ABSTRACT
In Francis Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple and Grayes Inne, the goddess Iris celebrates Vulcan's automata: “See how they moue, drawne by this heauenly ioy, / Like the wilde trees, which follow'd Orpheus Harpe.” 1 The simile in Iris’ praise reminds us what current scholars have often overlooked: the ingenious Vulcan may have been a model for Renaissance engineers in much the same way as Orpheus was a model for the period's poets. Iris's admiration makes clear that both figures—Vulcan and Orpheus, engineer and poet—were imagined in the period as like-minded makers of automata. 2 Both assembled immobile elements of the world to imbue them with a kind of movement imagined to amount to “an Artificiall life” (Beaumont C2r).
