ABSTRACT
THAT THE Renaissance compendia of mythology were as widely read in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they were on the Continent isnow a well-known fact. Natale Conti, Vincenzo Cartari, Lilio Gregorio Gyraldi, and Cesare Ripa are to be reckoned with as potential ‘sources’ for Elizabethan and later writers.Particularly is this true, of course, for the masque-writers who had to be concerned with the correct visual representation of their allegorical and mythological figures and who turned for theinformation they required to the illustrated handbooks of Cartari and Ripa. Professor Gilbert has arranged the ‘symbolic persons’ of Jonson's masques in alphabetical order, andunder each entry he gives – where these are available – Jonson's own hints as to how, and with what attributes, the ‘person’ concerned appeared on the stage. He has nodifficulty in proving still further Jonson's dependence on the manuals for the presentation of his masques. Where Jonson gives no definite indications, Professor Gilbert uses the handbooks– mainly Ripa – to reconstruct the probable appearance of the character in question. He also uses the evidence of the designs by Inigo Jones for the masques. And he sometimes addsdescriptions of symbolic figures by other contemporary English poets to compare with Jonson's presentation of them. The book thus becomes in itself a ‘mythologicalmanual’ through which the student who looks up Aglaia, Agrypnia or Vigilance, Amphitrite, Apollo, Architecture, or Avarice (to take a few entries at random from the ‘A’ section)can discover the form in which such persons might probably have been visualized by Jonson and his contemporaries. It contains seventy-one reproductions from Ripa, Cartari, and other sources.
