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For six years, from 1604 through 1609, Jacobean court masques stage the bodies and the intentions of women. Four masques in those five years claim Queen Anne as patron, actor, and even author: The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Beauty, and The Masque of Queens. Beginning with Samuel Daniel's Vision, escalating through Ben Jonson's Queens, masques written in the name of the queen parade female bodies before the king, staging blackness, martiality, and the history of women's power. Anne herself appears in these productions as producer and star player, providing, according to Daniel and Jonson, not only patronage but representational conceits. This reiterated claim of her intervention, perhaps in itself an authorial conceit, has its own power nonetheless, for the alternative iconographies of the Jacobean queen's masque transform the figure of the queen. As King James's wife, Anne is marginalized in the political transactions of the Jacobean court, representing power once removed. The Jacobean queen's masque removes her instead to the stage, to a space in which female sovereignty, as dramatic fiction, may effect the disruption or displacement of male power. The space between the masque and its royal observer becomes a place of alternatives in which the queen's representations do not obviously defer--or refer--to the king.
Generic conceit suggests that the masque is contained in its referentiality, that women's power, acted onstage, might be resolved into Jacobean compliment. The display onstage is referred exclusively to the royal spectator: the king, occupying the best seat in the house, provides both the masque's justification and its ideal reader, leaving the rest of the audience at one remove from spectacular immediacy. Jonathan Goldberg, in James I and the Politics of Literature, argues for a direct correspondence between the celebration and its subject: "In its form, the masque provides a mirror, too, for it elucidates the spectacle that the king presents sitting in state. The mysteries of the masque reflect the monarch's silent state: the masque represents, the king."(1) King James watches that which he already embodies, and the masque, in these terms, is constructed through synecdoche, representing a kingy quality through each masquer's body and cumulatively staging a sovereign whole. Dramatic fiction finds its referent in the audience, creating continuity...