"Your name shall liue / In the new yeare: as in the age of gold" Sir Thomas Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque, Performed at Knowsley Hall in 1641" and its Contexts

On Twelfth Night, 1641, James, Lord Strange, the future 7th Earl of Derby, and his wife Lady Charlotte de la Trémoille hosted a masque at Knowsley Hall, Lancashire. The principal masquer was Lord Strange's heir, Charles Stanley, and the masque itself was devised by Sir Thomas Salusbury, kinsman of the Stanleys, and head of a prominent family from North Wales in Lleweni, Denbighshire.¹ In Stuart England, the elite genre of the Stuart court masque was something of a hybrid dramatic form (see Butler, Stuart; Ravelhofer; Shohet; Knowles). David Lindley, tongue in cheek, described the court masque as "an elaborate framework for an aristocratic knees-up" (Lindley x). Martin Butler further reminds us that "the masque aimed to bind the court together, represent the monarch to the political nation at large and stimulate confidence in the values with which the monarch sought to have his government associated" (Stuart 20). As Julie Sanders has argued, the provincial or regional masque is of special interest as it demonstrates the "fluid interplay" or "flow" between "amateur and metropolitan sites of performance," encouraging us to ask how these site-specific texts "reconnect us in vital ways with the complex and dynamic geographies of performance" ("Geographies" 134–35).

Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque", which witnessed Lord Strange's children performing speaking roles, on one level smacks of amateur family dramatics, allowing us a rare glimpse into an intimate Derby family gathering. Yet, with prominent figures performing from leading North West families—such as the Molyneuxes of Sefton, Lancashire, and the Hoghtons from Hoghton Tower, Lancashire—one has to ask, how "private" was this event? This is especially pertinent as masquing roles were also played by long-standing retainers from established gentry families, such as the Farington, Fox, and Tyldesley families of Lancashire. Indeed, a key aim of this essay is to tease out the Deleuzian rhizomatic logic at the heart of this performance, whereby "routes of identity" are "formed through connections and traverses" to create what Augé has pinpointed as an "organic sociality" (Deleuze and Guattari 262; Augé 94). Mike Crang in Cultural Geography elucidates Deleuze's term "rhizomatic" through the vivid image of "brambles" that "send out shoots to produce a tangle of plants each criss-crossing the other" (Crang 172). In the masquing space of Knowsley Hall, these entwined branches of identity reached London and beyond. As this essay uncovers, fascinating resonances exist between Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque" in Lancashire and court masques performed at Whitehall, such as Ben Jonson's and Inigo Jones's Love's Triumph Through Callipolis (1631), and William Davenant's and Inigo Jones's Britannia Triumphans (1638) (Jonson and Jones, Love's Triumph 319–42; Davenant and Jones).

Of course, as 1641 dawned, such "routes of identity" were under especial scrutiny as the country teetered towards Civil War. The occasion of Salusbury's masque itself, "Twelfth Night," was famously a time of misrule, and the topsy-turvyness associated with this masquing occasion was fast becoming part of everyday life. Lord Strange, as the principal magnate of the North West, was a key figure in this growing national crisis. By the mid-1630s, Lord Strange had very deliberately removed himself from court, virtually retiring to his estates in Lancashire as a mark of his displeasure with Charles I's increasingly Laudian court. However, when the Bishops' Wars of 1638–40 broke out in Scotland, Lord Strange had rallied immediately to King Charles's standard, believing it to be "an honour to give honour to your sovereign" (James Stanley, "Letter" 22; on the Bishops' Wars see Fissel). Thus, Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque" offers an intrinsic insight into Lord Strange's own self-fashioning (of which the estate, the region, and the national landscape were each a part) at a moment of acute political anxiety. Employing a cultural-geographical approach allows us to consider the ramifications that this site-specific performance offers into the Stanley family, the region and the country...