ABSTRACT
Jonson wrote his two final court masques in 1631 after a fall from favour lasting six years. These two masques depart from those written for the Jacobean court in several ways, and these changes may be linked with the new political and aesthetic climate of the Caroline court. Through his promotion of the arts Charles asserted his view of kingship. In 1629 he commissioned Rubens to paint the ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and the design (which was probably worked out by Charles himself in conjunction with Inigo Jones) featured the heavenly apotheosis of James I, a graphic emphasis of the Stuart belief in the divine sanction of their rule. Charles appeared to grasp immediately how the arts might be manipulated to reinforce the power of the State, and his own absolutist claims; the Whitehall ceiling depicted a King who possessed all essential wisdom, and thereby powerfully self-sufficient and in no need of any outside counsel. Charles was interested in all manner of the arts, he amassed a great collection of fine art, encouraged composers, and purportedly wrote plays that were attributed to other writers. It is likely then, that Charles would have been interested in the court masque for aesthetic as well as ideological reasons. Even if Charles did not actually compose the texts of these late masques, it seems probable that his views and tastes powerfully informed their content, although we should not underestimate Henrietta Maria’s influence in this sphere. Royal taste largely accounts for the fact that the theatricals and masques of the Caroline court were pastoral in style, and largely omitted the political strains of the Jacobean entertainments. Jonson’s last masques appear to be shaped by this intensified atmosphere of royal absolutism, and the court masque as a genre seems to collapse into a mono-logic representation of royal authority. However, despite this collapse and the enfeebling of the antimasque, ironic tensions and contradictions remain latent within the masque itself, in a manner similar to the early masques. This may be attributable to the fact that ideology, no matter how absolute, is never completely self-contained, and, moreover, that Jonson’s critical impulse was extremely developed by the time he wrote these masques, thus making it 172unlikely that this impulse would be completely extinguished, even under these conditions of intensified royal absolutism.
