Court Masque Research Articles

Circean transformation and the poetics of Milton’s Masque

ABSTRACTCirce’s presence in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) invites readers to read both Milton’s Circe and Milton’s own poetic activity through long and intertwined traditions of theology and literary commentary. Stretching from Augustine and Aquinas to the commentaries and translations of Homer and Ovid by Sponde, Sandys, and Chapman, these traditions use Circe to explore and conflate the possibility, the permanence, and the experience of both human and literary transformation. Taken up by Townshend and Jones in their Caroline court masque Tempe Restored, they become essential intertexts for Milton’s Masque. Milton embeds this discourse in his masque – a genre that places metamorphosis at the heart of its poetics – to examine the nature of Renaissance intertextuality and the authorial self and interrogate his own use of Renaissance practices of imitatio and aemulatio. In Comus’ wood, Circean transformation becomes a touchstone for the virtuous soul and the virtuous poet alike.

Writing the monarch in Jacobean England: Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare and the works of King James

King James VI and I's extensive publications and the responses they met played a key role in the literary culture of Jacobean England. This book is the first sustained study of how James's subjects commented upon, appropriated and reworked these royal writings. Jane Rickard highlights the vitality of such responses across genres - including poetry, court masque, sermon, polemic and drama - and in the different media of performance, manuscript and print. The book focuses in particular on Jonson, Donne and Shakespeare, arguing that these major authors responded in illuminatingly contrasting ways to James's claims as an author-king, made especially creative uses of the opportunities that his publications afforded and helped to inspire some of what the King in turn wrote. Their literary responses reveal that royal writing enabled a significant reimagining of the relationship between ruler and ruled. This volume will interest researchers and advanced students of Renaissance literature and history.

Politics and political culture in the court masque

This review considers James Knowles. Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp vii, 288.

James knowles. Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque.

james knowles. Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque.

From Court to Playhouse and Back: Middleton's Appropriation of the Masque

<p>Bringing a thorough study of court masques to bear on reoriented readings of <em>The Revenger’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, The Changeling, </em>and the lesser known <em>Your Five Gallants, </em>I show that Thomas Middleton’s intimate knowledge of the Jacobean court masque enables him to exploit its conventions, iconography, and structural functions for use in the playhouse. Middleton confidently ‘deconstructs’ masque dramaturgy to create a masque episode which encapsulates the play’s overarching theme and engineers the resolution. At the same time, by subverting the very device used to represent the court to the world, he subtly critiques king and court.</p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br style="font-size: medium;" /></span></span></p>

The Material Culture and Theatricality of the Court Masque in Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace

The Material Culture and Theatricality of the Court Masque in Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace

The Role of Le Balet Comique in Forging the Stuart Masque: Part 2 Continuation

Following the discussion in Part 1 (Dance Research 32.2 2014, 185–207) of the use made by the Jacobean court of Le Balet Comique ( McGowan 1982 ) to frame innovation in the masque, this article will explore two further examples of the continuing use of the text. The overt adoption of features of Le Balet Comique for Tempe Restored (1632, Aurelian Townshend and Inigo Jones) brought French practice into play once more for the Caroline masque. Following in his father's footsteps, Charles 1 was able to bring to the masque his personal skill as a dancer and the participation of his young and beautiful French queen Henrietta Maria. From the re-launch of the court masque in 1631, until the break-up of the Whitehall court in 1640, both retrospective and innovative practices were pursued. Although this was a new reign, a strong element of continuity prevailed in the court personnel serving the masque. Acting as artistic director, Inigo Jones was now firmly in control of masque concepts, pursuing a design process of imaginative imitation based on Renaissance practice. In collaboration with individuals among the music and dance artists, Jones had been intimately involved in adapting features of the ballet in devising The Masque of Queens of 1609. 1 That Le Balet Comique formed the basis for Tempe Restored is made very plain in the published text. The influence of the 1581 ballet on A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle 1634 (known as Comus) by John Milton can only be discerned by analysing the performance conditions of a work that is now published as a poem. Once again the Circe persona takes the stage, this time in masculine form as Comus. I argue here that the link between the two is the personnel of Tempe Restored. An analysis of the original performance of Comus draws on understanding of elite dance practice of the day leading to new insights into this innovative masque.

The “Play-Boy,” the Female Performer, and the Art of Portraying a Lady

This essay asks how the boy players of the early modern English public stage and the aristocratic female performers of the early modern English court masque might have considered, and perhaps even affected, one another’s arts. The performances of both groups of performers were carefully calculated to achieve specific aesthetic, social, and political goals. Neither an aristocratic lady dancing in a masque nor a boy performing the role of such a lady on the public stage could have afforded to lose sight of the codes of elegant feminine behavior. Is it possible, then, that women’s and boys’ portrayals of elite femininity employed similar theatrical tactics? This essay proposes one methodology by which we might tease out potential relationships between boys’ and women’s performances. It begins by considering the conceptions of boy players and noble ladies inscribed in the texts of Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609) and Love Restored (1612), comparing them to the scandalous behavior of Frances and Catherine Howard at the end of the latter masque’s performance. It goes on to suggest that these contexts may help us better to imagine how the boy who first played the eponymous heroine of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c.1612-13) portrayed her noble yet transgressive femininity. Such a comparison between the verbal and physical rhetoric of masques and those of public theater dramas may allow us to glimpse shared codes of class and gender embodiment across a range of performance cultures.

The Power of Illusion

In this article, I examine how two English theatrical phenomena used stage technology to produce illusions for certain political ends. The two phenomena of interest are the court masque of the early 1600s and the illegitimate genres of the late Georgian London theatre. My focus will be on the latter, through an examination of the pantomime The Picture of Paris – opening at Covent Garden in 1790. Whereas a political reading of the court masque is well established in theatre studies, the same cannot be said regarding a political understanding of the theatre culture of the late Georgian period. Furthermore, those who have focused on the political aspects of this theatre culture have not been interested in the role played by stage technology. This is where this article aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge. Although the court masques and the illegitimate genres used much of the same stage technology, they differed in how they used it and to what political ends. Whereas the masque could be understood as a conservative statement of royal powers, asserting their right to rule, the illegitimate genres approached the governing powers and policies in a more subversive manner. Late Georgian cultural politics, censoring the spoken word on stage and patenting the performance of tragedy and comedy, gave rise to new theatrical genres where visual aspects – by legal necessity – took centre stage. The resulting spectacular theatre of action and visual image was exempt from government censorship, making possible a special kind of political freedom of expression in these genres. It was during performance, through their use of dumb shows, setting, stage machinery and special effects that government criticism could unfold within these genres.

Spiritual Alchemy through Embodied Hieroglyphs in Jonson’s Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court

In his verse epistle to Aurelian Townshend, Thomas Carew describes wit- nessing a court masque, Townshend's 1632 Tempe Restored, as a wondrous, transformative experience:It filled us with amazement to beholdLove made all spirit, his mould,Dissected into atoms, melt awayTo empty air, and from the gross allayOf mixtures and compounding accidents,Refined to immaterial elements. (77-82)Townshend 's masque replaces the representative of earthly desire, Circe, with the embodiment of divine beauty, played by Queen Henrietta Maria. Here Carew's language figures that transformation as alchemical refinement: love is disassembled into its component parts, like a metallic allay of mixtures, and refined into something transcendent. The corporeal mould becomes imma- terial, a perfected neoplatonic essence. Carew speaks for the audi- ence, ventriloquizing their collective wonder, and he also implies that the audience partakes in this transmutation by beholding it. The audience mem- bers witness an act of (which Carew's reference to dissection ties to another scientific context, that of the anatomical theater), but they also are the material upon which that works. The spectators will join with the masquers in dance, during which the masquers' perfection spreads to the rest of the court. For observers of the Stuart masque, entailed much more than the making of gold: it included transformation both per- sonal and global, both divine and divinely sanctioned. In Carew's account of Tempe Restored, the physical performance space becomes a theatrical alembic in which the noble masquers and their elite audience are refined by watching and enacting the verbal, visual, and kinetic process of the masque.But how can we reconcile a widespread contemporary belief in spiritual alchemy with the equally widespread satirical representation of practical al- chemy? These seemingly contradictory intellectual trends coexist within Ben Jonson's masque Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court. Like The Al- chemist, Mercury Vindicated seems to deride as a discipline filled with charlatans who erroneously value art over nature and who cozen the foolish or greedy for financial or social gain. Performed at Whitehall on 6 January 1615 by the professional actors of the King's Men and twelve male masquers, the masque begins in an alchemical laboratory, in which the personified Mercury escapes from a furnace, complains of the many abuses committed against him by alchemists, and begs for King James to save him from his oppressors.1 While Mercury opines about his situation, the alchemists, led by Vulcan and his as- sistant Cyclope, attempt to recapture him in two alchemically themed anti- masques. Eventually, the king's presence banishes the alchemists; a glorious bower containing an embodied Nature, accompanied by the masquers and Prometheus, replaces the laboratory; and the performance culminates in the noble masquers joining with the audience in a courtly dance. It is easy to read the alchemical content of Mercury Vindicated as an unambiguous condemna- of practical and a useful satirical tool.2 In arguing that Jonson only denounces or calls upon its figurative resonance for poetic pur- poses, such readings neglect the full import of the masque's complex emblem- atic and alchemical context.Mercury Vindicated has received less scholarly attention than other works like The Masque of Blackness, and recent criticism has most often focused on the masque's immediate courtly context: the rivalry between Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and the king's new favorite, George Villiers.3 The transforma- tion of men, then, has both philosophical and topical relevance. As Martin Butler suggests, this particular masque staged a contrast between false pro- ductivity and true creation in senses at once material and social (222). …

MARTIN BUTLER. The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture.

MARTIN BUTLER. The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture.

ヴァン・ダイク作《ペンブルック伯爵の家族肖像》再考 : 初期ステュアート朝宮廷仮面劇との関連を中心に(第六十三回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

ヴァン・ダイク作《ペンブルック伯爵の家族肖像》再考 : 初期ステュアート朝宮廷仮面劇との関連を中心に(第六十三回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

Between Courts: Female Masquers and Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy, 1603-5

The peace negotiations between England and Spain began in 1603 and were concluded in 1605; they began with a masque, Queen Anna´s first, and concluded, in Valladolid, with another masque. Spain´s ambassador had compiled a text of The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses and sent back to Philip III. The Spanish masque, like its English counterpart, was an example of female masquing, and it seems was deliberately designed to echo the Hampton Court masque, thus offering a reciprocal symmetry for the peace diplomacy.

Called to ‘the sports of night’: Blake's Europe and the Court Masque

Called to ‘the sports of night’: Blake's <i>Europe</i> and the Court Masque

MARTIN BUTLER, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture.

MARTIN BUTLER, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture.

Jacobean and Caroline Masquing Culture: Studies on Early Stuart Entertainments, 1998-2010

This article overviews literary criticism on the English court masque during the early Stuart period. More specifically, this survey piece analyses a selection of major critical studies that focus attention on to the court masques of James I and Charles I, circa 1603–1641. The article begins in 1998 – the year that witnessed the last major collection of essays on the genre – and then progresses to the present year by way of various journal articles, chapters and monographs.

Shrove-Tide Dancing: Balls and Masques at Whitehall under Charles II

The tradition of the Shrove-tide court entertainment with dancing and music, strong in the first half of the seventeenth century in England, was restored with the monarchy after 1660. Shrove-tide masques, balls and plays, along with dishes of pancakes and fritters, remained a feature of the court calendar to the end of Charles II’s reign. As well as borrowing elements from the Jacobean court masque, some of the entertainments presented before Charles II were modelled on French entertainments staged for Louis XIV. John Blow’s court opera Venus and Adonis may have received its first performance at a Shrove-tide event in 1682/3.

John Crowne, the Restoration Court, and the ‘Understanding’ of Calisto

This article investigates the messages conveyed by John Crowne in his Restoration court masque, Calisto (1675). While this large-scale production featured splendid dancing and expensive costumes, Crowne complained that its ‘Understanding’ was ‘slenderly treated’, This article considers what this ‘Understanding’ should have been. It suggests that Crowne’s intention in Calisto was to demonstrate what happened to conventional Christian morality and to female victims when the amorous ideas and justifications espoused by the Restoration court wits, and indulged by Charles II, were followed. It argues that Calista was a piece of counsel to the court — one that looked remarkably like that on Crowne’s stage — about the dangers of the Carolean court’s most conspicuous form of sexuality. This form employed deception, disguise and the innate redefinition of conventional values related to personal behaviour and morality (virtue, reason and honour) in order to seduce a series of sexual partners, and to justify that seduction with wit and intelligence.

The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture, by Martin Butler

The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture, by Martin Butler

Reconstructing the Spectacles of State: A Review of Martin Butler's The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture

Reconstructing the Spectacles of State: A Review of Martin Butler's <i>The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture</i>