Ben Jonson was the leading writer of courtly masques, the hybrid entertainments, part poetry and part spectacle, that flourished at the courts of James I and Charles I. Jonson's principal innovation in the genre was his development of the antimasque. The antimasque was an opening section of the performances featuring slightly relaxed decorum and providing a contrast with the elevated tone of the masque proper. To be acceptable, a formal innovation as important as the antimasque had to meet a great variety of demands that Jonson and his audience placed on this fragile art form. Though they were undeniably meant as entertainment, masques were designed to praise the sovereign, to confirm the legitimacy of the existing social order and to teach aristocratic audiences by entertaining them. It was a highly artificial and almost ephemeral form in which courtly decorum was doubly important because the royal family and the court were masquers as well as being members of the audience. Jonson, a bricklayer's stepson, took the form seriously and found in it a tremendous opportunity to advance his career, to employ his skills for a serious purpose and to practice his art by shaping a new medium. A comparison of some of Jonson's masques with and without antimasques demonstrates how the antimasque satisfied both the audiences' and Jonson's requirements.
This discussion centers on four of the masques Jonson wrote for James and his queen, Anne of Denmark. The first two are The Masque of Blackness (1605), which was Jonson's first, and The Masque of Beauty (1608), its thematic sequel. Neither of these masques features an antimasque, although Jonson had first experimented with antimasque elements in Hymenaei in 1606. The third is Oberon, the Fairy Prince (1611), Jonson's second work with a complete antimasque. The fourth selection, Lovers Made Men (1617), has no antimasque. By 1617, however, some features of the antimasque had become so i...