' His
conception
of the antimasque, there-
fore, makes it rather like the farce in a modern theatre.
fore, makes it rather like the farce in a modern theatre.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
Then, the upper part of the scene, which was all of
clouds and made artificially to swell and ride like the rack,' began
to open. Juno is discovered with eight of her nuptial powers,
each bearing one of her surnames, as used by classical writers.
The eight nymphs dance out in pairs led by Order, who is Reason's
servant. These ladies form the second masque. After dancing
alone, they pair with the men masquers, and the whole sixteen
dance, 'with this song provoked':
Now, now begin to set
Your spirits in active heat,
And since your hands are met,
Instruct your nimble feet,
In motions swift and sweet,
The happy ground to beat.
Jonson had prepared an epithalamion of fifteen eight-lined stanzas,
admirably translated from Catullus; but 'only one staff was
sung,' the company being exhausted by the length and elaboration
of the performance. The poet, however, ‘sets it down whole'
when he prints—and I do heartily forgive their ignorance whom
it chanceth not to please. '
While this masque does not reach the highest level of Jonson's
achievement, it is yet a beautiful and dignified composition, only
less charming than his next marriage masque, produced for the
marriage of lord Haddington? on 9 February 1608, at which Venus,
instead of Juno, is the presiding goddess. She appears in her
chariot at the top of the scene, and, descending on foot with the
three graces, declares that Cupid has disappeared and that she
must have him cried, "and all his virtues told. ' The verses in
which the three graces 'cry' Cupid, ‘Venus' runaway,' are the per-
fection of grace and lightness : a sprightlier opening to a masque
could hardly be imagined. As the verses end, Cupid discovers
himself, 'attended with twelve boys, most antickly attired, that
represented the Sports and pretty Lightnesses, that accompany
1 Called, by Gifford, The Hue and Cry after Cupid.
## p. 347 (#365) ############################################
Masque at Lord Haddington's Marriage 347
a
Love. ' Cupid gives the order to his ‘little jocund Sports '-—'with
your revel fill the room'; whereupon
they fell into a subtle capricious dance to as odd a music, each of them
bearing two torches, and nodding with their antic faces, with other variety
of ridiculous gesture which gave much occasion of mirth and delight to the
spectators.
But these boys are not the masquers. In the forewords of his
next masque—The Masque of Queens—Jonson calls them 'an
anti-masque of boys'; but his first conception of them made them
a dance of antics, who perform no true measures but a 'revel' of
‘ridiculous gesture. ' A dance of antics, in which the performers
wore absurd or monstrous masks, was not unknown in Elizabeth's
time? This, however, means only that Jonson does not reach a full
realisation of the antimasque until The Masque of Queens. The
torch-bearing Cupids of The Masque of Beauty, the contrast
between this and The Masque of Blacknesse, the contrast of the
two sets of masquers in the masque Hymenaei, and, finally, the
twelve boys in antic attire of The Hue and Cry after Cupid, are
the gradual steps by which the idea of the antimasque was reached
in Jonson's mind. After the dance of the twelve boys, Cupid is
about to explain what he has been doing when Hymen intervenes
and introduces the king to Venus as the modern pius Aeneas,
relating how the bridegroom of this great wedding has saved
his monarch's life, and expatiating upon the virtues of the bride.
Venus is further overwhelmed by the appearance of Vulcan, at
whose command, the red cliff at the end of the hall is cloven
apart, revealing the wonderful globe in which are the masquers
as the twelve signs of the zodiac. All the twelve are ingeniously
explained as
Sacred powers
That are presiding at all nuptial hours.
Inasmuch as in the 18th book of the Iliad, Vulcan's gifts for
Thetis were 'twenty tripods or stools with golden wheels to move
of themselves miraculously,' Jonson, regarding this passage 'a
most elegant place and worthy the tenth reading,' makes the
dances of the masquers signify the magic stools of Vulcan. Two
Cyclopes, as the masquers danced, beat a time to them with
their hammers. ' An epithalamion of seven verses comes at the
end ; and, this time, the poet insured the recitation of the whole
1 In Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber there is a merry antique showe,
in which four antics dance (Collier's edition, pp. 31—34).
? At the time of the Gowrie conspiracy.
3 The bride was lady Elizabeth Radcliffe, danghter of the earl of Sussex.
6
## p. 348 (#366) ############################################
348
Masque and Pastoral
of it by the device of putting four dances by his masquers
'full of elegancy and curious device' between the verses. "The
two latter dances were made by Master Thomas Giles, the two
first by Master Hier. Herne,' who were the Cyclopes. "The tunes
were Master Alphonso Ferrabosco's. The device and act of the
scene Master Inigo Jones's. ' The epithalamion is a noble lyric,
which prepares our ears for the more wonderful music of Milton.
Again and again, in the verse of Jonson's masques, we find work-
manship afterwards elaborated and improved upon by Milton,
between whom and the Elizabethans Jonson is the true link.
His ardour and idealism prepare us for the deeper spiritual
sublimity of the puritan poet. These two wedding masques have
a special charm of their own, and the second of them is the finest
of its kind in the language.
We come now to The Masque of Queens—the third masque
written for queen Anne-in which, as we have said, the idea of the
antimasque is fully reached by Jonson and definitely stated by
him in his commentary. It was presented at Whitehall on
2 February 1609, and immediately printed by prince Henry's com-
mand. The dedication to the prince is worthy of comparison with
the dedication, two years earlier, of Volpone to the universities.
The same lofty note is struck ; 'poetry, my lord, is not born with
every man, nor every day’; and the poet goes on to explain that
because 'the nobility of the invention should be answerable to
the dignity' of the persons taking part in the masque, he
chose the argument to be A celebration of honourable and true Fame, bred
out of Virtue, observing that rule of the best artist 1, to suffer no object of
delight to pass without his mixture of profit and example.
This combination of the moralist and idealist is characteristic of
Jonson in all his art, but it forms the very soul of his masques
and gives meaning and dignity to all their glitter and mechanism.
He now gives us his definition of the antimasque.
And because her majesty (best knowing that a principle part of life in
these spectacles lay in their variety) had commanded me to think on some
dance or shew that might precede hers and have the place of a foil or false
masque, I was carefula to decline, not only from others, but mine own
steps in that kind, since the last year I had an anti-masque of boys; and
therefore now devised that twelve women in the habit of hags or witches,. . .
the opposites to good Fame, should fill that part; not as a masque but as a
spectacle of strangeness.
8
1 Horace's maxim is meant, Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, Ars Poet.
343.
2 Fleay is certainly right in explaining «Careful to decline' as='afraid of de-
clining' (English Drama, vol. 11, p. 4). See Careful, 5,' in Oxford Dictionary.
6
## p. 349 (#367) ############################################
The Masque of Queens 349
To make a band of witches the foil or opposite of a band of
heroines is a striking thought, and interesting from the light it
throws upon the general conception of the witch in Jacobean
times. The idea took a strong hold of Jonson's mind and, in
his masque, he worked it out with energy. The witches of the
masque hold their own beside even the weird sisters of Macbeth.
They are the witches of popular superstition, and Jonson's excep-
tionally elaborate annotations show the close agreement between
these superstitions in ancient and modern times. Jonson's witches
with a kind of hollow and infernal music came forth' from 'an
ugly Hell. ' There were eleven, with their dame. After a dance,
each one relates her misdeeds to the dame, who proposes that
they shall try to blast with their wicked incantations the glory of
the masque that is beginning :
Darken all this roof
With present fogs: exhale Earth's rot'nest vapours,
And strike a blindness through these blazing tapers.
They fall into 'a magical dance, full of preposterous change and
gesticulation? ' The loud music of the real masque interrupts
them, driving the witches back into hell and disclosing the mag-
nificent house of Fame in which the twelve true masquers are
seated. Heroic Virtue, 'in the furniture of Perseus,' explains the
heroines, who are twelve great queens, beginning with Penthesilea
and ending with Bel-Anna. The lyric at the close, “Who Virtue
can thy power forget,' influenced the ending of Comus. In
the witch scene, Jonson's wonderful power of specialising as a
dramatist—of 'getting up' a particular trade, or profession—is
shown to perfection. Elsewhere, we occasionally miss in him the
fire of imagination required for blending the accumulations and
observation of his intellect into a vitally artistic product; but, in
the present instance, his imagination is at its height, and he puts
out his full strength. The third charm conveys powerfully the
horrid thrill that was the soul of the witch superstitions, and that
depended for its force upon all things ugly and foul in nature.
The owl is abroad, the bat, and the toad,
And so is the cat-a-mountain,
The ant and the mole sit both in a hole,
And the frog peeps out o' the fountain;
1 It must have been impressive. The witches do all things at their meetings
'contrary to the custom of men, dancing back to back, and hip to hip, their hands
joined and making their circles backward, to the left hand, with strange fantastic
motions of their heads and bodies. All which were excellently imitated by the maker
of the dance, Master Hierome Herne. '
## p. 350 (#368) ############################################
350
Masque and Pastoral
The dogs they do bay and the timbrels play,
The spindle is now a turning;
The moon it is red, and the stars are fled,
But all the sky is a burning :
The ditch is made and our nails the spade,
With pictures full, of wax and of wool;
Their livers I stick with needles quick;
There lacks but the blood, to make up the flood,
Quickly, Dame, then bring your part in,
Spur, spur, upon little Martin1.
Jonson, having reached a clear idea of the antimasque, did not go
back upon it. But this antimasque quite eclipses its masque.
The queens are mere wax-works after the witches. Jonson's
imagination concentrated itself upon the first half of his work.
Perhaps he left it to Inigo Jones to supply, by the magic of his
scenery, the necessary contrast ; in Jonson's own work, certainly,
this is not done. If the second part had been carried out with
the imaginative intensity of the first, this masque would have
formed the prototype of an artistic species of great and enduring
significance.
In 1610, Daniel supplied the masque for the court, and his
Tethys' Festival shows no advance upon The Vision of the Twelve
Goddesses. In 1611, Jonson is again at work: on 1 January
1611, he produced Oberon at Whitehall for prince Henry, and, in
the beginning of February, Love freed from Ignorance and Folly
for queen Anne. Oberon is
Oberon is a most delightful masque.
The
opening is written in dainty octosyllabic verse and elaborates into
a charming antimasque the part of the satyr in the entertainment
already described. This antimasque made a distinct impression
upon the literature of the day? Oberon may be taken as an
almost perfect example of the first kind of Jonsonian masque,
in
which the antimasque is not so much ‘a foil or false masque' as an
antic-masque, something lighter and less dignified than the main
masque, but in keeping with it rather than in contrast, and not
yet, in any true sense, dramatic. The grace, balance and finish of
the whole composition are beyond praise. Unfortunately, this is
the last masque annotated by Jonson for the 1616 folio; his notes
stop in it halfway, before he reaches prince Oberon. The only later
masque which he annotated was The Masque of Augures, specially
printed as the first masque presented in the new banqueting hall
1
1 Their little Martin is he that calls them to their conventicles. They find him in
the shape of a great buck goat upon whom they ride to their meetings. '
2 See Reyher, Les Masques Anglais, p. 324. It is conjectured that the three dancers
of The Winter's Tale, act iv, sc. 4, 329, had been among Jonson's satyrs.
## p. 351 (#369) ############################################
Jonson's Development of the Presenter 351
at Whitehall. Love Freed is a companion piece to Oberon, but
inferior to it in conception and workmanship.
If January 1612 be the date of Love Restored, it is important
for the student of the masque.
Jonson innovated again on
previous practice. The masque proper is preceded, not by an
antimasque, but by a scene of excellent comedy. The scene is
the development in a new style of the part of the presenter, and
still gives to that character the larger part of the dialogue, which
is in prose. Just as the satyr of the first entertainment was the
germ of the antimasque of Oberon, so the prose of Pan and his
dialogue with Mercury in the second entertainment may have
prompted this scene. The king and court being ready, Masquerado
enters to declare that there can be no masque, 'the rogue play-
boy, that acts Cupid, is got so hoarse, your majesty cannot hear
him half the breadth of your chair. ' But Plutus, 'as Cupid,' here
interrupts, ordering Masquerado off. What makes this light,
feathered vanity here? Away, impertinent folly! Infect not this
assembly. Plutus objects to the expense of the masque: 'I tell
thee, I will have no more masquing ; I will not buy a false and
fleeting delight so dear: the merry madness of one hour shall not
cost me the repentance of an age. ' But, here, Plutus is interrupted
in his turn by Robin Goodfellow, who is aghast at the news of
there not being any masque. He declares,
I am the honest plain country spirit, and harmless; Robin Goodfellow, he
that sweeps the hearth and the house clean, riddles for the country maids,
and does all their other drudgery, while they are at hot-cockles: one that
has discoursed with your court spirits ere now; but was fain to-night to run
a thousand hazards to arrive at this place: never poor goblin was so put to
his shifts to get in to see nothing.
Plutus will not listen : 'Your rude good-fellowship must seek
some other sphere for your admitty. ' Robin's answer is a triumph
of comic description. It puts before us all the crush and crowding,
all the tricks and pretences, which were a part of the fierce
competition to get a place at these great court masques. Robin
has been hit over the head by the porter, and shoved off a ladder
by one of the guards; then he tried the carpenters' way,' but
'the wooden rogues let a huge trap-door fall on my head. ' He
thought of getting in in a trunk, 'but that I would not imitate
so catholic a coxcomb as Coryat. ' So he tried disguises. 'I was
an engineer and belonged to the motions'; then, 'an old tire-
woman’; then,'a musician-marry, I could not shew mine instru-
ment and that bred a discord’; then,
6
a
## p. 352 (#370) ############################################
352 Masque and Pastoral
a feather-maker of Blackfriars, . . . but they all made as light of me, as of my
feathers; and wondered how I could be a Puritan, being of so rain a---
vocation; I answered, We are all masquers sometimes.
At last, 'with my broom and my candles,' he was himself, 'and
came on confidently, giving out I was a part of the Device. ' This
admirable speech exhibits Jonson's comic power in its most genial
and, therefore, most delightful vein. When Plutus goes on pro-
testing against the expense of masques as “superfluous excesses,'
Masquerado and Robin detect him for an impostor— Plutus, the god
of money, who has stolen Love's ensigns. At this point, the real
Cupid enters in his chariot 'guarded with the Masquers, in number
ten,' who, says Cupid, were 'the spirits of courts and flower of
men. ' But, here again, the masque, as it has come down to us, is
quenched by its antimasque. That antimasque, quite frankly, is a
dramatic scene, although the long harangue of Robin Goodfellow
may be called only a modification of the presenter's oration, and
the colloquy is suggested rather by what was customary at an
entertainment than by the new idea of the antimasque.
In Jonson's remaining masques, there are many similar scenes,
and they are all admirable. But their right to a place in the
masque may be called in question. They represent the intrusion
of drama into masque, and it may be contended that Jonson
never succeeds in evolving a type of masque which really absorbs
them. The plays of Aristophanes afford an example on the
grandest scale of the kind of artistic product that is aimed at,
and Jonson, in the scene we have just criticised and in other
places in his masques, is Aristophanic in his combination of robust
naturalism with imaginative fancy. Another consideration must
be kept in mind. The masquers themselves were always the
highest notables of the land, and, therefore, of course, amateurs
in everything but dancing. The nobleman could dance exquisitely,
but he might not act. This fact, of itself, prevented the develop-
ment in a dramatic direction of the real masque. But the
presenters and the allegoric personages who explained the masque
were, usually, professionals, and the antimasque, when it came, was
performed very largely by professionals. This is why the develop-
ment of the antimasque in a dramatic direction was easy, and why
the real coherence of masque and antimasque when the dramatic
element intruded was impossible.
The development of the Jonsonian masque is now complete,
although we have not yet considered half his work. Broadly
speaking, there are two types of Jonsonian masque : the masque
a
## p. 353 (#371) ############################################
Thomas Campion
353
proper, in which the antimasque is a foil to the masque; and the
;
masque improper, in which the antimasque is a dramatic scene.
But the masque proper may be said to include two species ; that
in which the antimasque is an antic-masque, and that in which it
is a true foil or opposite of the masque.
The date 1612, which we have now reached, offers a suitable
occasion for considering shortly the work of certain other masque
writers, since Jonson wrote no masque for the January and
February of 1613.
The death of prince Henry in November 1612 plunged the
nation into great grief. Nevertheless, in three months' time, it
welcomed, as an excuse for throwing off its gloom, the marriage
of the princess Elizabeth to the elector Palatine. The festivities
on this occasion were of an unparalleled magnificence and cost.
It was arranged that, on the evening of the wedding, being Sunday
14 February, the courtiers should present the first masque, known
since as The Lords Masque, and written by Thomas Campion,
and that, on the two following evenings, the inns of court should
present masques. So exhausted were the king and court generally
by the elaborate proceedings, that the third masque had to be put
off till the 20th of the month. The second masque-The Masque
of the Middle Temple and Lyncolnes Inn—was written by George
Chapman, and the third—The Masque of Grayes-Inne and the
Inner-Temple-by Francis Beaumont. Jonson said to Drummond
that 'next himself only Fletcher and Chapman could make a
masque? ' Probably, he had Beaumont's masque in his mind, as
we have no record of a masque by Fletcher. But Campion, rather
than either Chapman or Beaumont, deserves the next place
longo intervallo to Jonson? The Lords' Masque has an anti-
masque of 'Frantics. ' These are such characters as the lover,
the self-lover, the melancholic man, the schoolman overcome with
fantasy, the over-watched usurer, with others that made an absolute
medley of madness. These ‘Lunatics' danced 'a mad measure
fitted to a loud fantastic tune,' after which the music changed
to a solemn air, which drove out the 'Frantics. ' Prometheus
displays eight stars shining and dancing—a kind of second anti-
masque of stars. "The stars moved in an exceeding strange and
delightful manner, and I suppose few have ever seen more neat
artifice than Master Inigo Jones shewed in contriving their motion. '
6
1 Jonson's Conversations with Drummond (ed. Laing, D. ), p. 4. It is curious that
Jonson gives The Faithfull Shepheardesse to Fletcher and Beaumont.
? For a general account of Campion's life and work, see ante, vol. IV, chap. vm.
E, L. VI. CH. XIII.
23
## p. 354 (#372) ############################################
354
Masque and Pastoral
Campion's own songs, which accompany the scenic effects, have
that special charm of melody and natural grace which make his
lyrics more than any other man's typically Elizabethan. The
stars, vanishing, become the eight masquers, 'in their habits,
which were infinitely rich, befitting states' To accompany these
knights, sixteen pages, 'like fiery spirits, break from the earth
with torches, and 'The Torchbearers' Dance' follows, making the
second antimasque. When the time came for the masquers to
take partners from the audience, 'first of all the princely bride-
groom and bride were drawn into these solemn revels. The revels
are interrupted by a second 'set-piece' of elaborate splendour, from
which a ‘high vast obelisk dedicate to Fame' is drawn out by Sybilla,
who, in choice Latin verse, prophesies prosperity to the wedded pair
It will be seen, from this imperfect summary of a masque
remarkable for its elaboration, that Campion depends more
upon Inigo Jones than does Jonson. Jonson instinctively feels
for some situation which he must explain and which has in it
a logical development involving some slight dramatic interest;
Campion merely adorns the stage carpenter's ingenuities with
beautiful songs and poetic recitative. Nevertheless, Campion's
songs are very charming, and his masque has a poetic beauty in
its conceptions as sweet and splendid as any of Jonson’s. But
it does not join to poetic beauty his moral impressiveness ;
melody and beauty are the ingredients of Campion's magic. We
may add that Campion's account of his work is written in prose of
which the ease and charm are not less remarkable than are the
vigour and exactitude of that of Jonson's notes; while, in his
references to his fellow workers, Campion reveals himself as
a man of a generous personality, eager to praise his friends.
His three masques and single entertainment survive, as they
deserve; they are all of them remarkable for the melody of their
lyrics and the beauty of their conception. He would stand beside
Jonson as a masque writer if he had written as many masques.
Chapman's masque is in pleasant contrast to Campion's. It is
full of semi-dramatic matter and of quaint, picturesque, fantastic
detail quite different from the purely beautiful detail of the first
masque. It is interesting, also, because the cavalcade or procession
from the rendezvous in Chancery lane to Whitehall was a special
1 i. e. noblemen, as these all were.
2 The gist is :
Additur Germaniae
Robur Britannicum : ecquid esse par potest?
## p. 355 (#373) ############################################
6
Chapman as a Masque Writer
355
attraction of the show, and is carefully described by Chapman.
The masque is very topical. It is founded, mainly, upon the
current interest in the attempt to colonise Virginia', the chief
masquers being Indian princes, while their attendant Phoebades,
or Virginian priests of the sun, form a second antimasque.
The first antimasque satirises the globe-trotting propensities of
Englishmen. The main items of the cavalcade were, first, a mock
masque of Baboons horsed with asses and dwarf palfreys, with
yellow foot cloths, casting cockle-de-moys about in courtesy by
way of largesse’; then, in a car, the twelve Phoebades, 'chief
musicians of our kingdom’; then, the twelve chief masquers riding
in Indian habits, as Virginian princes; and, finally, another car
driven by Capriccio with Honor and Plutus on the top, and their
attendants Eunomia and Phemis beneath them. Capriccio, who
has a pair of bellows on his head, describes himself as a 'man of
wit'; he is a parallel figure to Jonson’s Fencer in Pan's Anni-
versarie or to his Christmas in The Masque of Christmas, where
a single character takes the part of a presenter. When the hall
is finally reached, he has a lively opening dialogue with Plutus“,
who replies to his contemptuous invective:
Sinful ? and damnable? What, a Puritan? Those bellows you wear on
your head shew with what matter your brain is puffed up, Sir; a religion-
forger I see you are and presume of inspiration from these bellows; with
which ye study to blow up the settled government of kingdoms.
Chapman spells 'antemasque' with an e and speaks of his prose
dialogue as a 'low induction’; his baboons' dance, he tells us, was
'anticke and delightful.
' His conception of the antimasque, there-
fore, makes it rather like the farce in a modern theatre. It is
to be noted, also, that his torchbearers have a dance—they de-
scended and performed another antemasque dancing with torches
lighted at both ends. ' Chapman's work, obviously, is influenced
by Jonson ; but he has not grasped the principles of balance and
composition which his master employs. It is delightful, however,
to find him in his explanatory narrative echoing exactly Jonson's
arrogant note. He inserts a page to answer certain insolent
objections made against the length of my speeches and narrations,
in which he shews himself the true mate of Ben, the only other
Elizabethan who matches his pride in his poetic craft.
Already, in Eastward Hoe (act in, so. 2), Chapman puts into the mouth of captain
Seagull a graphic account of Virginia's wonders.
% There seems here a clear reference to the Plutus of Jonson's Love Restored (ante,
p. 351).
* Cf. ante, chap. II.
6
23—2
## p. 356 (#374) ############################################
356
Masque and Pastoral
Beaumont's masque is a worthy third to the first two. The Inner
Temple and Gray's inn made Winchester house, on the south bank
of the river, their rendezvous, and their procession was by water.
Unfortunately, Beaumont does not describe this with the fulness
with which Chapman describes the cavalcade by land of the previous
night; but we know, from other sources, that it was very elaborate.
The gentleman-masquers “were placed by themselves in the King's
royal barge, with the rich furniture of state, and adorned with
a great number of lights, placed in such order as might make the
best show. ' They were ‘led by two Admirals,' and a multitude
of barges and galleys attended upon them, 'with all variety of land
music and several peals of ordnance. ' The king and the prince
and the newly married couple watched the landing at Whitehall;
but the hall of the palace was found to be too small for the
performance. This is the reason Beaumont gives for the postpone-
ment till Saturday. We learn, however, from a private letter, that
the king's fatigue was the real cause of the delay:
Sir Francis Bacon ventured to entreat his Majesty that by this disgrace
(i. e. the postponement) he would, as it were, bury them quick: and I hear the
king should answer, that they must bury him quick, for he could last no
longer.
But the masquers were reconciled to the delay by getting
permission to use the banqueting house instead of the hall on
Saturday.
Beaumont's masque is remarkable for the high quality of its
blank verse, which has in it a hint of Miltonic music, and for the
beauty of the lyrics, which, however, are few and short. The words
of the masque are quite subordinate to the elaborate music, dances
and scenic effects. Beaumont is at
Beaumont is at pains to point out that his
antimasque is ‘not of one kind or livery (because that had been so
much in use heretofore) but as it were in consort like to broken
music. ' This innovation tended further to disintegrate the masque
and break it up into a variety entertainment. For the second
antimasque, Iris, ‘in token that the match shall likewise be blessed
with the love of the common people, calls to Flora to bring in
'a May dance or rural dance, consisting likewise not of any
suited persons,' but of a pedant, May lord, May lady; servingman,
chambermaid; a country clown, country wench; a he-baboon,
she-baboon; a he-fool, she-fool; these rush in, dance their
measure and as rudely depart. The music was extremely
well fitted,' says Beaumont; 'but the perpetual laughter and
i Persons dressed alike.
9
6
## p. 357 (#375) ############################################
Dramatic Element in Jonson's Masques 357
:
applause was above the music. ' The king was so pleased that he
called for the second antimasque again at the end, and, also, for
the first, but one of the statues by that time was undressed. '
We have now to notice in Jonson's work the rapid growth
of dramatic interest. Passing over the graceful and original
A Challenge at Tilt and the realistic The Irish Masque, both
produced in December 1613, we find that, for four successive years,
Jonson wrote the Twelfthnight masque at court and, in 1617, added a
second, produced in February, as well as The Masque of Christmas,
of the previous 25 December. Mercury Vindicated from the
Alchemists, 1615, is the first of these. The antimasque, broadly, is
in the style of Love Restored. Mercury delivers two admirable
addresses in prose, worthy of a place beside the harangues of
Robin Goodfellow. The scene is 'a laboratory or alchemists'
work-house, Vulcan looking to the registers,' with a Cyclope tending
the fires. The Cyclope begins with a beautiful song, 'Soft, subtile
fire, thou soul of art. ' Mercury then peeps out ‘at the tunnel
of the middle furnace, whereupon Vulcan cries to hold him-
'Dear Mercury! Help. He flies. He is scaped. Precious golden
Mercury, be fixt: be not so volatile ! ' Mercury, after running
once or twice about the room, takes breath,' and begins a long
relation of his troubles-
a
Now the place and goodness of it protect me. . . . I will stand close
up anywhere, to escape this poult-footed philosopher, old Smug here of
Lemnos, and his smoky family. . . . The whole household of them are
become Alchemists.
The comic invention of this opening is in Jonson's happiest vein ;
and Mercury's speech worthily maintains it. In his masques,
Jonson's prose is more uniformly strong and distinguished than his
verse, and has not received the attention it merits. Mercury re-
counts all he has suffered:
It is I, that am corroded, and exalted, and sublimed, and reduced, and
fetched
over, and filtered, and washed, and wiped; what between their salts
and their sulphurs, their oils and their tartars, their brines and their vinegars,
you might take me out now a soused Mercury, now a salted Mercury, now a
smoaked and dried Mercury, now a powdered and pickled Mercury: never
herring, oyster, or cucumber past so many vexations.
And his account of what the alchemists claim to perform comes to
an excellent climax :
They will lay you an old courtier on the coals like a sausage, or a bloat
herring, and after they have broiled him enough, blow a soul into him with a
pair of bellows, till he start up into his galliard, that was made when Monsieur
was here.
1
## p. 358 (#376) ############################################
358
Masque and Pastoral
There are two antimasques : one, 'a troop of threadbare Alche-
mists'; and the second, a troop 'of imperfect creatures with helms
of limbecks on their heads, which Vulcan and his alchemists by
their art have created. These ridiculous monsters' vanish at
‘
Mercury's command, and a glorious bower appears in which are
Nature, Prometheus and the twelve masquers. The lyrics are
melodious, but short, and their effect in the reading is insignificant,
after the vigorous life of the first scene.
The Golden Age Restored, of 1 and 6 January 1616, goes back
to the lyrical style. It is a graceful and beautiful conception,
but not very fully reported. For next Christmas, Jonson wrote
The Masque of Christmas, which Fleay says was 'not a mask
proper. ' By the allusions to Burbage and Heminge, we gather
that it was acted by the king's players, and, consequently, there is
no real masque—it is all antimasque, and, in style and form, very
like the opening of Love Restored. Christmas takes the place of
Robin Goodfellow as presenter, but is not allowed speeches of
such length. Nowhere in our literature is the old merry Christmas
more graphically put before us : 'I am old Gregory Christmas
still, and though I come out of Pope’s-head alley, as good a
Protestant as any in my parish. ' He has brought a masque of
his own making, ‘and do present it by a set of my sons, that
come out of the lanes of London, good dancing boys all'. . .
'Bones o bread, the King ! ' (seeing James). His sons and
daughters enter, ten in number, ‘led in, in a string, by Cupid, who
is attired in a flat cap and a prentice's coat, with wings at his
shoulders. ' The family are, Misrule, Carol, Minced-Pie, Gambol,
Post and Pair, New-Year's-Gift, Mumming, Wassel, Offering and
Baby-Cake. Each has his torchbearer, and Jonson's magnificent
knowledge of English ways and manners finds delightful scope in
their attire, which is succinctly described. In place of the usual
elegant lyrics, we have a rollicking song, sung by Christmas to
drum and fife; but, before this can be delivered, there is a short
scene of comedy. 'Venus, a deaf tire-woman' presents herself;
she is Cupid's mother ; she dwells in Pudding lane ; 'yes, I can sit
anywhere, so I may see Cupid act; I had him by my first husband,
he was a smith, forsooth, we dwelt in Do-little-Lane then. ' "Will
you depart,' says Christmas, impatiently;
Ay, forsooth he'll say his part, I warrant him, as well as e'er a play-boy of
e'm all. I could have had money enough for him, an I would have been
tempted, and have let him out by the week to the King's players. Master
Burbage has been about and about with me, and so has old Master Hemings
too.
## p. 359 (#377) ############################################
The Masque of Christmas
359
The old dame has to be silenced by the drum, but a slight delay
occurs because some of the properties are forgotten—Mumming
has not bis vizard neither. ' 'No matter! his own face shall serve
for a punishment, and 'tis bad enough. ' Misrule's suit is too
small! The players have lent him one too little, on purpose
to disgrace him. ' The song has eighteen verses, which give the
names and addresses of the masquers :
Next in the trace, comes Gambol in place;
And to make my tale the shorter,
My son Hercules, tane out of Distaff-lane ;
But an active man and a porter.
It is the first purely humorous lyric with which we have met '
in a masque, and it smacks of the soil, or, to speak more exactly,
of the street. It is banged out on the drum with glorious energy,
and, when we are breathless with the speed of it, Cupid is called
upon to say his piece; but his mother interrupts and puts him out,
80 poor Cupid breaks down ignominiously and has to be taken
away, Venus exclaiming, “You wrong the child, you do wrong
the infant, I 'peal to his Majesty. It was, perhaps, the knowledge
that his work was to be acted by skilled professionals that
inspired Jonson in this fascinating little sketch. It has to be
confessed that, when the dramatist in Jonson gets to work in his
masques, we obtain results worth more as literature than all the
non-dramatic lyrics and descriptive verse. And Jonson's humour
in his masques is without the acrid, scornful element which, in
his great plays, too often obtrudes itself. In this little show, he
is with Shakespeare and Dickens in the hearty kindliness of his
comic observation. On the Twelfthnight after this Christmas
day, The Vision of Delight was presented. It is a notable
masque, containing the beautiful lyric, ‘Break, Phant’sie, from
thy cave of cloud,' and, in remarkable contrast, the long speech
of Phant'sie in doggerel lines of four beats. There is no prose.
But we must pass it over, as, also, the interesting Lovers Made
Men', in order to mention Pleasure Reconciled to Vertue, pre-
sented Twelfthnight, 6 January 1618, because this masque supplied
Milton with the main idea of Comus.
It was prince Charles's first masque. The scene is the
mountain Atlas, 'who 'had his top ending in the figure of an
old man. From a grove at his feet, comes 'Comus, the god of
cheer or the Belly, riding in triumph,' with one in front bearing
1 Called, by Gifford, The Masque of Lethe.
## p. 360 (#378) ############################################
360
Masque and Pastoral
the bowl of Hercules. The companions of Comus begin with a
‘Hymn ; full chorus':
Room! room! make room for the Bouncing Belly
First father of sauce and deviser of jelly,
Prime master of arts, and the giver of wit,
That found out the excellent engine, the spit.
After nearly thirty lines in this style, the bowl-bearer speaks
a prose oration on the Belly, which introduces the first anti-
masque of 'men in the shape of bottles, tuns, etc. ' Hercules,
the 'active friend of virtue,' enters, to reclaim his bowl and
denounce Comus and his crew; 'Help, virtue! These are sponges
and not men. ' He drives them off, asking, 'Can this be pleasure,
to extinguish man? ' Then he lies down at the foot of Atlas, and
the pigmies forming the second antimasque steal in and try to steal
his club. At his rising, they run into holes, and Mercury descends
to crown Hercules with poplar, because he has 'the voluptuous
Comus, God of cheer, Beat from his grove, and that defaced. ' So
far, the idea is clear and well-balanced, and the moral that
pleasure must be the servant of virtue is expressed with an in-
tensity that, obviously, influenced Milton in his Comus. But it is
interesting to contrast the gross homely Comus of Jonson, the
Belly god, with Milton's dignified abstraction, and to note, that to
match his Comus, Jonson's dramatic instinct supplies, not Virtue,
but Hercules. There is fine poetry in the conception and workman-
ship of Jonson’s masque; but it loses coherence after the crowning
of Hercules. Hercules is told that, in James's court, the 'cessation
of all jars' between pleasure and virtue is to be found; and, as
a proof, twelve princes are brought forth, bred upon Atlas, 'the
hill of knowledge. ' These, led by prince Charles, are the true
masquers. The chaplain of the Venetian ambassador1 has described
the masque.
He says that, after many dances, the dancers began to flag,' whereupon
the King who is naturally choleric got impatient, and shouted aloud,“ Why
don't they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take you
all; dance ! ” On hearing this, the marquis of Buckingham, his majesty's
most favoured minion, immediately sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty
and very minute capers with so much grace and agility, that he not only
appeased the ire of his angry sovereign, but, moreover, rendered himself the
admiration and delight of everybody. The other masquers, being thus
encouraged, continued successively exhibiting their prowess with various
ladies; finishing in like manner with capers and by lifting their goddesses
from the ground. '
1 Rawdon Brown's translation, quoted in Harrison's England, Part 11, Forewords,
p. 58. (New Shakspere Society)
## p. 361 (#379) ############################################
Jonson's Later Masques
361
Finally, James, delighted at the grace of the prince's dancing,
kisses him affectionately, and pats the marquis on the cheek.
The king caused the masque to be repeated, but with additions. '
This, apparently, meant that his majesty did not appreciate
the opening part of the masque. Contemporary critics asserted
that Inigo Jones had lost his charm, and that Ben Jonson 'should
return to his old trade of brickmaking? ' Jonson, therefore,
rewrote it for its second performance on 17 February, making it
elaborately complimentary to Wales? . Mount Atlas now becomes
Craig-Ereri, and we have a dialogue between three Welshmen,
which, like the dialogue in The Irish Masque, is inferior in wit
and vigour, but curious for the Welsh-English. The Welshmen
criticise the first device of Hercules and the Comus rout-there
was a tale of a tub'—and the pigmies, and we have, instead, a
dance of men and a dance of goats—'the Welsh goat is an
excellent dancer by birth'-as antimasques, with songs in Welsh-
English; and then, apparently, the real masquers with their dances
and songs followed. Though the first part of Pleasure Reconciled
to Vertue seems to have been too serious for the taste of king
James, it was able to stir Milton to the composition of Comus.
A break now occurs in Jonson's masque writing. His journey
to Scotland took place in 1618, and Jonson was not in London
again till about May 1619. The new banqueting house at
Whitehall was burnt down on 12 January 1619. Queen Anne
died in March. Jonson's quarrel with Inigo Jones was in progress.
He produced no more masques till 6 January 1621, when the
court called upon him again, and the admirable Newes from the
New World discovered in the Moone was the first of a series of
eight masques, containing some of his best work and ending in
1625 before his paralytic stroke. Every one of these, except the
imperfectly reported Masque of Owls, contains dramatic work
that brings before us contemporary London life and manners, with
a lighter and easier touch than Jonson uses in his plays. In Newes
from the New World, the printer, the chronicler and the factor
allow us a glance, tantalisingly brief, at the lower walks of litera-
ture in London and the beginnings of the London press ; Neptune's
Triumph, in a witty dialogue between a cook and a poet, magnifies
the art of Jacobean cookery; the Fencer, in Pan's Anniversarie,
is an amalgamation of all the old gamesters who swaggered in
the Elizabethan fencing ring ; A Masque of the Metamorphos'd
1 Brent to Carlton, Cal. State Papers, Dom. vol.
Called, by Gifford, For the Honour of Wales.
XCV, p. 12.
## p. 362 (#380) ############################################
362
Masque and Pastoral
Gypsies, Jonson's longest masque, 'thrice presented to King James,
is an exhaustive study of gipsy manners and gipsy language,
wonderful for scope and minuteness. It contains the ribald song of
Cocklorrel, another song of the street, almost Aristophanic in lusty
vigour. The ballad of the bearward, John Urson, in the excellent
Masque of Augures, is another lyric of the same quality. This
lyric of the gutter is found cheek by jowl with the solemn Latin
notes about augurs as if to reveal to us the two sides of Jonson-
the schoolmaster and the street arab. Both characters in Eliza-
bethan London were endowed with a fuller humanity than their
modern representatives. There is no failure of poetical power in
these later masques.
Pan's Anniversarie and The Fortunate
Isles contain exquisite lyrical work, and there is hardly anywhere
in the masques a finer song than the last 'hunting chorus' of
Time Vindicated, with its characteristic ending
Man should not hunt mankind to death,
But strike the enemies of man;
Kill vices if you can:
They are your wildest beasts,
And when they thickest fall, you make the gods true feasts.
Two masques, in 1631, conclude his series. It would seem as if
Jonson's experience in 1618 convinced him that he could not rely
upon the contrast between the fantastic and poetic to hold the
attention of his audiences. Popular taste began to ask for sen-
sational antimasque, and the multiplication of these threatened to
reduce the masque to chaos. Jonson fell back upon the dramatic
scene as a means of compelling the interest of his audiences, and,
either by the wit of his comic invention or the truth of his comic
characterisation, succeeded nearly always in rising above mere
farce.
Jonson has been called a prose Aristophanes? In his masques,
.
taken as a whole, he may be recognised as more truly Aristophanic
than any other English writer. His serious lyrics are Horatian in
their restraint and classic dignity and have none of the splendour
of the imaginative choruses of Aristophanes. Nevertheless, in
the lyrical and descriptive parts of the masques, Jonson’s fancy,
elevated as it is by his moral intensity and his sense of the poet's
dignity, continually produces a total result which is more than
fanciful—which, in a high sense, is imaginative. But, on the side of
full-blooded humanity, of intense appreciation of the joy of life in
Jonson n'est pas seulement un Labiche ou un Scribe qui aurait du style ; c'est
pour ainsi parler, un Aristophane en prose, Castelain, Ben Jonson, p. 353.
## p. 363 (#381) ############################################
Masques under Charles I. Pastoral Poetry 363
the coarsest and commonest types, of wonderful knowledge of con-
temporary men and manners, Jonson matches even Aristophanes.
Moreover, in the rollicking energy of his lyrics of the gutter and
his long prose harangues, the challenging insolence and swagger
of the Aristophanic parabasis is more than suggested. Jonson's
gusto, his vigour and virility, are the most natural and unforced
part of his genius. They were cramped in the masque. They were
cramped even on the Elizabethan stage. An Athenian Dionysiac
festival might have given them scope. Jonson, therefore, expresses
this side of himself in his masques only in fragments, and cannot
be called Aristophanic unless his masques are taken as a whole.
Jonson, as a masque writer, had no successor. The two great
sensations of Charles's reign, Shirley's Triumph of Peace and
Carew's Coelum Britannicum, both produced in 1634, are aptly
characterised by Schelling : ‘as to form, Shirley's masque is chaos
in activity, Carew's chaos inert' D'Avenant's Salmacida Spolia,
in which the king and queen took part in 1640, has so large a
number of successive ‘entries' in the antimasque as to make it
very like modern pantomime.
esse.
But, in 1634, Comus was produced at Ludlow castle. We have
pointed out that Milton took suggestions from Peele’s Araygne-
ment of Paris and from Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,
but his main inspiration came from Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheard-
Comus must not be classed as a masque because there is no
disguising and no dancing. It is a species of outdoor entertain-
4, ment, and, therefore, akin to pastoral. There is a natural tendency
for the outdoor entertainment, if it be lengthy, to approximate to
the pastoral; and pastoral resembles the masque, because, by its
conventions, it is undramatic.
It may, therefore, not seem inappropriate to consider the pas-
toral drama along with the masque. The one is an offshoot of
the legitimate drama for indoor use, the other for outdoor. Both,
in the main, may be described as efforts made by amateurs to
y bring the theatre into their own halls or parks. But it is not
until the professed poet and dramatist come to the help of the
amateur that any great art results. Jonson and Milton, so far,
have been examples of this fact, which becomes even more apparent
when we turn to pastoral drama in its fullest manifestation.
Pastoral poetry is without a place among the greater forms of
literary art, because it is essentially a reaction. Its two motives
are a longing for simplicity of thought and feeling and a longing
## p. 364 (#382) ############################################
364
Masque and Pastoral
for country as opposed to town. This latter longing is innate in
man, because his original home was the field or the forest, and
is the soundest and best part of pastoral art. The desire for
simplicity, on the other hand, has in it an element of weakness
and disillusionment. The pastoral poet is not strong enough to
confront and master his own age and find in it the materials
for his poem; his own age is too complicated and sophisticated.
He, therefore, takes refuge in Arcadia-in an Arcadia of feeling
and thought, which has the defect of being visionary and unreal.
It is not the life the poet knows, but his refuge from that life.
The Elizabethan drama was so firmly rooted in present realities
of passion and thought that it swept pastoral poetry, for a time,
out of sight. The prose of Sidney and the verse of Spense
noble as they were, were superseded by the new art of drama, and
it was only after the dramatic impulse had spent itself that the
exhausted dramatists accepted pastoral as a sufficient exercise for
their energies.
Theocritus and Vergil are the two fathers of pastoral poetry.
Of the two, Theocritus is commonly preferred as less artificial than
Vergil. The clear, bright naturalism of Theocritus, which, in fact,
is the perfection of art, makes Vergil's Eclogues seem artificial; but
these must not be considered apart from his Georgics.
clouds and made artificially to swell and ride like the rack,' began
to open. Juno is discovered with eight of her nuptial powers,
each bearing one of her surnames, as used by classical writers.
The eight nymphs dance out in pairs led by Order, who is Reason's
servant. These ladies form the second masque. After dancing
alone, they pair with the men masquers, and the whole sixteen
dance, 'with this song provoked':
Now, now begin to set
Your spirits in active heat,
And since your hands are met,
Instruct your nimble feet,
In motions swift and sweet,
The happy ground to beat.
Jonson had prepared an epithalamion of fifteen eight-lined stanzas,
admirably translated from Catullus; but 'only one staff was
sung,' the company being exhausted by the length and elaboration
of the performance. The poet, however, ‘sets it down whole'
when he prints—and I do heartily forgive their ignorance whom
it chanceth not to please. '
While this masque does not reach the highest level of Jonson's
achievement, it is yet a beautiful and dignified composition, only
less charming than his next marriage masque, produced for the
marriage of lord Haddington? on 9 February 1608, at which Venus,
instead of Juno, is the presiding goddess. She appears in her
chariot at the top of the scene, and, descending on foot with the
three graces, declares that Cupid has disappeared and that she
must have him cried, "and all his virtues told. ' The verses in
which the three graces 'cry' Cupid, ‘Venus' runaway,' are the per-
fection of grace and lightness : a sprightlier opening to a masque
could hardly be imagined. As the verses end, Cupid discovers
himself, 'attended with twelve boys, most antickly attired, that
represented the Sports and pretty Lightnesses, that accompany
1 Called, by Gifford, The Hue and Cry after Cupid.
## p. 347 (#365) ############################################
Masque at Lord Haddington's Marriage 347
a
Love. ' Cupid gives the order to his ‘little jocund Sports '-—'with
your revel fill the room'; whereupon
they fell into a subtle capricious dance to as odd a music, each of them
bearing two torches, and nodding with their antic faces, with other variety
of ridiculous gesture which gave much occasion of mirth and delight to the
spectators.
But these boys are not the masquers. In the forewords of his
next masque—The Masque of Queens—Jonson calls them 'an
anti-masque of boys'; but his first conception of them made them
a dance of antics, who perform no true measures but a 'revel' of
‘ridiculous gesture. ' A dance of antics, in which the performers
wore absurd or monstrous masks, was not unknown in Elizabeth's
time? This, however, means only that Jonson does not reach a full
realisation of the antimasque until The Masque of Queens. The
torch-bearing Cupids of The Masque of Beauty, the contrast
between this and The Masque of Blacknesse, the contrast of the
two sets of masquers in the masque Hymenaei, and, finally, the
twelve boys in antic attire of The Hue and Cry after Cupid, are
the gradual steps by which the idea of the antimasque was reached
in Jonson's mind. After the dance of the twelve boys, Cupid is
about to explain what he has been doing when Hymen intervenes
and introduces the king to Venus as the modern pius Aeneas,
relating how the bridegroom of this great wedding has saved
his monarch's life, and expatiating upon the virtues of the bride.
Venus is further overwhelmed by the appearance of Vulcan, at
whose command, the red cliff at the end of the hall is cloven
apart, revealing the wonderful globe in which are the masquers
as the twelve signs of the zodiac. All the twelve are ingeniously
explained as
Sacred powers
That are presiding at all nuptial hours.
Inasmuch as in the 18th book of the Iliad, Vulcan's gifts for
Thetis were 'twenty tripods or stools with golden wheels to move
of themselves miraculously,' Jonson, regarding this passage 'a
most elegant place and worthy the tenth reading,' makes the
dances of the masquers signify the magic stools of Vulcan. Two
Cyclopes, as the masquers danced, beat a time to them with
their hammers. ' An epithalamion of seven verses comes at the
end ; and, this time, the poet insured the recitation of the whole
1 In Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber there is a merry antique showe,
in which four antics dance (Collier's edition, pp. 31—34).
? At the time of the Gowrie conspiracy.
3 The bride was lady Elizabeth Radcliffe, danghter of the earl of Sussex.
6
## p. 348 (#366) ############################################
348
Masque and Pastoral
of it by the device of putting four dances by his masquers
'full of elegancy and curious device' between the verses. "The
two latter dances were made by Master Thomas Giles, the two
first by Master Hier. Herne,' who were the Cyclopes. "The tunes
were Master Alphonso Ferrabosco's. The device and act of the
scene Master Inigo Jones's. ' The epithalamion is a noble lyric,
which prepares our ears for the more wonderful music of Milton.
Again and again, in the verse of Jonson's masques, we find work-
manship afterwards elaborated and improved upon by Milton,
between whom and the Elizabethans Jonson is the true link.
His ardour and idealism prepare us for the deeper spiritual
sublimity of the puritan poet. These two wedding masques have
a special charm of their own, and the second of them is the finest
of its kind in the language.
We come now to The Masque of Queens—the third masque
written for queen Anne-in which, as we have said, the idea of the
antimasque is fully reached by Jonson and definitely stated by
him in his commentary. It was presented at Whitehall on
2 February 1609, and immediately printed by prince Henry's com-
mand. The dedication to the prince is worthy of comparison with
the dedication, two years earlier, of Volpone to the universities.
The same lofty note is struck ; 'poetry, my lord, is not born with
every man, nor every day’; and the poet goes on to explain that
because 'the nobility of the invention should be answerable to
the dignity' of the persons taking part in the masque, he
chose the argument to be A celebration of honourable and true Fame, bred
out of Virtue, observing that rule of the best artist 1, to suffer no object of
delight to pass without his mixture of profit and example.
This combination of the moralist and idealist is characteristic of
Jonson in all his art, but it forms the very soul of his masques
and gives meaning and dignity to all their glitter and mechanism.
He now gives us his definition of the antimasque.
And because her majesty (best knowing that a principle part of life in
these spectacles lay in their variety) had commanded me to think on some
dance or shew that might precede hers and have the place of a foil or false
masque, I was carefula to decline, not only from others, but mine own
steps in that kind, since the last year I had an anti-masque of boys; and
therefore now devised that twelve women in the habit of hags or witches,. . .
the opposites to good Fame, should fill that part; not as a masque but as a
spectacle of strangeness.
8
1 Horace's maxim is meant, Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, Ars Poet.
343.
2 Fleay is certainly right in explaining «Careful to decline' as='afraid of de-
clining' (English Drama, vol. 11, p. 4). See Careful, 5,' in Oxford Dictionary.
6
## p. 349 (#367) ############################################
The Masque of Queens 349
To make a band of witches the foil or opposite of a band of
heroines is a striking thought, and interesting from the light it
throws upon the general conception of the witch in Jacobean
times. The idea took a strong hold of Jonson's mind and, in
his masque, he worked it out with energy. The witches of the
masque hold their own beside even the weird sisters of Macbeth.
They are the witches of popular superstition, and Jonson's excep-
tionally elaborate annotations show the close agreement between
these superstitions in ancient and modern times. Jonson's witches
with a kind of hollow and infernal music came forth' from 'an
ugly Hell. ' There were eleven, with their dame. After a dance,
each one relates her misdeeds to the dame, who proposes that
they shall try to blast with their wicked incantations the glory of
the masque that is beginning :
Darken all this roof
With present fogs: exhale Earth's rot'nest vapours,
And strike a blindness through these blazing tapers.
They fall into 'a magical dance, full of preposterous change and
gesticulation? ' The loud music of the real masque interrupts
them, driving the witches back into hell and disclosing the mag-
nificent house of Fame in which the twelve true masquers are
seated. Heroic Virtue, 'in the furniture of Perseus,' explains the
heroines, who are twelve great queens, beginning with Penthesilea
and ending with Bel-Anna. The lyric at the close, “Who Virtue
can thy power forget,' influenced the ending of Comus. In
the witch scene, Jonson's wonderful power of specialising as a
dramatist—of 'getting up' a particular trade, or profession—is
shown to perfection. Elsewhere, we occasionally miss in him the
fire of imagination required for blending the accumulations and
observation of his intellect into a vitally artistic product; but, in
the present instance, his imagination is at its height, and he puts
out his full strength. The third charm conveys powerfully the
horrid thrill that was the soul of the witch superstitions, and that
depended for its force upon all things ugly and foul in nature.
The owl is abroad, the bat, and the toad,
And so is the cat-a-mountain,
The ant and the mole sit both in a hole,
And the frog peeps out o' the fountain;
1 It must have been impressive. The witches do all things at their meetings
'contrary to the custom of men, dancing back to back, and hip to hip, their hands
joined and making their circles backward, to the left hand, with strange fantastic
motions of their heads and bodies. All which were excellently imitated by the maker
of the dance, Master Hierome Herne. '
## p. 350 (#368) ############################################
350
Masque and Pastoral
The dogs they do bay and the timbrels play,
The spindle is now a turning;
The moon it is red, and the stars are fled,
But all the sky is a burning :
The ditch is made and our nails the spade,
With pictures full, of wax and of wool;
Their livers I stick with needles quick;
There lacks but the blood, to make up the flood,
Quickly, Dame, then bring your part in,
Spur, spur, upon little Martin1.
Jonson, having reached a clear idea of the antimasque, did not go
back upon it. But this antimasque quite eclipses its masque.
The queens are mere wax-works after the witches. Jonson's
imagination concentrated itself upon the first half of his work.
Perhaps he left it to Inigo Jones to supply, by the magic of his
scenery, the necessary contrast ; in Jonson's own work, certainly,
this is not done. If the second part had been carried out with
the imaginative intensity of the first, this masque would have
formed the prototype of an artistic species of great and enduring
significance.
In 1610, Daniel supplied the masque for the court, and his
Tethys' Festival shows no advance upon The Vision of the Twelve
Goddesses. In 1611, Jonson is again at work: on 1 January
1611, he produced Oberon at Whitehall for prince Henry, and, in
the beginning of February, Love freed from Ignorance and Folly
for queen Anne. Oberon is
Oberon is a most delightful masque.
The
opening is written in dainty octosyllabic verse and elaborates into
a charming antimasque the part of the satyr in the entertainment
already described. This antimasque made a distinct impression
upon the literature of the day? Oberon may be taken as an
almost perfect example of the first kind of Jonsonian masque,
in
which the antimasque is not so much ‘a foil or false masque' as an
antic-masque, something lighter and less dignified than the main
masque, but in keeping with it rather than in contrast, and not
yet, in any true sense, dramatic. The grace, balance and finish of
the whole composition are beyond praise. Unfortunately, this is
the last masque annotated by Jonson for the 1616 folio; his notes
stop in it halfway, before he reaches prince Oberon. The only later
masque which he annotated was The Masque of Augures, specially
printed as the first masque presented in the new banqueting hall
1
1 Their little Martin is he that calls them to their conventicles. They find him in
the shape of a great buck goat upon whom they ride to their meetings. '
2 See Reyher, Les Masques Anglais, p. 324. It is conjectured that the three dancers
of The Winter's Tale, act iv, sc. 4, 329, had been among Jonson's satyrs.
## p. 351 (#369) ############################################
Jonson's Development of the Presenter 351
at Whitehall. Love Freed is a companion piece to Oberon, but
inferior to it in conception and workmanship.
If January 1612 be the date of Love Restored, it is important
for the student of the masque.
Jonson innovated again on
previous practice. The masque proper is preceded, not by an
antimasque, but by a scene of excellent comedy. The scene is
the development in a new style of the part of the presenter, and
still gives to that character the larger part of the dialogue, which
is in prose. Just as the satyr of the first entertainment was the
germ of the antimasque of Oberon, so the prose of Pan and his
dialogue with Mercury in the second entertainment may have
prompted this scene. The king and court being ready, Masquerado
enters to declare that there can be no masque, 'the rogue play-
boy, that acts Cupid, is got so hoarse, your majesty cannot hear
him half the breadth of your chair. ' But Plutus, 'as Cupid,' here
interrupts, ordering Masquerado off. What makes this light,
feathered vanity here? Away, impertinent folly! Infect not this
assembly. Plutus objects to the expense of the masque: 'I tell
thee, I will have no more masquing ; I will not buy a false and
fleeting delight so dear: the merry madness of one hour shall not
cost me the repentance of an age. ' But, here, Plutus is interrupted
in his turn by Robin Goodfellow, who is aghast at the news of
there not being any masque. He declares,
I am the honest plain country spirit, and harmless; Robin Goodfellow, he
that sweeps the hearth and the house clean, riddles for the country maids,
and does all their other drudgery, while they are at hot-cockles: one that
has discoursed with your court spirits ere now; but was fain to-night to run
a thousand hazards to arrive at this place: never poor goblin was so put to
his shifts to get in to see nothing.
Plutus will not listen : 'Your rude good-fellowship must seek
some other sphere for your admitty. ' Robin's answer is a triumph
of comic description. It puts before us all the crush and crowding,
all the tricks and pretences, which were a part of the fierce
competition to get a place at these great court masques. Robin
has been hit over the head by the porter, and shoved off a ladder
by one of the guards; then he tried the carpenters' way,' but
'the wooden rogues let a huge trap-door fall on my head. ' He
thought of getting in in a trunk, 'but that I would not imitate
so catholic a coxcomb as Coryat. ' So he tried disguises. 'I was
an engineer and belonged to the motions'; then, 'an old tire-
woman’; then,'a musician-marry, I could not shew mine instru-
ment and that bred a discord’; then,
6
a
## p. 352 (#370) ############################################
352 Masque and Pastoral
a feather-maker of Blackfriars, . . . but they all made as light of me, as of my
feathers; and wondered how I could be a Puritan, being of so rain a---
vocation; I answered, We are all masquers sometimes.
At last, 'with my broom and my candles,' he was himself, 'and
came on confidently, giving out I was a part of the Device. ' This
admirable speech exhibits Jonson's comic power in its most genial
and, therefore, most delightful vein. When Plutus goes on pro-
testing against the expense of masques as “superfluous excesses,'
Masquerado and Robin detect him for an impostor— Plutus, the god
of money, who has stolen Love's ensigns. At this point, the real
Cupid enters in his chariot 'guarded with the Masquers, in number
ten,' who, says Cupid, were 'the spirits of courts and flower of
men. ' But, here again, the masque, as it has come down to us, is
quenched by its antimasque. That antimasque, quite frankly, is a
dramatic scene, although the long harangue of Robin Goodfellow
may be called only a modification of the presenter's oration, and
the colloquy is suggested rather by what was customary at an
entertainment than by the new idea of the antimasque.
In Jonson's remaining masques, there are many similar scenes,
and they are all admirable. But their right to a place in the
masque may be called in question. They represent the intrusion
of drama into masque, and it may be contended that Jonson
never succeeds in evolving a type of masque which really absorbs
them. The plays of Aristophanes afford an example on the
grandest scale of the kind of artistic product that is aimed at,
and Jonson, in the scene we have just criticised and in other
places in his masques, is Aristophanic in his combination of robust
naturalism with imaginative fancy. Another consideration must
be kept in mind. The masquers themselves were always the
highest notables of the land, and, therefore, of course, amateurs
in everything but dancing. The nobleman could dance exquisitely,
but he might not act. This fact, of itself, prevented the develop-
ment in a dramatic direction of the real masque. But the
presenters and the allegoric personages who explained the masque
were, usually, professionals, and the antimasque, when it came, was
performed very largely by professionals. This is why the develop-
ment of the antimasque in a dramatic direction was easy, and why
the real coherence of masque and antimasque when the dramatic
element intruded was impossible.
The development of the Jonsonian masque is now complete,
although we have not yet considered half his work. Broadly
speaking, there are two types of Jonsonian masque : the masque
a
## p. 353 (#371) ############################################
Thomas Campion
353
proper, in which the antimasque is a foil to the masque; and the
;
masque improper, in which the antimasque is a dramatic scene.
But the masque proper may be said to include two species ; that
in which the antimasque is an antic-masque, and that in which it
is a true foil or opposite of the masque.
The date 1612, which we have now reached, offers a suitable
occasion for considering shortly the work of certain other masque
writers, since Jonson wrote no masque for the January and
February of 1613.
The death of prince Henry in November 1612 plunged the
nation into great grief. Nevertheless, in three months' time, it
welcomed, as an excuse for throwing off its gloom, the marriage
of the princess Elizabeth to the elector Palatine. The festivities
on this occasion were of an unparalleled magnificence and cost.
It was arranged that, on the evening of the wedding, being Sunday
14 February, the courtiers should present the first masque, known
since as The Lords Masque, and written by Thomas Campion,
and that, on the two following evenings, the inns of court should
present masques. So exhausted were the king and court generally
by the elaborate proceedings, that the third masque had to be put
off till the 20th of the month. The second masque-The Masque
of the Middle Temple and Lyncolnes Inn—was written by George
Chapman, and the third—The Masque of Grayes-Inne and the
Inner-Temple-by Francis Beaumont. Jonson said to Drummond
that 'next himself only Fletcher and Chapman could make a
masque? ' Probably, he had Beaumont's masque in his mind, as
we have no record of a masque by Fletcher. But Campion, rather
than either Chapman or Beaumont, deserves the next place
longo intervallo to Jonson? The Lords' Masque has an anti-
masque of 'Frantics. ' These are such characters as the lover,
the self-lover, the melancholic man, the schoolman overcome with
fantasy, the over-watched usurer, with others that made an absolute
medley of madness. These ‘Lunatics' danced 'a mad measure
fitted to a loud fantastic tune,' after which the music changed
to a solemn air, which drove out the 'Frantics. ' Prometheus
displays eight stars shining and dancing—a kind of second anti-
masque of stars. "The stars moved in an exceeding strange and
delightful manner, and I suppose few have ever seen more neat
artifice than Master Inigo Jones shewed in contriving their motion. '
6
1 Jonson's Conversations with Drummond (ed. Laing, D. ), p. 4. It is curious that
Jonson gives The Faithfull Shepheardesse to Fletcher and Beaumont.
? For a general account of Campion's life and work, see ante, vol. IV, chap. vm.
E, L. VI. CH. XIII.
23
## p. 354 (#372) ############################################
354
Masque and Pastoral
Campion's own songs, which accompany the scenic effects, have
that special charm of melody and natural grace which make his
lyrics more than any other man's typically Elizabethan. The
stars, vanishing, become the eight masquers, 'in their habits,
which were infinitely rich, befitting states' To accompany these
knights, sixteen pages, 'like fiery spirits, break from the earth
with torches, and 'The Torchbearers' Dance' follows, making the
second antimasque. When the time came for the masquers to
take partners from the audience, 'first of all the princely bride-
groom and bride were drawn into these solemn revels. The revels
are interrupted by a second 'set-piece' of elaborate splendour, from
which a ‘high vast obelisk dedicate to Fame' is drawn out by Sybilla,
who, in choice Latin verse, prophesies prosperity to the wedded pair
It will be seen, from this imperfect summary of a masque
remarkable for its elaboration, that Campion depends more
upon Inigo Jones than does Jonson. Jonson instinctively feels
for some situation which he must explain and which has in it
a logical development involving some slight dramatic interest;
Campion merely adorns the stage carpenter's ingenuities with
beautiful songs and poetic recitative. Nevertheless, Campion's
songs are very charming, and his masque has a poetic beauty in
its conceptions as sweet and splendid as any of Jonson’s. But
it does not join to poetic beauty his moral impressiveness ;
melody and beauty are the ingredients of Campion's magic. We
may add that Campion's account of his work is written in prose of
which the ease and charm are not less remarkable than are the
vigour and exactitude of that of Jonson's notes; while, in his
references to his fellow workers, Campion reveals himself as
a man of a generous personality, eager to praise his friends.
His three masques and single entertainment survive, as they
deserve; they are all of them remarkable for the melody of their
lyrics and the beauty of their conception. He would stand beside
Jonson as a masque writer if he had written as many masques.
Chapman's masque is in pleasant contrast to Campion's. It is
full of semi-dramatic matter and of quaint, picturesque, fantastic
detail quite different from the purely beautiful detail of the first
masque. It is interesting, also, because the cavalcade or procession
from the rendezvous in Chancery lane to Whitehall was a special
1 i. e. noblemen, as these all were.
2 The gist is :
Additur Germaniae
Robur Britannicum : ecquid esse par potest?
## p. 355 (#373) ############################################
6
Chapman as a Masque Writer
355
attraction of the show, and is carefully described by Chapman.
The masque is very topical. It is founded, mainly, upon the
current interest in the attempt to colonise Virginia', the chief
masquers being Indian princes, while their attendant Phoebades,
or Virginian priests of the sun, form a second antimasque.
The first antimasque satirises the globe-trotting propensities of
Englishmen. The main items of the cavalcade were, first, a mock
masque of Baboons horsed with asses and dwarf palfreys, with
yellow foot cloths, casting cockle-de-moys about in courtesy by
way of largesse’; then, in a car, the twelve Phoebades, 'chief
musicians of our kingdom’; then, the twelve chief masquers riding
in Indian habits, as Virginian princes; and, finally, another car
driven by Capriccio with Honor and Plutus on the top, and their
attendants Eunomia and Phemis beneath them. Capriccio, who
has a pair of bellows on his head, describes himself as a 'man of
wit'; he is a parallel figure to Jonson’s Fencer in Pan's Anni-
versarie or to his Christmas in The Masque of Christmas, where
a single character takes the part of a presenter. When the hall
is finally reached, he has a lively opening dialogue with Plutus“,
who replies to his contemptuous invective:
Sinful ? and damnable? What, a Puritan? Those bellows you wear on
your head shew with what matter your brain is puffed up, Sir; a religion-
forger I see you are and presume of inspiration from these bellows; with
which ye study to blow up the settled government of kingdoms.
Chapman spells 'antemasque' with an e and speaks of his prose
dialogue as a 'low induction’; his baboons' dance, he tells us, was
'anticke and delightful.
' His conception of the antimasque, there-
fore, makes it rather like the farce in a modern theatre. It is
to be noted, also, that his torchbearers have a dance—they de-
scended and performed another antemasque dancing with torches
lighted at both ends. ' Chapman's work, obviously, is influenced
by Jonson ; but he has not grasped the principles of balance and
composition which his master employs. It is delightful, however,
to find him in his explanatory narrative echoing exactly Jonson's
arrogant note. He inserts a page to answer certain insolent
objections made against the length of my speeches and narrations,
in which he shews himself the true mate of Ben, the only other
Elizabethan who matches his pride in his poetic craft.
Already, in Eastward Hoe (act in, so. 2), Chapman puts into the mouth of captain
Seagull a graphic account of Virginia's wonders.
% There seems here a clear reference to the Plutus of Jonson's Love Restored (ante,
p. 351).
* Cf. ante, chap. II.
6
23—2
## p. 356 (#374) ############################################
356
Masque and Pastoral
Beaumont's masque is a worthy third to the first two. The Inner
Temple and Gray's inn made Winchester house, on the south bank
of the river, their rendezvous, and their procession was by water.
Unfortunately, Beaumont does not describe this with the fulness
with which Chapman describes the cavalcade by land of the previous
night; but we know, from other sources, that it was very elaborate.
The gentleman-masquers “were placed by themselves in the King's
royal barge, with the rich furniture of state, and adorned with
a great number of lights, placed in such order as might make the
best show. ' They were ‘led by two Admirals,' and a multitude
of barges and galleys attended upon them, 'with all variety of land
music and several peals of ordnance. ' The king and the prince
and the newly married couple watched the landing at Whitehall;
but the hall of the palace was found to be too small for the
performance. This is the reason Beaumont gives for the postpone-
ment till Saturday. We learn, however, from a private letter, that
the king's fatigue was the real cause of the delay:
Sir Francis Bacon ventured to entreat his Majesty that by this disgrace
(i. e. the postponement) he would, as it were, bury them quick: and I hear the
king should answer, that they must bury him quick, for he could last no
longer.
But the masquers were reconciled to the delay by getting
permission to use the banqueting house instead of the hall on
Saturday.
Beaumont's masque is remarkable for the high quality of its
blank verse, which has in it a hint of Miltonic music, and for the
beauty of the lyrics, which, however, are few and short. The words
of the masque are quite subordinate to the elaborate music, dances
and scenic effects. Beaumont is at
Beaumont is at pains to point out that his
antimasque is ‘not of one kind or livery (because that had been so
much in use heretofore) but as it were in consort like to broken
music. ' This innovation tended further to disintegrate the masque
and break it up into a variety entertainment. For the second
antimasque, Iris, ‘in token that the match shall likewise be blessed
with the love of the common people, calls to Flora to bring in
'a May dance or rural dance, consisting likewise not of any
suited persons,' but of a pedant, May lord, May lady; servingman,
chambermaid; a country clown, country wench; a he-baboon,
she-baboon; a he-fool, she-fool; these rush in, dance their
measure and as rudely depart. The music was extremely
well fitted,' says Beaumont; 'but the perpetual laughter and
i Persons dressed alike.
9
6
## p. 357 (#375) ############################################
Dramatic Element in Jonson's Masques 357
:
applause was above the music. ' The king was so pleased that he
called for the second antimasque again at the end, and, also, for
the first, but one of the statues by that time was undressed. '
We have now to notice in Jonson's work the rapid growth
of dramatic interest. Passing over the graceful and original
A Challenge at Tilt and the realistic The Irish Masque, both
produced in December 1613, we find that, for four successive years,
Jonson wrote the Twelfthnight masque at court and, in 1617, added a
second, produced in February, as well as The Masque of Christmas,
of the previous 25 December. Mercury Vindicated from the
Alchemists, 1615, is the first of these. The antimasque, broadly, is
in the style of Love Restored. Mercury delivers two admirable
addresses in prose, worthy of a place beside the harangues of
Robin Goodfellow. The scene is 'a laboratory or alchemists'
work-house, Vulcan looking to the registers,' with a Cyclope tending
the fires. The Cyclope begins with a beautiful song, 'Soft, subtile
fire, thou soul of art. ' Mercury then peeps out ‘at the tunnel
of the middle furnace, whereupon Vulcan cries to hold him-
'Dear Mercury! Help. He flies. He is scaped. Precious golden
Mercury, be fixt: be not so volatile ! ' Mercury, after running
once or twice about the room, takes breath,' and begins a long
relation of his troubles-
a
Now the place and goodness of it protect me. . . . I will stand close
up anywhere, to escape this poult-footed philosopher, old Smug here of
Lemnos, and his smoky family. . . . The whole household of them are
become Alchemists.
The comic invention of this opening is in Jonson's happiest vein ;
and Mercury's speech worthily maintains it. In his masques,
Jonson's prose is more uniformly strong and distinguished than his
verse, and has not received the attention it merits. Mercury re-
counts all he has suffered:
It is I, that am corroded, and exalted, and sublimed, and reduced, and
fetched
over, and filtered, and washed, and wiped; what between their salts
and their sulphurs, their oils and their tartars, their brines and their vinegars,
you might take me out now a soused Mercury, now a salted Mercury, now a
smoaked and dried Mercury, now a powdered and pickled Mercury: never
herring, oyster, or cucumber past so many vexations.
And his account of what the alchemists claim to perform comes to
an excellent climax :
They will lay you an old courtier on the coals like a sausage, or a bloat
herring, and after they have broiled him enough, blow a soul into him with a
pair of bellows, till he start up into his galliard, that was made when Monsieur
was here.
1
## p. 358 (#376) ############################################
358
Masque and Pastoral
There are two antimasques : one, 'a troop of threadbare Alche-
mists'; and the second, a troop 'of imperfect creatures with helms
of limbecks on their heads, which Vulcan and his alchemists by
their art have created. These ridiculous monsters' vanish at
‘
Mercury's command, and a glorious bower appears in which are
Nature, Prometheus and the twelve masquers. The lyrics are
melodious, but short, and their effect in the reading is insignificant,
after the vigorous life of the first scene.
The Golden Age Restored, of 1 and 6 January 1616, goes back
to the lyrical style. It is a graceful and beautiful conception,
but not very fully reported. For next Christmas, Jonson wrote
The Masque of Christmas, which Fleay says was 'not a mask
proper. ' By the allusions to Burbage and Heminge, we gather
that it was acted by the king's players, and, consequently, there is
no real masque—it is all antimasque, and, in style and form, very
like the opening of Love Restored. Christmas takes the place of
Robin Goodfellow as presenter, but is not allowed speeches of
such length. Nowhere in our literature is the old merry Christmas
more graphically put before us : 'I am old Gregory Christmas
still, and though I come out of Pope’s-head alley, as good a
Protestant as any in my parish. ' He has brought a masque of
his own making, ‘and do present it by a set of my sons, that
come out of the lanes of London, good dancing boys all'. . .
'Bones o bread, the King ! ' (seeing James). His sons and
daughters enter, ten in number, ‘led in, in a string, by Cupid, who
is attired in a flat cap and a prentice's coat, with wings at his
shoulders. ' The family are, Misrule, Carol, Minced-Pie, Gambol,
Post and Pair, New-Year's-Gift, Mumming, Wassel, Offering and
Baby-Cake. Each has his torchbearer, and Jonson's magnificent
knowledge of English ways and manners finds delightful scope in
their attire, which is succinctly described. In place of the usual
elegant lyrics, we have a rollicking song, sung by Christmas to
drum and fife; but, before this can be delivered, there is a short
scene of comedy. 'Venus, a deaf tire-woman' presents herself;
she is Cupid's mother ; she dwells in Pudding lane ; 'yes, I can sit
anywhere, so I may see Cupid act; I had him by my first husband,
he was a smith, forsooth, we dwelt in Do-little-Lane then. ' "Will
you depart,' says Christmas, impatiently;
Ay, forsooth he'll say his part, I warrant him, as well as e'er a play-boy of
e'm all. I could have had money enough for him, an I would have been
tempted, and have let him out by the week to the King's players. Master
Burbage has been about and about with me, and so has old Master Hemings
too.
## p. 359 (#377) ############################################
The Masque of Christmas
359
The old dame has to be silenced by the drum, but a slight delay
occurs because some of the properties are forgotten—Mumming
has not bis vizard neither. ' 'No matter! his own face shall serve
for a punishment, and 'tis bad enough. ' Misrule's suit is too
small! The players have lent him one too little, on purpose
to disgrace him. ' The song has eighteen verses, which give the
names and addresses of the masquers :
Next in the trace, comes Gambol in place;
And to make my tale the shorter,
My son Hercules, tane out of Distaff-lane ;
But an active man and a porter.
It is the first purely humorous lyric with which we have met '
in a masque, and it smacks of the soil, or, to speak more exactly,
of the street. It is banged out on the drum with glorious energy,
and, when we are breathless with the speed of it, Cupid is called
upon to say his piece; but his mother interrupts and puts him out,
80 poor Cupid breaks down ignominiously and has to be taken
away, Venus exclaiming, “You wrong the child, you do wrong
the infant, I 'peal to his Majesty. It was, perhaps, the knowledge
that his work was to be acted by skilled professionals that
inspired Jonson in this fascinating little sketch. It has to be
confessed that, when the dramatist in Jonson gets to work in his
masques, we obtain results worth more as literature than all the
non-dramatic lyrics and descriptive verse. And Jonson's humour
in his masques is without the acrid, scornful element which, in
his great plays, too often obtrudes itself. In this little show, he
is with Shakespeare and Dickens in the hearty kindliness of his
comic observation. On the Twelfthnight after this Christmas
day, The Vision of Delight was presented. It is a notable
masque, containing the beautiful lyric, ‘Break, Phant’sie, from
thy cave of cloud,' and, in remarkable contrast, the long speech
of Phant'sie in doggerel lines of four beats. There is no prose.
But we must pass it over, as, also, the interesting Lovers Made
Men', in order to mention Pleasure Reconciled to Vertue, pre-
sented Twelfthnight, 6 January 1618, because this masque supplied
Milton with the main idea of Comus.
It was prince Charles's first masque. The scene is the
mountain Atlas, 'who 'had his top ending in the figure of an
old man. From a grove at his feet, comes 'Comus, the god of
cheer or the Belly, riding in triumph,' with one in front bearing
1 Called, by Gifford, The Masque of Lethe.
## p. 360 (#378) ############################################
360
Masque and Pastoral
the bowl of Hercules. The companions of Comus begin with a
‘Hymn ; full chorus':
Room! room! make room for the Bouncing Belly
First father of sauce and deviser of jelly,
Prime master of arts, and the giver of wit,
That found out the excellent engine, the spit.
After nearly thirty lines in this style, the bowl-bearer speaks
a prose oration on the Belly, which introduces the first anti-
masque of 'men in the shape of bottles, tuns, etc. ' Hercules,
the 'active friend of virtue,' enters, to reclaim his bowl and
denounce Comus and his crew; 'Help, virtue! These are sponges
and not men. ' He drives them off, asking, 'Can this be pleasure,
to extinguish man? ' Then he lies down at the foot of Atlas, and
the pigmies forming the second antimasque steal in and try to steal
his club. At his rising, they run into holes, and Mercury descends
to crown Hercules with poplar, because he has 'the voluptuous
Comus, God of cheer, Beat from his grove, and that defaced. ' So
far, the idea is clear and well-balanced, and the moral that
pleasure must be the servant of virtue is expressed with an in-
tensity that, obviously, influenced Milton in his Comus. But it is
interesting to contrast the gross homely Comus of Jonson, the
Belly god, with Milton's dignified abstraction, and to note, that to
match his Comus, Jonson's dramatic instinct supplies, not Virtue,
but Hercules. There is fine poetry in the conception and workman-
ship of Jonson’s masque; but it loses coherence after the crowning
of Hercules. Hercules is told that, in James's court, the 'cessation
of all jars' between pleasure and virtue is to be found; and, as
a proof, twelve princes are brought forth, bred upon Atlas, 'the
hill of knowledge. ' These, led by prince Charles, are the true
masquers. The chaplain of the Venetian ambassador1 has described
the masque.
He says that, after many dances, the dancers began to flag,' whereupon
the King who is naturally choleric got impatient, and shouted aloud,“ Why
don't they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take you
all; dance ! ” On hearing this, the marquis of Buckingham, his majesty's
most favoured minion, immediately sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty
and very minute capers with so much grace and agility, that he not only
appeased the ire of his angry sovereign, but, moreover, rendered himself the
admiration and delight of everybody. The other masquers, being thus
encouraged, continued successively exhibiting their prowess with various
ladies; finishing in like manner with capers and by lifting their goddesses
from the ground. '
1 Rawdon Brown's translation, quoted in Harrison's England, Part 11, Forewords,
p. 58. (New Shakspere Society)
## p. 361 (#379) ############################################
Jonson's Later Masques
361
Finally, James, delighted at the grace of the prince's dancing,
kisses him affectionately, and pats the marquis on the cheek.
The king caused the masque to be repeated, but with additions. '
This, apparently, meant that his majesty did not appreciate
the opening part of the masque. Contemporary critics asserted
that Inigo Jones had lost his charm, and that Ben Jonson 'should
return to his old trade of brickmaking? ' Jonson, therefore,
rewrote it for its second performance on 17 February, making it
elaborately complimentary to Wales? . Mount Atlas now becomes
Craig-Ereri, and we have a dialogue between three Welshmen,
which, like the dialogue in The Irish Masque, is inferior in wit
and vigour, but curious for the Welsh-English. The Welshmen
criticise the first device of Hercules and the Comus rout-there
was a tale of a tub'—and the pigmies, and we have, instead, a
dance of men and a dance of goats—'the Welsh goat is an
excellent dancer by birth'-as antimasques, with songs in Welsh-
English; and then, apparently, the real masquers with their dances
and songs followed. Though the first part of Pleasure Reconciled
to Vertue seems to have been too serious for the taste of king
James, it was able to stir Milton to the composition of Comus.
A break now occurs in Jonson's masque writing. His journey
to Scotland took place in 1618, and Jonson was not in London
again till about May 1619. The new banqueting house at
Whitehall was burnt down on 12 January 1619. Queen Anne
died in March. Jonson's quarrel with Inigo Jones was in progress.
He produced no more masques till 6 January 1621, when the
court called upon him again, and the admirable Newes from the
New World discovered in the Moone was the first of a series of
eight masques, containing some of his best work and ending in
1625 before his paralytic stroke. Every one of these, except the
imperfectly reported Masque of Owls, contains dramatic work
that brings before us contemporary London life and manners, with
a lighter and easier touch than Jonson uses in his plays. In Newes
from the New World, the printer, the chronicler and the factor
allow us a glance, tantalisingly brief, at the lower walks of litera-
ture in London and the beginnings of the London press ; Neptune's
Triumph, in a witty dialogue between a cook and a poet, magnifies
the art of Jacobean cookery; the Fencer, in Pan's Anniversarie,
is an amalgamation of all the old gamesters who swaggered in
the Elizabethan fencing ring ; A Masque of the Metamorphos'd
1 Brent to Carlton, Cal. State Papers, Dom. vol.
Called, by Gifford, For the Honour of Wales.
XCV, p. 12.
## p. 362 (#380) ############################################
362
Masque and Pastoral
Gypsies, Jonson's longest masque, 'thrice presented to King James,
is an exhaustive study of gipsy manners and gipsy language,
wonderful for scope and minuteness. It contains the ribald song of
Cocklorrel, another song of the street, almost Aristophanic in lusty
vigour. The ballad of the bearward, John Urson, in the excellent
Masque of Augures, is another lyric of the same quality. This
lyric of the gutter is found cheek by jowl with the solemn Latin
notes about augurs as if to reveal to us the two sides of Jonson-
the schoolmaster and the street arab. Both characters in Eliza-
bethan London were endowed with a fuller humanity than their
modern representatives. There is no failure of poetical power in
these later masques.
Pan's Anniversarie and The Fortunate
Isles contain exquisite lyrical work, and there is hardly anywhere
in the masques a finer song than the last 'hunting chorus' of
Time Vindicated, with its characteristic ending
Man should not hunt mankind to death,
But strike the enemies of man;
Kill vices if you can:
They are your wildest beasts,
And when they thickest fall, you make the gods true feasts.
Two masques, in 1631, conclude his series. It would seem as if
Jonson's experience in 1618 convinced him that he could not rely
upon the contrast between the fantastic and poetic to hold the
attention of his audiences. Popular taste began to ask for sen-
sational antimasque, and the multiplication of these threatened to
reduce the masque to chaos. Jonson fell back upon the dramatic
scene as a means of compelling the interest of his audiences, and,
either by the wit of his comic invention or the truth of his comic
characterisation, succeeded nearly always in rising above mere
farce.
Jonson has been called a prose Aristophanes? In his masques,
.
taken as a whole, he may be recognised as more truly Aristophanic
than any other English writer. His serious lyrics are Horatian in
their restraint and classic dignity and have none of the splendour
of the imaginative choruses of Aristophanes. Nevertheless, in
the lyrical and descriptive parts of the masques, Jonson’s fancy,
elevated as it is by his moral intensity and his sense of the poet's
dignity, continually produces a total result which is more than
fanciful—which, in a high sense, is imaginative. But, on the side of
full-blooded humanity, of intense appreciation of the joy of life in
Jonson n'est pas seulement un Labiche ou un Scribe qui aurait du style ; c'est
pour ainsi parler, un Aristophane en prose, Castelain, Ben Jonson, p. 353.
## p. 363 (#381) ############################################
Masques under Charles I. Pastoral Poetry 363
the coarsest and commonest types, of wonderful knowledge of con-
temporary men and manners, Jonson matches even Aristophanes.
Moreover, in the rollicking energy of his lyrics of the gutter and
his long prose harangues, the challenging insolence and swagger
of the Aristophanic parabasis is more than suggested. Jonson's
gusto, his vigour and virility, are the most natural and unforced
part of his genius. They were cramped in the masque. They were
cramped even on the Elizabethan stage. An Athenian Dionysiac
festival might have given them scope. Jonson, therefore, expresses
this side of himself in his masques only in fragments, and cannot
be called Aristophanic unless his masques are taken as a whole.
Jonson, as a masque writer, had no successor. The two great
sensations of Charles's reign, Shirley's Triumph of Peace and
Carew's Coelum Britannicum, both produced in 1634, are aptly
characterised by Schelling : ‘as to form, Shirley's masque is chaos
in activity, Carew's chaos inert' D'Avenant's Salmacida Spolia,
in which the king and queen took part in 1640, has so large a
number of successive ‘entries' in the antimasque as to make it
very like modern pantomime.
esse.
But, in 1634, Comus was produced at Ludlow castle. We have
pointed out that Milton took suggestions from Peele’s Araygne-
ment of Paris and from Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,
but his main inspiration came from Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheard-
Comus must not be classed as a masque because there is no
disguising and no dancing. It is a species of outdoor entertain-
4, ment, and, therefore, akin to pastoral. There is a natural tendency
for the outdoor entertainment, if it be lengthy, to approximate to
the pastoral; and pastoral resembles the masque, because, by its
conventions, it is undramatic.
It may, therefore, not seem inappropriate to consider the pas-
toral drama along with the masque. The one is an offshoot of
the legitimate drama for indoor use, the other for outdoor. Both,
in the main, may be described as efforts made by amateurs to
y bring the theatre into their own halls or parks. But it is not
until the professed poet and dramatist come to the help of the
amateur that any great art results. Jonson and Milton, so far,
have been examples of this fact, which becomes even more apparent
when we turn to pastoral drama in its fullest manifestation.
Pastoral poetry is without a place among the greater forms of
literary art, because it is essentially a reaction. Its two motives
are a longing for simplicity of thought and feeling and a longing
## p. 364 (#382) ############################################
364
Masque and Pastoral
for country as opposed to town. This latter longing is innate in
man, because his original home was the field or the forest, and
is the soundest and best part of pastoral art. The desire for
simplicity, on the other hand, has in it an element of weakness
and disillusionment. The pastoral poet is not strong enough to
confront and master his own age and find in it the materials
for his poem; his own age is too complicated and sophisticated.
He, therefore, takes refuge in Arcadia-in an Arcadia of feeling
and thought, which has the defect of being visionary and unreal.
It is not the life the poet knows, but his refuge from that life.
The Elizabethan drama was so firmly rooted in present realities
of passion and thought that it swept pastoral poetry, for a time,
out of sight. The prose of Sidney and the verse of Spense
noble as they were, were superseded by the new art of drama, and
it was only after the dramatic impulse had spent itself that the
exhausted dramatists accepted pastoral as a sufficient exercise for
their energies.
Theocritus and Vergil are the two fathers of pastoral poetry.
Of the two, Theocritus is commonly preferred as less artificial than
Vergil. The clear, bright naturalism of Theocritus, which, in fact,
is the perfection of art, makes Vergil's Eclogues seem artificial; but
these must not be considered apart from his Georgics.
