ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I attempted to demonstrate the interactive relationship between history and the antimasque, examining how historical pressures shaped and gave rise to the form. In referring to the historicist debate surrounding the antimasque, I have been at pains to avoid any essentialist conclusions as to how the court entertainment operates, and tried to show that it is rather a dynamic, conditional text/event that relies on dialectically based strategies of accommodation, equivocation and negotiation. I have also emphasised that the polyvalence, or rhetorical instability, manifested in the masque is part of a wider tendency found in Jonson’s other plays and poetry, while the dramatic and exuberant nature of the antimasque is partly indebted to his comic drama. By endowing the masque with a measure of poly-valence, Jonson liberates himself as author and carves a space for an independent critique of the state, evading charges of either hypocritical flattery or subversion. Perhaps one of Jonson’s most important contributions to the genre of court masque is this negotiation of a critical space in which the author may assert and maintain his poetic integrity and independence. This chapter builds on the theoretical position of the previous one, and examines two antimasques in great depth as part of the wider project of illuminating the ways in which certain antimasques are expanded to such a degree that they threaten to consume their accompanying masques.
