daniel’s Arcadia are constantly hindered in their attempts to achieve happy marriages. They are victims of continual misunderstandings, quarrels, and mistaken identities, plot elements that are typical of both Italian and English pastoral. Unlike the marriage masques, which generally rectify disruptive obstacles through either divine masculine, or royal masculine intervention (usually a combination of the two), in Hymen’s Triumph it is Silvia’s linguistic adroitness that restores order, banishes confusion, and allows love to be realized. The Arcadians of Daniel’s play are characterized by a dual propensity for misconstruing social situations and for lying. Silvia’s communicative and interpretive skills effectively save Arcadia from social selfdestruction. Whether it is through textual inscription, as when she carves into a tree, “Thy, Silvia, Thirsis, lives; and is return’d” (1357), or through fiction making, as when she decides to alert Thirsis to her survival by telling him “some story that containes / Our fortunes and our loves” (990–1), Silvia possesses complete verbal authority at every stage of the play. In view of this, Daniel’s Arcadia is an apt fictional projection of the venue in which it found a theatrical life. Like Somerset House, it is a space in which women, rather than men, demonstrate rhetorical prowess.25 It is also a community in which the socially productive bonds Line references for Hymen’s Triumph are from The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, (ed.) Alexander B. Grosart, 5 vols (London, 1885–96), 3:325–98, and will henceforth be cited parenthetically. 25 Anna’s circle included a number of women who were prominent as literary patrons, or writers, or both, most notably the countesses of Bedford, Derby, and Arundel. 24

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of marriage are secured through female contrivance rather than male monarchical will. By thus altering social convention, Hymen’s Triumph extends and magnifies the modification of kingly authority that we witness in the transformation scene of The Somerset Masque. It not only offers an alternative to monarchical rhetoric, it does so through a genre unfamiliar to Jacobean Whitehall, in a court that was not the king’s, and as part of a marriage celebration for a favorite that was not his own. When we consider the context of the Carr/Howard celebrations in this light, Anna’s participation in Campion’s transformation scene begins to look increasingly like a reflection of a real authority over both the language and logistics of court ritual. The Question of Monarchical Authority Given the queen’s orchestration of the most important symbolic moment in the masque, is there room left for the king to exercise any power in the fiction? Not a lot. There is only one direct compliment paid to James (at the very end of the performance) and it cannot rightfully be said to be part of any consistent or logically unfolding royal encomium: All that was ever ask’t, by vow of Jove, To blesse a state with, Plentie, Honor, Love, Power, Triumph, private pleasure, publique peace, Sweete springs, and Autumns filld with due increase, All these, and what good els thought can supplie, Ever attend your Triple Majestie. (156, 2–7)

In the absence of any overt panegyrical context in the masque in which to situate this address, the passage appears rather prosthetic to the entertainment’s overall fiction. David Lindley has, likewise, perceived “the relegation of the praise of James to a late stage in the masque and its relative lack of connection with the main drift of its narrative.”26 Still, it would be too abrupt to end our enquiry into the monarchical dimension of Somerset here. Apart from this isolated compliment at the end of the entertainment, I do feel that the king’s presence is manifested just enough to complicate what would otherwise be the queen’s clear upper hand in this marriage masque. Demonstrating this requires that we return once again to the transformation passage. For although Anna certainly occupies the most visible role in this section, her participation does not function as a complete substitution for the king in the entertainment as a whole. The monarch does manifest himself implicitly during the transformation through a number of poetic allusions. The most important example of this can be found in the chorus that I quoted earlier: “Since Knightly valour rescues Dames distressed, / By virtuous Dames let charm’d Knights be released” (153, 10–11). The squire repeats this piece of inverted logic before asking Anna to remove a bough from the tree. These lines 26

Lindley, Thomas Campion, 229.

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form a verbal seam on which the authorities of James and Anna collide. On one hand, by reversing the masculine romance paradigm of the damsel in distress, the chorus opens a representational fissure in which Anna can perform the role of the heroic savior in the king’s place. The lines also, however, mimic a form of political rhetoric associated with James. The feminine inversion of chivalric or militaristic topoi recurs in monarchical propaganda of the Jacobean period. We have already observed a number of such instances in the king’s parliamentary speeches on the British Union, as when he ironically dubs the English “conquerors” of Scotland, though “not by the sword, but by the sweet and sure bond”; “an Union,” James explains, “As if you had got it by Conquest, but such a Conquest as may be cemented by love.”27 Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn lent a visual aspect to this eroticized martialism when it preempted the military games Mercury had promised with a series of sexually charged dances. Similarly demilitarized soldiers serve the king in Campion’s own Lord Hay’s Masque. The singing of the chorus in The Somerset Masque acquires a manifestly duplicitous quality when it echoes the theme of demilitarization. It inscribes James textually into a passage in which the queen would otherwise hold complete dramatic ascendancy. The chorus’s meanings split between its performative implications and its verbal associations. While the lines announce Anna’s key physical/ritualistic role in the antimasque dispersal, they also reproduce a rhetorical paradigm often used to promote a monarchical vision of British nationhood, one with which the queen ostensibly had nothing to do. The theme of the chorus resurfaces sporadically throughout The Somerset Masque, demarcating a residual or implicit monarchical presence. The song performed after the second dance declares, “Some friendship betweene man and man prefer, / But I th’ affection betweene man and wife” (155, 6–7). One could read these lines as a disapproving reference to James’s suspected sexual liaison with Robert Carr. But given Campion’s strong patronage links with the king via the Howard family, there is a greater probability that they were designed to operate in a more general (and less reckless) sense, as a rejection of homosocial military bonds in favor of the heterosexual, socially regenerative bonds of marriage. This idea not only extends the chivalric inversion of the chorus, it also connects back to an even earlier comment made by the first squire at the very opening of the entertainment in which James is reminded that the knights of the masque are “in Courtship seene, as well as Martiall fights” (150, 24). Monarchical rhetoric exhibits itself in this masque through a sparse but consistent poetic network of heteroeroticism and demilitarization, creating a set of political intertextualities that are different from, but which exist conterminously with, those pertaining to Anna’s performance. These rhetorical allusions suggest that the king, though comparatively demoted, is not entirely exiled to the margins of the entertainment either. It is more useful to think of The Somerset Masque as altering the form that monarchical 27 The Political Works of James I, (ed.) Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 294, 292.

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authority customarily takes in nuptial performance, rather than as banishing that authority altogether. James is projected into the masque’s central metamorphosis verbally even if he is not directly incited. The juxtaposition of Anna’s physical presence and James’s rhetorical presence results in a masque that pulls us in two directions, making it difficult to ascertain the extent of either the king or the queen’s empowerment with any degree of certainty. The excessively complex ritualization of the antimasque dispersal accentuates this equivocality by obscuring its own focal point. I am thinking, in particular, of the multiple ceremonial exchanges triggered by the tree of gold. The squire initiates the process, commanding that a bough be taken from the tree. Anna does so, but immediately passes it to a nobleman. He in turn passes it back to one of the squires who, with his companions, carry it to the masquing area. Since the original presentation of the tree was to Anna, she is still the one most closely associated with the golden bough and its powers of transformation. But the ritual of exchange threatens to bury the source of the object’s authority under a series of subsequent transactions. It stands as a forceful testament to the masque’s refusal to commit entirely to the aggrandizement of either member of the royal couple, a refusal that prevents us from locating a Prime Mover of the masque fiction. The Somerset Masque presents a vision of elite theater that is authoritatively eclectic, rather than monologically unified. It diagrams the politically composite and physically delocalized nature of the Jacobean court by moving monarchical rhetoric from a dominant to a constituent position within its representational apparatus. This is given a corresponding scenic dimension during the last section of the entertainment. The peculiar change in setting that concludes the transformation scene presents a London cityscape as the backdrop to the ensuing dances. In doing so, the masque effectively prevents its fiction from relocating to the king’s court at Whitehall. This is a significant detail since, conventionally, the movement from performance to dancing facilitated that crucial transfer from the removed mythical world of the spectacle to the real-time space of the court. The combination of the ideal and real worlds is normally a self-conscious and expository moment in the entertainment, an opportunity to stress the ideological significance of the masque’s collective fantasy. In The Lord Hay’s Masque, for instance, the transformation scene is immediately followed by a shift in attention from the performance taking place at one end of the hall to the king presiding over the court at the other end: “Long live Apollo, Britain’s glorious eye” (443). In The Masque of Blackness the dancing of the revels marks a move away from the seascape of the masque fiction into Jacobean Whitehall, where we are referred to James, “This sun” who “is temperate, and refines / All things” (235–6). In The Somerset Masque, by contrast, the performance shifts to a less specific setting. The retransformed knights “come forward to the dancing-place” (154, 5) and “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” (154, 6–9). Instead of moving from ideal to real, we are brought to another layer of artifice. The court—that place which

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always signifies both literally as itself and metaphorically as Britain—is replaced by London, a median space: at the same time more than the court and less than the nation, more general than Whitehall but more specific than Britain. It is a noncommittal space that collaborates in the masque’s larger refusal to moor itself to a single figure or a fixed locale. Just as it avoids placing elite ritual fully under the control of the king, the entertainment also shirks from situating it in the king’s court at Whitehall. The choice of London as the site of the revels in Campion’s masque invites us to view the court as a diaspora. The city contains Whitehall, but it also contains any number of other locations, including, of course, the Strand and Somerset House. Both in its enactment of the transformation and in the performance of the revels that follow, The Somerset Masque insists on retaining its pluralistic notion of the court and the royal authority which that court codifies. This is an idea that was similarly suggested by John Donne in his contribution to the wedding, “Epithalamion at the Marriage of the Earl of Somerset.” The poem opens with an eclogue in which “Allophanes finding Idios in the country at Christmas time, reprehends his absence from court.” When Allophanes levels his first accusations at Idios, the latter calls into question the very notion of the court as a location when he answers coolly, “No, I am there. / As heaven, to men dispos’d, is every where, / So are those Courts, whose Princes animate, / Not only all their house, but all their State” (39–42).28 Like Campion, Donne presents a vision of the court as a decentered institution, one which is metaphysically omnipresent throughout the kingdom. The major difference between Donne’s and Campion’s treatment of this theme lies in the fact that whereas Donne merely evokes locational ambiguity, Campion finds ways of incorporating that ambiguity into the structure of his panegyric: Whitehall is swapped for London as the masque’s final setting; monarchical rhetoric is deployed more covertly than in earlier propagandist masques; and, most importantly, Queen Anna is included as an alternative overseer of the ritual of metamorphosis. The Somerset Masque, in other words, showcases rather than conceals the authoritative multifariousness that characterized the Jacobean court generally and the events surrounding the planning of the Carr/Howard marriage celebrations more specifically. The entertainment’s most compelling claim to our critical attention lies in its ability to register the political tensions of mid-Jacobean court culture without advancing a single ideological position. Comedic Deconstruction in Jonson’s 1613 Entertainments A Challenge at Tilt and The Irish Masque were the first court commissions undertaken by Ben Jonson following his return from France, where between August 1612 and June 1613 he had acted as tutor to Sir Walter Ralegh’s son. As we have seen, Jonson’s wedding entertainments of 1605 to 1608 played a large role 28 John Donne, Complete English Poems, (ed.) C.A. Partides, introduced and updated by Robin Hamilton (London: Everyman 1994), 134–43.

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in establishing what could be thought of as a set of marriage masque conventions. What is striking about Jonson’s Carr/Howard entertainments is the extent to which they alter these conventions. A Challenge at Tilt, for instance, presents a pair of mischievous, bickering cupid figures which depart noticeably from the politically attuned Love that was portrayed in The Haddington Masque. The cupids of Challenge poke fun at union rhetoric and, consequently, prevent the entertainment from functioning as national myth. The Irish Masque expands upon this generic modification by disassociating itself from the structural and rhetorical requirements of monarchical propaganda. The king’s ordering and authorial power over masque fictions, which began to be interrogated at the Palatine festivities, is nonexistent in The Irish Masque. Instead, the performance centers on the Irishmen’s comic inability to locate the monarch. Like The Somerset Masque, a passage of national myth is appended to the end of the performance where it occupies a theatrical space exterior to the main device. Consequently, the fusion of entertainment and encomium that the genre had traditionally strived for is pulled apart. A Challenge at Tilt features a schematized dialogue of the sort typically deployed in the dramatic apparatuses of military sports. Two cupids argue over which one of them is the true Love, a debate structure that reminds us of Jonson’s 1606 Barriers. Yet as familiar as this kind of exchange seems, the dispute between the two cupids also provides a revealing glimpse into the way union rhetoric was being put to new uses in Jacobean court entertainment. This is an idea I intend to explore further, but doing so will require that we adjust the context in which the entertainment has most recently been viewed. David Lindley’s reading of A Challenge at Tilt, for instance, concentrates on the clash between fiction and reality that would have emerged at the moment of its performance.29 He focuses on the truce that takes place between the two groups of tilting courtiers when the cupids settle their argument. While the truce emblematizes factional reconciliation at court, this ideal concord also “conceals a dissonance that would have been sharply apparent to the original spectators.”30 For they surely would have noticed the significant number of absent invitees who, opposing Frances Howard’s marriage to Robert Carr, refused to attend the tilt. For Lindley, this visible rift between Jonson’s fiction and the real socio-political climate of the Jacobean court highlights “the deep-seated problems of panegyric or epideictic art.”31 The entertainment is “sabotaged by the evident failure of reality and myth to coincide.”32 Lindley’s brief analysis of A Challenge at Tilt—indeed, the whole essay of which it is a part—has had a shaping influence on how we understand the relationship between panegyric and the micropolitics of the court. That being said, it gives little consideration to the actual language used in the entertainment and certainly does not attempt to interpret that language outside the contextual parameters of the marriage event, or even the very day of 29

31 32 30

“Embarrassing Ben,” 348–50. Ibid., 350. Ibid., 348. Ibid., 350.

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the tilt’s performance. As a result, the rhetorical links that A Challenge at Tilt has with other entertainments are severed. David Riggs has given far more consideration to the poetic content of A Challenge at Tilt. He emphasizes the entertainment’s bawdy character, unprecedented in the author’s oeuvre: “Instead of a good and a bad cupid [Jonson] depicts two cupids who are equally, and outrageously, preoccupied with sex.”33 Riggs links A Challenge at Tilt with Bartholomew Fair and “On the Famous Voyage,” describing them as literary inscriptions of the bodily drives on which Jonson had placed severe restrictions after his excesses of consumption and debauchery in France.34 This heterogeneous literary context is effective in exposing the way A Challenge at Tilt participates in a larger authorial preoccupation with the lower-body stratum in the mid-Jacobean period. However, apart from a passing comment that Jonson had hitherto “refrained from using smutty language in his entertainments at court,”35 Riggs is not concerned to situate the tilt alongside other Whitehall performances, let alone other marriage entertainments. While Riggs’s analysis frees the tilt from the interpretive confinement of court micropolitics, it neglects its culminating position in the corpus of Jacobean marriage masques. This is a context that needs to be restored to A Challenge at Tilt, for without it we miss out on the important dialogue the performance conducts with earlier Jonsonian entertainments. More significantly than simply increasing the bawdiness of court theatricals, A Challenge at Tilt performs a comic send-up of the language of union as it was developed in earlier marriage masques. In this respect, the entertainment participates in the disengagement of nuptial performance from monarchical rhetoric that began at the Palatine festivities. In featuring cupids as disputants, A Challenge at Tilt immediately reminds us of Jonson’s previous wedding entertainment, The Haddington Masque. Haddington contained the first use of Cupid in a prominent speaking role in the Jacobean court. As we have seen, the character was carefully constructed to function within, and to contribute to, the monarchical rhetoric of the masque. The rewriting of the Amor Fugitivus theme in Haddington moved Cupid out of his conventional role of instigator of Petrarchan woe to become instead a politic Anglo-Scottish matchmaker working in the service of King James. He turns out not to be the mischievous character that his mother, Venus, assumes him to be in the masque, but, rather, a politically active Jacobean Love. A Challenge at Tilt second-guesses this revision by interrogating the status of Love within national myth. This is played out in several ways in the tilt. At the most basic level, the political and David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 203. As a point of comparison, see Katharine Eisaman, Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 103–10. Rather than seeing A Challenge at Tilt as a bawdy break from the past, Maus cites the entertainment as part of a gradual development in Jonson’s treatment of Eros between 1605 and 1615. 34 Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life, 210. 35 Ibid., 203. 33

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cultural meanings of Cupid are destabilized allegorically through the dramatic fracturing of the character: the fictional framework of Eros and Anteros allows Jonson to split Cupid into two contending figures, both of whom accuse the other of being an impostor. The question of authenticity is established early on in the entertainment with the first Cupid’s warning to the audience: Beware, young ladies, of this impostor, and mothers, look to your daughters and nieces; a false Cupid is abroad. It is I that am the true, who to do these glad solemnities their proper rites have been contented not to put off, but to conceal my deity, and in this habit of a servant to attend him who was yesterday the happy bridegroom. (20–25)36

To this the second Cupid promptly protests, “He tells my tale, he tells my tale, and pretends to my act” (28). The Haddington Masque had also opened with a warning. Like the first Cupid in A Challenge at Tilt, Venus cautioned the women of the court to be wary of her son. The crucial difference, of course, is that in A Challenge at Tilt it is an actual cupid who offers the precautionary guidance. He fashions himself in a way cognate to the Jacobean Love of 1608, claiming to have shown himself dedicated to the social and political ideal of marriage in having done “these glad solemnities their proper rites.” The other, and supposedly false, Cupid is by implication the amorous mischief-maker of popular tradition. Whereas in The Haddington Masque Jonson replaced this latter Cupid with a politically and socially gratifying one, in A Challenge at Tilt he plays the two against each other. Our understanding of the Jacobean Love also is complicated by means of a gender debate that takes place between the two Cupids. Very earlier on in the tilt, the two disputants begin backing up their claims to authenticity on the grounds of the gender of the member of the couple they serve. The first Cupid says, “I serve the man, and the nobler creature” (4), to which the second Cupid replies, “But I the woman, and the purer, and therefore the worthier” (5–6). This debate over the relative merits of the bride and bridegroom’s gender crops up consistently throughout the entertainment and connects to a basic representational question that attended the use of love imagery, and certainly the character of Love, within Jacobean national propaganda: does celebrating British nationhood through a love-topos script England into a submissive or feminized position? There is a sense in both the king’s public use of military imagery and Francis Bacon’s complex elaborations on compositio and mistio unions of an attempt to conceal this line of interpretation. Jonson had responded effectively to the problem in his last marriage masque by designing a Love-character who was politically active rather than wanton. A Challenge at Tilt, however, polarizes the gender of Love, again raising questions about the suitability of the character/concept to national mythmaking. When the second Cupid insists that his rival confess his deceit and

36 Line references for A Challenge at Tilt are from Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, (ed.) Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 198–205.

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“be penitent early” (149), the first Cupid breaks into a what was surely designed to be a stereotypically feminine tirade:37 I will break my bow and quiver into dust first—restore me mine own arms!—or be torn in pieces with harpies, marry one of the furies, turn into chaos again and dissolve the harmony of nature. (150–53)

To this barrage of archetypal feminine excess, the second Cupid replies, “O, most stiffly spoken! and fit for the sex you stand for!” (154). The physical division of Cupid into two figures is emphasized by their respective identifications with masculine virtue and feminine chaos. Such schizophrenic volatility makes the two characters unlikely overseers of a marriage event. Compare them to Reason, the grave master of ceremonies in Hymenaei, who demonstrated the virtue of Protestant marriage by taming the unruly humors. In the passage cited above, A Challenge at Tilt problematizes the stability of the paradigm of love by questioning how it is gendered. The split between paradigmatic feminine and masculine qualities marks a break from a concept of love as a reliable social ordering force, as in Hymenaei, or a guarantor of political and national policy, as in The Haddington Masque. A Challenge at Tilt effectively renders its cupids unusable for the purposes of national mythmaking. This fractured portrait of Cupid stands in contrast to Jonson’s previous uses of the character, not just in The Haddington Masque, but also in his other cupidfeaturing masques produced between 1608 and 1612. There is no indication in these performances of a gradual movement towards the kinds of cupids we find in A Challenge at Tilt. In Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611), Love is an agent of organization and control, similar to Reason in Hymenaei. Universal order is maintained through the socially beneficial act of sexual reproduction, which Love suggests when he says, “I rather strive / How to keep the world alive” (24–5).38 He concludes by insisting to the Sphinx who has imprisoned him, “Without me / All again would chaos be” (26–7). The following year, in Love Restored (1612), the Jacobean court met another Cupid. This entertainment, like A Challenge at Tilt, stages a comedic meditation on the idea of authenticity. Plutus disguises himself as Love in the masque only to be exposed in the end by Robin Goodfellow and Masquerado. But the drollery of this performance gives way to gravitas when the real Cupid finally arrives in a chariot to present a long speech in honor of King James and his court. During this address, Cupid also hints at the importance of his own amorous powers to a properly functioning hierarchy, reminding the audience that “the majesty that here doth move / Shall triumph, more secured by love / 37

This is potentially confusing. The “first Cupid” is here breaking into a feminine tirade whereas earlier in the text he said, “I serve the man.” To clarify: the performance occurred over two days. The designation of “first” and “second” in the text merely depends on which cupid had the first entry on that day. Hence, first Cupid on 27 December is second Cupid on 1 January in the text. 38 Line references are from Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, (ed.) Orgel, 174–85.

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Than all his earth” (232–4).39 In this masque, two years before A Challenge at Tilt, Cupid is still being placed firmly in the service of the monarch. Even 20 years later, when Jonson revisits the Eros/Anteros theme in Love’s Welcome at Bolsover (1634), there is complete concord between the two cupids. We can hardly imagine the bickering pair from A Challenge at Tilt saying things to each other like, “Me seems I grew / Three inches higher sin’ I met with you” (92–3), or, “When one’s away, it seems we both are less” (106).40 While the cupids of A Challenge at Tilt are part of Jonson’s ongoing experimentation with the idea of Love, they also mark a rupture in the treatment of the theme before 1613/14. For the first time, cupids do not have a discernibly productive role to play at court. The harangues of Jonson’s Eros and Anteros reverberate across the court entertainments of the second half of James’s reign. When Cupid appears in masques staged between 1615 and 1625, his function is both rhetorically and morally questionable. Jonson’s Christmas His Masque (1615) continues the comic send-up that had begun in Challenge. It presents a gritty, urban take on the politically calculated family unit presented in The Haddington Masque. Venus is cast as “a deaf tirewoman” (86)41 and “a fishmonger’s daughter” (111) living in Pudding Lane. She arrives unexpectedly in court to see her son act. Vulcan is again the father. As Venus tells Christmas, “I had [Cupid] by my first husband; he was a smith forsooth—we dwelt in Do-little Lane then” (108–9). Jonson clearly has no intention of revisiting the version of the family he constructed in 1608: Christmas continually asks Venus to leave, Cupid forgets his lines, and, in the end, he is even fired and sent home. Cupid resurfaces the following year in Jonson’s entertainment, Lovers Made Men, mounted at the home of James Hay in 1617. In this performance, Cupid returns to the traditional mischief-making status that was revised in The Haddington Masque. The son of Venus has placed a group of lovers in such a state of delirium that Mercury thinks they are ghosts of the dead. The charm is so strong that the lovers need to drink from the River Lethe in order to “forget / Love’s name” (58–9).42 Mercury warns of Cupid, “His every word falls from him is a snare: / Who have so lately known him should beware” (101–2). By the time of Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honors (1623), again by Jonson, Cupid seems to have regained some of his prestige within the nomenclature of national myth. He is not a troublemaker or a source of comic relief. Instead, he acts in league with Saturn to create a laudatory main masque. But even here Cupid lacks the purposeful political utility he had in The Haddington Masque. His long absence from the iconography of serious national myth is even hinted at in the direct address he makes to King James, assuring the monarch that he has not arrived in court for the purpose of disruption: “Receive it not as any 39

Ibid., 186–97. Line references are from Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments 1605–1640, (ed.) David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 194–9. 41 Ibid., 109–16. 42 Line references are from Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, (ed.) Orgel, 256–62. 40

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crime / ‘Gainst majesty that Love and Sport / Tonight have entered in your court” (308–10).43 It is really not until Ben Jonson’s Caroline masque, Love’s Triumph through Callipolis (1631), in which King Charles appears in a sumptuous pageant wagon surrounded by 15 lovers and 15 cupids, that Love re-enters elite spectacle at the center of the Stuart propagandist idiom. The court masque is an international theatrical form and, accordingly, stylistic developments in England tend to make more sense when looked at in a European context. Jonson’s uproarious cupids are no exception. They speak to the influence of the burlesque in the French ballet de cour. In the local context of the Jacobean court, though, an entertainment like A Challenge at Tilt must have felt jarring. Challenge upsets the meanings which Cupid had accumulated during the first 10 years of Jacobean court mythmaking and, as a consequence, places itself in an uneasy relationship with Jonson’s preceding masques. Rather than using Cupid to reconcile poetically the sexual body with the nation, Challenge dramatizes the volatility of Cupid as a political signifier. The Irish Masque adds another level to this comedic deconstruction of monarchical propaganda. If Challenge exposes some of the mythographic vulnerabilities of the language of union, Irish demystifies the forum through which that language was improvised, spoken and learned. It makes us laugh at the court as a hierarchical theater of state, and even bases its narrative device on the inability to mount an appropriately magnificent masque. The Irish Masque was performed twice: once between the two parts of A Challenge at Tilt, on 29 December 1613, and again after the second part, on 3 January 1614. As such, the two entertainments intervene in each other’s fictions, constantly adding to the cumulative meanings of both. In form and conception The Irish Masque is quite simple. Four ragtag Irishmen stumble into court, having crossed the Irish Sea in order to pay tribute to the famous wedding between Robert Carr and Frances Howard. As one of the Irishmen, Dennis, says, “Tere vash a great newsh in Ireland of a great bridal of one o’ ty lords here” (52–3).44 We have here two familiar devices. As in The Somerset Masque there has been an overseas voyage for the purpose of celebration. And like Campion’s squires, the Irishmen reveal that news of the wedding has circulated widely. Through the “great newsh in Ireland,” Dennis, Donnell, Dermock and Patrick have been able to attain sundry bits of information about the marriage. Patrick tells James that he knows the wedding is for “ty man Robin” (54). Donnell adds in the identity of the bride, “Toumaish his daughter” (55), and Dermock clarifies who “Toumaish” is: “Ty good man Toumaish o’ Shuffolk” (56).45 Armed with this information, the four Irishmen came to the court of King James to offer a celebratory performance. However, as they explain to the king, they have lost their masquing apparel during their journey. The Irishmen’s befuddled attempt to get 43

Ibid., 390–408. Line references for The Irish Masque are from Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, (ed.) Orgel, 206–12. 45 Frances’s father, Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk. 44

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around this problem results in a lengthy and meandering address to James in which they assure him of their country’s loyalty. The masque finishes with the entry of “a civil gentleman of the nation” (127) who condemns the Irishmen’s indecorous behavior towards the king. He introduces a bard who sings two songs of praise for James, during which the Irishmen drop their mantles to reveal that they are in fact wearing their masquing apparel underneath. As may be expected, recent critical interest in The Irish Masque has concentrated on the entertainment’s thematic links to contemporary events in Ireland.46 Protestant domination in the 1613 parliament in Dublin resulted in major grievances within the Catholic community. The creation of new seats that were bound to go to more Protestants and the nomination of Sir John Davies as Speaker were perceived as underhanded tactics aimed at securing a governing body in Ireland that was overwhelmingly in favor of English Crown policies. Between 1612 and 1613 there were even some Irish who came to Whitehall to plead their case to King James directly.47 The device of The Irish Masque could, in this respect, be seen as a satiric reversal of such unofficial diplomatic missions. It also has been suggested that the struggle between the four Irishmen to speak to the king could reflect the disorderliness of the Irish parliamentary proceedings.48 The Irish Masque definitely stands as one of the most direct engagements with contemporary political events in the masque genre, and to the thematic detriment of the nuptial occasion for which it was written. As David Lindley puts it, “It is obvious enough that this work, commissioned directly by the King, and performed by his servants, was primarily concerned with a different political circumstance.”49 It is the almost aggressive transparency of the masque’s political topicality that makes the entertainment resist being read in broader discursive terms. Nevertheless, The Irish Masque can be clearly situated within a larger rhetorical context of court performance, one that includes not only the Carr/Howard masques and other wedding entertainments, but some of Jonson’s later Jacobean masques as well. With or without the dimension of Anglo-Irish politics, The Irish Masque displays a fundamental interest in the relationship between dramatic invention and eulogistic obligation within the masque form. Both The Irish Masque and A Challenge at Tilt take part in the burgeoning use of comedy in Jacobean court entertainment, a stylistic development that 46

See, for instance, Lindley, “Embarrassing Ben,” 350–57; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, (eds) Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yaeger (London: Routledge, 1992), 167–71; James Smith, “Effaced History: Facing the Colonial Contexts of Ben Jonson’s Irish Masque at Court,” English Literary History 65 (1998): 297–321. 47 See Aidan Clarke and R. Dudley Edwards, “Pacification, Plantation and the Catholic Question, 1603–1623,” in A New History of Ireland, (eds) T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin, and F.J. Byrne, 9 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 3:87–231. 48 Lindley, “Embarrassing Ben,” 355. 49 Ibid., 351.

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suited the tastes of the king while repeatedly providing a vehicle for metacritical observations on the practice of masquing. We find this tendency primarily, though not exclusively, in Jonson’s masques. Robin Goodfellow, in the 1612 Love Restored, amusingly recounted his difficulties trying to gain access to the masque. The narrative results in a humorous and irreverent account of the material conditions of masquing, the social hierarchy of the court, and the codes of decorum that surround elite performance. The Irish Masque features a more expanded and consistent comic structure, and in this respect sets a precedent for the style of Jonson’s later Jacobean entertainments, such as For the Honour of Wales (1618), The News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620), and The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621). The antics of the Irishmen swallow up the entertainment as a whole, rendering the brief and solemn passage of monarchical praise delivered by the Gentleman and the bard structurally marginal and, in its comparative stylistic starkness, poetically forgettable. A key source of the entertainment’s hilarity would have been the Irishmen’s strong accents and syntactical malapropisms. Yet in the course of self-ridicule, the stage Irishmen also subvert our normal understanding of the court masque by changing the monarch’s relationship to the genre. The entertainment opens with an inability to locate James, normally the authoritative center of masque fictions. The very first line is Dennis saying, “For Chreesh’s sake, phair ish te king?” (4). This joke is pushed as far as it will go, the Irishmen growing increasingly confused as to where the monarch may be found: DERMOCK: Phair ish te king? DONNELL: Phich ish te king? DENNIS: Tat ish te king. DERMOCK: Ish tat te king? Got blesh him? (16–19)

In addition to showing the Irishmen’s farcical inability to mount a serious masque, this scene of befuddlement also alters the nature of the affiliation between court power and court performance. The monarchical presence is subordinated to the demands of comedy in the opening of The Irish Masque, with humor being derived from the inability to locate the king. In this capacity, The Irish Masque inverts the normal relationship between fiction and venue at masque events. The performance draws its vitality and ability to entertain from the effacement, rather than the invocation, of hierarchical authority in the court. When, in due course, the Irishmen identify King James, there is no epiphany or transformation that allows them to offer the tribute they had intended. The monarch remains in a passive, receptive position, rather than shifting to one that is productive and creative. The Irishmen’s success in determining the king’s whereabouts initially gives rise to more confusion than clarity. Donnell is the first to react, saying, “Blesh ty shweet faish, king Yamish, and my mistresh’ faish too: pre tee hear me now” (22–3), to which Dennis protests, “Phat ish te meaning o’ tish, Donnell? Didsh tou not shay, a’ Gotsh name, I should tell ty tale for tee?” (26–7).

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What ensues is a lengthy argument over who out of the four should be addressing James. The shouting match provoked by the monarch’s presence is a far cry from The Lords’ Masque, where the invocation of Jove exorcizes the contentious vocal multiplicity of the Frantics, allowing the main masque to proceed with dignity and clarity. James is scripted as an audience member in The Irish Masque and, as such, is not endowed with the authorial powers of verbal pacification that he receives in Campion’s Palatine entertainment. When the Irishmen insist on their country’s loyalty to the Crown, Patrick says, “Believe no tales, King Yamish” (107), to which Dermock adds, “For by Got, tey love tee in Ireland” (108). That James is required to decipher where truth lies, between the “tales” in circulation and the assurances of the Irishmen, only reinforces the interpretive role that the king is meant to occupy in this show. As we have observed, the civic entertainments for the Palatine wedding also fashioned James as a member of the audience and Whitehall itself as an interpretive space. However, to find the monarch thus situated at an entertainment taking place within the court is a novelty. It constitutes a major reorganization of the power relations on which Jacobean court performance had based itself up to this point. Denying the king an authorial role breaks the continuity between masque fiction and court space. Rather than showcasing conceptual links between the court and the nation, the four Irishmen produce an image of the court as a place where the center of authority is not always determinable, and where tribute disintegrates into confusion. Furthermore, by changing the normal relationship between the masque and its venue, Jonson’s text disallows itself one of the form’s most important properties: the ability to include the court in the production of national propaganda by merging the real world and the world of fiction. Far from striving to blur the line between audience and performance, The Irish Masque insists on a separation between the two by placing the king and other spectators in an overtly receptive role. In effect, The Irish Masque denies itself the attributes of a masque. It insists on its status as comedic spectacle, rather than as a performative extension of a monarchically-centered court and nation. It is not just the problematization of the venue that prevents Irish from achieving the full panegyrical potential of the masque form. Even the most basic raw materials of national mythmaking are denied to the masquers. A very straightforward example of this is the Irishmen’s lack of masquing costumes, lost during the journey to England. As Dennis explains, “Te villainous vild Irish sheas have casht away all ter fine cloysh” (66–7). As a result, “Tey musht e’en come ant dansh i’ teir mantles” (74). In addition, language itself is a resource less than readily available in the performance. The confusion of the Irishmen, first attempting to locate, and then attempting to address, King James, gives the entertainment an unscripted, off-the-cuff quality. Dennis, Donnell, Dermock and Patrick have definite difficulty getting any kind of intelligible narrative of their arrival in court off the ground. This is due in part to the argument that ensues over who should actually be speaking to the king in the first place. In the course of the dispute, the frequent accusations of lying that the Irishmen level at one another calls into question the extent to which language on their lips can be viewed as an

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appropriate and reliable tool of praise: “Shweet heart, tou liesht” (35); “Chreesh shave me, tou liest” (37); “Tell ty tale tyshelf, an’t be all tree!” (51). Moreover, the heavy accents indicated in the text complicate the language of the masque even further. The organizational difficulty that befuddles the Irishmen’s attempts to explain their purpose at court is matched by the elusiveness of their diction and phraseology. This kind of verbal idiosyncrasy was, of course, aimed precisely at comic effect, and the fact that the masque was performed a second time by popular demand50 suggests that these strategies were successful. In responding positively to the humor of The Irish Masque, the audience may very well have contributed to the performance’s critique of the genre, by proving that national myth was a disposable element of court performance, and that the language of union was no longer a fundamental part of spectator expectations. The Irish Masque uses humor as a substitute for national myth. It shows that comedy in masques may be employed not only as a critical counterweight to monarchical rhetoric, as in The Memorable Masque, but also as an alternative to it. In this way, The Irish Masque extends the dramatic range of the masque form and at the same time points out the limitations of early Jacobean monarchical rhetoric within it. The latter idea is reinforced when the Gentleman and the bard enter at the end of the masque. The Gentleman praises James and scolds the “coarser manners” (135) of the Irishmen. But what we are witnessing here is not the usual transition between antimasque and main masque. In the first place, the Irishmen have not been characterized as anti-courtly forces. On the contrary, they have pledged their loyalty to James. What is more, their arrival, their explanation, and, finally, their dancing, constitutes something dramatically more substantial than a traditional antimasque. It amounts to a complete and self-sufficient entertainment. The entry of the Gentlemen and the bard ushers in a brief passage of monarchical praise that is structurally exterior to the main performance. This panegyrical episode, in which the bard is asked to “view / The gladding face of that great king in whom / So many prophecies of thine are knit” (137–9), is relegated to the margins of the entertainment, like the similarly detached address to the king in The Somerset Masque. As well as being formally liminal, monarchical rhetoric is also placed at the geographical margins of James’s kingdom—Ireland. This is not the language of union as we have known it in the marriage masques so far. There is no mention of a united Britain. James is, rather, a prophetic character in the lore of the Irish bard: the king who will “redeem, / If she [Ireland] would love his counsels as his laws” (145–6). Even in this relatively brief section of national propaganda, then, The Irish Masque does not seize upon the theme of union made relevant by the wedding event. Poetically, it places its celebration of James in a space that is exterior to the court and the Anglo-Scottish nation which that court typically figures. Structurally, it allows this panegyrical passage no more than an ornamental role at the end of a masque that otherwise makes its audience laugh at the decorum of court ritual. The Irish Masque attempts to re-inscribe the conceptual line between entertainment and encomium that is so often blurred in occasional performance at Whitehall. 50

Ibid., 348.

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Jonson’s entertainments for the marriage of Carr and Howard are more metatheatrically self-conscious than any of the other performances mounted for the event. They explore the extent to which court entertainment is possible without going about the politically utilitarian business of expounding monarchical rhetoric. Challenge presents a version of Love that stands in direct contrast to the cupids who are rhetorical and political servants of King James in The Haddington Masque, Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, and Love Restored. The bickering duo reminds their audience of the instability of the representational tradition of which they are a part. The Irish Masque takes broader swings at court mythmaking. Rather than focusing on a particular strand of monarchical rhetoric, it contradicts the privileged relationship between monarch and performance which most marriage masques up to that point had insisted upon. While James is consistently addressed, his acknowledged presence never translates into quasi-divine fictional authority. The dismissal of national mythmaking in Jonson’s Carr/Howard entertainments is part of a broader shift, in which the poetic and theatrical range of masques was extended through a reappraisal of their political function. Jonson’s entertainments show that the dialogue masques conduct with the monarch and the nation can be contentious, humorous and even irreverent, as well as subservient, serious and eulogistic. In pointing out this possibility, A Challenge at Tilt and The Irish Masque look forward to the increasingly jocular and stylistically varied court entertainments of the later Jacobean period. The Masque of Flowers and National Myth: The Union Masques Revisited? The last masque performed for the marriage of Robert Carr and Frances Howard was The Masque of Flowers. It was presented on Twelfth Night, 6 January 1614. Both the authorship and inception of this masque are shrouded in uncertainty, although some conjectural surmises stand on enough evidence to have been generally accepted. What we can be certain of is that the masque was mounted by the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn and the expenses paid by Francis Bacon.51 The performance was probably intended as an offering of thanks to Robert Carr who had been highly influential in securing Bacon the attorney-generalship in 1613.52 James Spedding has asserted (and E.A.J. Honigmann follows his lead) that Bacon also may have overseen and approved the device of the masque.53 The actual writer(s), however, cannot be any more specifically determined than the 51 The most useful review of the extant documentary evidence pertaining to The Masque of Flowers can be found in E.A.J. Honigmann’s introduction to his edition of the masque in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, (eds) T.J.B. Spencer and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 151–7. 52 Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard, 130. 53 The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, (ed.) James Spedding, 7 vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1861–74), 4:343; A Book of Masques, (eds) Spencer and Wells, 156.

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three sets of initials placed at the end of the dedication to Bacon: I.G., W.D., and T.B. Frustratingly, each set of initials match up to more than one individual in the register for admissions to Gray’s Inn at that period.54 Honigmann has suggested that “T.B.” could refer to Thomas Bushell, a young man in Bacon’s household who later, in 1636, appears to have composed an entertainment entitled The Several Speeches and Songs, At the Presentment of Mr Bushell’s Rock to the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty. But Honigmann also points out that the three sets of initials may not refer to authors at all, but, rather, to some type of Gray’s Inn officials; perhaps the society members who were in charge of the revels that year.55 It is very likely that The Masque of Flowers was a rushed endeavor, a hasty replacement for what was originally intended to be a larger scale performance mounted under the auspices of all four Inns of Court in conjunction. There is no irrefutable proof for this, but the few critics who have discussed the entertainment accept it as a strong likelihood and use it as an explanation for the masque’s relative lack of creativity.56 The extant evidence is scanty, but highly suggestive. In a letter to an unknown recipient, for example, Bacon expresses his regret that “the joynt maske from the fowr Innes of Cowrt faileth.”57 The letter is undated, but it may very well be a reference to the circumstances surrounding the 1614 entertainment. The dedication to Bacon in The Masque of Flowers offers a possible point of corroboration. It reminds its patron how commendable it is “that one Inn of Court by itself, in time of vacation, and in the space of three weeks, could perform that which hath been performed” (22–3).58 The specification of “one Inn of Court by itself” is rather conspicuous. The author’s apparent surprise at the masque’s success suggests that its having been produced by “one Inn of Court by itself, in time of vacation, and in the space of three weeks” was not necessarily the original plan, but the unavoidable consequence of the other three Inns of Court pulling out of the venture. We must bear in mind that the masques organized for the Palatine wedding festivities had taken a considerable economic toll on the Inns. Another costly entertainment in such a short span of time may simply have been deemed economically unfeasible. What the Grayans finally produced in their three-week time frame was a performance that was visually impressive, if poetically somewhat banal.59 It stood 54 Register of Admissions to Gray’s Inn, 1521–1881, (ed.) Joseph Foster (London: Hazell, Watson and Viney, 1887). 55 A Book of Masques, (eds) Spencer and Wells, 155–6. 56 This is true of both Lindley and Honigmann. See The Trials of Frances Howard, 128; and A Book of Masques, (eds) Spencer and Wells, 154. 57 Quoted in A Book of Masques (152) where Honigmann discusses its contextual relationship to the 1614 masque in more detail. See, in addition, The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, (ed.) Spedding, 4:393–4. 58 Line references for The Masque of Flowers are from A Book of Masques, 149–77. 59 Percival Vivian, in a less forgiving diagnosis of Flowers, has said that “it is little better than doggerel” (Campion’s Works, liv).

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in marked contrast to Jonson’s two entertainments which supplemented small budgets with inventive and witty scripts. The Masque of Flowers opens with a light-hearted dispute between Invierno (Winter) and Primavera (Spring) which is interrupted by the entry of Gallus, a messenger delivering a letter from the Sun. The letter, read aloud by Invierno, announces that there is an important wedding afoot and commands the two seasons to contribute to the festivities. Invierno is asked to preside over an antimasque in which Silenus and Kawasha debate the relative merits of drinking and smoking.60 Primavera is to present the main masque in which a group of flowers transform into men, leading us into the customary series of revels and panegyrical songs. It is certainly the antimasque of Silenus and Kawasha that was designed to be the most memorable part of the masque. A note at the end of the text tells us that “it pleased his Majesty to call for the anticmasque of song and dance, which was again presented” (400–401). The detailed scene descriptions in the printed text give us a sense of the passage’s visual appeal. Silenus is “an old fat man” (168) with “a red swollen face ... and little horns” (171–2), while Kawasha bears a chimney on his head and “an Indian bow and arrows” (178–9). Both are accompanied by a troupe of fiddlers and singers attired as different social types. On Silenus’s side there is “a Miller, a Wine Cooper, a Vintner’s Boy, a Brewer” (186–7); on Kawasha’s, “A Skipper, a Fencer, a Pedlar, a Barber” (188–9). No doubt, the uproariousness of the antimasque, as well as its large cast, would have dwarfed the impact of the other, more mundane sections of the performance. It is, however, precisely to these more mundane sections that we must turn if we want to gain an accurate sense of the relationship between The Masque of Flowers and the Jacobean marriage entertainments that preceded it. On first impression, the passages before and after the antimasque appear to jar with the other Carr/ Howard entertainments in that they feature transparently regicentric motifs and overt monarchical praise. One could plausibly argue that The Masque of Flowers is the closest we get to a Union masque at the 1613/14 festivities. There are several aspects of the entertainment that can be easily associated with the Anglo-Scottish marriage masques in particular. The main masque, for example, features a garden setting and a transformation that takes place therein. The songs that attend this transformation are notably sexual in tone, and the song that follows it takes James and the new British imperium as its theme. All of this is highly reminiscent of The Lord Hay’s Masque. It too features a garden setting that tropes both the court and the nation, as well as a roughly similar transformation (from trees to masquers rather than from flowers to masquers) and the use of poetic eroticism to gesture towards an overarching fictional device of British political renewal. We may, of course, add to this list of correspondences, the occasion of Anglo-Scottish 60

This was a popular theme. Comparisons between tobacco and wine are made, for instance, in John Beaumont’s The Metamorphosis of Tabacco (London, 1602). King James had, in 1604, published his own pamphlet on the evils of smoking, A Counterblaste to Tobacco.

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marriage. The Masque of Flowers certainly possesses all the raw materials, as it were, of the Anglo-Scottish marriage masque. As the entertainment unfolds, it raises expectations for a return to a more conventional treatment of the political ideal of union. This is not, however, what the masque finally delivers. Although The Masque of Flowers establishes the rhetorical preconditions for monarchical propaganda and alludes to a familiar brand of national myth, it ultimately remains an incomplete piece of panegyric. King James’s authority over this court performance is clearly asserted, but the fictions staged within it are not permitted to signify at a national or mythical level. Furthermore, the poetic elements of Flowers that are familiar from Campion’s first masque do not produce the same rhetorical effect as they did in 1607. The vocabulary of the Union masques is employed decoratively, without cohering into an integrated and politically focused language. While the garden and the transformation scene in The Masque of Flowers provide formal lines of continuity with earlier propagandist masques, they do not refer to any greater political or cultural ideal outside the performance itself. Like Jonson’s entertainments for the Carr/Howard marriage, The Masque of Flowers disassociates the poetic and dramatic properties of the masque from the ideological project of national mythmaking. Two major passages of The Masque of Flowers will provide the focus of this discussion: the opening section of the masque, in which James’s authority over the entertainment is asserted through the prop of Gallus’s letter from the Sun, and the main masque, which puts conventional marriage-masque attributes to untypical uses. As we shall see, although structurally standard, the transformation passage of the main masque avoids making the commonplace metaphorical link between the rebirth of the masquers and the political renewal of the nation. It prevents the monarchical power asserted through Gallus’s letter from being extended beyond the actual entertainment. Thus, although The Masque of Flowers creates the same semiotic world as Lord Hay’s, poetically it disconnects itself from that masque and the ideological position it occupied. The episode in which Gallus delivers the Sun’s letter places the monarch in his customary position of fictional authority. However, in this case, rather than being endowed with divine vocality, James’s ascendancy is figured in terms which are specifically material and textual. The Sun (the James-figure of The Masque of Flowers) does not set the performance into motion through godly intervention. Instead, he simply sends a letter giving instructions as to how the masque should be executed. It announces, We have taken knowledge of a marriage to be solemnized between two noble persons, in the principal island of our universal empire, unto which we are pleased to do honour, and thereupon have directed our several letters to you the seasons of the year to visit and present them on your part. (132–6)

The letter goes on to assign Invierno and Primavera their performative tasks. The two seasons are told that their spectacles should be “given at our palace” (154), and, finally, the letter is signed, “Your lord and master, I, the Sun” (154–5).

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The letter replaces the king’s commanding physical presence with a text that is equally empowered on account of the signature. This power is asserted within a broader allegory in which the Sun, Invierno and Primavera occupy a set of courtlike relationships. The term “quarter-waiters” (131), used in the heading of the letter to describe Invierno and Primavera, casts all four seasons (“quarter”) as servants to the Sun-King (the word “waiter” on its own referred to a low court position). The letter passage, then, creates a series of parallels: between the seasons as courtiers, the Sun as King James, and his heavenly palace as Whitehall. Although these interconnected metaphors do allow James’s power to acquire a quasi-divine quality, the material prop of the letter itself tempers this with more terrestrial associations. Through the letter, the monarch is shown gaining control over the marriage by way of real networks of textual transmission, networks that could also, of course, be used to circulate unofficial, antimonarchical accounts of the wedding. So, while the advancement of James’s authority is embellished within a god-like framework, it also has a very pragmatic dimension. Rather than presenting the monarch’s fictional prerogative as transcending systems of public discussion, The Masque of Flowers presents a scene in which James, the Sun, is able to use textual networks to his advantage, as a tool of state. The Sun’s monopoly on textual transmission in The Masque of Flowers can be viewed as an allegorical extension of the king’s attempts to secure a similar kind of control in the actual regulation of his kingdom. In Hinchinbrooke, on 15 October 1613, for example, the king delivered a “Proclamation prohibiting the publishing of any reports or writings of Duels.”61 It is a significant oddity that this proclamation against publishing on the duels occurred more than a year before the proclamation issued directly against the duels themselves.62 The Hinchinbrooke proclamation makes it abundantly clear that a major offence is committed against the Crown “in daring to presume so farre upon Our speciall Prerogative, as to take upon them to make any publication of their pleasure, the power whereof is onely in Us.”63 The act of publication and transmission is stressed as being a royal privilege, not to be co-opted and then abused by others. The proclamation attacks this problem from two different angles, simultaneously averring the king’s right to publish while it emphatically bars others from doing the same thing. It closes by saying, “Whosoever shall after the publication of this Our Pleasure, presume to put in writing, or publish any Discourse of the maner, either of their meetings appointed with their parties, or their fighting, or of any part of that quarrellous businesse ... will have them to bee brought ... in the Starrechamber.”64 Here the proclamation highlights its own publication as the moment at which it achieves the status of unassailable law, while at the very same moment all publishing on duels 61 Stuart Royal Proclamations: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625, (eds) James F. Larkin and Paul F. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 295–7. 62 Ibid., 302–8. 63 Ibid., 96. 64 Ibid (my italics).

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becomes a punishable offence. This proclamation provides one good record of how the transmission of texts could be viewed by the Crown as a social and political tool. While the king perceives the potential threat of textual transmission, he also recognizes its intrinsic power enough to use the same networks of dissemination for his own ends. The first Star Chamber case to be based on this proclamation was concluded on 26 January 1614. Not only were the accused, William Priest and Richard Wright, sentenced to imprisonment and fines for writing and delivering a formal duel challenge, James also, importantly, ordered that the case be published and nationally distributed.65 A similar paradigm of textual authority is conformed to in the transmission of a poem that James wrote lampooning “railing rymes and vaunting verse” (23),66 a condemnatory response to a verse libel dropped at court around 1622/23. As Andrew McRae has noted, this poem was, in fact, circulated through the same unofficial social channels as those libels it castigated. It is even copied into a number of contemporary miscellanies alongside libelous verses.67 The Masque of Flowers, through a literary idiom, rehearses a very similar model of monarchical authority in its letter passage when a textual exchange is used to affirm James’s ascendancy over the marriage event. The Masque of Flowers conforms to the most basic ideological convention of the Union masques when it showcases the king as the Prime Mover of the fiction. The sense that we are being returned to a more regicentric style of court performance appears to continue in the main masque. The garden setting, for example, must have looked familiar to anyone who had attended The Lord Hay’s Masque seven years previous. And the song that prompts the transformation of the flowers invites further comparison with Campion’s first wedding entertainment: Hearken, ye fresh and springing flowers, The Sun shines full upon your earth; Disclose out of your shady bowers, He will not blast your tender birth. Descend you from your hill, Take spirit at his will, No flowers, but flourish still. (321–7)

65

Ibid., 296 n. 2. The Poems of James VI of Scotland, (ed.) James Craigie, 2 vols (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1958), 2:182–91. 67 Andrew McRae, “The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libelling,” Modern Philology 97 (2000): 376. See also, Alastair Bellany, “‘Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse’: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, (eds) Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1994), 294. For further discussion of James’s use of popular networks of textual transmission, see Curtis Perry, “‘If Proclamations Will Not Serve’: The Late Manuscript Poetry of James I and the Culture of Libel,” in Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, (eds) Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 205–32. 66

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Are these lines revisiting the sumptuous pastoralism of the 1607 Anglo-Scottish marriage celebration? Aesthetically speaking, yes, it would seem so. But the nature of this correspondence is fragile and cannot be pushed beyond a purely superficial level of association. To begin with, in The Lord Hay’s Masque, the bower of Flora and the flowers therein are immediately endowed with various tropological meanings. First, the flowers represent the bride and the bridegroom specifically; later in the song they represent all married or marriageable females at court (“Let every one his own protect” [207]). Since the flowers represent the court women, the bower of Flora, by extension, figures the court, itself symbolic of the AngloScottish nation. These multiple levels of metaphor are all firmly established in The Lord Hay’s Masque by the end of the first song. The Masque of Flowers treats its garden transformation scene quite differently. There is no attempt to invest either the flowers or their metamorphosis with meanings that extend beyond the strictly spectacular. Uncharacteristically, the text claims originality as the transformation’s primary virtue: Give place, you ancient powers, That turned men to flowers; For never writer’s pen Yet told of flowers re-turn’d to men. (314–17)

The main masque’s value, therefore, lies in what it offers as dramatic spectacle, not in what it refers to or metaphorically enacts. This claim for originality also acts as a denial of the influence that The Masque of Flowers must have drawn from the very similar transformation scene in The Lord Hay’s Masque. By insisting on its lack of literary and dramatic precedents, The Masque of Flowers disassociates itself from the project of national mythmaking as symbolized by Campion’s 1607 masque, in which the metamorphosis of trees into male masquers symbolized the triumph of one language of nationhood over another. The writer(s) of Flowers defamiliarize their transformation scene by emptying it of its standard political content. The sexual bodies of the masquers receive a similarly closed-off treatment in The Masque of Flowers. In The Lord Hay’s Masque the restoration of the knights of Apollo to their human form is eroticized in order to stress the return of sexual profligacy and, more importantly, of the national fertility which that sexual profligacy represents. In The Masque of Flowers, on the other hand, the song directly following the transformation, Cantus II, alludes to the erotic but ultimately prohibits either the spectator or reader from accessing it: Thrice happy flowers! Your leaves are turn’d into fine hair, Your stalks to bodies straight and fair, Your sprigs to limbs, as once they were, Your verdure to fresh blood, your smell To breath; your blooms, your seedy cell, All have a lovely parallel. (353–9)

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This song, we might say, almost eroticizes the bodies of the masquers it describes. In its incremental catalogue of the metamorphosis from floral to human state, the vegetal blazon promises to expose fully the bodies of the masquers. But in the end it does not deliver. It withholds eroticism at the last moment. When the catalogue reaches the flowers’ “blooms” and “seedy cell,” we are not given a human equivalent. It concludes by dissolving into generalities, stating simply that “all have a lovely parallel.” The Masque of Flowers again disassociates itself unexpectedly from the language of union, this time by denying eroticism, one of its most characteristic elements. This strategy of silence, of suggesting but not uttering, is anticipated in the letter passage. The Sun’s “postscript” gains a particular relevance when approached through the issues raised in Cantus II. It reads, “We have also directed our letters to the Summer and the Harvest, the one to present them with length of days, and the other with fruit, but those letters come with the next dispatch” (156–8). The postscript states in advance that the masque will not be dealing with the subjects for which an erotic idiom is normally employed: fruitfulness and progeny. It is Harvest—not Primavera or Invierno—who was instructed to present an entertainment that bestowed the couple with “fruit.” If the Anglo-Scottish dimension of the wedding of Carr and Howard were being celebrated, Harvest’s entertainment would certainly have been the most appropriate. The focus of this imaginary masque would have been on the couple’s post-nati British children. But as the postscript explicitly states, the instructions for Summer and Harvest would not arrive until the next dispatch. The theme of fruitfulness, the rhetoric of eroticism, and the imaginary Union masque mounted by Harvest are all placed outside the poetic and temporal borders of The Masque of Flowers. Cantus II confirms this. The Masque of Flowers does not so much efface King James’s authority as reformulate what having authority in a marriage masque means. The entertainment certainly casts James as possessing exclusive control over elite theatrical ritual. The Sun’s letter of instruction bears his signature only. But the language of the masque never forges a link between this fictional authority and any kind of larger national, cultural, or divine authority. Accordingly, The Masque of Flowers shows that the monarch can be portrayed as being at the center of a masque without that masque being the mouthpiece for a monarchical vision of nationhood. This constitutes a considerable shift in the encomiastic conventions of marriage entertainments. As a James-figure, the Sun is a peculiar character in that he is not part of a more elaborate national fiction. On the contrary, the Sun merely allows the king to be figured as the commander of court festivities, a role which James willingly (if unconsciously) acted out in reality when he called for Silenus and Kawasha’s song and dance to be performed again at the end of the entertainment. Like the Sun who represents him, James desires an amusing antimasque, not a self-aggrandizing propagandist spectacle. When, at this moment, the king treats the audience to another round of outlandish entertainment, he is also contributing to the masque’s own marginalization of royal panegyric. It is evident that by 1614 the seemingly

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inexperienced and rushed authors of The Masque of Flowers had a vocabulary of conventions and images to choose from, bequeathed upon them by earlier nuptial performances. However, it is also evident that they did not feel constrained by the pressure to present the same vision of nationhood that had catalyzed the dramatic form during the first years of James’s English reign. The nature of the correspondences between the Carr/Howard entertainments and earlier nuptial performances prompt us to some telling conclusions about the form as a whole. In addition to charting lines of rhetorical continuity with past wedding entertainments, the conventionalities of the Carr/Howard performances also highlight how very similar representational motifs could signify in strikingly different ways depending on the context in which they were being deployed. The vocabulary of symbols, characters, and other signs that populate these final Jacobean marriage entertainments are oftentimes recognizable from the Union masques of 1605–1608. But they do not collaborate in the same way to deliver a fully elaborated vision of monarchical or national glorification. The Carr/Howard entertainments, in this respect, lead us down two contrary, but equally valid, interpretive paths. On one hand, they expose the frequent semiotic homogeneity of the Jacobean marriage performances. On the other hand—and perhaps this is a more important point to bear in mind—they display the varying degrees of political efficacy that even this relatively stable and contained idiom could have. The Carr/Howard entertainments mark an interesting outcome to a type of performance that grew out of a need to solve the representational problems of the Jacobean Union. These entertainments illuminate a fascinating historical moment, one in which the shifting locales and changing social structures of the court impacted on the received eulogistic techniques of elite occasional performance. The event of the Carr/Howard marriage intersects with a series of transformations in court culture: Queen Anna withdrawing from Whitehall performance to stage theatrical productions at venues such as Somerset House and Greenwich instead; marriage masques ceasing to be part of the theatrical repertoire at court; and a new kind of king’s masque emerging that would take the place of Anna’s discontinued Christmas performances between 1615 and 1625. The Carr/Howard entertainments, being mounted in the midst of these changes, betray a sense of uncertainty as to what function they are supposed to fill. As the categories of court performance established between 1603 and 1613 began to crumble, they struggle to define themselves, straddling serious political engagement and comedy, monarchical panegyric and virtuoso spectacle, King James and Queen Anna. These entertainments consistently look backwards to the earlier marriage masques through which they developed, but they also look forward to what court performance would become in the middle to late Jacobean period. In this way, the Carr/Howard entertainments illustrate the significance of the nuptial performances in the broadest terms, not only as essential documents of emergent Jacobean monarchical rhetoric, but also as productions that are vital for understanding the history of Jacobean court theater.

Afterword There are no fully satisfactory explanations for why the court marriage masque disappeared after the wedding of Frances Howard and Robert Carr. It is not as if occasions ceased to present themselves. There were, in fact, an abundance of high-profile weddings between 1615 and 1625, and many of these were AngloScottish marriages. James Hay married his second wife, Lucy Percy, in 1617; Robert Ker’s marriage to Anne Stanley took place in 1621; John Ramsay married Martha Cockayne in 1624 after the death of his first wife. This is just to name a few. Moreover, entertainments such as the anonymously authored Coleorton Masque, performed in Leicestershire for the 1618 wedding of William Seymour and Frances Devereux, indicate that the practice of incorporating performance into nuptial celebrations was maintained, at least sporadically, outside of the court at aristocratic houses. A substantial contributing factor to the discontinuation of the court marriage masque may have been simple economics. Mounting a masque at court meant phenomenal expenditure for whichever of the married couple’s family or friends were footing the bill, and after the costs sustained by the Palatine and Carr/Howard marriages it was unlikely that either the king or the Inns of Court were going to chip in. Equally important, though, must have been changes in the cultural conditions of court performance. With the loss of Queen Anna as an oppositional masque patron in the second half of James’s reign, masque culture at the Jacobean court became less divisively ideological, less vigorously propagandistic. Moreover, the failure of the Great Britain project in Parliament meant that elite marriage was divested of an obvious national significance, and this would have severely undercut its appositeness as an occasion for elaborate mythmaking. In the long history of early modern nuptial entertainment—of disguisings, of mummings, of songs and dances—the Jacobean marriage masque represents only a brief, if lavish and expensive, segue into the upmarket world of the court. The primary concern of this study has been to decipher what exactly it was doing there. This task has been more straightforward in some places than in others. In the wedding events that occurred between 1603 and 1608 the marriage masques do appear to possess a well-defined political agenda in the Jacobean court. During these first five years of King James’s reign in England, we may quite justifiably think of marriage masques as an ideologically “British” performance practice. Entertainments such as Jonson’s Hymenaei, Barriers, and The Haddington Masque, as well as Thomas Campion’s The Lord Hay’s Masque, explored the varied cultural resonances of union and attempted through those explorations to assemble verbal and visual formulas that would communicate the benefits of AngloScottish nationhood effectively and eloquently. But, as we have seen, this dialogic correspondence between social ritual and political project does not remain fixed.

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The entertainments for the Palatine marriage and the wedding of Robert Carr and Frances Howard mediate a much larger array of political aspirations. They display, as well, an interest in testing the theatrical and aesthetic possibilities of the masque form in a way not present in the nuptial performances of 1603 to 1608. There are a number of tempting historical factors against which we may read these stylistic changes: the failure of the Great Britain project in Parliament; the increasingly rigid ideological divisions in the world of Jacobean high politics; the appearance and then sudden disappearance of Prince Henry as a major artistic patron. All of these elements played a part in transforming the marriage masque from a predominantly monarchical ritual to a more open forum of political debate. Developments in Jacobean political history help us to make sense of the evolution of court marriage entertainments, but they can also tempt us into dangerous critical territory. For in relying too much on political landmarks we run the risk of framing the story of nuptial performance within a misleadingly logical historical narrative, one which obscures the arbitrariness and artistic license which frequently characterized the form and which could serve to place the entertainments in a dissonant relationship with the occasions they were celebrating. Nuptial performance offers only imperfect, distorted, and inconsistent access to the politics of the Jacobean court. What it provides more fully is an opportunity to observe the crucial role played by language and ceremony in mediating between that political world and its elite participants. The masques and other shows that have been considered in this book display an increasingly sophisticated notion of how performance could be used to explore the links between linguistic and political power. This began as an ideologically focused project, aimed at adapting residual panegyrical conventions to King James’s emergent vocabulary of union. By 1613 it gave way to a diverse series of experiments, all concerned with how verbal modulations—between speech and silence, coherence and incoherence, good and bad poetry—could be deployed theatrically either to emphasize or to qualify monarchical authority. It is precisely this drive to engage creatively with the verbal aspects of political hierarchy that generated many of the theatrical innovations that proved influential to the more dramatic masques of the later Jacobean period. We recall, for example, the comedic performance of the upstart poet, Capriccio, in The Memorable Masque, or the humorous spectacle of the bickering Irishmen in The Irish Masque. In the course of improvising, adapting, and deconstructing a rhetoric of union, the Jacobean marriage entertainments triggered changes in the theatrical norms of early Stuart court performance. This attempt to drag a previously overlooked form of elite theater back into the scholarly line of vision has been motivated in the first place by an interest in how the social ritual of marriage functioned within the wider political culture of Jacobean England. It is my hope, though, that in the process of engaging this topic I have also provided a glimpse at—a test case in—something larger, something we might refer to broadly as the event-based, or occasional, nature of the early modern political imagination, the way the metanarrative edifices of collective identity are built and unbuilt, block by block, through series of local and

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politically specific events. The eulogistic interventions triggered by these events (a masque, say, or a commendatory poem) are neither block nor edifice, but, rather, a kind of mortar holding the two together. As this image suggests, the occasional, while preserving its own structural integrity, is not something entirely bounded and sequestered either, at least not when viewed from a literary or theatrical perspective. Instead, all eulogistic events are tangled in webs of meaning much larger than themselves. They are subject to the burdens of history and the specific historical freight of poetic and theatrical convention. To pursue “occasionality” as a category of critical enquiry is not to look only at occasions, but also—and, I think, more importantly—at points of contact, frission and negotiation, between the local and the national, the personal and the political, the fleeting moment and the unfolding process. The marriage entertainments of the Jacobean court are rife with such cultural ligatures, stretching between epithalamium and panegyric, newlyweds and monarch, court and kingdom, language of union and language of Union. They speak to the startlingly simple power of analogy within the early modern political imagination, but also to analogy’s many hazards and limitations, a contradiction that King James, Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion and others wrestled with continually, and which ultimately came to play an important role in maintaining the unique turbulence of Jacobean political identity.

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Index Amor Fugitivus 79, 83–4, 134 Anglo-Scottish Union, see Britain, Union of Anglo-Scottish Union Commission 59 Anna of Denmark, Queen 5, 48, 57, 86, 139 as masquer 6, 9, 13, 33–4, 35, 38, 41, 42, 90, 132–4, 140–41 as political and cultural agent 6, 34, 34n65, 89n1, 130, 135–8, 160, 161 aristocratic entertainments 3 Armada victory (1588) 18, 95–6 Arthur Tudor, prince of Wales 2 Audley End 135 Austin, J.L. 22n21 Bacon, Francis Briefe Discourse Touching the Happy Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, A 67–8, 144 and Gesta Grayorum 119n76 and Masque of Flowers, The 152–3 and Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, The 118–119 and masquing 13n42 Of Love and Self-Love 119n76 Of Tribute 54–5 and Parliament 30–32, 78 Bale, John King Johan 25–6 ballet de cour 42, 147 Barnes, Barnabe 83 Barroll, Leeds 5n15, 6n17, 14, 15, 33n59, 35n65, 135n15, 135n16, 136 Beaumont, Francis 3 Maid’s Tragedy, The (with John Fletcher) 96–7, 118 Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, The 92, 97–8, 117–27, 139 Beaumont, John 154n60 Birch, William 24–5 the Borderlands 22–3, 53, 58

Brinsley, John 73–4 Britain, Union of 4, 7–8, 12, 13, 16, 17–32, 35–7, 39–40, 42, 45–6, 48, 52–60, 62, 67, 69–72, 76, 78, 84, 85–7, 90–91, 93, 104, 115, 126,139, 154–5, 160–63 Britland, Karen 9, 35n67 Brooke, Christopher 95, 108–9 Brown, Cedric 3n9 Browne, Anthony 2 Browne, Mary 2 Browne, William 95 Bruce, Christina 57, 76 Buckingham, duke of, see Villiers, George Bushell, Thomas 153 Butler, Martin 3n9, 7n19, 7n20, 8n23, 14–15, 34, 36, 46, 55, 63n21, 68n33, 69 Campion, Thomas 3, 163 Lord Hay’s Masque, The 43, 46, 48, 61–75, 76–7, 79–80, 84–6, 131, 155, 157–8, 161 Lords’ Masque, The 92, 100–107, 113–14, 117, 150 Somerset Masque, The 129, 131–41, 157 Carleton, Dudley 1, 33, 35n66 Carr, Robert, earl of Somerset 5, 16, 32, 35n65, 45, 71, 129­–31, 135–7, 139, 142, 147, 152, 159, 161, 162 Cave, Margaret 2 Cavendish, William 57n2, 76 Cecil, Robert 44, 45, 61, 130n4 Cecil, Thomas 61n13 Cecil, William 45 Chamberlain, John 1, 2, 35n66, 61n16, 89n1, 94, 118, 135n15 Chambers, E. K. 2n6, 2n7, 33n58 Chapman, George 3 “De Guiana” 51–2 Iliad translation 108

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Memorable Masque, The 92, 107­–17, 127 and Prince Henry 91, 107–8 Charles I, King 35, 147 as prince 42, 48, 75, 91, 99 Cleves-Jülich crisis 91, 96 Cockayne, Martha 161 Coleorton Masque, The 3 corpus mysticum Christi 20 Cotton, Robert 108 Cressy, David 1 Daniel, Samuel Arcadia Reformed, see Queen’s Arcadia, The Hymen’s Triumph 64n24, 136, 137–8 Queen’s Arcadia, The 136 Tethys’ Festival 90, 136 Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, The 6, 35–6, 136 Davies, John 148 Denmark House, see Somerset House Denny, Edward 61–2 Denny, Honora 5, 58, 61–2, 66, 73, 90 Devereux, Frances 116n17, 161 Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex 4, 44–5, 130n4 Devereux, Robert, third earl of Essex 1, 4, 5, 43–6, 50, 65, 57, 90, 116n70, 130 Doge of Venice 1 Donne, John 108, 141 Doran, Susan 3n8, 26n37 Dormer, William 2 Drayton, Michael 91 Drummond, Jane 64n24, 135 Drummond, William 83

Frederick V, elector Palatine 4, 5, 16, 43, 89–91, 98, 99, 104, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, 120, 125 Gabaleoni, Giovanni Battista, the agent of Savoy 133n9 Gascoigne, George 2 Geertz, Clifford 10 Goldberg, Jonathan 10n32, 11–12, 13–14, 25n31 Gordon, D.J. 53, 82n60, 85 Gowrie conspiracy 75 Great Britain, see Britain, Union of Greene, Robert Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 29–30 Greenwich Palace 6, 130, 160 Guarini, Giovanni Battista 136

Elizabeth I, Queen 2–3, 5–7, 12, 14, 17–21, 24–6, 29, 40–43, 48–9, 54–6, 65, 68–9, 70–74, 91, 95–6, 119 Elizabeth Stuart, Princess 4, 5, 16, 48, 89–101, 104, 105–6, 110–14, 117, 120, 125 Entertainment at Ashby, The 3 Essex, earl of, see Devereux, Robert Etienne, Charles 29

Hakewill, William 108–9 Hay, James 5, 32, 58, 61–2, 66, 73, 75, 90, 146, 161 Hector of Germanie or the Palsgrave Prime Elector 97 Henri II of France, King 20 Henrietta Maria, Queen 9, 35 Henry, Prince of Wales 6–7, 19, 34n65, 48, 75, 90–92, 97–8, 107–10, 113, 118, 122n84, 123, 125–6, 129, 136, 162 Henry IV of France, King 91 Henry VII, King 2 Herbert, Philip 5, 32–3, 44, 57, 61, 90 Herbert, William 130n4, 133n9 Hesiod 92, 103n43 Heywood, Thomas If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 18–19 Hilliard, Nicholas 71n42 Home, George 44 Howard, Elizabeth 45 Howard, Frances 1, 4, 5, 16, 43–5, 50, 55, 57, 127, 129–32, 135, 142, 147, 152, 161–2 Howard, Henry, earl of Northampton 43–4, 45n79, 108n58 Howard, Theophilus 45, 57n2 Howard, Thomas, earl of Suffolk 1, 53, 61n13, 147n45

Foucault, Michel 10 Francois I of France, King 20

Inns of Court 90, 100, 97–8, 110, 113, 117, 119, 126–7, 129, 153, 161

Index Ireland 1, 29, 148, 151 Islam, early modern perceptions of 956 James IV, King 57 James VI and I, King 34, 35, 38, 40, 43, 48, 61–2, 75–6, 81, 84, 86, 94, 100–102, 104, 108–13, 119, 121–2, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132–4, 136, 138–40, 143, 145–52, 154, 155, 159–61 Basilicon Doron 11, 12, 19, 122n84 Book of Sports 122n84 Counterblaste to Tobacco, A 154n60 and European religious affairs 91–2, 96 and marriage (generally) 2, 3–4 and national rhetoric 11–32, 41, 53, 56, 78, 98–9, 106–7, 123, 126, 162–3 and textual transmission 156–7 Trew Law of Free Monarchies, The 12, 60n9, 111n67 and the Union of England and Scotland 5, 7–8, 36, 39, 45, 57–60; see also Britain, Union of du Jardin, Roland 48n88 Jocquet, D., see Masque of Truth, The Jonson, Ben 3, 6n16, 16, 163 and antimasque 6n16, 81–2n60 Barriers at a Marriage 21, 42, 43, 46, 53–6, 66, 142, 161 Bartholomew Fair 116n69, 143 Challenge at Tilt, A 129, 141–8, 152 Christmas His Masque 146 Entertainment at Britain’s Burse, The 109n58 “The Forest” 109n58 Gypsies Metamorphosed, The 122n82, 149 Haddington Masque, The 42, 58, 60, 75–87, 142–6, 152, 161 Hymenaei 21, 28, 42, 43–56, 58, 62, 76, 80, 100, 109n58, 145, 161 Irish Masque at Court, The 122n82, 129, 141–2, 147–52, 162 Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly 6, 90, 145, 152 Love Restored 145, 149, 152 Lovers Made Men 146 Love’s Triumph Through Callipolis 147 Masque of Beauty, The 6, 42, 90, 109

185

Masque of Blackness, The 6, 32–43, 21, 46, 48, 56, 71, 109, 111, 115, 126, 134, 140 Masque of Queens, The 6, 34, 81n60, 90, 134 News from the New World Discovered in the Moon 149 Oberon, The Fairy Prince 6, 90, 117 “On the Famous Voyage” 143 “On the Union” 37–8 and the Palatine wedding 100n40 Pan’s Anniversary 63n21 Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue 122n82 Prince Henry’s Barriers 6, 7n18, 90 and Ralegh’s son 141 and Sireniacs 108–9 Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honors 146 Juno and Hymenaeus 32–3 Katherine of Aragon 2 Kerr, Robert, Lord Roxborough 64n24, 135 Kipling, Gordon 2n7 Knollys, Henry 2 Knollys, William 45 Knowles, James 3n9, 6n17, 7n19, 8n23, 9, 41 Knox, John, 8n22 Lacan, Jacques 103–4 Lefebvre, Henri 99 Limon, Jerzy 93, 105 Lindley, David 3n9, 10n33, 14–15, 45n80, 61n13, 66, 68n33, 69–71, 86n68, 100n40, 102, 109–10, 117n71, 129n1, 130n3, 131n5, 131n6, 138, 142, 148, 152n52, 153n56 Lyly, John 49–50, 52 McManus, Clare 5n15, 6n17, 9, 33, 35n65, 41n74, 89n1, 90, 93–4, 136n18 Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots 57 marriage Elizabeth I’s attitude towards 2–3 James I’s attitude towards 3–4 Protestant approach to 47–8, 63–4 social and economic function of 1–2 Martin, Richard 108, 109n59 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots 18n5, 43

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Mary Tudor, Queen 89 Masque of Truth, The 92, 97–9, 105, 109, 111–12 masques and comedy 49, 122n82, 129, 148–9, 151, 160 critical approaches to 5–15 as literature 3, 9 and performance 8–9 and print 3–4, 9 Melville, Andrew 12 Middleton, Thomas Hengist, King of Kent 21n17 and a masque for Robert Carr and Frances Howard 129 Peace-Maker: or, Great Britainnes blessing, The 4n12 Mildmay, Thomas 2 da Modena, Nicolò Bellin 20 Molin, Nicolo, Venetian ambassador 1 Moschus, see Amor Fugitivus Munden, R.C. 4n13 Neville, Henry 44, 130n4 New Historicism 10–14 Norbrook, David 3n9, 10n33, 24n28, 82n65, 92n12, 95n21, 97n30, 97n31, 98 Norden, John 29 Northampton, earl of, see Howard, Henry Oatlands Palace 6, 130 Orgel, Stephen 3n11, 10n32, 11, 14n44, 20n13, 20,n14, 20n15, 62–3, 70 Overbury affair, the 130–31 Overbury, Thomas 131, 135 Ovid 68, 73–4, 78n56, 82, 101 Parliament 36, 45, 56, 107, 108n55, 109, 139, 161, 162 1559 session 19 1566 session 24 1601 session 18 1603 session 22, 24–7, 30–32, 41, 60 1606/7 session 22, 27–8, 59–60, 62, 86, 88 1610 session 12 1613 session (in Dublin) 148 1614 session 109

Parry, Graham 6n18, 63, 89n2, 90n4, 92n11, 108n56 Peacham, Henry 105 Peake, Robert 106 Peele, George 83n66 Percy, Lucy 61n16, 161 Pett, Phineas 118 Phelips, Edward 108, 109 Philip II of Spain, King 89 proclamations, royal 12, 16, 17, 20, 22–4, 27, 30, 39, 40, 41, 56, 122n84, 156–7 Radcliffe, Elizabeth 5, 58, 75–7, 81, 83, 90 Radcliffe, Francis 2 Ralegh, Walter 109–10, 141 Ramsay, John 5, 58, 75–6, 81, 83, 90, 161 Ravelhofer, Barbara 8–9, 119n78 Raylor, Timothy 3n9 Regius, Raphael 73–4 Ridgeway, Thomas 1 Rowley, William Birth of Merlin, The 21n17 Roxborough wedding, the 135–8 Ruthven, Alexander 75 Sabine women 67–8 St. James Palace 130 Savoy, the agent of, see Gabaleoni, Giovanni Battista Scotland 8, 12, 31n54, 45n79, 75; see also Britain, Union of Seymour, William 161 Shakespeare, William Coriolanus 96 Cymbeline 21n17 King Lear 21n17 and marriage 64 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 41, 73 Richard II 29–30 Titus Andronicus 73–4 Two Noble Kinsmen, The 122 Sharpe, Kevin 4n13, 108n58 Shirley, James 83 Shohet, Lauren 9 Sireniacs, the 108–9, 113 Somerset, earl of, see Carr, Robert Somerset House 6, 130, 136, 137, 141, 160 Southampton, earl of, see Wriothesley, Henry Southwell, Anne 20

Index Spenser, Edmund 41, 49, 79, 83–4 Spenserians 95 Stanley, Anne 161 Stone, Lawrence 3 Strong, Roy 6n18, 71n42, 91, 92n11, 92n13, 107n53, 109, 117n72, 118, 123 Suffolk, earl of, see Howard, Thomas Sylvester, Joshua 91 Tasso, Torquato 136 Taylor, John, the Water-Poet 94–6 Taylor, Thomas 58 Tomlinson, Sophie 6n15, 9, 33n59, 34n63, 35n67 Turbevile, George 82, 83 Two-Body Theory 26, 59–60 de Vere, Susan 5, 32–3, 90

verse libels 66, 132n8, 157 Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham 35n65, 57, 61, 135n15 Virgil 38–9 Wales 29, 75, 136 Webster, John White Devil, The 96 Whately, William 1 Wing, John 48, 64n24 Winwood, Ralph 43–5, 44, 130n4 Wither, George 95 Wriothesley, Henry, third earl of Southampton 2, 44, 130n4 Wroth, Mary 61–2 Yates, Frances 25n30, 92–3, 100n40

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