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The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Edited by DAVID BEVINGTON and PETER HOLBROOK. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv. + 335. Illus. $64.95 cloth.
Reveiewed by DAVID NORBROOK
The Jacobean masque used to be a backwater of literary history, of interest mainly as a context for the wedding masque in The Tempest. Prospero's "insubstantial pageants" had become such a cliche that it was easy to forget just how substantial such entertainments actually were. This was so both in their original courtly manifestations and in imitations of masques on the public stage. David Bevington points out that Prospero's "remark about 'thin air takes on a comic dimension when we visualize a chariot disappearing into the 'heavens,' perhaps with a disarranged Juno still aboard" (236).
It was Stephen Orgel who pioneered the argument that court masques were "substantial" in terms other than merely physical ones. In The Illusion of Power (1975), following up on his own earlier critical and historical studies, he used the masque as a key point in launching a new historicism, insisting that even apparently trivial social and artistic forms might have significant ideological content: that ideological content, indeed, was inseparable from its form. The power of the Stuart kings was theatrical, projected through images of authority. In much subsequent new-historicist writing the masque has effectively become the dominant form of Stuart culture, with the revelation of a hidden but potent royal authority as the subtext of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and any challenges to authority corresponding to the licensed and ultimately contained subversion of the antimasque.
The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque offers a series of...