Exorcising the Gorgon of Terror: Jonson's Masque of Queenes

According to Ben Jonson, the sixteen-year-old Prince Henry of England asked him for an annotated version of The Masque of Queenes soon after it had been performed by the queen and her ladies at Whitehall on 2 February 1609.¹ Jonson in turn created a handwritten document for the Prince, carefully designing it to look like contemporary printed editions of the classical authors complete with footnotes and marginalia. The Masque of Queenes was printed later that year in quarto "to be sold at the Spred Eagle in Poules Church-yard. 1609."² Like Jonson's earlier masques, it became a public document soon after it was performed. On sale in the largest market for books at Saint Paul's Church, Jonson clearly aimed to reach a larger readership. In addition to the dialogue and speeches of the masquers, the text includes descriptions of the décor, choreography and music on the night of the performance.It also includes detailed footnotes about witchcraft and magic from Jonson's study of both ancient and contemporary sources and numerous asides, written after the performance, justifying the moral and aesthetic underpinnings of his poetic methods and choices.³

The print history of this text shows clearly that The Masque of Queenes is not the script of the masque performed at Whitehall. The holograph Jonson produced for Prince Henry is a retrospective view of the writer on the masque. So, instead of being read as a performance text, The Masque of Queenes needs to be read as the author's reflections on his own work after the performance. As such, the text offers a fascinating example of authorial reflexivity. It is striking, then, that scholars attempting to understand the "present occasions" of the masque borrow and quote from a post-performance text later published by the poet as his own work.⁴ By rewriting the masque in retrospect, Jonson assumes property rights to a collaborative effort, extracting the maximum benefit for his own literary posterity. We can never measure the exact nature and extent of what Jonson, in the preface to The Masque of Blacknesse, called his "later hand."⁵ The possibility must be considered that the writer modified the original script (of which we have no copy) or emphasized aspects of the scenario and even speeches suppressed in the original script. The holograph of The Masque of Queenes is at least a different and perhaps in part even a very consciously "differing" and "deferred" work from the original script used for the performance.⁶ I would argue that reading The Masque of Queenes as a retrospective, post-performance text will help illuminate a poetic fantasy constructed around fame and envy. In doing so, I hope to throw into relief the poetic stakes of this post-performance text, eclipsed in readings which emphasize the masque in performance and the centrality of the king or other centers of power at court.⁷

Jonson's dedication of The Masque of Queenes to Prince Henry may best be read as the author's negotiation with posterity rather than a piece of courtly flattery. Elsewhere, Jonson states that it was the Prince who asked him to dilate upon his own work: "His Highnesse command, to have me adde this second labor of annotation to my first of invention."⁸ Yet, the act of annotating the "original" masque and then publishing it in quarto was precisely what the author had done with his previous masques.⁹ Jonson writes that the Prince was "curious to examine her [Poetry] with your eye, and inquire into her beauties, and strengths."¹⁰ Yet, this description of the Prince's eye as "curious" more aptly describes the curious eye of the poet with regard to his own work, a curiosity that bordered on a kind of obsessional inquisitiveness concerning how his work would be received.The poet hopes that the Prince's approval of the poet's work will "decline the stiffeness of others' originall Ignorance, allready arm'd to censure" (39-41). Here, Jonson effectively enlists the Prince in the poet's ongoing battle against present...