Copyright by Thomas Edward Lindsay 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Thomas Edward Lindsay Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: This Is Not Every Night: Space, Time, and Group Identity in the Jacobean Court Masque Committee: Eric S. Mallin, Co-Supervisor Hannah C. Wojciehowski, Co-Supervisor David D. Kornhaber James N. Loehlin Leah S. Marcus This Is Not Every Night: Space, Time, and Group Identity in the Jacobean Court Masque by Thomas Edward Lindsay, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2015 Dedication For my twin sister, Meg, and for my parents, Sam and Deb. Acknowledgements Thanks to the University of Texas at Austin and to the faculty and staff of the Department of English, especially Jamie Duke, Wayne Lesser, Patricia Schaub, Holly Schwadron, and Amy Douglas Stewart. Thanks to my team in the University Writing Center, especially Alice Batt, Brianna Hyslop, Vince Lozano, Trish Roberts-Miller, Michele Solberg, and Peg Syverson. Thanks to Alex Cho, Peter Hamilton, and Michael Roberts, for your ideas, encouragement, and elegant turns-of-phrase. Thanks to Matt Conway, for meeting me in the middle and sticking with me to the end. Thanks to my committee members, David Kornhaber, James Loehlin, and Leah Marcus, for your excellent insights and steady support. And thanks most of all to my co-supervisors and mentors, Eric Mallin and Hannah Wojciehowski, for giving me your time and your guidance, for believing in me, and for going with me when the going got rough. v This Is Not Every Night: Space, Time, and Group Identity in the Jacobean Court Masque Thomas Edward Lindsay, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Co-Supervisors: Eric S. Mallin and Hannah C. Wojciehowski This dissertation explores the relationship between space, time, dramatic narrative, and group identity in the Jacobean court masque. In early 17th century England, the court masque was a high-profile and multimodal seasonal event for the nation’s royal family and their court. Critics have recognized many of the ways the masque bonded this group together, but have not shown how its cohesive power manifested in individual masques. Following critical consensus, this dissertation first shows how all masque events, regardless of their particular elements and contexts, involved courtiers in embodied experiences of group inclusion, socio-political hierarchy, and royal favor. Next, in a series of case studies, this dissertation shows how three Jacobean masques tapped into these experiences in order to orient the court around various human centers, namely King James I, Queen Anna, Prince Henry, and Gentlemen of the royal Bedchamber. These case studies demonstrate how masques used dramatic narrative to engineer group experience and group identity, specifically by making meaning out their own socio-political realities in space and time. In general, then, this dissertation envisions the court masque as a highly self-referential form of participatory drama and social partying that worked to shape group identity by collapsing the court’s present realities into its socio-politically meaningful dramatic fictions. vi Table of Contents Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 The Court and the Masque in Space and Time ....................................19 Chapter 2 Hospitality, Empire, and Romance in The Masque of Blackness .........63 Chapter 3 Royalist Community in Oberon, the Fairy Prince .............................112 Chapter 4 Bedchamber, King, and Court in The Golden Age Restored .............163 Epilogue ...............................................................................................................219 References ............................................................................................................229 vii Introduction THIS IS NOT EVERY NIGHT On the night of New Year’s Day, January 1, 1611, the Jacobean court assembled in Whitehall’s Banqueting House to watch Prince Henry star in his first court masque. The court had been watching Henry participate in masques since his adolescence, but Oberon, the Fairy Prince was different.1 In earlier masques, Henry danced only in the social revels, after the events’ principal dancers finished their choreographed ballets.2 But in Oberon, he was a principal dancer in his own right. He was, in fact, the principal dancer, a singular star amongst a constellation of high-profile aristocratic performers, the fulcrum around which the masque’s drama and dancing revolved. In this way, Henry’s featured status within the masque reflected his new place within the Jacobean court. Roughly seven months prior, in May 1610, King James had created Henry as Prince of Wales, a formal position in England’s royal hierarchy that had not been occupied since Henry VIII was still heir. And Henry had embraced his position with gusto, forming an independent household, building a retinue of attendants and servants, and organizing networks of princely favor and patronage.3 Thus, as the court gathered in the Banqueting House before Oberon, they gathered to participate in something brand new, something inaugural, something they would never experience again: the debut masque for their 1 Ben Jonson, Oberon, the Fairy Prince, in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), cited hereafter in text by line number. 2 Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 77. 3 On the formation of Henry’s household, see Jean MacIntyre, “Prince Henry’s Satyrs: Topicality in Jonson’s Oberon,” in A Search for Meaning: Critical Essays on Early Modern Literature, ed. Paula Harms Payne (New York: Peter Lange Publishing, 2004), and Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (New York: Thames and Hundson, 1986), esp. 25-57. 1 king-to-be, a burgeoning nexus of social organization at court, England’s first Prince of Wales in roughly one hundred years. Appropriately, then, the masque expresses a sense of newness, singularity, and urgency when it sends Henry out to dance his first ballet. As Prince Oberon, Henry appears on stage amidst a scenic fairy palace and surrounded by a retinue of fairy musicians. When the time comes for him to descend to the Banqueting House dance floor, those musicians sing, “Then, princely Oberon, / Go on, / This is not every night” (321-23). Later in the masque, after Henry and his fellow masquers complete their first ballet, the singers are eager for them to continue: “Nay, nay,” they sing, “You must not stay, / Nor be weary yet” (328-29). And still later, after the second ballet, singers on stage declare that their dancing will keep the masque event from being overtaken by the coming day: Nor yet, nor yet, O you in this night blessed, Must you have will or hope to rest. If you use the smallest stay, You’ll be overta’en by day. (340-43) In response, Henry and his fellow dancers take out ladies for the event’s social revels, which continue for hours until the figure of Phosphorous appears to call the masque to a close: “To rest, to rest!” Phosphorous sings, “the herald of the day, / Bright Phosphorous, commands you hence” (362-65). In all these ways, Oberon celebrates Henry’s presence on the dance floor even as it glamorizes its own ephemerality. Its calls for more dancing are conventional and playful, as the court knows Henry and his fellows will keep performing even without prompting from the stage, but those calls also dramatize fundamental and meaningful facts: the masque is a special, seasonal, nighttime event meant for dancing, and it cannot last indefinitely. It is, as the singers say, “not every night.” And as a fiction of fleeting fairyland dalliance, it performs its own impermanent 2 nature in order to assert value for Henry, his dancing, and his new status within the court community. Oberon celebrates Henry with a fictional conceit of playful ephemerality, but simultaneously telegraphs to its audience that they are experiencing a new and ongoing reality. For instance, before Henry appears to dance, a Silenus and a group of young satyrs look forward to his arrival. “These are nights,” Silenus declares, Solemn to the shining rites Of the Fairy Prince and knights, While the moon their orgies lights. 2nd Satyr Will they come abroad anon? 3rd Satyr Shall we see young Oberon? 4th Satyr Is he such a princely one As you spake him long agone? Silenus Satyrs, he doth fill with grace Every season, every place; Beauty dwells but in his face: He is the height of all our race. … He is lovelier than in May Is the spring, and there can stay As little as he can decay. Chorus O that he would come away! 3rd Satyr Grandsire, we shall leave to play With Lyaeus now, and serve only Ob’ron? (41-64) Silenus’s messages about Henry’s immortality are hyperbolic, but his conversation with the satyrs expresses the prince’s very new and very real status at court, both in general and within the masque itself. For instance, Silenus alludes to the Prince’s investiture in “May” of the previous year and anticipates his presence on the Banqueting House dance floor, which he and his fellow masquers will “fill with grace” through dancing, and then “fill” with fellow courtiers during the social revels. In response, the satyrs playfully mirror the court’s present relationship with their new prince. Like the satyrs, onlookers 3 are also waiting for Henry to “come away,” as his dancing will constitute the event’s primary highlight and draw some of them onto the dance floor. And like the satyrs, who want to “serve only Ob’ron,” so too does the court look toward Henry as a new nexus of social organization, patronage, and favor.