THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Bible-centred Puritanism of the Pilgrims demanded a rejection of a cornerstone of James’s idea of kingship, an
integrated union of the English state with the English Church through the person of the King himself and the bishops
appointed by him.
James’s son, who succeeded to the throne as Charles I in 1625, was the first English monarch to have been born
into the Church of England; he also proved to be its stoutest, and most extreme, defender. Charles’s attempt to extend
its ecclesiastical order and its liturgy to his northern Kingdom of Scotland began the long-drawn-out challenge to his
authority which ended in his trial and execution and in the abolition of ‘the Kingly Office’ itself by the English
Parliament. In December 1641 Charles had proclaimed the Church of England ‘the most pure and agreeable to the
Sacred Word of God of any religion now practised in the Christian World’ and declared that, if martyrdom were
required of him, he would be prepared to seal his profession of faith with his own blood. Charles and the chief
instrument of his ecclesiastical policy,
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Archbishop Laud, were both to end their lives on the scaffold after the failure of their strenuous attempts to assert the
principle of uniformity in the Church. In no period of British history has the disparity between an ideal of political
and spiritual order and the reality of dissent and disorder been so destructive of civil life and so productive of an
expressive and often partisan literature.
That James I and his son should have so rejoiced in the art of the masque is testimony to their desire to use
symbolic theatre in order to celebrate their belief in the divine appointment of earthly kings. For both, the union of the
Crowns of England and Scotland under the Stuarts betokened a restoration of the primitive kingdom of the mythical
Trojan, Brutus, from whom Britannia had derived its name. For both, a policy of European neutrality, and a
reconciliation with the old enemy, Spain, seemed to usher in a new era of peace, prosperity, and concord in which the
English court would outshine those of its Habsburg, Bourbon, Gonzaga, and Medici rivals. Its festivals symbolically
proclaimed the special providence that had brought Britain to its unique glory. The first of Jonson’s masques for
James, The Masque of Blacknesse of 1605, had proudly announced the distinctive destiny of ‘this blest isle’ which
had ‘wonne her ancient dignitie, and stile, | A world divided from the world’. For Jonson and his royal patrons the
masque form was a complex political statement of the highest order. Long before Wagner conceived of the idea of a
Gesamtkunstwerk (the total, or all-embracing, work of art) the masque was a fusion of poetry, scene-painting, music,
song, dance, stage-machinery, and elaborate costumes. These spectacles, mounted but once, or at most three times,
were also awesomely expensive to produce. The court spent the then phenomenal annual sum of £3,000 - £4,000 on
such entertainments and in 1634 James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace cost the Inns of Court no less than £20,000 in
an exorbitant attempt to counter Charles I’s displeasure at the veiled insult to his Queen published by one of their
members.
The special feature of the masque, as opposed to the public theatre, lay in its combination of amateur and
professional actors, or, more precisely, in its use of princely or aristocratic participants in the most prominent roles.
Not only was the entertainment centred on the monarch, and the audience drawn exclusively from the most favoured
members of the court, but the extravagantly costumed appearance of James’s consort, Anne of Denmark, or of Charles
I and his wife, as dancers or as embodied virtues was viewed as a proper extension of their nobility. The whole was
deemed to be a stately, dramatic exercise in ethics. Introducing his Hymenaei; or the Solemnities of Masque and
Barriers at a Marriage (1606) Jonson insisted that masque ‘hath made the most royall Princes, and greatest persons
(who are commonly the personators of these actions) not onely studious of riches, and magnificence in the outward
celebration, or shew (which rightly becomes them) but curious after the most high, and heartie inventions, to furnish
the inward parts’. The splendour of outward representation ideally testified to an instinctive inward virtue. Unmasked,
or bereft of a symbolic costume, the courtier-actor emerged with his or her courtly nobility
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aggrandized. That the masque demanded relatively little action was integral to its form. The involvement of Inigo
Jones, the first British architect and designer to share the sophistication of his Italian counterparts, in the most lavish
of the court entertainments meant that the sensational stage effects, such as the opening vistas, the ideal landscapes,
or the glimpses of celestial perfection through a representation of sublime architecture, became triumphant visual
statements of a mysterious interaction of earth and heaven.
Charles I’s last masques - Thomas Carew’s Coelum Britannicum (1634) and Sir William Davenant’s Britannia
Triumphans (1638), Luminalia (1638), and Salmacida Spolia (1640) - all offered dense allusions to the developing
political storm. In Carew’s fantasy the heroes of ancient Britain were joined by the King and Queen in what was both
a perfected vision of a glorious future and a lavish attempt to dispel the rising criticism of the reign. Salmacida
Spolia, contrived jointly by Davenant and Inigo Jones, stretched classical allusion even further. The fountain of