Politics and Pageantry: The Renaissance Masque

Catalog description

Masques are the “forgotten genre” of English Renaissance drama, rarely appearing on syllabi or studied with the same frequency as works for the popular stage. Yet, during the first half of the 17th century, they exerted a political and artistic influence that arguably exceeds that of the plays that Shakespeare and company were staging at the Globe Theatre. Masques were bombastic entertainments performed for and by the Stuart court. They were studies in excess, with lavish sums spent upon well-documented costumes and scenery. They were commentaries on the state of things in England, where playwrights like Ben Jonson could speak directly (and critically) to the royalty themselves. They were avant-garde experiments, where creatives like the architect Inigo Jones could reinvent the visual style of theatre for centuries to come and where women—at least aristocratic women—could break ground by performing in dramatic roles at a time when male actors alone occupied the popular stage. In this course, we will dive into the hidden world of the early modern English masque. We will read and discuss Ben Jonson’s pioneering works that established many masque conventions, including The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Queens, and Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. We will discuss how masques offered a vehicle for dramatists to comment on current political affairs, colonial projects, and even salacious “true crimes” while reading George Chapman’s The Memorable Masque and John Milton’s innovative masque about chastity and liberation, Comus. Finally, we will encounter texts that reveal just how far these entertainments influenced literary culture more broadly. This will include Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which shows him trying to “keep up” with masque innovations, as well as Margaret Cavendish’s “The Contract,” a romance that details the complex traditions of attending masques—and the…