Expenses for Ben Jonson's The Masque of Beauty

EXPENSES FOR BEN JONSON'S THE MASQUE OF BEAUTY Thomas W. Ross Thomas W. Ross (B.A., M.A., Colorado College; Ph.D., University of Michigan) is chairman of the English department at Colorado College. Mr. Ross served as NATO Visiting Professor at the University of Regensburg, Germany in 1969 and has edited Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy for the Fountainwett Drama Texts Series. Anne of Denmark, James I's queen, loved spectacle and ostentation. She was Ben Jonson's patroness for several of his masques, including The Masque of Beauty, which was presented in the new Banqueting House at Whitehall on 10 January 1608.1 We have always known that these works, performed for and by royalty, were cosdy entertainments. An official record of accounts, here reproduced for the first time, provides detailed evidence of just how outrageously expensive was a show like The Masque of Beauty.2 On 27 December 1607 the Venetian ambassador Giustiziani reported that the Queen was preparing a masque "at her own charges."3 Anne was notoriously and dangerously pro-Catholic and pro-Spain, and she used even this performance to make public her preferences. Ladies from the foremost English Catholic families were persuaded to appear.* The French ambassador was snubbed, the Spanish ambassador was invited, and thus Anne had her petulant and pernicious way. The Court of James was shot through witii religious fanaticism and 1BeI* Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 19251941 ), VII, 193. Subsequent references are to this edition (cited as H&S). 2TlIe document, a folio leaf with the Queen's signature at the bottom, is in the collection of royal autographs owned by Professor Mark Lansburgh of the Art Department and Curator of the Rare Book Room, Colorado College. It was obtained from a private dealer in 1964. Written in a clear secretary hand, it is in perfect condition except for a small stain in the lower right which obliterates a few letters and figures. However, the letters can be dependably conjectured, and are supplied in brackets, since they are a part of the accountants formulas. And the amounts of money can be safely guessed by casting Lord Knyvet's sums and making up the differences. The standard works on Jonson and the masque make no mention of the accounts recorded in this document, although H&S, X, 457 ff., reproduce entries from other official papers which include expenses (also very large) for the furnishing of the new Banqueting House. Entries from the document are reproduced faithfully, though abbreviations are silently expanded and the Roman numerals for the sums are translated into Arabic. I should like to express my gratitude to Professor Lansburgh for permission to publish the new data, and to my students Jack Berryhül, Janis Rosenthal, and James Schwanke for their help in preparing this paper. SH&S,X,455., „ *H&S, X, 458. In addition to the Queen, the participants included Lady Arabella Stuart (James's cousin); the Countess of Arundel, Derby, Bedford, and Montgomery; and Ladies Guildford, Peter, Winter, Windsor, Clifford, Nevill, Hatton, Gerard, Chichester and Walsingham. The List of Masquers and Tilters (H&S, X, 440 ff.) provides biographical information about all these amateur actresses. 170RMMLA BulletinDecember 1969 homosexuality. The trauma of the Gunpowder Plot, with its aftermath of restrictive statutes against the Catholics, did not prevent Anne (a fairly recent convert) from flaunting her papistic sympathies. On occasion, James himself was publicly tolerant, hoping for an eventual reunion with the Roman Church.5 Furthermore, he had recendy acquired a new minion, Robert Carr, who was married to a member of the Howard family, the most influential Catholics in the realm, and the Queen was learning "to acquiesce in her husband's ineradicable homosexuality."6 To make Anne's bad taste even more obvious, everybody knew that Jonson and Inigo Jones, who created the designs for the masque, were botii Catholics too.7 It is unlikely, therefore, that James was much concerned with a troupe of overdressed females who were to dance an accompaniment to Jonson's allegorical verse. The masque, with its ponderous neo-Platonic symbolism, was unexceptionably moral. But Anne used it to flatter the Catholic faction. "The King did not deny her what she wanted; the expenditure of the...