Restoring Astraea: Jonson's masque for the fall of Somerset. Butler, Martin; Lindley, David.

Abstract: Renaissance studies have centered on the socio-political relationships of literature, particularly the Stuart masques. Ben Jonson's 'The Golden Age Restored' is discussed in its historical context. Although it is recognized that masques are possibly devices to mystify monarchial powers, it is posited that they are influenced by the politics of their time. Jonson's work is related to the death of Sir Thomas Overbury and the resulting scandal in the court of James I.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press

In the last ten years, as investigation of the social and political relationships of literature has become a central project of Renaissance studies, the politics of the Stuart masques have come under increasingly detailed scrutiny.(1) As public events performed by and to the court and utilizing fables that propounded an overtly ideological agenda, the masques have been obvious candidates for today's historicist criticism, and the most effective recent critical discussions have been those that have attended closely to the very local and specific historical embeddedness of their performance. Of course the older historicism acknowledged that masques had their politics, but it was in the main content to see them as effortlessly and unproblematically representing the court to the court, trading in naively flattering images of transcendent virtue and magical sovereign authority. More recent studies have tended to emphasize that masquing involved an interchange between "present occasions" and "more removed mysteries," in which the aesthetic and the political, the transcendent and the circumstantial frequently pulled against one another.(2) In the process it has become clear that though masques may have sought to mystify the operations of kingly power, their actions were always rooted in a specific, contingent politics that their fables implicitly endeavored to negotiate or manage. The translation of present occasions into more removed mysteries may sometimes have been straightforward, but most often it involved complicated trade-offs between what could and could not be said, between what was explicit and what had to be implied, suppressed, or cast according to the exigencies of the moment. Decoding the masques thus involves a reciprocal attention both to the complex rhetorical strategies by which they sought to shape their occasions, and to the economies of the occasions by which they themselves were shaped.

Considerations such as these press onto Ben Jonson's The Golden Age Restored with a force that has not hitherto been recognized. The Golden Age Restored is in many ways a quintessential Jacobean masque, with its iconography of transcendent kingly power, its opposition of evil antimasquers to godlike masquing heroes, and its emphasis on the political and cultural achievements of the Jacobean dispensation. In its fable, the goddess Pallas announces that Jove has decreed that the Golden Age and Astraea, goddess of justice, are to be restored to earth. But before this epiphany can come about, the occasion is interrupted by the Iron Age and his twelve attendant evils, who declare that they will subvert the perfect rule of Jove. They dance antimasque entries but are put to flight when Pallas reveals the glory of her shield, after which the Golden Age and Astraea descend, followed by four English poets laureate. The poets introduce the masquers, heroes who have been sleeping in Elysium but are now awakened by Pallas. After their entries and revels, the masquers are instructed to remain as "lights about ASTRAEA's throne," while Astraea herself avows that she is now unwilling to return to heaven and leave the Jacobean court.(3)

In the main the topoi deployed here are the common stock of masquing iconography in this era (the one unusual element is the inclusion of Astraea, of whom more later), and The Golden Age Restored has generally been regarded as straightforwardly rehearsing the customary pieties about the Jacobean state. The full significance of this masque, however, has been obscured by a failure to recognize how precisely its more removed mysteries were tied to the circumstances of its present occasion, and how problematic the presence of these factors makes the interpretation of the masque. Contextualising this particular masque reveals it to be a prime test case for more general strategies of reading and understanding the Jacobean masque.

The chief problem inhibiting discussion of The Golden Age Restored has been the question of exactly which occasion its performance should be linked with. In the Oxford Jonson, Percy Simpson adopted the suggestion (first advanced by W. W. Greg) that the two masques at the end of Jonson's Folio were printed in an order that reversed the order of their performance, so that the volume might conclude on a particularly high note.(4) This view has been accepted into most modern discussions, and underlies the one detailed commentary on the masque by Leah Marcus, which argues that its iconography should be explicated by reference to the crown's money problems of 1610-15. Marcus suggests that the celebration of James's Golden Age was specifically intended as a rebuff to the miserliness of the city, castigating those who grumbled about royal prodigality, and symbolically meliorating the crown's dependence on forced loans and parliamentary benevolences.(5) The basis of this interpretation is a series of topical parallels that Marcus proposes for the masque's iconography: she links it with a city entertainment of 1611, Anthony Munday's Chruso-thriambos: The Triumphs of Gold; with James's visit of that year to the royal mint, and with the 1614 proclamation commanding the gentry to help relieve the strain on the court by returning to the country. None of these proposed connections, however, seems indisputably parallel, and each depends on the audience making very precise and specific links with events of between two and five years earlier. Furthermore, they offer no equivalent for Jonson's extremely emphatic insistence on the quality of royal justice. Such "present occasions" are not very present--indeed are only loosely occasional--and do not make meaningful contact with the masque's "more removed mysteries."

Marcus's interpretation is further undermined by John Orrell's decisive refutation of the Greg-Simpson hypothesis. In 1977 Orrell published an eye-witness account of the masques for the 1615-16 season that has sufficient detail to make it incontestable that the two masques were printed in order of performance.(6) The Golden Age Restored was thus the masque danced at court on 1 and 6 January 1616, and with this date established, it becomes possible for the first time to explore the manifold relationships between the masque and the contingencies of the moment. As will become apparent, the referrents of Jonson's iconography in January 1616 would not have been far to seek for any member of the audience.

II

When Jonson chose to focus his masque for 1616 on the return of the goddess of justice he was doing so in a particular, and peculiarly relevant context. For in the latter part of 1615 rumors about the death of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower some two years earlier had begun to circulate, and had quickly led to judicial proceedings in what was undoubtedly the major court scandal of James's reign. In October 1615, Richard Weston had been tried and found guilty of poisoning Overbury, and shortly afterwards Sir Gervase Elwes, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Anne Turner, the confidante of Frances, Countess of Somerset, and James Franklin, a disreputable apothecary, were all executed as accessories to the murder. During these trials it had been claimed that the guiding spirits in the murder plot were Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the king's favorite for nearly ten years, and Frances Howard, who had become his wife in 1613 after the annulment of her marriage to the Earl of Essex. In January 1616, however, they were both still imprisoned and awaiting trial. The precise situation of the masque's performance in the very midst of these hearings is of crucial significance in the attempt to interpret its iconology and assess the possible responses of its audience.

Every one of the spectators for this masque would have been following the unfolding of these criminal proceedings closely; many of the peers present in the audience were shortly to be summoned to conduct the trials of Carr and his wife. The declaration by Pallas with which the masque opens must inevitably have seemed to bear on the events currently in train:

Looke, looke! reioyce, and wonder! That you offending mortalls are, (For all your crimes) so much the care Of him, that bears the thunder!

IOVE can endure no longer, Your great ones should your lesse inuade, Or, that your weake, though bad, be made A prey vnto the stronger.

And therefore, means to settle ASTRAEA in her seat againe; And let downe in his golden chaine The age of better mettle.

Which deed he doth the rather, That euen enuie may behold Time not enioy'd his head of gold Alone beneath his father.

But that his care conserueth, As time, so all times honors too, Regarding still what heau'n should doo, And not what earth deserueth. (1-20)

With its announcement of a renewal of justice this prologue resonated with echoes of the judicial proceedings so far carried out. There can scarcely have been a masque during the whole period that opened so directly and so pointedly with reference to a live political issue.

King James, writing on 21 October 1615 to the Commissioners entrusted with the investigation of the Overbury murder, had cast himself in precisely the same light as Pallas does in the masque. He said:

In this weighty and important cause which now is in question, the discovery of the truth whereof so much concerneth the glory of God, and the honour of our service, wee cannot satisfie our owne conscience, if any course should be left unattempted, wherby the foulenes of so haynous a facte may be layde open to the view of the world, both that therby the innocent may be cleared, and the nocent punished, and the care of our Justice against the virulent malice of slanderous tongues, both be blessed in this present age and heareafter be recommended to eternal posterity.(7)

The commendation of the king's justice in this cause was a common topos, and not only in England. Sir John Throckmorton wrote from Flushing to Viscount Lisle on 8 November 1615: "His [Ma.sup.tys] justice in this beusynes is not only admired, but nowe beginneth to be adored amonge these peopell, it being against soe great a person, his owne creatuer."(8) A little later in 1616, Charles Richardson published a Sermon Concerning the Punishment of Malefactors, and enthused:

And blessed be God, that at this time our eies do see the great care of his Maiesty, to have the land purged from blood, wherewith it hath been polluted, and that there is so strict and so just proceeding against all that were confederate in so wicked a fact. And the Lord strengthen the hart and hand of that most worthy Lord Chief Justice that he may stil go forward impartially to cut off al those that had any hand in so foul a murder.(9)

What gave the case its notoriety, and gave particular force to such praise of the king's justice, was, of course, that it involved those closest to him. As the king said in a letter of 20 October commending Coke's proceedings with Weston:

[W.sup.ch] as they give us cawse to be most hartely sory that the least touch of so fowle a facte, should fall upon the [hono.sup.r] and reputation of any that holdeth so neare a place about our person, so do we give god thankes and withall commend [yo.sup.r] industry and indeavors that the truth is discovered, that therby, so haynous and wicked an offence may receive in due tyme condigne and exemplary punishment.(10)

Here James shows himself ready to accept the guilt of those nearest to him, and assents to the necessary proceedings to bring them to trial. There are, however, reasons for suspecting that the king was not so much taking the initiative in driving the process forwards as acquiescing in a situation where he had been left little room for maneuver.

There can be little doubt that those who prosecuted the trials for the murder of Overbury felt able to do so in part because during 1615 the king's favor to Robert Carr had shown signs of wavering as George Villiers began his relentless rise. But they were still playing for very high stakes, and it was imperative that, once having begun, they did not fail of their eventual aim in bringing down Carr and his wife. From the very beginning of Weston's trial no secret was made of the real targets of the proceedings. When Coke instructed Lawrence Hyde to open the case he commented that

if in the declaration thereof they may meet with any great persons whatsoever, as certainly there were great ones confederate in that fact, he should boldly and faithfully open whatsoever was necessary, and he could prove against them.(11)

The strategy was very nearly thwarted when Weston, prompted perhaps by friends of Carr or the Howards, refused to plead and put himself on trial. If he had persisted in his refusal then no further trials would have been possible, since his conviction as principal was required before others charged as accessories could be brought to court. If he had remained mute Carr's antagonists would have placed themselves in a very vulnerable position. Coke responded to this potentially disastrous impasse, in defiance of all legal precedent, by ordering Hyde to outline the case against Weston anyway.

At the end of these dubious proceedings, Coke extravagantly praised the king, showing to the Lord Mayor and commissioners James's instructions concerning the case; he "then declared the king's justice, who, albeit the many favours and honours which his majesty had bestowed on the lord Somerset, and his nearness to his person, by reason of his office, yet he had committed him prisoner."(12) Not only had Coke thus made certain that the public were fully informed about the iniquities of Carr and his wife, he had also ensured by this strategy that James could do nothing but assent to his conduct. His purpose is transparent in the letter he sent to James recounting what he had done; ostensibly obsequious and anxious for the king's approval, he indicated clearly what the consequence of any back-tracking would be:

And for [yo.sup.r] [Ma.sup.ties] honour, and in manifestacion of [yo.sup.r] zeale toto Iustice, [yo.sup.r] directions and interrogateries under [yo.sup.r] owne gracious hand were published, but not redd openly, to the great comfort and satisfaction of the hearers. The standinge of the partye mute in refusinge his tryall, doth satisfie all indifferent men of his guiltines, and against him only the proceadinge nowe is. And if the ordinary course of Iustice against Weston doe not prevaile (the cause beinge so publique) the auditory consistinge of many thowsands, and by this time spred farre and here what scandall and blemishe may fall on [yo.sup.r] [Ma.sup.ties] Iustice [w.sup.ch] is so deere unto you, we in all humbleness leaue it to [yo.sup.r] princely wisedome and consideracion.(13)

That Coke's tactic had worked upon the audience at the trial is confirmed by an anonymous account that has survived in the Lambeth MSS. It gives us the picture of Coke praising the king's justice

with teares in his eyes partly for the ioy of it and partlie (as it seamed) for feare of his [Ma.sup.ties] daunger if such damnable practises wer not prevented he concluded with a prayer for his [Ma.sup.ties] preservation every mans hart in that great assembly answering his therein and such was the generall reioycing for that dayes proceiding as all did magnifye his [Ma.sup.tie] and many wer hard say that it was on of the happiest dayes that they had scene.

Slightly earlier in his account this witness demonstrates how effective Coke's decision to press on regardless had been, when he observes: "Altho he [Weston] remained mute he was condemned as guilty in the judgement of all the hearers & the acessories also."(14) After the case against them had been so powerfully insinuated, Carr and his wife stood already condemned in the estimation of all, and in the face of such popular feeling James could not stay the course of the proceedings.

The opening of Golden Age Restored, therefore, not only reflects on the past judicial proceedings, but looks forward to more spectacular trials still to come. When Pallas offers the same picture of a monarch determined to see justice prevail that Coke had so successfully deployed in his handling of Weston's case, there is a particular significance to her claim that Jove cannot endure that "Your great ones should your lesse inuade, / Or that your weake, though bad, be made / A prey vnto the stronger" (6-8). Weston was eventually prevailed upon to stand trial, and "when he had affirmed so much to the Sheriffe (who hath dealt honestly in this cause) he said withall, I hope they doe not make a nett to catche the little fishes or flyes and lett the greate goe."(15) This last phrase was eagerly quoted by Coke at Weston's second trial, and seems to have become a standard topos in the aftermath of these hearings.(16) Pallas's recollection of Weston's remark had particular force since the "great ones," the Earl and Countess of Somerset, had still not been brought to trial. Frances Howard had yet to confess to her part in the murder and feverish attempts were being made to collect further evidence against Carr. Amidst speculation about the king's determination to proceed against his favorite, the masque's opening is ambiguously celebratory and admonitory: it praises James but reminds him firmly that the job was not yet completed.

If the prologue introduces the action of the masque in language that powerfully and precisely invokes the judicial circumstances of January 1616, the action that follows rehearses a second salient aspect of the current political climate in terms that are equally undisguised. Pallas's announcement is interrupted by a group of anti-masquers representing the evils of the Iron Age, ready to fight to preserve their reign of vice against Jove's intended reformation. They are turned to stone as Pallas shows her shield with the Gorgon's head upon it. After their departure Astraea and the Golden Age are ushered in, followed first by the poets laureate then by the masquers, who come forward from their Elysian bowers to defend justice and "the age sustaine" (131). At first sight this seems to be no more than an uncontentious dramatic representation of the myth of Astraea's return after the evils of the Iron Age are ended. The contemporary audience, however, could not have been unaware of the close correspondence between this symbolic struggle and the factional contests that helped to bring about the fall of Robert Carr.

Carr's marriage to Frances Howard in 1613 had signaled the triumph of the Howard clan in the political world of James's court, but during 1615 it became increasingly plain to those about the court that George Villiers, who had first appeared upon the scene in late 1614, was gradually displacing Carr in the king's affections. By 26 April 1615 Secretary of State Winwood was writing to Sir Thomas Edmondes:

The king hath admitted, unto his bed-chamber, as a gentleman one named George Villyars, which was done upon St George his day. The next day he was knighted in her Majesteys bedd chamber. The fauor the king doth shew him ys extraordinary: and many hope that therby the torrent in the course of affaires wilbe stayed, though not the streame turned. . . . Neuer was the court fuller of faction and happy ys he that ys farthest from yt.(17)

Winwood, though he had been Carr's candidate for the Secretary-ship, was clearly hoping that the power of the Howards might be reined in. John Holles, writing to Lord Norris in May 1615, saw it very differently:

The Court is now a prettier place, then ever it was, and the catt hath found another taile to play with all: muche whispering, and faction: the new seems to grow dayly, and from the ould a generall defection, even the fastest leaves fall, having or pretending cause, for these marigoulds open with the sunn, and sett with the shaddow.(18)

Holles, who was to remain conspicuously loyal to Somerset, goes on to attack "the remains of the Earl of Essex, well wishers, as the main bulk, and gross of this new faction."(19)

It was into this fevered factional atmosphere that the first rumors of the poisoning of Overbury seeped some time during the summer of 1615. Whether or not Somerset himself was guilty of the murder (and many subsequent historians have judged it unlikely), there can be little doubt that his waning fortunes encouraged opponents in the belief that they had a chance of making the rumors stick. It was not only native writers, often with an axe to grind themselves, who noted as much, for foreign observers also registered the part that factional rivalties played in the case. Gondomar reported in October 1615 that:

it being seen that the King put up with the keeping back of Somerset's pardon, and that he seems to hear with pleasure the evil things that are said of him, has given such strength to his enemies, that this, and the support given to them by the Queen (to whom Somerset did not pay sufficient respect, nor has he known how to protect himself against her, nor shown any disposition to do so,) have brought him to such a condition, that in the very chamber of the King, where he is Lord High Chamberlain, there are persons who will neither speak to him nor take off their hats to him; and they have been searching for charges against Somerset, and throwing their toils round the King to such an extent that at present both the Earl and the King himself are in the greatest trouble and embarrassment.(20)

At about the same time the Tuscan ambassador, Francesco Quaratesi, wrote home with the story of Overbury's imprisonment and death, and glossed it in similar terms:

The faction opposed to the Lord Treasurer and Lord Chamberlain (who toddy are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Secretary Winwood, the Earl of Arundel, the Earl of Pembroke, mylord Fenton Montgomery [sic], the new favourite of the King George Villiers and others) have now brought again to light this thing of a long time ago, and had a witness questioned, who testified how the above mentioned Overbury died because of poison given him in some meditation.(21)

With positively indecent haste, Sir John Throckmorton wrote to Viscount Lisle on 8 November 1615 (before Somerset had even been tried): "I trust that this great mans fall will rayse your Lordship and some of your nobell freinds to your just and worthye demerites." Two days later he was making his own pitch: 'Undoubtedly their will be by this mans fall manye good things in his [Ma.sup.tys] guifte again. I beseache your Lordship, take this occation of my service at this time to move for sumthing for me unto his [Ma.sup.ty]."(22) As Holles wryly observed to his son in the same month:

Pembrok expects to be chamberlain, and Villars a baron, and Master of the hors, what other chipps be gathered from the fall of this great oake, I know not, every bird of them will carry sum straw, or other to his nest, or els have they laboured in vayn.(23)

Holles was also keenly aware that the rivals to his patron were not inexperienced, but men who regarded themselves as having been long excluded from power by the Howards: "Neither be they new men in the world, they have allready been uppon the stage, and heertofore so playd their parts, as the same is again to be expected." To this anxiously interested observer, events seemed poised for a return to power of the old Essex connection: "This faction is numerous, and multiplies like mustard seed."(24)

Given the seismic shifts through which Whitehall was living, it is almost inconceivable that the audience of The Golden Age Restored would not have perceived how narrowly the masque's fable shadowed the traumas of the moment. Obviously Jonson could not directly represent the fall of Somerset in the masque without breaching the dictates of tact, but a myth in which iron was supplanted by gold, villains by "semigods" (128), and evil criminals by a race of champions eager for justice seems chosen for its topicality. Iron Age is the leader of an interlinked network of vices that daringly shadows the newly uncovered scandal. The twelve-strong family of evils is more than reminiscent of the dizzying chain of conspiracy gradually being forged in the court hearings; the combination of Fraud, Slander, Ambition, Pride, Scorn and Corruption "with the golden hands" (39) distinctly registers the concatenation of crimes of which Somerset stood accused, and there is an all but open allusion to the murder of Overbury when that "babe last borne, / Smooth Trecherie" is summoned to appear (43-4).(25) On the other hand, the courtiers who dance the main masque are represented as reawakened heroes whose arrival puts an end to strife, hate, fear and pain, and restores the world to its original peace, love, faith and joy (141-44). Of course such images were common stock, but on this occasion the mythos of reform and renewal was more than usually plangent:

Like lights about ASTRAEA's throne, You here must shine, and all be one, In fervor and in flame. That by your union she may grow, And you, sustaining her, may know The age still by her name. (206-11)

The presence of such close correspondences would have made it difficult for a court audience not to read through the mythic text to the factional subtext, and understand the masque's transformations as a symbolic celebration of the achievement and forfeiture of influence around the crown. This would have been even more evident if the information provided by the Tuscan Quaratesi on 28 December is right. He wrote home:

In a few days there will be a beautiful ballet, whose head [capo] will be the Earl of Essex, who is continuously seen at Court now, after having been constantly absent from it after the now Countess of Somerset repudiated him.(28)

There is no other record of participants in this masque, so we cannot be absolutely certain that Essex actually did dance as principal masquer. But if this was in fact the case, then it would have been directly performative of the masque's message of factional competition and triumph. And even if Essex were not the principal performer, Pembroke presided over the occasion as the newly appointed Lord Chamberlain (Somerset's old office), and led in diplomats from France, Venice and Savoy as the evening's guests of honour. There could scarcely have been a clearer or more dramatic announcement of the renewal of anti-Spanish, anti-Howard alignments at court.

Moreover, in one further respect the fable of the masque seems to have been designed with a view to reflecting upon the purported crimes of the Somersets. After the masquers have performed their first and "main" dances, Pallas continues: "But here's not all: you must doe more, / Or else you doe but halfe restore / The ages liberty (178-80). What they must do to complete the reformation is recall the innocent sexuality of the Golden Age. The Poets spell out what is required:

It was a time of no distrust, So much of loue had nought of lust, None fear'd a iealous eye. The language melted in the eare, Yet all Without a blush might heare; They liu'd with open vow.

QVIRE

Each touch and kiss was so well placed, They were as sweet as they were chaste, And such must yours be now. (188-197)

Though not without precedent in other masques, in the context of the Overbury murder trials this injunction had special force. Throughout the hearings it was suggested that the reason for the murder was Overbury's opposition to the marriage of Robert Carr and Frances Howard. It was also revealed that the couple had been meeting before the Countess was released from her marriage to Essex. In the eyes of seventeenth-century society this constituted an adulterous relationship, as Hyde was not slow to insist at Weston's trial, suggesting that when Overbury

became familiar [w.sup.th] a great Lord nowe earle of Somerset then viscount rochester, hee found him lusting after a filthie woman another man's wife. Hee [Overbury] gave him good counsell: this Lord was angry and tolde itt his lewde woman for soe shee was.(27)

In Elwes's trial Coke expatiated upon the sin the couple had committed:

Beware of Adultery, bewarre of taking away of other mens wives. It hath bene pronounced by God himself, for the woman that thou hast taken thou shalt die the death. A man shall seldome see an Adultery of as high degree indeed, but accompanied with Murther.(28)

The revelation of sexual indiscretions, of consultations with Forman and of models of men and women in copulation had titillated the enormous crowds that gathered to hear the trials of Turner and Franklin. The attribution of the murder to the extreme malice of a woman and the complacence of her besotted lover who deserted his friend for the lure of lust became a commonplace narrative frame for the whole episode. In this context the suggestion that it is the duty of the male masquers to recreate a pre-lapsarian innocence as they take out the ladies to dance is particularly pointed. Just as in the masque's address to the King, the courtiers are here both complimented and warned. The transformation of the court will not be completed unless and until the sexual license that the Earl and Countess of Somerset were represented as personifying is purged.

III

In every respect, then, the action and iconography of The Golden Age Restored reflect upon the judicial and political events that surrounded the moment of its performance. The masque offers the court a ritualistic format within which the gains and losses of the Overbury affair could be processed, and thereby rendered comprehensible or legitimate. It rehearses a series of ceremonial gestures--the antimasquers turning to stone as Pallas reveals her shield, the disclosure of the masquers in a blaze of light--in which the recent political traumas are symbolically re-enacted, and its formal design welds these enactments into an aesthetic whole that celebrates and reaffirms the identity of a court emerging from crisis. Yet as the contemporary commentaries cited above inevitably suggest, there were gaps between the celebratory, ritualized discourse of the masque and the altogether messier political contingencies that such iconography was seeking to elevate and transform, gaps that the diverse audience for the masque might be expected to register. Though The Golden Age Restored is pitched as a timeless reflection upon political changes, its status as itself an intervention in those changes necessarily compromises the pose of transcendence that it otherwise seeks to maintain. The task of translating present occasions into more removed mysteries did not stop with the selection of a suitable fable, but involved problems of directing and controlling the resonances of the chosen myth and the implications of the masque's dialectical form in order to negotiate the many hidden strains and pitfalls that such a moment of crisis contained. For Jonson, the masque was an opportunity to glorify the justice of Jacobean Whitehall, and to elevate the court by suggesting that its political transformation was also a moment of ethical renewal. Yet even as he elevated the events into myth he had to manage them, since there were many difficulties latent in this project, not the least of which must have been that of making it acceptable to the king.

As we have already seen, an initial crux in interpreting the masque is to decide whether its representation of Jacobean justice is celebratory or admonitory. Jonson seems to be regaling James with images that compliment him on the quality of his justice, but there is room for supposing that such tropes involved a significant element of coercion and could have been understood as promoting judicial priorities that were not exactly James's own. This gap is all the more apparent by virtue of the text's tactful yet insistent reference to Jove rather than to James. For the bulk of the masque love is spoken of as the power who determines the masque's action and whose justice is so formidable, but the element of fictional distance allows the masque to sidestep an absolute affirmation early on that Jove's ideal justice corresponds exactly and automatically to King James's. Only at the very end does the masque finally identify the royal presence with that of Jove (228-33), and this strategic gap in the rhetoric enables its praises to seem somewhat provisional, as if Jove's justice were not unequivocally identical with James's, but with the goal to which James should aspire. The structure of many court masques enacts just such an educative impulse, and it was a common defence of panegyric that the poet praised his patron conditionally rather than flattering him outright. In the circumstances of January 1616 as we have outlined them, such a strategy might have seemed both necessary and yet more than usually problematic.

Secondly, Jonson's use of the figure of Astraea raised sensitive issues. Whilst the choice of this deity in a masque that thematized royal justice was an obvious one, the iconography of Astraea--imperial virgin, severe, chaste and militant feminine power--had been particularly pressed into service under Queen Elizabeth and had not, on the whole, had much part to play in the male and pacific iconography that had been cultivated for her successor. For critics of the Jacobean dispensation, of course, the revival of the memory of the Queen acted as a focus for the articulation of their present resentments.(29) Jonson's own ideological outlook seems not to have been hospitable to retrospective idealizations of Elizabeth as a godly saint.(30) Yet some anxiety about the way his chosen myth could be read might be detected in Pallas's introduction, which insists that Jove's new effort to "settle / Astraea in her seat again" is a demonstration that "Time not enioy'd his head of gold / Alone beneath his father" (14-15). At one level her comment is simply an example of Jonson's scrupulous classical learning (in that the Golden Age was presided over by Jove's father Saturn), but it is hard to resist the implication that the poet is asserting James's right to lay claim to an image that his predecessor had made her own.(31) A potentially uncomfortable comparison between James and Elizabeth is purposefully deflected in Jonson's masque, where the female power of Astraea is carefully subordinated to the masculine power of Jove, and at the end Astraea avows her devotion to the godhead that she senses emanates from Whitehall's kingly seat (231). Even so, the deployment of a feminized iconography associated with the Elizabethan monarchy would have been highly sensitive in the context of a resurgence of expectations amongst courtiers who were known to have a more forward ideological outlook than that of the Howards. It is possible that the invocation of Astraea at this festival occasion could have been interpreted by at least some members of the audience as a gesture towards a new political agenda for the Jacobean state.

On balance the masque probably manages to hold in check the ghost of an Elizabethan past that the return of Astraea threatened to invoke, but it still had to confront as a matter of some delicacy the issue of how near to a retrospective indictment of the Jacobean dispensation the allusions to Somerset's Age of Iron might come. The loss of an increasingly neurotic favorite may have done James little political damage, since Carr made little effort to build for himself a network of influence, and few seem to have lamented the fall of a low-born Scot, but the exposure of fraud and betrayal at the highest level was not exactly to the credit of the crown.(32) James was certainly concerned to limit the fall-out as much as possible, not least by avoiding the ultimate humiliation of seeing his former favorite go to the scaffold (the Somersets' punishments were subsequently commuted to imprisonment in the Tower).(33) In the masque this translates as a crux: Jonson has to find ways of representing the new world order without seeming to cast aspersions on the conduct of sovereignty in the old.

It was presumably this difficulty that forced him to represent the old Evils not simply as criminals but as political subversives. From the start of The Golden Age Restored it is emphasized that, whatever their individual crimes, collectively the Evils are guilty of rebellion. Pallas calls them "insolent rebellion," "prophaner eyes" who resist the heavens out of spite (25-26), and Iron Age is characterized as a demagogue, inciting his followers to rebel not merely out of a desire to commit crimes but in order to wrest power from the hands of Jove:

We may triumph together, Vpon this enemie so great, Whom, if our forces can defeat, And but this once bring vnder,

Wee are the masters of the skyes, Where all the wealth, height, power, lyes, The scepter, and the thunder. (47-53)(34)

For all that the masque celebrates the exposure of vice, the Evils are political entities, the enemies of hierarchy, order, Jove and (consequently) of James himself. There is a curious contradiction here, one that puts a spin on the masque's topicality. The court was witnessing the exposure of aristocratic corruption in the sequence of judicial hearings, yet Somerset could hardly be said to have been in revolt, nor were his crimes political (though some effort was expended in suggesting that to murder Overbury while he was in the Tower as a prisoner of the king was a species of treason). In representing the Evils as if they were opponents of kingship, Jonson's fable manipulated the issues in order to insulate James from blame by association. Far from having condoned crime at his elbow, the king himself is cast in the masque's presentation as the main target of the Evils' violence. It is the Jacobean peace that their military dancing disrupts.

In this way, a disclosure of corruption that was potentially damaging to kingly authority is turned so that it reinforces James's stature, and the problem of corrupt courtiers is displaced onto the far less ideologically problematic issue of rebellion. The Evils become a generalized threat to order rather than a split within the symbology of order itself. Even so, as the action continues after the banishment of the rebels, the problem of insulating the king continues to press onto the masque in the handling of the arrival of Astraea and the Golden Age, since whatever they might be taken to imply about the future, their return is clearly fraught with awkward implications about the past. In calling the two goddesses down, Pallas tactlessly remarks that they have been "long wish'd, and wanted" (79), and Astraea and the Golden Age themselves seem amazed at their restoration, scarcely able to comprehend that they might once more descend to earth (85-100). Inevitably, the inherent disadvantage of a fable of renewal is what it risks suggesting about the age before the present renovation. As Pallas admits, virtue has been "prest" and arts have been "buried" (120), while the invitation to the masquers to come forward ("O wake, wake, wake, as you had neuer slept" [134]) is even more devastating, half-conceding as it does that good men were absent (or at best asleep) in the time before the present. Plainly, Jonson cannot avow openly that James's reign hitherto has been distinguished by the dominance of corruption and self-interest, and the masque might comfortably be understood as generalized advice to the court to avoid factiousness in future. On the other hand, the danger of celebrating "the ages quickning power" (157) is that it does invite awkward reflections about what the age is quickening from.

The submerged presence of these contradictions indicates the difficulty that Jonson faced in giving ethical coherence to a sequence of events in which the dignity of the king was centrally interested, and in which ethical considerations were at every point crossed with the politics of faction. In order to legitimate the displacement of one courtly power-block by another, Jonson had to minimize any perception that the gulf between iron and gold was less absolute in reality than it could be made to appear in the rarefied atmosphere of myth. It is a maneuver that the masque does not fully accomplish. The champions of justice may discipline anarchic rebels, but in performance this would have been self-evidently a recasting of courtly competition in moral terms; while all the praises of the courtiers are ethically determined, by the end of the masque the element of reward within the renewal has been clearly acknowledged. Although Corruption is said to be the Evil with "golden hands" (39), by the time we reach Pallas's speech to the masquers the material benefits of courtship have been readmitted and the masque's function of underwriting the redistributed royal largesse has become clear. Pallas tells the masquers that Astraea will ensure that "want may touch you neuer," and she urges them to serve Jove "as his bountie giues you cause" (214, 203). These may be the rewards due to faithful rather than vicious service, but they are rewards nonetheless, and they threaten to contaminate the ethical scheme of the masque by acknowledging that the heroes' honor is as much a matter of royal favor as it is of more abstract ideas of goodness. The all-too-concrete rewards of virtue undermine the iconography of the Golden Age by disclosing that even the reign of Astraea has links with more material forms of gold.

IV

The Golden Age Restored, then, is a masque that illuminates the complex intersections of politics and aesthetics in Jacobean courtly culture. On the one hand, the text's aesthetic, formal design cannot properly be understood without detailed consideration of its engagement in the politics of 1616. As we have demonstrated, the judicial proceedings and political in-fighting of the moment profoundly conditioned the character of its action and the significance of its iconography. But on the other hand, when addressing the text's politics it is equally clear that a straightforward correlation between text and context, masque and occasion cannot be made. The 1616 audience would not have been able to regard The Golden Age Restored as a mere ceremonial celebration of the politics of the moment, but must have recognized it as a political intervention in its own right. Its fable seeks to shape the fluid political situation into meaningful forms, but its formal strategies are themselves compromised by contingencies that the masque is unable to transcend. Far from elevating politics into a transcendent language of myth, the masque conducts a complex and not always successful negotiation between myth and event, aesthetic form and political contingency.

Exploration of the partially hidden tensions that unsettle the masque's aesthetic completeness makes it all the more evident how intractable the task facing Jonson as court poet was, and how heavily considerations of diplomacy must have weighed upon him. Obliged to celebrate the court through symbolic devices that idealized and mystified the operations of power, Jonson cannot but have been aware of the inconsistencies and tensions in his practice of panegyric. Not only would he have had to attend diligently to issues of tact in a court still in the midst of a traumatic upheaval, he was himself in the unenviable position of having to eat many of his own earlier words in public. In praising the recovery of justice in the Whitehall of 1616 Jonson was implicitly contradicting the masques of 1615 and before, in which the court's justice had not apparently been in question. Moreover, in celebrating the achievement of power by the Pembroke-Essex connection Jonson was compelled to rewrite the earlier representations of court faction within his own panegyric. In 1606 he had dramatized a reconciliation between the Howards and the followers of the second Earl of Essex in the Barriers for Frances Howard's first marriage, but the Essexians had then been on the losing side in the tilt. Even more embarrassing must have been the memory of A Challenge at Tilt, performed exactly two years earlier at Frances Howard's marriage to Robert Carr. That alliance had unmistakeably signalled the triumph of the Howards, and Jonson's speeches urging the necessity of reconciliation between competing factions rang hollowly at a tournament from which many of the Essexians had conspicuously absented themselves.(35) In The Golden Age Restored Jonson therefore found himself memorializing the downfall of a patron who had until recently been himself the object of more than one panegyric, and at the same time celebrating the renewal of an alignment whose eclipse he had earlier been constrained to ameliorate in the ritualized combat of courtly tournament.

Four years before, in his "Epistle to Mr John Selden," Jonson had raised the question of what happens when the praises of panegyric are overtaken by the contingencies of history:

Though I confesse (as every Muse hath err'd, And mine not least) I have too oft preferr'd Men past their termes, and prais'd some names too much, But 'twas with purpose to have made them such.(36)

Jonson's evasive reply, that the poet's role must be to describe men not as they are but as they should be, could not sidestep the tensions in the practice of panegyric, which the celebrations of New Year's Day 1616 made embarrassingly self-evident. Difficulties such as these must have been all too common for writers of court panegyric, though rarely would they have been as acute as they must have been in the preparation of The Golden Age Restored. In the event, it is perhaps amazing that Jonson managed the occasion with as much sensitivity as he did.

University of Leeds

NOTES

1 Parts of this essay amplify some material that we have each referred to elsewhere for different purposes. See David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard (New York: Routledge, 1993), and Martin Butler, "Ben Jonson and the Limits of Courtly Panegyric," in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (London: Macmillan, 1994). We are grateful to Alastair Bellany for helpful commentary on this paper.

2 The essay that perhaps signals this shift is Leah Marcus's "'Present Occasions, and the Shaping of Ben Jonson's Masques," ELH 45 (1978): 201-25. For some subsequent analyses that explore the tension between the aesthetic and the political, see John Peacock, "Jonson and Jones Collaborate on Prince Henry's Barriers," Word and Image 3 (1987): 172-94; David Lindley, "Embarrassing Ben: The Masques for Frances Howard," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 343-59; and Martin Butler, "Politics and the Masque: The Triumph of Peace," The Seventeenth Century 2 (1987): 117-41, and "Politics and the Masque: Salmacida Spolia," in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. T. Healy and J. Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 59-74.

3 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press 1925-52), 7:428, line 206; all further references to masque are cited parenthetically in text by line.

4 Herford and Simpson (note 3), 10:545-46; citing W. W. Greg, "The Riddle of Jonson's Chronology," The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1926): 340-47. In the Folio no date is given for Mercury Vindicated, and The Golden Age Restored is dated 1615. Greg argued that before 1620 Jonson's practice was to use calendar dates rather than legal dates, and therefore that The Golden Age Restored belongs to the Christmas season 1614-15, and Jonson's printing reversed the masques' sequence. But Jonson's practice with dates was by no means consistent, and in the Folio he was in most other respects careful to print his masques in order of presentation (the exception is The Masque of Beauty, which is printed out of sequence in order to be next to its companion piece, The Masque of Blackness). In his early study of the masques Rudolph Brotanek suggested that The Golden Age Restored contained some of the allusions to Somerset that we are about to detail (Die Englischen Maskenspiele [Vienna: Niermayer, 1902], 202, 352), but these possibilities were discounted by the Oxford editors (10:546) and by E. K. Chambers (The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. [Oxford, 1923], 3:3, 390). See also note 25 below.

5 Marcus, "City Metal and Country Mettle: The Occasion of Ben Jonson's Golden Age Restored," in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. David M. Bergeron (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985) 26-47.

6 John Orrell, "The London Stage in the Florentine Correspondence," Theatre Research International 3 (1977-78): 173-74.

7 Public Record Office, State Papers 14/82/81.

8 HMG De L'Isle & Dudley MSS, 5:340.

9 Charles Richardson, A Sermon Concerning the Punishment of Malefactors (London: 1616), 28.

10 Public Records Office, State Papers 14/82/76.

11 T. B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols. (London, 1816) vol. 2, column 915.

12 Howell (note 11), column 922.

13 Public Records Office, State Papers 14/82/86.

14 Lambeth Palace MS 663, fol. [l.sup.v].

15 Public Records Office, State Papers 14/82/96.

16 Charles Richardson (note 9) commented that "the lawes must not be like unto cobwebs which catch and hold the little flies, but the great ones break through them" (28); five years later, preaching to the court, George Mason remarked, "When good lawes are enacted, let them not be like spiders webs, where great flies breake through, and little flies are entangled" (Two Sermons [1621], 60).

17 BL MS Stowe 175, fol. 310.

18 Letters of John Holles 1587-1637, ed. P. R. Seddon, 3 vols. (Nottingham: Thoroton Society, 1975), 1:70.

19 Seddon (note 18), 1:73.

20 S. R. Gardiner, "On certain Letters of Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, giving an account of the affair of the Earl of Somerset," Archeologia 41 (1867): 168.

21 Anna Mafia Crino, "Il Processo a Lord e Lady Somerset per L'Assassinio di Sir Thomas Overbury Nelle Relazioni di Francesco Quaratesi ed di Pompilio Gaetani," English Miscellany 8 (1957): 261. We are grateful to Matilde Coletta for translation of this article.

22 HMC De L'Isle & Dudley MSS, 5:340, 344.

23 Seddon (note 18), 1:94.

24 Seddon, 1:73.

25 This reference to Overbury's murder was in fact noticed by the Oxford editors, but they dismissed it since "the context . . . steers clear of any personal interpretation" (Herford and Simpson [note 3], 10:546).

26 Crino (note 21), 275.

27 BL MS Additional 35832, fol. 5.

28 Bodleian MS Willis 58, fol. 224.

29 Geoffrey Goodman was later to write: "But after a few years, when we had experience of the Scottish government then in disparagement of the Scots, and in hate and detestation of them, the Queen did seem to revive; then was her memory much magnified." John S. Brewer, ed. The Court of King James I, 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1839), 2:98. On this topic see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Rsnaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), especially chapter 8, "The Spenserians and King James."

30 See Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 300-20; and Martin Butler, "Stuart Politics in Jonson's A Tale of a Tub," Modern Language Review 85 (1990): 12-28.

31 For an analogous, though much more pointed recollection of Elizabethan iconography in a Jacobean masque, see the figure of Diana in Campion's Lord Hay's Masque (1607) and the discussion in David Lindley, Thomas Campion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), 185-190.

32 The resentment of Carr's rise and rejoicing at his fall are economically represented in this widely circulated epigram:

When Carre in Court at first a Page began, Hee sweld, and sweld into a gentleman And from a gentleman and bravely dight Hee sweld, and sweld till he became a Knight At last forgetting what he was at first Hee sweld into an Earle and then he burst. (Bodleian MS Malone 19, 157)

33 Gondomar was well aware of the difficulties the king faced in deciding on the punishment of the Somersets: see Gardiner (note 20), 185-86.

34 From a very different perspective Michael Drayton, in revising his satirical poem The Owle to include reference to the Overbury affair, characterizes the machinations of Frances Howard and Robert Carr as an effort to "rule the state" by subterfuge (Michael Drayton, Poems [London, 1619], 414-45).

35 The Agent of Savoy reported that many lords refused their invitation "because they are relatives of the Earl of Essex, and others have excused themselves, not being part of this [Howard] faction." John Orrell, "The London Court Stage in the Savoy Correspondence, 1613-1675," Theatre Research International 4 (1979): 80.

36 Herford and Simpson (note 3), 8:159.