ABSTRACT
With A Tale of a Tub Jonson made his farewell to the stage. The form with which he had first made his way into public notice was the first he was forced to lay aside under the pressure of failing faculties and changing times, when the dramatic craftsmanship he had struggled so hard to master was no longer serviceable to him and to his ideas . His masque-making lasted longer, as a few commissions continued to come in. Yet as the last plays had displayed a marked stiffening of their allegorical sinews, becoming more and more like masques, so his masques too were hardening into ever more rigid and rarefied forms . And as his play-writing fell off, so too as a masque-maker Jonson was drawing 'near the close, or shutting up of his circle'- during these years he wrote only two masques for the court, and two country entertainments.
