ABSTRACT
In 1638 Inigo Jones and Sir William Davenant produced two masques for the English court. The first, Britannia Triumphans, danced by the king in January, celebrated, a little prematurely, the triumph of the royal scheme of Ship Money: the famous trial was about to reach its conclusion, with a narrow victory in the Star Chamber for the crown. Three weeks later, at Shrovetide, the queen danced in Luminalia, Jones’s most elaborate scenic spectacle up to that time. The complexity of the engineering was the more impressive, Jones tells us, because it had to be devised very quickly:
The King’s majesty’s masque being performed, the Queen commanded Inigo Jones … to make a new subject of a masque for herself, that with high and hearty invention might give occasion for variety of scenes, strange apparitions, songs, music, and dancing… . This being suddenly done and showed her majesty, and she approving it, the work was set in hand, and in all celerity performed in shorter time than anything here hath been done in this kind. 1
