Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque considers the interconnections of the masque and political culture. It examines how masques responded to political forces and voices beyond the court, and how masques explored the limits of political speech in the Jacobean and Caroline periods.
Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque considers the interconnections of the masque and political culture. It examines how masques responded to political forces and voices beyond the court, and how masques explored the limits of political speech in the Jacobean and Caroline periods.
Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque considers the interconnections of the masque and political culture. It examines how masques responded to political forces and voices beyond the court, and how masques explored the limits of political speech in the Jacobean and Caroline periods.
Grounded in the language of early moderns themselves, this study proposes a new epistemology of early modern politics, which sees human thought as a precursor to political action. In analyzing a wide variety of seventeenth-century English texts, including the writings of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, Caroline Court masques, and the poetry and prose of John Milton, Todd Butler reveals an early modern English society deeply concerned with the fundamentally imaginative nature of politics.
Criticism and Compliment examines the poems, plays and masques of the three figures who succeeded Ben Jonson as authors of court entertainments in the England of Charles I. The courtly literature of Caroline England has been dismissed by critics and characterised by historians as propaganda for Charles I's absolutism penned by sycophantic hirelings. Kevin Sharpe questions the assumptions on which these evaluations have been based. Challenging the traditional argument for a polarity between court and country cultures in early Stuart England, he re-reads the plays, poems and masques as primary documents of political attitudes articulated at court. Far from being confined to a decade or a party, the courtly literature of the 1630s is relocated within the broader humanist tradition of counsel. Through the language of love - a language, it is argued, that was part of the discourse of politics in Caroline England - the court poets criticised fundamental premises of the King's political ideology, and counselled traditional and moderate modes of government.
The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music studies the complex impact of movements, costumes, words, scenes, music, and special effects in English illusionistic theatre of the Renaissance. Drawing on a massive amount of documentary evidence relating to English productions as well as spectacle in France, Italy, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire, the book elucidates professional ballet, theatre management, and dramatic performance at the early Stuart court. Individual studies take a fresh look at works by Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Carew, John Milton, William Davenant, and others, showing how court poets collaborated with tailors, designers, technicians, choreographers, and aristocratic as well as professional performers to create a dazzling event. Based on extensive archival research on the households of Queen Anne and Queen Henrietta Maria, special chapters highlight the artistic and financial control of Stuart queens over their masques and pastorals. Many plates and figures from German, Austrian, French, and English archives illustrate accessibly-written introductions to costume conventions, early dance styles, male and female performers, the dramatic symbolism of colours, and stage design in performance. With splendid costumes and choreographies, masques once appealed to the five senses. A tribute to their colourful brilliance, this book seeks to recover a lost dimension of performance culture in early modern England.