Literature and Politics in the 1620s

'Whisper'd Counsells'

P. Salzman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137305985
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literature and Politics in the 1620s argues that literature during this decade was inextricably linked to politics, whether oppositional or authoritarian. A wide range of texts are analyzed, from Shakespeare's First Folio to Middleton's A Game At Chess, from romances and poetry to sermons, tracts and newsbooks.

Part I

Imaginings

1

Drama

Jonson: monument/ornament/supplement

Shakespeare’s death in 1616 coincides fortuitously with the publication of Ben Jonson’s Folio. While Shakespeare’s First Folio appeared seven years after the playwright’s death, Jonson was only in the middle of his long career when he collected his works together and carefully saw them through the press. The Shakespeare Folio, as I will discuss later in this chapter, was a posthumous monument designed to construct a specific kind of reading experience that was surely influenced in part by the way Jonson’s Folio elevated plays into works that demanded serious reading attention. In Jonson’s case, this may have attracted a certain amount of amusement, as evidenced by the epigram: ‘Pray tell me Ben, where doth the mystery lurk, / What others call a play you call a worke’.¹ Recent scholarship has been uncertain about whether the Folio represents something of a conscious mid-career shift on Jonson’s part away from the public stage. It is indisputable that after the Folio’s publication Jonson produced only three further plays for the public stage (or four if one includes The Devil Is An Ass, which was performed in the same year as the Folio but not published until 1631): The Staple of News, performed in 1626, The New Inn, performed in 1629, and The Magnetic Lady, performed in 1632. So while Jonson continued his masque output at the rate of almost two per year up until 1625, and also produced a considerable amount of poetry, it is certainly the case that the bulk of his plays were behind him and that the Folio presents the plays as something more like texts to be read (and preserved), than scripts to be performed.²

I argue here that Jonson’s Folio, like Shakespeare’s, represents a collection as a literary event removed to a greater or lesser degree from the individual circumstances of performance or of quarto publication, in favour of a notion of literature as universal (‘for all time’). But while by 1620 Jonson may, in part through the publication of his Folio, have achieved some status as a writer worthy of the pension James awarded him in 1616 and a role of something like poet laureate, he produced a body of work in the 1620s that moved in the opposite direction: towards direct engagement with specific, localized political and social contexts. It is perhaps for this very reason that modern critics have, in the past, lamented a falling off in standard from the ‘great’ plays of his earlier period. I will look at a few examples of how Jonson in the 1620s has to be seen as a strongly ‘topical’ writer. In this, I am following the reassessment of Jonson’s masques that have built on Stephen Orgel’s pioneering scholarship; this is evident most recently in Martin Butler’s magisterial study of the masque genre’s relationship to the court.³

I will be looking at Jonson’s 1623 texts in relation to the publication of Shakespeare’s Folio in the second part of this chapter. Here I single out some key intersections between political/social controversies and Jonson’s work for the court, and for the stage. These occur at a time when Jonson was, initially, the premier author of masques, but an almost superannuated public dramatist – a position reinforced by the lack of success of the few plays he did write in the 1620s. Of the nine masques Jonson produced between 1620 and 1625, I am going to look here at the one that represents his most controversial engagement with current political events. The Gypsies Metamorphosed of 1621 is a masque intimately tied to the figure of Buckingham, who was at that stage at the height of his influence with King James, and at the same time was attracting the anxious suspicion of a good part of the populace. The masque was also extremely popular both in performance, and in its later manuscript circulation, which culminated in its appearance in print independently in 1640 as well as in the posthumous Second Folio. This has produced considerable textual complexity, given the variations between the three performances, not to mention what might be described as the various spin-offs from the masque itself, including parody and libel as well as more straightforward circulation of Jonson’s own material.

By 1621, largely thanks to Jonson’s collaboration with Inigo Jones, the masque had become an extremely sophisticated piece of aristocratic entertainment, centred on the court, but not confined to court performances. So in the case of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, Buckingham commissioned the masque in celebration of his marriage to Katherine Manners, with performances taking place on three occasions at three locations: first at Buckingham’s estate at Burleigh on the Hill, then at Belvoir Castle, the estate of Katherine’s father the Earl of Rutland, and finally at Windsor. While what might be called the plot of the masque remained constant, details of the text and action were changed for each performance. This masque is particularly complex and elaborate and has been the subject of some quite disparate interpretations centring on the resonances of its depiction of Buckingham as the leader of a gang of gypsies. In structural terms, the masque significantly alters the balance between what have been termed anti-masque and masque elements; that is, the more challenging, comic and disruptive elements dominate, and the transformation into elegant, aristocratic symbolism, mythic qualities and ceremonial action is far less of a feature. Martin Butler characterizes the masque as ‘unusually transgressive’.⁴ This might in part be seen as catering for King James’s taste, but in the case of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, it also seems shaped by the character of Buckingham and his relationship with different elements of the court as well as with the king.

Of course it is important to note that Buckingham’s entrance as gypsy leader at the beginning of the masque would have been far less provocative than the blacked-up aristocratic women in the 1605 Masque of Blackness. Indeed, as Martin Butler has pointed out in his detailed reading of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, Buckingham as gypsy is an extension of some of the qualities that led to James’s admiration, including the teasing relationship between king and favourite. The masque revels in the vulgarity sparked by evoking the location of the Devil’s Arse Cavern in Derbyshire, supposed home of Cock-Lorel, the gypsies’ founder. This allows Jonson to write Cock-Lorel’s ballad, which had separate circulation and also spurred parodic libels, as will be discussed below. Buckingham and his fellow gypsies tell fortunes and pick pockets in what seems uncomfortably like a reference to Buckingham’s meteoric rise in fortune, thanks to the king’s doting largesse. But the difficulty in determining the tone of all this is in fact anticipated in one of the earliest remarks of Jackman, the gypsy leader: ‘If we here be a little obscure, it is our pleasure, for rather then wee will offer to be our owne interpreters, we are resolv’d not to be understood’ (51).⁵ Buckingham plays upon the idea of the gypsies being a ‘tattered nation’ (51), flaunting the contrast between his disguise and his real status, in a masque that of course is itself an example of display and conspicuous consumption. The first palm read is that of the king himself, and he is simultaneously flattered and teased:

You are no great Wencher, I see by your table,

Though your Mons Veneris sayes you are able. (55)

From a political perspective, given the timing of this masque, early in 1621, it includes a paean to James as peacemaker, coming as it does at the height of James’s attempts to stay out of European conflict:

To see the wayes of truth you take,

To balance businesse, and to make

All Christian differences cease. (56)

Charles’s fortune, which is told next, alludes to the contest over a suitable match for him: ‘See what States are here at strife, / Who shall tender you a Wife’ (57). At the same time, this is a kind of post-wedding wedding masque, and much is made of the desired outcome of Buckingham’s marriage, with an explicitness that James clearly enjoyed, but that may or may not have embarrassed Katherine Manners, who is told:

Dame I must tell yee,

The fruit of your bellie,

Is that you must tender (58–9)⁶

Again this can be seen as having a political resonance: the dynastic implications of Buckingham’s marriage run parallel to the negotiations over Charles’s marriage, even though Buckingham’s was clearly of far less national importance. In arranging Buckingham’s marriage, James was confirming the favourite’s place (to the resentment of a number of courtiers, including figures like William Herbert, who were involved in the Windsor performance of The Gypsies Metamorphosed). The performance of the masque in its three locations underlined both Buckingham’s dominant position (emphasized especially by the Windsor performance), and the growing significance of his new family ties (emphasized by the Belvoir performance). The flattery that the gypsies direct towards those whose palms they read is coloured by the way that Buckingham’s position is cheekily underlined: he is indeed a gypsy, a purse-picker, an outsider, but also the most influential of courtiers. As Butler has emphasized, given that Buckingham had recently survived an attack in parliament against monopolies that tried to discredit him, the depiction of him as a gypsy who seems at first disreputable but is acclaimed (and engages in much staged banter with the king) underlines, albeit in a potentially daring way, his apparently unassailable position (in Chamberlain’s words, ‘parlement proofe’).⁷ While the gypsies’ antics seem like anti-masque elements that have overtaken the masque, they are balanced by a group of clowns (that is, rustic characters) who have their fortunes read. This ‘true’ anti-masque scene replays the aristocratic fortunes as wholly comic: ‘A Cuckold you must be, and that for three lives; / Your owne, the Parsons, and your Wives’ (67). This also enables Jonson to include the Cock-Lorel ballad, which encompasses social satire within the Rabelais-like tale of the Devil invited by the gypsies’ founder Cock-Lorel to a feast (containing such dishes as a Puritan poached and a Promoter in plum-broth), which causes him to emit a mighty fart resulting in the landmark known as the Devil’s Arse. At the penultimate stage of the masque, in the expanded Windsor version which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Imaginings
• Part II Religion
• Part III News
• Conclusion: Reading/Interpreting
• Bibliography
• Index