Abstract
The Caroline court masque Britannia Triumphans (1638) opens with “a curtain flying up [to] discover … the first Scene[,] wherein were English houses of the old and newer forms, intermixt with trees, and afar off a prospect of the City of London and the river of Thames, which, being a principal part, might be taken for all Great Britain.” 1 The ensuing masque, scripted by William Davenant, composed by William Lawes, and designed by Inigo Jones, was commissioned by King Charles as the Twelfth Night masque of 1638. As summarized by its scriptor, the masque depicts how “Britanocles, the glory of the western world[,] hath by his wisdom, valour, and piety … reduc’d the land … to a real knowledge of all good a[r]ts and sciences [, which] … Fame … hath already spread … abroad [arid] … should now at home … [so] that … the large yet still increasing number of the good and loyal may mutually admire and rejoice in our happiness” (265–66). Celebrating the monarch’s wisdom and virtue through the “mutual” “rejoicing” of king and subject, this device undertakes court masque’s characteristic fêting of royalist order. Antimasque disorder prances and is then banished as the golden “Palace of Fame” opens to reveal Britanocles in the person of King Charles: “Britanocles the great and good appears, / His person fills our eyes, his name our ears, / His virtue every drooping spirit cheers!” (286).
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Notes
James Maidment and W. H. Logan, eds., The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant, 5 vols. (Edinburgh: Paterson, 1872–1874), 2: 267.
See for instance Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975 )
Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–1642 ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981 ).
Murray Lefkowitz, ed., Trois Masques a la cour de charles IY d’Angleterre ( Parks: Edition du centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1970 ), 212–15.
For a reading of masques enacting absolutist order, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983 ).
Martin Butler, “Politics and the Masque: Salmacida Spolia,” in Literature and the English Civil War ed. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59–74, 65.
James Knowles, “The ‘Running Masque’ Recovered: A Masque for the Marquess of Buckingham (e. 1619–20),” English Manuscript Studies 8 (2000): 79–135, 79.
See also Peter Holbrook, “Jacobean Masques and the Jacobean Peace,” The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Holbrook ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ), 67–87.
For these examples, see Martin Butler and David Lindley, “Restoring Astraea: Jonson’s Masque for the Fall of Somerset,” ELH 61 (1994): 807–27
Butler, “Ben Jonson’s Pan’s Anniversary and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral,” English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 369–404
Lawrence Venuti, “The Politics of Allusion: The Gentry and Shirley’s Triumph of Peace,” in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from “English Literary Renaissance,” ed. Arthur Kinney and Dan Collins ( Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987 ), 293–316.
See Leah Marcus, “City Metal and Country Mettle: The Occasion of Ben Jonson’s Golden Age Restored” in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. David Bergeron ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985 ), 26–47.
See Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 38, 36.
Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court 2 vols. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973), 2:668–69.
Quoted in David J. Crankshaw,, “Community, City and Nation, 1540–1714,” in St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604–2004, ed. Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint (New Haven: Derek Keene, 2004 ) 45–70, 53.
Roy Strong, Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens, and Whitehall Palace ( London: Thames and Hudson, 1980 ), 7.
See Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996 ).
Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995 ), 4.
Inigo Jones and William Davenant, Britannia Trivmphans (London, 1637).
David M. Bergeron, ed., Thomas Heywood’s Pageants: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1986), 100. All further citations of Heywood’s works are from this edition.
David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 103, 105.
Francis Osborne, Historical Memoirs on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James 2 vols. (Oxford, 1658), 2:64–65.
Compare this to, say, Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland ( London: Oxford University Press, 1973 ).
David Norbrook, “The Reformation of the Masque,” in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 ), 94–110.
Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965 ).
Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetics of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982 ), 19.
Robert C. Johnson, Mary Frear Keller, Maija Jansson Cole, and William B. Bidwell, eds., Commons Debates, 1628 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977–1978), 3:494. The cited Commons speech is discussed in Burgess, Absolute Monarchy 64.
S. R. Gardiner, ed., Documents Relating to the Prosecution of William Prynne in 1634 and 1637, (London, 1877), 14, 16.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ), 225.
Roger Chartier, “Do Books Make Revolutions?,” in The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane ( Durham: Duke University Press, 1991 ), 67–91.
Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992 ).
John Milton and William Lawes, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (London, 1637), sigs. A2r—A2v.
Thomas Nabbes, Microcosmus, a Morall Maske (London, 1637).
See for instance Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ).
Thomas Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s [sic], ed. W. Bang ( Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1903 ), 25.
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© 2006 Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer
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Shohet, L. (2006). Reading Triumphs: Localizing Caroline Masques. In: Zucker, A., Farmer, A.B. (eds) Localizing Caroline Drama. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601611_4
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