Four Masques by Ben Jonson
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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 Masq
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iew of the audience. Beauty was a necessary characteristic of women in the idealized world of the masque, and a major reason for the masques was "the beauty with which they [masques] adorned the lives of king and court" (Dundas 166). The choice of classical source material for the masques was based not just on the need for learned subjects, but on the fact that gods and goddesses were "the subject matter of beauty" (Dundas 167). The ideal figures of the gods, like the Queen herself, could not be in need of improvement. Yet, the entire point of the masque was that the daughters of Niger needed improvement, and the fact that they would receive it from James himself did not improve matters. By painting their faces, the Queen and her friends violated this basic rule of the masque.
This flaunting of convention has been seen by scholars as the Queen's deliberate response to her "domestic estrangement" from James (Aasand 279). In the masque, Anne is presented "as a marginal figure, an alien princess indelibly stamped with an inferior color and in search of social legitimacy in the Jacobean court" (Aasand 276). The blame for the transgressions of decorum in the masque can certainly be assigned to Anne. Once she had laid down her
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 5960
Approximate Pages = 24 (250 words per page)
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