Patronage and Competing Visions of Virginia in George Chapman's The Memorable Masque (1613)

Abstract

AbstractLike the discourses of the colonial enterprise circulating during the period in which it was commissioned, written, and produced, George Chapman's The Memorable Masque, which was written to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, registers the nation's conflicted and in many ways incoherent vision of the Jacobean Virginia enterprise. Three satellites of patronage, each with its own colonial investments and ideologies, are given voice: the sponsoring Inns of Court, whose organizers were prominent members of the Virginia Company; the court of the recently deceased Prince Henry, Chapman's patron and a Ralegh‐sympathizer who directed the early course of the marriage festivities; and the court of James I, who established the terms under which the Virginia Company of London operated. Each of the major segments of the entertainment—procession, antimasque, masque, and epithalamium—differently articulates the Virginia colonial project by drawing on the peculiar idioms of the s...