Amazon reflections in the Jacobean Queen's masque. Schwarz, Kathryn.

Abstract: Playwrights Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson wrote a series of plays for the Jacobean court between 1604 and 1609 in which the queen instead of the king was simultaneously portrayed and privileged by performing the main role. Queen Anne was thus made to act out roles in plays such as 'The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses,' 'The Masque of Beauty,' and the 'Masque of Queens.' The recurring portrayal of Amazon queens in these plays reflect the English view of exotic and powerful women as well as their challenge to male power by presenting female alternatives.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1995 Rice University

Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.

Mirror warning, General Motors

For six years, from 1604 through 1609, Jacobean court masques stage the bodies and the intentions of women. Four masques in those five years claim Queen Anne as patron, actor, and even author: The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Beauty, and The Masque of Queens. Beginning with Samuel Daniel's Vision, escalating through Ben Jonson's Queens, masques written in the name of the queen parade female bodies before the king, staging blackness, martiality, and the history of women's power. Anne herself appears in these productions as producer and star player, providing, according to Daniel and Jonson, not only patronage but representational conceits. This reiterated claim of her intervention, perhaps in itself an authorial conceit, has its own power nonetheless, for the alternative ichnographies of the Jacobean queen's masque transform the figure of the queen. As King James's wife, Anne is marginalized in the political transactions of the Jacobean court, representing power once removed. The Jacobean queen's masque removes her instead to the stage, to a space in which female sovereignty, as dramatic fiction, may effect the disruption or displacement of male power. The space between the masque and its royal observer becomes a place of alternatives in which the queen's representations do not obviously defer - or refer - to the king.

Generic conceit suggests that the masque is contained in its referentiality, that women's power, acted onstage, might be resolved into Jacobean compliment. The display onstage is referred exclusively to the royal spectator: the king, occupying the best seat in the house, provides both the masque's justification and its ideal reader, leaving the rest of the audience at one remove from spectacular immediacy. Jonathan Goldberg, in James I and the Politics of Literature, argues for a direct correspondence between the celebration and its subject: "In its form, the masque provides a mirror, too, for it elucidates the spectacle that the king presents sitting in state. The mysteries of the masque reflect the monarch's silent state: the masque represents the king."(1) King James watches that which he already embodies, and the masque, in these terms, is constructed through synecdoche, representing a kingly quality through each masquer's body and cumulatively staging a sovereign whole. Dramatic fiction finds its referent in the audience, creating continuity between the celebration of royal power and its embodiment. The barrier between audience and stage, like the masque itself, is staged only to be discovered, revealed as artificial: the king is reflected in the masque, the audience is drawn into the final celebratory dance, and the space between James and the representation of his power is obscured in the glory of royal celebration.

Jacobean queen's masques reimpose that space, constructing an unbridgeable gap between masque and king. Early Jacobean celebrations - written by Daniel and Jonson, danced by Anne and her courtiers - disrupt the reflection of majesty with the vision of broken boundaries, and these boundaries, unlike the artificial barriers of the masque's reflective trope, are anxiously guarded. Beginning with Daniel's Vision, climaxing in Jonson's Queens, Jacobean queen's masques challenge the discrete terms of power, race, gender, and theatricality. The challenge is posed by images of female excess, bearing no resemblance to the king; the space between James and the stage becomes not conceit but ellipsis, and masquers' bodies, women's bodies, figure opposition rather than compliment. Jacobean queen's masques detach the display of women's power from the referent of the king. Instead power is articulated as martial, exotic, and historically inimical to men, the implications of violence progressing towards the literalism of an armed female body. The implications of that body, alien but with the familiarity of myth, suggest that the relationship between king and masque must be, not mutuality, but confrontation: the mirror of these masques reflects the king's encounter with the Amazon.

For the sixteenth century, Amazons are a constant preoccupation. The publication of Columbus's first letter in 1493 gives an account of "the women of Matremonio, which is the first island met on the way from Spain to the Indies, in which there is not one man," and the vision of woman warriors recurs throughout experiences of the New World.(2) Hernando Cortes and Amerigo Vespucci, among others, follow Columbus in the Amazon quest; in 1542 alone, Francisco de Orellana, seeing armed women on a South American riverbank, names the river "Amazon," while those who cross the continent remember Montalvo's legend of the Amazon queen Calafie, and name the western peninsula "California."(3) The progression of the myth through both exploration and romance has provoked speculation that Montalvo may have read Columbus's letter, and that Cortes in turn may have read Montalvo's addition to Amadis, producing a strange effect of familiarity in these narratives of a new world. By the second half of the century the intertextuality of Amazons, their simultaneous appearance as mythological figures and as objects of the explorer's quest, has itself become a trope; notorious for undermining categorical certainties, Amazons figure the sense in which boundaries between experience and fantasy are permeable. For Sir Walter Ralegh's 1596 Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana, such epistemological categories come close to vanishing altogether; Ralegh's uses of Amazon myth suggest that the previous accounts of other explorers are indistinguishable from mythological or fictional preconceptions, which in turn are inseparable from the writer's own experience. Ralegh, who discovers neither Guiana nor gold, offers instead a digression concerning Amazons which lays simultaneous claim to "truth" and the power of mediated narrative. "And though I digresse from my purpose, yet I will set downe that which hath bene delivered me for trueth of those women."(4) Rather than the conclusive literalism of discovery, Amazons motivate narrative production, their story endlessly reproduced in the accumulations of intertextuality. Amazon rewritings span the genres of Elizabethan literary production, populating the edge of the world, the battlefields of allegory and romance, and the popular stage; to name only the most familiar examples, Amazons appear centrally in Sidney's Arcadia, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.(5)

Yet, if Amazon myth suggests Elizabethan preoccupations, it is not clear what it reflects on the Jacobean court stage. The myth is implicated in Elizabethan iconography, and, while it may be less than politic to follow Knox in calling a queen an Amazon, Elizabeth's martial agency makes the connection, however implicit, nonetheless inevitable.(6) But in the Jacobean masque, among the props of James's sovereignty, Amazon myth produces a generic paradox: the queen's masque, as it brings the martial woman in from the margins, displaces the centrality of male power. Amazons are familiar objects of New World desire, traditional subjects in chivalric romance, provocative figures for the transvestism and fictional agency of the popular stage. They are not a logical idiom in which to celebrate a king. The conceit of the mirror is radically revised by the Jacobean queen's masque, for this mirror displays an image of power irrelevant to Jacobean iconography, an alternative to the central authority of the king. At best, Amazons suggest the potency of Elizabethan nostalgia; at worst, they pose a direct challenge to the terms of male sovereignty itself.

As I have suggested, the Amazon encounter imposes a peculiar double vision in the English Renaissance: figured both through present - if unverifiable - existence and through mythological history, the amazon is fantasy pursued by its own potential literalism. The overdetermined relationship between body and figure intensifies onstage with such Amazonian roles as Shakespeare's Hippolyta and Joan la Pucelle; reference to the myth complicates the terms of dramatic fiction. And, in the relationship of masquers to the iconography they represent, Jacobean queen's masques re-create this sense of a myth which may at any moment produce a body, which, onstage, must produce a body. Masquers, in their guises of power, are at once alien and familiar, echoing the dramatized Amazon as they bring together the remoteness of myth and the immediacy of their own bodies onstage. Like the court masque, Amazon myth has been claimed as a male fantasy, affirming heroism through both sexual and martial conquest; yet the agency of that conquest proves peculiarly mutable, threatening to affirm, not the hero, but the Amazon.(7) In the Jacobean queen's masques, masquer and Amazon converge: each represents a fantasy which exceeds the terms of its invention, doing violence to its referential conceit.

The convergence of Amazon and masquer becomes explicit identification with Jonson's staging of Penthesilea; it begins with Samuel Daniel's 1604 Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, the first Jacobean queen's masque. In Writing Women in Jacobean England, Barbara K. Lewalski credits Queen Anne with the power of the genre: "While entertainments of various sorts had been a staple of Queen Elizabeth's progresses, the court masque became a major genre in the early years of James's reign, and Queen Anne was midwife to it."(8) Appropriately enough in terms of this generational conceit, Anne's efforts, according to Daniel, produce proof of her husband's potency; in the text of this first queen's masque, Daniel justifies his Vision through its aptness to the king. The masque's purpose "was onely to present the figure of those blessings, with the wish of their encrease and countinuance, which this mightie Kingdome now enjoyes by the benefite of his most gracious Maiestie."(9) The twelve goddesses appear as figures of sovereign virtue, idealized women transformed into fragments of the king; the individuality of the masquers is subsumed in iconography as the masque pursues its synecdochic conceit. Daniel mediates the mythology of female power through an aggressively male aesthetic: "And well haue mortall men apparelled all the Graces, all the Blessings, all Vertues, with that shape wherein themselues are much delighted" (lines 61-3). Twelve female bodies construct a collective vision of male sovereignty, and Daniel's masque, itself a shape wherein men are to be much delighted, stages women in the name of the king.

The first necessity of this assembled compliment is limitation; the goddesses must not exceed their celebratory role. Daniel describes his editorial function: "And though these Images haue oftentimes diuers significations, yet it being not our purpose to represent them, with all those curious and superfluous obseruations, we tooke them onely to serue as Hierogliphicqs for our present intention, according to some one propertie that fitted our occasion, without obseruing other their mysticall interpretations" (p. 188). "Diuers significations" are, for this Vision, "mysticall," mystified, producing an excess of interpretation; to fulfill his synecdochic conceit Daniel's "Hierogliphicqs for our present intention" must be contained by his occasion. The masque restricts the multiplication of properties: Proserpina does not figure rape or Ceres revenge; the jealousy of Juno vanishes with the lust of Venus. And Daniel's martial woman loses her edge. The militant virginity of Diana becomes a vision of the pastoral:

[C]haste Diana, in her Robes of greene, With weapons of the Wood her selfe addrests To blesse the Forrests, where her power is seene, In peace with all the world but Sauage beasts.

(lines 110-3)

The violent potential of Diana's chastity, armed against violation, is obscured by Daniel's narrative, and the goddess's force finds its target only in the "Sauage beasts" over which she exercises a sort of pest control.

Yet the conceit of synecdoche, the single-mindedness of a vision in which only the king can signify multiply, does not suppress the plurality of myth. If the "diuers significations" of Daniel's goddesses threaten to disrupt his royal compliment, the vision of Diana introduces a more specific threat, the myth of Actaeon. In Ovidian myth Actaeon, surprising the goddess in her bath, is transformed by her into a stag and torn apart by his own dogs; and, as Nancy Vickers has shown, Diana and Actaeon are never far apart in Renaissance representation. Vickers describes their encounter in terms peculiarly resonant for the Jacobean queen's masque: "[I]t is a confrontation with difference where similarity might have been desired or even expected. It is a glance into a mirror - witness the repeated pairing of this myth with that of Narcissus (Metamorphoses 3.344-510) - that produces an unlike and deeply threatening image."(10) Narcissus, revised, might be the originary myth of Jacobean court celebration; the masque promises a purchasable narcissism through which self-love accompanies rather than obscures self-recognition. But alien images multiply in the queen's masques, and the self-satisfaction of Narcissus is impossible in the face of this fragmentation. Actaeon, rather than Narcissus, figures the king's relationship to the queen's masque; it is he who, in Vickers's terms, finds a stranger in the mirror. Actaeon, watching goddesses, loses his identity to a myth that tears men apart. Guilty of seeing too much, of an illicit spectatorship that exceeds male privilege, he becomes the victim of his own pleasures, and those pleasures take the form of James's own. George Sandys, writing his Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures a few years after the death of James, offers a peculiarly suggestive moral to Actaeon's story: "I rather agree with those, who thinke it to bee meant by his maintaining of ravenous and riotous sycophants: who have often exhausted the Exchequors of opulent Princes, and reduced them to extreame necessity. Bountie therefore is to be limited according to the ability of the giver, and merit of the receaver: else it not onely ruinates it selfe, but looseth the name of a vertue, & converts into folly."(11) The king's opulent celebrations, his dramatizations of sycophancy through the form of the masque, reproduce the image of Actaeon's spectacular excess; the goddess onstage implicates the king in the violence of Diana discovered. Through the threat of that violence, the effect of the masque's multiple bodies becomes ominous, suggesting an equation between synecdoche and fragmentation. Female masquers, as discrete aspects of the king, play to a watcher who, Actaeon-like, confronts the vision of his own dismemberment.(12)

As goddesses, the masquers recall a violent mythographic power; as courtiers they are disruptively individual, revealing familiarity through the veil of allegorical conceit. That familiarity concerns James closely, for, as Pallas Athene, Queen Anne displays the most recognizable form of female power, appearing with all the weapons of her masqued identity. "Pallas (which was the person her Maiestie chose to represent) was attyred in a blew mantle, with a siluer imbrodery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head, and presents a Launce and Target" (p. 190). Anne's armory, the "weapons and engines of war," is iconographically perverse, celebrating female violence against the notorious peace-keeping of the king. Daniel's narrative claims to disarm Anne-as-Pallas, reiterating the masque's drive toward figurative singularity: "war-like Pallas" becomes the figure "in whom both Wit and Courage are exprest," her power deferred to "Prouidence" as the queen's own state is referred to the king (lines 93-5). The potency, the androgyny, even the unnatural birth of Athena are appropriated by this claim; in Daniel's terms, "war-like Pallas" springs full-formed from the collaboration of his intent with that of James, celebrating pacifism, legitimating sovereignty, insisting on the masculine privilege, not of goddesses, but of kings. Yet the sum of twelve goddesses is not obviously a king, and Daniel's tribute to the queen's "heroicall spirit" refers to an alternative authority embodied on the stage (p. 187). Like the reduction of Amazon myth to an accessory of male heroism, the claim that women's bodies represent the virtues of men wavers when confronted with the bodies themselves. Iris's demand for silence - "For who can looke vpon such Powers and speake?" - invites literal-minded response, and Dudley Carleton, speaking, claims to have looked upon a surprising amount of Anne (lines 74-5). "Only Pallas . . . had a trick by herself, for her clothes were not so much below the knee that we might see a woman had both feet and legs which I never knew before."(13) Like Shakespeare's Hippolyta, described by Titania as "the bouncing Amazon / Your buskin'd mistress and your warrior love," Anne displays the buskins that identify both the stage and the martial role played upon it.(14) The role of Pallas, like that of Hippolyta, conflates theatrical and Amazonian enactment; it is a role in which disguise becomes display. In Carleton's formulation, the goddess of wisdom becomes the conveyor of transgressive knowledge, and that knowledge concerns the body of the queen. Suzanne Gossett says of Carleton's comment, "He ignored the appropriateness of the costume to Pallas in observing its inappropriateness to Anne."(15) Questioning the fiction exposes its incongruity: Daniel's goddesses exceed the generic conceit of the masque, and the body of the masquer is read, not as the wisdom of the king, but as the excess of a queen.

The martial form of that excess begs the question of which queen, suggesting yet another multiplication of identities. Stephen Orgel, in The Jonsonian Masque, says, "Even the first masque commissioned by the new king, Daniel's Vision of Twelve Goddesses (1604), looks back to the traditional pageant."(16) Looking back at this moment, from this newly acquired throne, suggests a powerful and potentially subversive nostalgia. The idealization of James's queen as a martial goddess trespasses on the iconography of Elizabeth I; Elizabeth, represented throughout her reign through the figures of Diana and Athena, appears as a ghost on the Jacobean court stage, and the multiple identities of her iconography are singularly inappropriate to James.(17) Anne, a queen playing at a goddess's power, is a place-holder for the more persuasive power of an earlier queen; if Daniel's figures are allusive, if their fictionality is not self-contained but referential, the images presented by this "traditional pageant" suggest a referent other than the king. Not surprisingly, the response to this specter of Elizabethan nostalgia is an attempt at displacement, and both Daniel and his traditional pageant soon vanish from the stage of the Jacobean queen's masque. Within a year of Daniel's Vision, in his first collaboration with Inigo Jones, Ben Jonson presents his Masque of Blackness.

Jonson, echoing Daniel, refers the masque to its praises of the king, offering the text of Blackness "In duty, therefore, to that majesty who gave them their authority and grace, and, no less than the most royal of predecessors, deserves eminent celebration for these solemnities."(18) But Jonson's preface, like Daniel's, turns immediately to the queen, and claims more specific inspiration than that of her "heroicall spirit." "Hence, because it was her majesty's will to have them blackamores at first, the invention was derived by me, and presented thus" (lines 18-9). Anne's will blackens the masquers, leaving traditional pageantry behind. It is an abrupt departure, doing violence to the masque's conventions; Dudley Carleton writes, "Their Apparell was rich, but too light and Curtizan-like for such great ones. Instead of Vizzards, their Faces, and Arms up to the Elbows, were painted black, which was Disguise sufficient, for they were hard to be known; but it became them nothing so well as their red and white, and you cannot imagine a more ugly Sight, then a Troop of lean-cheek'd Moors . . . [The Spanish Ambassador] took out the Queen, and forgot not to kiss her Hand, though there was Danger it would have left a Mark on his Lips."(19) The masquers' beauty is inscrutable, their "red and white" obscured; "they were hard to be known." And the extent to which the "blackamores" mark men goes beyond the danger to an Ambassador's lips. Carleton, reading the queen's conceit as a failure of genre, identifies Blackness as inappropriate seeing: "Theyr black faces, and hands which were painted and bare vp to the elbowes, was a very loth-some sight, and I am sory that strangers should see owr court so strangely disguised." His account concludes in a vividly evocative causality: "[A]nd one woeman amongst the rest lost her honesty, for which she was caried to the porters lodge being surprised at her busines on the top of the Taras."(20) When the masquers are "hard to be known" anything can happen. The visible transgression of the queen's conceit becomes the sexual impropriety of a woman's "business"; versions of excess are indistinguishable in this metonymy, and the loss of "honesty" implicates both sexuality and disguise. The peril of the fiction is the literalism of women's bodies: for the space of this royal celebration the masquers are "too light and Curtizan-like," scandalous company for a king.

Like a glimpse of the queen's legs, the physicality of the masquers' blackness displaces metaphor, dislocating the royal referent. Herford and Simpsons' collection of commentaries includes a response to the masque taken from a spectator's letter: "At night was there a sumptuous shew represented by the Q. and some dozen Ladyes all paynted like Blackamores face and neck bare and for the rest strangely attired in Barbaresque mantells to the halfe legge, having buskins all to be sett with iewells, which a waue of the Sea as it weare very artificially made and brought to the stage by secrett ingines cast forth of a skallop shell to performe the residue of the devise of dansing etc. Which I saw not, nor harkened after further. But tell it you only for this that you discerne the humor of the tyme" (p. 449). Again the literalism of the watcher intervenes between the body of the masquer and the image of the king; again the woman's legs, the Amazonian buskins, suggest the strangeness of the queen's conceits. Queen Anne brings to court the marginalia of cultural anxiety: the masquers of Blackness recall the Amazons of New World mythology, who cross and recross the boundaries of race as well as those of gender performance. Associated by classical authors with the atrocities of the Scythians, rewritten for Renaissance explorers into the unknown spaces of Africa and America, martial women obscure the specificity of race as they do the boundaries between woman and man. Gaspar de Carvajal, chronicling the naming of the Amazon river, describes the "Amazons" seen by Francisco de Orellana as "very tall, robust, fair," as "somewhat whiter than the [Indians]." The fairness of the women, their visible separation from their male companions, identifies them as Amazons and motivates the river's naming. Yet at nearly the same moment, for another explorer, the terms of recognition may be very different: thus Nuno de Guzman searches the west coast of Mexico for "the elusive black Amazons."(21) Race and gender are equally indeterminate in the Amazonian myth of nonrecognition, and Blackness stages this uncertainty, displaying the "humor of the tyme" to the spectator who remembers only the queen's disguise. Existing outside convention, committing all transgressions from ruling over men to eating them, the fantasized women of the New World are peculiar figures for the stability of male power. The blackened courtier exceeds Jonson's trope and James's court; described as "the first formed dames of earth," Anne's masquers present a vision of originality that is neither the poet's nor the king's (line 113).

Jonson's masquers come to a land "Ruled by a sun that to this height doth grace it, / Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force / To blanch an Ethiop" (lines 223-5). Yet the masque ends, not with a recuperative display of sovereign male power, but with the masquers' promise to return, and for three years their transformation remains suspended. In 1608, after a delay that in itself seems symptomatic, Jonson presents the Masque of Beauty. His preface to this delayed sequel once again disclaims authority, crediting the queen with the sustained conceit: "[I]t was her highness' pleasure again to glorify the court, and command that I should think on some fit presentment which should answer the former, still keeping them the same persons, the daughters of Niger." Blackness recedes into memory as the masquers again take the stage, "their beauties varied according to promise, and their time of absence excused, with four more added to their number."(22) That the ladies have vanished only to increase themselves has strange echoes of parthenogenesis, suggesting an infinite supply of Niger's daughters; their cosmetic transformation, however, is laid at the feet of the king. "Which among these is Albion, Neptune's son?" asks Boreas, seeking the source of metamorphosis. The answer is a question which should not, in this context of alienation and disguise, be asked: "Or can / A doubt arise, 'mong creatures, which is man?" (lines 20-5).

The doubt arises. James's allegorization as Albion proves irrelevant to the transformative vision of women, for the literal spectator-king and the nominal son of Neptune are equally removed from the action. As it rebinarizes beauty and blackness, separating the aesthetic from the alien, the masque identifies this as an exclusively female struggle: rather than opposing the obscurity of disguise to the vision of James, Jonson sets the envy of Night against the intervention of Aethiopia. James, addressed in terms that identify his court as the site, himself as the agent of transformation - "[N]ow expect to see, great Neptune's son, / And love the miracle which thyself hast done" - cannot bear witness to his own moment of glory (lines 142-3). The miracle takes place offstage, outside the scope of the masque's conceit of compliment. This transformation, producing a spectacle of alien beauty, recalls the narrative of Shakespeare's Joan la Pucelle, who embodies a dangerous efficacy in 1 Henry VI:

Lo, whilest I waited on my tender lambs, And to sun's parching heat display'd my cheeks, God's Mother deigned to appear to me, And in a vision full of majesty Will'd me to leave my base vocation And free my country from calamity. Her aid she promis'd, and assur'd success; In complete glory she reveal'd herself; And whereas I was black and swart before, With those clear rays which she infus'd on me That beauty am I blest with which you may see.(23)

Joan's transformation, too, is effected by a specifically female intervention; bleached by the "clear rays" of a heretical iconography, transformed from blackness to beauty, she anticipates the progress of Jonson's masques. It is a subversive intertextuality, for Joan's "assur'd success" is the defeat of England, and, where Jonson promises new decorum in his masquers' beauty, Joan's own beauty is incorporated into her martial force. "My courage try by combat, if thou dar'st, / And thou shalt find that I exceed my sex" (I.ii.89-92). This is precisely the anxiety of Blackness: that the masquers, at once familiar and strange, may exceed their sex, becoming the inscrutable viragoes of Carleton's claim. "Stay, stay thy hands! Thou art an Amazon," Shakespeare's Dauphin begs the transformed Joan; and fear of the Amazon, recognition of the Amazon, is the last step in the progress from blackness to beauty (I.ii.104).

The final moments of Beauty implicate the audience in the masque's fictions; the concluding songs, celebrating metamorphosis, suggest a narrative of social and sexual violence in which the spectator must participate.

If all these Cupids now were blind, As is their wanton brother, Or play should put it in their mind To shoot at one another, What pretty battle they would make If they their objects should mistake, And each should wound his mother!

(lines 280-6)

The "play" of Jonson's Cupids is a fantasy of incest, conflating eroticism and death; blind Cupids, as they find their objects in error, disrupt the hierarchies of paternal control and the boundaries of socialized desire. The song's second verse reiterates the threat, making violence explicit: "For say the dames should, with their eyes, / Upon the hearts here mean surprise, / Were not the men like harmed?" (lines 292-4). As the masquers draw their audience into the dance the masque exceeds its boundaries, and "Beauty at large brake forth and conquered men" (line 332). The breaking forth of beauty, like the disguise plot of Blackness, occupies a stage on which representation cannot be contained by royal male iconography. Beauty concludes that "women were the souls of men," ending in a vision of possession, of appropriation from within, peculiarly resonant for these masques which claim to contain the true spirit of the king (line 310). The power of women populates the royal dream-vision - and unlike poets, "Ethiops never dream" (Blackness, line 160).

These first three Jacobean queen's masques represent versions of female power which are either mythologically remote or geographically inaccessible; bringing that power to the court's center stage, the masques erase the safe space of marginalization which keeps the Amazon from the king. Through Goddesses, through Blackness, and through Beauty the bodies and myths of women multiply, bringing the Amazon to the stage; it is a metonymic process that progresses as fragmentedly as do the masques themselves, through images of violence, alienation, and women's power. Implicit in the mythological apparatus of Goddesses, in the disguise plot of Blackness, and in Beauty's language of martial conquest, Amazon myth moves toward an explicit identification with the masquers onstage. The space of deferral imposed by the masque's celebratory conceit gives way to Amazonian immediacy, and in 1609, in Jonson's Masque of Queens, the parade of female sovereignty begins with "Penthesilea the brave Amazon."

"[I]t was my first and special regard to see that the nobility of the invention should be answerable to the dignity of their persons."(24) This is Jonson's introduction to Queens, his "first and special regard" recalling the theatrical indiscretions of Blackness. Having credited Anne with that alien conceit, Jonson describes her desire for a compensatory structure of distinction in Queens:

And because her majesty (best knowing that a principle part of life in these spectacles lay in their variety) had commanded me to think on some dance or show that might precede hers and have the place of a foil or false masque, I was careful to decline not only from others', but mine own steps in that kind, since the last year I had an antimasque of boys; and therefore now devised that twelve women in the habit of hags or witches, sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc. the opposites to good Fame, should fill that part, not as a masque but a spectacle of strangeness.

(lines 8-19)

Blackness had sustained this relation of "a spectacle of strangeness" to its sequel of beauty; the new insistence on formalizing contrast in a display which is not a masque suggests the celebratory failure of the aestheticized grotesque. Jonson's published commentary on Blackness concludes, "So ended the first masque, which, beside the singular grace of music and dances, had that success in the nobility of performance as nothing needs to the illustration but the memory by whom it was personated" (lines 337-9). Yet it is precisely the "memory by whom it was personated," the consciousness of particular identity, which complicates disguise and alienates the watcher from the masque. In Queens, through the structural addition of the antimasque, Jonson claims first to isolate and finally to subdue the female grotesque; his "twelve women in the habit of hags or witches" are played by male actors, distinguished from the female masquers by social hierarchy and the visible deformity of gender disguise. Gossett identifies the antimasque of Queens as a clarification of the masque's exemplary function: "The new method called for men or boy actors to play female roles in the antimasques, embodying the distorted vision of women, and for aristocratic women to play the masquers. The message conveyed to the audience is that 'real women' are, or should be, like the masquers" (p. 99). The antimasque represents distinction, guarding against misreading; in what might be explicit response to Daniel's Sybil, Jonson asserts that "a writer should always trust somewhat to the capacity of the spectator, especially at these spectacles, where men, beside inquiring eyes, are understood to bring quick ears, and not those sluggish ones of porters and mechanics that must be bored through at every act with narrations" (lines 95-9). Masque and antimasque engage in mutual clarification, ensuring that "the nobility of the invention should be answerable to the dignity of their persons." In this masque no woman should find reason to lose her honesty.

In making the antimasquers professional actors, Jonson makes them men; in representing them as "hags or witches" he creates a transvestite stage. These are speaking parts, through which the royal audience may well "be bored through at every act with narrations"; while the masquers remain properly silent, the witches address the king. The power of speech is thus displaced, from the mediating function of Daniel's Sybil to the oppositional intent of antimasque. The witches do not reflect or compliment the king but rather challenge his sovereignty: "I hate to see the fruits of a soft peace, / And curse the piety gives it such increase" (lines 132-3). The antimasque attacks James's pacifism and his piety, opposing to it a monstrous image of "female" power. Implicated - disarmed - in the arming of the witches, presented with a vision in which violence coincides with gender disguise, the royal watcher confronts Jonson's "spectacle of strangeness" - and finds that these are speaking parts, indeed.(25)

The division of masque from antimasque polarizes the powerful woman between aesthetically desirable and monstrous, representing the violence of witches and the agency of queens as perfectly separable fictions. Reimposing distinction between the aesthetic and the grotesque, Jonson's theory of Queens asserts that the difference can be seen, can be known. It is an assertion which reclaims discretion, denies the synthesis of anxiety and desire, and banishes the Amazon from the stage. Yet no other masque presents Amazons more aggressively than does Queens: visually, mythographically, and in the elaborations of its published text, Jonson's third queen's masque insists on the excesses of women's power. This preoccupation invests the masque's narrative structure, as the goddesses are introduced by a man made famous through proximity to powerful women: standing in the place of Daniel's Sybil, mediating between witches and queens, is Perseus. According to myth, Perseus, acting under the aegis of Athena, kills Medusa and brings her head to be affixed to Athena's shield. Described by the masque as "expressing heroic and masculine virtue" (line 342), Jonson's Perseus embodies a power derived from women, defining himself through the death of the gorgon:

I did not borrow Hermes' wings, nor ask His crooked sword, nor put on Pluto's casque, Nor on my arm advanced wise Pallas' shield (By which, my face aversed, in open field I slew the Gorgon) for an empty name.

(lines 346-50)

In Queens, Perseus's name draws together witch and queen as his mythological history had united Athena and the gorgon. The masque claims that, with the appearance of the goddesses, "not only the hags themselves but the hell into which they ran quite vanished, and the whole face of the scene altered, scarce suffering the memory of such a thing" (lines 335-7). But "the memory of such a thing," like Blackness's "memory by whom it was personated," must be suffered; Perseus himself imposes that necessity. The Dame, "naked armed, barefooted, her frock tucked, her hair knotted and folded with vipers," embodies the Medusa myth to which Perseus refers, and Medusa is quite literally inseparable from the aestheticized power of goddesses or queens (lines 87-8).

Again, as in Blackness, the convergence of beauty and power produces the threat of sexual excess. Sandys describes the creation of Medusa: "It is here fained that Pallas converted her [Medusa's] faire haire into Serpents, for being vitiated by Neptune in her temple: declaring how infamy is the ugliest of deformities, especially in the beautiful" (p. 221). In a peculiar inversion of accountability, Medusa's rape transforms her into the paralyzing vision of "infamy," of sexuality; violation produces a reciprocal violence that turns men to stone. Perseus, fetching Medusa's head with all its implications of sexual power, brings to chaste Athena the only weapon she lacks, and the result, as William Blake Tyrrell suggests, is a more potent mythography: "Restored within her and combined with her military attributes, the gorgon would make of Athena an Amazon."(26) This transformation, through which beauty becomes sexual transgression and arms a goddess, mirrors the processes of Queens: the drama of masque and antimasque opposes two myths of female power, and the visible result, echoing the consequences of Perseus's gorgon quest, is not difference but assimilation. As Athena first conquers and finally appropriates the power of the gorgon, so the queens attach to themselves the symbolic force of the witches: Athena wears Medusa's head upon her shield; the queens tie the witches' bodies before their chariots.

In "Jonson and the Amazons," Stephen Orgel suggests that the power of Medusa is already displaced: "Perseus is there because he confers - on the poet - the power of women, the power of the gorgon."(27) Yet, as Orgel himself points out, Perseus possesses power only contingently. The hero of the gorgon quest embodies the sense in which the king's agency is both displaced by and referred to the power of women; like the marginalization of Albion in Beauty, the imagined identification of Perseus-as-James only makes visible the contingency of male power. Perseus mediates between women, representing a "heroic virtue" which is always located elsewhere. He kills Medusa in the mirror of Athena's shield, only to transform that mirror by adding the image of the gorgon. And the gorgon's image, at once grotesque and beautiful, displays the simultaneity which antimasque claims to avoid; Medusa's is a different mirror-myth, in which desire, seeing, produces not compliment but paralysis.(28) Sandys's reading of the Medusa myth, like his moralization of Actaeon, has uncanny resonance for James: "Thus provided, Perseus kills Medusa, reason corporall pleasure: yet lookes not on her, but only sees her deformity in the shield of Pallas (as we view without prejudice to our sight the eclyps of the sun in the water) since it is not safe to behold what our hearts are so prone to consent too" (p. 222). The vision of Medusa in the shield of Pallas - Anne's Pallas? - mirrors the conflations of Queens, and Sandys's analogy of the sun eclipsed is an eerie echo of James's iconographic vulnerability. Medusa, like Diana, is a dangerous object for a king; the aggression of women, of goddesses and queens as of witches or gorgons, produces not royal compliment but an irrepressible monstrosity. As Sandys concludes, "Medusa, lust and the inchantments of bodily beauty, which stupifies our senses, make us altogether unusefull, and convert us as it were into marble, cannot be subdued" (p. 221).

In the Masque of Queens Narcissus confronts Medusa? The fantasy of a purchasable narcissism, contained and determined by the watchful presence of the king, is not sustained by the women's bodies onstage; the frozen impotence of Medusa's victims recalls the fate of Narcissus, the paralysis of a mirror in which self-recognition fails. Narcissus, mistaking the referent, is an Ovidian warning to the royal watcher who finds either mutuality or adoration in Jonson's Queens; like Daniel's originary Vision, this masque disrupts synecdoche with the pluralities of myth. In Queens, "heroic and masculine virtue" is incorporated in women, and the witches - Anne's conceit, Jonson's "foil" - encounter the masquers in a conflation leaving little space for male sovereignty. And, as it displaces the king, Jonson's Masque of Queens brings the Amazon in from the margins. Suggested in the conflation of Medusa and Athena, echoed in the aggression of witches, the martial woman of myth emerges as Jonson's first queen: "Penthesilea the brave Amazon." Penthesilea is the most aesthetic of Amazons, chaste lover of Hector and ally to Britain's ancestral Trojans; yet she is, like all Amazons, deadly to men. Virgil's Aeneas recalls her futile courage: "A Queene of war, though maide she bee, with men she likes to trie"; Spenser calls her "bold Penthesilee, which made a lake / Of Greekish bloud so oft in Troian plaine."(30) Penthesilea's heroism may champion a good cause, but she is nonetheless a woman attacking men, and attacking them with disconcerting efficiency. Achilles, who kills her, finds her more approachable when dead: "The Argives long for a wife like Penthesilea, and Achilles wants her as his wife, only after she is dead."(31) But it is not the death of the Amazon that preoccupies Jonson's Queens. Setting the tone for the queens who follow, Penthesilea the brave Amazon transforms the display of female sovereignty into a parade of mythological assaults on men.

The masquers of Queens figure a tradition of violence as old as the Iliad and as present as Queen Anne herself. Masque convention may impose a veil between aggression and the king; the excesses of mythology are mediated through costume, through an elaboration of disguise that recalls Sidney's extravagant Pyrocles.(32) Yet the queens, cumulative in their names, their myths, and the histories they evoke, represent a disruption of gender convention that compromises the masque's aesthetic, a disruption that becomes explicit in Jonson's published notes. Contextualizing Queens, Jonson cites Virgil on Camilla: "She had not accustomed her woman's hands to the distaff or the work baskets of Minerva; but, though a maiden, was inured to bear the hardships of war"; Xerxes on Artemisia: "Indeed men have shown themselves to me women, yet women have shown themselves men"; Xiphilinus on Bunduica: "[Her] mind was a man's rather than a woman's."(33) These narratives, in which performance displaces sexual essentialism, are not only Amazonian but theatrical; in creating a transvestite stage on which men dressed as women speak treason to the king, Jonson gives the visual propriety of the masquers its own ironic twist. Each masquer, however gauzy, carries the implications of a violent history; in Jonson's notes the queens wear armor, eat their victims, cut their hair, kill their men. Jonson's eleventh queen makes explicit the sense in which Queens progresses through Amazonian acts: "The eleventh was that brave Bohemian queen Valasca, who for her courage had the surname of Bold. That to redeem herself and her sex from the tyranny of men which they lived in under Primislaus, on a night and an hour appointed led on the women to the slaughter of their barbarous husbands and lords; and possessing themselves of their horses, arms, treasure, and places of strength, not only ruled the rest, but lived many years after with the liberty and fortitude of Amazons" (p. 546). The first step in the construction of Amazons is the death of the husband, the death of the king.

And Valasca, bringing onstage the blood of a murdered king, precedes the final queen, who "Possesse[s] all virtues, for which one by one / They were so famed" (lines 393-4). Anticipated in the "virtues" of eleven Amazonian queens, synthesizing acts ranging from domestic violence to genocide, the "queen in whom all they do live" is Queen Anne (line 504). As she summarizes the progress of iconoclasm, Anne appears onstage without the mediation of an alien history; she is Bel-Anna, "Queen of the ocean," "the worthiest queen" (lines 392, 398). Jonson describes the transparency of her disguise: "The name of Bel-Anna I devised to honor hers proper by, as adding to it, the attribute of fair, and is kept by me in all my poems wherein I mention her majesty with any shadow or figure" (p. 547). Constant in representation, this literal queen embodies the climax of Queens. In contemporary accounts her sovereignty might itself appear as a fictional representation, a politic conceit: "[James] had a very brave queen that never crossed his designes, nor intermeddled with state affaires, but ever complyed with him (even against the nature of any, but of a milde spirit) in the change of favourites; for he was ever best when furthest from his queene."(34) But in Queens Anne, Bel-Anna, poses a powerful alternative to the relationship between masque and king. Daniel had claimed that his Vision "was onely to present the figure of those blessings, with the wish of their encrease and countinuance, which this mighty Kingdome now enjoyes by the benefite of his most gracious Maiestie." In Queens referentiality is displaced from the royal spectator; it is the queen onstage who draws together the masquers' synecdochic display, her role emerging from the sum of their parts. Lewalski argues that Anne replaces the king altogether: "[T]he attempted containment cannot succeed: these militant Queens whose force is directed against Kings and husbands need, and find, a female referent in Queen Anne, not in King James."(35) In the specific histories through which Anne is constructed, Queens parades before its royal audience a more relentless hostility than any suggested by the witches' threats. Promising to distinguish aesthetic from excess, the masque confronts the king with a queen who is an Amazon.

In that Amazonian identification, as in Daniel's earlier iconography of martial queens, Anne might be a placeholder; the teleology of Queens extends beyond Bel-Anna to the image of Elizabethan nostalgia. The Jacobean court masque, celebrating King James, might intervene between present sovereignty and the past; the Jacobean queen's masque obscures that barrier as it does the discrete identities of gender, race, and role-playing more generally. Thomas Heywood, in The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World, recreates Jonson's progress of martial queens, concluding his own catalogue with an explicitly Amazonian Elizabeth: "Let me not here forget the Campe at Tilbery in which her Majestie was in person, and that if the Spaniard had prevailed by Sea to have given him battaile by land, appearing in the head of her Troopes, and incouraging her Souldiers, habited like an Amazonian Queene, Buskined and plumed, having a golden Truncheon, Gantlet, and Gorget; Armes sufficient to expresse her high and magnanimous spirit."(36) Heywood's final queen, like Jonson's Bel-Anna, is the queen through whom celebration reaches its climax; again like Bel-Anna she is an Amazonian queen. And Penthesilea sets the stage for Heywood's Elizabeth as she does for Jonson's Anne. Echoing Queens, Heywood gives histories of Camilla and Thomyris, Hypiscratea, Boadicea, and Zenobia, and these narratives again refer back to the heroic and masculine virtue of Penthesilea: "All these Heroyicke Ladies are generally called Viragoes, which is derived of Masculine Spirits, and to attempt those brave and Martial Enterprises, which belong to the honour of men, in which number, this Penthesilaea hath prime place."(37) Heywood's celebration of Penthesilea recalls the transgressions of Queens, returning to the question of who, exactly, has prime place on the Jacobean court stage. "Masculine Spirits" are appropriated by "Heroyicke Ladies"; Penthesilea is hardly the image of James, and in the queen's masque, in The Masque of Queens, the displacement of the king leaves the Amazon at center stage. Penthesilea the brave Amazon imposes a referentiality constructed outside the symbiosis of poet and king; the relationship of figure to referent is that of masquer to myth, and the royal watcher is irrelevant to Amazonian histories. This is the vision of Queens: forward women, looking back.

The vision has brief tenure on James's stage. On June 5, 1610, Tethys Festival, commissioned by Anne and written by Daniel, celebrates Henry as Prince of Wales; this queen's masque, the first to follow The Masque of Queens, unwrites the antimasque and banishes the Amazon beyond the margins. At its conclusion Mercury restores proper identity to both watchers and performers, summoning six noblemen to "bring backe the Queene and her Ladies in their owne forme."(38) The emphasis on their own form, on a return that is not an invasion, unveils the masquers; Daniel's final comment dismisses the illusion of disguise. "And in all these shewes, this is to be noted, that there were none of inferior sort, mixed amongst these great Personages of State and Honour (as vsually there haue beene) but all was performed by themselues with a due reseruation of their dignity" (lines 416-20). "None of inferior sort," like "their owne forme," reclaims the conceit of transparency. For Jonson's anti-masque of witches Daniel, in Tethys, substitutes "the Ante-maske, or first shew," a dance of nymphs and naiads which imposes neither gender disguise nor social confusion. Earlier queen's masques, obscuring royal compliment in a display of female agency, invite interrogations of the king's place and of the queen's power; with Tethys the terms of referentiality change, and the Amazonian antimasque vanishes from the stage.(39) Thomas Campion's 1613 Lords Masque gestures briefly toward earlier aggressions: the masque centers around Orpheus, and the anti-masque of Franticks recalls the Thracian women who tear apart the poet-king. But although Campion's Franticks are Amazonian in their violence, the Amazons, like goddesses and blackness and visions of queens, have vanished in the extravagance of new grotesques. In 1625, in "Of Masques and Triumphs," Francis Bacon lists the images of Jacobean excess: "Let anti-masques not be long; they have been commonly of fools, satyrs, baboons, wild men, antics, beasts, sprites, witches, Ethiops, pigmies, turquets, nymphs, rustics, Cupids, statuas moving, and the like."(40) The iconographic perversity of Jonson's witches, with that of his Ethiops, is subsumed in a generalization of otherness. The conceit of Queens, a conceit referred to the authorial intervention of Queen Anne, had produced images of Amazons; as the first decade of the seventeenth century ends, neither Anne nor the Amazon is much in evidence.

Yet for six years Jacobean queen's masques stage power through women's bodies. The list of these masques might be a catalogue of Amazonian identities: Goddesses, Blackness, Beauty, Queens. Such identities, attached to the Amazon, find power in the conflation of aesthetic and grotesque, and for this first period of Jacobean sovereignty that mythological power is staged through the body of a literal queen. On stage and in published texts, Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson write a narrative of patronage and authorial agency that insistently implicates Queen Anne; the poet, writing for the king, stages, arms, and celebrates a queen. In her stage presence, through her staged powers, Anne poses a threat to the discrete embodiment of royal authority. The threat originates in metonymic implications, as the mythologically potent woman, named Diana or Athena or Penthesilea, confronts the legendary power of the gorgon and finds that they have much in common. Both take the stage in recognizably paradoxical bodies - the goddess is a queen, the witch is a man - and the man who acts a woman begs the question as effectively as does the woman who acts like a man. Privileged seeing doubles back on itself, insisting on the fates of Actaeon, Narcissus, and the gorgon's victim, and synecdoche, representing women as the parts or the souls of men, presents the fragmentation of the king. From Daniel's Vision to Jonson's Queens, these royal celebrations bring the martial woman to center stage: reflecting power, the Jacobean queen's masque displays the image of the Amazon.

NOTES

1 Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), p. 57. Stephen Orgel discusses the complementary relationship between masque and king in The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975); see especially pp. 37-43. Stephen Kogan, in The Hieroglyphic King: Wisdom and Idolatry in the Seventeenth-Century Masque (Rutherford NJ: Associated Univ. Presses, 1986), also reads the masque as a reflective genre: "the entire genre is an extended royal celebration. It is a panegyric in three dimensions, so to speak, and a living symbol of harmony between the king and nation" (p. 47).

2 In that first letter Columbus offers a lengthy account of monstrosities "found" and undiscovered:

Thus I have neither found monsters nor had report of any, except in an island which is the second at the entrance to the Indies, which is inhabited by a people who are regarded in all the islands as very ferocious and who eat human flesh . . . they are no more malformed than the others, except that they have the custom of wearing their hair long like women . . . These are those who have intercourse with the women of Matremonio, which is the first island met on the way from Spain to the Indies, in which there is not one man. These women use no feminine exercises, but bows and arrows of cane, like the abovesaid [cannibals]; and they arm and cover themselves with plates of copper, of which they have plenty. In another island, which they assure me is larger than Espanola, the people have no hair. In this there is countless gold, and from it and from the islands I bring with me Indios as evidence.

(Quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner [Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1955], p. 211.) The island of martial women, "the first island met on the way from Spain to the Indies," is suggestively transitional; as the geographic introduction to the New World, it is metonymically linked with the specters of effeminacy, cannibalism, and wealth, a gateway bracketed by anxiety as well as anticipation.

3 For the relationship between exploration and romance, see Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949); for the naming of California, see Ruth Putnam, "California: The Name," Univ. of California Publications in History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1916), 4:293-365.

4 Ralegh's The discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden citie of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) . . . Performed in the yeere 1595 by Sir Walter Ralegh was published in 1596, and reprinted in Richard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598-1600). I quote from the modern edition of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, 12 vols. (Glasgow, 1903-5), 10:338-440, 366-7. In his History of the World (1614) Ralegh will return to this conflation of myth, romance, and exploration, concluding an Amazonian catalogue ranging from Herodotus's Scythia to his own South America with an explicit denial of generic or epistemological distinction: "But in substance there is little difference, all confessing, That such Amazons there were" (ed. C. A. Patrides [London: Macmillan, 1971], p. 292).

5 For more exhaustive accounts of Amazons in Elizabethan literature, see Celeste Turner Wright, "The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature," SP 37, 3 (July 1940): 433-56; Winfried Schleiner, "Divina virago: Queen Elizabeth as an Amazon," SP 75, 2 (Spring 1978): 163-80; Abby Wettan Kleinbaum, The War against the Amazons (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1983), especially chap. 2, "The Net of Fantasy"; and Leonard, cited above.

6 John Knox makes notorious use of the figure: the sight of a woman ruler, he assures his readers, "should so astonish them that they should judge the whole world to be transformed into Amazons" ( The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), in The Political Writings of John Knox, ed. Marvin A. Breslow [Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1985], pp. 37-80, 43). For Knox the monstrosity of the transformation, the monstrosity of Amazons, is self-evident; it is an assumption which will be greatly complicated by the aesthetic conventions of the Jacobean queen's masque. However, it is certainly true that the image of the Amazon contains too many implications of excess for iconographic propriety; as Louis Adrian Montrose argues, "Although the Amazonian metaphor might seem suited to strategies for praising a woman ruler, it was never popular among Elizabethan encomiasts. Its associations must have been too sinister to suit the personal tastes and political interests of the Queen" ("'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 31-64, 46). Wright concludes, "I have not found any Elizabethan comparing the queen directly to an Amazon" (p. 445 n). She asks, "Was Elizabeth puzzled because she herself, with these two Biblical heroines, was made a divine exception, whereas the example of the Amazons and the enfranchisement of women were in general condemned?" - but concludes, "Probably not; feminine royalty is used to being an exception" (p. 456). Amazons are always at the margins of Elizabethan iconography, but, as Schleiner's essay suggests, it is after Elizabeth's death, when nostalgia displaces her present power, that the identification becomes explicit.

7 Kleinbaum describes the construction of Amazon myth as a mode of male self-aggrandizement, saying, "To win an Amazon, either through arms or through love or, even better, through both, is to be certified as a hero. Thus men told of battling Amazons to enhance their sense of their own worth and historical significance" (p. 1). It is certainly true that battle against the Amazons becomes a trope of male heroism, and that Amazonomachy, the wholesale destruction of the Amazons, is a mythographic industry in itself. There is, however, a great deal of unresolved anxiety associated with such assertions of potency; this is particularly clear in New World narratives of cannibalism and sexual exhaustion, although it appears in more explicitly fictional narratives as well, as in Artegall's transvestite humiliation in Spenser's Faerie Queene.

8 Barbara K. Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), p. 28.

9 Samuel Daniel, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, presented in a Maske the eight of January, at Hampton Court. By the Queenes most excellent Maiesty, and her Ladies (1604), in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 4 vols. (London: Hazell, Watson, and Viney, 1885), 3:188; hereafter Vision. I have modernized the "s" throughout. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.

10 Nancy Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme," in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 95-110, 103.

11 George Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures (Oxford, 1632), rprt., ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 132. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.

12 The fragmentary representational conceit of the masque, like the generic imperative that requires the masquers' silence, is strikingly similar to the Petrarchan structure described by Vickers: "A modern Actaeon affirming himself as poet cannot permit Ovid's angry goddess to speak her displeasure and deny his voice; his speech requires her silence. Similarly, he cannot allow her to dismember his body; instead he repeatedly, although reverently, scatters hers throughout his scattered rhymes" (p. 109). Vickers's account might describe the symbiosis of poet and king, the closed system within which the only space for the female masquer is a space of silence; the oppressive efficacy of the poet's "reverence" suggests, for the masque, the disruptive effects that will be produced by the speaking parts of Jonson's antimasquers in Queens.

13 Quoted in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 41.

14 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. I quote here from the Arden edition, ed. Harold F. Brooks (New York: Routledge, 1979), II.i.70-1.

15 Suzanne Gossett, "'Man-maid, begone!': Women in Masques," ELR 18, 1 (1988): 96-113, 98.

16 Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), p. 56.

17 Frances A. Yates, in her discussion of the iconography of Elizabeth I, describes a multiplicity of celebratory images; in these terms, a pageant of discrete female virtues seems a distinctly Elizabethan celebration. "The just virgin is thus a complex character, fertile and barren at the same time; orderly and righteous, yet tinged with oriental moon-ecstasies" (Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975], p. 33).

18 Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness (1605), in The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), lines 8-10; hereafter Blackness.

19 Ben Jonson, C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925-52), 10:448; hereafter Ben Jonson. Emphasis in original. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.

20 Ben Jonson, 10:449. I have modernized "which," "with," "the," and "that" throughout.

21 The Voyage of Francisco de Orellana down the rive of the Amazons, A.D. 1540-1, in Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, ed. Clements R. Markham (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1859), pp. 21-40, 34; Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492-1616 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), p. 620.

22 Ben Jonson, The Masque of Beauty (1608), in The Complete Masques, lines 2-6; hereafter Beauty.

23 William Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI. I quote from the Riverside Shakespeare edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), I.ii.76-86.

24 Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens (1609), in The Complete Masques, lines 3-5; hereafter Queens. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.

25 The antimasque of Queens clearly reflects James's own interest in witchcraft. Again, however, something intervenes between the king and his interests; the extensive marginalia of the masque, in which Jonson exhaustively describes the history and customs of both witches and queens, are written at the request not of James but of Prince Henry. Jonson dedicates this elaborated text "to the glory of our own, and grief of other nations, my lord Henry, Prince of Great Britain." As well as imposing another intention between masque and king, the dedication is singularly appropriate in the context of Amazons. Prince Henry takes on the Amazonian iconography which had been variously inappropriate first to Elizabeth and then to James; the celebration of the prince's baptism anticipates the queen's masque and, in particular, The Masque of Queens. "Last of all came in three Amazones in women's attire, very sumptuously clad; and these were the Lord of Lendores, the Lord of Barclewech, and the Abbot of Holy-roole-house" (The Progresses of Elizabeth, ed. John Nichols [London: Printed by and for John Nichols and Son, 1828], p. 356). The men dressed as Amazons at Henry's christening represent his appropriation of Amazon myth; celebrated as much for his figurative inheritance from Elizabeth as for his biological connection to James, Henry embodies an Amazonian power unconstrained by the iconographic necessities of virginity or pacifism. For a discussion of Henry's iconography and its relationship to Elizabeth, see Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), chap. 3, "The court of Henry, Prince of Wales"; for comments on Jonson's dedication of Queens, and its significance for both Henry and James, see Stephen Orgel, "Jonson and the Amazons," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 119-39, 134-6.

26 William Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Myth-Making (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), p. 110. Mythographically the gorgon might be an Amazon; Diodorus Siculus, in his account of the various Amazon nations, records that "oone maner nation of thise women was called Gorgones, agayne whome Perseus made mortall debate and warre." He associates the "Gorgonides" with the Amazons at the time of Medusa's reign of terror: "Then were they conquered agayne by Duke Persius, Iupiters sonne, the tyme when Medusa reigned vppon theym as Madame Governour and Quene of high estate. And fynally, by myghty strong Hercules they were vtterly distroyed, and not oonly they but the nation of the Amasons also" (The Bibliotheca Historica, trans. John Skelton, Early English Text Society [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956], p. 287; pp. 291-2). Ralegh, tracing the origins of the Amazons he "discovers" in Guiana, asserts that there were "in Africa those that had Medusa for queene" (p. 367). Helen Diner refers to "the Libyan Amazon Medusa," and adds that "Of all the African Amazons, only the Gorgons seem to have maintained a pure Amazon state" (Helen Diner, Mothers and Amazons: The First Feminine History of Culture, trans. John Philip Lundin [New York: Julian Press, 1965], pp. 127, 136). The myth of the gorgons as a tribe of warrior women is a variation on Ovid's tale of Medusa and her two immortal sisters; like the simultaneity of sex and violence that informs Medusa's transformation, this identification of the gorgon as a martial queen makes explicit the convergence of Medusa and the Amazon.

27 Orgel, "Jonson and the Amazons," p. 130. Goldberg discusses the representation of James through heroic mythological figures as well; see especially pp. 60-5. Emphasizing Perseus's contingent power, Jonson chooses him from among heroes who are notoriously successful in the Amazon encounter: "The ancients expressed a brave and masculine virtue in three figures, of Hercules, Perseus and Bellerophon, of which I chose that of Perseus, armed" (p. 542). Hercules, in his ninth labor, captures the girdle of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, and in various accounts either kills her or gives her to Theseus as a battle prize; Bellerophon is sent by Iobates to attack the Amazons, and succeeds in destroying them. Jonson rejects these two Amazonomachic heroes for Perseus, who, while also successful in his quest, succeeds ultimately in conflating two visions of female power rather than in neutralizing either one. Indeed, as Tyrrell suggests, the heroism of Perseus in some sense produces the Amazon rather than effecting her destruction.

28 In his essay "Medusa's Head" (1940), Freud, too, identifies Medusa with the anxiety produced by transgressive seeing. Paralysis, in Freud's account, is produced by the vision of the female genitals, and the snakes mask essential lack. "It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror" (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. [London: Hogarth Press, 1974], 18:273-4, 273; hereafter Standard Edition). Again Medusa is the vision of female sexuality, and again that vision is fundamentally disabling, requiring mediation.

29 Freud takes Narcissus as the originary myth of male homosexuality; in "On Narcissism" (1914) he says, "Large amounts of libido of an essentially homosexual kind are drawn into the formation of the narcissistic ego ideal and find outlet and satisfaction in maintaining it." He concludes, "[The ego-ideal] binds not only a person's narcissistic libido, but also a considerable amount of his homosexual libido, which is in this way turned back into the ego. The want of satisfaction which arises from the non-fulfilment of this ideal liberates homosexual libido, and this is transformed into a sense of guilt (social anxiety)" (Standard Edition, 14:69-102, 96; 102). The masque's idealized Narcissus structure, disrupted by the intervention of women, is interesting in this context; the invasion of James's stage by Medusa and the Amazons is perhaps an interruption of homosexual desire, and certainly a disabling of homosocial exclusivity.

30 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne (1573), in The "Aeneid" of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne: A Critical Edition Introducing Renaissance Metrical Typography, ed. Steven Lally (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), line 469; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1978, 1987), 3.4.2.

31 Tyrrell, p. 81; emphasis in text.

32 Pyrocles, disguising himself as an Amazon in order to approach his beloved Philoclea, is a vision of feminine excess:

And to begin with his head, thus was he dressed: his hair (which the young men of Greece ware very long, accounting them most beautiful that had that in fairest quantity) lay upon the upper part of his forehead in locks, some curled and some, as it were, forgotten, with such a careless care, and with an art so hiding art, that he seemed he would lay them for a paragon whether nature simply, or nature helped by cunning, be the more excellent. The rest whereof was drawn into a coronet of gold, richly set with pearls, and so joined all over with gold wires, and covered with feathers of divers colours, that it was not unlike to a helmet, such a glittering show it bare, and so bravely it was held up from the head. Upon his body he ware a kind of doublet of sky-colour satin, so plated over with plates of massy gold that he seemed armed in it; his sleeves of the same, instead of plates, was covered with purled lace. And such was the nether part of his garment; but that made so full of stuff, and cut after such a fashion that, though the length fell under his ankles, yet in his going one might well perceive the small of the leg which, with the foot, was covered with a little short pair of crimson velvet buskins, in some places open (as the ancient manner was) to show the fairness of the skin.

(Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (1581), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985], p. 24.) In his near-armor and his "little short pair of crimson velvet buskins" Pyrocles seems more masquer than Amazon, particularly when compared with the descriptions of masquers in Goddesses and Queens and the surviving sketches for Queens.

33 Queens, pp. 542, 543, 545. The terms of transgression, of gender inversion, recall the witches as they echo Amazon myth; Strabo says of Amazonian exploits, "For this is the same as saying that the men of those times were women and that the women were men" (The Geography of Strabo, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956], p. 237). Lysias describes Amazon identity in the same terms: "They were accounted as men for their high courage, rather than as women for their sex" (Orations of Lysias, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library [London: W. Heineman, 1930], 2.4).

34 "Sir Anthony Weldon's Character of King James I," in Robert Ashton, James I by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson of London, 1969), p. 13.

35 Lewalski, p. 38.

36 Thomas Heywood, The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World: Three Iewes. Three Gentiles. Three Christians. Written by the Author of the History of Women (London, 1640), p. 211.

37 Heywood, p. 96.

38 Samuel Daniel, Tethys Festival: or, The Qveenes Wake (1610), in The Complete Works, lines 395-6; hereafter Tethys.

39 Lewalski argues that the effective conclusion of Anne's interventions occurs after Tethys, saying, "The next two Queen's masques constrain Anne firmly to the King's ideology and interests" (p. 40). For her discussion of Tethys itself as potentially subversive, see pp. 39-40.

40 Francis Bacon, "Of Masques and Triumphs," in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (1625), in Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (London: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 145-6. Suggestively, Ethiops and Cupids, Jonson's first transgressive masquers, appear here as antimasques; Bacon imposes the opposition which the masques themselves had failed to represent.

Kathryn Schwarz is a graduate student at Harvard University.