The Stuart Masque and Pantagruel's Dreams

Abstract

In many Stuart masques there comes a moment when form and light triumph over the folly, confusion, and obscurity that for a time threaten, if sometimes more amusingly than dangerously, to cast their shadow over the court's civilized and civilizing splendor. This splendor is inevitably indicated through the formal intertwinings of the dance, sweet music, verse filled with allusions to light and concord, and scenery that in its proportion and balance expresses the Vitruvian and Neoplatonic harmony that (according to this political and artistic myth) typifies and emanates from royal power. Appropriately enough, the resolution into a vision of elegant calm and ordered peace finds expression through a predominately neoclassical style, one that distinguishes these masques from Elizabethan entertainments. Most sources for Inigo Jones's sets and costumes, for example, even those for the irrational and disorderly antimasquers, appeal to what was for the English court a fairly recently acquired taste. I Indeed, it has been suggested that through the loss of earlier and more native elements in court ceremony the Stuarts further alienated themselves from a nation nostalgic for a culture <saturated in romantic memories of medieval traditions and informed by an essentially northern and medieval love for flamboyant spectacle.2 Yet it seems unlikely that Jones and his collaborators, especially Ben Jonson, could have composed antimasques of any vigor had their imaginations not extended into other less fashionable realms of image and behavior, including realms as psychologically compelling as they were morally (and perhaps by now aesthetically) disreputable. Jones and Jonson scattered the irrational from the scene through the politic fictions and splendid revelations that structure the masque, but they cherished it nonetheless, and their