Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605-1640

by David Lindley, Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion

This selection of 18 masques offers a fascinating insight into the culture and politics of the early 17th century.

Genres: Drama

Paperback

First published August 1, 1984

About the author

David Lindley is a theoretical physicist and author. He holds a B.A. in theoretical physics from Cambridge University and a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Sussex. Then he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University.

Reviews

[David Sarkies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Basically a Collection of Puff Pieces
10 Aug 2022 – Rochester

I’m currently sitting in a cafe in Rochester called ‘The Dead Cat’, or at least I am while writing this, and drinking a nice cup of tea. Anyway, after about two years (according to the started reading reference on Goodreads) I have finally finished this book. Actually, half the reason it took me so long was because I was reading all of the masques individually and writing reviews on them. Okay, half the reason was to inflate the number of reviews I have written, but since I am up to something like 1700 books, I’m not sure if it matters all that much anymore. On the other hand, I’m certainly not the person on this site who has read the most books, or even wrote the most reviews, and even if I was, I doubt I’d get any prize.

Anyway, as you can probably guess from the title of this book, and also the multiple reviews that I have written, this is a collection of court masques that were written during the Jacobean and Carolingian periods. It turns out that most of them were written by Ben Jonson, but that is probably because he was one of the most famous playwrights during that era. Okay, there was Shakespeare but it seems that Ben Jonson’s fame took off after Shakespeare retired from public life. Also, Shakespeare didn’t appear to have written any masques, but I suspect that that might be because court masques were somewhat beneath him (though Jonson wrote some pretty good plays as well).

To put it simply a court masque is simply a puff piece for the king, or one of the nobles. They are nothing more or less. They were basically written for the patron, usually during some special event such as a marriage, or a return from a successful campaign aboard. Even the last masque in the book, which was produced and performed just before the English Civil War, was celebrating the fact that Charles had managed to somehow reach an agreement with the parliamentarians, though the suggestion from the masque is that Charles might not have been willing to concede all that much to his opponents.

Anyway, like a lot of plays, these are probably better to be seen performed, not that they are actually performed. However, I actually prefer reading plays as opposed to masques because with plays there certainly seems to be some ideas being tossed about, character building, and of course movement in the actions. Masques just seem to be a group of actors telling the patron how wonderful they are, and hoping that the patron will continue to throw some scraps their way. Mind you, it does bring to mind how different theatre was in the past, and how it happens to be today. For instance, most films, and even stage productions, advertise themselves based on the performers as opposed to the creators. Okay, there are some directors, and writers, that do stand out, but in general most of them sit in the background these days.

Back in the days of these masques, it was completely different – the actors were generally nobodies, and the theatre companies staked their reputation on that of their writers. The actors were not only replaceable, but also at the bottom of the pile, though of course some of the good ones could be guaranteed of having regular work. Back in these days, actors were not the superstars that they are today.