HE THEATER Of Inigo Jones was created for that most ephemeral of Renaissance genres, the court masque. Hymns of praise, instances of royal magnificence, spectacular fantasies, the form was, even in its own time, ambiguously regarded. These Things are but Toyes, said Bacon, come amongst such Serious Observations,' Nevertheless, to Ben Jonson, classicist and moralist, masques were the vehicles of the most profound ethical statements, creating heroic roles for the leaders of society, and teaching virtue in the most direct way, by example. Every masque moved toward the moment when the masquers descended and took partners from the audience, annihilating the barrier between the ideal and the real, and including the court in its miraculous transformations. We may even feel in the Caroline masques of Aurelian Townshend, Thomas Carew, and Sir William Davenant a kind of mimetic magic, as if by the sheer force of poetry and spectacle incipient war and dissolution could be metamorphosed into harmony and peace. What remains of the form to us is a diminished thing. Ben Jonson undertook to translate the momentary visions of permanence into a literary form, but most of a masque was not literature. If we can take the masque at all seriously, it is largely through Jonson's efforts; his text appears the center about which the work of other artistsdesigner, composer, choreographer-revolved. This is an accident of time; for Jonson, a happy accident, considering his famous quarrel with his foremost collaborator. But to a contemporary spectator, the experience of a masque allowed no easy distinction among the