ABSTRACT
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927 Recent years have seen an explosion of writing on the court masque. Whereas earlier studies of the masque concentrated upon the origins of the form (particularly its relation to Elizabethan entertainments and Continental analogues) or the iconographical significance of its elements and its literary and formal properties, recent criticism has emphasised the occasionality of the form and its interconnections with the politics of the Jacobean and Caroline court. Influenced by the contextualisations of New Historicism and the microhistories favoured by historical revisionism, recent masque scholarship has completely re-assessed the previously denigrated Caroline masque, accompanied by an increased consideration of the diversity of the masque tradition, both within the court, through non-Jonsonian exemplars, and outside the court, through aristocratic entertainments-a consideration spurred by the steady recovery of lost texts and documentation. Masque criticism has moved a long way from the early defences against accusations of sycophancy and ephemerality, and most scholars now share the perception of masque as a central early-modern cultural form closely allied to the traditions of
educative panegyric (laudando praecipere) espoused by humanism. Awareness of compliment has been replaced by sensitivity to criticism, and now the debate centres on the limits of the form, its success and failure as a vehicle of communication between monarch, court, and nation.
