Stuart Masque Research Articles

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). …

The Spanish Ambassador and Samuel Daniel's Vision of the Twelve Goddesses: A New Document [with text

The performance of Samuel Daniel's masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses at court on January 8, 1604 took place in the midst of the preliminary negotiations that would lead to the signing of the Anglo-Spanish peace at Somerset House the following August. Philip III sent a special ambassador to England to congratulate James on his accession, and a series of tussles between Juan de Tassis and his French counterpart ensued. As a recently-discovered document in the Archivo General de Simancas reveals, Anna of Denmark intervened personally to insure that de Tassis, and not the Frenchman, attended the masque. This was a clear signal of James and Anna's peace aims, which de Tassis conveyed to the King of Spain; moreover, he enclosed in his dispatch a text of Daniel's masque which he clearly considered both political intelligence and of interest to the theater-loving Hapsburg monarch. The Simancas text of the Daniel masque is a new version, hitherto unknown, which adds to our knowledge of the circumstances in which the first Stuart masque was performed. Here we present a transcription and annotated translation of both de Tassis' letter and the text of the masque he had compiled for Philip III. (B. C.-E. and M. H.)

GABRIEL HEATON. Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments: From George Gascoigne to Ben Jonson.

In Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments, Gabriel Heaton takes us from the specifics of properly prepared but seemingly impromptu performances for Tudor royalty through to the demonstrably rehearsed occasion of the Stuart masque. Referring to the idea of the ‘gift’ as pivotal to appreciating the effort involved in appealing to patrons—although most especially to royalty—we understand through this book how ‘entertainment’, in the one-off sense, was offered. In the first instance, this was through inspiration, commission and performance; in the second, through the copying, circulating and presenting as manuscript text. Further than this, we learn how some entertainments were produced as printed text both after production and—on occasion—before, presumably spreading the original ‘gift’ among a wider and wider circle. The range of entertainments and their purposes is extensive, and subtly inspires the reader to think of these occasions from the royal receiver’s point of view. What was Queen Elizabeth to perceive (one wonders) as she came across the scene of the Maid, Hermit and two knights—‘locked in combat’—as she went riding through the woods of Woodstock in 1575? How was she to take the news, heard from the lips of the hermit Hemetes as he stepped forward to greet her, that the prophecies had now been fulfilled, just by her mere presence? We are well acquainted with these situations for Elizabeth I, curiously subject to such occasions—such as those where children jumped out of bushes to receive her, often made up to look like her and spouting some speech of welcome; but Heaton’s particular approach is well executed and valid, and one continues to enjoy imagining royalty’s personal as well as public response.

:The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music

:<i>The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music</i>

Book Reviews: Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modem Stage, the Renaissance World, Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Rewriting, Remaking, Refashioning, Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres, the Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music, the

Book Reviews: Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modem Stage, the Renaissance World, Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Rewriting, Remaking, Refashioning, Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres, the Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music, the

Ritual, Ostension and the Divine in the Stuart Masque

Ritual, Ostension and the Divine in the Stuart Masque

Hamlet [Vol. 1.] by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, and: Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 [Vol. 2.] by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (review)

YES, 38.I & 2, 2008 279 Stepping herway throughdance forms that may have been used forantimasques, for royal and aristocratic main masquers, and for social dances used in the revels that followed, she emphasizes the strong influence of Queen Anne and Queen Henrietta Maria, the latter importing French styles of dance to enhance native traditions. Discussing costume, she draws on Henrietta Maria's household accounts, demonstrat inga complex industryof preparation, maintenance and storage. She identifies'discreet cost-saving, which interfered as little as possible with the ostentation of luxury in performance' (p. I56). Some garmentsmight be recycled,but theQueen stipulated that masque costumes she had used were exclusively royal and should not be subsequently 'prostitutedupon anyMercenary stage' (p. I65). There are case studies of twoJonsonian masques (TheMasque of Queensand Oberon), one Carolingean (Coelum Britannium), and a record of an English wedding masque devised by Robert Bargrave, 'LevantMerchant' in Constantinople in i650. She shows how evidence of dancing, with itsaccompanying music, and of colourful costume, topped off withmask ormake-up and enhanced by lighting,can present amore vivid, albeit blurred, image of the theatrical impact and cultural significanceof theearly Stuartmasque than either InigoJones's designs,which were intended asworking drawings forscene painters and costume makers, or textual records intended, particularly inBen Jonson's case, to celebrate theprintedword asmuch as the event itcommemorated. Framing her studywith an account by a foreignvisitor of a Stuart masque and with themasque devised in Turkey,Ravelhofer creates a Verfrerndungseffekt inwhich we re evaluate how dimly-litmoving figures, obscure texts, arcane symbolism, creaking scenery, and backstage interference combine to create multimedia pieces, uniquely reflectingthe sometimes glorious, sometimes tottering,state of the early Stuarts. Occasionally, Ravelhofer's enthusiasm forcontextual exploration leads her intoeccen tricity, aswhen she explores the relevance of theambigram to InigoJones's experiments with perspective (p. 96). Once, her scholarship leads her to condemn as 'amateur and historicallyuninformed' (p. 7) amodern adaptation of historical dance (in the filmEliz abeth)inwhich thedance consultant, drawing freelyon authentic sources to realize the director's interpretation,actually showed an unpedantic theatricalprofessionalism that perhaps had itsroots in theStuart masque. Ravelhofer claims her work as 'a tribute to early studies by Allardyce Nicoll, Enid Welfor and Lily Campbell' (p.268). It isaworthy tribute,restoringemphasis to the 'living spectacle' (p. 269) of the early Stuart masque through robust evaluation of a dazzling array of familiar and unfamiliarmaterial. GUILDHALL SCHOOL OFMUSIC & DRAMA, LoDmON DIANA DEVLIN Hamlet. Ed. by ANN THOMPSON and NEIL TAYLOR. [Vol. i.]Arden Shakespeare: Third Series. 3rd edition. London: Arden Shakespeare. 2006. xxii + 6I3 pp. ?8.99. ISBN: 978-1-904271-33-8. Hamlet: The Textsof I603 and i623. Ed. byANN THOMPSON and NEIL TAYLOR. [Vol. 2.] London: Arden Shakespeare. 2007. xvi + 368 pp. ?I2.99. ISBN: 978-1-90427I-80-2. Editors of Shakespeare are oftenJekylland Hyde figures; they may talkat lengthabout the rational principles thatunderlie theirprocedures in their introductions, but their 280 Reviews practice ischaracterized by deeply subjective, literaryjudgements. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor's edition has no such darker side; itsgreat achievement is topresent three texts,consistently and conservatively edited. Essentially, Thompson and Taylor deliver the texts that the arguments in favourof Shakespeare as reviser,and so against confla tion,demand. On those terms, their twovolumes provide themost accurate editions of theQi, Q2, and Folio texts(the firstand last in the second volume). Such consistent and conservative editorial practice produces quite radical effects:the Q2 Prince Hamlet now addresses his "'Seems", madam' speech tohis 'coldmother' and not his 'good mother'(I. 2. 77); while the Folio prince, apologizing to Laertes in the fencing scene, talksof shooting his arrow over thehouse and hurting his 'mother' and not his 'brother' (v. 2. I9I). Some will relish the changes; some, who have previously argued against conflated texts,may, I suspect, want to reconsider their positions. Thompson and Taylor have catered for such second thoughts; they lay out neatly the arguments fora conflated text. (Indeed, the thoroughness and intellectualmodesty with which theysurvey thevarious editorial arguments todate isremarkable.)Might theynot have provided such a conflated edition? As theypoint out, theyhad no need: Harold Jenkins's edition, itseems,might be considered the thirdvolume of theArden Hamlet. In the real world of the undergraduate market, almost no...

The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music by Barbara Ravelhofer (review)

The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music by Barbara Ravelhofer (review)

The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music, by Barbara Ravelhofer

<i>The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music</i>, by Barbara Ravelhofer

The Book of the play: playwrights, stationers, and readers in early modern England

Book of the is a collection of essays that examines early modern drama in the context of book history. Focusing on the publication, marketing, and readership of plays opens fresh perspectives on the relationship between the cultures of print and performance, and more broadly between drama and the public sphere. Marta Straznicky's introduction offers a survey of approaches to the history of play reading in this period, and the collection as a whole consolidates recent work in textual, bibliographic, and cultural studies of printed drama. Individually, the essays advance our understanding of play reading as a practice with distinct material forms, discourses, social settings, and institutional affiliation. Part One, Real and Imagined Communities, includes four essays on play-reading communities and the terms in which they are distinguished from the reading public at large. Cyndia Clegg surveys the construction of readers in prefaces to published plays; Lucy Munro traces three separate readings of a single play, Edward Sharpham's The Fleer; Marta Straznicky studies women as readers of printed drama; and Elizabeth Sauer describes how play reading was mobilized for political purposes in the period of the civil war. In Part Two, Play Reading and the Book Trade, five essays consider the impact of play reading on the public sphere through the lens of publishing practices. Zachary Lesser offers a revisionist account of black-letter typeface and the extent to which it may be understood as an index of popular culture; Alan Farmer examines how the emerging news trade of the 1620s and 1630s affected the marketing of printed drama; Peter Berek traces the use of generic terms on title pages of plays to reveal their intersection with the broader culture of reading; Lauren Shohet demonstrates that the Stuart masque had a parallel existence in the culture of print; and Douglas Brooks traces the impact print had on eclipsing performance as the medium in which the dramatist could legitimately lay claim to having authored his text. The individual essays focus on selected communities of readers, publication histories, and ideologies and practices of reading; the collection as a whole demonstrates the importance of textual production and reception to understanding the place of drama in the early modern public sphere.

The early Stuart masque: dance, costume, and music

PART ONE: DANCE 1. Methodology 2. English and Continental Sources 3. Theatre Dances 4. Discipline or Pleasure? PART TWO: COSTUME 5. Masque Costumes 6. Colours and Lights: The Costume in Motion 7. Costume Conventions for Male and Female Masquers PART THREE: CASE STUDIES 8. Two Jonsonian Court Masques 9. Historical Costume, Historical Dancing: Coelum Britannicum 10. Global Spectacle: An English Masque in Constantinople

The Wisdom of Their Feet: Meaningful Dance in Milton and the Stuart Masque

Previous articleNext article No AccessOriginal ArticleThe Wisdom of Their Feet: Meaningful Dance in Milton and the Stuart MasqueBlair HoxbyBlair HoxbyHARVARD UNIVERSITY Search for more articles by this author HARVARD UNIVERSITYPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 37, Number 1Winter 2007 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2007.00094.x Views: 49Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Blaine Greteman “Perplex't Paths”: Youth and Authority in Milton's Mask, Renaissance Quarterly 62, no.22 (Jul 2015): 410–443.https://doi.org/10.1086/599866

The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (review)

The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (review)

The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. By BARBARA RAVELHOFER.

This is an impressive and handsome book that makes a fine contribution to masque scholarship. Its premise is that contemporary considerations of masques do not adequately represent the material practices of dance, costume and lighting, and it seeks to show how ‘masque producers, with their multimedia facilities at hand, attempted to render a spectacle accessible’ (p. 7). Along the way, it successfully tackles some of the pervasive problems of masque criticism, engaging with questions such as: how were these entertainments understood by observers; do printed masque texts adequately present the spectacle as it was experienced; were the productions wasteful and costly? Drawing on a range of material in various languages, Ravelhofer's responsible, meticulous scholarship sheds new light on the masque genre. The book is divided into three sections: it begins with a consideration of dance, takes up the subject of costume, and finishes with a consideration of specific entertainments in a manner that draws together the previous discussions. I found the middle section the most engaging, and it was here that Ravelhofer's time in the archives really paid off. Drawing on documents such as royal accounts, warrants and Henrietta Maria's household papers, she investigates how masque costumes were created, transported and stored, uncovering fascinating material about the lower echelons of courtly society: the people who sold lace, who trimmed candles and who ferried masque stuffs around London.

A Stuart Masque in Holland

A Stuart Masque in Holland

A Stuart Masque in Holland

A Stuart Masque in Holland

Ritual, Ostension and the Divine in the Stuart Masque

Ritual, Ostension and the Divine in the Stuart Masque

Lydgate's Mummings and the Aristocratic Resistance to Drama

Lydgate's Mummings and the Aristocratic Resistance to Drama ROBERT EPSTEIN In an article in PMLA in October 1998, W. B. Worthen declared "a conceptual crisis in drama studies."1 Over the last two decades, the field ofperformance studies has coalesced around assertions ofthe primacyoftemporal performance over the presumed authorityofthe written text; thus drama studies, from which performance studies emerged, has been left in a critical quandary. The essentialproblem,Worthen says, is that "the burgeoning of performance studies has not really clarified the relation between dramatic texts and performance."2 Also in 1998,DerekForbes staged Lydgate's MummingatHertfordat Hertford Casde, the location ofits original performance, and dien published his adapted text along widi an account of the production under the tide Lydgate'sDisguisingatHertford Castle: TheFirstSecular Comedy in theEnglish Language.3The subtide is erroneous,butForbes'sproductionwas die firststage presentation ofthis or anyofLydgate's mummings since tiieir original performances in the late 1420s.4 To accomplish his restaging,however,Forbeshadto make numerous alterationsto Lydgate's textbeyond simplyupdatingthe language—includinghavingan actor in die role ofKing HenryVI, and providing dialogue for players who were originallymute. Like theater in the twenty-first century, Lydgate's fifteenth-century mummings inhabitthe interstices between drama and performance, between performanceand textTheyhavedramaticqualitieswithoutseeming to qualify fully as drama. They are performance texts, but the relationship ofthe text to the performance is deeply vexed. Are they die scripts ofaperformedwork, or do theycommemorate aspectacle andtiierefore belong to thatgreat"other" category ofliterature, the"occasional"work? 337 338Comparative Drama But though they exist in a critical twilight, they are significant to theater history, ifprimarilyas textualevidence ofrudimentaryearlydrama.5 To literary criticism, they are virtually invisible. It is axiomatic that literary history is biasedtoward high art at the expense ofpopular culture; that it chooses the elite over the demotic; that it favors the secular over the religious ; that itprefers the capital to die provinces. Nonetheless, TheNew History ofEarly English Drama has index entries neither for "Lydgate" nor for"mumming,"whileWilliamTydeman,writing in the recent Cambridge Companion toMedievalEnglish Theatre, mentions the mummings onlyto dismiss them in a single paragraph as associated with the"sterile pageantsinaureateverse"thatLydgateproducedforceremonialoccasions.6 The "mumming" has a complex and often obscure history of shifting generic boundaries. An essential feature, as the name implies, is silence , and a "mumming" most often describes a dumb-show, a performance by nonspeaking actors; as such it is an ancient form that survives today in English Christmas mummings. The courdy entertainments known as mummings constitute the prehistory ofthe celebrated Stuart masque.7Theaterhistorianshave hypothesized thattheyderive fromthe quête, me ancient custom in which groups ofmasked individuals would enter noble households for impromptu and often coercive exchanges of gifts,"apracticethatlies somewherebetween seekingdonations andholdingpeople to ransom."8This disorderlycustom, itis said,was eventually overtaken, stylized, and controlled bythe aristocrats themselves.9 Lydgate's mummings comprise seven texts that appear exclusivelyin two manuscripts byJohn Shirley, six in Cambridge, Trinity College MS. R.3.20, and one in Bodleian LibraryMS.Ashmole 59, part 1.10 The central and intractable question is the relationship ofthese texts to the occasions from which they arise. Since they are texts, the designation "mummings" increases the generic confusion, and Shirley's typicallyloquacious introductions onlymuddythe water further. They are all associated with festive occasions (to use a deliberately vague phrase) for the royal court or for the wealthiest representatives ofthe London merchant class. But on the few occasions when scholars have analyzed the mummings at any length, they have been hard pressed to explain the exact nature of the performances and die exact function ofthe texts." The textknown as die MummingatBishopswood is, according to Shirley, Robert Epstein339 a"balade ... sentebyapoursyvanttotheSliinevesofLondon."TheMwmmmg atEltham is "a balade" by Lydgate "for a momyng tofore pe kyng and be qwene." The MummingatLondon is a "devyse ofa desguysing," and the Mumming at Windsor a "devyse of a momyng."12 It is most likely that most ofthese poems were deictic texts read aloud by a herald while disguised performers mimed allegorical scenes, as is suggested by Shirley's heading to the Mummingfor theMercers ofLondon: "And nowe filowebe alettre made inwyse ofbaladebyDaun Iohan,broughtbya poursuyaunt in wyse of mummers desguysed to fore pe mayre of London, eestfeld, vpon pe twelffepe night ofCristmasse, ordeyned ryallych by pe worthy merciers...

:The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque

List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgements Note on the text 1. Introduction David Bevington and Peter Holbrook 2. Courtly negotiations Martin Butler 3. Upstaging the Queen: the Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon and the Accession Day celebrations of 1595 Paul E. J. Hammer 4. Jacobean pacifism and Jacobean masques Peter Holbrook 5. The gingerbread host: tradition and novelty in the Jacobean masque Tom Bishop 6. Inventing the Stuart masque Leeds Barroll 7. Marginal Jonson Stephen Orgel 8. Jonson, the antimasque and the 'rules of flattery' Hugh Craig 9. 'Rival traditions': civic and courtly ceremonies in Jacobean London Nancy E. Wright 10. The Tempest and the Jacobean court masque David Bevington 11.'Virgin wax' and 'hairy men-monsters': unstable movement codes in the Stuart masque Barbara Ravelhofer 12. The politics of music in the masque David Lindley 13. Milton's Comus and the politics of masquing Barbara K. Lewalski 14. Valediction Leah S. Marcus Index.

Measure as a Choreographic Term in the Stuart Masque

Measure as a Choreographic Term in the Stuart Masque