and ballets at the center of their correspondence about them. But what of the content of the Masque of Queens itself? As he had for the Haddington Masque, Le Fèvre de la Boderie declined to describe or comment on the spectacle of the Masque of Queens, focusing instead on the personal attentions lavished upon him by the royal family. In this way, the ambassador exemplified a form of diplomatic spectatorship that willfully marginalized the content of lavish court spectacles. The diplomat’s point of view thus offers a fascinating corrective to scholarly accounts of court entertainment that characterize these pompous displays as oppressive tools of monarchal propaganda.
In fact, the Masque of Queens has galvanized a great deal of critical attention around the question of its relationship between patronage and political authority at court. As its title implies, this masque foregrounded Anna’s role as primary sponsor. In the preface to the printed libretto, Ben Jonson underlined Anna’s particular authority as patron and collaborator. Noting that the masque represented “the third time of my being used in these services to Her Majesty’s personal presentations,” Jonson observed that this necessitated a great attention to the “nobility” and “variety” of the spectacle.95 He attributed the masque’s main innovation—the “foil or false masque” that preceded the queen’s own entry onto the stage—to Anna herself.96 Jonson also highlighted Anna’s role as primary object of the masque’s encomiastic function, in describing the parade of queens that composed the centerpiece: “The twelfth, and worthy sovereign of all I make BEL-ANNA royal Queen of the Ocean, of whose dignity and person the whole scope of the invention doth speak throughout.”97 As Leeds Barroll, Clare McManus, and others have explored, the masque thematized feminine authority of all kinds.98 The opening antimasque featured a parade of “hags” or witches calling for their leader or “Dame.” Finally, a personification of Heroic Virtue descended to clear away the hell-scape and make way for a pageant of noble queens from antiquity: from Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, to Bodicea and finally Anna herself, embodying the culmination and epitome of their glory. As described by McManus, the Masque of Queens staged “the empowering specularity of the female body,” a body that was “expressive despite and because of the physical definition of femininity.”99
Despite this focus on the nature and limits of feminine authority in the themes, imagery, and text of the spectacle, scholars recall that representations of masculine monarchal power remained a crucial feature of this feminocentric spectacle. The figure who banishes the witches from the stage is described as embodying a “heroic and masculine virtue.”100 The penultimate dance honors young Prince Charles by having the masquers form the letters of his name.101 In an essay on the Masque of Queens, Stephen Orgel goes further in asserting the primacy of the king’s authority as signaled by his privileged viewing perspective in the audience: “Outside the fiction but at the center of the courtly spectacle, sits the monarch, declaring by his presence that in this masque of queens, heroism may be personified in the royal consort, but the highest virtue is that of the Rex Pacificus, scholar and poet.”102 Jonson may have organized the spectacle at Anna’s command, but monarchal politics confers final authority to the king. Orgel’s argument here recalls earlier New Historicist arguments that the pompous spectacles of court always refer back to the ultimate monarchal authority that they help realize.103 More recent scholarship adopts the nuanced view that spectacles such as the Masque of Queens demonstrate the “polymorphic” nature of the English body politic and played a role in negotiating a fractured, “chaotic and frequently confusing” political structure at the English court.104
The diplomatic setting adds an extra layer of chaos and confusion to our understanding of the masque’s political context, as it asks us to consider the perspectives of viewers only tangentially interested in power struggles within the English court. Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s account of the masque places himself and the matter of Britain’s diplomatic relations with France at the center of the event. Although it might be tempting to dismiss his perspective as narcissistic or as biased by professional self-fashioning, this is surely not the whole story. His letter exchanges with Villeroy and Puisieux reveal how much time and attention were invested to ensure that the masque accomplished its diplomatic goals. Moreover, since the French ambassador sat alongside the king at the performance, any argument about the significance of James’s privileged vantage point on the dance must apply to Le Fèvre de la Boderie as well.
Given his particular set of preoccupations and expectations, what might he have seen from his seat of honor next to the king, and how might he have interpreted it?105 The discourses mobilized by the diplomatic correspondence draw attention to features of the masque’s text and imagery that may have spoken to the French ambassador in particular. Much of the scholarship on this masque has focused on the elegant, triumphant second part, the parade of queens. But for a contemporary audience, it was the first, grotesque part of the masque (called the “antimasque” by modern critics)106 that deserved most attention. The dialogue between the witches and their Dame allows for a scene of exposition in which the hags announce their names and identities. They expound on the vices they represent—Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, Falsehood, Murmur, Malice, Impudence, Slander, Execration, Bitterness, and Rage Mischief—all characterized as “faithful opposites / To Fame and Glory.”107 As Barbara Ravelhofer points out, many Britons—including King James—believed in witches and demons; this scene would have had a “creepy impact” on this sector of the audience in particular.108 The moral content represented by the witches also takes on special resonance when viewed in the context of the affair over the French ambassador. As Jonson remarks in his marginal notes on the libretto, he gave a great deal of thought to the presentation of the witches in order to make this scene plausible and appealing to spectators. He explains, for example, that he delayed the witches’ proclamation of their identities until the Dame arrived onstage to avoid boring “narrations” directed at the audience rather than another character.109 Moreover, he had the hags reveal their names in a natural order: “In the chaining of these vices I make as if one link produced another…. Nor will it appear much violenced if their series be considered, when the opposition to all virtue begins out of Ignorance.”110 Jonson aims to produce moral reflection in spectators. The sequence of the witches’ speeches should provoke a consideration of how moral errors accumulate: from ignorance to suspicion to credulity to falsehood to murmur and so forth. It is noteworthy that the “vices” personified in the masque pertain to the circulation of information and discourse. In part, this foreshadows the triumph of “Good Fame” at the end of the masque.111
From Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s perspective, however, a more pointed interpretation leaps to mind, in which the hags embody—and mark as “vices”—some of the behaviors and emotional responses produced by the recent diplomatic incident. The sequence of witches onstage echoes the way the French ambassador’s reaction to his non-invitation escalated from “ignorance” and “suspicion” of its political justifications through the spread of “murmur” and “malice” in correspondence, and all the way into “execration,” “bitterness,” and (a mild form of) “rage mischief” in the demands he reportedly transmitted to James. Could the honor of his invitation to the masque have also provided the occasion for a subtle rebuke of his behavior in dance form?
Because Le Fèvre de la Boderie never recorded his impressions of the masque for posterity, what he glimpsed from his ambassador’s oblique gaze and how he interpreted the witches and queens he saw onstage at Whitehall remain unrecoverable. Yet the fact that he neglected the content of the performance in his reports reveals something important about his mode of spectatorship. For the ambassador, attending a masque was less about watching than about acting and interacting. Moreover, the present event paled in significance as compared to the diplomat’s own performance, destined for publication through letters to a wider—and often more prestigious—audience in the masque’s aftermath. The masque provided the centerpiece for these peripheral performances directed at ever-widening circles of audiences, but it was subsumed by the everyday theatrics that surrounded it.
Conclusion
