The masque had a brief but splendid life as the dominant mode of entertainment at the early Stuart court, and it has increasingly come to be recognized as a genre offering a fascinating insight into the culture and politics of the early seventeenth century. This selection of 18 masques traces the evolution of the genre from Jonson's early masques for King James I to Davenant's 1640 masque for Charles I, performed just before the outbreak of civil war. It also includes examples of entertainments performed on royal progresses, as well as one domestic masque. Court masques were extravagant multi-media happenings, imbued with often arcane allegorical programmes by writers and designers, and frequently commenting on topical political issues. In this, the most substantial available selection, readers are offered the annotation necessary to gain an understanding of the complexities of the individual texts. Under the General Editorship of Michael Cordner of the University ofYork, the texts have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition to the detailed notes there is a scholarly introduction, making this edition invaluable to students of Renaissance drama and court culture.

The Renaissance court masque, traditionally an entertainment of music, dancing, pageantry, and spectacular scenic effects was transformed by Ben Jonson into a serious mode of literary expression. Because its flexibility provided a forum for his dramatic imagination, Jonson was able to resolve and transcend the satiric vision that was in many ways the substance of his drama. He instructed as well as applauded his courtly audience and, with the aid of the great theatrical designer Inigo Jones, brought unity to the diverse elements of the masque, infusing them with a moral and poetic life. In early 1969, Yale University Press published The Complete Masques, the first one-volume edition and the most carefully edited and annotated text available. A modernized version, the 576 page Complete Masques includes the faithful reprinting of Jonson’s own glosses and notes, translated and annotated, as well as explanatory notes which offer the most detailed critical commentary ever undertaken. This abridged collection contains the most important of the works included in the large edition, and Mr. Orgel’s introduction which discusses Jonson’s development of the masque in relation to Inigo Jones’s development of the illusionistic stage. Mr. Orgel is associate professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.

First published in 1999, this volume examines how under the patronage of James I and then Charles I, Ben Jonson wrote no less than 28 court masques. Paying particular attention to the antimasque, Lesley Mickel discusses in detail those court entertainments which contributed significantly to the genre’s evolution and development. Her approach is innovative in that she examines these court entertainments in relation to Jonson’s poetry and dramatic works. This reveals some idea of the way in which Jonson perceived the relationship between satire and panegyric, as well as highlighting the related, if oppositional, views of state power which he expresses in the Roman plays and in the masques.