ABSTRACT

In the last chapter I examined Blackness and Beauty, Jonson’s first court masques, in order to show that even in these early entertainments fractures in the dominant ideology of masque manifest themselves, fractures which, I argue, would later be developed and exploited with the emergence of the antimasque. Jonson’s chivalric masques, Prince Henry’s Barriers (1610) and Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611) share much common ground with these early masques, as they too, express tensions between competing ideologies, tensions which Jonson attempts to reconcile. The chivalric masques are of particular interest here as they witness the emergence of the antimasque, and we see Jonson working out a strategy whereby the court entertainment can express openly values contradicting those of the monarchy. My argument hinges on the view that Oberon offers us the first example of the Jonsonian antimasque, that is, a prelude to the main masque that interrogates its dominant assumptions. Most critics, however, follow Orgel in detecting the presence of the first antimasque in The Masque of Queens (1609). While this is true to a certain extent, I view this antimasque as a kind of false start as the antimasque of witches in Queens is one-dimensional in presenting us with stereotypical hags who chant and dance in a bizarre fashion, thus parodying the choreographed harmony of the following masque, yet the witches fail to articulate any views counterbalancing the content of the latter. That Jonson was unsatisfied with this first attempt at an antimasque may be deduced from the fact that the entertainment for the following year, the Barriers, omits an antimasque, although Jonson makes a more successful attempt with the form in Oberon. These are, however, the embryonic stages of the antimasque, and the chivalric entertainments on the whole attempt to reconcile all the competing ideologies that find expression in the masque, whereas Jonson would capitalise on this problematic aspect of the masque in later entertainments and produce the fully developed, dramatic antimasque; an innovation ensuring a critical space for the poet’s political and poetic 64values and for challenging, topical reflection on current issues as opposed to the masque’s universalising and idealising expression of monarchical government.