Abstract
John Chamberlain’s letter to Dudley Carleton testifies to the strangeness of Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed. Whereas in earlier letters Chamberlain had referred to the ‘great provision of plays, masques and all manner of entertainment’ that had accompanied James I’s visit to Buckingham’s house at Burley in August 1621, the uncertain terminology, ‘ballad or song’ and ‘play or show’, marks early recognition of how far Gypsies disrupted generic and cultural norms. Chamberlain’s even vaguer ‘devises’ continues his classificatory anxiety over the nature of Gypsies and is confirmed by the image of its hybridity: these songs and devices are of ‘baser alloy’.
For lack of better news here is likewise a ballad or song of Ben Jonson’s in the play or show at the Lord Marquis at Burley, and repeated again at Windsor … There were other songs and devises of baser alloy, but because this had the vogue and general applause at court, I was willing to send it to you.1
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Notes
Martin Butler, ‘Private and Occasional Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed A. R. Braunmuller and M. Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 134,
and D. B. J. Randall, Jonson’s Gypsies Unmasked: Background and Theme of ‘The Gypsies Metamorphos’d’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975).
For example, M. Netzloff, ‘“Counterfeit Egyptians” and Imagined Borders: Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed’, English Literary History, 68 (2001), 763–93f.
Thomas Cogswell, ‘The People’s Love: The Duke of Buckingham and Popularity’, in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Early Stuart Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 212, dates this change to 1624; Gypsies seems to prefigure and predate this strategy.
The Palatine crisis impinged on localities directly as first Elizabeth’s envoy, Achatius zu Dohna (April/May 1620), and then the Parliament sought fiscal support for the wars (1620/21). The Earl of Huntingdon’s speech in favour of rapid action because ‘the celerity of war canot stay the formality that soe great a Council as a Parliament will require’ illuminates how political information and activity operated beyond parliamentary periods: see Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, The State and Provincial Conflict (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 34–9.
J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes (eds.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, Volume 1: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), nos. 208 and 218.
Martin Butler, ‘Jonson’s News From the New World, the “Running Masque”, and the Season of 1619–20’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 6 (1993), 153–178, esp. pp. 163–5,
and James Knowles, ‘The “Running Masque” Recovered: A Masque for the Marquess of Buckingham (c.1619–20), English Manuscript Studies, 8 (2000), 79–135.
Martin Butler, ‘Jonson’s News From the New World, the “Running Masque”, and the Season of 1619–20’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 6 (1993), 153–178, esp. pp. 163–5,
and James Knowles, ‘The “Running Masque” Recovered: A Masque for the Marquess of Buckingham (c.1619–20), English Manuscript Studies, 8 (2000), 79–135.
Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London: Longman, 1981), p. 120.
Martin Butler, ‘“We are one man’s all”: Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed’, Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991), 253–73.
Raymond South, Royal Castle, Rebel Town: Puritan Windsor in Civil War and Commonwealth (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1981), p. 17. Compare, ‘You ploughed so late with the vicar’s wife’ (WIN 556–7).
Robert Richard Tighe and James Edward Davis, Annals of Windsor: being a history of the castle and town, with some account of Eton and places adjacent (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1858), 2.82–3.
Martin Butler, ‘Ben Jonson’s Pan’s Anniversary and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral’, English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), 369–404, p. 384.
Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 131–5.
Susan Wiseman, ‘“Adam, the Father of all Flesh”, Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory In and After the English Civil War’, Prose Studies, 14 (1991), 134–57, esp. pp. 134 and 144.
David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 249.
For the sexual satires see my ‘“To scourge the arse/Jove’s marrow so hath wasted”: Scurrility and the Subversion of Sodomy’, in Scurrility and Subversion, ed. T. Kirk and D. Cavanagh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 74–92; on the wider implications of this culture, see Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early Stuart Political Culture’, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 277–300.
Thomas Cogswell, ‘“Published by Authoritie”: Newsletters and the Duke of Buckingham’s Expedition to the Ile de Ré’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (2004), 1–25, pp. 4 and 7.
E. M. Portal, ‘The Academ Roial of King James I’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 7 (1915–16), 189–208.
BL MS Add 12,528 (accounts of Sir Sackville Crowe for George Villers), fol. 15v; Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 156; Cogswell, ‘Underground Verse’, p. 281, suggests Corbett’s promotions were in part due to his topical poetic facility.
The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2.182–91, lines 22–3. These poems are discussed in Curtis Perry, ‘“If Proclamations Will Not Serve”: The Late Manuscript Poetry of James I and the Culture of Libel’, in Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. M. Fortier and D. Fischlin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), pp. 205–32.
Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 86.
Letter to Joseph Mead, 16 May 1627, cited in Thomas Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of Charles I, 2 vols. (London: H. Colburn, 1848), 1.226.
Julius Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1.390–3.
The appearance of Mercury prefigures Honthorst’s painting of Buckingham as Mercury presenting the Liberal Arts to Charles and Henrietta Maria: J. R. Judson and R. O. Eckhart, Gerrit van Honthorst, 1592–1656 (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1999).
Peter J. Smith, ‘Ajax by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet: Shakespeare, Harington and Onomastic Scatology’, in Tudor Theatre: Emotion in the Theatre, ed. André Lascombes (Bern: Lang, 1996), pp. 125–58, p. 133, suggests that Satanic anality, commonplace in medieval theatre, may suggest that the fart is parodic of the breath of life (Genesis 2:7).
Randle Cotgrave, cited in Butler, ‘Pan’s Anniversary’, p. 384; Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’, in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 166–97.
See Robert Rowland, ‘“Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons”: European Witch-Beliefs in Comparative Perspective’, in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Heningsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 161–90, esp. p. 166 which cites ‘ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table and of the table of devils’ (1 Corinthians, 10),
Ben Jonson traces possible sources in Raoul de Houdenc’s Songe de Enfer (c.1214–15). It is possible Jonson had access to the poem through Sir Kenelm Digby who donated a MS copy to Oxford in 1634 (Bodleian Library, Digby MS 86), see M. T. Mihm (ed.), The Songe d’Enfer of Raoul de Houdenc (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984), 30–1, 84.
Frank Kermode, ‘The Banquet of Sense’, in Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (London: Viking Press, 1971), 84–115.
Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 152–3.
Katharine A. Craik, ‘Reading Coryats Crudities (1611)’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 44 (2004), 79–96, esp. p. 82.
Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Performing Politics: The Circulation of the Parliament Fart’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 69 (2006), 121–38, p. 127.
Peter W. Travis, ‘Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Fart: Noise in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale’, Exemplaria, 16 (2004), 1–19, p. 6.
Andy Wood, ‘“Poore men woll speke one daye”: Plebeian Languages of Deference and Defiance in England, c.1520–1640’, in The Politics of the Excluded in England, c.1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 67–98, p. 88.
Claude M. Simpson, The Broadside Ballad and Its Music, 2 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 1.129–33. The tune was printed in 1651 but is mentioned in Rowley’s Match Me at Midnight (1622) and The Partial Law (which may date as early as 1615).
Alastair Bellany, ‘Singing Libel in Early Stuart England: The Case of the Staines Fiddlers, 1627’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 69 (2006), 177–93, pp. 182 and 189.
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Knowles, J. (2015). ‘Hoarse with Praising’: The Gypsies Metamorphosed and the Politics of Masquing. In: Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432018_5
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