ABSTRACT
my title comes from Ben Jonson’s poem An Expostulation with Inigo Jones, a long and vitriolic attack on his old artistic collaborator by whom Jonson felt betrayed. Neutral enough out of context, the phrase is in Jonson’s verse bitterly ironic: O shows, shows, mighty shows! The eloquence of masques! what need of prose, Or verse, or sense t’express immortal you! You are the spectacles of state! (39–41)
