Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments: From George Gascoigne to Ben Jonson

WRITING AND READING ROYAL ENTERTAINMENTS

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Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments From George Gascoigne to Ben Jonson GABRIEL HEATON

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Gabriel Heaton 2010 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–921311–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements I have incurred many debts of gratitude during the years I have been working on this project. It began life as a doctoral thesis, which was made possible by a studentship funded by the AHRB (as it then was). I am also grateful to a number of bodies at the University of Cambridge which provided additional funding: the Members English fund, the Judith E. Wilson fund, the Newton Trust, and Corpus Christi College. My thesis supervisor was Professor Ian Donaldson, who led me through the project in an unfailingly calm and kind manner. For two years I was employed as a Research Fellow on the John Nichols Project within the AHRB Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites and Court Cultures at the University of Warwick, where I was privileged to find myself part of a large team exploring the myriad texts of the Elizabethan court, at the heart of which were Elizabeth Clarke, Jayne Archer, and Elizabeth Goldring. I am very grateful to everyone on the Nichols team, and this book owes a great deal to research undertaken for editorial work on that project. I started to recast my work into its current form in 2006. By this time I was employed in the Department of Books and Manuscripts at Sotheby’s, and I am extremely grateful to my colleagues in Books for providing such a friendly and stimulating weekday environment while I was spending my weekends tinkering with this book. I have always been well served by the scholarly community. There is not space here to list all of those from whose conversation and knowledge I have benefited but it will be obvious to the reader that I have worked very closely with James Knowles, and this collaboration has been enormously beneficial (and good fun). Special mention must also go to Gavin Alexander, Marie Axton, Peter Beal, Mark Bland, Colin Burrow, H. Neville Davis, Jonathan Gibson, Elizabeth LeedhamGreen, Alan Nelson, Sue Simpson, and Henry Woudhuysen. Equally important have been the help and advice provided by staff at a wide range of libraries including the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library, a host of county record offices and specialist libraries, and a number of US institutions (the Folger, the Huntington, and the Beinecke). I am also grateful to the Marquess of

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Salisbury, the Duke of Devonshire, Marquess Townshend of Raynham, Viscount De L’Isle, and the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers for allowing me to quote from privately owned manuscripts. An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published as ‘The Queen and the Hermit: “The Tale of Hemetes” (1575)’, in Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo (eds.), Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (London: The British Library, 2007), 87–114; an earlier version of part of Chapter 3 was published as ‘Elizabethan Entertainments in Manuscript: The Harefield Festivities and the Dynamics of Exchange’, in J. Archer, E. Goldring, and S. Knight (eds.), The Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 227–44; and a short section in Chapter 5 previously appeared as ‘The Copyist of a Ben Jonson Manuscript Identified’, Notes and Queries, 246 (2001), 385–8. Parts of Chapter 4 are indebted to an article co-written with James Knowles, ‘Entertainment Perfect: Ben Jonson and Corporate Hospitality’, Review of English Studies, 54 (2003), 587–600. This book is dedicated to my wife with love, thanks, and apologies for the lost Saturdays.

Contents List of Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction

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PART I: ELIZABETHAN ENTERTAINMENTS 1. The Queen and the Hermit: the Tale of Hemetes (1575) 2. Armed Address: The Elizabethan Tournament 3. Publishing Praise: The Circulation of Elizabethan Entertainment Texts

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BRIDGE: FROM ELIZABETHAN TO JACOBEAN PART II: BEN JONSON AND THE JACOBEAN COURT 4. Negotiating Gifts: The 1607 Entertainment at Merchant Taylors’ Hall 5. Revision and Sociability: The 1607 Entertainment at Theobalds 6. The Jacobean Masque: Jonson, Authorship, and Royal Address Conclusion: Selling Entertainments Bibliography Index

125 163 207 248 269 301

List of Illustrations 1.1 The frontispiece to the Tale of Hemetes 2.1 Portion of the draft epistle of Philautia from Love and Self Love in Francis Bacon’s autograph, with marginal notes to the Earl of Essex 3.1 The Entertainment at Harefield, Dudley Carleton’s copy 3.2 The Entertainment at Harefield, Sir Edward Conway’s copy 4.1 The minutes of the Merchant Taylors’ Company Court of Assistants meeting following King James’s announcement that he would dine at their hall, including their decision to employ Ben Jonson 5.1 The Entertainment at Theobalds, Lord North’s copy 5.2 The Entertainment at Theobalds, Sir Edward Conway’s copy 6.1 Jonson’s presentation manuscript of The Masque of Blacknesse 6.2 Title page of Ben Jonson, His Part of King James His Royall and Magnificent Entertainment (London: Valentine Sims and George Eld for Edward Blount, 1604) 6.3 Title page of Samuel Daniel, The vision of the 12. goddesses (London: Thomas Creede for Simon Waterson, 1604)

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83 111 113

145 187 193 211

229 231

Note on the Transcriptions i/j and u/v have been regularized throughout, and abbreviations have been silently expanded.

Abbreviations BL CSP HMC MCA ODNB OED V&A

London, British Library Calendar of State Papers Historical Manuscripts Commission Guildhall Library, Merchant Taylors’ Company, Minutes of the Court of Assistants Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Victoria and Albert Museum

Introduction This book is about dramatic entertainments performed before two rulers of Tudor and early Stuart England, Queen Elizabeth and King James I, over a period of fifty years. This was a time when mounted knights, wearing elaborate coloured costumes over their armour, paraded before the monarch before engaging each other with lance and rebated sword; when actors dressed as classical deities, the embodiment of Time, or the Fairy Queen, praised the monarch in verse when she spent a summer weekend at an aristocratic estate; when singers dressed in sailor suits sang hearty songs of welcome and largesse from a pageant ship hanging from the ceiling of a civic hall when royalty condescended to visit; and when noblewomen, decked in borrowed jewels and wearing costumes designed by the greatest architect of his generation, danced their praise of the King elaborated in complex allegories against a backdrop of painted perspective landscapes. These forms all incorporated a verbal element— songs, orations, dialogues—and it is the written texts of those words spoken before the monarch that are my particular subject. There are a range of forms covered by this study, and considerable development took place over the period covered by the pages that follow. Elizabethan royal pageantry began, of course, with the coronation entry, a highly public event in which certain characteristics of the new monarch (her support for religious reform, her ease in the public gaze) were made manifest. In the years that followed, royal entertainment under Queen Elizabeth tended to be focused on her royal progresses: the royal court was traditionally peripatetic but the pleasure Elizabeth took in travelling around England (mostly southern and eastern counties) during the summer months meant that long and relatively wide-ranging progresses quickly became established as a distinctive feature of her reign. Entertainment was an element in the welcome that she received when she visited both towns and the country houses of aristocrats. This often took the

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simple form of an oration, especially from civic authorities, but from the mid-1570s onwards the Queen’s hosts often chose to celebrate her visit with elaborate entertainments that included songs, speeches, and micro-dramas. The 1570s saw many of the most ambitious progresses of the reign, including the 1575 visit to the West Midlands (and most notably her stay at Kenilworth) and her 1578 progress around East Anglia with a week-long sojourn in Norwich. The increasingly dangerous international situation meant that there were few progresses in the 1580s, but the tradition was resumed in the 1590s. In the last decade of the reign she tended to travel less far from London but was entertained on an increasingly lavish scale. The traditional chivalric exercise of the tournament also had features of royal entertainment which took on distinctively Elizabethan forms, especially with the development of the Accession Day tournament from the late 1570s (see Chapter 2). A number of elaborate tiltyard entertainments organized by groups of young noblemen also took place, especially from the 1580s onwards. The different habits of King James led to an immediate and marked shift in the culture of royal entertainment. Regional progresses were a much less significant feature of his reign so there were far fewer progress entertainments and most of the country house entertainments of the Jacobean period were performed in locations close to London or the royal hunting lodges where James spent much of his time. Nevertheless, when James travelled many of his hosts along the way provided him with dramatic entertainments; the major progress of the reign took James back to Edinburgh in 1617–18, and several entertainment texts by civic and aristocratic hosts survive from that progress. The tradition of Accession Day tournaments continued under James but they became much less prominent and the quasi-dramatic aspect that was such a feature of the Elizabethan Accession Day largely appears to have disappeared. Occasional tournaments sponsored by aristocrats did continue, for example the ‘Four Knights Errant of the Fortunate Isles’. Martial entertainments were a major feature of the court that briefly gathered around Prince Henry between about 1609 and his death in 1612, and Prince Charles’s installation as Prince of Wales was in turn celebrated by a tournament organized by the Inns of Court. The Jacobean court is above all associated with the masque. This was not a new form, but King James and Queen Anna employed a new generation of writers and artists (supremely, of course, Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones)

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who brought a new seriousness to the entertainment. The early Stuarts were also willing to put considerable funds into the masque, whereas those entertainment forms that found preference under Elizabeth were all paid for by private hosts and performers rather than from the royal purse. All of these performances took place within a wider entertainment culture. Although performances without a royal spectator are beyond the scope of this study, their existence should not be forgotten. Probably the most significant form was the annual pageant in London that celebrated the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor: these performances displayed London’s civic power through pageants on the Thames and on the streets, and from the second decade of the seventeenth century the texts of these shows regularly appeared as printed pamphlets. Both country house entertainments and, latterly, court masques, were imitated by groups of aristocrats at celebratory occasions and important visits that did not involve royalty: Marston’s 1607 Entertainment at Ashby, the Coleorton Masque of 1618, and Milton’s 1634 Maske at Ludlow Castle are all examples of this. Court entertainments were also imitated enthusiastically during the Christmas revels at the Inns of Court. Written texts are found in various forms. There are drafts and other manuscripts produced as part of the preparation for the performance; there are presentation manuscripts, produced for the benefit of a single intended reader; and there are copies produced in both manuscript and printed form to bring the entertainment to a wider readership. Taken together, these material texts shed considerable light on how entertainments were written and how they were read. Rather than focusing on the moments of performance, this book traces entertainments from their inception to their reception, examining the collaborative way in which they were written, how they were disseminated as texts, who read them, and how they were read. This movement through production and dissemination—from writing to reading—is a process of reification, a matter of fixing the moment of performance onto the page. Texts sometimes formed part of entertainments themselves. A wellknown moment at Elizabeth’s coronation pageant was the presentation to her of an English Bible by Truth, which she ostentatiously clasped to her bosom.1 Mock letters of state business formed a part of several 1 Richard Mulcaster, The passage of our most drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the citie of London to westminster (London: Richard Tottill, 1558), sig. C2v.

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Elizabethan entertainments, and while she was at Harefield during her last summer progress of 1602 Elizabeth was handed a petition from St Swithin apologizing for the terrible weather.2 Texts were also used to ensure that the monarch received the message which might have been inaudible or confused in performance: when Elizabeth was at Bristol in 1574, for example, a prominent citizen swam the Avon to present her with a velvet-bound copy of Thomas Churchyard’s verses explaining the narrative of the ongoing martial entertainment, and the presentation of verses was also incorporated into a number of court masques.3 However, these texts themselves do not survive so they are, generally speaking, beyond the scope of this study. Although I consider both manuscripts and print texts, it is the medium of manuscript that will be examined in greatest depth. Throughout the period studied here approximately as many entertainments circulated in manuscript form as were printed. A simple and rough number count gives an indication of how common manuscript circulation was: there are about thirty different entertainments that survive in manuscript form from the reign of Elizabeth and about the same number from the Jacobean period. Of those, about two-thirds survive in multiple copies or can otherwise be shown to have existed in greater numbers than their authors’ papers or a single presentation copy. In other words, about forty Elizabethan and Jacobean entertainments were circulated and read by significant numbers of people in manuscript form, and the approximately 200 surviving manuscript copies of Elizabethan and early Stuart royal entertainments undoubtedly represent a tiny proportion of those that once existed. Yet the scholarship on these manuscripts is almost entirely 2 Letters formed part of the Rycote Entertainment (Speeches Delivered to Her Majestie This Last Progresse (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1592), sigs. C1v–C4r), the Mitcham entertainment (John Lyly (?), Queen Elizabeth’s Entertainment at Mitcham: Poet, Painter and Musician, ed. Leslie Hotson (New Haven and London, 1953), pp. 16–17), and a ‘Conference Between a Gentleman Usher and a Post’ at Cecil House (BL, Harley MS 286, fos. 248–9 and Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 79, fos. 14–15); for the petition at Harefield see John Davies, The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 215–16. 3 Thomas Churchyard, The Firste parte of Churchyardes Chippes, contayning twelue seuerall Labours (London, 1575), sigs. O1r–O2v; references to the production of manuscripts for masques can be found in Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1908), 209, 239, 286–7, 301, 391.

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restricted to studies of individual manuscripts (often bringing them to the attention of the scholarly community for the first time); none of these articles draws general conclusions about the manuscript transmission of entertainment texts; and none of the more general work on entertainments acknowledges the importance of the scribal medium. The medium of manuscript is often associated with literary texts that were subversive or scurrilous. For example, Harold Love in Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England describes the ‘insider’s writing’ of Restoration scribal verse, mostly satirical and circulating amongst elite coteries, as being ‘in an antithetical relationship to the idealization of the court in the masques of Jonson, Carew, D’Avenant and Crowne, performed for the benefit of outsiders rather than inmates and subsequently promulgated through the print medium’.4 This book explores how and why entertainments were written and read, and manuscripts are particularly useful to this because more information can be extracted from them about the precise context in which they were produced than is typically possible with printed texts. Multiple copies of a given text may have been transcribed, but each one bears traces of an individual origin: distinctive quirks in the text, the presence of other texts that were transcribed alongside the entertainment, accompanying letters, and provenance. These contexts make it possible to build up a picture of the transactions (gifts, borrowings, purchases) that lay behind the dissemination of the texts, who was reading them, and what kinds of value they saw in them. By examining how manuscript circulation functioned within a discrete body of texts, this book also provides an addition to the body of work that has appeared in the past twenty years or so on manuscript circulation in early modern England.5 This in turn has its roots in important work by Don McKenzie, Jerome McGann, and others that 4 Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 210. 5 For example: Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, i: 1475–1625, 2 parts (London: Mansell, 1980); Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992); Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Love, Scribal Publication; H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

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has renewed interest in the material text by considering its role in producing meaning.6 The emphasis on manuscripts is one way in which this book is distinct from other recent work that has explored the material texts of masques, such as that of Lauren Shohet.7 The entertainments that circulated in manuscript are often quite different from those that reached print, and give a broader perspective on the variety of entertainment culture in early modern England. Many accounts of early seventeenth-century royal entertainments focus almost exclusively on the masques that took place at Whitehall around Twelfth Night. Although this was the most spectacular and high-profile entertainment in the court calendar, as well as being the form with which the central author, Jonson, was most closely associated, it did not exist in isolation. Jonson himself wrote provincial masques, country and town house entertainments, civic entertainments, Lord Mayors’ pageants, and speeches for James’s coronation entry: a comprehensive understanding of the culture of entertainments can only be gained by looking beyond Whitehall.8 Rejecting Harold Love’s dichotomy, quoted above, between ‘oppositional’ verse satire and ‘propagandistic’ masques is a recognition that masques and entertainments were not straightforwardly or simply propaganda. Certainly they were part of the spectacle of state and affirmed the majesty of rule, but they were not produced by a central body in order to propagate a particular attitude or thesis to a wider public, although this is not to deny that they were directly influenced by and (more or less) explicitly reflected the political contexts in which they were produced. In the last twenty years critics have moved away from seeing early modern 6

The two central works being Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (London: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986). 7 Lauren Shohet, ‘The Masque in/as Print’, in Marta Straznicky (ed.), The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 176–202. 8 For the variety of masquing culture see David Norbrook, ‘The Reformation of the Masque’, in David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 94–110; Cedric C. Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alan J. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). The variety of entertainment culture in Britain will be the subject of a forthcoming book by James Knowles provisionally entitled Noble Recreations: The Jacobean and Caroline Entertainment.

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royal entertainments as an expression of political absolutism, as they were in the major works of the 1970s and 1980s by, for example, Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, and have more commonly read them as reflecting a more complex and fractured political system in which various sites of power coexisted, and which could encode criticism of the monarch that they ostensibly celebrated.9 This shift is seen very clearly in the work of Sydney Anglo, who, when he came to write a preface to a new edition of his Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (first published 1969), openly rejected the assumption of propagandistic aims that underpinned his earlier work: ‘It is evident that the Tudors, like all Renaissance princes, enjoyed the prestige gained by a display of magnificence: but I am no longer convinced by a facile, and indeed anachronistic, use of the word “propaganda” with its implications both of systematic governmental control and of consistent theory.’10 My approach has been to focus on the relationship that lay at the heart of every entertainment, and explore the rhetoric through which that relationship was expressed. The following chapters will show again and again how entertaining the monarch—whether in a country house, at the tiltyard, in a civic setting, or in a royal palace—was an opportunity to address the monarch, and that part of the skill when writing and producing an entertainment was in expressing the distinctive political perspective and desires of the host in terms appropriate to the majesty of royalty. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that entertainment texts were valued by the royal court as a means of making a wider public aware of these magnificent celebrations. It was hardly ever the royal court that attempted to disseminate the texts of entertainments: the impetus behind print publication or manuscript circulation came instead from aristocratic hosts, authors, courtiers, and publishers, all of whom had agendas of their own.

9 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1975); Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Among the first works to explore masques as complex reflections of power was Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 10 Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy, rev. edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. xi.

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Another subject to which this work returns many times is the role of the author and nature of authorship. Entertainments were produced collaboratively, and detailed research has also been published on specific aspects of the masque that reveals the extent to which they were collaborations in which dancing masters, musicians, and set designers played an important role alongside poets, patrons, and performers.11 The written text itself was (as will be shown in the chapters that follow) typically produced by the hired writer working closely with the patronhost or his agents. It was, after all, the host not the writer in whose name the entertainment was performed; hosts would often have sat through more entertainments than the hired writer, and they frequently had a better knowledge of what was likely to please the monarch. Texts only became primarily associated with their authors through the deliberate constructions of such writers as George Gascoigne and Ben Jonson. There is a central dichotomy in the way an entertainment text could be read, valued, and understood: it was either valuable primarily as a record of a specific event, a moment of courtly pageantry, or it was appreciated as a literary work. This is a dichotomy that will reappear in different forms in the pages that follow. Texts could be published anonymously or attributed to their author; the phrasing of the title could be nuanced in any number of different ways; and the description of the entertainments could be published or handwritten in a wide range of different forms. All of these features are evidence for how these works were understood, and evidence for reception survives, to take two examples, in the form of letters, and in texts’ treatment by their owners. The six chapters that follow are divided into two parts: Chapters 1–3 examine entertainments and their texts from the reign of Queen Elizabeth; Chapters 4–6 cover the work of Ben Jonson under King James. They discuss entertainments on progress and in the tiltyard, at aristocratic country houses and the halls of London Livery Companies, and masques at court. The range of texts is similarly wide-ranging, taking in drafts, royal presentations, scribal transcripts, and printed publications. The 11 John Peacock, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–40 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

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first two chapters of both parts are more tightly focused on particular entertainments or groups of entertainments, whilst the third examines the entertainment culture (of, respectively, the Elizabethan and Jacobean years) more broadly. Chapter 1 is a study of a single entertainment text, the tale told by the hermit Hemetes to Queen Elizabeth at Woodstock in September 1575. By looking at one performance and one material text, this chapter establishes in miniature the parameters of the book’s argument and the main themes which are returned to in later chapters. The chapter begins by putting into context the tale itself and the occasion on which it was told, with particular reference to the Lieutenant at Woodstock, Sir Henry Lee. It becomes clear that Hemetes’s tale, although a conventional romance narrative, echoes the circumstances and desires of Lee (and other people involved in hosting the Queen) in complex ways. The second part of the chapter turns to the presentation manuscript of the Tale of Hemetes, given to the Queen by the poet George Gascoigne at New Year 1576. This presentation was a response to the Queen’s positive reaction to the original performance, but Gascoigne had not written the tale, so his presentation of the manuscript was an audacious appropriation of the text. His aim was straightforward: to attract royal attention and so gain patronage. This fits very easily into a wider pattern of publication by Gascoigne at the time, which was clearly motivated by his personal circumstances. The manuscript was highly distinctive because it had to engage with the cultural traditions of New Year gifts at court and take its place alongside much richer and more visually striking gifts by favoured courtiers. However, by presenting a manuscript to the Queen, Gascoigne created for himself a privileged space in which he could address her directly, and the chapter considers in some detail how he used this space, the physical features of the manuscript, and the authorial persona he constructed for himself in the text. Chapter 2 has a broader subject: the Elizabethan tiltyard. It begins by outlining the various opportunities that the tiltyard provided for the performer to take on a chivalric persona, especially impresa shields, and what sorts of message these personae were used to convey. A central figure to Elizabethan chivalry was Sir Henry Lee, and this chapter looks at how he used entertainments in the tiltyard in the years after the Woodstock entertainment discussed in the previous chapter. Lee was, in

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particular, responsible for the development of the Accession Day tournaments. Some of Lee’s Accession Day speeches survive, and the distinctive personae revealed in these speeches show how he used the tiltyard to articulate his personal circumstances. These speeches are excellent examples of how courtiers balanced praise of the monarch with the expression of their own personal agendas. One recurrent theme in Henry Lee’s entertainments is his own refusal of ambition, which was crucial in enabling him to remain a prominent figure in Elizabethan court entertainment without eliciting the jealousy of more powerful courtiers. This carefully positioned modesty was not a feature of three other courtiers whose tiltyard entertainments are also examined in this chapter: the Earls of Arundel, Oxford, and Essex. The 1580/1 challenge of Arundel as ‘Callophisus’ is a particularly well-documented tiltyard entertainment: a range of different texts relating to it survive, and it is a fine example of how tensions within the court elite (in this case between Arundel and Oxford) could be played out in entertainments under a veneer of praise for the Queen. Nearly fifteen years later the Earl of Essex’s device Love and Self Love, the best-known and most literarily sophisticated Elizabethan tiltyard entertainment, was performed. Its use as a vehicle for Essex’s ambition has been analysed by a number of previous scholars, and this chapter builds on previous work in two ways. It examines the surviving drafts of the entertainment, which shed light on how the text developed as a collaborative project in which Essex himself was actively involved. The chapter also rethinks the reception of the entertainment, and shows that the surviving manuscript copies are less closely connected to the performance than has usually been assumed. Chapter 3 returns to country house entertainments and explores how their texts were produced and circulated, focusing on the parallel forms of printed pamphlet and manuscript separate. These two forms were both practical media for getting the text of an entertainment to the intended readership. By examining the various surviving printed texts it is possible to show that they reached print in a range of different ways: in some cases the aristocratic host was evidently involved in seeing the text into print; on other occasions the author saw that the text was issued in his name; and yet other publications appear to have reached print primarily through the actions of an entrepreneurial publisher. A central relationship was that between the author and the commissioning host,

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and the case of John Davies provides an example of how a writer could manage this relationship: unlike Gascoigne, who appropriated texts for his own ends, Davies emphasized his role as a servant and was happy to abdicate control over the text to his patron. One of the entertainments written by him, the Harefield entertainment of 1602, survives in large numbers of scribal copies and so provides a unique opportunity to examine in some detail the mechanics of how texts of an entertainment were produced and circulated. After outlining the occasion of the entertainment, this chapter concludes with a detailed study of the surviving manuscripts and shows how a combination of the desire of the hosts to advertise their lavish entertainment of the Queen and active interest among court circles who had not been present at the performance led to the text’s rapid dissemination within an elite readership, followed by a slower spread of the text (in increasingly corrupt forms) to less privileged readers. Chapter 4 turns to the reign of James I and the work of Ben Jonson, but continues its exploration of the same central themes. This chapter is focused on a single entertainment, the only civic entertainment considered in this book, which was performed at the hall of the Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors in May 1607. Previous chapters looked at how hosts used the opportunity provided by entertaining the monarch to express their political agenda, and this is once again shown to have been the case here. The context of this entertainment is a particularly rich subject because underlying it was the complex political and economic relationship between the Crown and the London mercantile elite represented by the Merchant Taylors’ Company. In particular, this chapter explores how the tension between Court and City, in the specific circumstances of 1607, was played out at the Merchant Taylors’ through the concept of gift exchange. The development of the entertainment is recorded in considerable detail in the archive of the Company itself, providing another example of how entertainments developed through collaboration and discussion. The role of Ben Jonson, hired as someone who could please the court, is particularly interesting: he provided songs that articulated his patron’s position with real subtlety, but did not publicly acknowledge his own authorship or include the text in his printed works. Finally, this chapter looks at the decision of the Merchant Taylors to encourage the circulation of the entertainment in manuscript form.

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Chapter 5 centres on another entertainment written by Ben Jonson and performed before King James in the summer of 1607, this time at Theobalds, the Hertfordshire home of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, on the occasion of his gift of the house to the King. There was a rich tradition of entertainment performance at Theobalds, and it can be shown (primarily through the surviving manuscripts) that Salisbury had always taken an active role in their development. Collaboration between Salisbury and Ben Jonson was at the heart of the 1607 entertainment, which celebrated a sensitive occasion: Theobalds was the most important patrimony received by Salisbury and its loss could easily have been interpreted as a betrayal of his father, Lord Burghley. Jonson’s text deals with this issue with great sensitivity. The text circulated quite widely in manuscript, and then in 1616 was included in Jonson’s Workes, but in a slightly different textual form. Underlying this textual difference was almost certainly Jonson’s disenchantment with Salisbury, which grew in the years between the entertainment’s performance and print publication. As with the 1602 Harefield entertainment, several of the original recipients of the manuscript texts can be identified, allowing a picture to be built up of the earliest readers. The text first circulated among well-connected wits whose interests were less in goings-on at court than with fashionable coterie poetry. This was a notable shift from the Harefield entertainment five years earlier. Chapter 6 takes as its subject the Jacobean masque and Jonson’s construction of himself as an author. A fascination with power runs through Jonson’s work, and in Cynthia’s Revels he even represented the relationship between monarch and masque writer. The masque was the entertainment form most closely associated with the royal family itself, and Jonson’s own relationship with royalty can be explored through his surviving royal presentation masque manuscripts. The manuscript of The Masque of Blacknesse provides yet another example of the collaborative development of a text as well as displaying Jonson’s concerns about his ambivalent position as a masque writer, in which he was fulfilling highly prestigious commissions but relegated to the status of employee. Concern about his authorial authority is also reflected in the manuscript of The Masque of Queenes, a much more ambitious object that was a formal presentation to the Prince of Wales. It was carefully designed, and the logic and circumstances of its presentation are explored partly through comparison with the royal presentation that

Introduction

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Jonson depicted in Poetaster, in which Virgil is shown giving the manuscript of the Aeneid to the emperor Augustus. Masque texts circulated much more widely than the royal household, however, and both Jonson and other masque writers were responsible for bringing their masques into print in pamphlet form. Jonson saw these pamphlets as a means of developing the masque as a literary genre rather than an occasional work, but other writers wrote about their masques as courtly events and did not promote the genre in the lofty terms preferred by Jonson: while Jonson claimed to be writing works to be read as literature, for Samuel Daniel the masque was an event that found meaning through performance. There was a significant shift in the way masque texts appeared in the second half of the reign: Jonson became almost the only poet to receive major commissions for masques, but he stopped producing masque pamphlets in his earlier manner. The masque pamphlets that did appear were privately printed and produced before the masque had been performed. Other masques were withheld from the press altogether, and this encouraged the proliferation of manuscript copies. This chapter concludes with a brief survey of these later Jacobean masque manuscripts. My method throughout this book is to examine those material texts that have survived and to consider how and why they were produced and circulated, and what this reveals about both the entertainments and the culture in which they were produced. But these texts did not stop circulating in the years after the entertainment, so the book concludes by tracing in brief the later history of entertainment texts. There are about sixty surviving copies of the various Elizabethan entertainment pamphlets, and the provenance of these copies shows how they have shifted from being objects of antiquarian interest cheaply bound by donnish collectors, to highly prized bibliographical rarities moving into libraries of ever-increasing opulence. Manuscripts have, for a number of reasons, tended to circulate much less, but a similar pattern of steadily increasing value can be discerned in the way that they have been sold over the centuries. Although almost all of these texts are now in institutional collections, a few continue to circulate commercially and the book ends with details of recent auction sales.

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P AR T I ELIZABETHAN ENTERTAINMENTS

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1 The Queen and the Hermit: the Tale of Hemetes (1575) In September 1575 a tale was related to Queen Elizabeth by the character of a hermit in the park of the royal manor of Woodstock. As with many royal entertainments, the tale the hermit told was written to entertain the Queen and wrote her into its fiction. The Tale of Hemetes (the name of the hermit) was commissioned by Sir Henry Lee, the Lieutenant of Woodstock, and the form it took was determined by Lee’s status and ambitions, along with lesser influence from other figures. It was one of a number of events that occurred during Elizabeth’s stay at Woodstock, where she arrived in late August and remained until early October. Immediately after the tale was told, Hemetes led the Queen and her party to his bower, where further devices were presented. One narrative strand from the tale was continued in a play performed before the Queen on 20 September. Before this, on 11 September, the Vice Chancellor of Oxford University, Laurence Humphrey, had travelled the eight miles from the city in order to deliver a lengthy Latin oration before the Queen and present her with a Bible.1 After its original performance the Tale of Hemetes appeared in a number of textual forms. A presentation manuscript of the tale, together with translations into French, Italian, and Latin, was given to the Queen by George Gascoigne (London, British Library, Royal MS 18.A.XLVIII). The 1 The oration rapidly found its way into print: Oratio ad Sereniss. Angliæ, Franciæ, & Hyberniæ Reginam Elisabetham, in Aula Woodstochiensi habita a` Laurentio Humfredo (London: Henry Binneman for George Bishop, 1575). The presentation of a Bible is referred to on sig. E4v. The various texts relating to the Woodstock entertainment (with English translations) are gathered together in a new edition, edited by Heaton, in John Nichols, John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Clarke, and Elizabeth Goldring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). The copy of the Bible presented by Humphrey cannot now be located.

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original text and Latin translation were later appended to a short pamphlet, Alexander Fleming’s translation of Synesius of Cyrene’s A Paradoxe, Proving by reason and example, that Baldnesse is much better than bushie haire . . . Hereunto is annexed the pleasant Tale of Hemetes the Heremite, pronounced before the Queenes Majestie (London: H. Denham, 1579), while in 1585 the speech formed part of a pamphlet account of the Woodstock entertainment.2 An incomplete text survives among Sir Henry Lee’s papers (British Library, Add. MS 41499A), and a copy comprising only the beginning of the tale is found in the commonplace book of Sir Stephen Powle (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 169, fo. 179r ). This chapter focuses on the presentation manuscript, which is one of the most carefully worked-out manuscripts to have been presented to Elizabeth during her reign, and was constructed to give expression to the status and ambitions of Gascoigne, even though its author was not Gascoigne but, probably, Robert Garrett, who was a young fellow at an Oxford college. These two presentations of the tale, in performance by Sir Henry Lee and in manuscript by George Gascoigne, exemplify the complex dynamics of manipulation and dependence that typified writing for Queen Elizabeth. Lee and Gascoigne both saw that writing for the Queen gave them an opportunity to write their relationship with her in their own terms, but both men also recognized that they depended on the Queen’s positive reception of their offering. In both cases Elizabeth seems to have accepted the presentation with grace, although the effect of this on their relationships with the Queen is less clear. SIR HENRY LEE AND THE WOODSTOCK PERFORMANCE The month Queen Elizabeth spent at the royal manor of Woodstock in 1575 came at the end of the longest summer progress of her reign, which had taken her as far from London as Stafford.3 The devices 2 The pamphlet was printed by Thomas Cadman in 1585. The only surviving copy is incomplete, beginning at gathering B, and has the running-title The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke. 3 For the Queen’s itinerary in 1575 see Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 188–9.

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performed at Woodstock were organized by its Lieutenant, Sir Henry Lee. Woodstock had been a royal manor for many centuries: there are records of tournaments held there in the fourteenth century, and King Henry II had kept his mistress ‘Fair Rosamond’ Clifford in a bower in the park.4 It was an appropriate location for the sight that Elizabeth came upon when riding in the woods: two knights locked in combat, watched by a maiden and a hermit. On spotting the Queen, Hemetes the hermit stepped forward and ended the combat with the exclamation that the prophecies had now been fulfilled—an announcement he went on to explain to the Queen by telling the tale of how these four exotic characters had found their way to an Oxfordshire wood. The location of the entertainment in the realm of chivalry not only suited the medieval inheritance of Woodstock, it was also highly appropriate for Sir Henry Lee. In the years after his first recorded appearance in the tiltyard in 1571, Lee emerged as the dominant figure in the Elizabethan tiltyard. He was also in favour with the Queen, as is revealed by the fact that in the years immediately after Lee took over at Woodstock in 1571, Elizabeth had visited three times (in 1572, 1574, and 1575), compared to two other visits throughout the whole of her reign.5 Lee was highly skilled in the traditional chivalric skills of joust and tourney and took advantage of every opportunity to display his prowess before the Queen. For example, at Woodstock in 1574 Lee had appeared as an unknown discontented knight who, along with a companion, ‘made an open, and Solempne proclamacion ageynst all nobellmen, and gentyllmen at Armes’ who were willing to fight for the sake of Love and Virtue, in order to prove whether the ‘farr spred prayse of the noblest yonge gentillmen of theys partes of the worlde, mought be founde as certayne in there warlicke forces, as fame hath throughly publyshed the same’.6 Lee’s dominance of the tiltyard culminated in his instigation of the annual Accession Day tournaments in honour of the Queen towards the end of the 1570s, so the Woodstock entertain4 Victoria County History: Oxfordshire: Volume 12, ed. Alan Crosby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 435–9. 5 E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee: An Elizabethan Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 38 and 82. Elizabeth’s only other visits to Woodstock during her reign were in 1566 and 1592. 6 London, College of Arms MS, Tournament Cheques Portfolio, no. 23a.

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ment of 1575 marked an important step in Lee’s emergence as a major figure in the world of Elizabethan entertainments and pageantry. The Accession Day tournaments, Lee’s later development of his tiltyard persona, and the extent to which this brought him success at court are discussed in the next chapter. Lee was one of the knights whom the Queen found locked in combat in 1575, and we can be fairly confident that it was only after Lee and his opponent had had a decent opportunity to display their martial skills that Hemetes stepped forward to stop the fight. Lee’s persona of Loricus was much more developed than that of the generic discontented knight, and the Queen was entertained by an elaborate fiction, but like challenges and speeches in the tiltyard, the hermit’s tale was told as an explanation for a combat. The tale has the form of a conventional, if highly condensed, chivalric romance (the entire narrative is crammed into about 2,500 words), but its significance cannot be extricated from its function as providing a narrative frame for chivalric display before the Queen. This was a frame in which all participants, the Queen included, had a specific role to play. The tale itself can be briefly retold. Gaudina, the princess of Cambaya (the city-state of Khambat, roughly corresponding to modern Gujarat, but here simply signifying the distant Indies), was in love with the baseborn but honourable Contarenus. When this was discovered by the Cambaian king, Occanon, he hired an enchantress to spirit Contarenus from his kingdom, but when Gaudina heard what her father had done she promptly quit the country in search of her lover. She eventually reached the grotto of the Sibyl, where she met a knight called Loricus, and they were told that they must travel together until they reached a particularly fortunate land ruled by a most worthy queen, where Gaudina would be contented and Loricus comforted. Loricus had loved a matchless lady but, when she would not even allow him to serve her chastely, he took a curious route to her favour: he pretended to love another woman, one who was ‘every day in her eye’. This only led to his true love disdaining him as inconstant, and he came to the realization that he was, in fact, unworthy to serve her, so he set off to endeavour to prove his worth with travel and arms. Contarenus, meanwhile, had been told by the enchantress that he must travel in the company of a blind hermit for seven years but that, eventually, he would fight the hardiest knight in the world and see the

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worthiest lady, whereupon he would find contentment and the hermit would regain his sight. The personal history of Hemetes the hermit was no less fraught. He had also loved a lady (fit to be loved of Love himself ) but she, unfortunately for Hemetes, was a shape-changer and when she became a ferocious tigress he was deterred from further pursuit. As so often happens, his problems soon multiplied, and when he went to the temple of Venus to complain he was struck blind. A jealous Venus was angry that he had always served Apollo in addition to her: books and beauty, she claimed, make no match. Apollo’s priest told him (after helpfully explaining that inconstancy was part of women’s nature) that he would regain his sight when, in a most peaceful land, two of the most valiant knights fought, two most constant lovers met, and the most virtuous lady in the world looked on. In the end the two groups, Loricus with the Cambaian princess and her long-lost lover with Hemetes, independently found their way to the promised land just north of Oxford, and when Contarenus saw his lady in the company of another man he did what any self-respecting knight errant would do—attacked him immediately. So when Queen Elizabeth happened upon the scene (being of course the worthiest queen and most virtuous lady in the world) the prophecies were fulfilled, Hemetes regained his sight, and the lovers were reunited. Hemetes then led the Queen off to his hermitage, an elaborate bower that had been built in the grounds, ‘the place of the princes entrance bedect with Ivy & spanges [spangles] of gold plate’, built around a large oak and containing a chair of state and a large banqueting table laden with dainties, the walls decorated with a ‘number of fine Pictures with posies of the Noble or men of great credite’.7 Once the party had settled down to the banquet the Fairy Queen put in an appearance, making a verse speech to Queen Elizabeth and presenting her with a gown, while her handmaids gave ‘fine smelling Nosegayes made of all cullere to every one whereof was annexed a posy of two verses’.8 The world of chivalric fantasy intersected with the English royal court principally through the figure of the Queen, who was the primary spectator to whom Hemetes addressed his tale, and who was drawn into the tale 7

The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke, sig. B4r–v. The fairy imagery at Woodstock is discussed in Matthew Woodcock, ‘The Fairy Queen Figure in Elizabethan Entertainments’, in C. Levin et al. (eds.), Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 97–115 at 100–8. 8

Part I: Elizabethan Entertainments

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itself as the exemplum of virtuous power and femininity which brought the various narratives together and to a satisfactory conclusion. For all the conventionality of its narrative tropes, the Tale of Hemetes played out in some distinctive ways. Most entertainments involving armed combat took the form of the challenge, as Lee’s display at Woodstock in 1574 had done: in such circumstances Elizabeth’s role was typically that of the mistress for whose love the combatants fought. This can be seen in the Callophisus entertainment discussed in the next chapter. The 1575 entertainment is substantially more ambitious: Hemetes’s tale elevates the Queen to a different role from that of ‘mistress’, and configures her presence as fulfilling prophecies and bringing peace, rather than being the cause of division and competition. The use of a more complex chivalric frame was probably influenced by the ‘Princely Pleasures’ at Kenilworth in July 1575, which had also given Elizabeth a chivalric role, for example in freeing the Lady of the Lake from the predations of Sir Bruse sans Pitie. When she first came across the knights locked in combat in Woodstock Park, Elizabeth’s familiarity with the conventions of chivalric romance is likely to have led her to assume that if they were not fighting over her, the Queen, they must be fighting over the watching princess, Gaudina. Yet, as Hemetes tells his story, this is shown to be not quite the case because Loricus is making no claim on Gaudina. Nevertheless, Gaudina’s divisive role is in contrast with that of the Queen herself, the source of harmony whose presence ends the conflict. The story of Gaudina and Contarenus was continued as a play later on during the Queen’s stay at Woodstock, where it took an even less conventional direction.9 In the play, a remorseful Occanon has pursued his daughter from the Indies to Oxfordshire and, after some debate, the lovers Contarenus and Gaudina find a new respect for place, responsibility, and regal authority; they determine to master their passion and part from each other for ever. Gaudina returns with her father while Contarenus seeks out Loricus as a companion for a career in knight-errantry. The Queen’s role in the Tale of Hemetes was not limited to her literal intrusion into the world of Hemetes as the fulfilment of various prophecies; she also figured in it at the level of allegory. This was not just a tale told for her entertainment, it was a tale in which the characters are figures for 9

The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke, sigs. C3v–G3r.

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her courtiers. Lee was Loricus, so who could the matchless unattainable lady whom Loricus strives to be worthy to serve be but Queen Elizabeth herself ? He is casting himself as her knight errant. Loricus is dominated by his desire to be accepted as worthy to serve, but this desire is presented in a highly specific way: his love for her is to be expressed solely through chivalric escapades, for he has already scripted her refusal of his courtship. He hopes that she will recognize his worthiness to serve in that specific capacity, but that is the limit of his ambition. The fictionalized relationship between Loricus and his lady, which overlays Lee’s relationship with Elizabeth, therefore prefigures his role as her Champion, which he was to play in the Accession Day tournaments in the 1580s. By making the fictional characters figures for courtiers the tale suggests itself as an allegory and, like other entertainments, it was read as such by contemporaries. In the printed pamphlet describing the events at Woodstock the narrator remarked of Hemetes’s tale that, ‘if you marke the woords with this present world, or were acquainted with the state of the devices, you shoulde finde no lesse hidden then uttered, and no lesse uttered then shoulde deserve a double reading over’.10 This is one of a number of moments at which the narrator of the pamphlet gestures towards a meaning that is beyond his ken: behind the open, public, and indeed publicized address, it is suggested, lay a private, intimate, even secret, meaning. An element of the Loricus persona that is particularly important to the ‘hidden’ meaning of the tale is his feigned love of someone other than his true mistress, which within the narrative had brought him into disfavour in the first place. The implication of this narrative strand is that Lee’s name had recently been connected with someone close to the Queen at court, and this affair was now being represented in such a way as to show that his passion never, in fact, wavered from Elizabeth (the fact that Lee had been married for twenty years is entirely irrelevant). There is no other indication of Lee having been engaged in a liaison at the time, nor anything to suggest that he was in disgrace with the Queen.11 Whether or not there was any truth behind this suggested liaison may well have been less important to Lee than the display of an 10

Ibid., sig. B1r. Chambers suggests that Lady Susan Bourchier may have been the object of Lee’s affection in 1575 because she was in attendance at Woodstock and was later remembered in Lee’s will (Sir Henry Lee, 91). 11

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intimate relationship with the Queen it implied: speaking obliquely of court secrets, however minor, was a means of publicizing his ability to talk privately with the Queen. Furthermore, making the admission implied that the Queen would be interested in his transgression. It also allowed Loricus to present himself as an apologetic suitor, which was a useful way of representing the patron–client relationship. Dedications and petitions throughout the period were suffused with craven apologies: works were inevitably unworthy, petitioners consistently humble and despairing of their capacity to do justice to the worth of their would-be patron. By depicting yourself as unworthy, you displayed your own modesty and provided an opportunity for the patron to display their Christian charity and forgiveness by accepting your gift. Lee must have seen the advantage in apology for he returned to the subject of his own weakness in 1592, when he entertained the Queen at his own manor of Ditchley, just a few miles from Woodstock, and resurrected the persona of Loricus. In an entertainment full of echoes of the 1575 visit, the ‘Old Knight’ admits that despite having been warned, ‘lend not any ladye once an eye’, ‘unhappie I was overtaken j by fortune forcd a straunger ladies thrall’.12 Although at that time Lee did have a mistress, Anne Vavasour, there is once again no evidence that his behaviour had led to any royal disfavour, and the primary importance of advertising his waywardness and weakness was probably to display his closeness to the Queen by indirectly reasserting his (doomed) courtship of her. The Tale of Hemetes was a narrative with multiple strands in which Loricus was only one character, and although the Woodstock entertainment has always been primarily associated with Sir Henry Lee it is important to remember that he was not performing as her host in his own demesne, but as the Queen’s Lieutenant at a royal manor. Another figure who played a significant role was the courtier and poet Edward Dyer. Lee ultimately had his rights to the Lieutenantship of Woodstock from Dyer, who had been granted the position of Steward of Woodstock in 1570, but farmed it out. Dyer nevertheless maintained some connection to Woodstock that was evident around the time of the 1575 royal visit. He wrote a poem of Despair that was sung from an oak tree 12 BL, Add. MS 41499A, fo. 13v. See my edition in John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Archer, Clarke, and Goldring.

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as Elizabeth returned from her banquet at Hemetes’s hermitage, and a letter written by Dyer from Woodstock some weeks after Elizabeth left suggests that he stayed in the area for some time.13 Considering that Dyer and Lee were both associated with the Earl of Leicester (who had been responsible for the Kenilworth entertainment earlier in the summer), and also shared literary interests, it is likely that they collaborated more widely on the entertainment. The existence of multiple plots in the Tale of Hemetes suggests that others had an important role at Woodstock that had to be acknowledged, but although the other narratives probably also alluded to court events, the identification of Loricus with Lee and the multiple representations of Elizabeth are the only ones that can be made with certainty. E. K. Chambers suggested that the bookish courtier Dyer was figured in Hemetes himself, who had indeed seen fit to flee from a tigerish Elizabeth a few years previously (it has also been suggested that the song of Despair was concerned with Dyer’s disgrace).14 As a stock figure of chivalry, the hermit was a useful persona for courtiers like Dyer or, in later years, Sir Robert Cecil (see Chapter 5), who had little talent for martial display. Even if Dyer was not meant by Hemetes, Elizabeth was undoubtedly the object of Hemetes’s affections who was, ‘withoute disdayne to be desiered, but most deynty to be dealt with’ (fo. 9r ). After all, the allegorical suggestiveness of the tale depends on it having been told in the presence of the Queen, and in this context all worthy but unattainable women are inevitably associated with Elizabeth. The story of the desperate lovers Gaudina and Contarenus needs to be considered in its two constituent parts: within Hemetes’s tale, and in its continuation as a play. In the first part of the narrative their story is that of star-crossed lovers and seems fairly self-enclosed and free of allegory, whereas the play takes the story of the lovers in a direction that is not hinted at in the earlier narrative. Deference to royal opinion on foolish marriage and unruly passion is unmistakable in the play’s pragmatic and level-headed rejection of romantic love. Scholars have usually seen it as alluding to Elizabeth’s own relationship with the Earl 13 Dyer to Burghley, 27 Oct. 1575. HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield, ii (London: HMSO, 1888), 119. 14 Chambers, Sir Henry Lee, 91; Ralph M. Sargent, At the Court of Queen Elizabeth: The Life and Lyrics of Sir Edward Dyer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 33, 207.

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of Leicester, although it has recently been suggested that the play alludes instead to the potential match between Elizabeth and Franc¸ois, Duc d’Alenc¸on.15 Given that the Woodstock entertainment took place just two months after the Earl of Leicester’s ‘Princely Pleasures’ at Kenilworth, in which the Queen’s marriage was also a major theme, there may have been a conscious relationship between Kenilworth and the Woodstock play. Although it has been argued that the Woodstock play was a response opposing the agenda of Kenilworth, Susan Doran has convincingly argued that there are close similarities in their respective agendas: Kenilworth articulated Leicester’s ambitions as defender of the Protestant cause in the Low Countries, and the play, which concludes with Contarenus (i.e. Leicester) embarking on a career of knighterrantry, can be seen as making a similar plea for Elizabeth to allow Leicester independence and military command.16 Regardless of the specifics of the play’s allegory, its performance before Queen Elizabeth made it inevitable that parallels would be seen between her and Gaudina. Indeed the central argument of the play— that in marriage princes must balance desire with the interests of the state—is not dependent on reference to a particular proposed match for the English Queen, and its principal purpose may have been nothing more than to provide an ending to the story of which the Queen would approve. The play may have been something of an afterthought: the lack of any indication within the Tale of Hemetes that there will be a continuation to the story of Contarenus and Gaudina, or that their story will end in anything other than the conventional marriage, is certainly striking. One cannot help but wonder if the play was written to capitalize on the Queen’s favourable response to the initial Tale of Hemetes, although this would have necessitated the commissioning, writing, and rehearsal of an 8,500-word play in ten days—a stretch even given the hectic pace at which Elizabethan entertainments were prepared. 15

Woodcock, ‘The Fairy Queen Figure in Elizabethan Entertainments’, 106–8. J. W. Cunliffe, ‘The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke’, PMLA 26 (1911), 92–141 at 130; Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980), 120–2; Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 56–96; Susan Doran, ‘Juno versus Diana: The Treatment of Elizabeth I’s Marriage in Plays and Entertainments, 1561–1581’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 257–74. 16

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The Queen’s response to an entertainment was a crucial measure of its success. Sir Henry Lee’s representation of his idealized relationship with Elizabeth in an allegorical mode was nearly worthless if she chose to ignore the allegory or refused to play the game as he was encouraging her to do. An entertainment that irritated rather than entertained could hardly be said to have served its purpose well: hosts and performers looked, above all, for the Queen’s acceptance of their relationship with her as they depicted it. Entertainments turned on Elizabeth’s response, the looked-for smile that would indicate to the host and the watching court that she accepted the role she had been given. She was certainly capable of withholding such a response and there is plenty of evidence that she was acutely aware of the implications of how she was represented in entertainments: Susan Frye, who terms this the ‘competition for representation’, has discussed such examples as the coronation pageant and the Kenilworth entertainment.17 When Sir Philip Sidney wrote a device performed at Leicester’s residence at Wanstead in 1578, the Queen was invited to chose a marriage partner for the Lady of May: there were plenty of clues within the text to encourage her to pick one candidate but she chose the other, probably in a deliberate rejection of the character who was a figure for the Earl of Leicester himself.18 She played along willingly at Theobalds in 1591, when the entertainment played out Lord Burghley’s wish to retire from public life, but her response made it clear that she still required his presence at court.19 Entertainments celebrated and developed the hierarchical relationship between monarch and subject. Deeply embedded within them was a language of reciprocity and mutual love, and the use of entertainments as vehicles for self-representation, self-promotion, or challenge of the 17

Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. Stephen Orgel, ‘Sidney’s Experiment in Pastoral: The Lady of May’, in The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 44–55; Robert Kimbrough and Philip Murphy, ‘The Helmingham Hall Manuscript of Sidney’s The Lady of May : A Commentary and Transcription’, Renaissance Drama, NS 1 (1968), 103–19 at 105–6. 19 Elizabeth’s response to an entertainment that excused Burghley’s retirement on grounds of melancholy was to produce a mock Chancery charter in which she ordered writs ‘too abiure desolacon & moourning (the consumers of sweetnes) too the Frozen Seas and deserts of Arabia Petrosa, uppon payn of fyve hundred despights too their terror & contempt of their torment, if they attempt any part of yoour hoous agayn’ (the MS is now at Yale University, Elizabethan Club; see below, n. 25). 18

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royal will had to be balanced against this. A number of the more potentially disruptive entertainment texts (such as Gascoigne’s Masque of Zabeta at Kenilworth, an unsubtle encouragement of royal marriage) were in fact never performed; these are most likely cases where a commissioned writer produced something unsuitable that was vetoed by the commissioning host. Nevertheless there were a few occasions when the desire of a host to make a particular point (usually over royal marriage or religion) was so strong that they were willing to risk disfavour.20 Uncompromising assertions, like the virulently anti-Catholic masque (including a cardinal with a wolf mask and a bishop with an ass’s) performed by Cambridge students in 1564, disrupted the gracious exchange that was supposed to be at the heart of entertainments; on that occasion, according to the Spanish ambassador (admittedly not an unbiased observer), the Queen ‘was so angry that she at once entered her chamber using strong language, and the men who held the torches, it being night, left them in the dark’.21 There was nothing performed at Woodstock in September 1575 that challenged Elizabeth, as the treatment of royal marriage demonstrates, and her response to the Tale of Hemetes and the other devices that followed in the hermit’s bower seems to have been extremely favourable. According to the pamphlet, ‘her Majestie filled with conceites, returneth home, leaving earnest command that the whole in order as it fell, should be brought her in writing’.22 The Queen’s gracious acceptance was itself an important form of reciprocity since it marked an acknowledgement of the status which was claimed by the performers in the entertainment. In this case she even gave the performance further validation by asking that it be memorialized; it was the success of the entertainment in striking the right courtly pose that encouraged its later reproduction in textual form.

20

For representations of marriage see Doran, ‘Juno versus Diana’. The text of the masque itself is found in Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.5.14, fo. 141v; for analysis (and the Spanish ambassador’s report) see Marion Colthorpe, ‘Anti-Catholic Masques Performed before Queen Elizabeth I’, Notes and Queries, 231 (1986), 316–18. 22 The Queenes Maiesties Entertainment at Woodstocke, sig. C2v. 21

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GEORGE GASCOIGNE AND THE PRESENTATION MANUSCRIPT Queen Elizabeth’s request for a written copy of the Woodstock entertainment provided an opportunity that was taken up by George Gascoigne at New Year 1576, when he presented her with a manuscript copy of the Tale of Hemetes. The tale suited Gascoigne’s purposes because the Queen was already written into it, and the manuscript which he presented to her wrote her into the additional role of his personal saviour. The original significance of the tale was intimately bound up with its immediate context and occasionality, which in turn depended on its oral performance. The play on the identities of the protagonists, and their relationship with Elizabeth as both character and audience, lost their immediacy in the transition to written form. Gascoigne’s manuscript enacted a deliberate and radical reorientation of the text, compensating for its loss of occasion by overwhelming the tale with paratexts: a frontispiece, a lengthy dedicatory epistle, verses, translations of the tale into Latin, Italian, and French, and an emblem to accompany each translation. Gascoigne’s manuscript of ‘Hemetes’ is particularly valuable as it is the only surviving example of an entertainment text that was actually presented to Queen Elizabeth. A small number of comparables are known from the Jacobean period: John Marston’s manuscript of the pageants for the entry of King James and the King of Denmark in 1606 and Ben Jonson’s presentation manuscripts of the Masque of Blacknesse and the Masque of Queenes from the first decade of the seventeenth century.23 Gascoigne’s manuscript was not part of the original entertainment itself, but once again only a tiny number of texts that formed part of the performance of entertainments survive. None of the texts

23 BL, Royal MS 18.A.XXXI, Royal MS 17.B.XXXI, and Royal MS 18.A.XLV. Other non-royal presentation manuscripts also survive, such as a copy of Marston’s Entertainment at Ashby for Alice Dowager Countess of Derby, for which see James Knowles, ‘Marston, Skipwith and The Entertainment at Ashby’, English Manuscript Studies, 3 (1992), 136–92, and Robert White’s Cupid’s Banishment for Lucy Countess of Bedford, for which see C. E. McGee, ‘Cupid’s Banishment: A Masque Presented to Her Majesty by Young Women of the Ladies Hall, Deptford, 4 May, 1617’, Renaissance Drama, NS 19 (1988), 227–64.

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presented to Elizabeth during the visit to Woodstock itself (the Bible presented by Humphrey, the ‘posies’ offered to her and her ladies at Hemetes’s hermitage) is known to survive, although a collection of commendatory verses by Oxford students given to her during an earlier visit in 1566 is still among the Royal manuscripts now in the collections of the British Library.24 The only example of a surviving text that actually formed part of an Elizabethan entertainment is the mockChancery charter presented by the Queen to Lord Burghley at Theobalds in 1591.25 Perhaps the greatest oddity of the manuscript is that it was produced and presented by Gascoigne. He is quite clear in his preface to the Queen that he did not write the tale, and he claims responsibility only for translating it into Latin, Italian, and French for presentation to the Queen. The main candidate for authorship, aside from Gascoigne, has previously been Sir Henry Lee himself.26 Lee was commended in his lifetime for his literary skills, for example in the dedication to him of The Model of Poesy by his nephew William Scott, which has been discussed by Stanley Wells.27 Scott praises Lee’s abilities as a writer of emblems (presumably including tournament imprese), abilities which are also referred to in his 1592 Ditchley entertainment. As with many Elizabethan courtier poets, however, it is easier to find commendations of Lee’s skills than a corpus of work that can be identified as his.28

24

BL, Royal MS 12.A.XLVII. This manuscript was sold at Sotheby’s, 16 Dec. 1980, lot 299. It was acquired by the Elizabethan Club in 1985 and is reproduced in Stephen Parks, The Elizabethan Club of Yale University and its Library (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 98–100. 26 Frances Yates first suggested Lee was the author of ‘The Tale of Hemetes’ in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 97. 27 The manuscript of The Model of Poesy is in private possession and not accessible to scholars. It is of particular interest as it apparently contains one of the earliest discussions of Shakespeare’s work. See Stanley Wells, ‘By the placing of his words’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 Sept. 2003, pp. 14–15. I am very grateful to Professor Wells for discussing the manuscript with me. 28 There are three short poems (two of which are connected to his 1590 retirement tilt) that can be assigned with a relatively high level of confidence, for which see Thomas Clayton, ‘ “Sir Henry Lee’s Farewell to the Court”: The Texts and Authorship of “His Golden Locks Time Hath to Silver Turned” ’, English Literary Renaissance, 4 (1974), 268–75. 25

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Although the Tale of Hemetes is so attuned to Lee’s status and ambitions at court that he must have been closely involved in its production, a manuscript text of part of the tale, unknown to previous commentators on the entertainment, makes possible a fresh ascription of authorship. This manuscript gives the following title: ‘The Hermitts tale, made by Garrett master of Arte of my proceedinge’.29 Stephen Powle, who wrote out this title, was a lawyer and one of the Six Clerks of Chancery; he had proceeded MA from Christ Church, Oxford, on 9 October 1573, some nine months after the man he refers to as the author of the Tale of Hemetes, Robert Garrett.30 Stephen Powle and Robert Garrett were for seven years contemporaries at Oxford colleges which backed onto each other (Corpus Christi and Christ Church), so they can safely be assumed to have known each other. The relatively careful and detailed attributions and notes of sources in Powle’s manuscript collection attest to the fact that he took care over establishing facts about texts before transcribing them, and there would also seem to be little purpose in inventing the Tale’s connection to a little-known figure such as Garrett. Admittedly, the manuscript was written many years after the entertainment took place, probably not until the second decade of the seventeenth century, and there is no evidence to suggest that Stephen Powle had been at Woodstock in September 1575.31 When he made his copy he dated the performance vaguely, to ‘1576 or about that time’, and he only copied one page of the text. But the fact that he was still interested in the text so long after its performance strongly suggests that it was the connection with an Oxford contemporary that resonated with him. 29

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 169, fo. 179r. The existence of this copy was first noted in H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 72. 30 For Powle see Virginia F. Stern, Sir Stephen Powle of Court and Country (London: Associated University Press, 1992). 31 Powle wrote the manuscript over an extended period of time. The title of the tale was first written on fo. 177r and then repeated, with the page of text, on fo. 179r. The title on fo. 177 was crossed out and the leaf filled with poems and letters dated Nov. 1617, so the title probably dates from before that. There are many items in the manuscript which, like Hemetes, dated from many years before Powle transcribed them. For example, at some point after transcribing Hemetes, Powle copied into the manuscript a series of letters from the early 1580s (fos. 178, 179v–185v). For the identification of the hand responsible for the Tale of Hemetes as Powle’s, see Stern, Sir Stephen Powle, 56.

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In 1575 Robert Garrett was Reader in Rhetoric at St John’s College, Oxford, and this position is the strongest supporting evidence for his authorship of the Tale of Hemetes. Not only does it locate him only a few miles from Woodstock, but St John’s was an institution with which Sir Henry Lee had close contacts. His younger brother Cromwell may have been a member of the college and was certainly connected to it in some capacity during the years he lived in Oxford.32 Sir Henry’s own association with St John’s began when he first took over at Woodstock manor in 1571, when most of the members of St John’s were residing at Woodstock: ‘Chaucer’s House’ at the edge of the park (which still stands) was leased to the college from the Crown, and it was used as an alternative residence while plague kept them from Oxford itself, a set-up which ran for over a year until at least Lent 1572.33 In later years Lee became closely entangled financially with St John’s and continued as a patron to members of the college, taking a personal chaplain from among its members on at least three occasions.34 When Sir Henry Lee was looking for someone highly literate whom he could commission to write a tale fit for a queen, the rhetoric reader at St John’s would have made an obvious choice. Garrett, whose future 32 Anthony a` Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 3rd edn., ed. Philip Bliss (London: for F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1813–20), i. 715, states he was a member, but the college accounts are not extant for the time when he would have been in attendance so this cannot be confirmed. However the library of St John’s still possesses an Italian dictionary written by Cromwell Lee. I am very grateful to Mr Michael Riordan, the archivist of St John’s College, Oxford, for clarifying the evidence for Cromwell Lee’s attendance at St John’s. 33 Chambers, Sir Henry Lee, 28; W. H. Stevenson and H. E. Salter, The Early History of St. John’s College, Oxford (Oxford Historical Society, NS 1; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 177–9. 34 From at least 1580 Sir Henry also took an active interest in Gloucester Hall, an old university hall that had been incorporated into St John’s (Stevenson and Salter, Early History, 497), and by the 1590s their interests were entangled over the Oxfordshire manor of Charlbury, which Lee leased from St John’s, and the advowson of the parish (W. C. Costin, The History of St John’s College Oxford 1598–1860 (Oxford Historical Society, NS 12; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 26). The chaplains Lee drew from St John’s were Henry Price, John Lee (a distant relative), and Theophilus Tuer. There is an inconsistency in the record of the dates served by Price: according to the Fleet Marston parish registers he was appointed in 1584, but recent unpublished research by Dr Andrew Hegarty shows that he only entered St John’s (aged 18) in that year, and redates his appointment to 1597. John Lee served Sir Henry from 1601, and Tuer, who was appointed in 1610, was present at his funeral in 1611 (Chambers, Sir Henry Lee, 298). I am very grateful to Dr Hegarty for allowing me access to his unpublished work.

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career depended on the patronage that men such as Lee could provide, would hardly have been in a position to refuse. He had been educated at Christ Church and had obtained his position at St John’s through the influence of the College President, the court-oriented cleric Tobie Matthew (also previously of Christ Church). It does not seem to have been a particularly happy appointment: in 1574 Garrett was reprimanded for lack of diligence in his readership and ordered to keep the peace, and he was later accused of embezzling college goods.35 In the summer of 1577 he married and was deprived of his fellowship. The Visitor of the college, Sir William Cordell (Master of the Rolls), commented on this turn of events, ‘the College hath no loss in my opinion by the want of such an unnatural branch as he was’.36 Garrett can probably be identified with the Robert Garrett who in 1578 was installed as the vicar of Eglingham, Northumberland.37 If so, this suggests his roots were in the North-East. He does not seem to have been any more successful at Eglingham than he had been at St John’s: proceedings were begun against him in 1582 when he was found to have been neglectful of chapels in his parish, and Garrett resigned from his benefice in 1587.38 Given his eclipse by Lee and then by Gascoigne, it is entirely plausible that the author of the Tale of Hemetes was relatively young and inexperienced as a court writer: after all, the man who actually wrote this successful piece apparently did not benefit from its success, unlike those who commissioned and translated it. Garrett’s role was to fulfil a specific commission, just like the other hirelings such as actors and musicians who were required to produce a royal entertainment. Entertainments were primarily associated with the commissioning patron in whose name they were performed, and although certain authors like Gascoigne himself, who published the Kenilworth entertainment in 1576, and Thomas Churchyard were beginning to assert their authorship, it was 35 This information is, once again, derived from unpublished work by Dr Andrew Hegarty. 36 Stevenson and Salter, The Early History of St. John’s College, 485. 37 Madeline Hope Dodds (ed.), A History of Northumberland: Vol. XIV (Newcastle: A. Reid, Sons & Co., 1935), 365. 38 The Injunctions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings of Richard Barnes, Bishop of Durham, 1575–87, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Society, 22; Durham: G. Andrews, 1850), 97, 111.

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only in the following century, with the emergence of Ben Jonson as the leading court poet, that the status of entertainment authors really began to change.39 It is clear from the way in which the Tale of Hemetes speaks Lee’s agenda that, like many patrons, he must have dictated, at least in outline, what the entertainment was to say: in the rhetorical terms that Lee and Garrett would have used to understand their respective roles, Garrett was responsible for dispositio, but the initial stage of inventio was Lee’s. This does not, of course, explain why it was George Gascoigne who presented a manuscript copy of the tale to the Queen. Since he refers to having seen her pleasure in the tale at Woodstock, Gascoigne must have been present there. It is possible that he was employed in some capacity at Woodstock, but Alfred Pollard’s suggestion that he wrote the play, the only other substantial device presented at Woodstock, has been convincingly rebutted.40 It has been suggested that Gascoigne had played the part of Hemetes, but it may simply be that he had tagged along with the court on its progress from Kenilworth in July, where he had been employed by Leicester.41 There is nothing other than the manuscript to connect Gascoigne with Hemetes’s speech, and her specific request for a copy was almost certainly the reason he presented Elizabeth with this text rather than, for example, one of his own devices from Kenilworth. It is unlikely that Gascoigne received a specific commission from Lee for the manuscript because he makes no mention of any such commission in his lengthy epistle.42 Gascoigne’s own explanation of his presentation of the Tale to the Queen in the manuscript’s prefatory epistle was that the manuscript demonstrated his skill and willingness to serve: 39 George Gascoigne published a pamphlet, The princelye pleasures at the courte at Kenelworth (London, 1576). The only known copy was destroyed by fire in 1879, but the text was reprinted in The whole woorkes of George Gascoigne Esquire (London: Abell Jeffes, 1587). 40 The Queen’s Majesty’s Entertainment at Woodstock 1575, ed. Alfred Pollard (Oxford: H. Daniel and H. Hart, 1910), p. xiii; Cunliffe, ‘The Queenes Maiesties Entertainment at Woodstock’, 128–9. 41 Gillian Austen, George Gascoigne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 137. 42 The manuscript is assumed to have been commissioned in both Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), and Richard C. McCoy, ‘Gascoigne’s “Poemata Castrata”: The Wages of Courtly Success’, Criticism, 27 (1985), 29–55.

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I fynd in my self some suffycyency to serve your highnes which causeth me thus presumpteowsly to present you with theis rude lynes/ having turned the eloquent tale of Hemetes the Heremyte (wherwith I saw your lerned judgement greatly pleased at Woodstock) into laytne, Italyan and frenche/ nott that I thinke any of the same translacions any waie comparable with the first invencion/ (fo. 5r–v)

The presentation fits into a sustained campaign by Gascoigne to win favour and patronage through his literary labours that began with his return from service in the Netherlands in the summer of 1574, where he had been a Spanish prisoner of war for several months.43 This campaign had two characteristics: repeated assertions of his reformation of character, and equally repetitious attempts to pursue links to the royal court. A new edition of his collected poetry appeared early in 1575, revised in an (unsuccessful) attempt to placate the authorities who had been offended with the previous edition of 1572. He adopted a stance of reformed prodigality which was consistently maintained in four strongly moralistic works that appeared over the following eighteen months, written, he claimed, ‘too make amendes for the lost time which I misbestowed in wryting so wantonlie’.44 Along with announcing his reformed prodigality, Gascoigne also promulgated the idea of himself as a courtly writer. The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (London, [1575]), although published anonymously, included woodcuts of Elizabeth with Gascoigne himself in attendance, and in 1576 he produced the Princelye pleasures of the courte at Kenelworth.45 43 See the biographical introduction to A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W. Pigman III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. xxvii–xxxviii. The most extended biography of Gascoigne remains C. T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), but for a nuanced reading of his publications of 1575–6 see Austen, Gascoigne, 84–195. 44 A delicate diet, for daintiemouthde droonkardes (London, 1576), sig. A2v. The other publications were: The glasse of gouernement (London: John Charlewood for Richard Jhones, 1575); The steele glas. A satyre . . .Togither with The complainte of Phylomene (London: for R. Smith, 1576); The droomme of Doomes day (London: Cawood, 1576). Gascoigne’s use of the prodigal narrative has been noted by many critics, including Richard Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 44–58, and McCoy, ‘Gascoigne’s “Poemata Castrata” ’. 45 The evidence for Gascoigne’s responsibility for Venerie is in George Whetstone, A Remembraunce of the wel imployed life, and godly end, of George Gaskoigne (London: for Edward Aggas, [1577]), as was noted in Jean Robertson, ‘George Gascoigne and The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting’, Modern Language Review, 37 (1942), 484–5.

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Although it was the manuscript of Hemetes that brought Gascoigne closest to the court, he is very unlikely to have presented the manuscript to the Queen in person. Gascoigne oriented himself towards the court in a number of works but he did not have any official post, nor did he have the social status, wealth, or connections to be a courtier: he was what Steven May has termed a ‘court poet’ rather than a courtier poet.46 The manuscript was presented at the traditional time for gift-giving, New Year, which, because of the sheer volume of gifts exchanged, was not a time for personal interaction in presentation. Non-courtiers who wished to present a manuscript to the Queen in person found other occasions to do so, such as on progress, when the temporary arrangement of the court made the conventions of access more difficult to maintain, or on routine occasions such as when she passed to chapel.47 Courtier poets, who had relatively easy access to the Queen, almost exclusively gave her verses in more informal circumstances.48 Informal gifts also tended to be less formally produced. In his study of manuscript presentations Carlo Bajetta argues that the manuscript of Ralegh’s Ocean to Scinthia at Hatfield House, which is usually assumed to be a working copy, may have been intended for the Queen, a less formal copy serving his purpose better than a more finished one because it evoked the distressed mind and feverish penitential writing of the disgraced courtier.49 A letter describing in detail the process of New Year gift-giving at court reveals it as an impersonal and bureaucratic system. It dates from the early years of James I’s reign, but the process was probably much the same in the 1570s: You must buy a new purse of about vs. price, and put therinto xx peeces of new gold of xxs. a piece, and go to the Presence-chamber, where the Court is, upon New-yere’s day, in the morninge about 8 o’clocke, and deliver the purse and 46 Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 40. 47 For presentation manuscripts see Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 88–103, and Carlo M. Bajetta, ‘The Manuscripts of Verse Presented to Elizabeth I’, Ben Jonson Journal, 8 (2001), 147–205. Richard Robinson describes presenting a manuscript to the Queen as she passed to chapel in BL, Royal MS 18.A.LXVI, fo. 8r (see Woudhuysen, pp. 195–203). 48 Bajetta, ‘The Manuscripts of Verse’, 177–82. 49 Ibid. 183–4.

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gold unto my Lord Chamberlin, then you must go down to the Jewell-House for a ticket to receive xviiis. vid. as a gift to your paines, and give vid. there to the box for your ticket; then go to Sir William Veall’s office, and shew your ticket, and receive your xviiis. vid.. Then go to the Jewell house again, and make choice of a peece of plate of xxx ounces waight, and marke it, and then in the afternoone you may go and fetch it away, and then give the gentleman who delivers it you xls. in gold, and give to the box iis. and to the porter vid..50

Although Gascoigne ensured that he was presenting a very attractive object, his gift had considerable competition for royal attention. As George Puttenham complained: Gracious Princesse, Where Princes are in place To geve you gold, and plate, and perles of price It seemeth this day, save your royall advice Paper praesentes, should have but little grace[.]51

Among the fantastic and ornate jewellery and clothing that the Queen received at New Year 1576 from favoured or ambitious courtiers was a golden squirrel from the Lord Strange and a collar of gold in the shape of twin serpents from Secretary Walsingham, and a ‘paper praesent’ would certainly have had difficulty competing for attention among such gifts.52 These were objects marked by an excessive desire to please, excessive because they would never be matched by Elizabeth’s return gift (inevitably plate of a quantity determined by rank), and so suggesting a particular dependence on royal favour (either existing or anticipated). Gascoigne’s gift did not only have to compete with these high quality attention-grabbing pieces, but also with a huge number of more everyday presents. Gift exchanges were part of the ritual life of the court and most were no more than tokens recognizing an existing service. Many aristocrats simply gave money, and many groups conventionally gave the same things, such as lute strings from court musicians, or green ginger and orange flowers from apothecaries. The manuscripts most commonly received by Queen Elizabeth at New Year were given by heralds, especially the Garter King of Arms. 50 Letter by the Earl of Huntingdon, 1604/5, in John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Festivities of King James I, 4 vols. (London: Nichols, 1828), i. 471. 51 BL, Cotton MS Vespasian E.VIII, fo. 169r. 52 John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London: Nichols, 1823), ii. 1.

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These were beautiful objects but highly conventional in form, each containing the arms of historic knights of the Garter, fully illuminated and gilt on vellum and bound in velvet on boards.53 Such gifts did not suggest a complex or intimate relationship between the donor and the Queen and were of course intimately tied to the donor’s profession, providing the herald with an opportunity to display his skill in reproducing arms. Gascoigne rose to the challenge of presenting a New Year’s gift, and indeed few manuscripts presented to Queen Elizabeth compare with Gascoigne’s in attention to visual detail. Most such manuscripts were relatively unambitious in their mise en page, and while they were typically written in formal hands without messy corrections, most are fairly plain, without any range of hands or illustrations.54 For example Petruccio Ubaldini, who has been described as the Elizabethan court’s ‘professional Italian’, was a highly capable scribe but his frequent gifts of manuscripts to prominent courtiers, including the Queen, were mostly written in his own italic hand without extra adornment.55 A manuscript would have been first judged on its binding, so it is regrettable that the original binding of Gascoigne’s gift has been lost. Like many British Library Royal manuscripts, it was rebound in the eighteenth century in red morocco stamped with the arms of George II. Cropping and gilt-edging probably also occurred at that time. The book being presented in the frontispiece to Gascoigne’s manuscript may give a clue to the original binding, although it seems to be substantially thicker than the thirty-nine leaves of the manuscript. That presentation has a fairly simple finish of two tooled compartments. The original binding may have borne a mark of Elizabeth’s ownership such as the 53 A group of nine such manuscripts produced by Sir Gilbert Dethick were sold at Sotheby’s, 18 Dec. 1986, lot 203; another example, produced by his son William Dethick and depicting the arms of the K. G.s created by Edward IV, was offered in the same rooms on 15 Dec. 2005, lot 1. Further examples are listed in surviving New Year’s Gift rolls. 54 Carlo Bajetta notes a number of presentation manuscripts with corrections, notably Cambridge University Library MS 8915, and concludes that fine penmanship is not a universal quality of royal presentation manuscripts (‘The Manuscripts of Verse’, 149). 55 BL, Royal MS 14.A.I is Ubaldini’s ‘examples of writinge very faire’, which contrasts with, for example, Royal MS 14.A.X (to Lord Howard of Effingham, 1588), 14.A. XI (to Sir Christopher Hatton, 1589), and 14.A.XIX (to Queen Elizabeth, 1577). May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets, 38–9.

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Royal arms, and although velvet is known to have been Queen Elizabeth’s favourite binding material and was used for surviving heraldic gifts, the binding material is likely to have been vellum, the malleability of which would have made it the most appropriate material for a short text like the Hemetes manuscript.56 Despite the care with which Gascoigne’s manuscript was prepared, it is unlikely that his funds allowed for the sort of binding that would have made any real visual impact; he could not have competed with Sir Henry Lee, the tale’s original sponsor, who presented the Queen with a blank manuscript ‘booke of golde’ on the same occasion.57 When the Queen opened Gascoigne’s manuscript, however, on the first page she would have found a re-imagining of the circumstances in which it was given, in the form of a pen and ink frontispiece illustration depicting Gascoigne kneeling before Queen Elizabeth offering her a book (see Fig. 1.1). The tradition of presenting the kneeling donative author is mostly associated with late medieval France.58 There are, however, a few other Elizabethan examples: the closest parallel is a manuscript copy of Beauchesne’s A Booke Contaning Divers Sortes of hands, with additions and illustrations, prepared by William Teshe in 1580, which depicts Teshe offering the book when kneeling before the Queen, who sits in Fame’s Chariot.59 Gascoigne’s image shows the respective roles he imagines for himself and the Queen, and also illustrates how clearly he understood that presenting a work to the Queen allowed him to address her directly in a way he could not hope to do in person. This image is the best-known aspect of Gascoigne’s manuscript: it has been reproduced several times and

56 For the surviving bindings of Queen Elizabeth, almost all of which have marks of ownership, see William Younger Fletcher, English Bookbindings in the British Museum (London, 1895), plates XVIII–XXV; P. J. M. Marks, The British Library Guide to Bookbinding (London: The British Library, 1998), 57–9. I am also grateful to Jan Storm van Leeuwen for comments on bindings. 57 Nichols, Progresses . . . Queen Elizabeth, ii. 1. 58 For the traditions of such illustrations: see Ruth Mortimer, A Portrait of the Author in Sixteenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Cynthia J. Brown, ‘Text, Image, and Authorial Self-Consciousness in Late Medieval Paris’, in Sandra L. Hindman (ed.), Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, circa 1450–1525 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 103–42. 59 BL, Sloane MS 1832, fos. 7v–8r.

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discussed by a number of critics.60 As Wendy Wall has noted, there is an undercurrent of aggression in the image. Gascoigne might be kneeling but he is at the centre of the picture while the Queen has been pushed towards the margin, his foot resting on the edge of her train. Although in reality he is unlikely to have been able to put the manuscript into her hands himself, in his representation of the act of presentation Elizabeth has no attendants, there are no servants or courtiers in the room, and even the corridor behind is empty. Gascoigne has granted himself unmediated and sole access to her person. Gascoigne’s two vocations, soldier and poet, are both represented in the illustration: he holds a lance in his left hand and a book in his right, he has a sword at his belt as well as a pen behind his ear, and a hand descends from the ceiling holding a tablet with his motto, ‘Tam Marti quam Mercurio’ (as much for Mars as Mercury). It is, however, the book that has brought Gascoigne into personal attendance on his monarch. The book has not yet reached the Queen’s hands so she cannot have conferred the laurel upon him on the basis of her reading of it; instead, the picture implies that by accepting Gascoigne’s gift Elizabeth will be acknowledging the poetic status he has already achieved. Gascoigne understood that a book is a gift that can imagine its own reward, and although he was not unique in using the gift of a manuscript as a means of self-promotion, this manuscript is unusual in the careful and coherent way in which his relationship with the Queen was constructed. It can be contrasted, for example, to the manuscript of A rebuke to Rebellion by his friend Thomas Churchyard, which was presented to the Queen at an undated New Year. In his dedicatory 60

Wendy Wall provides an acute analysis of the frontispiece (which she incorrectly describes as an engraving) as part of a discussion of Gascoigne’s pageant texts in The Imprint of Gender, 127–40, seeing in it a mixture of deference and aggression that she finds typical of Gascoigne. Both Wall and McCoy, in ‘Gascoigne’s “Poemata Castrata” ’, 46–7, see sexual undertones in the frontispiece with its phallic tokens (sword, pen, lance). The frontispiece is discussed by Catherine Bates as emblematic of the dynamics of Elizabethan courtiership in the prologue to The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–4. Bajetta begins his article on manuscripts of verse presented to Elizabeth I with this image, commenting that it is ‘one of the best known visual images of a poet presenting his work to the Queen’ (‘The Manuscripts of Verse’, 147). The image was used at the cover illustration for P. Beal and G. Ioppolo (eds.), Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (London: The British Library, 2007), in which an earlier version of this piece appeared, and featured again in Austen, Gascoigne, where it is discussed on pp. 139–43.

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Fig. 1.1. The frontispiece to the Tale of Hemetes. British Library, Royal MS 18. A.XLVIII, fo. 1. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

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epistle to that work Churchyard comments that it was penned ‘under the protection of your highnes’, suggesting that it was presented as the fruit of existing patronage, rather than (as Gascoigne does) demonstrating his worthiness of future patronage.61 It also does not bring its royal reader into the text in such a strong way. To Churchyard, the Queen was the exemplary and first reader of a work ‘proffitable for good people, and a pinching rebuke to badd Subjects’, which (assuming it found favour), would then be printed for general readership.62 To Gascoigne, however, the Queen was not just the best but the only reader, and rather than just looking for approval he used the opportunity of addressing her as a means of making her a player in the drama of his life. When George Puttenham presented a poem, Parthenides, to the Queen in 1579 he did involve her directly in its content and looked for more than simple royal approval.63 However, rather than bringing himself into the manuscript he presented it anonymously. This was no doubt because he had chosen to use his opportunity of addressing his monarch to press on her, decorously but unmistakably, the importance of providing an heir. Gascoigne used the privileged space of address to the Queen in order to portray himself as an isolated and repentant figure who recognizes that his life has been full of mistakes, but is surrounded by many detractors who restrict his ability to act out his reformation. This is an authorial position in which Gascoigne placed himself repeatedly in the texts he produced in the last years of his life. At New Year 1577 Gascoigne sent an emblem and letter to the Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon.64 That emblem illustrates two horses, one being ridden, the other beaten, with a motto explaining that some men are like colts, 61

BL, Royal MS 17.B.VII, fo. 1r. A Rebuke for Rebellion was printed as ‘A Warning to the Wanderers Abroad’ in Churchyards Challenge (London: Edward Allde for John Wolfe, 1593), sig. 1*v, where it is dedicated to Sir Michael Blount. 63 The surviving copy of Parthenides (Cotton MS Vespasian E.VIII, fos. 169–78) has the title ‘The principall addresse in nature of a new yeares gifte, seeminge thereby the Author intended not to have his name knowne’. Puttenham comments that she lacks two joys ‘A Casar to her husband, a kinge to her soone’ (fo. 169v), and later gives an allegory of the withering of the Tudor line (fos. 172v–173r). 64 The letter is in the possession of Marquess Townshend of Raynham, on deposit at Norfolk Record Office, RAY 25. It has been misdated to 1 Jan. 1577/8 (after Gascoigne’s death). 62

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resistant to service, ‘Yett (onse well broke) suche men prove not the worste’. In the accompanying letter Gascoigne explains the emblem’s relevance to his own life: although he has now been broken in, his ‘koltish trickes’ have left him so weak that he is ‘enforcede to neye and braye unto your good Lord and all other which have the keye of Her Majesties storehowse’. Not only does Gascoigne represent himself as desperately in need of patronage, but also as hopelessly indebted to his existing patrons. When dedicating the Droomme of Doomes day to the Earl of Bedford, he described the book as a ‘pawne of thankfulnesse’ (sig. **3v ) given to serve until an opportunity arises for Gascoigne to repay the true debt of gratitude that he owes to Bedford. Claiming indebtedness, like admitting inconsistency and inadequacy, is a common part of the rhetoric of clientage since it asserts a relationship with the putative patron, implying that the writer should be employed so he can display his gratitude. Gascoigne does not have a great deal to say about the tale itself, which was just a convenient vehicle for his authorial self-presentation, but he is unusually explicit about his desire for patronage: Then peereles prince, employe this willinge man In your affayres to do the beste he cann/ (fo. 2r)

He does not claim that he should receive the Queen’s patronage on the basis of the value of his gift. Should Elizabeth compare his translations to the original text, ‘you shall fynde my sentences as much disordered, as arrowes shott owt of ploughes/ and my theames as unaptly prosecuted, as hares hunted with oxen’ (fo. 5v ). To present the monarch with a gift was to engage in a courtly game which was especially tricky for those with limited resources, and asserting the worthlessness of the gift, as Gascoigne does, was a common rhetorical move. Offering a gift to a monarch was not only a fairly extreme example of that timeless problem of what to give someone who has everything, but also required particular care since the donor did not necessarily wish for his or her gift to imply a lack on the part of the recipient. The Renaissance model for gift-giving was provided above all by Seneca’s De Beneficiis, which emphasizes gratitude and asserts that, in the translation of Thomas Lodge, ‘that which is offered to the eye, is not the good workes or

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benefit, but onely a lustre and signe of the same’.65 Seneca’s model is considered in more detail in Chapter 4. A similar moral can be found in the Biblical Lesson of the Widow’s Mite, another favourite reference in dedications, which also insists that we look towards the giver not the gift (‘this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had’).66 What matters is not the material object given but the act of giving: the physical gift is just the trace of goodwill so can be safely denigrated. This is a useful model for exchange between radically unequal transactors such as monarch and subject because it levels the value of the exchange, translating the objects themselves into mere signifiers of the only true gift—love. Gascoigne uses the privileged space he has constructed for personal address to Elizabeth in order to assert his abject dependence on her bounty: ‘fyndyng my youth myspent, my substannce ympayred, my credytt accrased, my tallent hydden, my follyes laughed att, my rewyne unpyttyed, and my trewth unemployed . . . I presume . . . to knock att the gates of your gracyous goodnes’ (fos. 4v–5r ). The manuscript also includes three emblems that precede the three translations of the tale.67 Their subject is Gascoigne’s current status and dependence on favour to allow the fruition of his potential. In the first, a serpent that has been trodden underfoot refuses to die: even those that are trodden underfoot (as Gascoigne has been by fortune), asserts the motto, will rise again. In the Italian emblem Gascoigne is himself depicted trying to hold onto a great bundle of sticks while the motto dwells on ambition, as he considers that the man who grasps at too much is often able to hold on to nothing. This was an image he picked up again with reference to himself in his poem The Grief of Joye (1577).68 The French emblem returns to the theme of Gascoigne’s age (to which he had alluded in his preface): just as a walnut tree will be more fertile if it is left to 65 The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Both Morrall and Naturall (London: William Stansby, 1614), 7. The original reads, ‘Sic non est beneficium id, quod sub oculos venit, sed beneficii vestigium et nota’ (De Beneficiis, I. 5. vi). 66 Mark 12: 38–44 and Luke 20: 45–21: 4. 67 The most detailed analysis of the emblems is in Austen, Gascoigne, 144–9. 68 In the opening stanzas of the fourth song he compares himself to a boy overambitiously gathering wood from a pile, who pulls the entire pile down on his own head (BL, Royal MS 18.A.LXI, fos. 30v–31r).

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mature before being harvested, so his service will be more fruitful for coming in his middle age. The Hemetes manuscript is a display of Gascoigne’s personal labour on behalf of his prince. He is also physically present in the manuscript through the illustrations: it is a recognizable likeness that presents the manuscript in the frontispiece, and he reappears grasping sticks in the Italian emblem. The labour which Gascoigne has spent on providing multiple translations, which take up far more of the manuscript than the original tale, is a demonstration of the linguistic abilities that make him suitable for government service. The translations were also surely calculated to please Elizabeth, who took great pride in her own linguistic abilities. Despite the multiple ways in which Gascoigne brings himself into the manuscript and his rhetoric of personal address, the handwriting is entirely scribal. The various hands bear little resemblance to the writing in Gascoigne’s 1576 autograph letters to Burghley; although the letters were admittedly written more hurriedly than the Hemetes manuscript, some similarities should still be expected.69 The only appearance of Gascoigne’s own hand in the manuscript is the signature at the foot of the epistle to Elizabeth. The occasional corrections in the manuscript also seem to be in the scribal hand, but Gascoigne may have been responsible for the systematic revision of the punctuation, in which many parentheses and virgules were added, often as a replacement for commas. Gillian Austen provides some evidence for considering the emblem illustrations to be the work of Gascoigne himself, along with the emblem in the letter to Bacon, which is unmistakably the work of the same artist (the stocky dimensions of the human figures and the decorative borders are very similar), but they could equally be the work of the same highly skilled scribe who was responsible for both the manuscript and the letter.70 Gascoigne did not write out the tale himself because his handwriting was not fit for a Queen, but he surely collaborated closely with the anonymous 69

Samples of these letters (in the National Archives, SP 70/139 and 140) are reproduced in English Literary Autographs 1550–1650, ed. W. W. Greg in collaboration with J. P. Gilson et al., 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–32), ii, pl. 37. 70 Austen argues that Gascoigne’s claim to have ‘set in portrayture’ the woodcuts in his translation of The Noble Arte of Venerie is evidence of his artistic skills (Austen, Gascoigne, 108–11 and 134), and see also B. M. Ward, ‘George Gascoigne and his Circle’, Review of English Studies, 2 (1926), 32–41 at 39–41. The Bacon emblem motto is written in the same italic hand as the Hemetes mottoes (note, for example, the long straight ascenders and descenders, the use of serifs, and the tail of g), and the text of the letter is in the same distinctive secretary hand as Hemetes.

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scribe and may have been responsible for the overall scheme behind the manuscript’s appearance, and its sophisticated use of various visual codes. Ruled red margins demarcate the writing space on each page and leave extensive margins, making the manuscript the equivalent of a large paper copy of a printed book (the writing space takes up approximately 55 per cent of the page). The manuscript was written in a variety of scripts. A formal secretary with engrossing capitals was used for the prefatory sonnet and epilogue poem. The remaining English portions of the text were written in a different secretary script with the conventional use of italic for emphasis and foreign words. The translations are all in scripts that were deemed appropriate for their languages: the Latin translation is in a roman hand, the Italian in an italic, and the French in a bastard secretary. The scripts are entirely distinct but the Italian italic has some deeper structural differences that result from the scribe’s use of space rather than script formation: it is a less compact hand that leaves considerably more space between letters and words, it regularly crosses over the right margin, and it makes no use of line-fillers. This section is therefore probably the work of a different scribe from the rest of the manuscript. The manuscript is in quarto format, and most of the ten sheets were quired before transcription commenced, suggesting that it was prepared with care and forethought. The paper itself is probably of French origin, and has a watermark of a sword in a shield with the letters ‘I C’.71 However the second half of the manuscript does not fall into neat gatherings: both the distribution of watermarks and the visible structure of the manuscript suggest that the Italian translation (but not the Italian emblem) was inserted into the centre of an existing gathering, offering further evidence that the Italian was farmed out to a different scribe. Since the manuscript now has thirty-nine original leaves, at some point a leaf has been lost and collation shows that this missing leaf came before the Italian emblem, so it seems most likely that an earlier version of the Italian emblem was cut out of the manuscript because a mistake was made in its production.72 71 The watermark is similar to C. M. Briquet, Les Filigranes (Amsterdam: Paper Publications Society, 1968), no. 9457, found in documents dating from 1576–8. 72 The first twenty leaves (beginning with an unfoliated original flyleaf) collate I10 II6 III4. Watermark evidence suggests that fo. 20 is conjugate with fo. 32; fo. 31 with the missing leaf (which therefore falls after the Latin and before the Italian emblem); and fo. 21 with fo. 30. Into the centre of this fourth gathering were placed two additional

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A few months after Gascoigne presented this manuscript to the Queen he succeeded in finding employment from the Crown. He was sent to observe affairs in the Low Countries, where he was unfortunate enough to be caught up in the Sack of Antwerp. He must have seen his gift to the Queen as having played a part in his appointment, because at New Year 1577 he presented her with a second manuscript, The Grief of Joye. This was again scribally produced (this time Gascoigne did not even sign his own name), and visually inventive: whenever the word ‘Queen’ appears it is written in gold—a device that Gascoigne had seen at Kenilworth in 1575, where a poem of welcome that was hung over the castle gate had been similarly gilded.73 The Grief of Joye is a poem fully within the mode of reformed prodigality which develops many of the same themes as the Hemetes manuscript, especially in Gascoigne’s self-presentation as a grateful, but still needy, recipient of royal bounty. On this occasion the poem was written by Gascoigne himself specifically to be presented to the Queen: Not that I thinke my Poemes any waie worthie to bee ones redd or beheld of youre heavenly eyes, but that I might make youre Majestie witnesse, how the Interims and vacant howres (of those daies which I spent this sommer in your service) have byn bestowed/ (fo. 2v)

Gascoigne continues to denigrate his own abilities whilst constructing for himself a privileged position from which he addresses the Queen directly and alone, and indirectly requests favour through repeated reference to his abject dependence on royal bounty. On this occasion, however, he is able to bring his own voice into the main body of the text. The Grief of Joye is presented incomplete for her judgement, and only if she deems it worthy will he complete the work and put it into print dedicated to her. The Queen, textually privileged in gold, is the only reader for whom he is writing. Throughout the poem Gascoigne imagigatherings (fos. 22–5 and 26–9), corresponding exactly with the Italian text. The final six leaves are bifolia, suggesting that the amount of paper needed was at first slightly underestimated. 73 The hand in this manuscript, BL, Royal MS 18.A.LXI, and the influence of Jean de Beauchesne on it, is discussed in A. Fairbank and B. Dickins, The Italic Hand in Tudor Cambridge (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1962), 16–17. For the use of gold writing at Kenilworth see Robert Laneham, A letter whearin, part of the entertainment untoo the Queenz maiesty, at Killingwoorth Castl . . . is signified (London, 1575), 13–14.

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nes a series of enemies who threaten to bring about an abrupt foreclosure, and it is eventually ‘Left unperfect for feare of Horsmen’ (fo. 38r) mid-stanza, just as he is about to sing the vanities of equestrian pursuits.74 The construction of enemies allows him to appeal personally and repeatedly to the Queen for protection, to conjure her into the poem itself as the only point of address with sufficient understanding and power to provide an external authority to legitimate the work. Nevertheless it was perhaps a genuine anxiety about the Queen’s reaction which stalled completion of the poem until the author had received personal encouragement, gratitude for his labour, a reciprocal response to his gift. Presentations depended on the Queen’s response, but such responses are difficult to judge. We do not know whether Gascoigne’s employment in royal service had any connection to his presentation of the Tale of Hemetes, and Elizabeth’s response to Gascoigne’s second gift is unknown since the poet was dead before the end of 1577. Equally, it is not clear how Lee’s performance as Loricus impacted on his emergence as the Queen’s champion. It is not possible to point to specific ways in which these presentations rewrote the presenters’ relationships with Elizabeth, and it is unlikely that her smiles of appreciation readily or directly translated into material bounty. The significance of such presentations was that they provided an opportunity for those involved to script their own relationship to the Queen. Beyond the presentation the script was not theirs to write, but royal response at least allowed them to gauge how far the Queen’s version of their future relationship coincided with their own. 74 Prouty (George Gascoigne, 97) blamed Spanish cavalry for interrupting Gascoigne’s labours, but I do not find this convincing; and see also Austen, George Gascoigne, 211–12. The courtly horse-lovers follow a succession of enemies, including court beauties who threaten to pull out his muse’s tongue when he expounds on the vanity of beauty (fo. 12v ).

2 Armed Address: The Elizabethan Tournament THE ARENA OF THE TILTYARD The ritualized combat of the tournament was an important form of entertainment for the royal court in the late sixteenth century, as it had been for the previous four hundred years. Such combat took three principal forms: the tilt, in which the combatants rode against each other with lances separated by a palisade (the tilt itself, from which the form took its name); the tourney, in which the mounted knights fought with rebated swords; and the barriers, often fought inside, in which the combatants fought on foot with sword or pike. The chivalric ideal of aristocratic manhood that participation in these activities expressed was still very much alive in the reign of Elizabeth and beyond, but tournaments themselves were a residual form that no longer performed any significant function as training for war. One consequence of the loss of underlying military purpose was the lack of seriousness that characterizes the tournament in the later sixteenth century. Lances were made increasingly weak, so they would break more easily on impact and lessen the likelihood of injury. Role play—including cross-dressing—and dramatic back-stories had long formed a part of tournaments, but they came to dominate under Elizabeth, when tournaments became increasingly centred on the construction of witty and telling personae through extravagant and dashing costumes, speeches, and impresa.1 1 See Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) for a history of the tournament, and Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 227–52, for the technical demands and skills of jousting.

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From the mid-1570s through to the early 1590s Sir Henry Lee played a prominent part in court entertainments. He was particularly significant in the development of tiltyard entertainments and was the instigator of the Accession Day tournaments. This chapter looks at how Lee and other active performers in the tiltyard (especially the Earls of Arundel, Oxford, and Essex) took on specific personae when they appeared before the Queen and used these performances to express, often with some subtlety, how they saw their own situation at court and relationship to the Queen, as Lee had done at Woodstock. Tournaments of course had a celebratory function—Roy Strong and others have seen the Accession Day tournaments as an expression of the ‘cult of Elizabeth’, that elaborate web of symbols and imagery that was wrapped around the Virgin Queen—but they were nevertheless opportunities for expressing a range of personal agendas. Tournaments (like other forms of royal entertainment) provided access to the royal presence, were a celebration of the court under that monarch, and were also an opportunity to display the aristocracy’s martial prowess. They were also traditionally opportunities for the monarch to display his own prowess. All forms of entertainment had a rhythm that was in sympathy with the reigning monarch, but in the tiltyard this rhythm was closely tied to his physical body and capacities. It was under physically active kings and princes who were anxious to display their virility that tournaments flourished—Henry VIII was a great example of this, but Philip of Spain (during his marriage to Mary I) and James I’s son Henry, Prince of Wales, were others. Tournaments tended to be less popular when the monarch was unable to participate in the action for reasons of age, inclination, or sex. The reign of Elizabeth was unusual in having a strong tradition of tiltyard entertainment without any royal participation, and this lack of royal involvement had two consequences: it meant that the role of triumphant champion was up for the taking by a non-royal participant, and it placed the monarch consistently in the position of observer. This in turn encouraged greater prominence to be given to quasi-dramatic features in the tiltyard performance, such as costume and speeches, which provided greater expressive opportunity. So when a courtier presented himself in the tiltyard, as when he entertained the monarch during a progress visit, he had an opportunity to define his relationship with the sovereign in public by performing it before her.

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Quasi-dramatic opportunities for self-definition took a number of forms. It was traditional for those taking part in tournaments to wear tokens for their mistress. Robert Dudley and Lord Hunsdon followed this tradition in 1559, appearing at tilt wearing black and white scarves, the colours favoured by the Queen. A more complex example of the use of colour is the Earl of Essex’s appearance at tilt all in black in 1590, probably (knowledgeable observers believed) as a mark of contrition for his recent marriage.2 At the same tournament at least one follower of Essex also appeared ‘In mourning Sable dight by simpathie’, so using colour to mark out a web of allegiance amongst the tilters.3 Colours, feathers, tokens, and ribbons, all signifying allegiances of one kind or another, seem to have been a common part of tournaments, but in the vast majority of cases they are unrecorded. Prominent Elizabethan tilters wore brightly coloured and decorated armour, sometimes specially commissioned and often bearing heraldic or other insignia either of the wearer or of the Queen (for example a suit of tournament armour produced c.1580–5 for the Earl of Cumberland was decorated with Tudor roses, fleurs-de-lis, and ‘E’s).4 One suit commissioned by Sir Henry Lee bore an impresa on the pouldrons or shoulder plates: the device of a sun shining and uprising bird, presumably an eagle (which could by tradition look directly into the sun), flying towards it, and a ribbon underneath on which was written a motto. Once again, the surviving evidence is fragmentary as the text of the motto is lost, but the eagle probably represented Lee and the (unreachable) sun Elizabeth. It is the impresa that best sums up the personal and ephemeral nature of tiltyard entertainments. Tournament imprese were personal emblems borne on decorated shields, made of wood or papier-maˆche´, that were carried by knights into the tiltyard and presented to the monarch. They are succinctly defined by William Camden: ‘An Imprese (as the Italians 2 See Edmund Lodge, Illustrations of British History, 3 vols. (London: Mitcham, 1838), ii. 419–20, 422; Arthur Collins, Letters and Memorials of State, 2 vols. (London: T. Osborne, 1746), i. 312. 3 George Peele, Polyhymnia (London: Richard Jhones, 1590), sig. B2r. 4 A major source for Elizabethan armour is the Topf manuscript at the V&A, which includes ink and watercolour illustrations of twenty-nine suits of armour, including Cumberland’s and Lee’s. Copies of most of these are included in An Almain Armourer’s Album, ed. Viscount Dillon (London: W. Griggs, 1905). Cumberland’s armour is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

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call it) is a devise in picture with his Motte, or Word, borne by noble and learned personages, to notifie some particular conceit of their owne: as Emblemes (that we may omitte other differences) doe propound some generall instruction to all.’5 Knights paraded into the tiltyard bearing impresa shields such as ‘A dyall in the sunne; In occasu desinit esse [At sunset it ceases to be]’ or ‘A ballance in a hand; Ponderare est errare [To weigh is to err]’.6 An illustration in a heraldic manuscript in the College of Arms depicts a tournament of 1559, with eight knights bearing family insignia on their horses’ bards and also with personal imprese.7 The presentation of the impresa shield to the Queen was a central moment in the Elizabethan tiltyard entertainment and it was commonly at this point that the knight’s page made a speech, which itself often referred to the impresa. The gist of its meaning is often clear enough, and in particular many were pleas for patronage, such as ‘An empty bagpipe; the word, Si impleveris [If you will fill]’. But, as Camden makes clear, the significance of the impresa does not lie in the image and motto alone, but in those elements triangulated with the ‘particular conceit’ of the bearer: their meaning is tied their being borne by that individual at that moment. A simple example is provided by an impresa borne at a tournament of May 1571 of ‘a white lion devouring a young coney. His word was in English—“Call you this Love?”’ The general sense of devouring love is clear enough, but it is given very particular significance once we have the precise context, as explained in a letter by the Gentleman Pensioner George Delves, who also participated in the tournament.8 The impresa was carried by Thomas Coningsby (1550– 1625), who was at the time pursuing the hand of Frances Howard: the coney was therefore a punning self-reference to Coningsby, while the white lion, a Howard family badge, signified Frances Howard.

5

William Camden, Remaines (London: Simon Waterson, 1605), 158. These examples are taken from The Diary of John Manningham, ed. Robert Parker Sorlein (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976), 31–3. 7 College of Arms, MS M.6, fos. 56v–57r. See Alan Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London: George Philip, 1987), 125–7, and Richard C. McCoy, ‘From the Tower to the Tiltyard’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 425–35. 8 Letter by George Delves (d. 1604), to the Earl of Rutland, 14 May 1572; HMC, 12th Report, Appendix, Part IV: The Manuscripts of . . . the Duke of Rutland (London: HMSO, 1888), i. 92. 6

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The true significance of the impresa was therefore only accessible to the privileged few who had some knowledge of the bearer’s ‘particular conceit’. This contrast between a superficial public meaning and a deeper, secret, more personal meaning has already been met in the previous chapter, where it was acknowledged by the narrator of the published account of the Woodstock entertainment. In a similar way a number of reports of tournaments refer to the impenetrable meaning of the impresa. These hidden personal meanings are a distinctive feature of entertainments, for while much Renaissance literature was understood to operate on at least two levels, with a deeper meaning only accessible to a select few, in most genres that hidden meaning was of a higher, more general, and therefore less personal significance, whereas the opposite is the case here. Camden himself contrasts the emblem and the impresa: the impresa has a covert and privileged meaning that is personal, political, and particular, whereas the emblem’s hidden meaning is typically abstract and philosophical. The ideal impresa motto, again according to Camden, should be: ‘in some different language, wittie, short, and answerable therunto; neither too obscure not too plaine, and most commended, when it is an Hemistich, or parcell of a verse’.9 So the reader had to comprehend a foreign language (typically Latin), complete the quotation, and then apply the motto and illustration to its bearer. A number of drafts for an impresa survive in the Ditchley manuscript (this manuscript, which is associated with Sir Henry Lee, is considered in more detail below): Senica hath a sayinge, cure leves loquntur, ingentes stupent10 which is, the cares that speack be light, ther greater astone11 Its said of lucullus magnificentiam luculi imitantur omnes virtutem quis,12 which is, lucullus glorie all pursue, his vertue whoe. If you lyke eyther of these devises, wherof ther later pleaseth myself best, use but the last wordes of eyther sentence 1. Ingentis stupent 2. virtutem quis

9

Camden, Remaines, 158. Phaedra, l. 607. Astone : strike mute with amazement (OED). 12 Lucius Lucullus (118–56 BC) was a consul known for his extravagance; see Seneca, De Officiis, 140. 10 11

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ther is a third of my owne devise which is my reward is patience and payne premium patientia pena: my reward is the payne of patience.13

These are the notes of a writer, advising and providing options to the courtier who would bear the completed impresa. Surviving records of payments to professional writers (including on one occasion Shakespeare) for composing imprese suggests that this was a common way for them to be produced.14 In the mottoes from Seneca suggested above, the motto text lacks a crucial part of the verse without which the meaning is unclear: in the first we would read that ‘the greater strike dumb’ but not the ‘cares’ that are the subject of the sentence, whilst in the latter motto we read that ‘virtue who’ but are not provided with the verb (‘pursues’). The theme of the motto was probably agreed before these three proposals were put forward, as all three place a similar emphasis on stoicism in the face of adversity and seem to hint at an undeserved failure to find favour and reward. The importance of personal significance is indicated by the provision of three possibilities, with the bearer presumably being expected to choose the motto that most closely reflected his personal circumstances. These notes make no reference to the accompanying image, which was presumably produced after a final decision had been reached about the motto and could well have been the responsibility of a completely different artist. The impresa was among the most public of entertainment forms, and it may well be for this reason that its private significance was correspondingly well hidden. Unlike masques, which were performed indoors, or entertainments held in the grounds of private estates, tournaments mostly took place in the tiltyard on the western side of Whitehall, a large space on the edge of London that was accessible to a large paying public.15 From about 1580 onwards these shields were hung in the shield gallery at Whitehall Palace after the performance at which they had formed part. This colourful display of chivalric conceits became a favourite attraction for visitors to London, and a number of these visitors noted down the mottos they saw, and sometimes also the images. 13 14 15

BL, MS 41499A, fo. 7v. Young, Tournaments, 72. Ibid. 86.

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In 1601/2, the Middle Temple student John Manningham, for example, recorded thirty-six ‘Devises and Empresaes taken by the Scucheons in the Gallery at Whitehall’, while Johann Georg Dehn-Rotfelser, who visited London in the service of the 17-year-old Landgraf Otto of Hessen-Kassel in 1611, recorded more than 400 devices.16 As a result an impressive number of tournament imprese survive—Alan Young prints more than 500 different examples of the genre in his study—but in most cases their meaning remains frustratingly opaque.17 We have long lists of mottoes, but without knowing the individual context in which they were presented to the Queen we cannot know their true significance. Two features of imprese can be applied more widely to the tournament device: the public performance, which contrasts with the personal meaning deliberately constructed to be accessible only to a few, and their fragmented nature. The texts of tournaments are typically much more fragmentary than those of other entertainment forms, and a normative way of representing the tournament in textual form never really became established. The few texts that were printed appeared in a wide range of forms, for example incorporated into narrative histories, books on chivalry, or accounts of festivities (such as the tilt at Shrovetide that formed part of the entertainment during the 1598 reign of the ‘Prince D’Amour’ at Middle Temple).18 A number of individual speeches circulated as manuscript separates in the last years of the reign, but these texts are relatively few considering the frequency and significance of tournaments in the calendar of pageantry. On occasion tournaments were recorded with some care: in one year Edmund Tilney was paid 10s. for the ‘fayre writing’ of two copies of all the tournament devices for the Queen, while in 1587 Philip Gawdy sent his father a book that had been given to him at Accession Day, ‘Divers of them being gyven to most of the lordes, and gentlemen about the Court, and one especially to the Queen’.19 Neither of these texts survives. Two 16 BL, Harley MS 5353, fos. 3r–4r, printed in The Diary of John Manningham, 31–3; Alan R. Young, The English Tournament Imprese (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 29–33. 17 Young, English Tournament Imprese. 18 Benjamin Rudyerd, Le Prince D’Amour (London: for William Leake, 1660), 86. 19 Documents Relating to the Office of Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1908), 391; The Letters of Philip Gawdy, 1579–1616, ed. I. H. Jeayes (London: Nichols, 1906), 25.

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poems by George Peele give narrative accounts of specific tournaments,20 and further descriptions are embedded in longer prose works including Sidney’s New Arcadia and the herald William Segar’s Honor Military, and Civill, contained in foure Bookes (London: Robert Barker, 1602). Some heraldic manuscripts also provide records of entire tournaments, although they do not generally include imprese or speeches. Nevertheless, the great majority of surviving texts relate only to a single participant in a tournament. The personal nature of individual contributions to a tournament meant that the occasion did not easily coalesce into a coherent whole, and their structure (a series of individual entries) also meant that no single individual could exert the level of control over a tournament that was possible in other forms of entertainment. The fragmentary nature of these texts makes it difficult to get an adequate overall impression of the Elizabethan tournament. SIR HENRY LEE The impresa was the commonest form of text associated with tiltyard entertainments, and the distinctive theory and structure of the impresa, especially its intimate association with its bearer, should guide our wider understanding of how entertainments worked. However, the fragmentary nature of surviving imprese means that we need to look elsewhere to see in detail how self-display functioned in the Elizabethan tiltyard. Much is revealed by the career of Sir Henry Lee. His greatest success in the world of pageantry was as originator of the Accession Day tournaments, which, as celebrations of Queen Elizabeth on the anniversary of her accession, would seem at first to be geared towards the monarch rather than opportunities for self-presentation by Lee or anyone else. Their origin was described towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign by the herald William Segar: these annuall exercises in Armes, solemnized the 17. day of November, were first begun and occasioned by the right vertuous and honourable Sir Henry Lea, Master of her Highnesse Armorie, and now deservingly Knight of the most noble Order

20 The poems by Peele are Polyhymnia on Lee’s retirement tilt of 1590, and Anglorum Feriae (BL, Add. MS 21432), on the 1595 Accession Day tilt.

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[of the Garter], who of his great zeale, and earnest desire to eternize the glory of her Majesties Court, in the beginning of her happy reigne, voluntarily vowed (unlesse infirmity, age, or other accident did impeach him) during his life, to present himselfe at the Tilt armed, the day aforesayd yeerely, there to performe in honor of her sacred Majestie the promise he formerly made.21

Segar was almost certainly romanticizing the origin of the Accession Day tournaments by tracing them to the beginning of the reign. Modern scholars are largely agreed that Accession Day only began to be celebrated in about 1570, in the aftermath of the Northern Rebellion, while the earliest record for a tournament on 17 November is for 1577, with such records only becoming regular from 1581 onwards.22 These tournaments would therefore appear to post-date Lee’s appearance as Loricus at Woodstock in 1575, but their regularization coincides with Lee’s appointment as Master of the Armoury in 1580; this is unlikely to be coincidental, as one of the duties of that position was the provision of arms and armour for tournaments. We can be reasonably confident that Segar was correct in pointing to Sir Henry Lee as their originator, as the same claim appears in other sources, not least the inscription on Lee’s tomb, which included among his achievements ‘honouring his highly gracious Mistris with reysing those later Olimpiads of her Courte justs and tournaments . . . wherein still himself lead and triumphed’.23 Segar also states that the tournaments originated in a chivalric vow by Lee, wherein he undertook to make an annual appearance in the tiltyard in defence of Queen Elizabeth’s honour: thus the annual tournament to celebrate the Queen’s accession did not originate in any action by the Queen herself but was established by one of her subjects. Unfortunately, no account of this particular chivalric episode—surely a crucial moment in the development of a distinctively Elizabethan form of chivalry—is known to survive. Self-promotion by a courtier is therefore interlinked with celebration of the Elizabethan settlement right from the origins of Accession Day. 21 William Segar, Honor Military, and Civill, contained in foure Bookes (London: Robert Barker, 1602), 197. 22 Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (London, 1977; repr. London: Pimlico, 1999), 117–19; Young, Tournaments, 35–6. 23 Quoted from John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Clarke, and Elizabeth Goldring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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The vow, from Sir Henry Lee’s perspective, served an extremely useful purpose: it placed him at the heart of the court’s festivities every Accession Day. As a result of his unique role Lee is almost always called the Queen’s Champion in histories of the Elizabethan court, but what is not usually acknowledged is that this title was something claimed by Lee himself through his vow, rather than being an office granted by the Queen. In fact the Queen did have an official Champion, but it was not Sir Henry Lee. The position of Champion was not even in the Queen’s gift: a fourteenth-century legal dispute had concluded with the judgement that the office of Champion, whose onerous duties included riding at the coronation procession and issuing a challenge at the subsequent feast, was inalienably connected to the Lincolnshire manor of Scrivelsby, the property of the Dymoke family.24 Sir Edward Dymocke had ridden at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth I, and indeed some 400 years later Sir John Lindley Marmion Dymoke was Champion at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The fortunes of the Dymokes of Scrivelsby were at something of a low ebb in the 1570s, however, meaning that they were not in a position to challenge Lee’s presentation of himself as an alternative champion. Robert Dymoke, the incumbent at Scrivelsby at the time of Lee’s rise to prominence, was a confirmed recusant who also suffered from paralysis.25 Sir Henry Lee’s promotion of himself as the Queen’s own knight at the expense of the hereditary champion, tilting for her honour on the anniversary of her accession, is a fine example of a tiltyard persona. Through the initial chivalric vow, and then through speeches and quasidramatic performances, Lee was able to define an image that was so strong and coherent that—often incorrectly solidified into an official position at court—it has dominated his historical reputation to this day.26 The question this raises is what Sir Henry Lee did with the privileged space that he had created for himself. A group of tiltyard speeches and verses are among the texts that survive in a manuscript associated with him, the ‘Ditchley Manuscript’ (British Library, Add. 24

See the ODNB, sub Sir John Dymocke. Joseph Gillow, A Literary and Biographical History: Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from the Breach with Rome, in 1534, to the Present Time, 5 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1885–95), sub Robert Dymocke. 26 The summary description of Sir Henry Lee in Ewan Fernie’s entry on him in the ODNB is ‘queen’s champion’. 25

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MS 41499A), from which draft imprese have already been quoted. This manuscript was bequeathed to the British Museum in the 1920s by the 17th Viscount Dillon, a descendant of Lee, prior to which it is believed to have remained at the family’s residence at Ditchley since the sixteenth century. It is written in a single rapid secretary hand which, comparison with surviving autograph letters reveals, is not Lee’s, and the contents are somewhat jumbled and non-chronological. It is probably therefore a secretarial manuscript copied in the 1590s or thereabouts from Lee’s original loose papers in order to ensure their preservation. The manuscript has suffered significant damage. It now comprises twenty-two folio leaves but there are at least three lacunae, some surviving pages are torn, and the manuscript has suffered significant water damage, rendering some portions illegible even under ultraviolet light. Despite its condition, this manuscript is one of the most important records of Elizabethan chivalric entertainments, and indeed of other royal entertainments of the period. It contains a rich range of texts, and despite being known to scholars since the early twentieth century and described in detail by E. K. Chambers in 1936, much about the manuscript remains to be explored and a number of the texts found within it have never been printed in full.27 In addition to the draft imprese, the Ditchley manuscript includes ten texts that can be connected (albeit with different levels of certainty) to specific tiltyard appearances by Sir Henry Lee, including his speech that preceded a tilt performed for the Flemish agent Frederic Perrenot, Sieur de Champagny, on 28 February 1576, but mostly at various Accession Days. These include a speech by ‘the Damsell of the Queen of fayries’, who introduces Lee as an ‘enchanted knight’, which perhaps dates from 1584, Latin verses mourning the death of Sir Philip Sidney from Accession Day 1586, and an inscription that formed part of Lee’s 1590 retirement tilt.28 The manuscript also includes a copy of part of the Tale of Hemetes at Woodstock in 1575 (as discussed in the previous 27 E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee: An Elizabethan Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 268–75. Significant additional portions of the manuscript are printed in John Nichols’s The Progresses. 28 The speech by the ‘Damsel’ can be connected to Lee as it is described, in slightly fictionalized form, by Sir Philip Sidney in The New Arcadia as the ‘Iberian Jousts’ (The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Victor Skretkoricz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 253–6).

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chapter), a speech made on Lee’s behalf at Accession Day subsequent to his retirement from the tiltyard in 1590, and fifteen speeches and songs that were performed before the Queen at her visit to Lee in 1592 (the Ditchley entertainment). At least some of the Ditchley entertainment was written by the Oxford-educated clergyman Richard Edes, much as Robert Garrett was apparently employed in 1575, and the Ditchley manuscript additionally contains both the epilogue to Edes’s 1582 Latin play on Julius Caesar and a sermon that has been ascribed to him.29 Two entertainments in which Lee did not take part are also found in the manuscript: the speech by the Earl of Arundel at the culmination of the ‘Callophisus’ tournament of 1581 (discussed below), and the ‘Peddler’s Tale’ spoken at Heneage House in 1584. The manuscript also includes an incomplete epistle (dated October 1575) in praise of the retired country life, with an accompanying poem. The tiltyard speeches and related fragments in the Ditchley manuscript allow us to build up a picture of how Lee developed his entertainment persona in the years after his appearance as Loricus. As was conventional, Lee appeared before the Queen in a different guise every year: leading a band of shepherds, as the ‘Green Knight’, the ‘Black Knight’, a blind knight, a solitary knight, as the enchanted servant of the Fairy Queen. Many of these different roles depict Lee as central to the performance but marginal to the world in which it takes place. Lee’s characters do not belong at the court, which is often pictured in surprisingly negative terms. This can be illustrated by a device which shares many motifs familiar from the Tale of Hemetes, and is in fact another story of a knight told to the Queen by a hermit. This hermit speaks on behalf of a ‘homely rude Companye’ who appear at the tiltyard led by a worthy knight.30 The knight had spent his youth at a court ‘which was governed by such a princesse, as your majesties selfe is, more valewed then I Can tell you, & yet of more vertewe, then she was valewed’, where he encountered a woman so far above all others in estimation that he determined to love her although she was, inevitably, far beyond his reach. The knight was soon resigned to chaste service but then found himself excluded from access to the lady he loved and served, at which, bewildered at his mistreatment, he abandoned the 29 30

Chambers, Sir Henry Lee, 275. BL, MS 41499A, fo. 2r.

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court. While in the wilderness the knight found solace in the words of a wise hermit (who himself once followed the court) who explains to him the nature of the world he has left behind. The hermit, speaking in the tiltyard, tells the assembled English court that he remembers from his days as a courtier howe smylinge & frowninge wer both in on[e] chamber, & favore & displeasuer both onder on[e] rofe, I had found disdayne at the dore & daunger within, I had seene fleringe dissimulation & sore malice, Arme in Arme, pleasing hopes & shrinckinge feares, both Contynewally attended on with pryinge suspicious standinge to gether, I had seene love followed with Jelesie, & hatred with Rancor, not a foot in sonder, To be short I told him I cold see very litle in that place he came from, to make an honest man much to love it, or a wise man longe to tary in it, but only one, & that was the mistres of the place[.]31

The story is (again like that of Hemetes), doubled, and the hermit himself, like the knight he advises, was cast from the court by Wrong (‘lyke a serpent he is with a nomber of heades, more then Can be told, & but two winges but of sondrye Colors, redd & pale, the first is slaunder tother envie’).32 Thus enlightened as to the nature of the court, the knight has taken up a new and happy life in a rural community and only returns to the tiltyard because of his vow, ‘which was whilest he cold sett on a horse, & carye a staffe in his hand, to sacrefice yearly the strength of his arme, in honor of her that was mistres of his hart’. The nameless knight who tilts in fulfilment of a vow is clearly a figure for Lee, and this narrative is typical in portraying Lee’s character as coming to the tiltyard as an outsider from the wilderness. Nor is it the only occasion in which he describes himself as appearing at the tilt in a more or less unwilling fulfilment of his obligation to appear for the Queen. At this most courtly of events, Lee does not present himself as a courtier; at the annual tilt which he inaugurated and dominated, he presents himself as a temporary visitor. The idea that Sir Henry Lee went to the considerable trouble of crafting a position for himself at the heart of the tiltyard entertainment then used it to reject the court requires some explanation. In presenting himself as a temporary visitor, Lee was reflecting a truth about his 31

Ibid., fo. 2v.

32

Ibid., fo. 3r.

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position: this was indeed the temporary moment when he was at the heart of the court, and it was his vow that brought him there. By pushing this further and suggesting a certain ambivalence about his service, implying that he is only available to her service for this one day and associating himself with hermits and the wilderness, Lee seems to have been constructing a carefully nuanced position. Aware that a tiltyard device was an address to the Queen made in public, Lee was emphasizing that he was not a threat to the established hierarchy and signalling that he was not presuming a place for himself among the favourites at the heart of the court—powerful men who were, of course, themselves watching proceedings at tilt. There is a similar implication in a 1576 appearance as the Green Knight, in which Lee presents himself as a man without ambition, in contrast to the rest of the assembly: ‘heare be many servants to hope, & friendes to fortune (whom he [Lee himself] treadeth vnder foot)’. Not every tournament appearance contained the same message. Underlying the occasion when Lee relinquished his position at his retirement tilt of Accession Day 1590 is a claim for quasi-official recognition of his position as the Queen’s own knight. Lee acted out a ceremony, invented for the occasion but with the accoutrements of an ancient rite: he had set up a pavilion in the form of a temple, ‘like unto the sacred Temple of the Virgins Vestall’, complete with three virgins, before which stood ‘a crowned Pillar, embraced by an Eglantine tree’ representing the Queen. The virgins offered gifts to the Queen, one of which was a cloak and safeguard (a form of outer skirt) with gold buttons engraved with the arms of noblemen friends of Lee fixed to a crowned pillar.33 Lee disarmed himself and nominated the Earl of Cumberland to the Queen as his successor, ‘humbly beseeching she would be pleased to accept him for her Knight, to continue the yeerely exercises aforesaid’.34 Having divested himself of his armour, Lee, in line with the personal mythology of the previous fifteen years, took on the hermit’s mantle, asking ‘Goddesse, allow this aged man his right, j To be your Beads-man now, that was your Knight’.35 Through this fanciful ritual Lee praised the Queen but also attempted to turn his special position in the tiltyard into a post that was

33 34

Segar, Honor Military, and Civill, 197–200. 35 Ibid. 199. Polyhymnia.

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within his own gift. He had constructed a specific role for himself which was principally founded on his (self-proclaimed) relationship with the Queen, and which depended in turn on her willingness to play the part set for her, but it here becomes a source of patronage that serves to bind him to his powerful friends at court such as Cumberland, as is intimated by the decorative buttons on his gift to the Queen. It proved to be an empty ceremony, as Cumberland never succeeded in taking up Lee’s role: he only appeared in tournaments irregularly during the 1590s, had to contend with the prominent position of the Earl of Essex, and his surviving tiltyard speeches make little reference to his inherited vow from Lee. Lee’s involvement in entertainments did not end with his retirement from the tiltyard. The undercurrent of tension in his relationship with his Queen was developed further in the entertainments that took place when she visited his seat at Ditchley in 1592. On this occasion Lee revisited the character of Loricus that he had taken on in 1575 at nearby Woodstock, and also revisited the theme of his own ostentatious inconstancy. The Queen passed through a forest of inconstant lovers transformed into trees as she approached the house where Loricus lies in an enchanted sleep, cursed by the Fairy Queen, to whom he has been unfaithful by falling under the influence of another woman. Only England’s Queen could wake him. The second day’s entertainment revises the story of Loricus. The narrative is curiously unconnected to that of the previous day and there is no reference to an enchanted sleep resulting from inconstancy to the Fairy Queen. Loricus now apparently lies on his deathbed as his chaplain repeats his life story to the Queen. He has spent his life in devotion to his royal mistress: manifesting inward Joyes by outward Justs, the yearly tribute of his dearest love. Sometymes he somoned the witnesses of deepest Conceyts, himmes & songes, and emblemes, dedecatinge them to the honor of his heavenly mistres . . . Thus spent he the florishe of his gladdest dayes, craving no reward els but that he might love, nor no reputation beside but that he might be knowne to love, till the too enimies of prosperitie, envie & age the one grevinge at him, thother growinge on him cut him cleane of from followinge the Court not from goinge foreward in his course: thence willingly vnwillinge he retyred his tyred lymmes into a corner of quiet repose[.]36

36

BL, MS 41499A, fo. 15v.

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This is a retelling of Lee’s retirement, but the reasons given for ‘Loricus’s’ withdrawal from the court are entirely different from those given by Lee two years earlier. Rather than being a deliberate choice to take up the part of the hermit, he now explains his actions with reference to those anonymous courtly enemies who were spoken of in his earlier entertainments. Loricus prepares for death, his eyes fixed on the crowned pillar (a reference to the retirement tilt of 1590 in which this pillar had featured). The presence of the Queen duly brings him back from the point of death and in thankfulness Loricus determines to distribute his goods according to the will he had prepared. There is no question, of course, about who will be the principal beneficiary: ‘Item. I bequethe (to your Highnes) THE 37 WHOLE MANNOR OF LOVE, & the appurtenaunces thereunto belonging’. The logic of the narrative is unstated but clear. Loricus has been unjustly removed from the Queen’s presence by ‘Envy’, his equanimity preserved only by his own stoicism; removed from the only sunshine in which he will flourish, he has withered to the point of death; his loyalty has remained constant, but his treatment has not. The blame, naturally, lies with those convenient enemies, but hovering behind them is an accusation against the Queen of inconstancy. Lee’s repeated insistence that the active malice of enemies has driven him from the court cannot be taken at face value. Whilst the nature of court life tended to feed a certain level of paranoia, Lee seems to have been a fairly popular figure who was careful not to align himself too strongly with any faction and was certainly never driven from the court. The presence of these fictional enemies is best explained by considering the particular function they serve within Lee’s narratives, which is to have prevented his access to the royal presence. Access to the royal presence was indicative of royal favour and crucial to power and standing at court, but Lee’s own access to the real heart of power was restricted. By pinning the blame for his lack of access to the court on unnamed enemies, he could draw attention to his frustrating position but without acknowledging the fundamental and (within an entertainment) unmentionable reason for it, which was the Queen herself. Lee never did manage to tilt his way to the heart of the Elizabethan court. He was an established figure at court from the second half of the 37

BL, MS 41499A, fo. 16r.

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1570s onwards, as indicated for example by his regular gifts of jewels to the Queen at New Year, but the royal appointments that came his way remained minor (Lieutenant of Woodstock, Master of the Leash, and Master of the Armoury). It was unusual for a relatively insignificant political player to have such a prominent role in courtly entertainments, but Lee’s limited success goes to show emphatically that entertainment was not a way to political power at the court of Elizabeth. It must have been his status in the tiltyard and thus his role in developing distinctive Elizabethan forms of chivalry that lay behind his one great honour, admission to the Order of the Garter in 1597, but Lee’s larger political ambitions at court remained unfulfilled. Like many other wealthy and ambitious Elizabethans, Lee spent much time and money at court in the hope that he would eventually be granted one of the prominent and lucrative positions in the Queen’s gift; but Elizabeth managed the men of her court by deferring reward, so, like many of his contemporaries, Lee found that a secure position— despite apparent promises—remained frustratingly out of reach. Rowland Whyte provides us with a glimpse of Lee during the Christmas season of 1595, hanging around the Queen with Lord North, two middle-aged men hoping for preferment: ‘they play at cards with the Queen, and that is like to be all the honor that will fall unto them this year’.38 Entertainments were a means of commenting on the performer’s position and laying out an agenda, but they were not an effective means of intervening in the political process. They could be used for coded complaints and petitions but their very coded and playful nature made them easy to ignore; they could raise issues but could not demand an answer. The personal nature of sixteenth-century government meant that a crucial means of intervening in governmental processes was the petition, and when it came to petitioning the Queen Lee largely relied on intermediaries. Lee himself spoke of this reliance when he appeared as ‘the Old Knight’ at Accession Day pleading that his ‘son’ should serve in his place: he presented an unspecified gift for the Queen ‘as the yearly fyne of his fayth’, and beseeched that it be passed on to her by ‘some noble or worthie gentleman, that is most lyke to have next accesse, to

38 HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of . . . Lord De L’Isle and Dudley, ii (London: HMSO, 1934), 205.

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her sacred person’.39 That worthy gentleman, the Old Knight knew, was not going to be Lee himself. Letters by Lee to Walsingham, Burghley, and Robert Cecil ask them to intervene with the Queen on his behalf, and whilst they contain repeated protestations of loyalty, they also make clear his frustrations at not receiving greater recompense for his services. In 1586 he told Walsingham that if his nephew was not granted the reversion of an office ‘I may ryghtfully wyshe I had never delt with all’ at court.40 Even more dramatically, in 1600 he made the following announcement to Sir Robert Cecil: her majestie thr[e]tenc a progreace and her commynge to my howses, of which I wolde be most prowde as ofte beforetyme if my fortune aunsuered, my desyer, or part of her hyghnes many prommyses parformed, my esstat, withowt my undoynge canne not bere yt, my contynuence in her Cowrt hath bene longe, my charge grete my lande sowlde and detes not smale, howe this wyll agre with the entertaynyng of shuch [sic] a prynce, yowr wysdome cane best Jugge and I beseach yow consyther of.41

Such outbursts are not necessarily a truer reflection of Lee’s feelings than the protestations of love and admiration in the tiltyard. Disenchantment had conventions of its own: Lee undoubtedly addressed his complaint to Cecil as a friend who had the Queen’s ear to an extent he would never have, and could ensure that an appropriately expressed version of his petition would reach the Queen’s ear. There were also specific incidents that lay behind his outburst in 1600. There were, for a start, the decades of mounting frustration. His brother Richard had recently been appointed as an English trading representative with Muscovy, and some of the costs had come from Sir Henry’s pocket, for which he felt he deserved recompense. More seriously, he felt his voice had not been given sufficient weight over the affairs of another kinsman, ‘my unfortunat cossyn [Sir Thomas] Lee’, who was under house arrest having returned from Ireland with the Earl of Essex, and ‘whos case

39

BL, MS 41499A, fo. 1. BL, Harley MS 286, fo. 100; Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 90–1. 41 Lee to Sir Robert Cecil, 22 Dec. 1600 (Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 80, fo. 24r ). 40

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growes worse and worse’ (he was eventually executed after getting drawn into Essex’s conspiracy).42 Sir Henry Lee made masterful use of the conventions of chivalric romance in the service of courtly diplomacy. Although he employed writers at least on occasion, Lee’s is nevertheless a distinctive voice, characterized by the redoubling of conventional narrative tropes and self-reflexive but tactful complaint combined with proud and dutiful service. Unlike other prominent figures in the Elizabethan tiltyard, Lee took care that his devices were uncontentious. His skill in selffashioning make his tiltyard speeches and other entertainments worthy of fuller treatment than they have been given here, especially alongside his use of portraiture and other literary texts.43 Lee was a significant influence on Sir Philip Sidney, who also chose to appear in the tiltyard as a ‘desert knight’ from the wilderness, and whose tiltyard speeches spoke of his alienation from the court; the Ottley manuscript, which contains verses associated with Sidney much as the Ditchley manuscript does for Lee, is a crucial source for exploring this relationship further.44 Because of his limited public role and ultimately rather careful voice, however, Lee’s entertainments tend not to have much of a wider political significance. This marks out him as quite different from other major performers in the Elizabethan tiltyard, whose devices often expressed a much more aggressive form of ambition. CALLOPHISUS Given that tournaments involved men charging at each other on horseback with lances, it is hardly surprising that they were sometimes used to fight out factional divisions within the court; not everyone chose to present themselves in non-threatening guises, as did Sir Henry Lee, or to describe enemies that were unidentifiable. In such cases the mainte-

42

Ibid. Lee was responsible for commissioning the Ditchley Portrait, perhaps the bestknown portrait of Queen Elizabeth, and a number of significant portraits of Lee himself also survive. 44 See Peter Beal, ‘Poems by Sir Philip Sidney: The Ottley Manuscript’, The Library, 5th ser., 33 (1978), 284–95. 43

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nance of fictional personae were invaluable in ensuring that the belligerence did not run out of control. A particularly fractious tournament took place in January 1581, initiated by Philip Howard, the 23-year-old head of the powerful Howard family, who was just coming into his inheritance as England’s senior Earl, the 13th Earl of Arundel. Arundel is best remembered as a Catholic martyr but in the years before his conversion to the Roman faith in 1584 he was a prominent figure at the court of Elizabeth. The rather protracted process of Howard’s inheritance began with the death of his maternal grandfather, Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel, in February 1580. Howard’s right to the title was challenged, but he took the Arundel arms in May 1580, was summoned to Parliament under the title on 16 January 1581, and was restored in statute on 15 March 1581. Arundel’s new title and the lands that went with it, when combined with the restored estates inherited from his father Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (executed 1572), made him among the greatest landowners in the country. Howard had been a prominent figure in entertainments of Elizabeth ever since he reached his majority (he had, for example, entertained the Queen in Norfolk in August 1578 and performed in a device before her in March 1579), and this tournament was evidently intended to mark the young man’s new status. As a man just established as one of the land’s very greatest magnates, and as the son of Elizabethan England’s most dangerous rebel, Arundel’s issuing of a tiltyard challenge was always going to have an interest among the great men at court that the actions of Sir Henry Lee could never match. This inherent tension was exacerbated by the terms of the challenge itself. Arundel appeared under the name of Callophisus, lover of beauty, and offered to fight any who would dispute six propositions. The first three points in the challenge asserted in various ways the superiority of his mistress: ‘the moste perfect creature, that ever either the eye of man hath beheld, the Arte of Nature hath framed, or the compasse of the earth hath enjoyed’.45 The second group of three propositions turned on Callophisus’s own loyalty to this paragon, claiming that he ‘for his faith will yeelde to none, and for his loyalty

45 Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, Challenge of Callophisus (London: John Charlewood, 1581).

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dooth thinke himselfe aboove all, and in these two respects pronounceth himselfe moste woorthy to be accepted into favor with his Mistresse’. Whilst this challenge uses the same chivalric rhetoric as Sir Henry Lee’s texts, its terms are very different. Lee had many an inestimable mistress but his entertainments are characterized by duplication and he does not tend to claim that his own mistress is straight-forwardly superior to all others. More significantly, as we have seen, Lee certainly does not claim to be uniquely worthy to serve; he tended to dwell on his own unworthiness and inconstancy, and was careful not to claim too much from his vow to fight for his Queen. It is Callophisus’s claim to be uniquely loyal and worthy of favour that marks out his challenge as unusually aggressive. Arundel had more reason than most to proclaim his loyalty to the Queen: not only had his father rebelled against her but his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had also both been attainted for treason. The aggressive claims in the challenge and his explosive political heritage ensured that his challenge was not going to go unanswered, even were it not for more immediate events at court over the Christmas period. Arundel also took the highly unusual step of having his challenge printed. It was originally issued (probably by being spoken by a page) on Twelfth Night, with the combat to be held on 15 January. The date of tournament was then put back to the 22nd, and some time after this revised date was agreed (but before the tournament itself), Callophisus’s challenge appeared as a broadside from John Charlewood’s press. Charlewood had a close relationship with Arundel, describing himself as printer or servant to the Earl, so there can be no doubt that Arundel was happy to see the challenge in print, presumably with the aim of generating interest among a wider public and so ensure a good turnout at the tiltyard (the broadside is careful to specify the date and location of the tournament).46 Only one copy of this broadside survives and nothing is known of its provenance prior to its appearance at Sotheby’s in 1903, but the publication would undoubtedly have taken the

46 Charlewood styled himself servant or printer to the Earl of Arundel in John Nicholls, The Oration and Sermon Made at Rome . . . the xxvij daie of Maie 1578 (1581) and Lord Henry Howard, A Defensative against the poyson of supposed prophesies (1583). He also appears to have printed Catholic works for Arundel in the later 1580s.

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tournament text outside the courtly arena.47 No other Elizabethan challenge appeared as a broadside; indeed it was fairly unusual for an aristocrat to involve himself so directly in printing any entertainment text. This public airing of Callophisus’s claims to unique worth and loyalty to his mistress (the Queen, of course) gave his challenge a further aggressive push. The issue of loyalty had a particular resonance at court at the time because just weeks earlier, on 16 December 1580 in the semi-public space of the Presence Chamber at Greenwich and before the Queen herself, the Earl of Oxford had accused three fellow courtiers and his former friends, Lord Henry Howard, Charles Arundel, and Francis Southwell, of conspiring against Elizabeth.48 Since one of the accused, Henry Howard (the future Earl of Northampton), was the uncle of the Earl of Arundel and had been his mentor at court, and given that Oxford also chose to opine that the Howards were the ‘most villanouse and treacherouse race under heaven’, there can be little doubt that Arundel’s challenge was directed in particular against Oxford.49 It was the tension between Arundel and Oxford that triggered the next stage of the Callophisus entertainment, although this—unlike the challenge itself—was probably restricted to the courtly world. In the two weeks between the proclamation of the challenge and the tilt itself, a series of texts were exchanged between participants in the form of a counter-challenge and three responses. First of all the ‘White Knight’, who can be identified as Lord Windsor, nephew of the Earl of Oxford, answered Callophisus, claiming the latter and his mistress to be strangers to the court, and asserting the superior virtues of ‘that royall virgine that peereles Princes that Phenix and Paragon of the world whome with all devocion I doe serve Love honer and obey’.50 This in turn prompted responses from the ‘Red Knight’ (Arundel’s assistant Sir William Drury) and the ‘Blue Knight’ (Sir Philip Sidney, who had a long-standing enmity with Oxford), who 47 It appeared in a various-owner sale with no property designation, Sotheby’s, Catalogue of Valuable & Rare Books and Illuminated and Other Manuscripts, 11–14 December 1903, lot 505, sold for £20 to Pearson. The broadside is now at the Folger Shakespeare Library. 48 The affair is discussed in Alan H. Nelson, Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 249–75. 49 Ibid. 251–2. 50 BL, Lansdowne MS 99, fo. 263r.

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both observed that the White Knight had broken the protocols of chivalry by challenging a challenger.51 Both men added their own dose of chivalric rhetoric and proposed additional combats to answer the White Knight’s second challenge. Finally the Knight of the Tree of the Sun (the Earl of Oxford himself ) replied to the Red Knight, defending the White Knight ‘albeit to me he be unknowenn’ and accusing Callophisus of attempting to cover his faults behind protestations of loyalty: ‘to shadowe his imperfecion he hath convead himself under the winges of the most perfectest, for whome eche would adventure: but against whome none wil lift his Lance’.52 This bad-tempered exchange was clearly being driven by personal enmities; it is the kind of escalating exchange satirized in As You Like It, moving perhaps through the ‘reply churlish’, ‘reproof valiant’, and the ‘countercheck quarrelsome’. If real names had been used then it could have easily led to a duel, as a similar exchange between Oxford and Philip Sidney almost had a few years previously. The conventionally adopted chivalric personae wear very thin here but they do—crucially—hold, and it is this pretence that made the tiltyard a relatively safe arena for aggressive competition: since the characters all insist that they haven’t the slightest idea who the others are, they avoid directly impugning each other’s honour (rather as the word ‘if’ saves the day for Touchstone). It is not clear how these various responses to the initial challenge were actually played out. They may have been performed at court as short dramatic devices: there is a reference in the records of the Office of the Revels for payments to the Master of the Revels, who ‘attended for the presenting of diverse devises’ between Callophisus’s challenge and the tournament.53 The dramatic potential of the exchange between the colourful knights does seem somewhat limited, so perhaps some other lost devices were performed, but the responses to Callophisus did enjoy some circulation in manuscript form. The exchange is known from a copy preserved among the Lansdowne manuscripts in the British Library in a composite volume of Lord Burghley’s papers. The four speeches were produced as a group since they are written in a single 51 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 203. 52 BL, Lansdowne MS 99, fo. 261r. 53 Documents, ed. Feuillerat, 336.

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attractive scribal secretary hand (docketed in a second hand), and the copy even includes the Blue Knight’s impresa device. The text is not a draft and Burghley was not himself involved in the affair, so it is likely that this is one of what were originally multiple copies that circulated around the court. The way the document is filed may give an indication of Burghley’s opinion of his fellow courtiers’ antics: it is in a volume (Lansdowne MS 99) that comprises letters from madmen (including one from ‘Emmanuel Plantagenet’, who claims to be the son of God and Queen Elizabeth), invectives and pasquils, absurd petitions, obsessive denunciations, counterfeit warrants, and the odd challenge to a duel.54 Finally, there were the speeches and devices in the tiltyard itself. Two of these survive for Callophisus, once again in different textual forms. One of these was the tiltyard device by the Earl of Oxford as the Knight of the Tree of the Sun. Oxford used the opportunity for display before the Queen not to further the quarrel with Callophisus but to repeat his accusation of treason against his three former Catholic friends. The Tree of the Sun (‘so statelie to behold, that the more other shrubs shrinke for duetie, the higher it exalteth it selfe in Majestie’) symbolized the Queen, and it provided the knight with refuge from the harshness of the elements: ‘finding all felicity in that shade, and all security in that Sunne: hee made a sollemne vowe, to incorporate hys harte into that Tree, and ingraft hys thoughts vppon those vertues’.55 In a dream the knight has seen ‘dyvers undermining the Tree behinde him’ who, when he attempted to prevent their foul practices, ‘made a challenge to winne the Tree by right, and to make it good by Armes’, following which he awoke and hurried to the tiltyard.56 The significance of this allegory, and the identity of those who wished to undermine the tree of majesty, would have been unmistakable for those in the know about recent events at court involving Oxford. The device of the Knight of the Tree of the Sun was printed eleven years after the tournament itself in a pamphlet with the following title: 54 It must be noted, however, that the binding of the manuscript is later so this filing arrangement may not be contemporary. 55 Axiochus. A most excellent Dialogue, written in Greeke by Plato . . . Translated . . . by Edw. Spenser Heereto is annexed a sweet speech or Oration, spoken at the Tryumphe at White-hall before her Maiestie, by the Page to the right noble Earle of Oxenforde (London: Cuthbert Burbie, 1592), sigs. D2r–D3r. 56 Ibid., sig. D3v.

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Axiochus. A most excellent Dialogue, written in Greeke by Plato . . .Translated . . . by Edw. [sic] Spenser Heereto is annexed a sweet speech or Oration, spoken at the Tryumphe at White-hall before her Maiestie, by the Page to the right noble Earle of Oxenforde (London: Cuthbert Burby, 1592). There are two recorded copies of Axiochus, only one of which is complete with the tiltyard speech. This copy was once bound in a group of (mostly eighteenth-century) pamphlets that had belonged to the annalist, bibliographer, and collector Narcissus Luttrell (1657– 1732), and is now in the Pforzheimer collection.57 Given the delay in its appearance and the phrasing of the title page, the speech was probably included in the pamphlet at a late stage as a supplement to bulk out a short pamphlet.58 This may suggest an earlier manuscript circulation. It is unlikely that the publisher of Axiochus, Cuthbert Burby (then at the beginning of a prolific career), was supplied with a text directly by Oxford; he was admittedly also responsible in the same year for publishing two works by Robert Greene, who had benefited from Oxford’s patronage, but given Greene’s prolific output this is probably a coincidence. Intriguingly, however, the pamphlet was the work of two printers, and the tiltyard speech was printed by John Charlewood, the Earl of Arundel’s man who had printed the challenge back in 1581.59 Given Charlewood’s involvement in the tournament, he may have acquired the text at the time and now (no longer being associated with Arundel) took an opportunity to put it into print. The copytext had the features that we would associate with a manuscript separate circulated after the performance, not only providing the text of Oxford’s 57 It came from a portion of Luttrell’s library that passed to Luttrell Wynne (d. 1814), and thence to the Stackhouse family of Pendarves, Cornwall. The pamphlet was separated out from the group of later publications with which it had been bound prior to its inclusion in the Pendarves sale, Sotheby’s, 4–6 May 1936, lot 162, to Rosenbach. See The Carl H. Pforzeimer Library: English Literature, 1475–1700, 3 vols. (New York: Privately Printed, 1940), iii, no. 966. 58 A bibliographical feature encourages this possibility: there is also a blank leaf (sig. C4) at the end of Axiochus, and it is therefore argued that the tiltyard speech (sheet D, also including the preliminaries, and by a different printer (see the note following)) was only added after sheet C was printed off. See ibid. 59 Sheet D was printed by John Charlewood, whereas Axiochus itself was by a different printer, possibly Edward Allde (see the Pforzheimer Library). Burby was responsible for The Repentance of Robert Greene (1592) and The Third and last Part of Conny-Catching (1592). These publications are among twenty editions of twelve different works attributed to Greene that were published in 1592.

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speech, but also descriptions of performance details: the tent from which ‘The Knight of the Tree of the Sun’ emerged, ‘curiously imbroydered with Silver, & pendents on the Pinacles very sightly to behold’; the Tree of the Sun itself (a bay tree covered in gold); and even recording that ‘after the finishing of the sports: both the rich Bay-tree, and the beautifull Tent, were by the standers by, torne and rent in more peeces then can be numbred’. Similar details, surely written by eyewitnesses relatively soon after the performance, appear in a number of other manuscript separates of entertainments. Callophisus’s own speech in the tiltyard is preserved in the Ditchley manuscript that belonged to Sir Henry Lee. Against the speech is written the following note: ‘written at the erle of Arundels desier at his challenge: Callophisus’.60 The phrasing of this note suggests that the speech was commissioned, either from Lee himself or from a collaborator whose papers got mixed with with Lee’s. At the conclusion of the tournament Callophisus’s page invited the Queen to award the prize to the defender who had peformed best (Callophisus himself, as the challenger, was not eligible); she was also presented with a pair of compasses, ‘with which only he Judgeth your conninge sufficient rightly to measure both himself, & his meaning, knowinge you be best measurer this age yealdeth, both of thinges and thoughts’. It is hard not to see a reference, once again, to Oxford’s recent accusation against Arundel’s uncle and others in this appeal to the Queen’s capacities as a judge. We can only speculate whether this trust in the Queen’s judgement was shaken by her decision to award the prize to the Earl of Oxford. Although the Callophisus tournament can be reconstructed in some detail, this is only because of the survival of a unusually large number of different texts, not because of any contemporary attempt to record the tournament as a whole. Four months later another major tournament took place, known as the Four Foster Children of Desire, for which was published, uniquely among Elizabethan tiltyard entertainments, a pamphlet describing the entire event. The Earl of Arundel was once again the leading challenger in this well-known event, alongside Lord Windsor (Oxford’s second in Callophisus), Philip Sidney (who had previously 60

BL, MS 41499A, fo. 6r.

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appeared as the Blue Knight), and Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville. The allegorical device referred, again, to recent events at court, but is much less personal and more overtly and widely political than was typically the case in the tiltyard. The challengers’ failed attack on the Fortress of Perfect Beauty (which housed of course the Queen) demonstrated her impregnability to desire: given that the tournament was performed before a French legation that was in London for negotiations over the marriage of the Queen to the Duc d’Alenc¸on, this was clearly sending a message that the Queen was not susceptible to Gallic charm. The pamphlet, A Brief Declaration of the Shews, which was described as ‘collected, gathered, penned & published’ by Henry Goldwell, was entered in the Stationer’s Register on 12 July 1581, about two months after the performance, and was printed by Robert Waldegrave. Although no other tournament had been detailed in a pamphlet, precedents can be found in the pamphlets of civic and country house entertainments that had been published in the 1570s. Goldwell (who never published another work) explained his publication in his dedication, which was not to any of the participants in the tournament but to an obscure Buckinghamshire gentleman, ‘Master Rowland Brasebridge of great Wickombe’. He is publishing the text because he sees an opportunity (‘sith no man writeth at al of these worthies . . . I have attemted the writing’), and because it is something his patron will appreciate: ‘knowing it would delight you to heare of the towardnesse of our English Nobles . . . sith you were absent at the perfourming of these pleasures, I have at this present for your recreation thus certified these courtly and knightly discourses’. Similar appeals to patrons will be seen in letters accompanying scribal transcripts of entertainments in later chapters. Although the pamphlet and its dedication fit into a wider pattern of publication, it seems likely that the story behind its appearance in print was more complicated and that Goldwell had some assistance in preparing his pamphlet from someone more directly involved in the tournament. A Brief Declaration of the Shews includes a large number of texts from the tournament: the initial challenges, a pair of songs sung by the challengers’ retinue, their pages’ speeches at the end of both days’ combat, the speech of the ‘herald of desire’, and three additional tiltyard speeches by defenders who took part in the tournament. It is not impossible that Goldwell obtained them by approaching servants and

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secretaries of the leading participants, and there are other examples (considered in later chapters) of entertainment pamphlets being published by people with no connection to their performance. However, bearing in mind the obscurity of both Goldwell and his patron, and the fact that the entertainment touches directly on England’s foreign policy, it seems more likely that one of the Four Foster Children made the text available to Goldwell as a means of pushing the text discreetly into print and so disseminating opposition to the French match.61 This would make the pamphlet closer to a piece of propaganda than any other text that has been encountered so far. LOVE AND SELF-LOVE: THE POLITICS OF THE 1590S Goldwell’s pamphlet was unique: tiltyard speeches were, even more than other entertainment forms, produced to be understood only by those within the courtly world, and were rarely made available in printed form. These speeches often had a purely personal significance, as is shown by Robert Carey’s later recollection of how he used the 1592 Accession Day tournament to reconcile the Queen to his marriage: My father wrote to mee from Windsor that the Queene meant to have a great triumph there, on her coronation day, and that there was great preperation making for the course of the field and tourney. Hee gave mee notice of the Queen’s anger for my marriage, and said it may bee, I being so neere, and to retourne without honouring her day, as I ever before had done, might be a cause of her further dislike, but left it to myselfe to do what I thought best . . . I came to court, and lodged there very privately, only I made myselfe knowne to my father and some few friends besides. I here tooke order and sent to London to provide mee things necessary for the triumph: I prepared a present for her majestie, which with my caparisons cost me above four hundred pounds. I came into the triumph unknown of any. I was the forsaken Knight that had vowed solitarinesse, but hearing of this great triumph thought to honour my mistresse with my best service, and then to retourne to pay my wonted mourning. The triumph ended, and all things well passed over to the Queene’s liking. I then

61

I am grateful to Henry Woudhuysen for discussing this issue with me.

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made myselfe known in court, and for the time I stayed there was daily conversant with my old companions and friends.62

Carey is another example of a participant who chose to describe himself as alien to the court before which he appeared, and it is a shame (given the detailed context he provides) that his speech does not survive. A text does survive, however, of another device with a matrimonial theme. In 1600 William, Lord Compton, claimed to appear in the tiltyard in fulfilment of a prophecy that the power of ‘a Royall sceptre in a Virgins hand’ would cause a tough adamantine stone to ‘change his native hardnes, and relent j And in kind pittie shall disolve to teares’.63 The surviving copy of this speech identifies the stone as Sir John Spencer (one of London’s richest merchants), whose opposition to his only child’s marriage to Compton (one of England’s more improvident aristocrats) had been so absolute that he found himself imprisoned in the Fleet while Compton allegedly resorted to spiriting the girl off in a baker’s basket. The manuscript is a neat scribal separate with explanatory marginalia in a group of papers with no obvious connection to Compton—in other words, it has all the features that suggest scribal circulation. It is much less clear, however, why Compton would be interested in having such a personal address circulated within courtly society. Compton’s was one of a number of the speeches given at late Elizabethan Accession Day tournaments which were circulated as manuscript separates, a phenomenon that will be considered in more detail in the next chapter. A number of scribal copies were made of speeches for the Earl of Cumberland (who, it will be remembered, had been presented in 1590 as the successor to Sir Henry Lee), probably because of his public prominence. Cumberland used his opportunities to address the Queen in the tiltyard to ask for patronage for his privateering ventures. His first surviving speech probably dates from 1591.64 It 62 Memoirs of the Life of Robert Cary, Baron of Leppington, and Earl of Monmouth. Written by Himself, And now published from an original Manuscript in the Custody of John Earl of Corke and Orrery. With some explanatory notes (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), 66–9. 63 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 3201 (Talbot Papers), fo. 27. 64 This speech is printed in G. C. Williamson, George, Third Earl of Cumberland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 108–9, from a mid-17th-c. transcript by Richard Robinson, now on deposit at the Kendal branch of the Cumbria Record Office (WD/Hoth/1986/6). The transcript dates the performance to 1592, but there was

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introduces him as having Arthurian lineage, claiming that the pageant castle which he drew into the tiltyard was Pendragon Castle, ‘in one night removed from Westmerland, to Westminster’, and then turning to his exploits as a privateer by drawing out an allegory based on the name of one of his ships, the Red Dragon.65 Merlin, in this narrative, has foretold that ‘till a red Dragon did fly into the Sea, to encounter the black Eagle [symbol of the House of Habsburg], the castle should not be fortunate’, and through this allegory he makes a plea for royal support for his next expedition. A second speech, which was delivered at Accession Day 1593 when the tournament took place at Windsor, is in a similar vein.66 Cumberland’s speech from Accession Day 1600, however, strikes a different note: he now appears as a melancholy knight, ‘removyng from castell to castell now rowleth up and downe, in open feild, a field of shaddow’. His initial complaints, which have the familiar refrain of frustrated ambition (‘he hath made ladders for others to clymbe, and his feet nayled to the ground’), are corrected by the sight of ‘Cynthia’, from whose brightness and constancy he takes renewed patience.67 The dominant figure in the tiltyard for much of the 1590s was, of course, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. A number of entertainments relating to Essex survive, including some curious pieces that would benefit from further study. The device known as the Entertainment of the Indian Prince is believed to be associated with Essex (and perhaps to the 1595 device) but its origin remains uncertain.68 Even less is known about a set of drafts for one or more entertainments from the 1590s in the hand of Lord Henry Howard that have recently come to light. Like the Indian Prince, this work contains references to travel, and no Accession Day tournament in that year: Alan R. Young suggests a date of 1590 (see ‘Tudor Arthurianism and the Earl of Cumberland’s Tournament Pageants’, Dalhousie Review, 67 (1987), 176–89) but there are a number of reasons for preferring a date of 1591: the second of Cumberland’s speeches undoubtedly dates to 1593, and refers to this related earlier performance as having taken place two years earlier, while Merlin’s prophecy refers to a time when ‘a Virgin hath reigned thirty three years’, and Elizabeth was about to enter the thirty-fourth year of her reign on 17 Nov. 1591. 65 Red Dragon had been purchased by Cumberland in 1586 (ODNB ). 66 This speech was printed in Williamson, George, Third Earl of Cumberland, 122–3, from a manuscript then (1920) at Appleby Castle. 67 Chatsworth, Bolton Abbey MSS, Sundry Documents 54. 68 The National Archives, SP 12/254/67.

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it also seems to connect to Essex’s political agenda in the mid-1590s. The occasion is not known, but the speeches refer directly to the Ditchley entertainment of September 1592 so the piece must have been written soon after that date.69 Much the best-recorded and most elaborate tiltyard device of the 1590s was Essex’s Love and Self Love of 1595. Essex tested the limits of factionalism and overtly political content in this device. The best summary of what took place remains the letter Rowland Whyte wrote to Sir Robert Sidney on 22 November, a few days after the entertainment had taken place: My Lord of Essexs Devise is much comended in these late Triumphes, some pretty While before he came in him self to the Tilt, he sent his Page with some Speach to the Queen, who returned with her Majesties Glove. And when he came himself, he was mett with an old Hermitt, a Secretary of State, a brave Soldier, and an Esquier. The first presented him with a Booke of Meditations; the second with pollitical Discourses; the third with Oracions of brave fought Battles; the fourth was but his own Follower, to whom thother three imparted much of their Purpose, before his Coming in. Another devised with him, persuading him to this and that Course of Liffe, according to their Inclinations. Comes to the Tilt Yard unthought upon, thordinary Post Boy of London, a ragged Villain all bemired, upon a poore leane Jade, gallaping and blowing for Liff, and delivered the Secretary a Packet of Lettres, which he presently offred my Lord of Essex; and with this dumb Shew our Eyes were fed for that Time. In th’after Supper, before the Queen, they first delivered a well pend Speach to move this worthy Knight, to leave his vaine following of Love, and to betake him to hevenly Meditacion; the Secretaries all tending to have him follow Matters of State, the Soldiers persuading him to the Warr; but the Esquier answered them all; and concluded with an excellent, but to plaine English, that this Knight wold never forsake his Mistress Love, whose Vertue made all his Thoughts Devine, whose Wisdom tought him all true Pollicy, whose Beauty and Worth, were at all times able to make him fitt to comand Armies.70

Roy Strong in the 1950s noted that the occasion ‘must be read as part of the programme of the Essex set to establish their hero on the path to

69 BL, Cotton MS Titus C.VI, fos. 203–6; see D. C. Andersson, ‘ “Embarke but under caution”: A New Elizabethan Masque Fragment’, Notes and Queries, 253 (2008), 171–5. 70 Centre for Kentish Studies, U 1475, C12/26.

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“domestical greatness”’.71 This argument has been elaborated with increasing nuance by Richard McCoy and Paul E. J. Hammer.72 In the mid-90s Essex was pressing his ambitions to be the Queen’s chief adviser, to have an appointee of his choosing made Principal Secretary (a position which had at this point been vacant for several years), and to encourage the Queen to involve England more fully in Continental affairs. In line with this, the device trumpets the scholarly, military, and political skills of the Earl, and promotes him as a loyal servant of the crown. The part of the entertainment that survives is the ‘th’after supper’ speeches by the Hermit, Soldier, and Secretary, all aspects of Philautia (self-love), when they attempt to draw Essex/Erophilus (lover of love) away from his worship of the Queen. Because such devices were invariably read as allegories of the court, the figures of Hermit, Secretary, and Soldier were likely to be understood by those attending the performance as figures for actual courtiers, and especially the Cecils. There is no indication in the surviving drafts discussed below that they were explicitly intended as such, but it seems unlikely that Essex would have been surprised that others made the association. As was discussed above, it was rare for courtiers to risk the Queen’s visible displeasure at an entertainment, but Paul Hammer suggests that Essex was relatively uninterested in royal response as he was aiming at a wider audience, and his principal aim was not to court royal favour but to ‘build up political momentum and put pressure on her to surrender to his views on policy’.73 Could entertaining a royal spectator ever be considered a secondary aim in a royal entertainment? The Queen’s response to the device would after all be part of the audience’s experience; it would have been observed with great interest and coloured the wider response. It was all very well for Essex to assert his ambitions but a sign of displeasure from the Queen would have changed the significance of his 71 The Cult of Elizabeth, 141. The original form of this essay was published in the Warburg Journal in 1959. 72 Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 85–7; Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Upstaging the Queen: The Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon and the Accession Day Celebrations of 1595’, in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (eds.), The Politics of the Early Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 41–66. 73 Hammer, ‘Upstaging the Queen’, 54.

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performance: ambition celebrated could easily become ambition circumscribed. Hammer argues that the entertainment was a success despite the Queen’s reaction, whereas others have maintained that it must be considered a failure because it annoyed the Queen. However, the underlying assumption that the Queen reacted badly to Love and Self Love needs closer examination. The evidence comes from Rowland Whyte’s letter quoted above (in which he also says the entertainment had been ‘much comended’). Having described Essex’s device, Whyte concluded: The world makes many untrue constructions at these speaches comparing the Hermytt and the secretary to two of the lords and the soldier to sir Roger willms: but the queen sayd that if she had thought ther had bene so moch sayd of her, she wold not have bene their that night. and soe went to bed.

The usual interpretation is that Elizabeth was saying that there had been ‘so moch sayd’, so she wished she had not been there. There is, however, another and, I would argue, more natural interpretation of Whyte’s account. Her tart comment could be an imperious piece of logic in which, in response to talk of these ‘constructions’, she informs the gossiping court that there could not have been any factional meaning to the piece, since had the subject matter been so partisan then she would not have stayed to watch it. If this is the correct reading then the Queen did not publicly acknowledge that the entertainment included any partisan message of which she disapproved. The political significance of Love and Self Love is open to debate, but it is an unusual piece in that there are significant clues to what the devisers intended. It is not only the political agenda of Love and Self Love that has given it particular interest to scholars: it is a much more sophisticated and accomplished piece of writing than most Elizabethan entertainments, which is unsurprising as it was written—at least in part—by no less a figure than Francis Bacon. A partial draft survives in his rapid italic hand which was evidently given to Essex for approval, as it contains marginal notes addressed to the Earl.74 This draft thus not only provides evidence for authorship, but also of the working relationship between Bacon and Essex. The entertainment was extensively 74

Lambeth Palace Library, MS 936, item 274.

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reworked after the submission of Bacon’s draft and there can be little doubt that Essex was, as Hammer suggests, closely involved in the entertainment’s development. The draft comprises three separate small folio leaves, none of which were originally conjugate (so there could have been further text on the three lost leaves), with writing on four of the six available pages.75 The first leaf has a brief summary of the principal characters, who are described as personifying specific characteristics (‘one dressed like an Heremite or Philosopher representing Contemplacion, the second like a Capitayne representing Fame, and the third like a Counsellor of Estate representing Experience’) followed by a preliminary speech by the Counsellor that was not used. The third leaf has ‘The speach of the Hermite or Philosopher in wysh of Contemplation or studies’, much of which was later reworked into the Secretary’s speech. It is the second leaf that is the most interesting, not only because of the content of the text but also because at certain points Bacon explains his intentions in marginal notes addressed to Essex (see Fig. 2.1). This piece, which was apparently unused, is a letter from Philautia herself to the Queen, to be sent some days after she has been rejected by Essex’s Squire in the main entertainment. Philautia has now had an interview with Pallas Athena, and she has been directed to return to Erophilus to try and tempt him again, on the basis that Erophilus may continue to resist but his royal mistress might be more susceptible to self-love (‘And then the alone Queen (so she ever termes your ma.) will see that she hath had Philautias first offer, and that if she reject it it wilbe receyved elsewhear to her disadvauntage’). The argument of the piece is, within its context, outrageous: not only does Philautia comment on ‘the inclinacion of Countenaunce and ear which I discerned in your ma. rather towardes my grownd [corrected from ‘faithfull perswasions’], then to his voluntary [i.e. the Squire]’, in other words claiming that the Queen has shown herself susceptible to self-love, but it goes on to suggest that she could be manipulated through Erophilos/Essex. Rather than being an equal (at least) of the gods and of course semper eadem, as she is usually portrayed in entertainments, Queen Elizabeth is here a mere mortal who is motivated by fear or jealousy of one of her courtiers. 75 The leaves cannot be conjugate as all three have a watermark, a lion similar to Briquet 10546 (an Italian paper of about 1592).

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Fig. 2.1. Portion of the draft epistle of Philautia from Love and Self Love in Francis Bacon’s autograph, with marginal notes to the Earl of Essex. Lambeth Palace Library, MS 936, no. 274. Reproduced by permission of Lambeth Palace Library.

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Bacon’s marginal comments show that he understood his text to be political, and that the thinly veiled attacks on the Queen were an integral part of his design. Alongside Philautia’s comment about the Queen’s susceptibility to ‘Self-Love’, Bacon notes archly ‘That your Lo knoweth whether the Q have profited in Self love’. His comment about Athena’s suggestion that it would be worth renewing the temptation of Erophilus is in a similar vein: ‘That your Lordship knoweth & I in partes in regard of the Qs unkind dealing which may persuad yow to selflove.’ These notes betray unease on Bacon’s part, an uncertainty that his meaning is clear or altogether appropriate, and he was clearly the junior partner is this collaboration with Essex. Bacon’s political agenda in Philautia’s letter is both more explicit and narrower than in the entertainment as performed. The letter is less about Essex’s claims to greatness than his circle’s frustration with a policy driven by narrow self-interest and unfair dealing that is associated directly with the Queen. Bacon’s marginal notes show that he saw a court entertainment as an intervention in a political debate that could easily couch criticism within flattery, although it is perhaps surprising that he believed the Queen would find anything entertaining in the Philautia letter. Bacon’s text was, however, only a draft to be presented to Essex for his perusal and comment. Essex had seen many entertainments and knew the Queen far better than Bacon; he would have had a clearer understanding of where the boundaries of acceptable speech lay, and recognized that directly associating the Queen with Self-Love lay beyond them. The idea that the famously hot-headed Earl advised the cool politician Bacon to tone down his language is of course deeply ironic, especially because Essex would singularly fail to heed similar advice from Bacon in later years. This is excellent evidence of a common aspect of the collaborative relationship between the writer and the entertainment host: the hired writers who wrote entertainments rarely had the experience of the host in the intimate business of royal compliment, so they must often have sought their advice when learning how best to smooth the tongue when addressing the monarch. The speeches from Essex’s 1595 device are the only one of the late Elizabethan tiltyard devices to survive in more than one contemporary manuscript copy, and this evidence of it having been read is the main reason that Hammer considers it to have been a success. Leaving aside those texts that are associated with the Essex circle itself (the drafts, a corrected fair copy, and a translation into French), there are seven

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surviving manuscript copies of the speeches.76 Paul Hammer claims that the manuscript circulation of the entertainment was closely linked to the self-promotion of the performance, and that copies were circulated among Essex’s friends ‘as a deliberately literary reinforcement of the spectacle itself ’.77 This was, according to Hammer, part of a deliberate campaign of self-advertisement in 1595, also including such texts as Essex’s letter of advice to the Earl of Rutland, behind which lay Essex’s secretariat comprising four men of high intellectual standing with strong links to the universities.78 This is a tempting argument, but not one that is supported by close examination of the surviving manuscripts. Aside from the texts that are directly connected with Essex’s immediate circle, none of the surviving texts are contemporary with the performance, and almost all can be dated to after Essex’s fall and the collapse of his circle. The only manuscript that provides evidence for the Essex circle’s dissemination of the text of the speeches is a translation of two speeches from the entertainment into French that survives in draft form in the hand of Essex’s personal secretary Edward Reynoldes.79 This translation was probably produced for the benefit of a visiting dignitary (for a similar case see Chapter 5). There is, incidentally, a similar lack of evidence for the industry of Essex’s secretariat in disseminating other texts discussed by Hammer: for example, almost all of the manuscripts of Essex’s letter of advice to the Earl of Rutland date from after Essex’s fall.80 Leaving aside the drafts and related texts, seven of the eight copies of Love and Self Love are found in scribal collections. The earliest of these is probably a copy entitled, on a much defaced title page, ‘Speaches for my Lord of Essex at the tylt’, in an important volume belonging to the Duke of Northumberland that primarily comprises works by Francis 76 See Peter, Beal, Index to English Literary Manuscripts, i: 1475–1625, 2 parts (London: Mansell, 1980), BcF 308–317. The fair copy is Lambeth Palace Library, MS 936, item 118; the translation is National Archives SP 12/254/68. 77 Hammer, ‘Upstaging the Queen’, 49. 78 For Essex’s secretariat see Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c.1585–1601’, English Historical Review, 109 (1994), 26–51. 79 National Archives, SP 12/254/68. 80 Those manuscripts are listed in Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘The Earl of Essex, Fulke Greville, and the Employment of Scholars’, Studies in Philology, 91 (1994), 167–80 n. 20.

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Bacon, including ‘Of Tribute’ and a number of shorter works, which contains nothing written later than the mid-1590s and can probably be dated to the later 1590s.81 It was evidently compiled as a collection of works by Bacon and since it is presumably Bacon’s (rather than Essex’s) connection with the entertainment that explains its inclusion here, it is not evidence of the Earl’s secretariat’s industry.82 The second early manuscript (Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.214) only contains a copy of the Secretary’s speech from the device but it brings us closer to the Earl of Essex’s own circle. It is a substantial volume of nearly 270 leaves that includes a number of pieces relating to Elizabethan Ireland, including Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (fos. 136–93) and many items relating to the Earl of Essex, including letters by and to him, his ‘Apology’, and, at the end of the manuscript, two letters by Essex’s chaplain Abdias Assheton defending his conduct during the Earl’s final days (fos. 266–71). The manuscript is written in a number of different scribal hands, but one of the main scribes wrote the following note on the front pastedown: ‘Die veneris Julii 1o 1601. per me Richardum Greenum’. 1601 is an unusually early date for such a substantial group of papers relating to Essex to be transcribed, and some of the items (e.g. the Assheton letters) never had widespread circulation. Richard Green has resisted identification but it has been suggested that he may have been in the service of the Earl; in any case, not only does the manuscript post-date the entertainment by several years but since it includes a number of fairly privileged items the presence of the tiltyard device therein is not evidence of its widespread circulation in the mid-1590s.83 81 The manuscript, Alnwick Castle, MS 525, has been reproduced in Frank J. Burgoyne, Northumberland Manuscripts: Collotype Facsimile & Type Transcript of an Elizabethan Manuscript Preserved at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1904). 82 The early provenance of the manuscript is unknown: it was in Northumberland House in London from the later 18th c. and may always have been in the Percy family, but some evidence suggests it may have come from the collections of John Anstis and John Anstis the Younger, both Garter Kings of Arms (see Burgoyne, Northumberland Manuscripts, pp. ix–x, quoting a letter by the antiquary John Bruce, 14 Aug. 1869); however, the manuscript cannot be positively identified in A Catalogue of the Large and Valuable Collections of Manuscripts of John Anstis . . . Also of his Son John Anstis . . . Which will be sold by Auction, Baker and Leigh [i.e. Sotheby’s], 12–16 Dec. 1768. 83 See James MacManaway, ‘Elizabeth, Essex, and James’, in Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner (eds.), Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies, Presented to Frank Percy Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 219–30.

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The other manuscripts all date from well into the seventeenth century. One is a separate of ten folio leaves in a single gathering, bound into a composite volume (Folger MS V.b.213). This is an unusual example of a later separate, as is shown by the paper stock (which is probably 1610s) and the scribe accidentally beginning the date of the device as ‘16.’—a very unlikely mistake before 1600.84 British Library, Add. MS 40838, which probably derives from the collection of James Vernon (1646–1727), is another folio scribal collection.85 It is in a single accomplished script that includes ‘The Earle of Essex his devise on the Queenes day before he was to runn at Tilt the 17. Novembr 39 Elizabeth’ (fos. 24r–27r ) along with various other letters and speeches relating to Essex.86 It also contains many Jacobean texts relating to affairs of state, and internal evidence shows it could not have been transcribed until at least 1622. The Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 121 and MS 130 are both late scribal copies in miscellaneous midseventeenth-century manuscripts, and Pierpont Morgan MS 1201 is similar. Inner Temple, Petyt MS 538, vol. 36, is a substantial folio collection in a single hand; it is a personal collection including explanatory notes to some items, and is not the work of a hired scribe.87 The device is here found alongside a range of material mostly concerning affairs of state from the 1580s to the mid-1610s, with the last dateable item being from 1614. Finally, another copy of the entertainment was recorded in 1880 as being among the Willington family papers at Stanford Court, Worcestershire, in another scribal collection of state papers and similar material that (assuming it was not a collection of 84 For the watermark, twin pillars surmounted by a bunch of grapes with a central cartouche bearing the initials ‘GAI’, see Edward Heawood, Watermarks, Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Hilversum: Paper Publications Society, 1950), nos 3490–511 and 3528–35. 85 The latest dateable item is ‘Master Francis Phillips petition for his brother Robert Phillips – releasment out of the Tower’ (12 Apr. 1622). 86 The manuscript was among the Vernon papers that were presented to the British Museum in 1923, a collection primarily associated with James Vernon, who rose to be Secretary of State under William III. 87 The notes demonstrate the compiler’s personal interest: for example, before transcribing a lengthy extract from Cavendish’s life of Cardinal Wolsey, he wrote a page of notes including biographical details on Wolsey, other sources and facts to be checked, and that ‘This book or the like is . . . printed in Prose or verse in quarto and by Allen played on the stage’ (fo. 148v), presumably referring to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII.

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earlier separates) cannot have been produced before the latter part of the 1620s.88 It was not among the manuscripts from Stanford Court sold in 1932, so may well have been lost in the fire that gutted the house in 1882.89 All of these manuscripts post-date the performance by at least a few years, and most were written an entire generation later. They have nothing to do with Essex’s secretariat, or with the circulation of Love and Self Love in 1595, but are a testament to later interest in the life of Essex as the great shooting star of Elizabeth’s court and Protestant tragic hero. Anyone familiar with the early Stuart scribal collections usually described as ‘State Papers’ in catalogues will know how commonly texts relating to Essex are found in them alongside documents relating to Jacobean court scandals and factional tensions, often focusing on the lives of men (Ralegh, the Earl of Somerset) who fell before the awful power of the monarch. Earlier lost copies must of course have preceded these manuscripts, but their origin is far from clear and does not necessarily suggest a widespread readership in the mid-1590s, especially as a very similar pattern of surviving texts is found for private letters which surely only reached a wider readership after Essex’s fall. The retrospective popularity enjoyed by Love and Self Love is exceptional. The only other Elizabethan entertainment to find its way into a significant number of Stuart scribal collections is the Hermit’s Oration of 1594, which is connected with Robert Cecil, and in that case all known copies derive from a single exemplar.90 It is generally true, however, that the model of a centrally organized programme of circulation—such as Hammer’s argument for Essex’s secretariat—rarely provides an adequate explanation of how manuscripts came to be widely copied and read. There was a limit to the extent to which these texts were ever 88

HMC, First Report, appendix (London: HMSO, 1870), 54. A Catalogue of Interesting Early Manuscripts and Rare Black-letter and 16th Century Books including A Selection from an Old Country House Library, Hodgson’s, 25 May 1932, lots 461–81; The Victoria County History: Worcestershire: Volume 4, ed. William Page and J. W. Willis-Bund (London: the St Catherine Press, 1924), 341. 90 This is suggested by a collation of the texts. Furthermore, all four scribal collections are associated with the Feathery Scribe: Trinity College, Dublin, MS 802, fos. 60r–62v; Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. D.692, fos. 106r–109r; BL, Add. MS 73087, fos. 181v– 185r; Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2858, fos. 188r–192r. See Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 58–108, 225, 229, 257. 89

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considered as propaganda, and it tended to take the involvement of more than one party for copies to be generated: it was not enough to have willing copyists, there also had to be interested readers. This centralized model also suggests a uniformity of texts that is rarely found. In the case of Love and Self Love, for example, there are significant textual differences between the manuscripts.91 The different ways in which texts of Elizabethan entertainments reached a readership, and the different sorts of text that were produced, are subjects for the next chapter. 91 For example, three of the manuscripts, including the fair copy, do not include a short opening speech by the Squire that is found in most of the manuscripts.

3 Publishing Praise: The Circulation of Elizabethan Entertainment Texts ELIZABETHAN ENTERTAINMENTS IN MANUSCRIPT AND PRINT Entertainment texts most commonly appeared in one of two related forms, manuscript separates (such as Love and Self Love) and printed pamphlets (such as the Four Foster Children of Desire). They are in many respects parallel formats: short, capable of being rapidly produced, and ephemeral. Many more printed pamphlets survive than do manuscript separates: there are about sixty surviving pamphlet copies (a total of sixteen editions of ten distinct texts), compared to sixteen manuscript separates of eight different entertainments. These raw figures give a misleading impression of the relative popularity of the two media for a number of reasons. A manuscript separate is considerably more fragile than a printed pamphlet so we would expect a lower survival rate. There is no union catalogue for manuscripts with the depth of the STC for printed publications, so a significant number of manuscript separates may survive unrecorded. Although relatively few separates survive, copies of at least another ten entertainments exist in manuscripts miscellanies or commonplace books, and in most cases these will have been copied from more ephemeral separates. This count excludes drafts and other such texts that may never have had any wider circulation. Four printed royal entertainments included in larger and more miscellaneous publications that appeared some years after the original performance and are not directly connected with their author may also have found their way to the printing house via earlier manuscript

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circulation.1 Adding these figures together, it appears that slightly more entertainments circulated in manuscript than in print, although the total number of pamphlets was probably greater than that of separates. The ephemeral nature of separates made them well suited to the pattern of demand for entertainments, which was usually strongest in the brief period immediately after the performance—Love and Self Love being a counter-example that can be explained by its association with the Earl of Essex. Multiple manuscript copies could be produced more rapidly than a pamphlet could be printed. It has been estimated that the minimum number of copies that could be economically produced on a printing press was about 100 (and most print runs were of several hundred copies), so if the demand was likely to be counted in the tens of copies then it made more sense to turn to scribal production.2 It was also a more flexible system, and although occasionally multiple more or less identical scribal transcriptions were produced, rather like a printed edition (one such example is discussed in Chapter 4), separates were more typically produced on an individual basis and with a specific recipient in mind; they could be individuated in any number of ways and were usually transmitted, not by sale, but as enclosures within personal letters. They were therefore enmeshed within specific interpersonal relationships to a greater degree than printed texts. Both the fact that they tended not to be exchanged commercially, and their restriction to relatively elite social groups, made separates a particularly appropriate mode of dissemination for royal entertainments—the entertainment itself being a form accessible only to an elite few and to which giftgiving was a basic gesture.3 1 Sidney’s Lady of May performed at Wanstead c.1578 and printed in The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia . . . with Sundry new additions (London: for William Ponsonbie, 1598); the 1581 speech of ‘The Knight of the Tree of the Sun’ in Axiochus (1592); and both the 1592 Entertainment at Ramsbury (‘Thenot and Piers’), and tiltyard verses by Cumberland from 1600 in Francis Davison’s A Poetical Rapsody (London: V. S[immes] for Iohn Baily, 1602). 2 D. F. McKenzie, ‘Printing and Publishing 1557–1700: Constraints on the London Book Trades’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.),The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 553–67 at 559–62. 3 For manuscripts and gift-exchange see Natalie Z. Davis, ‘Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser.,

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Changes in the relative prevalence of manuscript and print during Elizabeth’s reign reflect broader shifts in entertainment culture. The first great Elizabethan pageant was of course the coronation entry, and a printed pamphlet by Richard Mulcaster of this event soon appeared, which included the text of the various verses and orations. This was not the first English coronation entry to appear as a printed pamphlet: Queen Elizabeth’s mother’s entry had been recorded in The Noble Tryumphant Coronacyon of Quene Anne (1533). Given the symbolic importance of the coronation entry for the new reign, and especially as the Queen used the opportunity to demonstrate her religious preferences (or at least her support of the English Bible), there must have been a wide interest in the occasion. It is not therefore surprising that the coronation entry was the most commonly reproduced Elizabethan entertainment: there are two surviving editions from 1559, two further editions appeared at about the time of James I’s entry in 1604, and it was also reproduced in Holinshed’s Chronicles.4 The earliest surviving texts of progress entertainments are mostly civic orations, and speeches given before the Queen during progress visits to Coventry (1566), Warwick (1572), and Worcester (1575) survive. The first is a manuscript separate and so it clearly enjoyed contemporary circulation, while the Chamber Order Book of the City of Worcester provides an excellent example (albeit in idiosyncratic and halting prose) of how the flexible nature of manuscript production allowed it to cater for the sudden interest generated in a text by a successful performance before the Queen: This oracion beyng ended And as well of her highnes as of all the rest of the nobles & honorable & others Attentyvely harde And by her highnes with a pryncelie countenance specially noted & well likd of, As hee gave wytnes And also for that dyvers honorable afterward willed to have copies therof, which was doone accordynglie5 33 (1983), 69–88; Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harrington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Gabriel Heaton, ‘Performing Gifts: The Manuscript Circulation of Elizabethan and Early Stuart Royal Entertainments’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003). 4 The 1559 editions are STC 7589.5 (the earlier of the two) and STC 7590, whilst the 1604 editions are STC 7592 and STC 7593. 5 Chamber Order Book 1539–1601, Worcester County Record Office, County Hall Branch, X496, BA 9360/A-14, fo. 124r.

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Most printed pamphlets of entertainments appeared within two brief time periods, the first being 1575–8. These years were a high point for progresses: the Queen’s journeys were particularly ambitious in scope, making this a period when she was more visible to a wider public than had previously been the case, and professional writers were increasingly being employed to provide texts that were more and more literary in nature and so suitable for publication.6 The 1575 progress that took the Queen to Worcester also included her famous visit to Kenilworth and the stay at Woodstock that was the occasion of The Tale of Hemetes the Heremyte. Various parts of the extensive Woodstock entertainment circulated in manuscript and in 1585 a pamphlet account was printed (the reason for this unusually long gap in not known). George Gascoigne, who had been responsible for some of the devices at Kenilworth, and had previously included a masque (non-royal) in his collection A Hundreth Sundres Flowres, saw The Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth into print in 1576 with the text of the speeches and verses spoken to the Queen.7 The only known copy of this pamphlet was destroyed by fire in 1879, but the text was reprinted in the posthumous Whole Woorkes of George Gascoigne (1587).8 A second and entirely independent pamphlet recording events at Kenilworth also appeared in print: highly distinctive and entertaining, this was Robert Laneham’s A Letter Whearin part of the entertainment vntoo the Queenz Maiesty at Killingwoorth Castl . . . is signified from a freend officer attenant in coourt. There are two editions of this, so it seems to have enjoyed considerable success despite its author’s apparent embarrassment at finding his work in print and his attempt to suppress the text.9 6

Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), provides a synopsis of the pattern of progresses (pp. 33–4), and a detailed chronology of royal visits (pp. 180–202). 7 ‘Gascoigne’s devise of a maske for the right honorable Viscount Montacute’, in A Hundreth Sundres Flowres (London: Henry Bynneman for Richarde Smith, 1573), 382–94. 8 The unique copy was held at Birmingham Reference Library. For bibliographical details of this work see W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1939–1959), i, no. 90. 9 See Elizabeth Goldring, ‘ “A mercer ye wot az we be”: The Authorship of the Kenilworth Letter Reconsidered’, English Literary Renaissance, 38 (2008), 245–69, which effectively answers questions about the text’s authorship and provides a compelling explanation of its publication history. I am grateful to Dr Goldring for providing me with a copy of her article prior to its publication.

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1578 was probably the year that Leicester entertained the Queen at Wanstead with an entertainment written by Sir Philip Sidney, The Lady of May, which first circulated in manuscript.10 It was also the year of Elizabeth’s major progress through East Anglia, including a week-long sojourn in Norwich, which (like the Kenilworth festivities) led to the publication of two different pamphlets. Both of these were authored by poets who had been employed to write and produce devices, and who followed Gascoigne’s earlier example. The Joyfull Receyving of the Queenes most excellent Majestie into hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich: The things done in the time of hir abode there: and the Dolor of the citie at hir departure, two editions of which appeared in 1578, was the responsibility of Bernard Garter. The other pamphlet was A Discourse of The Queenes Majesties entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk: . . . with divers shewes of his own invention sette out at Norwich: and some rehearsal of hir Highnesse retourne from Progresse, written by Gascoigne’s friend Thomas Churchyard. In the same year Churchyard also published Churchyardes Chippes, a miscellany that included his earlier devices written for the Queen’s visit to Bristol in 1574. The surviving texts by Churchyard significantly underplay his contribution to Elizabethan entertainments since he wrote a number of works that are now lost, at least if we are to trust his list of his own works in Churchyardes Challenge (1593), sigs. *–**. Among the works listed but not known to survive are ‘The devises and speeches that men and boyes shewed within many prograces’, and ‘The devises of warre and a play at Awsterley, her highnes being at sir Thomas Greshams’.11 Also on this list, among a group of works that remain unpublished because ‘gotten from me of some such noble freends as I am loath to offend’, is the following entertainment (about which nothing more is known): A book of a sumptuous shew in Shrovetide, by sir Walter Rawley, sir Robart Carey, M. Chidly, and M. Arthur Gorge, in which book was the whole service of my L. of Lester mencioned, that he and his traine did in Flaunders, and the gentlemen Pencioners proved to be a great peece of honor to the Court: all 10 The Helmingham Hall manuscript of The Lady of May (BL, Add. MS 61821) predates its appearance in print in the 1598 edition of Sidney’s Arcadia. 11 Although Queen Elizabeth visited Sir Thomas Gresham at Osterley on a number of occasions, the most likely date for an elaborate entertainment is Feb. 1578, when the Queen visited after the completion of major building works.

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which book was in as good verse as ever I made: an honorable knight dwelling in the black Friers, can witnes the same, because I read it unto him.

The second cluster of entertainment pamphlets was published in the years 1591–2. These were the years that saw a renewal of major progresses after the hiatus of the 1580s when the Queen had stayed close to her capital and the most prominent entertainment form had become the tournament (this was the decade in which the Accession Day tournaments became established and also of such tournaments as Callophisus and the Four Foster Children of Desire). Only two minor entertainments, at Heneage House and Greenwich, are known from manuscript texts from the 1580s, and the earliest surviving printed pamphlet recording a Lord Mayor’s show dates from 1585.12 With the renewal of major summer progresses came a resurgence of sophisticated entertainments. Three entertainment pamphlets were printed in 1591–2: The Honorable Entertainement gieven to the Queenes Majestie in Progresse, at Elvetham in Hampshire (1591) in two editions; The Honorable Entertainment Given to the Queenes Majestie in Progresse, at Cowdrey in Sussex (1591) in two editions; and Speeches Delivered to Her Majestie this last progresse, at the Right Honorable the Lady Russels, at Bissam, the Right Honorable the Lorde Chandos at Sudley, at the Right Honorable the Lord Norris, at Ricorte (1592). The last ten years of the reign saw a marked shift towards the circulation of entertainments in manuscript form rather than in print. No further pamphlets were printed after 1592, but two-thirds of those entertainments that circulated as separates were written in the final decade of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, including the entertainment at Theobalds in 1594, other Cecil family productions at Wimbledon (1599) and Cecil House (1602), entertainments at Chiswick (1602) 12

Neither the ‘Peddler’s Tale’ at Heneage House (copies in BL, Add. MS 41499A, fo. 9v, and Downing College, Cambridge, Botwell MSS, ‘Wickstede Thesaurus’, Part 2, fos. 2–3r ) nor ‘Goodwill’s Part’ at Greenwich (BL, Egerton MS 2877, fo. 182r ) can be dated precisely. The former is printed in Marion Colthorpe, ‘A Pedlar’s Tale to Queen Elizabeth I’, Records of Early English Drama: Newsletter, 10/ 2 (1985), 1–5; the latter in C. E. McGee, ‘A Reception for Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich’, Records of Early English Drama: Newsletter, 5/2 (1980), 1–8. The earliest Lord Mayor’s pageant pamphlet is George Peele’s The Device of the Pageant borne before Woolstone Dixi (London: Edward Allde, 1585); the only other Elizabethan Lord Mayor’s pageant pamphlet is the same author’s Descensus Astraeea (London: for William Wright, 1591).

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and at Harefield (1602), not to mention a number of tiltyard speeches (including Essex’s 1595 Love and Self Love). These separates almost always circulated anonymously, although authors were occasionally named in accompanying letters. The exception is the manuscript of the entertainment at Sir William Russell’s house at Chiswick, which is subscribed ‘John Lilly’.13 A number of factors lie behind this shift from print to manuscript in the 1590s. There was a change in the pattern of the progresses themselves: although dramatic entertainments and increasingly costly displays of hospitality remained regular occurrences, progresses became shorter and therefore less public events, less likely to command the interest of a wide public.14 Equally important, however, was a wider cultural shift. Entertainments fed the distinct readerly demands for coterie literature and court news, and the hungry demand for both in the 1590s was largely fed by manuscript separates. This was a period of great activity among sophisticated communities reading and writing poetry at the Inns of Court and elsewhere (with prominent figures including John Donne and John Davies), and was also a time when networks of newsmongers and intelligencers like Rowland Whyte and John Chamberlain were becoming increasingly common. Many of these figures were involved in circulating royal entertainments. PRODUCING THE ENTERTAINMENT TEXT Entertainments were produced in a series of distinct stages, control over which was in the hand of a series of overlapping authorities, and overall they were a highly collaborative form. The occasion of the performance was primarily decided by the Crown, with due deference to tradition and in discreet negotiation with those who would be responsible for performance. The writing of dramatic devices was a matter of collaboration between noble patron and hired poet, for which there is a significant body of textual evidence including the Bacon draft of Essex’s 13 Northamptonshire Record Office, Finch Hatton MS 2414. The subscription is in the same hand as the rest of the manuscript, but this is not the author’s autograph. 14 For the inflation in the expense of entertaining the Queen towards the end of the reign see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 452–4.

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1595 tiltyard entertainment, discussed in the last chapter, and other examples that are considered in this and later chapters. The words may have been written by a hired hand but they were unequivocally speaking for the aristocratic host: ‘Under my person’, said the Poet greeting Elizabeth at Elvetham, ‘Semer [Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford] hides himselfe.’15 The entertainment was at its most collaborative at the moment of performance: host, hired poet, musicians, actors, the Queen, and the watching court all played a part in constructing entertainments as events. Producing and disseminating texts of the entertainment in whatever form, and in either manuscript or print, involved yet more people and more collaboration. The collaborative nature of the various stages of production show that an entertainment neither originated in nor was promulgated by a single person. As has already been discussed, the texts of entertainments were not simply a form of propaganda: the assumption that entertainments straightforwardly expressed the agenda of a single body (either the Crown or the host) provides a narrow and impoverished basis for understanding these complex texts. Dramatic performance before Queen Elizabeth provided an opportunity for the performing aristocrat or his representative to address the Queen in words of his or her own choosing, albeit in highly conventionalized terms, and to be heard to so address her by the court at large. The views the host wished to promote had to be balanced against what would be acceptable to the Queen, and both Queen and host knew that their interaction was being watched and judged by the courtly audience. Furthermore, neither the Crown nor the host was necessarily responsible for producing the surviving material texts upon which scholarly interpretation is primarily based, and further distinct agendas were introduced in their production, usually after the performance. Texts could be produced by different people for a range of reasons. Given the active role and financial investment of patron-hosts in the entertainments themselves, it is unsurprising that the impetus behind publication can often be traced back to them. The hand of the patron can be discerned guiding that of the scribe in a number of manuscripts of the Harefield entertainment of 1602, discussed in detail later in this chapter. Other hosts simply retained copies of entertainments that they 15 The Honorable Entertainement gieuen to the Queenes Majestie in Progresse, at Elvetham in Hampshire (London: John Wolfe, 1591), sig. B3r.

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had commissioned, as did Sir Julius Caesar for his 1598 entertainment of the Queen at Mitcham.16 Among the printed pamphlets, the Elvetham entertainment has the most obvious characteristics suggesting the Earl of Hertford was involved in its publication. The pamphlet is unusually ambitious: it is the only Elizabethan entertainment publication to include a visual element in the form of a specially commissioned woodcut; this was replaced by a second and more detailed woodcut in the revised edition, and copies of the woodcut appear to have been hand-coloured before sale.17 The special commissioning of a woodcut (let alone a second replacement woodcut) could not have been economically justified for a minor ephemeral publication, and strongly suggests that its publication must have been subsidized. The text itself points towards the source of this subsidy: the first edition refers to Hertford throughout as ‘My Lord’, and is very keen to stress the praise Hertford himself had received, even reporting that the Queen had told him he would ‘finde the reward therof in her especiall favour’. This blatant advertisement of Hertford’s royal favour was removed in the second edition, which also distanced him from the publication by replacing the occurrences of ‘my Lord’ with ‘The Earl of Hertford’. In most cases the desire of aristocratic hosts not to appear as vulgar self-publicists makes it difficult to find evidence for hosts subsidizing printed pamphlets, either in the form of surviving financial accounts or in dedications of the texts themselves, but it is notable that while many pamphlets left the author anonymous, all provide details of the host on the occasion. As discussed in Chapter 2, Henry Goldwell’s A Brief Declaration of the Shews was probably encouraged into print by one of the participants, although this is not acknowledged in the pamphlet’s preface. Although a number of hosts may have discreetly encouraged publication, those who paid for the entertainments did not always control their publica16

BL Add. MS 12497, fos. 253–62. This is apparently a fair copy rather than a draft. The pamphlet also includes a woodcut of the Earl of Hertford’s arms, but this had previously been used in Thomas Coghan, The Haven of Health (London: Henrie Midleton, 1584) and Marc Antonio Pigasetta, Itinerario (London: John Wolf, 1585). For further discussion of this text see H. Neville Davies’s edition of the Elvetham entertainment in, John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Clarke, and Elizabeth Goldring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). I am very grateful to Neville Davies for allowing me to read his edition prior to publication. 17

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tion or manuscript circulation. Print publication was sometimes used as an opportunity for an author to claim ownership of an entertainment. In his preface to A Discourse of the Queenes Majesties entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk, Thomas Churchyard provided multiple explanations for bringing into print the devices he had written for the Queen’s visit to Norwich in 1578: as a precedent for future progresses; to entertain the book’s dedicatee Sir Gilbert Gerard; to trumpet the loyalty of Norfolk and Suffolk; for the benefit of ‘those people that dwell farre off the Court’; and, crucially, to display his own work, ‘that myne honest intente may be thereby expressed, and my friendes maye see how glad I am to honor God, my Prince, and my Countrey’.18 He nowhere suggests that the city of Norwich, for whom the devices had been written (and which had of course paid for them), was in any way involved in the publication, and indeed the very presence of the preface and dedication, with their assumption that the text was ultimately his, was an assertion of Churchyard’s authority over the text. There was potential profit to be made from these pamphlets, and as a result they were sometimes seen into print by people with no connection to the entertainment itself. The Oxford printer-publisher Joseph Barnes, for one, clearly felt he would find a ready market for entertainment texts, explaining in his preface to Speeches Delivered To Her Majestie This Last Progresse, At The Right Honorable the Lady Russels, at Bissam, the Right Honorable the Lorde Chandos at Sudley, at the Right Honorable the Lord Norris, at Ricorte that he was himself responsible for acquiring the texts he was printing, and that he was publishing without the knowledge of either hosts or author. Elizabeth Goldring has argued convincingly that Laneham’s Letter on the Kenilworth entertainment was produced without the involvement of either the host or the author of the entertainment.19 It had previously been suggested that the Letter was not written by Robert Laneham (or Langham) but by the author and fellow mercer William Patten.20 Goldring brings new biographical evidence to bear in favour of Laneham’s authorship, but suggests that Patten was responsible for publishing the text. His reasons for doing so 18 Thomas Churchyard, A Discourse of the Queenes Maiesites entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578), sigs. A3v, B4r–v. 19 Goldring, ‘The Kenilworth Letter Reconsidered’. 20 David Scott, ‘William Patten and the Authorship of “Robert Laneham’s Letter” 1575’, English Literary Renaissance, 7 (1977), 297–306.

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were almost certainly financial, and Laneham was sufficiently embarrassed by the publication to attempt (evidently without much success) to have the text suppressed. These examples do not suggest that entertainment texts were tightly controlled, and one body that never seems to have involved itself in publishing or circulating entertainments was the Elizabethan court itself. In contrast to the festival books published in many European countries, before about 1620 the English Crown did not finance the publication of entertainments—even when they had the political significance of, for example, the 1559 coronation entry into London.21 At most, there is the occasional suspicion that royal pressure may have been applied to suppress or censor texts, for example the elision in the second edition of The Honorable Entertainement . . . at Elvetham of the Earl of Hertford’s claim that he had been promised favour in the light of his entertainment. The Queen’s influence was strongest at the point of performance: she ensured some performances never took place and made clear her disapproval of others, typically when they touched on religion or royal marriage. The relative lack of control over the written versions of entertainments is shown by George Gascoigne’s Masque of Zabeta, written for performance at Kenilworth: its impolitic comments on royal marriage meant that it was not performed, but Gascoigne took the opportunity of his publication of a pamphlet account of the Kenilworth festivities to bring the masque to light, complete with the lines (such as the exclamation ‘How necessarie were j for worthy Queenes to wed’) that had been carefully kept from the royal ears. THE HAREFIELD FESTIVITIES OF 1602 John Davies (knighted 1603) was probably the leading writer of entertainments in the final few years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. He wrote pieces for at least three distinct tiltyard and country house entertainments between 1600 and 1603, including those at Harefield in the 21 For publications in other European countries see Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘The Early Modern Festival Book: Function and Form’, in J. R. Mulryne, Helen WatanabeO’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring (eds.), ‘Europa Triumphans’: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), i. 3–18.

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summer of 1602. Surviving letters to patrons enclosing entertainment texts show that he understood his role as a writer of entertainments very differently from those, like Gascoigne or Jonson, who cultivated authorial personae. In a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, apparently referring to a speech for barriers to be performed at the Inns of Court, Davies unambiguously situates final ownership of the text with Cecil and expects him to revise his work, writing that: This speech doth nothing satisfie me, & thefore much lesse will it seem passable in your honours Judgment . . . I humbly beseech your honour to lett your eie passe a little over it; & to lett me know what your Judgment mislikes, & I shall quickly correct it. The gentleman that is to speake it must not know that it comes from me, for then he will never learne it. I am not ambitios to be reputed the autor of a speach, but am zealous to have things donne according to your honours pleasure.22

Davies recognized that the author’s job was to provide a text over which the patron could assume control and ownership. Rather than providing a complete and valuable work, Davies figures the text as an inadequate manifestation of his service. He claims that what gives the text significance to him is not his work itself but that it demonstrates commitment to his patron and, implicitly, his desire for further service. He expressed similar sentiments in another letter, on this occasion enclosing a ‘cobwebb of my invention’, which was sent to Sir Michael Hickes: ‘the imployment be light & trifling; bycause I am glad of any occasion of being made knowne to that noble gentl. whom I honour & admire exceedingly. if ought be to be added or alter’d, lett me heare from you, I shall willingly attend to doo it’.23 Writing was for Davies in part an opportunity to develop relationships with powerful men who could help him in his career as a lawyer.

22 Hatfield House, Cecil Papers 90/69 (Davies to Sir Robert Cecil, 1601?), printed in The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. xxviii. 23 BL, Lansdowne MS 88, fo. 4 (Davies to Sir Michael Hickes, 22 Jan. 1600 [1601]), printed in The Poems of Sir John Davies, 415–16. The text is not known: Krueger suggests it was Davies’s Poems on Trenchers, but this follows an error in Grosart, who stated that Hickes was the secretary to Lord Buckhurst, Lord Treasurer at the time the letter was written (which is significant because the Poems on Trenchers were written for a Lord Treasurer). In fact Hickes worked for the previous Treasurer, Lord Burghley, and was also closely associated with his son Sir Robert Cecil (see Alan G. R. Smith, Servant of the Cecils: The Life of Sir Michael Hickes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), esp. 134–6), so the ‘noble gentleman’ was probably Cecil.

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Davies’s letter to Sir Robert Cecil also provides some incidental details about the process of commission. He begins his letter by recording that ‘about 6 of clock this evening, my lord of Cumbreland signified your honours pleasure unto me; that I should instantly conceave a speach for introduction of the barriers. I have donne it with a running pen, & a more running head.’ Entertainments were rarely written at leisure: they needed to be up to date and were susceptible to contingencies ranging from the weather to the Queen’s frequent changes of plan. Authors had to work close to the moment of performance. George Gascoigne, for example, makes several boastful references to his remarkable speed of work in his narrative to The Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth, while Thomas Churchyard paints a comic picture of himself bustling around Norwich with a dozen boys dressed as nymphs in an increasingly desperate search for hiding places from which to surprise the Queen with hastily written poetic tributes.24 Davies probably wrote all of the Harefield entertainment, which shares many features with the works mentioned in his letters: it was written for a patron who could help him further his legal career, the Lord Keeper Sir Thomas Egerton (and his wife Alice, Dowager Countess of Derby); and, since it includes references to the weather during the Queen’s visit, it must have been written very close to the moment of performance.25 The Harefield entertainment was performed during Queen Elizabeth’s last summer progress in 1602, and provides an unequalled opportunity for examining in detail the various interests and agendas that lay behind the dissemination of an entertainment text, because it survives in fourteen early sources including five separates, and is referred to in seven contemporary letters.26 No other Elizabethan entertainment survives in so many manuscript copies—indeed few printed pamphlets survive in such numbers—and none provides such a wealth of information about the early circulation and reception of the text. This large number of surviving texts makes it possible to trace the circulation of the text outward from a nucleus of copies closely associated with the event. 24 Kenilworth Illustrated (Chiswick: C. Whittingham, 1821), pt. 2, pp. 60, 73; Churchyard, The Queenes entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk, e.g. sigs. E4v and G2v. 25 For the question of authorship see my edition in John Nichols’s The Progresses Court and Culture, ed. Archer, Clarke, and Goldring. 26 For a full list of these sources see ibid.

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The 1602 progress was brief: there had been plans to travel as far as Bristol but in the event Elizabeth travelled for only two weeks and barely passed outside the area covered by modern London. This short progress nevertheless included several visits to local landowners, and her reception was recorded in a number of contemporary newsletters. John Chamberlain reported a synopsis of the progress to his friend Dudley Carleton on 2 October: The Q. progress went not far, first to Cheswicke to Sir William Russells, then to Ambrose coppingers who because he had ben a master of art intertained her himself with a Latin oration, then to Harvill [i.e. Harefield] to the L. Kepers. So to Sir William Clarkes by Burnham, who so behaved himself that he pleased nobody, but gave occasion to have his miserie and vanitie spread far and wide. Then to Otelands, where she continues to the seventh of this moneth that she comes to Richmond. the causes that withheld her from the erle of Hartfords and the L. cheife Justice were the fowle weather, and a generall infection of the small pocks spred over all the countrie.27

Chamberlain’s comment on Sir William Clarke’s reception of the Queen exposes the importance of entertainments to their hosts’ reputations, and also the part played by letters in establishing reputations; it was, of course, exactly letters like Chamberlain’s that ensured Clarke’s inhospitality was ‘spread far and wide’. Chamberlain, who had not himself accompanied the court, was not the only writer to comment on Clarke. When the Earl of Northumberland provided Lord Cobham with a report on the state of the court on 6 August he began with a complaint: ‘wee are at Sir Willam Clerkes and shall be here till monday, whoe nether gives mete nor monny to any of the progressers; the house her ma: hathe at commandement, and his grasse the gards horses eate, he shafes [i.e. chafes], and this is all[.]’28 Entertaining the Queen brought a great deal of attention to the host so, even apart from an unwillingness to anger the Queen, few hosts were willing to make a public display of inhospitality, as Mary Hill Cole has shown.29 The correlative motive was the prestige successful entertainment could bring: 27

National Archives, SP 12/285/23 (fo. 47v). National Archives, SP 12/284/97. 29 Cole, The Portable Queen, 85–96, shows that although Clarke was not the only host willing to snub the Queen, especially in the last years of her reign, these moments of overt disharmony were much less frequent than some commentators have suggested. 28

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Lord Keeper Egerton paid out over £2,000 for food, drink, and preparations to the house for the Queen’s visit to Harefield, and we can be sure that he hoped to have his hospitality and expenditure widely reported.30 The production and dissemination of manuscript texts was closely entangled with this business of reputation building, since those same letter-writers who were crucial to the formation of public reputations were also a main conduit for the circulation of manuscript separates. The hosts at Harefield had particular reasons for demonstrating their noble hospitality. Sir Thomas Egerton may have been Lord Keeper but he was illegitimate and from a minor Cheshire family. In contrast his wife Alice was the daughter of Sir John Spencer of Althorp, one of the wealthiest commoners in England, and the widow of Ferdinando Stanley (d. 1594), Earl of Derby and great-great-grandson of Henry VII. This disparity of status was especially important to the Dowager Countess as she had three daughters from her first marriage: girls with the blood royal running through their veins but who had lost the earldom that sustained their status, and whose inheritance was being contested by their uncle William Stanley, the current Earl of Derby.31 Lavish hospitality publicly displayed that Egerton was capable of maintaining the magnificent lifestyle appropriate to his wife’s noble status and her daughters’ royal lineage. When the Queen entered the grounds of the estate she was met by a dairymaid and a bailiff, who gave a comic dialogue in which they pretended not to know the identity of the visitor but nevertheless ended their welcome with the gift of two jewels shaped as a rake and a fork.32 A second welcome followed at the entrance to the house, where the personification of the Place, dressed (with shades of Pyramus and Thisbe’s Wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) ‘in a partie-colored roabe, lyke the brickes of the howse’, discussed with Time (who has 30 Egerton’s expenditure is preserved in a series of accounts which are now Huntington Library, MS EL 122 and 124–27 (EL 123 is a forgery by John Payne Collier), printed in The Egerton Papers, ed. John Payne Collier (London: Camden Society, 1840), 340–57. 31 Barry Coward, The Stanleys, Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby, 1385–1672 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 41–55. 32 Quotations from the Harefield entertainment are taken from the forthcoming edition in John Nichols’s The Progresses, ed. Archer, Clarke, and Goldring.

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stopped for the Queen) the honour of the royal visit. This dialogue also culminated in a gift: a jewel in the shape of a heart. At some point during the following two days of the Queen’s visit she was presented with a petition, accompanied with a gift of a ‘gown of rainbows’ that supposedly came from St Swithin, in which he explained that he was not responsible for the poor weather. A fourth device was a lottery in which the Queen and her ladies drew gifts with attached verses from a box of booty in the possession of a mariner. Finally, at Elizabeth’s departure Place once again appeared, now in mourning, to lament her going and present yet another jewel (this time an anchor). Egerton and his wife could manage events at Harefield to give the appearance that the whole fabric of the estate, from the milkmaid to the house itself, all wished to perform their duty to the Queen, and that only the English weather remained beyond her command; they could ensure that every device culminated in an expensive gift to the Queen; however, they could not control how letter-writers and gossips would respond, and those responses would determine how the entertainment would shape their public reputation. While the major expenditure and witty dialogues ensured that the Harefield entertainment was seen as one of the more comment-worthy events of the summer, it did not stifle criticism or the individuality of responses. Sir George Savile sent a copy of the farewell speech to his patron the Earl of Shrewsbury. In his accompanying letter Savile provided a particularly enthusiastic report of the entertainment: ‘[t]he Jewell my lord keper presented was held Richly worth 1000li. as I was credibly told. Another Jewell said worth vi C.li. And the Gowne of Raynbows very Riche embradrid’, while the richness of the feast is ‘much talked of in London’.33 But Savile makes clear that his main reason for providing the text was ‘my desire to do your lordship some service’, so it was in his interest to emphasize the significance of the text as a worthy gift for the Earl. The importance of speedy production is revealed in Savile’s hope that the text would be sufficiently new to please his patron, especially as, he reminds Shrewsbury, acquiring such a text was ‘hard for me to doe, for your lordship hath so many frendes of bitter [i.e. better] Intelligence’. 33

Nottingham Archives, DD/SR 1/D/14 (Savile to Shrewsbury, 14 Aug. 1602).

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The amount of money spent by Egerton impressed Savile, but not all writers were inclined to take the massive expenditure as the bountiful largess of a happy court. An intelligencer writing under the name ‘Anthony Rivers’ wrote to Robert Persons, the Superior of the Jesuit Mission to England in Rome, that the Queen had been ‘most royally entertained and feasted at the Lord Keepers his charge in that behalf, amounting to about 4,000 li’.34 However, he interpreted the expenditure as waste and the progress as exposing disharmony. While Chamberlain had blamed the weather and smallpox for the brevity of the progress, Rivers claimed that local discontent had influenced the decision and explained to Persons that the Queen was primarily motivated by ‘a covetous humour (as most of her late progresses have been), to receive rich presents and jewels’. Rivers also revealed how Elizabeth had responded to her entertainment: [The Queen] being at the Lord Keeper’s, in her merriest vein, the Countess of Derby (his wife) moved that it would please her to accept of the Lady Strange [Anne Stanley] and her sister [Frances Stanley] to wait on her in her privy chamber, and to bestow them in marriage where she thought fit, or at least to give her leave to bestow them; at which motion the Queen was exceedingly passionate and commanded silence on that behalf. The younger, as is supposed, is contracted to the Keeper’s son, and the parents hoped the Queen would have approved it, and made him knight. Now they are at a nonplus, and know not how to proceed[.]

Rivers reverses the role of the Queen: she is represented in the entertainment itself as the source of bounty and harmony, but Rivers figures her instead as a source of disharmony and ingratitude. The Catholic ‘Anthony Rivers’ was certainly partisan, but he was well informed (he may have been William Sterrell, confidential secretary to a Privy Councillor, Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester).35 The match between Frances Stanley and John Egerton had been agreed when the Dowager Countess married Thomas Egerton, but they had not been able to gain the Queen’s consent at that time and it is entirely plausible that tension over this subject resurfaced at Harefield.36 It may have been this tension that was referred 34 Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, ed. Henry Foley, SJ, 7 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1877–83), i. 46 (Rivers to Persons, 25 Aug. 1602). 35 Patrick Martin and John Finnis, ‘The Identity of “Antony Rivers” ’, Recusant History, 26 (2002), 39–74. 36 The couple married in secret before the Queen’s death (see The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosoph-

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to by Thomas Edmondes, diplomat and Clerk of the Privy Council (and one of Shrewsbury’s friends of better intelligence mentioned by Savile), when he reported to the Earl of Shrewsbury that ‘Her Highness hath been very honourably entertained at my Lord Keeper’s house, and many times richly presented; yet all men are not confident that the same will procure an abolition of former unkindness’.37 These differing interpretations of events at Harefield were written in the days and weeks following the Queen’s visit. The Queen left Harefield on 2 August and the earliest surviving report of the entertainment (by Thomas Edmondes in the letter quoted above) was written just one day later. The first record of an actual text of the entertainment is found in a letter to Sir Robert Sidney, governor of Flushing, from his deputy Sir William Browne dated 12 August, shortly after the court returned to the royal palace of Oatlands. The letter reported in detail Browne’s recent audience with the Queen in Sir William Clarke’s garden at Hitcham, and in a footnote mentions ‘I send you with this letter all the Queenes enterteinment at Cheswick and att my Lord keepers I have gotten them coppyed out for you’.38 Unfortunately, Sidney’s copies of the Harefield and Chiswick entertainments are not known to survive. Savile sent his copy of the text to Shrewsbury two days later and several other copies, although they cannot be dated so precisely, probably also date from August 1602. The text quickly spread throughout England and beyond, mostly among courtly insiders then absent from the centre of power, although the August report to the exiled Jesuit Robert Persons shows that no one could control to whom it was reported. As we have seen, early recipients included Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and member of the Privy Council; Sir Robert Sidney, Governor of Flushing; and Dudley Carleton, secretary to the English ambassador in Paris, who was sent a report (quoted above) that was followed by a text of the entertainment. Others soon had ical Society, 1939), i. 188–91) and may have already been married when the Queen came to Harefield: the entries on both Frances Stanley and John Egerton in the ODNB suggest their marriage took place in 1601. 37 Edmund Lodge, Illustrations of British History, 3 vols. (London: Mitcham, 1838), ii 562–3 (Edmondes to Shrewsbury, 3 Aug. 1602). 38 Centre for Kentish Studies, U1475 C8/135 [misdated 1601], quoted by kind permission of Viscount De L’Isle from his private archive deposited at CKS for safekeeping.

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access to a text or a description: Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York; Sir Edward Conway, Lieutenant Governor of Brill (Brill was, like Flushing, among the English Cautionary Towns in the Low Countries); and one of the Newdigates, a wealthy Warwickshire gentry family. Two of the surviving early texts have characteristics that associate them with the household at Harefield, but the hosts were only one among several sources from which texts were acquired. In fact, despite being produced over a short period and circulated within a relatively coherent social group, these early manuscripts of the Harefield entertainment are notably heterogeneous and were not the result of a coordinated campaign of manuscript publication. No single surviving copy contains all of the devices known to have been performed at Harefield, and although some of the copies derive from the same (lost) exemplars, no two copies are written in the same hand or on the same paper. This lack of coordination is indicated by Browne’s letter, which specifies that he got the text copied on his own initiative (and would therefore presumably have had some control over the copy) rather than being given or purchasing a copy. One of the two copies directly associated with the Harefield household was sent to Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, who wrote enthusiastically on 30 August to the President of the Council of the North, Lord Sheffield, that ‘As for hir Majestes entertainment at my Lord Keepers house, I am glad to heare it was to hir good likinge & best contentment’.39 Hutton’s letter goes on to give an elaborate and goodhumoured description of ‘Place and Time’, commenting that they were exceedingly lively given their advanced age (which he calculates at 5,564 years). The text that belonged to Matthew Hutton was written on two sheets of paper folded into bifolia, in a rapid but clear secretary hand. This text includes all the devices except the initial dialogue between the Bailiff and the Dairymaid, but it does mention that the initial dialogue took place and so is the only text which clearly indicates awareness of all the different devices performed at Harefield. It also provides more detail about the various gifts and their costs than any other source: it is this text, for example, that tells us that the ‘gown of rainbows’ given to the Queen by St Swithin cost £340, was made of cloth of silver, and was 39 North Yorkshire County Record Office (Northallerton branch), ZAZ 1286/8282–89. The letter follows at ZAZ 1286/8290.

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accompanied by sleeves embroidered with rubies and pearls. It is the presence of such details that suggests the origin of this text was the household of the Lord Keeper and Dowager Countess, who are moreover referred to throughout as ‘My Lord’ and ‘My Lady’. The second copy that probably came directly from the Harefield household is found in the papers of the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall in Warwickshire.40 The Newdigates had been the owners of Harefield House until 1586, so their interest in the Queen’s entertainment at their ancient family home is easy to imagine. The family had retained property in the area and developed a number of links to the household of Egerton and the Dowager Countess.41 The Newdigate copy is closely related to Hutton’s: it also consists of two sheets of paper folded into bifolia; although written in a different hand, textual parallels show that it was copied from the same exemplar; and it contains descriptive passages that suggest its scribe saw the performance, such as that the dialogue of ‘Place and Time’ began ‘When her Majestie was alighted from her horse, and ascended 3 steeps neare to the entering into the house, a carpet and chaire there sett for her’.42 These texts catered to the desire of the hosts at Harefield to broadcast their hospitality, but the Newdigate manuscript also seems to have been produced with the sensitivities of the Newdigate family in mind. Their copy lacks the ‘Lottery’, a celebration of the female centre of the Elizabethan court in which gifts were given to the Queen, her Maids of Honour, Ladies of the Privy Chamber, and other attendant women.43 Given the close connections between this manuscript, the Hutton manuscript, and the household at Harefield, the scribe probably had access to the ‘Lottery’, which suggests that the section was deliberately omitted from the Newdigate manuscript. A likely explanation for the omission is found in the family of the mistress at Arbury Hall, Anne 40

Warwickshire County Record Office, CR 136/B2455. Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture: The Seventeenth-Century Newdigates of Arbury and their World (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), 21–35. 42 WCRO, CR 136/B2455, fo. 1r. For detail on the textual relationship between the Hutton and Newdigate copies see John Nichols’s The Progresses Court and Culture, ed. Archer, Clarke, and Goldring. 43 For the importance of female community to the entertainment see Mary C. Erler, ‘ “Chaste Sports, Juste Prayses, & all Soft Delight”: Harefield 1602 and Ashby 1607, Two Female Entertainments’, The Elizabethan Stage, 14 (1996), 1–25. 41

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Newdigate. She was born Anne Fitton and was the sister of Mary Fitton, who had been a Maid of Honour until 1601, when she became pregnant by the Earl of Pembroke and he ‘utterly renounceth all marriage’. The disgraced Mary then retreated to her sister’s home of Arbury Hall.44 A decision could well have been made to omit the lottery from the copy for the Newdigates out of concern that they would not appreciate a celebration of the privileged group from which one of their number had been irrevocably expelled, in which, for example, the Maids of Honour’s obedience and chastity were extolled when their chaperone was presented with a scarf: ‘Take you this skarfe binde Cupid hand & foote j Soe love must aske yow leave before hee shoote.’ A second pair of manuscripts survive that, like the Hutton and Newdigate copies, have close similarities to each other and share a common origin, which in this case appears to have been an unidentified courtier. These copies were acquired by Sir George Savile and John Chamberlain, who sent them as enclosures in letters, and both copies were heavily abbreviated. In their accompanying letters both men said they were enclosing the entire entertainment, but both texts in fact consisted only of the farewell speech of Place (see Fig. 3.1). This abbreviated text easily fitted onto a single page and was particularly suitable for passage within the letter-writer’s flow of news and gossip; so, like the Newdigate manuscript, these copies appear to have been tailored to the demands of the individual recipient. They are not in the same hand but collation reveals that these two copies contain almost identical texts and almost certainly shared a common exemplar. Savile seems to have acquired his text while the court was at Oatlands in August, but Chamberlain was not able to provide a text to Carleton until 19 November. This was six weeks after his first letter describing the summer progress but just a few days after the court’s return to London.45 Since both men acquired their copies when in close proximity to the royal court, it is likely that Savile and Chamberlain got their texts from the same source, and that this shared source was a courtier. 44 Lady Newdigate-Newdegate, Gossip from a Muniment Room (London: David Nutt, 1897), 38. 45 The Queen returned to Whitehall on 15 Nov. in time for the Accession Day celebrations two days later. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), iv. 115.

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Fig. 3.1. The Entertainment at Harefield, Dudley Carleton’s copy. The National Archives, SP 12/285/59. Reproduced by permission of The National Archives.

It is not clear when or from whom Sir Edward Conway in Brill received his copy of the entertainment, but his position meant that he was in frequent correspondence with the court in England and, as mentioned above, his colleague Sir Robert Sidney had been sent a copy of the entertainment (now lost) by Sir William Browne on 12 August. Conway collected a great many verse manuscript separates, including a number of royal entertainments, and his interests, contacts,

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and collections will be considered in more detail in Chapter 5.46 Conway’s text of Harefield is another separate written in a neat secretary hand (see Fig. 3.2).47 This copy includes the verse parts of the entertainment but none of the prose speeches, a pattern of omissions that suggests the text was constructed to reflect Conway’s personal interests, which (as his surviving collection attests) was for manuscript poetry. Conway’s text is less closely tied to the original performance and the household at Harefield than the Hutton or Newdigate copies: the occasion of the performance is given but the copy provides little circumstantial detail about the performance. While some other copies were clearly produced as court news for readers who were expected to be interested in the entertainment as an occasion and as a reflection on the hosts, Conway’s text was produced as a literary work, and it was formal qualities (i.e. prose/verse) that determined what it included. The Harefield entertainment was initially disseminated amongst a relatively coherent elite social group that may have been physically dispersed—ranging from northern England to the Low Countries— but was well connected and in regular contact with the royal court. Other copies, most of which are textually corrupt and were probably produced at a slightly later date, show that the circulation of the entertainment soon passed outside this group. One copy of the ‘Lottery’ survives in the ‘diary’ of the Middle Temple student John Manningham, which demonstrates that the text of Harefield was circulating around the Inns of Court by February 1603.48 Given the number of errors in his copy it seems certain that it was a second-generation copy or later. Scribal literature flourished at the Inns of Court and there are many routes by which copies could have reached Manningham: through its circulation within London, from the Egerton family’s

46

For Conway as a collector see James Knowles, ‘Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’, in Martin Butler (ed.), Re-Presenting Ben Jonson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 114–51 at 123–5. He owned texts including the Jonson’s 1607 The Entertainment at Theobalds, The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse (1608), and The Gipsies Metamorphosed (1621), Middleton’s 1622 Barkham Entertainment, and the anonymous Running Masque (1620). 47 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS X.d.172. 48 BL, Harley MS 5353, fo. 95v. See The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, ed. Robert Parker Sorlien (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976). The Harefield text is between entries dated 4 and 6 Feb. 1603.

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Fig. 3.2. The Entertainment at Harefield, Sir Edward Conway’s copy. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS X.d.172, fo. 5. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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close links with Lincoln’s Inn, from another well-connected family with a member at the Inns, or from the entertainment’s author John Davies. Manningham was well placed to obtain copies of such texts—his ‘diary’ also includes an otherwise unrecorded song from a 1601 masque, for example (fo. 1r)—but for all the social connections and access to elite circles that membership of one of the Inns of Court provided, the Harefield entertainment’s circulation there made it accessible to a significantly less exclusive readership, of which John Manningham, the adoptive heir of a prosperous London mercer, is a good example. In later years the text spread more widely still. Two other miscellanies not known to have belonged to anyone close to the entertainment contain derivative texts produced in about 1605, reinforcing the link between the quality of a text and the connections of the original owner, and a third is later still.49 There are also surviving copies of the ‘Mariner’s Song’ with musical settings that are likely to have come from musicians involved in the entertainment.50 Another poetical miscellany includes a version of the ‘Lottery’ with a number of individual lots not found in any other copy.51 This manuscript preserves the earliest known version of the lottery, but the presence of texts of a slightly later date means that the manuscript must have been produced sometime after the Queen’s death. Although the unidentified compiler of this miscellany had close connections at court, his source for Harefield seems to have been John Davies’s own drafts.52 Its compiler clearly found the text worth copying but he did not show much interest about the circumstances of the entertainment’s production: it is not dated, the place is not specified, Egerton is not named, and he is given the imprecise title of Lord Chief Justice.

49 Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn MS fb 9; Folger MS Z.e.28; Oxford, The Queen’s College, MS 130. 50 BL, Add. MS 24665, fos. 19v–20r; Robert Jones, Ultimum Vale (London: n.p., 1608). 51 BL, Add. MS 22601, fos. 49–51r. 52 The best evidence of a link to the court is the sequence of poems by King James (fos. 24–5, 32–6) only otherwise known from a manuscript belonging to the royal household (BL, Add. MS 24195). For the text of the ‘Lottery’ see Poems of Davies, ed. Krueger, 409–10. The miscellany includes a number of works by Davies apparently copied from his paper, including his entertainment A Contention betwen a Wife, a Widowe and a Maide.

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In 1608 the ‘Lottery’ was printed in the second edition of A Poetical Rhapsody, which was edited by Francis Davison, the son of Elizabeth’s disgraced secretary William Davison.53 This is the only text to name John Davies as the text’s author, but by 1608 the details of the performance were becoming hazy: it is simply placed at ‘The Lord Chancellor’s house’ in 1601. The inclusion of the entertainment in a poetical miscellany clearly treats it as a literary artefact rather than court news. In its appearance in the Poetical Rhapsody the Harefield entertainment was no longer keyed to the reputation of Egerton and his wife, to be understood alongside feasts, gifts, and hospitality, but was recontextualized with sonnets and epigrams. By 1608, with the old Queen dead five years, the entertainment was no longer news nor was it relevant as a manifestation of the hosts’ status. Jonson had by this time published two masque quartos that included prefatory comments strongly defending the masque’s artistic validity, and this may well have had an effect on how other royal entertainments were read.54 One consequence of the shift towards the literary merits of the Harefield entertainment was that its authorship took on a new significance, especially given that Sir John Davies (as he was by 1608) was a well-known poet. Despite this new emphasis on its literary pedigree, Harefield’s prestigious origin remained significant in the Poetical Rhapsody. Davison was careful to note the fact of its performance before Queen Elizabeth, and this was presumably one reason for the entertainment’s prominent position as the second item in the collection. The printing of the Harefield entertainment was itself a result of its earlier circulation in manuscript. Fragmentary surviving lists of Davison’s manuscripts reveal that the Poetical Rhapsody was largely produced from his extensive personal collection of manuscript verse.55 Davison had himself written The Masque of Proteus for the Gray’s Inn Revels of 1594 so could be expected to have a particular interest in entertainments, but he had a more than amateur interest in acquiring

53

A Poetical Rapsodie (London: Nicholas Okes for Roger Jackson, 1608) sigs. B2v–B4v. Jonson had published Hymenaei (London: V. Sims for T. Thorp, 1606) and The Characters of Two Royall Masques. The One of Blacknesse, the Other of Beautie (London: G. Eld, 1608). 55 BL, Harley MS 280, fos. 102–5. 54

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manuscript texts.56 Early in the reign of James I, Davison wrote out a list of ‘manuscripts to get’, and this included ‘sports masks & Entertaynments to the Late Queen The King. &.c.’.57 The items on his list are heterogeneous: entertainments are placed alongside political items like the letters of Essex, as well as translations of the Psalms, satires, and the poems of Jonson. What connected these disparate items was readerly interest. Davison acted as a nodal point in the exchange of manuscripts: he wanted those manuscripts on his list ‘to get’ not for personal interest but because there was a ready market for them. This confirms that there was a widespread interest in entertainment texts that was catered for through the medium of manuscript and could outlast the newsworthiness of the occasion. The Harefield entertainment was transmitted through a combination of the hosts’ willingness to supply copies and readerly interest in court events and literary productions, with the readership gradually extending over a period of about seven years from a courtly coterie to a paying public. 56 The masque is included in A Poetical Rapsodie from its first edition (1602), and a manuscript copy of the masque in Davison’s own hand is in BL, Harley MS 541, fos. 138–45. 57 BL, Harley MS 298, fo. 159v.

BRIDGE

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From Elizabethan to Jacobean The death of Queen Elizabeth in March 1603 brought about an immediate shift in entertainment culture as it developed to cater for the different tastes and priorities of the new monarch and his family. The masque rapidly became established as the most significant genre for royal entertainment at the new court, principally fostered not by King James but by his wife, Queen Anna of Denmark. This development was made possible by the willingness of King James to open the royal purse to pay for entertainments; unlike the country house or tiltyard entertainment, the masque was typically hosted and paid for by the royal court. A new generation of writers was employed to provide royal entertainments for the new court. This was not necessarily because the poets of the previous reign had lost favour: in the case of John Davies, for example, the opposite was the case. His intended career had always been in the law, and he quickly found favour with the new King, was knighted, appointed solicitor general in Ireland, and largely abandoned poetry. The most significant of the new generation of writers was of course Ben Jonson, whose career as an entertainment writer began with a country house entertainment for the new Queen and Prince Henry at Sir Robert Spencer’s house of Althorp in June 1603, during their progress from Edinburgh to London. Robert Spencer was the nephew of Alice, Dowager Countess of Derby, so this device originated in an elite circle close to the hosts at Harefield the previous year. This first entertainment written by the quintessential poet of the Jacobean court was a diffuse affair very similar to Harefield and other late Elizabethan country house entertainments. It depicted an estate peopled by fanciful characters including a satyr, fairies (including Queen Mab), and the character of ‘No-body . . . attyred in a paire of breeches which were made to come up to his neck, with his armes out at his pockets, and a

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cap drowning his face’. There are only a few moments which mark the text as not being Elizabethan, most obviously the references to the death of ‘our late Diana’, but also the jibe about Elizabeth’s favour to the ‘dancing Chancellor’ Christopher Hatton (‘And though they dance afore the Queene, j Ther’s none of these doth hope to come by j Wealth, to build another Holmby [Holdenby]’).1 It is in 1604 that a distinctively Jacobean style emerges in a series of entertainments including Samuel Daniel’s vision of the 12. goddesses, the coronation pageant (especially Jonson’s contributions), as well as Jonson’s Highgate entertainment. These texts are marked by a more consistent and sophisticated use of Classical mythology and imagery, much less homespun domesticity (the Jacobean court had little patience for all those fairies and dairymaids), and a shift in tone towards solemnity as opposed to the comedy and light-hearted whimsy of Elizabethan entertainments. The fictional worlds of the Elizabethan entertainment in many ways have more charm, but there is no doubt that the Jacobean court was receptive to greater artistic ambition than its immediate predecessor. There is also no doubt that this artistic flourishing was enabled by the new King and his highly educated poetic tastes. King James’s interest in poetry gave Ben Jonson an opportunity to establish himself as the royal poet that Spenser, say, never had. Jonson himself had a strong and coherent sense of the poet’s proper role in public life, and of poetry’s potency when justly praising a prince. Whilst he was willing and able to work collaboratively in the production of an entertainment that served the agenda of a paying patron, as both Chapters 4 and 5 show, he also used entertainments—and especially court masques—to promote himself as an author. This was not entirely new, and we have already seen how George Gascoigne used an entertainment as a means of self-promotion, but Jonson’s aims and achievements were much more complex: he was not simply looking for patronage, nor did he see poetry simply as a means of self-presentation. This development of the authorial persona was very much led by Jonson, as is considered in Chapter 6, but it was only made possible by the King’s sympathy towards poetry. The clear division in style and content that separates Elizabethan from Jacobean court culture is the main reason that most scholarly 1 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vii. 128–9.

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works tend to limit themselves to either one period or the other, but there are nevertheless many continuities in the culture of entertainment. Most of the great families bridged both reigns, and the underlying structure and process of production did not change significantly. Entertainments still had to balance the host, the monarch, and the watching court, and this continued to demand close collaboration. The language was different but the function was unchanged: entertainments still expressed an agenda and a relationship at a specific moment (Chapter 4 explores a particularly distinctive example of this), and the typical forms of the previous reign, such as the country house entertainment and the tiltyard entertainment, were still performed (Chapter 5 discusses a country house entertainment of 1607). The dynamics of the court masque (the subject of Chapter 6) were somewhat different, as the royal court also served as host, but King James himself never performed in masques, so they could still pursue a distinctive agenda through performance before a watching monarch. In the early years of the reign this agenda was predominantly that of Queen Anna. The circulation of masque and entertainment texts in print and manuscript still by and large took place without any significant involvement of the royal court, and manuscript separates and printed pamphlets continued to co-exist in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Most texts continued to be produced through the agency of authors, hosts, publishers, and scribes, and, despite changes in court culture and authorship, the following chapters show that many of the issues and themes that have already been addressed continued to be important through the Jacobean years.

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PART II B EN J ON SO N A ND THE JACOBEAN COURT

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4 Negotiating Gifts: The 1607 Entertainment at Merchant Taylors’ Hall A gift is received ‘with a burden attached’. One does more than derive benefit from a thing or a festival: one has accepted a challenge, and has been able to do so because of being certain to be able to reciprocate, to prove one is not unequal. Marcel Mauss, The Gift

On 16 July 1607 the Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors, one of the twelve great livery companies of the City of London, held a feast to mark the end of the mastership of John Swynnerton and the election of a new master, John Johnson. The company elected (and still elects) a new master each year, but the election-day feast of 1607 was of unparalleled splendour because it was attended by King James I, his eldest son Prince Henry, and a large retinue of courtiers. It was an occasion that brought together the royal family with the elite of the City of London, and in which the complex relationship between these two groups found expression in the magnificence of entertainment and the dynamic of gift exchange. Among the company’s preparations for this great event was the employment of Ben Jonson to write a suitable entertainment. It was long supposed that no part of Jonson’s text survived, but three songs found among the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House, which were first tentatively associated with the entertainment by the editors of the 1607 volume of the Historical Manuscripts Commission’s calendar of the Cecil Papers, have now been firmly connected with the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment and ascribed with reasonable

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certainty to Ben Jonson.1 This chapter explores these three songs and the event for which they were commissioned. GIFT EXCHANGE Previous chapters have shown how entertainments both express and develop a relationship between monarch and subject, whether it be the courtier presenting himself as a knight errant or the owners of a country estate finding distinctive and lavish ways to express their hospitality. The country house entertainment in particular was a form of bountiful hospitality, an occasion to exhibit the proper generosity of an aristocratic host and an expression both of mutual love and of traditional hierarchies. At the heart of that hospitality was the concept of gift exchange or benefits. The hospitality provided to the King at Merchant Taylors’ Hall was closely and deliberately based on this form of aristocratic hospitality, but the King’s relationship with wealthy London merchants was fundamentally different from that with favoured courtiers: this was not a personal relationship between members of a traditional hierarchy, but a corporate relationship based on fiscal policies and commercial advantages. This difference marks the entertainment in a number of ways, and especially through its distinctive expression of the traditional ideals of the free flow of bounty, or gift exchange. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Seneca’s De Beneficiis was a fundamental text underlying the understanding of gift exchange in the early modern period.2 Seneca uses a range of evocative images to express the continuous and harmonious flow that is proper to the movement of benefits. At one point he likens exchange to a ball game, in which players pass the ball smoothly among themselves in a sequence of harmonious gestures, 1

Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 140, fo. 114; vol. 144, fos. 267, 273; HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the . . . Marquess of Salisbury . . . part XIX (1607), ed. M. S. Giuseppi and D. McN. Lockie (London: HMSO, 1965); Gabriel Heaton and James Knowles, ‘Entertainment Perfect: Ben Jonson and Corporate Hospitality’, Review of English Studies, 54 (2003), 587–600. 2 Seneca’s was the most exhaustive text on gift-giving available in the early modern period, although one of the most widely read Classical works, Cicero’s De Officiis, also discusses the subject. For the origins of early modern beliefs about giving see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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and elsewhere he conjures up the Three Graces as a representation of the ideal model of exchange. There are three of them ‘because the one of them representeth him that Bestoweth; the other, him that Receiveth; the other, him that gratifieth and remunerateth the Benefit’.3 The identification of this threefold obligation (to give, receive, and reciprocate) is just one among many points where Seneca’s theory is similar to that of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, whose book The Gift remains the seminal modern work on gift exchange.4 Seneca expands on the association with the Graces: they laugh because this is the appropriate countenance with which benefits should be exchanged, they are young because benefits should be repaid in good time, their clothes are shining and transparent because good deeds should be seen, and they dance in unity: Because the order and processe of benefits (that passe through their handes that give the same) is such, that they returne againe to the giver, and should wholly loose the grace of all which they should effect, if ever they should bee interrupted: contrariwise, that they alwaies retaine their beautie, when they are united and hand-fasted together, and when they are restored and acknowledged in their time.5

Successful gift exchange is a graceful dance, an ongoing series of gestures sustained by its own internal dynamic. Gifts are an essential bond in human society, so the social and the economic spheres are entwined in gift exchange. ‘To give a benefit is a sociable thing. It joyneth that mans favour, and obligeth this mans friendship.’6 The Senecan model fosters social bonds, as Jonson expresses in his ‘Epistle to Sir Edward Sackville, now Earl of Dorset’. This poem emphasizes the importance of timing and grace in gifts, which should freely flow from the desire of the giver rather than the request of the recipient: For benefits are ow’d with the same mind As they are done, and such returnes they find: 3 De Beneficiis, 1. 3. The translation is by Thomas Lodge in The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Both Morrall and Naturall (London: William Stansby, 1614), 4. 4 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Hall (London: Routledge, 1990), 13–14. 5 The Workes of Seneca, 4. 6 ‘Beneficium dare socialis res est, aliquem conciliat, aliquem obligat’ (5. 11. 5). The Workes of Seneca, 100–1.

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The gesture of giving demands reciprocation not only because of the material benefit it provides the recipient, but also because it is a trace of goodwill. This is a codification of behaviour that subordinates the material exchange to a prior intention, by asserting that certain (replicable) forms of behaviour in the act of exchange (grace, timeliness) are indicative of love. Restating the material gift as a gesture of affection establishes a sort of equivalence between giver and recipient and creates a forward-looking relationship between the transactors: your gift does not incur a debt but forms a bond. As well as criticizing patrons who are tardy or reluctant in the giving of benefits (‘Where any deed is forced, the grace is marred’, l. 24), Jonson is also critical of those beneficiaries who ‘will receive j Naught but in corners’ (ll. 43–4) and are reluctant to acknowledge the gift, who would ‘Give thanks by stealth, and whispering in the ear, j For what they straight would to the world foreswear’ (ll. 49–50). The fault of both is to see the gift as no more than a material exchange and thus as the acceptance of an ignoble debt; in fact the acceptance of a gift is a recognition of a social bond. The exchange of gifts should be celebrated as an incomplete, open-ended, and ongoing set of transactions; gifts, in other words, are exchanged between mutually obligated transactors.7 The deep-rootedness of gift exchange in early modern English society encouraged certain forms of entanglement between social networks and economic activity. On an individual level, the partnership of marriage was understood in financial as well as affective terms, while the natural place to look for a financial loan was among friends.8 The relatively 7 See James G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London: Routledge, 1995) and Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1983). 8 Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and the Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), discusses how notions of male friendship as an affective relationship were beginning to supersede older ideas of friendship as faithfulness assured by the circulation of gifts. A good example of a friendship with a

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unembarrassed mingling of economic self-interest and friendship is a feature of both the personal correspondence and the literature of the period. Love and economics were also mingled together in the relationship between patron and client, a form of relationship which itself underlay much literature: many of the poems of Ben Jonson, for instance, were presented by their author as gifts within a patronage relationship.9 The ‘Epistle to Sackville’ was itself both a gift to its recipient and a celebratory public acknowledgement of Jonson’s acceptance of benefits from Sackville. Even the language of commerce in early modern England did not stress open self-interest but mutual obligation and trust; furthermore, the shortage and poor quality of cash meant that a high proportion of transactions depended on credit, and the informal nature of credit meant that creditworthiness depended to a great extent on public social standing.10 Gifts, bounty, and the Senecan language of benefits was also a dominant rhetoric of government. When Rubens came to paint the Apotheosis of James I in the Whitehall Banqueting House, his representation of James’s virtuous government included Apollo as Royal Bounty overcoming Avarice.11 It was acknowledged, however, that this model, in which valuable goods flowed as tokens of love, easily shaded into corruption, and Linda Levy Peck has shown that the increasingly frequent charges of corruption levelled against administrators in the early seventeenth century was indicative of a system under pressure from an increasingly commercialized society.12

commercial interest is Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice (Jessica is the usurer’s daughter of Hutson’s title). See also Ronald A. Sharp, ‘Gift Exchange and the Economies of Spirit in The Merchant of Venice’, Modern Philology, 83 (1985–6), 250–65. 9 The role of patronage in the works of Jonson is an abiding concern of Robert C. Evans; for example, see Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (London: Associated University Presses, 1989). 10 Craig Muldrew, ‘Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Commerce in Early Modern England’, Social History, 18 (1993), 163–83; id., ‘“Hard Food for Midas”: Cash and its Social Value in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 170 (2001), 78–120. 11 Linda Levy Peck, ‘Benefits, Brokers and Beneficiaries: The Culture of Exchange in Seventeenth-Century England’, in B. Y. Kunze and D. D. Brautigam (eds.), Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern History in Honor of Perez Zagorin (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1992), 109–27. 12 Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).

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Masques and entertainments, perhaps especially the country house entertainment, were natural places for the expression of gift exchange according to the Senecan model. They often speak of affective bonds and debts of love, and the Graces themselves put in an appearance at Elvetham in 1591, removing the blocks of Envy and so allowing the Queen to move towards the house and its owner.13 As well as celebrating royal and aristocratic bounty and largess, entertainments were themselves a manifestation of those traditional virtues: they were not only opportunities for lavish gift-giving, but civic entries and country house entertainments were typically structured as gifts, with the city or mansion being figuratively (or, in one case discussed in the next chapter, literally) offered to the monarch. The model by which gifts establish bonds rather than incur debts also indicates the crudity of the argument that an entertainment ‘failed’ if the host received no obvious pay-off, or repayment of the debt incurred, in the aftermath of an entertainment. The Merchant Taylors’ entertainment is freighted much more heavily with the cultural baggage of gift exchange and its ethos than any other entertainment considered in this book because, whilst it is structured as a manifestation of traditional hospitality, convivial bonds were largely irrelevant to the relationship between the two parties that met together on that July day. This is not to suggest that gift, generosity, and patronage were alien to the mercantile community. The Livery Companies were themselves a vehicle for social cohesion and a means by which fraternal love was represented and celebrated, but these were not the terms on which merchants’ and financiers’ relationships with the Crown were conducted. COURT AND CITY IN 1607 The fundamental reason for King James’s 1607 visit to Merchant Taylors Hall is easily explained: the King needed money. Royal impecuniousness, partly resulting from the King’s prodigal largess on coming to the 13 For a further consideration of this moment and others see Felicity Heal, ‘Giving and Receiving on Royal Progress’, in J. E. Archer, E. Goldring, and S. Knight (eds.), The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 46–61.

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English throne, and exacerbated by the difficulty of raising funds through Parliamentary subsidy, was making massive loans to the Crown an increasingly common phenomenon. The most important domestic source for any loan was the cash-rich mercantile elite of the City of London.14 Leading London merchants and financiers were mostly members of one or other of the Livery Companies, so the King’s visit to one of these Companies was an excellent means of accessing London’s elite on whom he was financially dependent. There were a number of reasons for the Companies’ importance in the City of London. By the early seventeenth century the role of the Great Livery Companies had expanded far beyond that of trade guilds. The ancient and highly prestigious Great Companies were plutocracies run by rich merchants and financiers, most of whom had no connection to the attendant trade. The Livery Companies retained regulatory control over the trades whose names they bore (by and large, tailors would have been Merchant Taylors), but their real power came from their position in the civic government and official life of the City; they provided the only means of access to the higher echelons of civic power.15 Only members of the Livery (senior members) of the twelve Great Companies were eligible to be chosen for the Court of Aldermen, the body from which the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of London were drawn. Their charitable foundations made the Companies an indispensable part of wider London life, and the members’ rituals and dinners also provided, especially in the days before coffee houses, a valuable social space. The great and the good of the City of London were to be found among the Livery of the Great Companies—there were three past and future Lord Mayors at the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment.16 When the King wooed the City in the summer of 1607, visiting both the Clothworkers’ Company and Merchant Taylors’ Company in a 14

Increasingly inventive means were found for extracting money; for example, from 1609 the Livery Companies were strongly encouraged to invest in the plantation of Ulster (T. W. Moody, The Londonderry Plantation, 1609–40 (Belfast: William Mullan, 1939), 62–98). 15 William F. Kahl, The Development of the London Livery Companies: An Historical Essay and Select Bibliography (Kress Library of Business and Economics, 15; Boston: Baker Library, 1960); George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, 4th edn. (London: Cass, 1966). 16 Sir Leonard Halliday (1605), Sir William Craven (1610), and Sir John Swynnerton (1612).

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matter of weeks, the Venetian Ambassador is unlikely to have been the only one to have discerned a monetary motive: There has been such great expenditure since the King’s accession that a scarceness has displayed itself in the privy purse, and the King has conceived some resentment against the Treasurer . . . To meet the want of money they will have recourse to various expedients, among them to a loan from the City. With this in view the King, contrary to his custom, went to dine privately with the Mayor, two days ago. He hopes by this popular act to have rendered the citizens more ready to comply with his wishes.17

In truth, however, the King’s advisers may have been less concerned with an immediate need for cash than with an incipient decline in royal credit. Robert Ashton has observed that the creditworthiness of the Crown was dependent on its refusal to take advantage of its uniquely powerful position, and punctiliously to repay loans despite the inevitable weakness of the terms upon which they were secured.18 Such abstemious behaviour was not a strength of the early Stuart monarchy. A debt to the Corporation of London originally incurred by Elizabeth in 1599 was only just being repaid in 1607, several years late. In 1604 another £15,000 had been raised for the Crown directly through the Livery Companies—the Merchant Taylors had been assessed as the single richest company on that occasion. The loan had been due in 1606 but at the time of the King’s visit in 1607 it still had not been repaid to the Merchant Taylors (or the Goldsmiths).19 These facts go a long way to explaining why the King decided to honour this particular company with a visit. Despite King James’s visits to the City in 1607 the effects of his profligacy became clear in the following years. In 1610 City financiers accepted another loan only with a plethora of securities, notwithstanding which repayment was still delayed, and in 1614 the City refused to loan the Crown £100,000, offering instead a free gift of £10,000.20 The picture is not simply one of a rapacious monarch condescending to visit wealthy subjects to make them more agreeable to a future 17 Despatch of 24 June 1607 [NS], Calendar of State Papers: Venetian, 1607–10, ed. Horatio F. Brown (London: HMSO, 1904), 8. 18 Robert Ashton, The Crown and the Money Market 1603–40 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 68. 19 20 Ibid. 114–17. Ibid. 118–22.

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extraction of cash, since the commercial interests of many merchants were strongly bound up with the Crown in a complex web of financial interdependence which included patents, monopolies, and overseas trade under the aegis of the various joint stock companies (the viability of which depended on royal charters acknowledging their sole right to trade with a certain area, and the willingness of the Crown to enforce these privileges). Probably the best example of the symbiotic relationship between Crown and City was customs farming: those who won the contracts to raise customs revenue on behalf of the Crown were able to make massive profits, while the Crown was relieved of administrative costs and ensured a constant revenue. Again, a central factor underlying this relationship was the perpetual indebtedness of the Crown. A crucial advantage of the system of customs farming to the early Stuarts was that the farmers were among their most regular creditors: the system created a group of businessmen directly dependent on the Crown’s support, which could easily be withdrawn, and who could thus easily be pressurized into lending money to the Crown, while for the merchants lending money was a way of ensuring that they remained indispensable and kept their profitable farms.21 A number of men with business interests binding them close to the Crown were found in the higher echelons of the Merchant Taylors’ Company. Several were major investors in joint stock companies, especially the East India Company.22 The greatest of these investors was Sir Leonard Halliday, a senior liveryman who had served as Lord Mayor of London in 1605–6. Halliday had invested £1,000 in the first East India Company voyage in 1599, followed by another £1,440 in 1601; he was one of the founding directors and was the East India Company Treasurer in 1602.23 Richard Wright, a Warden of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, was the East India Company’s secretary

21

Ibid. 70–2, 79–85. The group also included investors in the Spanish Company, among them John Swynnerton senior and junior, and especially Thomas Owen, a Warden of the Merchant Taylors and a director of the Spanish Company (Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), Appendix). 23 Calendar of State Papers: Colonial, East Indies 1513–1616, ed. Noel Sainsbury (London: HMSO, 1862), 99, 105, 125, 131. 22

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and had invested in it since its incorporation in 1600.24 Sir John Swynnerton, the son of the Master in 1607, had also been one of the original investors in the East India Company, putting £300 into the first venture in 1599 and making a further investment in 1600.25 Another past investor had been William Albany, also a Merchant Taylor Warden in 1607, and John Johnson, the new Master in 1607, was to invest in the East India Company in 1614.26 Sir John Swynnerton and Richard Wright were the two liverymen with the closest links to the court, and these same two men also played central roles in organizing the King’s visit to Merchant Taylors’ Hall. Swynnerton was an Alderman and an MP, he had served as Sheriff of London in 1603, and was a future Lord Mayor. He was a leading wine merchant and a customs farmer, and his success in both capacities depended on his close contacts with the Court. From 1593 until 1605 (except for the years 1597–9) he had been the farmer of French and Rhenish wines, and was the court’s wine supplier.27 He had lost the lucrative wine customs in 1605, along with a bid for the new Great Customs Farm, but was doing all he could to win back his position. He was an implacable opponent of the winning syndicate and in 1607, backed by the Earl of Northampton, he was engaged in a concerted attempt to have their contract dissolved by accusing them of fraud and offering the government a higher rent and a large cash payment if he was given the monopoly.28 His attempt to gain control of the Great Farm was unsuccessful in 1607 but the Crown used his arguments to demand an increased rent from the governing syndicate. Swynnerton tried again in 1612 with somewhat greater success: he did not win the Great Farm but he did gain the grant of the sweet wine duties, while once again his opponents’ rents were ratcheted up.29 24

25 26 Ibid. 107, 131, 134. Ibid. 101, 116. Ibid. 124. HMC, Salisbury, ix. 249–50, 304; xiv. 138–9; xvii. 168; HMC, Calendar of Sackville Manuscripts, 2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1940–66), i. 299–306; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1603–10, ed. M. A. E. Green (London: Longman, 1857), 137, 459; Frederick C. Dietz, English Public Finance 1558–1641 (London: Frank Cass, 1964), 316, 324, 329–32. 28 The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), i. 243; CSP, Domestic Series, 1603–10, 480. 29 Letters of John Chamberlain, i. 404–5; Linda Levy Peck, Northampton: Patronage and Politics at the Court of King James (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), 131–8. 27

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The second crucial figure among the Merchant Taylors was the above-mentioned Warden, Richard Wright. He was the Packer of the City of London, had the impost of tobacco, and was paymaster to troops in the Low Countries, gaining the last position through the agency of the Earl of Salisbury.30 He had also held the customs farm for currants (with Roger Dallison) since 1604, as a client of the Earl of Suffolk. This put him at loggerheads with the Levant Company, whose merchants imported currants and wanted the income from the customs to pay for their ambassador in Constantinople, and court patrons played, as always, a crucial role in the resulting dispute.31 The courtly connections of Swynnerton and Wright were, as will be seen, much in evidence when the King came to visit.

THE ROYAL VISIT TO THE CLOTHWORKERS’ COMPANY The visit to Merchant Taylors’ Hall had been preceded on 12 June 1607 by another royal encounter with London’s civic dignitaries, when the King had been feasted by the Lord Mayor Sir John Watts, a member of the Clothworkers’ Company. Royal involvement in London’s civic ceremonies was unusual before the reign of Charles II, but although King James did not take part in London’s own ceremonials again after 1607 there were a number of other entertainments which brought together the King and London’s ruling oligarchy during his reign, notably more than under either Elizabeth or Charles I. When Frederick, Elector Palatine, came to England to marry the King’s daughter Elizabeth, he was feasted at the Guildhall at the expense of the Lord Mayor on 30 October 1612. The Mayor that year was Sir John Swynnerton, the man who had played a leading role in organizing the visit to the Merchant Taylors’ Hall in 1607. On 4 January 1614 the Corporation of

30 HMC, Salisbury, xiv. 153–4; HMC, De L’Isle, iv. 198; HMC, Sackville, i. 130–1; Letters of John Chamberlain, i. 204. As Packer, Wright was responsible for supervising the packing of exported goods liable for custom duties. 31 Dietz, English Public Finance, 364–6.

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London paid for the performance of Thomas Middleton’s Masque of Cupids, which formed part of the celebrations for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset and Lady Frances Howard. Perhaps the closest parallel to the 1607 Merchant Taylors’ entertainment came on 8 June 1616, when the King attended Alderman Cockayne’s celebration of the New Merchant Adventurers’ Company. That entertainment was also written by Jonson.32 Sir John Watts, King James’s first civic host of 1607, was another merchant whose success had been directly dependent on the monarchy: he had made his fortune through privateering—he was described to the King of Spain as ‘the greatest pirate that has ever been in this kingdom’—and had been Governor of the East India Company in 1601.33 The King, attended by the Duke of Lennox and other courtiers, visited Watts’s home, along with his corporate companions from the livery of the Clothworkers’ Company. After the feast, Watts and the Clothworkers ‘became humble suiters unto his Majestie that he wold be pleazed to honor the said Company of Clothworkers by vouchsafinge to be free thereof, to the which his Highnes (being informed that some of his Predecessors Kings of England had heretofore vouchsafed to be free of some other of the Companyes of the said Citty) graciously condiscended’.34 This exchange took the form of a sequence of apparently spontaneous reciprocal gestures. The Clothworkers’ invitation and the King’s acceptance had presumably been discussed beforehand, but to make sense as a gesture of goodwill they had to have the appearance of spontaneity—the respondent must be seen to have voluntarily chosen his response. Yet any such gesture had to be balanced against royal propriety, hence the care to establish that the King’s action was endorsed by precedent. The King’s invitation to join the Company having been accepted, the assembled company moved to the Company Hall, which adjoined Watts’s house and had been freshly prepared with flowers and boughs

32 N. W. Bawcutt, ‘Ben Jonson’s Drunken Hamburgians: An Entertainment for King James’, Notes and Queries, 242 (1997), 92–4. 33 G. E. Cockayne, Some Accounts of the Lord Mayors and Sheriffs of the City of London, 1601–25 (London: Phillimore, 1897), 28–30. 34 London, Clothworkers’ Company, Orders of Courts 1605–25, fo. 21v.

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of birch.35 Symbols of royalty had been hung on the walls including a portrait of the King (borrowed from the Merchant Taylor Leonard Halliday) and an escutcheon of the royal arms, and the King was seated on a newly made great chair cushioned with green velvet and with the Company’s arms carved on its back. Seated in this corporate space: the said Lord Maior, Sir William Stone [Master of the Clothworkers’ Company]36 the Wardens & others of the said Company kneelinge before him . . . his highness was pleazed openly to publish that hee wolde from thenceforth be a free brother of the said Company of Clothworkers, and his Majestie was then also pleazed to drinke to the said Lord Maior Sir William Stone & the reste of the said Company by the name of his good bretheren the Clothworkers, prayenge to god to blesse all good Clothworkers & all good clothwearers, Whereuppon the said Lord Maior Sir William Stone & the reste of the Company in token of theyr great joy and thankfulnes kissed his Majesties royall handes[.]37

Although this gesture was meant to indicate the unity of King and City, the manner of its enactment acknowledged the King’s position above this civic fraternity. The King joined the Company by stating that he was happy to be known as a brother, but did not take the customary oath of membership, and while he (somewhat facetiously) toasted the Company, this was no loving cup passed around the group: he was presented with the wine by the Earls of Shrewsbury and Cumberland, both of whom were noble as well as freemen of the Clothworkers’ Company.38 The King’s visit was a significant coup for the Clothworkers’ Company, which ranked lowest in the ceremonial hierarchy of the twelve Great Companies, and they were eager to commemorate, publicize, and

35

Clothworkers Company, Quarter Warden’s account book, 1606–7, fos. 8r–12v. Stone was another figure with profitable links to the court as a moneylender and supplier of goods to the Queen (HMC, Salisbury, xix. 249). 37 Orders of Courts 1605–25, fo. 21v. 38 John Stow and Edmund Howes, The Annales or Generall Chronicle of England, begun first by maister John Stow, and after him continued . . . vnto the ende of . . . 1614 (London: Thomas Adams, 1615), 890. For the significance of oaths in early modern London see James Knowles, ‘The Spectacle of the Realm: Civic Consciousness, Rhetoric, and Ritual in Early Modern London’, in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 157–89 at 163–6. 36

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repeat it. On 30 June 1607 the Company determined to ‘invite the Kinges Majestie to dynner at the Eleccion of the new Maister & wardens’.39 It was agreed to consult with the Lord Mayor on the matter, but three days beforehand the Court of Assistants of the Merchant Taylors’ Company had been informed that the King, Queen, Prince Henry, and various courtiers intended dine with them on their election night, so this second visit to the Clothworkers never took place.40 Despite this failure to get a return royal visit, on 28 July Sir William Stone, ‘moved this Court that for asmuch as it hath pleazed the Kinges majestie to vouchsafe to be free of this Company, hee thought it fitt for the worshipp & creditt of the Company that the Hall should be enlarged’.41 They also ensured that the event was written into history: in May of the following year the Clothworkers paid Edmund Howes £5 for inserting an account of the evening into his continuation of Stow’s Annales.42 THE MERCHANT TAYLORS’ ENTERTAINMENT The King’s attendance at the Merchant Taylors’ dinner took place a month after he visited the Clothworkers. Just as the King’s acceptance of membership had been the centrepiece of the earlier visit, so on this second occasion Prince Henry was invited to join the Merchant Taylors’ Company. The King’s decision to visit the Merchant Taylors rather than accepting the invitation to dine with the Clothworkers ensured that more of the city elite gained the privilege of his presence and avoided the potentially divisive appearance of favouritism. International diplomacy also played a part in his decision. Representatives of the United Provinces were in London to discuss the ongoing negotiations for a truce with Spain. The Clothworkers’ feast did not occur until after the Deputies had left the country, but they were able to be present at the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment ‘by [the King’s] special order’.43 39

Orders of the Court 1605–25, fo. 22r. Guildhall Library, Merchant Taylors’ Company, Minutes of the Court of Assistants, v. 261. 41 Orders of the Court 1605–25, fo. 24r. 42 Quarter Warden’s Account 1607–8, fo. 13v; Stow and Howes, Annales, 890. 43 Orders of Courts 1605–25, fo. 22r; CSP Venetian, 19. 40

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The Netherlanders’ negotiations for a truce with Spain had been embarrassing for the English when announced earlier in the year: ‘the Suddainness used in it is somewhat strange to his Majesty, who hath not ben made acquainted with it, but after it was already concluded’.44 The most important condition of any peace, from King James’s point of view, was that the United Provinces be acknowledged as an independent state.45 One means of acknowledging this aspiration to statehood was to treat the deputies with the sort of respectful ceremonial usually reserved for full ambassadors. During their stay the Deputies were feasted by the Sheriffs of London and by the Merchant Adventurers’ Company, but ‘theyre best entertainment was at Marchant-taylers feast on Thursday where they met the King and were placed next the Prince with many other extraordinarie favors’.46 Apparently, the Spanish ambassador was ‘redy to burst to see them so graced’. The King’s public favour to the representative of the United Provinces would undoubtedly have played well in London, where, as is suggested by the various entertainments provided for their benefit, considerable solidarity was felt for their cause as co-religionists who were also the nation’s primary trading partner. The Merchant Taylors’ continuing support was made clear in 1619 when they gave a feast for the farewell of Commissioners from the United Provinces and a masque of ‘artillerie men’ was provided.47 Although it is not clear whose idea it was to hold the entertainment in 1607, Sir John Swynnerton was probably the central figure within the Company. His father John Swynnerton was the outgoing Master, making it his decision whether to hold an election-day feast. In reality, however, John Swynnerton’s more prominent, richer, and ambitious son was much more important. He also evidently had a fondness for lavish pageantry. Swynnerton senior had been too ill to attend Company meetings between January and May 1607 and, although he was present during the summer, by 28 August 1607 he was once again too ill to come—he never attended another meeting and died the following 44 Salisbury to Winwood, 2 Apr. 1607, in Ralph Winwood et al., Memorials of Affairs of State, ed. Edmund Sawyer, 3 vols. (London: T. Ward, 1725), ii. 298. 45 Ibid. ii. 329–35. 46 Letters of John Chamberlain, i. 245. 47 Ibid., ii. 233.

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year.48 These feasts were conventionally held at the expense of the outgoing master, but on this occasion Swynnerton senior was only able to pay £140 towards the £1,061. 5s. 1d. cost of the entertainment, leaving his colleagues somewhat disgruntled (MCA, 283). The first documentary indication that a great entertainment was planned is found in the minutes of the Merchant Taylors’ Court of Assistants meeting of 27 June 1607, in which it is recorded that ‘the Kinges moast excellent Majesty with our gratious Queene, and the noble Prince, and diverse honorable Lordes and others determyne to dyne at our hall on the day of th’eleccyon of Master & Wardens’.49 This gave the Company less than three weeks to make the necessary preparations. These preparations expose the clear intention of the Court of Assistants, the governing body of the Company, to spare no expense in ensuring that they provide the most magnificent possible hospitality. Richard Wright’s contacts at court were recognized and utilized in his appointment as a caterer specifically entreated ‘from tyme to tyme t’attend at court to understand from my Lord Chamberlen [i.e. the Earl of Suffolk], and my lord of Salisbury, what complementes are fytt to be performed by the company, and to knowe yf his majesty hould his purpose and resolucyon to come’ (MCA, 262). Sir John Swynnerton and Alderman Geoffrey Elwes invited ‘all the Lordes that are resident about London’ (MCA, 264) to join the feast. The payments for consumables provide vivid evidence of the opulence with which the King was entertained.50 To give a few illustrative examples: the Company purchased 224 tongues from various unfortunate animals; fifty-nine pikes; seventeen swans; 417 chickens; ten owls; 1,300 eggs; 360 pounds of butter; 446 pounds of sugar; fourteen and a quarter gallons of cream; twenty-eight barrels and a tun of beer and ale; 48 Memorials of the Guild of Merchant Taylors, ed. Charles Matthew Clode (London: Harrison, 1875), 588; Guildhall Library, Merchant Taylors’ Company, Minutes of the Court of Assistants, v. 243, 255, 283, 331. Further references refer to this volume as MCA and will be incorporated in the text. 49 MCA, v. 261. The Company’s extensive records pertaining to the entertainment were printed almost in full in Memorials, ed. Clode, 147–81. A portion is also transcribed, to a higher degree of accuracy, in A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640, ed. Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon (Malone Society Collections, 3; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 168–74. 50 Guildhall Library, Merchant Taylors’ Company, Account Books, vol. 9, unpaginated (Memorials, ed. Clode, 164–81).

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about 441 gallons of wine; twenty-four pounds of prunes; twenty pounds of currants; three gallons of gooseberries; sixty pounds of potatoes; 120 artichokes; and fourteen pickled lemons. Then there was the banquet with its pastes, candied fruits, comfits and so on, which alone cost £80. Plasterers, bricklayers, carpenters, masons, joiners, slaters, ironmongers, gardeners, and labourers were all employed to alter and beautify the hall, which was the largest of the livery company halls.51 £1,000 was a vast sum to spend on a feast. Sir Thomas Egerton’s entertainment of Queen Elizabeth five years earlier, which had impressed contemporaries with its prodigality, had cost him about £500 per day. Even Lord Mayor’s Shows, massive public festivities involving land and water pageants, typically cost much less than this feast: the last Merchant Taylors’ show in 1605 had cost about £700, and Sir John Swynnerton’s show in 1612 was unusual in costing nearly £1,000 (another example of his love of extravagant pageantry).52 Nevertheless, even this sum was dwarfed by the cost of the Twelfth Night masques at Whitehall, which could cost £2,000 or more.53 The Merchant Taylors went to great lengths to provide hospitality that would surpass that provided by other civic bodies and match the forms of entertainment found at the royal court itself. The King’s generous gesture in condescending to visit, which demanded of the Company a response equal to their honour, was answered with such magnificence that it in turn put pressure on the King to make an adequate acknowledgement of their honour. The competitive edge of this display was directed against both the royal court and rival city interests. A debate within the Company at a meeting on 9 July reveals a clear anxiety that the honour manifested by the lavish hospitality should be reflected back solely to the Company. The question was whether the Lord Mayor and aldermen should be invited to the feast, 51 Account Books, vol. 9. The hall’s dimensions in the 19th c., probably the same as two centuries earlier, were 82  43  43 feet (Memorials, ed. Clode, 587). 52 See Lord Mayors’ Pageants of the Merchant Taylors’ Company in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries, ed. R. T. D. Sayle (London: Eastern Press, 1931), 65, 78. 53 There are records of costs of £2,000 for the 1604 Masque of Blacknesse, although it was reported by contemporaries to have cost £3,000, while the somewhat confusing accounts relating to the 1609 Masque of Queenes include one total charge of £2,751 (Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), x. 445–6 and 493).

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and it was widely felt that to invite outsiders would ‘much derogate from the privat company who should be at the whole chardge, And so make it seeme as an entertaynement done at the charge of the whole cytty’ (MCA, 265). Their wariness concerning the agenda of the wider civic body was especially driven by the long history of animosity between the Merchant Taylors’ and the Clothworkers’ Companies.54 Suspicion of the Clothworkers surfaced in the argument that my Lord Maior for the present yere being a Clothworker and having procured the king to grace that company and to cause his Majestes name to be entred as one of that society, he woulde doe his endevor to crosse our Company of that honor, which wee understand the Princes Highnes meaneth to conferr upon our company (MCA, 265)[.]

This also reveals that Prince Henry’s acceptance of membership of the Company was agreed in advance. It was decided not to invite the Lord Mayor, but the Company’s concerns were not unfounded as the City authorities, led by Watts the piratical Clothworker, were evidently keen to appropriate some of the honour of being associated with the coming entertainment. Two days before the entertainment the Recorder of the City tried to pressure the Company into reversing their decision but he was fobbed off with the argument that there would be no space for the Mayor and other civic dignitaries in the Hall. When this did not succeed, the response of the Mayor was to turn up uninvited before the King and indulge in some impromptu ceremonials: [T]he Lord maior and Aldermen (albeit they were not invited, and some of them discontented therwith) came all to the hall in their scarlett, and there staied untill his majestes coming, And then the Lord maior and the master of our company and some of the Aldermen went to the gate next the streete, And the Lord maior delivered up his sword to the king, and the master of the company did welcome his majesty and attended his majesty up into the hall. (MCA, 267)

Although the attempted exclusion of the wider civic authorities from the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment was a decision made entirely by 54 The similarity of their trades had led to disputes over searching rights in the 16th c.; see Thomas Girtin, The Golden Ram: A Narrative History of the Clothworkers’ Company, 1528–1958 ([London]: Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, [1958]), 21, 29–32, 42–5, 51–2.

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the Company, most preparations seem to have been made in close consultation with the royal court, with Richard Wright acting as the conduit between the two bodies. It was Wright’s patrons Salisbury and Suffolk who formally invited the King along with the Queen and Prince Henry (MCA, 264), and the court was behind the invitation of the Dutch Deputies (it was probably the favour done to the Dutch that kept the pro-Spanish Queen away). The court was also concerned with the spatial arrangement of the hall. The Company was informed that ‘the Kinges Majesty will dyne in the Kinges chamber, and the Princes highnes in the greate hall’ (MCA, 262), and in response to this the committee responsible for the entertainment ordered structural alterations to the hall. Care was taken that the King and court be segregated from the civic company. The King’s chamber was a recently constructed and richly decorated room that adjoined the hall at the upper end, and the installation of an internal window looking down into the hall allowed King James to watch the election ritual from the elevated vantage point of his chamber.55 The symbolism of this paralleled the way that the government of London was largely autonomous from the Crown whilst ultimately deriving its authority from it. In the hall itself, the normal long table was replaced by smaller tables to allow Prince Henry and the nobles to dine separately from their hosts. The walls of the garden were raised so James could walk in them without being observed from a neighbouring tavern. A large band of musicians was assembled, many of whom regularly performed at court. Of the three singers, John Allen sang in The Masque of Queens and The Lords’ Masque, while Thomas Lupo was a member of a prominent family of court musicians.56 At least one of the two treble violinists, Stephen Thomas, was drawn from the City Waits, although he also performed in The Lords’ Masque of 1614.57 A band of twelve lutenists had been gathered together from a number of sources.58 They 55

Memorials, ed. Clode, 36. Account Books, vol. 9 (Memorials, ed. Clode, 177); A Biographical Dictionary of English Court Musicians, 1485–1714, comp. Andrew Ashbee and David Lasocki, 2 vols. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). The third singer was John Richards. 57 Accounts Book, vol. 9 (Memorials, ed. Clode, 178); Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–40 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 39. 58 The lutenists were Thomas Robinson, John Done, George Roselor, Thomas Sturgon, William Fregosie, John Robson, Nicholas Sturt and his unnamed son, William 56

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were divided into two groups of six in galleries on either side of the hall near the upper end, screened off by birch screens in which windows had been cut.59 Also placed ‘over the skreene’ were six wind musicians drawn from the Royal Music. Only two of these musicians are named in the records: Peter Edney, a flautist, and one of the Lanier family.60 One decision made by the Company committee was to employ Ben Jonson. The minutes reveal that this decision was made in order to ensure that the Merchant Taylors’ Company hosted their King in a manner that would impress the court (see Fig. 4.1): Sir John Swynnerton is entreated to conferr with Master Benjamyn Johnson the Poet about a speech to be made to welcome his Majesty and for musique and other inventions which may give liking and delight to his Majesty by reason that the company doubt, that their schoolmaster and schollers be not acquainted with such kinde of Entertaynementes. (MCA, 262)

Traditional pageantry in London and other cities had typically been the responsibility of schoolmasters—here Merchant Taylors’ School—but the Company was following similar decisions by other civic bodies to employ established writers, preferably with links to the court, when charged with entertaining royalty. As early as the 1570s, the civic authorities in both Bristol and Norwich had employed Thomas Churchyard and others to provide the entertainment when Queen Elizabeth visited these cities. It was a decision that could be divisive (Churchyard had his entertainment at Bristol sabotaged by a discontented schoolmaster ‘who envied that any stranger should set forth these shoes [i.e. shows]’), and that had its origins in part in the suppression of

Browne, Joseph Sherley, William Morley, and Robert Kennersly. Accounts Book, vol. 9 (A Calendar of Dramatic Records, ed. Robertson and Gordon, 173). John Robson was a member of the City Waits and when he died his place was taken by John Sturt, perhaps Nicholas’s son. A list of London Waits can be found in Walter W. Woodfill, Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth I to Charles I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 247–51. Thomas Robinson was a Cecil client; see Lynn Hulse, ‘The Musical Patronage of Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 114 (1991), 24–40 at 27. Robert Kindersley was employed as a violinist in the King’s Music in 1631; Walls, Music, 174. 59 Account Books, vol. 9 (A Calendar of Dramatic Records, ed. Robertson and Gordon, 174); MCA, 267–8. 60 Biographical Dictionary of Court Musicians. Six sons of Nicholas Lanier played wind instruments in the Royal Music.

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Fig. 4.1. The minutes of the Merchant Taylors’ Company Court of Assistants meeting following King James’s announcement that he would dine at their hall, including their decision to employ Ben Jonson. Merchant Taylors’ Company Court Minute Book, vol. 5, p. 261. Reproduced by permission of the Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors.

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traditional local pageantry such as Corpus Christi plays that would once have been performed before a visiting dignitary.61 In a recent study of the civic entertainments of the 1570s, C. E. McGee has argued that the increasing employment of professional London writers who provided imported and courtly forms of pageant performance was indicative of an increasingly centralized culture and state, but that it did not prevent these performances from being vehicles for the expression of local concerns.62 Traditional civic rituals were subordinate in the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment, which was more explicitly imitative of courtly forms than any previous civic entertainment, but it was nevertheless, like those earlier entertainments, an assertive performance by a confident civic body. By 1607 Jonson was an established court poet so would have been a logical choice as one likely to ‘give liking and delight to his Majesty’, and furthermore both of Richard Wright’s principal contacts at court, the Earls of Salisbury and Suffolk, had had previous dealings with Jonson. He was also a Londoner with bonds within the city as a freeman of the Tylers’ and Bricklayers’ Company. Although Jonson largely excluded his civic commissions from his Workes, preferring to figure himself as the King’s man, he had written part of the City’s coronation pageants for King James as well as the (lost) Lord Mayor’s pageant for the Haberdashers’ Company in 1604.63 Many years later he was also appointed London’s Chronologer. Jonson was paid £20 ‘for inventing the speech to his Majesty and for making the songes, and his direccions to others in that busines’.64 He did not just write verses but was consulted about various aspects of the entertainment and had a supervisory role over the evening: there was, 61

The First parte of Churchyardes Chippes, sig. O6v. C. E. McGee, ‘Mysteries, Musters, and Masque: The Import(s) of Elizabethan Civic Entertainments’, in J. E. Archer, E. Goldring, and S. Knight (eds.), The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 104–21. 63 Records of several civic commissions are noted in Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, xi. 586–7, and the surviving records relating to the 1604 Lord Mayor’s pageant for the Haberdashers’ Company, which show that Anthony Munday was employed as well as Jonson, and that a printed pamphlet of the device was produced, are printed in full in A Calendar of Dramatic Records, ed. Robertson and Gordon, 61–8. 64 Account Books, vol. 9 (A Calendar of Dramatic Records, Robertson and Gordon, 174). 62

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after all, no body of skilled workers regularly employed by the Company with experience in the provision of entertainments. The terms of Jonson’s employment were presumably modelled on the role played by the writer of a Lord Mayor’s Show, when the commission often included responsibility for costumes and printing the text. Jonson’s presence at rehearsals is confirmed by a payment to ‘Master Johnson’ for the musicians’ dinner the day before the performance, and his responsibility for paying ‘Powle’s singing men’.65 His influence may well be seen in the employment of John Heminges, a leading player in the King’s Men who had acted in Every Man in his Humour and Volpone, and who on this occasion prepared John Rice, the boy actor who spoke Jonson’s speech of welcome.66 Jonson may also have advised that Giovanni Coprario was the right musician to set his songs: Coprario was regularly employed by the Earl of Salisbury so would have worked with Jonson on previous occasions.67 JONSON’S SONGS Some paragraphs back we left King James entangled in unplanned ceremonials with the Lord Mayor. Jonson’s contribution to the entertainment began soon after the Mayor had relinquished his hold on the King. Once the King had entered the hall and sat on the chair of state, ‘a very proper child well spoken being clothed like an Angell of gladnes, with a taper of Francinnsence burning in his hand, delivered a short speech contayning xviii verses, devised by Master Benjamyn Johnson’ (MCA, 267). A certain amount can be surmised about the speech of 65

Ibid. Ibid. (A Calendar of Dramatic Records, Robertson and Gordon, 172). Rice went on to perform as a Nymph in the pageants for the creation of Henry as Prince of Wales, may have acted in Chapman’s Memorable Masque, and later joined the Princess Elizabeth’s and then the King’s Men, in which capacity he is listed in the first folio of Shakespeare. Edwin Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors . . . in England before 1642 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 297. 67 Dictionary of Court Musicians; Hulse, ‘The Musical Patronage’, 26. Coprario’s first major court commission was The Lords’ Masque of 1612/13, in which many of the musicians employed in 1607 also performed. His music for 1607 does not survive; Richard Charteris, John Coprario: A Thematic Catalogue of his Music (New York: Pendragon Press, 1977). 66

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welcome, although no copy of the text appears to have survived. If the speech was short, then ‘contayning xviii verses’ probably means eighteen lines of verse. These lines almost certainly made use of the classical symbolism of frankincense. It was burnt as an offering, a symbol of the public acknowledgement of gratitude, on many different occasions both private and public. One such occasion was the triumphal entry of a monarch; for example, Quintus Curtius describes how the civic leaders of Babylon welcomed Alexander the Great with frankincense and other offerings.68 But frankincense was also a luxury dependent on effective overseas trade—an account of which takes up much of Pliny’s discussion of frankincense—and as such it served as a reminder of the commercial interests of the King’s hosts.69 Once the Angel had spoken the music struck up. The centrepiece of the entertainment was three singers dressed as mariners who sang from a ship that hung from the ceiling. The ship was the Company’s pageant ship. It had been made in 1602 for Sir Robert Lee’s Mayoralty when it had been chosen to signify the Company, ‘in regard of this Companies Incorporacion and name of Merchantailors, as also in regard, the saide two woorshipfull persons [i.e. Lee and (Sir) John Swynnerton, a Sheriff in that year], are merchantes by profession, the shippe is proper and very apt, for this occasion, and tyme’ (MCA, 60). After the pageant, payments were made for ‘new paynting and setting up the shipp and pageant in the Companies Hall’.70 This same ship was reused for Sir Leonard Halliday’s mayoralty in 1605 and continued in use up to the Civil War.71 It was typically used to represent the trading interests of the new Lord Mayor: for Sir Leonard Halliday it was laden with Eastern spices and silks; for Swynnerton it

68 Quintus Curtius, History of Alexander, trans. John C. Rolfe, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1962) 5. 1, ll. 19–22. 69 Pliny, Historia Naturalis, trans. H. Rackham, 10 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1967–9), 12. 30. 70 Lord Mayors’ Pageants, ed. Sayle, 65. 71 Although it was omitted from an inventory of 1609, ‘One Shipp hanging in the hall’ is listed in the 1618 inventory of the Company’s property; Guildhall Library, Merchant Taylors’ Company, Ancient Manuscript Book 12, unpaginated and unfoliated. It was once again hung from the ceiling when the King and Queen visited the Hall to see The Triumph of Peace in 1634 (A Calendar of Dramatic Records, ed. Robertson and Gordon, 180).

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was filled with wine; and Sir John Gore’s 1624 pageant included references to woollen cloth.72 Dressing up in sailor suits was not just a matter of high camp. Like the tuneful mariner who brought gifts to Elizabeth and her ladies at Harefield in 1602, these sailors were a reminder of the maritime origin of England’s wealth. This was especially relevant to London, the country’s greatest port. Thomas Campion’s 1614 Somerset Masque included a chorus of twelve skippers who were introduced to break up the masquers’ dances and had little connection to the main plot of this rather diffuse masque. Campion’s mariners were, like the mariners of 1607, specifically connected to London: they appeared in four barges, singing and dancing in celebration, immediately after a scene change has revealed ‘London with the Thames . . . very arteficially presented’.73 The first song of the 1607 London mariners expressed, in idealized figural terms, the nature of the Company’s relationship with the King: Jolly Mate, Looke forthe & see what Lightes those bee. The Ayre doth glowe as if the starrs were all at warrs. I know not what they are In all my houres at seas I have not seene such Lightes as these. Is not the one, that fixed starr that guides us out at Sea so farr the glory of the North? It is: And those the fires that shine About our tacklinges, and devine Cleare Calmes, & safety when w’are forth. Double, oˆ double then our joyes and say, Their wished sight nere brought a happier day.

10

72 Anthony Munday, The Triumphes of re-united Britania (London: W. Jaggard, 1605), sig. A4v; Thomas Dekker, Troia-Nova Triumphans (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), sig. v B1 ; John Webster, Monuments of Honor (London: Nicholas Okes, 1624), sig. B4r. 73 Thomas Campion, The Description of a Maske: Presented . . . At the Mariage of the Right Honourable the Earle of Somerset (London: E. A. for Lawrence Lisle, 1614), sig. v B2 .

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Part II: Ben Jonson and the Jacobean Court Nothing could more wellcome be to us then hee. who doth our course abroad direct at home protect Then Wellcome Let us sing And thanckes to these bright formes who with their presence fright all stormes: We will both thanckes and Wellcome Ring True wellcome non but glad hartes bring. and Wellcome ours shall pay They shall: Nor is there Losse in Love. Free gratitude to powers above findes fayth & favour in the way. Wellcome oˆ Wellcome then our Joyes; and maye still Wellcome be the chorus of this Day.74

20

30

Although the presence of a large group is acknowledged in the opening lines, the emphasis is on the Royal guests and especially King James, the lodestar whose fixed presence guides their travels abroad and protects them at home. The ‘fires that shine’ are the lights of St Elmo’s fire and the line ‘Double, oˆ double then our joyes’ suggests that the reference is to the two other expected royal visitors, the Queen and Prince Henry. According to Pliny, St Elmo’s fire was a good omen when seen double: it signified the protection of Castor and Pollux, which meant the ship would not be wrecked, a belief referred to in lines 21–2 of the song. It is somewhat unfortunate that the Queen did not attend, since a single discharge of St Elmo’s fire portended shipwreck.75 Lines 23–8 introduce an economic frame of reference which runs through all three surviving songs. The currency of exchange is the ‘Welcome’ which passes freely from the hosts to the guests and is a signifier of their ‘glad hartes’ (l. 24). Yet the ‘glad hartes’ are not spontaneously inspired: the love and happiness felt by the hosts and expressed in their welcome is described as resulting from the various benefits which they derive from the ‘glory of the North’ and accompanying ‘bright formes’. The undercurrent of self-interest becomes

74 75

Cecil Papers, vol. 144, fo. 267r. Pliny, 2. 37.

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explicit in lines 26–8, which insist that there is no ‘Losse in Love’ because it will bring reciprocation in the form of ‘fayth & favour’. The welcome which expressed this love had cost over £1,000, and the song seeks to remind the monarch (and reassure the hosts) of the proper response to such expressions of love. Although reciprocity is a necessary mechanism for a system of gift exchange, its open expression negates the Senecan ideal of ‘free gratitude’ since reciprocal gestures should be seen to be spontaneous and governed by mutual love. This song’s attempt to direct the royal response is indicative of concern that an appropriate reciprocal response will not be forthcoming—that the King would prove ungrateful. No doubt these sentiments were influenced not only by the cost of the entertainment but also by the considerable debt (over £1,300) that had been due in 1606 but which the Crown still owed to the Merchant Taylors’ Company. This song’s conflation of the language of commerce with that of benefits is indicative of the tension between the economy of gift exchange, royal largesse and patronage, and the economy of commercial exchange and usury that governed most of the dealings between Crown and City. The Merchant Taylors’ Company followed the model of an aristocratic entertainment, but the relationship of the leading figures in the Company with the King was different in nature from those of aristocrats, resulting in a tension between the form and the message expressed within it. Commerce and usury were usually termed in opposition with amity: whereas the reciprocal exchange of gifts was a sign of friendship, the commercial loan of money was the opposite and one did not (at least in theory) lend money at interest to friends.76 After the first song the King was led up to his separate chamber, where the composer and organist John Bull and the Children of the Chapel Royal had been installed with an organ, which Swynnerton had arranged to borrow from Sir Michael Hicks, to perform while James dined (MCA, 268).77 This group was often employed as an aid to the

76 The contradistinction of gift and usury was commonplace; see e.g. Seneca, De Beneficiis, 3. 14. It is also a theme in The Merchant of Venice. For a modern treatment see Hyde, The Gift. 77 Sir John Swynnerton to Michael Hicks, 10 July 1607 (BL, Lansdowne MS 90, fo. 80).

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royal digestion so the music was probably taken from an established repertory.78 Aristocrats and commoners were separated from each other within the hall itself, with the Prince, assembled nobles, and Dutch Deputies seated at the specially prepared high table that replaced the normal communal table for the feast. ‘Personable young men of the company’ (MCA, 262) had been chosen to act as waiters for the evening but the royal guests’ ‘first course was carried up by the Knightes, Aldermen Maisters Assistaintes and Lyvery which were of the company, the Lyvery having their hoodes upon their shoulders, the service being ritch and bountifull, as by the charge will appeare’ (MCA, 268). The second song, the subject of which is the feast, continued the theme of the ‘ritch and bountifull’ expenditure that manifests the Company’s love and honour. It was probably sung by the elevated mariners in the hall after the King’s retreat to his private chamber. Certain aspects of the song suggest that he was not present for its performance: it is addressed throughout to a group whereas in both other songs King James is singled out; and the tone is much lighter, suggesting some degree of equality and communality among the revellers. To fill your Wellcome Stomaches, Mirth & Chere be present here Rouse up your blood Rouse up your blood And make the wine with drinking good. Where Cates are kindely tasted No Cost is wasted. It causeth a glad hall And bides much good enriche yow all Sitt yow then merry, fortune, health, & peace these joyes increase Your cupps full crowne Your cupps full crowne And both your Cares and busines drowne. then dayes are truly holy when feastes are jolly

10

78 Craig Monson, ‘Elizabethan London’, in Iain Fenlon (ed.), Man and Music: The Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1989), 304–40 at 322.

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It causeth a glad hall And bides much good enriche yow all.79

The event being commemorated is again placed explicitly within a reciprocal exchange: it is the response the hosts receive that will ensure that ‘no Cost is wasted’. Conspicuous consumption is justified by the establishment of a ‘glad hall’ which may ‘enriche’ the assembled company with ‘good’, a term that, like the first song’s ‘welcome’, is loaded with an economic meaning. The song has strong points of similarity with other celebrations of the gustatory by Jonson. The line ‘make the wine with drinking good’ is a translation of the Classical tag ‘vinum tu facies bonum bibendo’ which can be found, among other sources, in Martial, Epigrams, 5. 78, l. 16. This Martial epigram was an important source for ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’, in which a reading from Tacitus and honest conversation is preferable to a table groaning with fowl, and in that poem the sentiment is rendered as: ‘It is the fair acceptance, sir, creates j The entertainment perfect: not the cates’ (ll. 7–8). Jonson’s use of the same source in a poem rejecting extravagant and pretentious feasts seems so pointed that it is tempting to believe that he had the Merchant Taylors feast in mind as a negative exemplar when he wrote ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’. The Merchant Taylors undoubtedly were relying on the ‘cates’ to create the ‘entertainment perfect’. The Merchant Taylors are unlikely to have been overly concerned if Jonson was privately unimpressed with their feast, but they were keen that their extravagant display should impress others among the audience as well as the King, especially Prince Henry and the courtiers. Prince Henry was particularly important because it had been arranged for him to join the Company. His acceptance of membership was to follow the ritual heart of the entertainment, the investiture of the new Master which followed the feast. The ceremonial elements of the royal visit were similar to the Clothworkers’ entertainment the previous month. Vellum rolls which listed all the royal and noble members of the Company since its foundation (including Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry VII) had been drawn up by the Company’s Clerk, Richard Langley, and were given to the King and

79

Cecil Papers, vol. 144, fo. 273.

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Prince Henry. This provided the evidence of precedent that proved there was no dishonour in membership, and also showed that the historical membership of the Merchant Taylors’ Company was far more impressive than that of the Clothworkers. Just as the Lord Mayor had given gold to the King, on this occasion purses of gold were presented to the King and Prince (respectively containing £100 and £50) (MCA, 268). Prince Henry took some part in the investiture as he took on the conventional role of chief guest, whereas the King himself was in a distinctive position separated from the ceremony but looking out onto the hall from his first-floor window, honouring the ceremony with his approving gaze: ‘it pleased the Kinges moast excellent Majesty, to resort into the litle lobby out of which there was a faier windowe made of purpose for his majesty to looke into the hall, and there his majesty observed the whole manner of the Ceremony’ (MCA, 271). According to convention, the Master and wardens ‘procede righte over the herthe (which is then fynely set with flowers) to the chief Geste sittinge at the Highe Table . . . the Master proffereth hym his Garlande who chearefully accepteth it and putteth it on his hedd, and after, giveth yt agayne to the Master’.80 So, on this occasion, ‘it did moast gratiously please the prince, to call for the Maisters Garland, and to put the same upon his owne heade, wheareat the Kinges Majesty did very hartely laugh’ (MCA, 271), perhaps not realizing that his son was acting in accordance with custom. Like his facetious toast to the Clothworkers, the King’s laugh indicated a lack of seriousness in his response to civic ceremony that—although not commented upon in the records of events—is unlikely to have gone unnoticed. Although Prince Henry was only 13, he seems to have shown a precocious awareness of the mechanics of ceremonial reciprocity, of love displayed by apparently spontaneous gestures, by choosing to make a further reciprocal gesture in response to the invitation to join the Company. When invited to be made free of the Company he not only accepted, but commaunded one of his gentlemen and the clarck of the company to goe to all the Lordes present, and require all of them that loved him and were not free of other Companies to be free of his company, Whereuppon these Lords whose names ensue (with humble thanckes to his highnes) accepted of the freedome[.] (MCA, 268)

80 The account of the election ritual was drawn up in 1573 (Memorials, ed. Clode, 120–3 at 122).

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The Prince specifically asked that the young Earl of Essex, who was not present, also be enrolled. It may of course be that in these gestures Prince Henry was following advice. He and Essex were close friends, but this public sign of affection for the heir of a popular Protestant hero was bound to please the assembled company, especially given the undercurrent of militant Protestant Internationalism provided by the presence of the Dutch Deputies. The Company appreciated Prince Henry’s behaviour. It is striking that later Merchant Taylor Lord Mayors’ Shows made much of Prince Henry’s membership of the Company, whereas shows by the Clothworkers included relatively few references to King James.81 As late as 1624 the Merchant Taylors’ Company commemorated how the Prince’s actions had figured forth his generous and virtuous nature: On Vertue, and on Worth he still was throwing Most bounteous shewers, where er’e he found them growing, He never did disguise his wayes by Art But shooted his intents unto his hart, And lov’d to do good, more for goodness sake, Then any retribution man could make.82

Once the election ceremony was complete and the names of the new members of the Company enrolled, the King came back down to the Hall and was regaled with a song of farewell before his departure which ‘so pleased his Majesty that he caused the same to be sung three tymes over’ (MCA, 271). Will then these gloryes part away? will wished joyes not Last a day? oˆ that the Sunne were taught to stay! Never did time so swiftly runne,

81 In Thomas Heywood’s Londini Emporia or Londons Mercatura (London: Nicholas Okes, 1633) James is not mentioned at all in the speeches, and only briefly in the introduction to the printed text; in the show for Robert Parkhurst, Time, who stands on the ‘Monument of Fame’, briefly refers to James’s membership as a sign that, in his great wisdom, ‘He knew your merits, worth and dignity’; John Taylor, The Triumphs of Fame and Honour (London: [n.p.], 1634), sig. B3v. 82 Webster, Monuments of Honor, sig. C2v. Prince Henry had also played a prominent role in the 1612 pageant, Dekker’s Troia-Nova Triumphans.

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Part II: Ben Jonson and the Jacobean Court our happines was but begunne Who Would be riche to be so soone undone? Our hopes are yet. Our hopes are yet. Place makes not Heaven to forgett farewell farewell. And as our thankes are true Let them remayne with yow. It is, it is, It is./ The princes virtue to knowe who are his/83

10

From being the North Star James has now become the sun, which, because it moves through the sky, is a more appropriate image with which to figure his departure. The sixth line of the song suggests not only that the visit has been all too short and that with its end the Company will be impoverished by the absence of their loved guests, but also that the hosts have undone themselves with their massive expenditure on this one day’s entertainment. The singers’ ‘hopes’ that the King’s elevated position will not make him forgetful is another reminder of his reciprocal obligations, and another indication of concern about his potential ingratitude. It is the lavish display, and the love which it represents, that the King is encouraged to remember: if it is ‘The princes virtue to knowe who are his’, then he gains this knowledge by their displays of love, and trust and reward ought to follow from such displays. The shift in tense between the stanzas in the repeated auxiliary verbs (from ‘are yet’ to ‘it is’) also expresses a power relationship, for while their hopes are uncertain, looking towards the future, royal favour is a fixed matter of fact. Although two of the surviving songs focus on the King and the hosts’ anxiety that the Company’s love and expenditure be properly acknowledged and reciprocated, the entertainment was a play for status among a much wider community and a powerful assertion of the wealth and status of the Merchant Taylors’ Company: every noble resident around London had been invited to a feast that matched their own hospitality in its grandeur, called to witness that citizens were capable of entertaining the King with an opulence and sophistication equal to any peer. The

83

Cecil Papers, vol. 140, fo. 114.

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Merchant Taylors’ Company may have imitated courtly forms and fashions, but the attendance of the King, Prince of Wales, and courtiers at their feast was a powerful indication of civic power. Prince Henry’s invitation to courtiers to join the Company, and the Company’s record of those who accepted membership, means that an unusually detailed list of the assembled gathering survives (MCA, 269–71). It was a fairly heterogeneous group but broadly reflected the groups in favour with the King at the time. It included three members of the Cecil family (Salisbury, his son, and his nephew) and four Howards (the Earls of Nottingham, Suffolk, Arundel, and Northampton). The Herbert brothers, Pembroke and Montgomery, were present, as were the Scottish favourites Lennox and Hay, along with the Earls of Oxford, Worcester, and Perth, and Lords Eure, Hunsdon, Knollys, and Sanquer. Another sixty-six courtiers, forty of them knights, were made honorary members, along with ‘divers Esquires, Gentlemen and Servants to the King, Queen, Prince and Noblemen’. These men range from the Prince’s Governor to the King’s taster, and at least seventeen were from Prince Henry’s household. Two had performed in the recent Lord Hayes Maske (Sir John Digby and Sir Richard Preston) and five had taken part in the barriers for the marriage of the Earl of Essex and Frances Howard (Digby, Sir Thomas Munson, Sir Robert Maunsell, Sir Robert Carew, and Sir Roger Dallison). Like the Clothworkers, the Merchant Taylors’ Company was keen to commemorate the honour done to them by the visit. A detailed narrative, including a list of all the honorary members created on the day, was drawn up for the court book by Richard Langley (MCA, 267–71). Langley’s narrative also formed the basis of Edmund Howes’s account of the feast in his continuation of Stow’s Annales.84 Howes was not paid directly for the inclusion of this material by the Merchant Taylors (whereas he had been by the Clothworkers) but he did receive money when he presented a copy of the book to the Company on publication.85

84

Stow and Howes, Annales, 890–1. Howes was awarded 5 marks for presenting a copy of the Annales on 4 Apr. 1615; Memorials, ed. Clode, 147. John Stow, himself a Merchant Taylor, had received a pension from the Company. 85

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The Company also chose to commemorate the event in another way: Jonson’s ‘man’ was paid 15 shillings ‘for writing out copies of the speech and songes to be given to the King and Lordes with others’.86 The production of manuscript copies, another emulation of aristocratic and courtly practice, was perhaps suggested by Jonson, whose employment had been based on his understanding of how to please a courtly audience. There is nothing to suggest that scribal copies were made available to members of the Company or to civic dignitaries. The decision to disseminate the text in a limited way to an exclusive readership was a contrast to Lord Mayors’ Shows. A Lord Mayor’s Show was highly visible, with pageants on the streets of London, speeches to the public, and popular gestures to the crowd such as having the city’s conduits flow with wine. The texts are not known to have circulated in manuscript but pamphlets describing the pageantry and printing the speeches and songs were occasionally printed from the 1580s onwards, and customarily from about 1611. Little detail survives of either Watts’s show of 1606 or the 1607 pageant of Sir Henry Rowe of the Mercers’ company, but their public nature will have contrasted with the Merchant Taylors’ feast, held in the confines of the Company’s hall with a great deal of effort having been expended in excluding unwanted citizens— from the Lord Mayor down to drinkers who might have gawped at the King from the neighbouring tavern. A more restricted form of dissemination was thus more appropriate. Expense is unlikely to have been a major consideration in this decision, as a comparison of the respective costs involved in print and manuscript production shows. In 1604, when Jonson had prepared the Lord Mayor’s Show with Anthony Munday as junior partner, the Haberdashers’ Company had paid 30 shillings for the production of a printed pamphlet. In 1605 the publication costs were apparently much higher (or are more completely recorded), as the pamphlet of Munday’s text cost £6. So for, at most, an additional £6 (a tiny proportion of the £1,000 cost of the entertainment) the Company could have had produced a commemorative text that would have been available not only to everyone who attended the feast but also for public consumption, ensuring its magnificence became more widely known in London and 86 Account Books, vol. 9 (A Calendar of Dramatic Records, ed. Robertson and Gordon, 173).

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beyond. Instead they chose to pay 15 shillings to produce perhaps thirty copies (since the payment was for copies for the King, lords, and ‘others’ we cannot be sure how many were produced, but at least nineteen aristocrats were present, together with the King and Prince Henry). The actual unit costs may not have been that different, given their respective scales of production: the total of thirty copies gives a cost per transcript of 6d., and if 300 pamphlet copies were produced of the 1605 Lord Mayor’s Show (a rough and perhaps conservative estimate) then the unit cost would have been 4s. 8d. The main advantage of producing scribal copies was that it limited the availability of the text, at least in the first instance, to a highly elite readership. These were carefully produced manuscripts, at least judging by the surviving example. The three songs could all have been fitted onto a single bifolium but each of the surviving songs at Hatfield House is neatly written on the recto of the first leaf of a separate bifolium of expensive Venetian writing-paper, altogether using three times the minimum paper required. This paper had a sheet size of 298394 mm and a watermark of a double pennant with ‘G 3’ around the base of the flagstaff. As has been demonstrated by Mark Bland, this paper was used by Ben Jonson between about 1605 and 1610, other examples being the presentation manuscript of The Masque of Queenes (see Chapter 6), the Le Neve copy of the Theobalds entertainment (discussed in the next chapter), and Jonson’s autograph epigrams to the Earl of Salisbury at Hatfield House.87 The hand is neat, regular, and easily legible, but without flourishes or other marks of exceptional calligraphic skill. The songs do not have the additional notes, illustrations, sumptuous binding, or other forms of lavish excess that mark formal presentation manuscripts such as Gascoigne’s or Jonson’s royal presentations. Supplying a limited number of copies of an entertainment text could, as other chapters have shown, have the effect of stimulating interest, leading to rapid dissemination of the text among a small but influential group of courtiers, gossips, and connoisseurs. No such 87 Mark Bland, ‘Jonson, Biathanatos, and the Interpretation of Manuscript Evidence’, Studies in Bibliography, 51 (1998), 154–82 at 159, which uses the paper as evidence that Jonson was responsible for the Bodleian manuscript of Donne’s Biathanatos, identifies a number of distinct watermarks, and reproduces beta-radiographs of four variant watermarks found in Jonson manuscripts. CP144, fo. 315 is Bland (c); fo. 318 does not match any of Bland’s beta-radiographs; CP 140 fo. 114 is Bland (a).

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wider circulation seems to have occurred in the case of the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment, of which only one incomplete first-generation copy survives. There are no known later separates, copies in commonplace books, or references to copies in letters. The ephemeral nature of separates means that too much should not be read into this, but it is striking that no other transcripts are known despite the fact that the text was accessible to the same group of wits that were responsible for disseminating the contemporaneous Theobalds entertainment discussed in the next chapter, which survives in a number of copies and was copied into personal miscellanies. Aside from Jonson himself, many members of that scribal community were closely associated with Prince Henry and several were in attendance at Merchant Taylors’ Hall. Among those listed in the Company’s records as accepting honorary membership were Richard Connock, Sir John Kaye or Key, and Richard Martin. These were all men who were part of a loose scribal community that was actively involved in the exchange of texts, but no one in this group seems to have taken up the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment despite it being a highly unusual entertainment with fine and subtle verses by Jonson. It may in part be the case that the failure of the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment to circulate more widely was because copies were given to the wrong people. We saw in the last chapter that it was those who had not seen an entertainment that tended to be most eager to find a copy and pass it on to others who had also been absent: in this case, however, copies were given to the men who had attended the performance. Perhaps they were simply uninterested in a text that was already familiar. A further explanation for this failure of circulation may lie in the social nature of scribal circulation. The Merchant Taylors’ entertainment was imitative of practices associated with exclusive, prestigious, and courtly texts, but while massive and aggressive expenditure could display the wealth of the civic community as being comparable to the aristocracy, it could not produce social equivalence. Manuscript separates commonly circulated as enclosures within letters and although correspondents could undermine the message of the entertainment, its very transmission was a validation—a statement that the entertainment (and the host) was worthy of attention. Many of the men involved in the circulation of entertainments were on the fringes of the court and (with the sensitivity of people anxious about their status) were perhaps unwilling to endorse the

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implicit claim of London’s wealthy merchants to be equals of the aristocracy. At the very least they were likely to be less interested in a production that was the responsibility of a group of citizens, however wealthy they might be, than in a text with a noble pedigree. The production of a printed text was primarily a matter of capital and technology whereas scribal reproduction depended on established social networks, which means that successful texts were always likely to be in sympathy with the shared cultural assumptions of those social networks. The medium thus tended to endorse the culturally conservative: it was less open than print and far more deeply embedded in social networks and practices. One effect of this was that it was not a medium in which wealth could easily buy cultural cachet. This cultural conservatism should be balanced against the medium’s association with oppositional, sexually explicit, or otherwise subversive material, for which it was the medium of choice because manuscript circulation took place outside any effective legislative framework. The Merchant Taylors’ songs do not seem to have enjoyed much readership among elite circles, despite the Company’s valiant efforts, but there is indirect evidence for some wider circulation in their influence on a later entertainment. In 1617 Thomas Campion was employed by Francis Clifford, 4th Earl of Cumberland, to devise an entertainment for the King when he visited Brougham Castle in Cumbria on his return from Scotland.88 Part of the entertainment provided by Campion was a series of songs that were performed around a feast, and these songs, which were set to music by George Mason and John Earsden, owed a great deal to Jonson’s songs for a similar occasion ten years earlier. A feasting song advised that ‘Musicke is as good as wine, j And as fit for feasting’ and asked all guests to ‘Joyne then, one joy expressing. j Here is a guest for whose content j All excesse were sparing.’89 Another song bids the King

88 For this entertainment see R. T. Spence, ‘A Royal Progress in the North: James I at Carlisle Castle and the Feast of Brougham, August 1617’, Northern History, 27 (1991), 41–89. 89 George Mason and John Earsden, The ayres that were sung and played, at Brougham Castle in Westmerland, in the Kings entertainment (London: Thomas Snodham, 1618), sigs. A1v–A2r.

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The song of farewell laments that ‘Bright beames that now shine here, j when you are parted, j All will be dimme’, and continues ‘O griefe! that blest houres soone consume, j But joylesse passe at leasure.’91 The sentiments expressed in these songs are conventional enough, but their form and phrasing are strikingly similar to Jonson’s songs and show that Campion, at least, surely read and appreciated Jonson’s work for the Merchant Taylors’ Company. 90

Ibid., sig. B2r.

91

Ibid., sig. E2r.

5 Revision and Sociability: The 1607 Entertainment at Theobalds What need hast thou of me? or of my Muse? Whose actions so themselves doe celebrate Ben Jonson, Epigrammes, XLIII (‘To Robert Earl of Salisburie’)

This chapter looks at an entertainment written by Ben Jonson and performed before the King eight weeks before the entertainment at Merchant Taylors’ Hall. Jonson’s patron on this occasion was Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, the man who provoked Jonson’s question in the epigram quoted above: what is the point of panegyric when the subject’s actions speak for themselves? It is a double-edged question, because just as praiseworthy actions may render the poet’s praise redundant, inglorious actions can speak just as eloquently and expose praise as false flattery. The purpose of panegyric is an issue that Jonson reflects on many times in his work, but there is little doubt that the double nature of this particular question reflected his ambivalence to Salisbury. Nevertheless, unlike the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment, this piece circulated widely in manuscript and was included by Jonson in his Workes of 1616 as the final piece in the ‘Entertaynments’ section (sigs. 4E6r– 4F1v): the ‘Entertainment of King James and Queene Anne, at Theobalds, When the House was delivered up, with the possession, to the QUEENE, by the Earle of SALISBURIE, 22 of MAY, 1607’. The Theobalds entertainment reveals the working relationship between Jonson and Salisbury. As with examples discussed in previous chapters, this was a work of collaboration; the sensitive nature of the occasion on which the entertainment was performed meant that it

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required particularly strong trust between the two men principally involved in creating it. Nevertheless, signs of tension between the two men can also be discerned, in particular through Jonson’s apparent revision of the work prior to its appearance in print in 1616. There are five known surviving manuscript copies of the entertainment, as well as a copy of the final song and a translation of the entertainment into French among the papers of the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield House. These manuscripts provide further evidence about how the medium of manuscript could be used to circulate a text rapidly within a relatively coherent social group. Unlike the readers of the entertainments at Harefield or Merchant Taylors’ Hall, these were men who had in common literary interests rather than a role in court life. Although these men—Edward Conway, Henry Goodyer, and others— are minor figures in the literary culture of the time, they were part of a culture of metropolitan ‘wits’ and had an important role as discerning readers and intermediaries responsible for the dissemination of texts. ROBERT CECIL, EARL OF SALISBURY, AND ENTERTAINING AT THEOBALDS Sir Robert Cecil, created Earl of Salisbury in 1605, employed Jonson on several occasions and was his most significant non-royal patron between 1605 and 1609. The earliest documentary evidence of their relationship is Jonson’s 1605 letter to Salisbury begging for assistance when he was imprisoned over Eastward Ho. There was evidently some earlier history to the relationship, however, since the letter mentions earlier favours, probably help over his trouble with The Isle of Dogs and Sejanus, before assuring Salisbury that by ‘freing us [i.e. Jonson and Chapman] from one prison, you shall remove us to another, which is aeternally to bind us and our muses, to the thankfull honoring of you and yours to Posterity; as your owne vertues have by many descents of Ancestors ennobled you to time’.1 There are striking ambivalences here: Jonson compares indebtedness to Salisbury to imprisonment and makes it clear 1 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), i. 196; David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 125.

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that his future encomia will be in gratitude for Salisbury’s assistance, but then rather lamely continues that any such praise is justly deserved by Salisbury’s inner virtues. It is another example, like the quotation at the head of this chapter, of the slippery relationship between poetic praise and the subject’s worth. In the following years the relationship flourished. Jonson wrote entertainments for Salisbury when King James and Christian IV of Denmark visited Theobalds in 1606, when King James and Queen Anna visited Theobalds in 1607 for the presentation of the house to the royal couple, when the King visited Salisbury House in London in May 1608 after the Earl had been made Lord Treasurer (a post his father had also held), and in April 1609 for the opening of Britain’s Burse, a commercial centre on the Strand intended by Salisbury to rival the Royal Exchange. Salisbury was the subject of three of Jonson’s epigrams, and was probably responsible for his commission for Hymenaei.2 Jonson also performed some more sensitive work on Salisbury’s behalf, apparently acting as a spy within the Catholic community at the time of the Gunpowder Plot.3 In the early years of the century Jonson was firmly established within Salisbury’s patronage network. There was probably always a degree of tension in their relationship, however, and once Salisbury was safely dead Jonson did not conceal his dissatisfaction with his former patron. In the printed version of the Epigrammes Jonson follows two epigrams in praise of Salisbury with a bitter attack on his muse for having sung the praise of a ‘worthlesse lord’, and many commentators have noted the implication that Salisbury is Jonson’s target.4 One of the many outspoken comments in the Conversations 2 The marriage of Essex and Frances Howard, celebrated in Hymenaei, was arranged by Salisbury and Suffolk (another recipient of a letter by Jonson from prison). 3 See Frances Teague, ‘Jonson and the Gunpowder Plot’, Ben Jonson Journal, 5 (1998), 249–52; Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson: To the First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 143–55; B. N. DeLuna, Jonson’s Romish Plot: A Study of Catiline and its Historical Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); James Tulip, ‘Comedy as Equivocation: An Approach to the References of Volpone’, Southern Review [Adelaide] (1972), 91–100. 4 Ben Jonson: Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 35; DeLuna, Johnson’s Romish Plot, 67–71; James A. Riddell, ‘The Arrangement of Ben Jonson’s Epigrammes’, Studies in English Literature, 27 (1987), 53–70 at 55–7; Robert C. Evans, ‘Frozen Maneuvers: Ben Jonson’s Epigrams to Robert Cecil’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 29 (1987), 115–40.

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with Drummond records Jonson complaining about Salisbury’s lack of respect and selfishness.5 Jonson’s posthumous criticisms of Salisbury probably indicate his eventual disappointment with a patronage relationship that had once been fruitful and productive, rather than a dislike that can be traced right through their lengthy collaboration. Jonson’s work for the Merchant Taylors shows that his ability to write a sympathetic work did not necessarily indicate a deep personal sympathy with his patron, but the multiple works Jonson wrote for Salisbury do suggest a belief in his worthiness as a patron. The patron–client relationship undoubtedly required some compromise from the poet but it is probably unfair to characterize this as hypocrisy. Jonson’s later comments give the strong impression of intimacy betrayed: he recalled to William Drummond how he had been seated at the lower end of Salisbury’s table when he clearly felt his service warranted greater recognition. We should, however, remember the closely collaborative service as well as the personal slight. All of the commissions Salisbury provided Jonson were for entertainments at moments of personal significance, but the 1607 entertainment was of greatest delicacy as it celebrated the moment that Salisbury gave away the greatest manifestation of his patrimony, the massive Hertfordshire house of Theobalds. The estate had been purchased in 1564 by Salisbury’s father William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, the year after his second son’s birth. Burghley embarked upon a massive and ambitious programme of building that lasted until 1585, by which time he is estimated to have spent £25,000 on Theobalds.6 It was among the grandest of the Elizabethan prodigy houses, built on a huge scale, with elaborate internal decoration. A letter by Charles Cavendish to his mother, Elizabeth Countess of Shrewsbury, gives a flavour of Elizabethan Theobalds. He describes Burghley’s great chamber and gallery as they appeared during a visit of the court: he hath mad at the nether end a fayre rock with duckes fesantes with divers other birdes which serves for a cubbord, the ould treees be there still, he hath a cloth of estatt mad of thin horne of divers colors lyke the bestes and flowers be of nature, hath in the Rouff a sunne goinge which truly poynteth the 5

Conversations with Drummond, in Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, i. 141–2. Sir John Summerson, ‘The Building of Theobalds, 1564–85’, Archaeologia, 97 (1959), 107–26. 6

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hower . . . In this chamber my lo: feaseted the Q. who was nobly intertayned and all lordes and ladyes satt at the bord[.]7

The house was entangled in Burghley’s relationship with his Queen. As with other great houses built by Elizabethan courtiers, the lavish display looked towards a likely royal visit and Burghley’s building work increased in scale as the Queen’s approval of his house became clear. This connection was exemplified during her second visit in 1571, when she was presented with verses and a picture of the house on the occasion of the completion of Burghley’s first stage of building work.8 Queen Elizabeth eventually visited the house on a dozen occasions before Burghley’s death in 1598, making it the non-royal residence she visited most often.9 Theobalds became particularly associated with Robert Cecil in the 1590s. The house was not, despite its grandeur, Burghley’s primary seat; that honour belonged to Burghley House in Northamptonshire, which was to be inherited by Burghley’s eldest son Thomas. As a secondary estate, Theobalds became the principal inheritance of Robert, Burghley’s second son but his political heir. This point has been elaborated at length by James M. Sutton, who argues that the decorative scheme of the house itself—as well as the entertainments staged there—promoted a ‘house of Cecil’ by imagining a pedigree that stretched back to the Welsh ‘Sitsilts’ with which the family claimed connection, and looking forward to Robert’s inheritance of his father’s political mantle.10 The promotion of Robert Cecil as Burghley’s political heir in the 1590s was not just a matter of a smooth transmission of power to a new generation; it was in part a reaction to the aggressive behaviour of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, whose ambition to carve out a dominant political role for himself (which was expressed in various forms of public display) often put him at odds with Robert Cecil.11 7 Charles Cavendish to the Countess of Shrewsbury, ?1587, Chatsworth House, Hardwick Drawers/43/16/1. 8 Daniel Lysons, The Environs of London, 4 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1792–6), iv. 31. 9 Elizabeth first visited Theobalds on 27 July 1564; later visits took place in 1571, 1572, 1573, 1575, 1577, 1583, 1587, 1591, 1594, and 1597. Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 209–10. 10 James M. Sutton, Materializing Space at an Early Modern Prodigy House: The Cecils at Theobalds, 1564–1607 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 11 Sutton is dismissive in his book of the importance of the Essex/Cecil rivalry in Cecil’s actions in the 1590s, but see his earlier work, including ‘The Cecils’ Houses/The “House of Cecil”: The Cultural Patronage of William and Robert Cecil’ (Ph.D. diss.,

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In the entertainments of the 1590s Theobalds figured as a hermitage, and the figure of the ‘Hermit of Theobalds’ was connected to Robert Cecil (according to one tradition he played the hermit himself, but there does not appear to be any contemporary evidence for this).12 These entertainments give relatively little prominence to the intimate and profoundly important personal relationship between the Queen and Burghley. When the Queen visited Theobalds in May 1591 she was welcomed by a hermit who explained that his ‘founder’ Burghley had, out of grief for recent family deaths (Burghley’s mother, daughter Anne, and wife had all died in the previous few years) retreated from public view and left him in charge at Theobalds.13 This played out in miniature a public withdrawal of Burghley in favour of his son. It also enacted a rejection of this withdrawal (which of course Elizabeth would never countenance) because, apparently at the hermit’s request, the Queen drew up a Chancery charter demanding that Burghley return to public life and ‘abjure desolacon & moourning (the consumers of sweetnes) too the Frozen Seas and deserts of Arabia Petrosa’—the charter was duly signed by Lord Chancellor Hatton and the Great Seal affixed.14 Burghley’s desire for retirement may have been overruled in the entertainment, but it had nevertheless been spoken: it was a classic move, familiar from other Elizabethan entertainments, which provided a means for the host to raise a desire unpalatable to the Queen. A second device a few days later explicitly praised Robert Cecil, who is described as having transformed a wild plot of ground into a fine and well-organized garden. It is the younger Cecil’s potential for statecraft that is being praised here, in an analogy between garden and state that is familiar from Shakespeare’s Richard II and elsewhere.15 A third entertainment Yale University, 1995), and ‘The Retiring Patron: William Cecil and the Cultivation of Retirement, 1590–98’, in Pauline Croft (ed.), Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils (London: Yale University Press, 2002), 159–79. 12 See e.g. Algernon Cecil, A Life of Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury (London: Murray, 1915), 48. 13 BL, Egerton MS 2623, fos. 15–16. 14 The mock charter was sold at Sotheby’s, 16 Dec. 1980, lot 299, and is now in the collection of the Elizabethan Club at Yale University. 15 The dialogue between the Gardener and the Molecatcher is found in two manuscripts, Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 140, fo. 94, and BL, Egerton MS 2623, fos. 17–18. The allegory is discussed in Marion Colthorpe, ‘The Theobalds Entertainment for Queen Elizabeth I in 1591, with a Transcription of the Gardener’s Speech’, Records of

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took place when the Queen returned to Theobalds in June 1594. The Hermit reappeared and in a lengthy oration commented on the increasing prominence of Robert Cecil (‘your Majestie doth use him in your service as in former tyme yow have done his father my founder, and that althoughe his experience and judgement be noe waye comparable, yet as the report goeth hee hath some thinges in him like the child of such a parent’), presented the Queen with gifts, and pleaded that she ensure he would not be evicted from his hermitage.16 The first half of the 1590s saw the development of a tradition and history of entertainment at Theobalds, but Queen Elizabeth did not return to the house after the death of Burghley in 1598. From the opening of James’s reign it became once more a favoured residence of royalty. King James first visited Theobalds on his triumphal progress from Edinburgh to London to take possession of his new kingdom, arriving on 3 May, where a huge crowd had come from London to see their new King, and remaining for four days of hunting, feasting, and entertainment.17 The King returned to Theobalds every year thereafter, and in 1606 visited with his brother-in-law, King Christian IV of Denmark. On this occasion of the visit of the two kings, ‘there was at the entrance of the Gates, planted a goodly Tree with leaves, and other ornaments resembling a great Oake: the leaves cut all out of greene silke, and set so artificially, that after certaine speeches delivered, and Songes of Welcome sunge . . . all the leaves showered from the tree, both uppon the heades and Garmentes of both the Kinges, and of a great multitude of their followers: uppon everie leafe beeing written in golde Letters this word (Welcome)[.]’18 This ‘greene taffita welcom’ had been devised by Salisbury’s secretary Thomas Wilson, and was followed by another welcome at the inner court, where the three Hours greeted the kings Early English Drama Newsletter, 12/1 (1987), 2–9; Curtis C. Breight, ‘Entertainments of Elizabeth at Theobalds in the Early 1590’s’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, 12/2 (1987), 1–9; and Sutton, Materializing Space, 110–19. See Richard II, III. iv. 16 BL, Add. MS 73087, fo. 183v. 17 John Savile, King James his Entertainment at Theobalds: with his welcome to London, together with a salutatorie Poeme (London: T. Snodham sould at the house of T. Este, 1603) [STC 21784], sigs. A4–B2. 18 The King of Denmarkes welcome: Containing his arivall, abode, and entertainment, both in the Citie and other places (London: Edward Alde, 1606), 12–13.

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with a song by Ben Jonson.19 Overall responsibility for the entertainment, however, lay not with Jonson but with Inigo Jones, who was paid for ‘invention and care’ over proceedings.20 The visit also saw ‘the representation of Solomon his Temple and the coming of the Queen of Sheba’, which was described in a letter by Sir John Harington as a drunken debacle in what is probably the bestknown (and undoubtedly the funniest) account of a Jacobean country house entertainment.21 There is unquestionably a partisan agenda at work, but it is the only account of the masque that we have. The Queen of Sheba tripped on a step and upset her gifts into the lap of the Danish King, who nevertheless arose to dance with her, ‘but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried into an inner chamber and laid on a bed of state; which was not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen which had been bestowed on his garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other good matters’. The entertainment continued with the arrival of Faith, Hope, and Charity. The first two were inarticulate with drink but Charity managed a speech, ‘then returnd to Hope and Faith, who were both sick and spewing in the lower hall’. Victory presented a sword to the King ‘and, by a strange medley of versification, did endeavour to make suit to the King’, before collapsing unconscious on the steps of the antechamber. Finally, Peace made an entry and displayed great enthusiasm to get close to her King, so much so that she ‘most rudely made war with her olive branch, and laid on the pates of those who did oppose her coming’. The device seems to have been a fairly simple one in which a sequence of female figures were to approach the central ‘Temple’ to do homage, giving it a similar structure to Samuel Daniel’s Vision of the 12 Goddesses of 1604. Jonson is not known to have been involved and the device lacks the imagination and erudition we could expect from one of 19

The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), i. 232. Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vii. 147–50. Sutton discusses this visit in Materializing Space, pp. 170–94. In the course of this analysis he claims that the three songs among the Cecil Papers which form the basis of Chapter 4 of this current work belong to the 1606 Theobalds show. The extensive evidence to the contrary is outlined in Chapter 4. 20 James Knowles, ‘ “To raise a house of better frame”: Jonson’s Cecilian Entertainments’, in Pauline Croft (ed.), Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils, 1558–1612 (London: Yale University Press, 2002), 181–95 at 192. 21 Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae (London: for J. Frederick, 1769–75), ii. 133–6.

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his efforts. The piece was somewhat unusual in giving speaking parts to the amateur aristocratic performers; the disastrous nature of the performance provides an eloquent justification for leaving such roles to professionals. Theobalds was the house that, more than any other, connected the Earl of Salisbury to his father Lord Burghley, and with its history of hermits, molecatchers, leaves of gold, and drunken allegories, it had a rich tradition of Cecil-sponsored hospitality. Yet in 1607 King James decided that he was so fond of Theobalds that he would take it for himself: it was a more modern building than any of his royal palaces and, crucially for this lover of the hunt, was conveniently located for a number of royal parks. The house was exchanged for the royal palace of Hatfield, and since Hatfield had been part of Queen Anna’s jointure, Theobalds was officially given to the Queen. This was a problematic exchange. Sutton misrepresents the difficulty by focusing on the contrast between the magnificence of Theobalds and the ‘small, cramped, unimpressive’ palace at Hatfield.22 The palace at Hatfield was certainly a much less impressive building, but Salisbury also gained from the Crown surrounding parks and woods, two manors with land in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, two manors in Kent, manors in Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire, and Middlesex, with further land, including mills and tenements, in Lancashire, Derbyshire, Herefordshire, Surrey, and Suffolk. The problem was not so much any manifest economic inequality in the exchange as Salisbury’s alienation of his patrimony. The sensitivities are evident in the preamble to the Parliamentary bill that ratified the exchange. This carefully outlined the motives of both parties, which were, naturally, the subject’s loving duty and the Prince’s munificence. It outlines the attractions of Theobalds, notably its proximity to a number of royal hunting grounds, which have led to the King’s greate liking thereunto: Of which the said Earle having taken particular knowledge (although it be the only dwelling howse left unto him by his father) hath most willingly and dutifully made offer thereof unto his highnes . . . preferring therin his Majestes health and contentacion before any private respect of his

22 James M. Sutton, ‘Jonson’s Genius at Theobalds: The Poetics of Estrangement’, Ben Jonson Journal, 7 (2000), 297–323 at 298.

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owne; which offer his Majestie hath graciously foreborne to accept, without yealding a full and princely recompence to the said Earle in other Landes.23

Salisbury decided that the arrival of the royal family to take possession of the house should be commemorated with an entertainment. He charged Jonson with the delicate task of retelling the loss of Theobalds, the most public cultural signifier of his ancestry, in an appropriate manner. The development of this entertainment was almost certainly collaborative, and there is plenty of evidence to show that Salisbury was actively involved in entertainments performed under his auspices. The surviving manuscript text of the earliest entertainment with which he was associated, the Hermit’s Welcome of 1591, is a draft which shows that the ‘Welcome’ went through two stages of revision.24 The first set of changes is apparently authorial, being in the same hand that initially wrote out the verses, but the second is in a different hand. This revising hand appears to have been that of Robert Cecil himself: the sample is admittedly small (seventeen words) and written to fit into a limited space, but the writing has a strong resemblance to Cecil’s distinctive rapid italic.25 The two passages that he revised were concerned with 23

Act for the assurance of the House of Theobaldes, The National Archives, SP 14/27/31. BL, Egerton MS 2623, fos. 15–16. The leaves are not now conjugate and text is written on the rectos only, but the position of wormholes shows that fo. 15 was originally reversed and the text was on the inner pages of a bifolium. This manuscript once belonged to John Payne Collier, who claimed it was subscribed ‘George Peele’. The portion of manuscript on which this subscription was supposedly found has since been mutilated. The entire manuscript was denounced as a forgery in Colthorpe, ‘The Theobalds Entertainment for Queen Elizabeth I in 1591’. This was refuted on the basis of internal evidence by Breight, ‘Entertainments of Elizabeth at Theobalds in the Early 1590’s’, and codicological evidence confirms that the manuscript is genuine: the paper is of approximately the correct date, with a crossbow watermark of a type found in the 1590s (Briquet, nos. 728–37, and especially <www.gravell.org>, CRSBW.004.1); the hands do not have graphs similar to those picked out by Anthony G. Petti as indicative of Collier forgeries in English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 89; and Collier’s own transcription in The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, 3 vols. (London: Murray, 1831), i. 283–7 contains a number of errors. 25 Similar features include: the relative lack of ligatures; the presence of hooks on many letters (including w, y, d, h, and t); the formation of b by a single pen-stroke; the open bowled terminal d; the ‘ht’ and ‘ts’ ligatures; the secretary-influenced h, the back of which does not always fully descend to the base-line; and the use of both long and short initial s. The documents in Cecil’s hand that formed the basis of this comparison are a 1592 letter (Hatfield House, Cecil Papers 21/33); letters from 1593–5 (BL, Stowe MS 166, fos. 72, 210, 218); and his interlineated revisions to a later letter (Hatfield House, Cecil Papers 195/30–32). Dr Marie-Louise Coolahan agrees that the reviser was proba24

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Burghley’s family circumstances and his wish to retire in favour of his son. The first altered passage dealt with recent deaths in the family that had led to Lord Burghley’s increasing wish to retire from the court: a passage deleted in the first stage of revision (‘for he oretaken with excessyve greefe j betooke hym to my sylly hermytage j & ther hathe lyved two yeares & som few monnethes j by reason of so manny funeralles’) was reinstated but with ‘many funeralles’ changed to ‘bitter accidents’. The second revision also softened the way in which Burghley’s retirement was described: where originally the death of his wife ‘inforst’ Burghley to a ‘solitary aboad’, it now simply ‘broght’ him there, while a change in tense in the line following clarifies that the ‘founder’ remains in solitude. Cecil continued to be personally involved in later Elizabethan entertainments, and, according to the surviving manuscript copies, was the author of the 1594 Hermit’s Oration. These manuscripts all date from the 1630s and derive from a single ancestor so this ascription of authorship may not be reliable, but there is no reason to doubt that Cecil was competent to write or revise such pieces: he is known to have written a number of pieces in prose and verse, and like many other courtiers engaged in playful versifying at court, writing poems that figured the Queen as the ultimate object of desire.26 One of the letters by John Davies discussed in Chapter 3 was written to Cecil and explicitly invites and expects him to revise Davies’s text.

bly Cecil in her edition of the Elizabethan entertainments at Theobalds in John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Clarke, and Elizabeth Goldring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 26 See Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘ “Preserved Dainties”: Late Elizabethan Poems by Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Clanricarde’, Bodleian Library Record, 14 (1991–4), 136–44, and Joshua Eckhardt, ‘ “From a seruant of Diana” to the Libellers of Robert Cecil: The Transmission of Songs Written for Queen Elizabeth I’, in Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo (eds.), Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (London: The British Library, 2007), 115– 32. It has been suggested that he was the voice behind Bishop Barlow’s sermons given at Paul’s Cross after the execution of Essex and the exposure of the Powder Treason; see Thomas S. Nowak, ‘Propaganda and the Pulpit: Robert Cecil, Robert Barlow and the Essex and Gunpowder Plots’ in Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst (eds.), The Witness of Time: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1993), 34–52. He was probably the author of a pamphlet refuting claims that the Powder Treason was being used to justify the extirpation of Catholicism, An Answere to Certaine scandalous Papers (London: Robert Barker, 1606).

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In the Jacobean period Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, continued to pay close attention to projects such as entertainments undertaken in his name. Among the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House is an autograph manuscript of the English verses by Ben Jonson that were spoken by the Hours at the arrival of James I and Christian IV of Denmark on 24 July 1606.27 The manuscript has two corrections in a second hand: the ‘Guests’ who were originally invited to enter Theobalds became ‘Princes’, and the Hours’ statement that they have never seen ‘Spectacle like you’ was altered to ‘object like to you’. Percy Simpson claimed that the alterations to the 1606 verses were in Salisbury’s hand, but comparison shows that the correcting hand is in fact that of Robert Kirkham, a senior member of Salisbury’s household.28 This shows that the text provided by the hired poet was subject to final revision within the household, following a similar pattern of revision to that found in the 1591 Hermit’s Welcome. The changes were again made to a sensitive part of the text, in this case how the visiting kings were described: ‘Princes’ is both a more complimentary term than ‘Guests’ and a more appropriate one to the rhetoric of country house entertainments, according to which the royal visitor is not merely a guest because the host has, at least temporarily, made a gift of the house. Various explanations have been put forward for the change from ‘spectacle’ to ‘object’, but one significant difference is that ‘spectacle’ is a term that puts the princes on public display whereas ‘object’ allows the maintenance of a fiction of privacy, and the 1606 visit seems to have been specifically intended as a withdrawal from public business.29

27

Cecil Papers, vol. 144, fo. 272. Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vii. 147; Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 144, fo. 271. There are significant differences between the revising hand in the manuscript and that of Salisbury such as the reversed ‘e’, not used by Salisbury. See also Peter Beal, Index to English Literary Manuscripts, i: 1475–1625, 2 parts (London: Mansell, 1980), Pt. 2, p. 283. See for comparison the manuscript copy of the final song from the 1607 entertainment, also at Hatfield. 29 Herford and Simpson suggested that the change was made because the original description of the Kings as a unique ‘Spectacle’ was ‘a dubious compliment’ (Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vii. 147). Another proposal comes from Sutton, who suggests that describing the Kings as a spectacle was to make them part of the entertainment, whereas the term ‘object’ places them safely outside the performance as ‘the stable foci about which these dynamic ceremonies of welcome revolve’ (Materializing Space, 180). 28

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It is indicative of Salisbury’s business and workload that in 1606 he used a secretary to make corrections, when fifteen years earlier he made similar revisions himself. Much of Salisbury’s involvement in Jacobean projects was through a core trusted staff to whom he could delegate work, and James Knowles has analysed how these projects were organized, with particular reference to the 1609 Entertainment at Britain’s Burse.30 It is clear from a letter written to Salisbury by his secretary Thomas Wilson about preparations for the Britain’s Burse entertainment that, whilst management of the project (including supervision of Jonson and Inigo Jones) had been delegated to Wilson, important aspects of the device had come from Salisbury himself, who was the overall ‘architector’ of the project.31 Even with his huge workload, Salisbury did not always limit himself to inventio: a bill for the 1608 Salisbury House entertainment which directs payment of £20 each to Jonson, Inigo Jones, and Edward Aleyne was not only signed off by Salisbury himself but also has an additional subscription (‘I pray you pay this money to these 3. Men’), and a further payment of £10 to the ‘Juggler’ in the Earl’s hand.32 When Sir John Harington referred to the 1606 masque of the Queen of Sheba as made ‘by device of the Earl of Salisbury and others’ this was not just deference to rank but an acknowledgement of his role in entertainments’ production.33 Knowles suggests that Salisbury’s active control, the organization of his patronage, and his expectation that the writers and others that he employed would follow his overall direction, was what offended Jonson.34 Jonson may well have disliked the mediating role played by Thomas Wilson and others that distanced him from his patron, which as we have seen was at the heart of his complaint about Salisbury, but—as has been discussed in previous chapters—the active involvement of patrons and the collaborative nature of entertainments were entirely normal and would certainly not have been limited to his experience with Salisbury. 30

Knowles, ‘ “To raise a house of better frame” ’. Knowles, ‘Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’, in Martin Butler (ed.), RePresenting Ben Jonson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 114–51 at 115–16; OED, sub ‘Architector’, 3. 32 Cecil Papers, Bills 22. This is one of nine surviving bills relating to the entertainment. 33 Harington, Nugae Antiquae, 133. 34 Knowles, ‘ “To raise a house of better frame” ’, 192. 31

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Before the 1609 Britain’s Burse entertainment, Salisbury’s secretary Thomas Wilson noted that it was an opportunity to ‘taxe the divers ydle comments that have ben upon it [i.e. the Burse] since it was begonn’; the 1607 Entertainment at Theobalds would have been considered in the same way, especially as the occasion had a real potential to elicit negative comment about Salisbury dispensing of his ancestral home.35 The initial concept of the device may well have been either Salisbury’s or have come from one of the key members of his household, and Jonson would certainly have had to supply his draft text to the household for final revision. The entertainment directly addressed the problematic loss of Theobalds by mythologizing the change of ownership with the help of a convenient prophecy. The piece opens with the Genius of the house discovered mourning the loss of his master. The scene, initially draped in black, opens up to display ‘a glorious place, figuring the Lararium, or seat of the household-gods, where both the Lares, and Penates, were painted, in copper colours; erected with Columnes and Architrabe, Freeze, and Coronice . . . Within, as farder off, in Landtschap, were seene clouds riding.’ A winged boy figuring ‘Good Event’ hovers in the air with no visible support, and Mercury descends to speak with the three Parcae or Fates, ‘the one holding the rocke, the other the spindle, and the third the sheeres, with a booke of Adamant lying open before them’. The Parcae then utter an ancient prophecy that Theobalds will be fated to change masters at a certain remarkable moment when it houses ‘The greatest King, and fairest Queene’, together with a pair of Princes (James and Queen Anna were accompanied by their son Prince Henry and the French nobleman Charles de Lorraine, Prince Joinville, the son of Henri, Duc de Guise). Genius displays an admirable scepticism towards the claims of these classical intruders, asking: But is my Patron with this lot content, So to forsake his fathers moniment? Or, is it gaine, or else necessitie,

35 Thomas Wilson to Salisbury, 31 Mar. 1609, Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, 195/100.

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Or will to raise a house of better frame, That makes him shut forth his posteritie Out of his patrimonie, with his name? (ll. 74–9)36

Vocalizing such questions allows them to be answered, and Mercury duly provides an assurance that no such base motives were at work. Unusually, however, this does not satisfy Genius, who responds with a second set of questions, wondering ‘Doe men take joy in labors, not t’enjoy?’ (l. 86) This time he is not met with an answer but an injunction, ‘Genius, obey, and not expostulate’ (l. 91), as he is invited to estrange himself from Salisbury and informed of the wondrous qualities of his new master (‘he, that governes with his smile,j This lesser world, this greatest Isle’). Genius is thus finally won around and begins to praise his fortune, and the entertainment ends with a song (‘O blessed change! j And no lesse glad, then strange! j Where wee, that loose, have wunne; j And, for a beame, enjoy a Sunne.’) The basic structure of this device is very similar to Elizabethan entertainments discussed in earlier chapters: the representation of the house itself, the use of prophecy, the appearance of figures from classical antiquity in an English landscape, and praise of the royal visitors have all been seen on earlier occasions. In its sophistication and complexity, however, it shows the rapid aesthetic shift from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean court. Five years earlier Harefield Place had been represented by an actor in a costume of bricks, whereas Jonson’s parallel figure for Theobalds is decked out according to Classical precedent. Only a few details of his costume are provided in the text, but it was no doubt similar to the costume worn by Edward Alleyn as Genius of London in Jonson’s portion of the coronation entertainment. Genius wore a garland, no doubt of plane leaves (which, as he explained on the earlier occasion, ‘is said to be Arbor genialis’), a mantle and buskins of purple, and carried a cornucopia.37 Rather than simply having figures appear in the landscape, as they had tended to do in Elizabethan entertainments, the 1607 entertainment involved the dramatic unveiling of an elaborate perspective set designed by Inigo Jones. Jonson’s text is also brought

36 Line numbers throughout are from Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vii. 154–8. 37 Ibid. 85.

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more alive as a piece of drama by incorporating conflict between Mercury and the somewhat reluctant Genius. Less happily, the entertainment is also typically early Jacobean in the solemnity of its praise of the King. This makes for somewhat lugubrious reading when compared to the playful compliments that were directed at Queen Elizabeth, which praised her to the skies with phrases intended to leave a smile on Gloriana’s lips. The 1607 Theobalds entertainment is a fine example of an early Jacobean entertainment but its success in justifying Salisbury’s loss of the house is less clear. Genius’s reluctance to accept his fate could be read as a protest against it, and there is a clear contrast between Salisbury’s willingness to forfeit his ancestral home and the traditional aristocratic virtues of hospitality and patrilinear succession that are celebrated by Jonson in well-known poems like ‘To Penshurst’. Indeed that poem can be read as a negative response to the entertainment, having a similar relationship to it as that traced in the last chapter between the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment and ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’.38 It is also curious that Mercury explicitly denies that Salisbury has ‘vaine desire, j To frame new roofes, or build his dwelling higher’ (ll. 81–2), when he was about to embark upon a massive building programme at Hatfield House. James Sutton provides a reading that emphasizes this sense of unease very strongly, finding the entertainment to be characterized by estrangement: claiming that it was for Salisbury an occasion of ‘domestic loss, material and spatial dispossession, and deprivation of property’, that Salisbury’s dispossession of his own patrimony estranged him from Jonson (who registered this estrangement in the text), and that this was the fault-line which led to the rift between Jonson and Salisbury.39 Given Salisbury’s continued patronage of Jonson after 1607 that last point, at least, is not sustainable. Jonson’s expression within his text of the ambivalences that he (and perhaps Salisbury) saw in the loss of Theobalds could rather be indicative of his commitment to his patron and the seriousness with which he approached the commission. Jonson had great ambitions for occasional entertainments: he aimed to produce 38 See Alistair Fowler, ‘The “Better Marks” of Jonson’s “To Penshurst” ’, Review of English Studies, NS 24 (1973), 266–82. 39 Sutton, Materializing Space, 195–208 at 196; id., ‘Jonson’s Genius at Theobalds’.

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texts with substance, that were more than simple flattery, and the sceptical words of Genius give weight to the text by providing proper consideration of the significance of the occasion without compromising the praise of the King. Salisbury left no record of any private misgivings about the loss of Theobalds, and he would also have been aware that the presentation of the house to the King was precisely the sort of lavish gift exchange that bound the king more intimately to his chief adviser. We have seen that Salisbury paid great attention to entertainments presented in his name; had he discerned any inappropriate sentiments in the Theobalds entertainment he would have had them altered, and would not have continued as Jonson’s principal non-royal patron for the next two years. Jonson’s treatment of the text when he came to prepare it for inclusion in his 1616 collected works does provide intriguing evidence of his possible unease over this commission of 1607, but this, like his other complaints about Salisbury, comes after Salisbury’s death. THE TWO VERSIONS OF THE THEOBALDS ENTERTAINMENT The text of the 1607 Theobalds entertainment printed in Jonson’s 1616 Workes differs significantly from the text found in the manuscript copies that circulated around the time of the performance. The points at which the manuscripts differ from the printed text tend to be where Salisbury is likely to have been sensitive to the precise wording of the text, such as where royalty is addressed, or where Salisbury’s own relationship with the King is mentioned. The pattern is similar to Salisbury’s interventions in previous entertainments and the manuscript version, which is almost certainly closer to what was performed, by and large appears to represent the text favoured by Salisbury, whereas the printed text is that finally preferred by Jonson. However, this picture becomes more complex when the relationship between Salisbury, Jonson, the manuscripts, the printed text, and the performance is examined in more detail. Given the vagaries of textual transmission—especially bearing in mind that none of the manuscripts is in Jonson’s autograph, thus leaving room for scribal corruption, and that the printed text did not

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appear until nine years after the performance—too much significance should not be attached to small individual variants, but the accumulated weight of variant readings is enough to provide convincing evidence that a conscious act of revision lies behind these two versions of the text. There are four sections of text that are found in the manuscripts but not in the printed text. Two of these passages provide praise of visiting royalty. Lachesis’s speech in praise of the King is four lines longer in the manuscripts and the monarch, already one ‘that governes with a smile, j This lesser world, this greatest Isle’ (ll. 98–9), is additionally described as: The next to godhead, who of grace Soe ofte hath chaungd thy masters name And added honores to thy place By him unlooked for till they came[.]40

Lachesis’s four additional lines lavish further praise on the King, and they also introduce the idea of reward through the reference (‘Soe ofte hath chaungd thy masters name’) to the titles he had granted Salisbury (Lord Essendine, Viscount Cranborne, and finally Earl of Salisbury). These titles came, of course, ‘unlooked for’: it is not that Salisbury wants or expects to be rewarded, but that the largesse the King has seen fit to bestow upon his humble servant demonstrates his princely benevolence. This passage fine-tunes the terms in which the relationship between Salisbury and royalty is expressed and is very similar in purpose to the changes to the Theobalds entertainments of 1591 and 1606 that have already been discussed. The second significant passage found only in the manuscripts has a similar purpose. Two of the manuscripts have a four-stanza version of the final song rather than the two stanzas found in the printed text (the fact that these lines only appear in two manuscripts is considered below). The additional stanzas come right at the end of the entertainment and primarily praise the Queen: But thank that Queene whose bountye it hath bene Such lyking first to take And of our cell her pallace make 40 British Library Add. MS 34218 (hereafter Fa), fo. 24r. Further references will be incorporated in the text.

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So prosper still those happie walls that are not raised with others falls. Joy then faire place Joy in thy present grace Joy in thy innocence Joy in thy founders best expence for this great day which still to thee in reverenc shall cept holy bee.41

The other two passages unique to the manuscripts are very short and have a simple deictic purpose, clarifying the action. Mercury is given a half-line, ‘That is now’, establishing (surely unnecessarily) that Clotho’s prophecy (ll. 59–72) refers to the present time. Mercury also gains an extra-metrical line at the end of his admonition to Genius (ll. 91–4), ordering him to ‘Attend the rest’, in other words to listen to the prophetic words of the two Parcae who have not yet spoken (although this line is not found in the most corrupt of the manuscripts). In addition to the passages that are unique to the manuscripts there is also a two-line passage found only in the printed text, where Genius follows his expostulation ‘What sight is this, so strange! and full of state!’ with a description of what he sees: ‘The sonne of MAIA, making his descent j Unto the fates, and met with good Event’ (ll. 45–6). This, like the shorter additions in the manuscripts, is simply a clarification of the action. It is tempting to consider that these two lines may have been added for the printed text: commenting on Mercury’s descent would have been redundant in performance, but is necessary for the reader to understand that moment of action. There are also numerous differences in wording between the manuscript and printed versions: Genius hears of Theobalds’s change in ownership ‘in a vision’ in the manuscripts and ‘by bold Rumor’ in the folio (l. 14); in the printed text Prince Joinville is ‘styled of Lorraine’ (l. 63), but in the manuscripts he is ‘borne a Prince of Lorraine’. There is a clear contrast between the somewhat mealy-mouthed description in print of Prince Joinville being ‘styled of ’ and his being described as ‘borne a Prince of’ Lorraine. It is also surely more in keeping with the

41 BL, Add. MS 27407 (hereafter LeN), fo. 128v. Further references will be incorporated in the text.

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solemnity of majesty that Genius learns of the royal acquisition of Theobalds in a ‘vision’ rather than from ‘bold rumour’. Both of these changes turn on terms of praise, and are once again similar to revisions known to have been carried out by Salisbury or his household. There are, however, also a number of indifferent variants that make no substantial difference to the sense of the piece: whether Salisbury must seek a habitation his ‘father’, as in the manuscripts, or his ‘fathers’ (l. 19) never knew; whether Joinville has sprung ‘of Charlemaine’ (in the manuscripts) or ‘from’ him (l. 64); whether ‘soe’ or ‘Thus’ (as in the printed text l. 72) the Fates demand change; whether raising the walls of Theobalds was to Elizabeth’s ‘lasting Crowne and praise’ (manuscript reading) or ‘crowne, and lasting praise’ (l. 107); or whether Queen Anne ‘should’ (in the manuscripts) or ‘might’ (l. 122) read Genius’s faith and thoughts in his heart. Further light is shed on how the text was revised, and also on the relationship between the two versions and the performance, by the manuscript copy of the French translation of the entertainment that is found at Hatfield House.42 This is the retained copy of a translation made by a member of Salisbury’s household for the French Prince Joinville. Although it is a fairly loose translation of the English, the translation was undoubtedly based on a text very similar to that of the other surviving manuscripts; it includes versions of the additional manuscript passages and most of the indifferent variants. Given that this text was surely produced around the time of performance and that it originated in the host’s household, it is presumably based closely on the performance text. This in turn suggests that it was the manuscript version, or something very close to it, that was performed. The fit is not perfect, however, as the French translation lacks Mercury’s first speech and provides the song in its two-stanza version (like the printed text). The French version also has its own unique passage: Clotho’s rather brief reference to Joinville is expanded into a six-line eulogy which praises ‘sa bonte,j Sa vertu, sa valeur, son courage indompte’.43 The introduction of this fulsome praise of Joinville is a particularly clear example of an individual text of an entertainment being altered for a specific reader. 42 43

Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 140, fos. 110–11. Ibid., fo. 110v.

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Like other examples examined in previous chapters, none of the manuscript copies mention Jonson as author, although one cautiously describes the entertainment as ‘Verses reported to be made by the Earle of Salesburye’ (Fa, fo. 2v), whereas the printed text is first and foremost a work by Jonson, and is described as ‘An Entertainment of King James and Queene Anne’, with Salisbury relegated to third place. The version of the entertainment that circulated in manuscript bears marks of involvement of Salisbury and his household, although we lack direct evidence that any specific passages were revisions written by or at the instigation of Salisbury. It seems likely that when Jonson came to prepare the text for print publication he returned to his original version, thus omitting revisions made for the performance. To some extent, then, Jonson may have chosen to undo a collaboration that was crucial to the production of a successful entertainment. An instructive parallel is that between the early texts of Milton’s Masque at Ludlow Castle, where the Bridgewater manuscript almost certainly provides the text as it was revised for performance, as opposed to the version preferred by Milton that is found in the printed texts.44 However, although we can be confident that the printed text of Theobalds is that ultimately preferred by Jonson, the picture is confused by the fact that the printed text is so much later. Jonson undoubtedly made changes when preparing the text for publication in 1616, such as the addition of prose passages explaining the occasion and describing sets, costume, and action, and it is possible that other revisions were made at that time. The final song introduces further complications, since both the twoand the four-stanza versions existed in 1607. It is the two-stanza version that is found in the 1616 printed text, but it is also that version that was used in the French translation, which has the authority of the Salisbury household. A copy of the final song in the hand of Salisbury’s secretary Robert Kirkham also survives in Hatfield House, and that too is the

44 See Cedric C. Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 171–8. The precise nature of the relationship between the texts, and Milton’s involvement in the version represented by Bridgewater, is contentious. See John S. Diekhoff, ‘The Text of Comus, 1634 to 1645’, in id. (ed.), A Maske at Ludlow: Essays on Milton’s Comus (Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western University, 1968), 251–75, and the introduction to John Milton, A Maske: The Earlier Versions, ed. S. E. Sprott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973).

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two-stanza version.45 Whilst two of the contemporary manuscript copies of the whole entertainment have the four-stanza version of the song, it is missing entirely from the other two manuscripts (Fa and K). It is not entirely clear what is going on here, but it seems most likely that the final two stanzas were very late additions (made after the translation had been completed but before the performance) probably made at the request of the household. The first of the two additional stanzas praises the Queen, and perhaps it was added to counter concern that the text as it stood did not give sufficient recognition of Queen Anna since it was to her that Theobalds was, at least officially, being given. But there are alternative possibilities. James Knowles has suggested that the fourstanza version preceded the two-stanza version, and that the final stanzas of the song were cut for publication in 1616 because the trajectory of the Workes was towards the King’s, not the Queen’s, patronage.46 Sutton, arguing in a similar vein, believes that the Theobalds entertainment enacts Jonson’s shift from aristocratic to royal patronage. It is certainly the case that the Workes was a self-conscious display of Jonson’s authorial persona and career trajectory, and that the Entertainment at Theobalds is at an important juncture in the volume since it is the last entertainment to be included and falls directly before the first masque. However, since there are texts dating from 1607 that contain the shorter version of the song, the existence of that version cannot be explained with reference to Jonson’s aims in 1616. Furthermore, whilst the final line of the two-stanza song (‘And dutie thrives by breath of Kings’) is indeed appropriate coming just before the masques, praise of the Queen would hardly have been out of place as, turning the page of the Workes, the title of the next text confronted by the reader is: ‘The QUEENES MASQUES. j The first, j OF BLACKNESSE’.47 It may be that in 1616, as part of his search for textual autonomy that marks the folio Workes, Jonson chose to undo some of the results of his earlier collaboration, but we cannot conclude from that that he was an unwilling collaborator in 1607. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Jonson was sufficiently satisfied with the text to play an active role in the

45 46 47

CP 144/271. James Knowles, private communication. Sig. 4F3r.

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dissemination of the manuscript version in 1607, even though this text was never attributed to him. THE MANUSCRIPT CIRCULATION OF THE ENTERTAINMENT The original owners of the surviving early manuscript copies of the Theobalds entertainment can all be identified, and together they reveal the social network in which the text circulated. There are close similarities to the pattern seen previously with the Harefield entertainment, including a correlation between better quality texts and well connected owners. Indeed one man, Sir Edward Conway, owned copies of both Harefield and Theobalds. There is, however, much less evidence of the Theobalds entertainment being circulated and read as court news: it was not discussed extensively in courtly newsletters, and the readership appears to have cohered less around courtiership than around literary interests. The central figure is less the sharp and ambitious observer taking the temperature of the court than the well-connected ‘wit’ or connoisseur. These are by no means mutually exclusive groups, and several of the owners of the Theobalds manuscripts could certainly be considered courtiers, but they were also men connected to the semiformal convivial social clubs, loosely associated with such bodies as the Inns of Court and the House of Commons, that flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century. They were not central figures in any known group but were intermediaries and collectors, men who have attracted little attention in literary and cultural history but who were essential to the flourishing of elite literary culture as both sophisticated readers and distributors of texts. Two of the surviving manuscripts are separates that were produced for influential courtly connoisseurs. BL, Add. MS 27407, fos. 127–8 (LeN ) was almost certainly copied for Dudley, third Lord North.48 Sir Edward Conway has been convincingly suggested as the original owner of Public Record Office, SP 9/51, fos. 41–2 (G ). Two further copies survive in transcriptions of the papers of figures around the Jacobean court: Sir 48

This copy, which is not in Beal’s Index, was made known to me by James Knowles.

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Francis Fane, later Earl of Westmoreland, BL, Add. MS 34218, fos. 23v– 24v (Fa); and a member of the Yelverton family, Oxford, All Souls College, MS 155, fos. 319–321r (Y). Finally, there is a copy in a fragment of the commonplace book of a Yorkshire gentleman, John Kaye, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS X.d.475, fos. 1–3r (K ). Kaye had no direct connection to the court, Jonson, Salisbury, or Theobalds. With one possible exception (G and K ), collation of the texts does not reveal any particularly close associations between witnesses, although as already discussed they all share a number of characteristics that distinguish them from the printed text. The manuscripts therefore seem to have independently derived from a lost ancestor. LeN is a separate neatly written on a single bifolium that was once folded into a packet and is now fos. 127–8 of a composite manuscript (see Fig. 5.1). It is written in a neat secretary hand on the same highquality Italian writing paper that Jonson used at around this date, for example in the Merchant Taylor songs that were the subject of the last chapter.49 The composite manuscript in which LeN is found is one of three volumes of literary separates (BL Add. MSS 27406–8) collected by the Norfolk antiquary Peter Le Neve (1661–1729). This diverse collection also includes two poems by the Caroline poet Aurelian Townshend about which I have written elsewhere.50 A major source of Peter Le Neve’s collection of literary separates was the collection of the third Lord North. The volumes include two poems on the death of Anne of Denmark printed in North’s collection The Forest of Varieties (London, 1645), as well as two unpublished poems in his autograph.51 The bound volumes also contain a number of poems addressed to Lord North, namely: one of the poems by Townshend, entitled ‘To my Lord North upon his Poems’; two ‘accrostiches sur le nom du tres noble, et tres 49 The LeN watermark is identical to beta-radiograph (d) in Mark Bland, ‘Jonson, Biathanatos, and the Interpretation of Manuscript Evidence’, Studies in Bibliography, 51 (1998), 154–82. 50 Heaton, ‘ “His Acts Transmit to After Days”: Two Unpublished Poems by Aurelian Townshend’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 13 (2007), 165–86. 51 Add. 27407, fo. 4, ‘Upon the death of Anne of Denmark’ (‘Brave soul thou hast prevaild, heaven hath its owne’) and ‘Epitapth’ (‘Here lyes James his true gemm the eies delight’), both printed in The Forest of Varieties (London: Richard Cotes, 1645), 73; the poems in North’s hand, for which see his commonplace book (Oxford, Bodleian Library, North MS adds. e.1) are Add. 27407, fo. 7 (‘When first myne eyes thy hea’nly eyes did see’) and fo. 153 (‘Fayre heav’nly one whome moste my soule adores’).

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Fig. 5.1. The Entertainment at Theobalds, Lord North’s copy. British Library, Add. MS 27407, fo. 127. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

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illustre Seigneur Monseigneur NORTHE, baron’ by P: De Verzignoll; ‘An Epistle Congratulating the Kings amendment In his Sickness the 28th of March. 1619 originally addressed to my Lord North’; a copy of a verse epistle to Ben Jonson that was presented to North (this poem is discussed below); a Latin epitaph on Roger North, the third Lord’s brother, with an English translation; and a copy of a translation of Psalm 137—which in another manuscript copy is ascribed to Francis Davison (for whom see Chapter 3)—with an accompanying note addressed to ‘My most honoured Lord’ who had requested the poem, who may be tentatively identified as North.52 These poems enrich our knowledge of the cultural interests of the 3rd Lord North, who is a shadowy figure in the elite literary culture of the early seventeenth century. The only significant interpretative study of North’s own writing is a doctoral thesis nearly thirty years old, although a number of his poetical manuscripts survive and have been the subject of an article by Margaret Crum, while Mark Bland is currently working on an edition of North’s poetry.53 He was not significant as a patron, although Nicholas Breton dedicated two works to him.54 His published collection The Forest of Varieties gives more information about his circle of acquaintance, and includes pieces addressed to Lady Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Queen of Bohemia, and Sir John Suckling.55 He was possibly connected to Samuel Daniel, but whilst two manuscripts by Daniel were once among the North family papers, they are likely 52 Add. 27407, fo. 5; Add. 27408, fo. 110; Add. 27407, fos. 63–4 (the epistle beginning ‘The Ides of our good Caesars malladies’); Add. 27407, fos. 8–9; Add. 27407, fo. 6 (‘Inferiore nuper Borealis in orbe Coruscans’; ‘The starr of late that shinde in North in this our sphere belowe’); Add. 27407, fo. 65 (‘By Euphrates flowrie side’). Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. poet. 61 includes the Psalm on fo. 62 and is headed ‘Certaine selected Psalmes of David (in verse) . . . composed by Francis Davison, esqr. deceased and other gentlemen. Manuscribed by R. Crane’. 53 Robert J. Parsons, ‘Autobiographical and Archetypal Elements in the Verse of the Third Lord North’ (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1980); Margaret Crum, ‘Poetical Manuscripts of Dudley, Third Baron North’, Bodleian Library Record, 10 (1978–82), 98–108; C. M. Borough, ‘Calendar of the Papers of the North family’ (unpublished National Register of Archives handlist, 1960). 54 The 3rd Lord North was the dedicatee of Breton’s An Excellent poeme, vpon the longing of a blessed heart (London: John Browne & John Deane, 1601), and Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 394, a Breton autograph manuscript of three prose dialogues, where he describes North as ‘my very good Lorde and Master’. 55 Forest of Varieties, 1–6, 192, 213.

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to have come through a different route and entered the family in the next generation.56 There is no address or docketing on the manuscript of the Theobalds entertainment to connect it to North but it dates from a similar period to those items in the collection that can positively be connected to him. His ownership of the text also fits with known biographical details.57 North had travelled extensively abroad in the first years of the century but by 1607 he was back in England and hoping to find a place at court. From 1610 he was to have some prominence at the court of Prince Henry and in the following years he performed in several entertainments.58 North wrote poetry himself (for no reason, he explained, but ‘to give some ease to myself’) and had his work set to music; his grandson recalled that he had dramatic and musical entertainments performed in a glade near his Cambridgeshire home of Kirtling to which he gave the name ‘Tempe’.59 Among those employed to provide music at Kirtling was the lutenist and composer John Jenkins. A chance reference in one of John Chamberlain’s letters suggests that North had long taken an interest in entertainments. As mentioned in a previous chapter, in November 1602 Chamberlain sent Dudley Carleton in Paris a copy of the Entertainment at Harefield. Carleton was evidently unimpressed with the devices because when Chamberlain wrote to him on 23 December, he said that ‘you likt the L kepers devices so yll, that I cared not to get master Secretaries [i.e. Robert Cecil’s] that were not much better, saving a pretty dialogue of John 56 These are the Hatton and the Brotherton manuscripts. John Pitcher convincingly argues that they derived from James Montagu, whose sister married the 4th Lord North; see Samuel Daniel: The Brotherton Manuscript. A Study in Authorship (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1981), 11–12. 57 The 3rd Lord North’s biography is outlined in Dale B. J. Randall, Gentle Flame: The Life and Verse of Dudley, Fourth Lord North (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), 11–27. 58 He performed in Jonson’s Barriers for Henry’s creation as Prince of Wales (1610) and injured his arm tilting with Montgomery on 23 Mar. 1612; John Nichols, Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of James I, 4 vols. (London: Nichols, 1828), ii. 441. He also took part in Campion’s 1613 Caversham entertainment for the Queen and Jonson’s Challenge at Tilt in 1613/14 for the Earl of Somerset’s marriage. An impresa for a tiltyard entertainment with accompanying verses survives in his commonplace book (Bodleian Library, North MS adds.e.1, fos. 58v–60v). 59 Forest of Varieties, 118; ‘The Autobiography of the Hon. Roger North’ in The Lives of the Norths, ed. A. Jessop, 3 vols. (London: Gregg, 1972), iii. 68.

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Davies twixt a maide a widow and a wife’.60 He went on to say that there was little point in sending the text as ‘I do not thincke but master Saunders hath seen [it]’. Saunders was a cousin of Carleton then residing at his house, but the reason for him being in Paris was that he was the travelling companion of Lord North.61 Chamberlain’s comment shows that Saunders was known to have access to networks of manuscript circulation independent of him or Carleton, which must surely have come through the young, wealthy and well-connected Lord North; it therefore seems that as early as 1602 North was sufficiently involved in literary circles and the circulation of texts to be assumed to have easy access to the latest English court entertainment, even from Paris. Further detail about Lord North’s cultural connections comes from a poem in the Le Neve volume which takes the form of a verse epistle addressed to Ben Jonson (beginning ‘When I with busie thoughtes, in house of Sleepe’) dated 9 July 1610, but which was sent as a letter packet addressed to ‘the right Honorable my Lord North’.62 This poem comprises an extended analogy between Augustan Rome and Jacobean England. The suggestion that early Stuart England was somehow ‘Augustan’ was made by many poets, not least Jonson, from the beginning of James’s reign—as is familiar from Howard Erskine-Hill’s classic 1983 study The Augustan Idea in English Literature—but this poem provides an unusually specific and precise basis for the analogy. The Rome of Augustus was a place and time marked by peace, literary achievement, and the birth of Jesus Christ. So, in England under James: The Word of God is truly playnly showne; And errour, even with her owne wieght orethrown And our Augustus, crown’d with peacefull bayes; how Artes do flourishe, and among the rest; how gentile Poesie; the child of ease, begott one Peace; hath had such larg encrease, 60

TNA SP/12/286/13 (fo. 38v). The Letters of John Chamberlain, i. 150, 167. No copy of the Contention belonging to North is known to survive. 62 BL, Add. 27407, fos. 8–9 (9v). The seal, an unidentified regular geometrical symbol, is intact. Although I have previously suggested that the poem’s author was Richard Connock (‘Performing Gifts: The Manuscript Circulation of Elizabethan and Early Stuart Royal Entertainments’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003), 117–18), this attribution remains uncertain. 61

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There are Jacobean equivalents to Virgil, Ovid, and the rest, and Jonson, ‘Whos Variouse Muse, not fixt, unto the stadge, j boundless dost marck; one any ground, with state’ (fo. 8r), takes the place of Horace. Jonson is different from Horace only in that he lacks a Maecenas, ‘that did grace [Horace’s] spirritt, j And to Augustus grace, his worth did merit’, and this absence ‘makes even Vertue sadd’ (fo. 8v). Jonson of course identified himself with Horace, most explicitly in Poetaster (as is discussed in Chapter 6), so this poem addresses Jonson in Jonson’s own terms. The poem concludes by positing an explanation for the near complete analogy between Augustan Rome and Jacobean England in the influence of the ‘Monarchall starrs, that spredd j A similar effect, wher they remaynd’. A prose footnote to the poem reveals the author’s substantial astronomical knowledge: it explains that the ‘stellae monarchales; are a certaine, (though moving) Constellation: & did shift, from the Assyrian, to the Persian, Grecian, and Roman empires, and are now predominant over this our quintessentiall empire’. This remarkable explanation for the Augustan nature of Jacobean England refers to the Royal Stars, first noted by the Persians, which are a group of bright stars with right ascensions about six hours apart, that conveniently appear to mark the equinoxes and solstices. The idea that they have cast their influence over successive empires probably refers to the precession of the equinoxes, that is to say the gradual easterly drift of the equinox over time.63 While the poem was addressed to Jonson in friendly and familiar terms, the manuscript was written for the eyes of Lord North and is enmeshed in a complex social network. The central message was Jonson’s lack of a Maecenas, but the sender probably did not expect that North himself would take up this role. Rather, the author, who was probably acting as a proxy for Jonson, sent the poem to North as a proxy for the Prince of Wales. The poem was sent in July 1610, just one month after Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales, which marked his emergence as a major source of patronage. North had taken part in the tournament to celebrate the installation. There was a significant overlap between Jonson’s social circle, especially the convivium philosophicum that met at the Mitre tavern on Bread Street, and those in Prince Henry’s circle, but despite this and although Jonson had been actively seeking 63

Geoffrey Cornelius, private communication.

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Prince Henry’s patronage, it had been his rival Daniel who had provided the masque (Tethys Festival) that celebrated his installation.64 North was evidently identified by someone in Jonson’s circle as being both supportive of Jonson and close to the newly installed Prince of Wales, and was therefore chosen to forward an indirect petition for patronage for Jonson. Lord North’s courtly career did not, in the end, have much impact, but this poem is an intriguing glimpse of the possibility that he could have been a significant cultural figure. The other surviving manuscript separate of the 1607 Entertainment at Theobalds is in the hand of Sir Henry Goodere (or Goodyer): he was another courtly wit with links to the Inns of Court, another friend of Ben Jonson, and another figure whose main significance in Jacobean culture was as an intermediary between writers and patrons.65 The manuscript (G) is a single bifolium (sheet size 350  249 mm) with a grapes watermark that has been folded twice along the horizontal axis, probably for enclosure in a letter packet (see Fig. 5.2).66 The text is written in a single italic hand. It is found in a composite volume of forty-three leaves containing seventeenth-century poetic separates held among the State Papers at the National Archives in Kew (SP 9/51). Peter Beal has connected this volume to Sir Edward Conway, although since SP 9/51 was a loose bundle until December 1982 it is possible that not all individual items share the same provenance.67 Goodere was a friend of Conway and is known to have copied a number of literary works for him. There is other palaeographical evidence connecting SP 9/51 to Conway, including a poem in the ‘para-Goodyer’ hand which is also found among other Conway papers, and other pieces in the bundle (poems by courtly wits, verses on the Low Countries) also fit Conway’s interests or, in the case of later items, those of his son.68 The only point of doubt on the origin of the papers is 64

I. A. Shapiro, ‘The “Mermaid Club” ’, Modern Language Review, 45 (1950), 6–17. Beal, Index, i, Pt. 1, p. 248. 66 The watermark is similar to Gravell GRP.007.1 with initials ‘M & G’ or ‘M & C’. 67 Beal, Index, i, Pt. 1, p. 248. A sticker on the modern binding notes that it was sent to the conservation department of the PRO on 17 Dec. 1982; earlier catalogues refer to the document as a ‘small bundle’ and there are no records of any earlier binding (I am grateful to Dr Malcolm Mercer at the National Archives for checking this detail). 68 The para-Goodyer hand copied Donne’s ‘Love’s Usury’ in SP 9/51, fo. 43, verses beginning ‘Poore lines if ere you fortunately stand’ (fo. 22), and Carew’s ‘The Flea’ (fo. 25). Among the works elsewhere in the Conway collection in the para-Goodyer hand is 65

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Fig. 5.2. The Entertainment at Theobalds, Sir Edward Conway’s copy. The National Archives, SP 9/51, fo. 41. Reproduced by permission of The National Archives.

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that they do not have the ‘Conway Papers’ stamp that was applied to the collection before its dispersal by J. W. Croker in the 1850s. At that time political and state papers were presented to the Public Record Office, included among which were Conway’s copies of The Harefield Entertainment, Britain’s Burse, The Gipsies Metamorphosed, and Middleton’s Barkham Entertainment (now among the State Papers Domestic series at the National Archives); while personal and literary papers were deposited at the British Museum, including the Conway copy of The Running Masque. It seems most likely that SP 9/51 are Conway papers that for some reason were not stamped and came to the collection with the state papers despite their literary rather than political character, and were incorporated into SP 9, a miscellaneous domestic series, the nucleus of which is the collection made by Sir Joseph Williamson, Keeper of State Papers 1661–1702, into which some stamped items from the Conway papers were also incorporated.69 Sir Edward Conway has already made an appearance in Chapter 3 of this book, but he does not figure prominently as a patron in literary histories. His surviving collection shows that he was connected to numerous literary figures including Francis and John Beaumont, Jonson, and Donne. He was a cultivated Protestant internationalist, had been knighted by Essex, and was associated with Prince Henry’s court, fighting at Barriers with him in 1610 and 1611.70 In these respects, apart from the association with Essex (for which North was too young), there are striking similarities between him and Lord North. Conway had a long association with Sir Henry Goodere, who was responsible for transcribing many literary works for him, including a The Gipsies Metamorphosed (SP 14/122/58). The hand responsible for the anagram on Diana Cecil in SP 9/51, fo. 20, is found in the collection of separates from the Conway papers (BL, Add. MS 23229, fos. 19, 80, 81), which also contains another poem based on the same anagram (fo. 119). Both BL Add. 23229 and SP 9/51 have similar 19th-c. pencil subscriptions, perhaps by Croker. 69 The other Conway papers in the group are SP 9/95, a register of baptisms and marriages at Brill, and SP 9/193, 19th-c. transcripts of Conway papers. This suggestion is encouraged by the absence of SP 9/51 from the list of Williamson papers in F. S. Thomas, A History of the State Paper Office (London: HMSO, 1849), 60–89, although this list is incomplete. SP 9/51 is, however, included in the undated Press List of the Contents of the State Paper Branch Record Office Anterior to 1688 (NA OBS 1/886/12), p. 77 (no. 346), which also has ‘Duplicate Conway papers’ (no. 354). 70 See Knowles, ‘Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’, 123–5.

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number by Goodere’s friend John Donne.71 A series of poems written by Goodere himself in the 1620s finds him capitalizing on his friendship with Conway, by then Secretary of State, by using him as a conduit for the passage of commendatory poems to Buckingham in an unsuccessful attempt to improve his desperate financial situation.72 A pattern familiar from the verse epistle to Jonson can be seen in this exchange: on one occasion Goodere sent Conway a verse epistle addressed to the Marquis of Hamilton, but with Hamilton being a proxy for the Duke of Buckingham, praise of whom dominated the poem. Goodere was another man whose liminal position at the threshold of several different worlds gave him a distinctive role in facilitating the circulation of texts. Goodere’s family background has parallels to that of Francis Davison, another significant figure in the circulation of literary manuscripts who was discussed in Chapter 3. Both were from wellconnected gentry families that had fallen on bad times under Elizabeth through connections with Mary, Queen of Scots: while William Davison had been ruined by authorizing her death, Goodere’s family had fallen under suspicion because they assisted her when she first fled to England.73 Given his family’s service, Goodere (unlike Davison) could hope for support from the new king, so it is not surprising to find him (like Sir 71 Beal (Index, i, Pt. 1, p. 247) lists the following poetry manuscripts owned by Conway and transcribed by Goodere: SP 14/153/112 (verses by Goodere on the Prince’s return from Spain); SP 14/180/17 (commendatory verses by Goodere on Buckingham addressed to Lord Steward Hamilton); Add. 23229, fos. 10–14 (Donne’s ‘Ecclogue. 1613. December 26’), 37 (Donne’s ‘Elegie on the Lady Marckham’), 49 (‘Shall I dare to return to fires’), 58 (‘Le Bien Venu’), 76–7 (Donne’s ‘Goodfriday. 1613. Riding Westward’), 133 (‘For as who doth { . . . } glasses try’), 134 (‘Madam, There are enow whose braynes your beautyes hate’), 135–6 (‘Angells first fault was pride, there grew there fall’), fragments on 137–8, and 142 (‘Since some with leather doe, I hope I may’). 72 Goodere’s poems are listed in Poems from Sir Kenelm Digby’s Papers in the Possession of Henry A. Bright, ed. Bright for the Roxburghe Club (London: Nichols, 1877), 34–6. 73 Goodere was heir to another Sir Henry Goodere, who, when Mary had first arrived in England and come to the home of his kinsman Richard Lowther, had ‘devised a cypher for the Queen to use to such as she trusted; the which afterwards being discovered, Goodyere and Lowther were both committed to the Tower, where after some time he was delivered, but never recovered the good opinion of the late Queen’ (Sir John Stanhope to Robert Cecil, HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield, 24 vols. (London: HMSO, 1883–1976), xvii. 120). The elder Sir Henry was another Protestant internationalist with connections in the Low Countries: he had been a friend of Sir Philip Sidney and fought at Zutphen (R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 163).

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John Davies) in Scotland immediately after the death of Elizabeth.74 He was appointed a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and thereafter spent many years hovering around the court, occasionally taking part in masques and tournaments and obtaining a few minor appointments, but never finding the significant success that would offset the expense of court life. The parallels to Lord North here are obvious. Goodere’s position on the periphery of the court is what made him such a useful go-between: having friends at court but being easily able to cross to the London taverns where societies of wits and lawyers congregated meant, for example, that he was in a position to introduce his close friend John Donne to the woman who became his patron, Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Goodere’s distinctive position in the literary milieu of his day is gracefully summarized by Jonson in one of the two epigrams he wrote on his friend: When I would know thee GOODYERE, my thought lookes Upon thy wel-made choise of friends, and bookes; Then doe I love thee, and behold thy ends In making thy friends bookes, and thy bookes friends[.]75

One way in which Goodere made his friends’ books was by acting as a scribe, but he also introduced poets to potential patrons who could ‘make’ their books through financial support, and introduced their poems to his wide circle of friends. Whilst his uncle, Sir Henry Goodere senior, had been a patron—most notably to the young Michael Drayton—his nephew played a different part in the literary economy, inscribing himself into the prestigious social and patronage networks that also served as the vehicle for manuscript circulation. It was a role well suited for a man who was well connected, well educated, and with literary sensibilities, but who did not have funds that corresponded with his status; not only was introducing writers to patrons cheaper than acting as a patron oneself, but circulating manuscripts was a process that largely took place outside the monetary economy. Intermediary or go-between characters played an important role in the manuscript transmission of literary works, and there are sufficiently 74 ‘A relacion of the Princes noble and vertuous disposicion’, Huntington Library, MS EL 6862, fo. 6r. 75 Epigrammes, LXXXVI, ll. 1–4.

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striking biographical similarities between Goodere, Davison, and others to sketch out a provisional typology. These were men at the margins of the court, who performed in the odd entertainment and maybe held a minor position (usually of the sort that cost more than any income it brought in); they were from families with historic links to the powerful but whose own political fortunes had fared badly; intellectually adventurous, they were often connected with the vaguely oppositional way of thinking that coalesced in the 1590s around the Earl of Essex; these were men who prized friendship and were part of the world of the selfdefined ‘wits’ (associated more with the Inns of Court and the House of Commons than the royal court) in which political poetry and verse libels thrived and were widely circulated in manuscript.76 The other owners of copies of the Entertainment at Theobalds are less significant within the elite literary-cultural network—they do not, for example, have known links to Jonson—but they were to close to the world of the metropolitan wits. One copy is found among the papers of a prominent legal and Parliamentary family, the Yelvertons. Sir Christopher Yelverton (1536/7–1612) was a Judge of the King’s Bench and had been Speaker of the Commons in 1597, while his son Sir Henry Yelverton (1566–1630) eventually became Attorney General. All Souls College, MS 155, is a quarto volume of 413 leaves which comprises transcripts in a single secretary hand of Yelverton family papers, most of which relate to Sir Christopher.77 The manuscript came to All Souls in 1786 from a descendant of Narcissus Luttrell. Jonson’s entertainment was probably collected by Henry Yelverton rather than his father: the elder Yelverton had an attested interest in drama, but his son was much closer to the social group among which manuscript copies of the text originated, both in age and as an MP, like both Sir Henry Goodere and Sir Francis Fane.78 The Yelvertons must 76

See Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 77 A few items are directly connected to Henry, such as his speech to the Lords on Commons’ privileges, fos. 314–316r, and on fo. 316v, ‘H: Yelvertons answer to a Servant of the archbishoppe of Cant:’; other items post-date the death of Christopher Yelverton in 1612. 78 Sir Christopher Yelverton wrote the epilogue for Gascoigne’s Jocasta in 1566, and took an active interest in plays and masques performed at Gray’s Inn (see A. Wigfall Green, The Inns of Court and Early English Drama (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 146, 151).

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have known many of the Mitre convivium philosphicum, which included Jonson as well as many MPs and independently minded lawyers such as Richard Martin, Christopher Brooke, and John Hoskins. The family’s literary interests are tellingly exposed by a group of works by Sir John Davies that are found in the manuscript, including the 1602 Cecil entertainment, ‘A Contention betwen a Wife, a Widowe and a Maide’ as well as epigrams, miscellaneous occasional poems, and ‘The Kinges Welcome’ from 1603. Davies’s editor, Robert Krueger, argues convincingly that these texts came directly from the author’s papers: a number are unique to this manuscript, they are of high quality, and their layout is similar to Davies’s autograph and other authoritative texts.79 This was probably another example of Davies using his literary work to cultivate important legal contacts. As well as being one among several court entertainments in the manuscript, the Theobalds entertainment is one among several pieces in the manuscript relating to Salisbury (including one of the two copies of Salisbury’s only known poem, ‘From a servant of Diana, as faithfull as the best’).80 Overall, then, this copy of the entertainment is easily explicable both in terms of the social group amongst which copies originated, and in terms of the collecting interest of its original owner. The House of Commons, which was in session until two months after the performance of the Theobalds entertainment, is also a point of connection with another owner of a copy, Sir Francis Fane (1583/ 4–1629), MP for Maidstone as well as a Knight of the Bath and, eventually, Earl of Westmorland.81 British Library Add. MS 34218 is a folio volume of 222 leaves copied out by someone in Fane’s service in around 1616.82 Alphabetical headings on fos. 5–28 suggest that the manuscript was originally intended as a formal commonplace book but few entries were made before it was given over to the transcription of 79

The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 445–6. 80 For the poem by Cecil see Duncan-Jones, ‘ “Preserved Dainties” ’ and Eckhardt, ‘ “From a seruant of Diana” ’. 81 P. W. Hasler (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1558–1603, 2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1981), ii. 102. 82 The status of the scribe is suggested by the phrasing of several items such as the list of presents given to ‘my master, att his beinge in Wilt aboute 25 Iunii. 1608’ (fo. 5v). The terminus a quo of 1616 is from a letter on fo. 18r about Sir Edward Cecil’s (Salisbury’s nephew) sale of a walkway.

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private papers. As in the case of the Yelverton manuscript, the collection appears to have been transcribed from loose papers, so the exemplar of the entertainment was almost certainly a separate. Parliamentary business and letters, many relating to Fane’s Kentish estates and his position in the Commission of Sewers for Kent, dominate the collection. It also includes common controversial pieces relating to Parliament such as the inevitable ‘Parliament Fart’ (fos. 20–1) and the Petition of Right (fol. 11), confessions and speeches relating to Essex’s trial (fos. 210–18) and the Powder Treason (fos. 67–82), court business including ‘A List of the Kings Majestys proceeding through London, 15 Martii 1603’ (fo. 31v), and Fane’s own 1596 prose oration to Elizabeth (fos. 205v–206r) when he was a student at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Among the literary items in BL Add. MS 34218 are the ‘Challenge of the Knights of the Fortunate Isle’ (fo. 183v), which is also found in the Yelverton volume, libels on Frances Howard (fos. 162v and 165r), and poems on the 1615 satirical Cambridge play Ignoramus (fos. 152–154r). A slightly later companion volume (BL Add. 34217) includes ‘The Interpreter’ (‘That the unwyse may Learne to understand’) defining Protestant, Papist and Puritan (Add. 34217, fos. 34–38r), and the 1620s political libel, a ‘Petition to the Blessed Saint Eliza’ (Add. 34217, fol. 39v–41v).83 Fane’s other known manuscripts do not include many pieces similar to the entertainment, so his ownership does not fit into a pattern of collecting as easily as in the cases of North, Conway, or even Yelverton. There is little evidence for Francis Fane’s interest in drama but perhaps such an interest is reflected in the activities of two of his children: his daughter Rachel was one of the few women known to have written masques, and his son and heir Mildmay wrote and staged a series of plays and masques at the family seat of Apethorpe.84 A surviving ‘Catalogue of the Books of Apethorpe’ includes a substantial amount of English poetry but little of this can be connected to Sir Francis, and

83 BL, Add. 34217 is a similar transcription of later papers in the same hand with additions relating to the Second Earl. 84 Julie Sanders, ‘ “sat their all the while to see the maske”: The Rachel Fane Manuscript’, paper given at Keele University, 3 June 2000. Six dramatic works by Mildmay Fane, second Earl of Westmoreland, are in BL, Add. MS 34221. See Mildmay Fane’s Raguaillo D’Oceano, 1640, and Candy Restored, 1641, ed. Clifford Leech (Louvain: Libraire Universitaire, 1938).

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the family copy of Jonson’s 1616 Workes, in which Mildmay inscribed commendatory verses on Jonson, was not purchased until the 1630s.85 Francis Fane was a man of greater means than most of the other figures discussed in this chapter, and his affiliations brought him into tension with the Earl of Salisbury. His father, Sir Thomas Fane (d. 1589), had been a wealthy man, but the key to Sir Francis’s success was his marriage to Mary, the only child of Sir Anthony Mildmay, who had inherited the fortune amassed by Sir Walter Mildmay (1520–89). A Kentishman, Sir Francis had had close connections to Lord Cobham, with whose assistance he had gained a county seat in the 1601 Parliament.86 When Cobham fell in 1603 most of his lands had gone to the Earl of Salisbury. Following these events Fane seems to have taken an active, if somewhat morbid, interest in Salisbury’s fortunes: there are a number of items relating to him—particularly his death—in the manuscript.87 The key to understanding Fane’s ownership of the entertainment is, once again, the literary network of which Jonson was a part, and in particular Fane’s friendship with another crucial intermediary figure in the circulation of literary texts, Rowland Woodward. Fane had befriended Woodward when they were students at Lincoln’s Inn, and Woodward later served as his secretary, although he was not responsible for transcribing this manuscript.88 Woodward was, like Henry Goodere, a close friend of Donne—also of course at Lincoln’s Inn—and also a friend of Jonson.89 Fane was the owner of a manuscript volume of Donne’s works transcribed by Rowland Woodward, the ‘Westmoreland Manuscript’, now in the Berg collection of New York Public Library. In a further sign of interconnection, the Westmoreland Manuscript is 85

BL, Add. MS 34220, fos. 22–25v (rev.). There are some early items including Daniel (1602), Chaucer (1602), and Fairfax’s translation of Tasso (1600). One curious item, ‘Mustapha a manuscript Play’ (fo. 24v), could refer to either Fulke Greville’s Mustapha (1596) or Peter Boyle’s Mustapha, Son of Solyman the Magnificent (1665). Scribal copies of both plays survive. For the Jonson (Yale University, Beinecke Library, 1977 + 422) see Mark Bland, ‘William Stansby and the Production of the Workes of Beniamin Jonson, 1615–16’, Library, 20 (1998), 1–33 at 20–2. 86 HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of . . . Lord De L’Isle and Dudley, 6 vols. (London: HMSO, 1925–66), ii. 535. 87 The items include a detailed account of his illness and death by J. Bowle, fos. 125–128r, and his will, fos. 138–42. 88 See the facsimile of Woodward’s hand in Sotheby’s sale catalogue for 30 July 1928, lot 35. 89 Bland, ‘Jonson, Biathanatos’, 156.

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textually related to the Donne poems found among the Conway papers, which were the work of Henry Goodere.90 Woodward may well have been responsible for providing the text to Fane, especially given his movements at the time: in the summer of 1607 Woodward was freshly returned to England, having spent the previous two years in Venice as the secretary to Sir Henry Wotton; he had been attacked by robbers in France on his return journey and was recuperating in the care of none other than the Earl of Salisbury.91 Even if Woodward did not provide Fane’s original transcript of the entertainment, the friendship between the two men connects Fane to the social group in which other copies originated. The original owner of the final copy of the Theobalds entertainment falls further from Jonson’s direct circle of acquaintance.92 Folger Shakespeare Library MS X.d.475 is a fragment, eight leaves long, of an early seventeenth-century miscellany. In addition to the entertainment (fos. 1v–2v) it contains: the end of a sermon on the wiles of Satan (fol. 1r); part of a popular satirical poem, ‘The Definition of the Puritan’ (fo. 3r); two Latin poems discussed below (fo. 4r); a piece outlining the doctrine of the Last Judgement by the Huguenot Theodorus Beza (1519–1605) (fo. 4v); apparently unique English verses on the importance of order to the commonwealth entitled ‘Servo superbis efflato, et moroso’ (I serve with proud and obstinate breath) (fo. 4v); a Latin exercise on the relative values of town and country living (fos. 5v–7r); a Latin epideictic poem on Queen Elizabeth (fo. 7v); and a synopsis of a dispute on the Last Judgement between Bishop Andrewes and Cardinal Bellarmine (fo. 8r) which, since it designates Andrewes as Bishop of Ely, must date from between 1609 and 1619. The two Latin poems on fo. 4r place the writer in a very specific social context: in ‘Jo: K. amico suo franc: Saunderes S. P. D.’, the poet invites Saunders to drop momentarily other affairs such as his ‘papers’ and ‘our laws’ and take up his poem; and the second is addressed, again by

Beal, Index, i, Pt. 1, pp. 252 and 254–5, sub DnJ ˜ 19 and DnJ ˜ 40. M. C. Deas, ‘A Note on Rowland Woodward, the Friend of Donne’, Review of English Studies, 7 (1931), 454–7. 92 An earlier version of the following has been published as Heaton, ‘The Copyist of a Ben Jonson Manuscript Identified’, Notes and Queries, 246 (2001), 385–8. 90 91

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‘Jo: K.’, to ‘Magistro Bowles serio in collegio Reginarum S. P. D.’93 The epideictic on fo. 7v expands the initials ‘Jo: K:’ to ‘Johannes Kaye’ and the two poems provide sufficient detail to identify this man: Francis Saunders matriculated from Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1596 and entered Middle Temple on 21 February 1601; Oliver Bowles matriculated from Queens’ College, Cambridge, in about 1593 and was a fellow there from 1599 to 1606; also a member of Queens’ was John Kaye, who matriculated in 1595 before moving on to Middle Temple on 17 March 1597, where he stayed until about 1601.94 The verses’ composition can thus be dated to 1601, when Kaye and Saunders were at Middle Temple, and Bowles a Fellow at Queens’. John Kaye (Kay/Keye) was a member of the Kaye family of Woodsome in the West Riding of Yorkshire, near the village of Almondsbury (now a suburb of Huddersfield), where they had been established since the fourteenth century. He was born in 1578, married well, came into his inheritance with the death of his father in 1620, and died on 9 March 1641.95 The family papers are full of homiletic verses on the virtues of industry and frugality, mostly by John Kaye’s grandfather (also called John), and accounts of the improvements made to the family home and fortune by successive generations.96 John the copyist’s son, yet another John, was made a Baronet on 4 February 1641/2, and became Secretary of State to the North.97 In the eighteenth century the Kaye family papers found their way into the collection of the Yorkshire antiquary John Wilson of Broomhead Hall 93 S. P. D. is an abbreviation of Salutem Plurimam Dicit, so the titles translate as ‘John Kaye wishes much health to his friend Francis Saunders’, and ‘John Kaye earnestly wishes much health to Master Bowles in Queens’ College.’ 94 J. and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–54), iii. 12; H. A. C. Sturgess, Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, from the Fifteenth Century to 1944, 3 vols. (London: Butterworth, 1949), i. 71. The date of Kaye’s departure from Middle Temple comes from the family papers, according to which his father, Robert, ‘placed John his sonne at Queens colledg in Cambridg & allowed him being fellow commoner there two yeares & foure or fyve yeares at Middle Temple London’ (Folger, MS W.b.482, p. 23). 95 John Kaye’s wife was Anne, the daughter of Sir John Ferne, Secretary to the Council of the North. 96 See Folger, MSS X.d.445–6 and W.b.483–4 for the verses; X.d.448 and W.b.482 for the family’s financial development. 97 See G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Baronetage, 6 vols. (Exeter: Pollard, 1900–9), ii. 156–8.

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(1719–83). A number of manuscripts are now at the Folger, and others are now at the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds. The latter provide confirmation that the Folger copy of the Entertainment at Theobalds is in the hand of this particular John Kaye. MS 295 (Wilson Papers), vol. 44, fo. 71 and vol. 70, Book 4, fos. 1 and 4, are separated leaves from what had been begun as a legal commonplace book, presumably when Kaye was at Middle Temple.98 They are in the same hand as that which predominates in K, and contain several drafts of letters to family members—with the initials ‘Jo: K:’ and greeting ‘SPD’ written with the similar flourishes to those in the Folger manuscript—which confirm him as the man who was at Queens’ and Middle Temple.99 John Kaye’s ownership of a copy of the entertainment is a reminder of the small size of the educated classes in Jacobean England. Although he had no particular literary or courtly connections, it is nevertheless possible to discern three links between Kaye and the loose social network that has been traced in this chapter. First, John Kaye must have known Francis Fane: both men matriculated in 1595 from Queens’ College, Cambridge. Secondly, a number of the ‘wits’ (including Henry Goodere) had been at Middle Temple, and Kaye was a student there at the time of the great revels of 1597–8 in which such figures as Richard Martin, John Davies, and John Hoskins had played leading parts.100 Unfortunately, comparison of the texts themselves does not confirm any of these links. Kaye’s copy (K) was not taken from Fane’s (Fa): whilst K is the more corrupt of the two, Fa also includes errors that are not shared by K.101 The text that

98 None of the leaves bears a watermark but all are in the same hand, have a very similar layout, contain entries on legal subjects, and measure approximately 304  205 mm. 99 How K was separated from the Wilson papers is unclear. It was purchased for the Folger at Sotheby’s 28 June 1965, lot 9, in a sale of the Bibliotheca Phillippica, new series, first part, but no Phillipps number is given for K in the Sotheby’s sale catalogue. The Wilson collection had passed to Sir Thomas Phillipps in 1843, but was purchased entire after Phillipps’s death by Wilson’s descendant Charles Macro Wilson. Before the Wilson collection found its way to the Brotherton ‘A selected portion of the Wilson papers’ had been siphoned off and was sold at Sotheby’s on 31 July 1962. The Folger acquired eight Kaye family manuscripts at this sale. Either K was removed from the collection of Wilson MSS before their sale to the Brotherton but was held back from the 1962 sale, or it was never reincorporated back into the Wilson papers from the Phillipps collection. 100 See O’Callaghan, The English Wits, 10–34. 101 On l. 18 Fa uniquely reads ‘a gage’ rather than ‘engage’ and on l. 84 it has ‘Containe’ rather than ‘continue’.

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Goodere copied for Conway (G) shares a distinctive common variant with K, ‘house’ for ‘place’ (l. 55), but since this error follows an obvious logic it could result from convergent variation. The third possible link between Kaye and Theobalds is the most intriguing. On 27 May 1607, just five days after the performance of the entertainment at Theobalds, a man by the name of ‘John Keyes’ was knighted at Whitehall.102 Sir John Keyes could well have been at the performance of Theobalds, and was listed among those who attended the entertainment of the King and Prince Henry by the Merchant Taylors’ Company on 16 July 1607.103 It was assumed by Venn in the Alumni Cantabrigienses and Cokayne in the Complete Baronetage that Keyes was Kaye of Woodsome, and if so it would prove that he was around the court at the time of performance and give an excellent reason for his access to, and interest in, the entertainment. Unfortunately, this seems to be a case of mistaken identity. The Almondsbury parish records invariably refer to John as an esquire, and he was also recorded with this appellation in the 1665 visitation of Yorkshire.104 The man who was knighted was a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Surveyor of Ordnance at the Tower between 1608 and 1623: not only did the latter post require military experience that, as far as is known, our John Kaye did not have, but the reversion of the post in 1623 suggests that Sir John died in that year whereas John of Woodsome lived on for nearly another twenty years.105 The coincidence of the two John Kaye/Keyes is so striking, however, that it seems possible that some connection between Kaye of Woodsome and Sir John Keyes explains how the former obtained a copy of the Theobalds entertainment. 102

J[ohn] P[hilipot], A Perfect Collection or Catalogue of All Knights Batchelaurs made by King James (London: H. Moseley, 1660), 40. 103 Guildhall Library, Merchant Taylors’ Company, Minutes of the Court of Assistants, v. 270. 104 Charles Augustus Hulbert, Annals of the Church and Parish of Almondbury (London: Longman, 1882), 197–8; The Visitation of Yorkshire by Sir William Dugdale, 1665 (Durham: Surtees Society, 1866), 175. 105 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1603–10, ed. M. A. E. Green (London: Longman, 1857), 447; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1611–18, ed. M. A. E. Green (London: Longman, 1858), 314; O. F. G. Hogg, The Royal Arsenal: Its Background, Origin, and Subsequent History, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), ii. 1042. The Surveyor was charged with controlling the quality of materials brought to the stores and logging items received; see Richard Winship Stewart, The English Ordnance Office, 1585–1625 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996), 15.

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The fact of Kaye’s ownership is at least as significant as the way in which it reached him: it is the sort of contingency that easily resulted from the informal circulation of manuscript texts within social networks. Manuscript circulation could (at least initially) keep a text within an exclusive coterie, but the borders of this exclusive group would always be porous: passing a text from friend to friend could bring it to Yorkshire gentry families in very few steps, with the aura of exclusivity that to a great extent drove the circulation of the text gradually fading each step of the way. That aura of exclusivity is very much evident in Kaye’s text, which has an intimate and precise title: ‘A spech made at Tibaldes the xxiith [sic] of maye when the Queene tooke posession being acompanied with the kinge, younge prince a great peare of France and many nobles’ (fo. 1v). Typically, and despite Jonson’s apparent role in circulating the text, this copy does not record that the ‘spech’ was written by Jonson. The surviving copies of the Theobalds entertainment belonged to people who can be connected to each other socially. They form a much more coherent group than, say, the owners of copies of the Harefield entertainment, and the loose social network to which they all belonged also included Ben Jonson, but not the Earl of Salisbury. Despite any tension between Jonson and his patron, Jonson was almost certainly responsible for the initial circulation of the text, even though he was not named as its author—although it is possible that the production of scribal copies for circulation was part of his commission.106 The last two chapters have seen Ben Jonson playing an unusually selfeffacing role in the dissemination of texts that he had written: he was involved in the manuscript circulation of both of the 1607 entertainments before King James, but in neither case were these manuscripts circulated with his name attached as author, and authorship of the verses was subsumed within the larger issue of responsibility for the performance. The distribution of texts was even part of the author’s commission when Jonson worked for the Merchant Taylors’ Company, and 106 Salisbury may have paid Jonson for producing copies of his 1608 Britain’s Burse entertainment: among the surviving bills is the payment ‘To Mr Johnsons man and anoth[er] feld [i.e. Nathan Field] that satt up all night wryt[ing] the speeches songes & inscript[ions]’ (Hatfield House, CP Bills 35), which could refer to scribal transcripts for distribution rather than to his work composing the text.

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may also have been so when he worked for Salisbury. Of course Jonson’s ambitions as an author extended far beyond the late-night scribbling of anonymous transcripts for a rich patron, and the next and final chapter examines Jonson’s strong authorial self-presentation in the texts of the Jacobean masque.

6 The Jacobean Masque: Jonson, Authorship, and Royal Address Thinke on some sweet, and choice invention, now, Worthie her serious, and illustrious eyes, That from the merit of it we may take Desir’d occasion to preferre your worth, And make your service known to Cynthia. Arete to Crites, Cynthia’s Revels, 3. 4. 93–7

PRESENTING THE MASQUE OF BLACKNESSE In the first decade of the seventeenth century the court masque became established as the pre-eminent form of courtly entertainment, an expression of courtly culture of unparalleled magnificence. It was also a form that became strongly associated with a single writer, Ben Jonson. Although masques had been performed at court long before King James and Queen Anna, Stuart masques were much more ambitious in scope, both financially and artistically, than anything previously performed in England, and whilst Jonson was not the first or only poet to write masques for the Stuart court, the depth and sophistication of his artistic vision set him apart from his contemporaries. Masques were a distinct and prestigious commission with a much closer connection to royalty than country house or tiltyard entertainments: not only were they performed at the heart of the court in royal palaces, but the patron and paymaster was also royal—if not the King himself then his Queen or the Prince of Wales. Previous chapters have shown how entertainments provided a means for the aristocratic sponsor to address the

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watching monarch and this was also a feature of those masques sponsored, for example, by Queen Anna and Prince Henry. A keen interest in the relationship between artist and monarchical power runs through Jonson’s work, and the distinctive role of the masque writer is first explored—or perhaps fantasized—in his 1600 satire The fountaine of selfe-love. Or Cynthia’s Revels, a play written several years before he first took on the part of masque writer. The play is an awkward attempt to satirize vain and shallow courtiers at the same time as representing an ideal court, with the two worlds coming together towards the end of the play in a masque written by Crites. The masque is a simple series of entries in which eight courtly virtues (four male and four female), each bearing an appropriate allegorical device, enter in succession with a brief introduction by a narrator, then dance decorously together. However, each of the masquers in fact embodies the vice that is antithetical to the virtue he or she represents within the masque. Cynthia, the goddess who rules the court (and who is inevitably an idealized Queen Elizabeth), sees through the performance to the contrasting vices beneath—self-love, mockery, gluttony, prodigality, and so on—and the offending courtiers are duly banished from her court. In later years Jonson was to make similar use of antithesis as a structuring device in his court masques, which often turn upon courtly virtues represented by masquers banishing their antithetical vices in the form of an antimasque (in real masques it was not possible to represent vice and virtue through the same character). Cynthia’s Revels shows Jonson’s keen sense of the potential discrepancy between a masquer and his or her character in the masque, either as something to be viewed with weary irony or to be utilized as a demand for reform. The masque is written by Crites, or scholarship, who is commissioned by Cynthia’s Maid of Honour Arete, or virtue. She first invites him to write for Cynthia with the words quoted at the head of this chapter, but the terms of the commission are only finalized at the beginning of Act 5 of the play. It is in fact a collaborative affair: the decision that the commission should take the form of a masque is not made by Crites or Arete but by the decadent courtier Amorphus, whilst the decision that the masque should be an ironic mockery of the courtly masquers is sensibly left to the disguised god Mercury. When Arete first dangles the promise of a commission before Crites, she is clear that its

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greatest value is the opportunity that it provides to ‘make your service known to Cynthia’. Before the masque has even begun Cynthia enquires ‘unto whose invention, must we owe, j The complement of this nights furniture?’ (5.6, 81–2). When Arete informs her Queen and praises Crites, Cynthia answers that she has already judged him and knows of his virtues. This is typical of how, in the early comical satires, Jonson tended to show his favoured characters being judged and found worthy before they are put to the test through action, so providing an unambiguous and clear statement of what constitutes virtue at the expense of dramatic tension. But despite her comment to Arete, Cynthia had not previously acknowledged Crites’s virtue, so it is of great significance to him when Cynthia expostulates at the end of the first part of the masque that ‘Not under heaven an object could be found j More fit to please’ (5.8, 13–14). Crites’s masque has achieved an image of a perfect court that mirrors Cynthia’s and in doing so has opened up a future of royal patronage. A powerful image of the mutual sympathy which underlies Cynthia’s decision is found at the end of the play, when the Queen delegates her authority to Crites and Arete and allows them to determine the punishment to be meted out to the decadent courtiers who have polluted her court. Jonson is thought to have gained the commission for the Twelfth Night masque of 1604/5 in a somewhat similar way to Crites, with Lucy, Countess of Bedford, playing the part of Arete. The masque was the Queen’s, and Jonson’s relationship with Queen Anna was central to his early years at court but it was not an entirely easy one, as a number of recent critics have shown.1 Whereas Cynthia is an ideal patron and does not tell Crites what to write, the device of Jonson’s first masque was predicated on the Queen’s express desire to black up.2 She was closely involved in preparations for the performance and several contemporary letters describe the bustle around the Queen during the rehearsal 1 See e.g. Ian Donaldson, The World Upside Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 37–45; Leeds Barroll, ‘Inventing the Stuart Masque’, in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (eds.), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121–43; Stephen Orgel, ‘Marginal Jonson’, ibid. 144–75. 2 ‘it was her Majesties will, to have them Black-mores at first’ (Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vii. 169).

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period.3 Whereas Cynthia graciously and easily grants Crites pre-eminence in his role as author, Jonson had to assert himself into a dominant position. The surviving manuscript of The Masque of Blacknesse (BL, Royal MS 17.B.XXXI) reveals more about Jonson’s relationship with his royal mistress. The masque generated considerable interest: it is described in several surviving letters and Dudley Carleton believed a pamphlet to be in the press immediately after the performance.4 In fact the text did not reach print until 1608 and the presentation manuscript is the only surviving text contemporary with the performance. The manuscript is a high-quality production, carefully written out on single half-sheets of paper probably of German origin (not the Venetian stock used by Jonson in presentations in the years immediately after 1605) with line-fillers, catchwords, and wide-ruled red margins (which leave a writing space of 145  110 mm), written in a scribal secretary hand with a distinguishing italic for proper names, foreign words, and the six songs.5 At the end of the text Jonson subscribes his signature and a Latin quotation. (See Fig. 6.1.) The title of the manuscript (‘The twelvth nights Revells’) indicates that the manuscript was produced before the next Twelfth Night came around, and the probability is that it was written shortly before the masque was performed. The inclusion of careful descriptions of costume, setting, and action mean that it cannot have been written until those details had been worked out, but these descriptive passages are in the present tense—a tell-tale sign of an early text, as such passages were typically moved into the past tense in later copies and print publication.6 There are also minor differences in staging between the manu3 See ibid., x. 446. For Queen Anna’s cultural significance see Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 4 For the masque’s reception see Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, x. 448–9. 5 The watermark, a basilisk (which suggests Basle as its origin), is similar to Gravell COCK.001.1, which is dated 1605. 6 The printed pamphlet has these phrases in the past tense and makes other changes including the addition of marginalia. Stage action is typically in the present tense only in print publications sent to the press before the performance, in texts taken hurriedly to the press after the event like Chapman’s Memorable Masque, or in publications taken from an early manuscript like the edition of The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn in Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies and tragedies (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1647).

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Fig. 6.1. Jonson’s presentation manuscript of The Masque of Blacknesse. British Library, Royal MS 17.B.XXXI, fo. 4. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

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script and the later printed text: these apparently represent last-minute alterations, which strongly suggest that the manuscript was copied before all details of the performance were finalized.7 The presence of the manuscript in the Royal collection shows that it was a gift to a member of the royal family, and since we can date the production of the manuscript to late December 1604 (i.e. shortly before the performance on 6 January 1605), it may well have been a New Year’s gift. The recipient could have been either the King or the Queen: it was of course Queen Anna’s masque, but given her close involvement in preparations for the masque she would presumably have been very familiar with the text anyway, and the manuscript could have been given to the King in order to ensure that he was informed of what was to be performed. The absence from the manuscript of fourteen lines of text found in the quarto (ll. 116–30 including a speech heading) is evidence for revision and collaboration. These lines are probably last-minute additions, made before the performance but after the manuscript had been produced, although, rather like the final stanzas of the 1607 song at Theobalds, there is a chance that these lines were added later when Jonson revised the text for print publication in 1608. They seem to have been written to clear up an apparent implausibility in the narrative, which has Niger, the African river, travel through the ocean to reach the shores of Britain but emerge undiluted.8 The additional lines are an exchange between Oceanus, who exclaims in wonder that the river has travelled through the ocean, and Niger himself, who replies that . . . ’tis not strange at all, That (since the immortall soules of creatures mortall Mixe with their bodies, yet reserve for ever A power of separation) I should sever My fresh streames, from thy brackish . . . Though . . . thus far mixed.

7 The scene of woods and coastline was opened as a curtain in the manuscript (fo. 3r) but ‘fell’ in the quarto; the Moon appears in a chariot in the manuscript (fo. 6r), on a throne in the quarto. 8 An alternative explanation is offered by A. W. Johnson, who suggests that the additions were made to improve the numerological balance of the text; Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 120–8.

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The revision to the text is a good example of the kind of collaborative writing and last-minute change that should by now be familiar. It is even possible that the production of the manuscript led to the need for revision. One can easily imagine the famously pedantic King James reading the text and expressing his wonder that an African river could cross the ocean undiluted, the King’s comment being whispered back to the author, and Jonson hurriedly writing an additional piece of explanatory dialogue. On opening this manuscript of Blacknesse to its first page, the reader is confronted by the following title page: THE Teares of the Howers. JUSTICE. PEACE. & LAWE. wept into the bosome of the best K. Mutare dominum non potest liber notus. 1604.

This is followed, on fo. 2, by a second title page reading ‘The twelvth nights Revells’, and the text of the masque then runs from fo. 3 to fo. 8v, with fo. 9 left blank. The additional ‘Teares’ title page shares a number of scribal practices with the rest of the manuscript, such as red doubleruled margins and the use of horizontal guidelines, which were constructed by scoring the paper before writing commenced. The hands are probably also the same: the highly skilled scribe used a number of different scripts in the masque, but one of these (in which the words ‘The Song’, ‘Niger’, and ‘Oceanus’ on fo. 4r are written, and the word ‘Song’ on fo. 8v) is very similar to the ‘Teares’ title page. There are admittedly differences in the proportions of ‘T’, ‘h’, and ‘n’, but this could result from the use of guidelines to determine the writing area on fo. 1. Although watermark evidence is lacking, the similar distribution of chain-lines suggests that fo. 1 is the same paper stock as the rest of the manuscript. However, this first leaf is not integral to the manuscript of the masque, as fos. 2–9 form a discrete bibliographical unit.9 The most 9 Fos. 3–8 comprise three successive bifolia. The most logical explanation of the manuscript’s structure, supported by the distribution of chain-lines, is that fos. 2 and 9 were a conjugate pair which enclosed and held together the unquired bifolia, although extensive rebinding work has left the binding tight and cut away the inner edges of the manuscript.

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plausible explanation for this lonely and unexplained singleton is that The Masque of Blacknesse, as originally presented, was accompanied by a second text of which only the title page remains. Percy Simpson conjectured that the missing text is Jonson’s Panegyre because of ‘[t]he reference to Themis and her daughters Dice, Eunomia, and Irene in lines 20–9 of the Panegyre and the date 1604’.10 Why the poem should have been given a different title is not explained, but even should Jonson have decided to retitle the Panegyre, ‘The Teares of the Howers’ would have been a peculiar choice. Poetic laments were sometimes called ‘Tears’, as in Spenser’s Tears of the Muses, but the Panegyre is a poem of praise not lament. Nor does the title work in a more literal way: Themis is admittedly in tears when she gives her analysis of English political history to the king in the Panegyre (ll. 107–8), but her children the Hours are only briefly mentioned in the poem and are entirely dryeyed. The title page would rather seem to be evidence of a lost work, one that was presented alongside the masque around New Year 1604/5 and may well have included a dedication or other prefatory material (the lack of which in the surviving manuscript is unusual for a royal presentation), but which became separated from the masque manuscript and for unknown reasons was not included by Jonson in the 1616 Workes. The ‘Teares’ was given to the King, into whose bosom the Hours weep. With so little known about the lost text there is little to choose between two hypotheses: either both manuscripts were given to the King at New Year or they were parallel presentations to King and Queen. Then there is the Latin epigraph on the ‘Teares’ title page. ‘Mutare dominum non potest liber notus’ (A well-known book cannot change author) is taken from Martial’s Epigrams (1. 66), which could hardly be a source more typical of Jonson. Martial’s epigram is addressed to a fellow poet who had taken false credit for Martial’s own work, and provides satirical advice about what sorts of poem are most easily stolen. This epigraph is thematically linked to the epigraph with which Jonson signs off at the end of the masque (which are also the only words in the manuscript in Jonson’s own hand other than his signature), ‘Hos ego versiculos feci’ (I made these meagre verses). It is perhaps not surprising to find that Jonson is being somewhat less self-effacing here than at first 10

Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vii. 69.

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appears, for these words form the beginning of a poem ascribed to Virgil in Donatus’ Life of the poet. They are also concerned with plagiarism: according to Donatus, the poem was composed for Augustus’ eyes as an indirect complaint after a distych he had written in praise of the emperor was claimed by another poet as his own work. Jonson quotes the first part of a line completed with the words, ‘tulit alter honores’ (another took the honours). The parallels between the Latin epigraphs surely remove any doubt that the masque belonged with ‘The Teares of the Howers’, whatever that may have been. Possibly Jonson had a specific act of plagiarism in mind when he picked out these quotations, but his choice was probably a more general assertion of his authorial authority and expression of anxiety about the status of a masque writer.11 It is of course possible that this issue of authorial control was dealt with in more detail in the lost work. The production of the presentation manuscript was connected with Jonson’s concern about authorship: the act of presenting a manuscript to a member of the royal family was an attempt to foster a relationship with royalty, and royal sponsorship was itself a powerful guarantee against all forms of illicit appropriation, including libellous interpreters as well as those who would take unwarranted credit for his work. Concern over plagiarism, and more generally over rightful acknowledgement of his authorship, surfaces on many occasions in Jonson’s work, especially in the early years of the century.12 There were also particular issues that Jonson set out to change surrounding the ambivalent position of the writer of entertainments. He was fulfilling a highly prestigious and well-paid commission but was relegated to the status of employee, fulfilling a brief often laid down by the patron in considerable detail.

11 It is possible that Jonson had in mind his squabble with Dekker over the Magnificent Entertainment pamphlets in the summer of 1604, which had resulted in Jonson’s pamphlet being impounded, and a text being published as the Whole Magnifycent Entertainment (London: E. Allde for Tho. Mann, 1604) without Jonson’s speeches. See Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vii. 77–9, and x. 386–7. 12 For example Poetaster 4. 4, Epigrammes LVI, LXXXI, and C. See also Ian Donaldson, ‘“The Fripperie of Wit”: Jonson and Plagiarism’, in Paulina Kewes (ed.), Plagiarism in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 202–28.

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Four years after Blacknesse, Jonson produced another and considerably more lavish royal presentation manuscript, this time of The Masque of Queenes. This was intended as a gift to Prince Henry, the heir to the throne, and is much the best-known masque manuscript. Produced after the performance of the masque, it is entirely in Jonson’s autograph. The ambitions of the manuscript have been recognized by later generations: pages have been reproduced many times and it is designated a Treasure of the British Library, where it sits on permanent exhibition in a dimly lit case in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery. Jonson could hardly have hoped for more than to find his gift placed in so literal a way at the heart of Britain’s literary heritage, although his pleasure in posterity’s verdict might have been slightly tempered by the name placed over the exhibition case in which his work is found—which is, inevitably, ‘Shakespeare’. Even more than Blacknesse, inherent in the manuscript of Queenes is a claim by Jonson of his ownership of the text as its author: it is his to give to the Prince. Jonson moved successively from being an employee working as part of a team to provide a masque that met a patron’s specifications, to a scholar poet willingly assisting in the education of a prince, to a public poet asserting the worth of his work and its royal authorization. Each step took the text progressively away from Queen Anna, who had originally employed Jonson. The collaborative nature of the masque is once again well attested: Jonson himself admits that the antimasque of witches stemmed from demands by the Queen, who specifically ‘commaunded mee to think on some Daunce, or shew, that might praecede hers, and have the place of a foyle, or falseMasque’.13 A two-page summary ‘argument’ of the masque also survives that was presumably produced while the masque was in preparation in order to provide details of the device either to the courtiers who were perform the piece, or the technicians and other specialists responsible for sets, music, dance, costume, lighting, and other aspects of staging.14

13

Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vii. 282. BL, Harleian MS 6947, fo. 143, printed in Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vii. 318–19. 14

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The act of royal presentation itself is represented in another of Jonson’s early comical satires. The first chapter of this book was illuminated by the striking image of a fantasy royal presentation, the drawing which appeared as the frontispiece to George Gascoigne’s New Year’s gift to Queen Elizabeth of The Tale of Hemetes the Heremyte, in which the free and unmediated access allowed by the gift of the manuscript was entwined with the acceptance of laurels. A similar moment is played out at the beginning of 5. 2 in Jonson’s Poetaster. The setting is Augustan Rome, where the Emperor, Maecenas, and the poets Gallus, Tibullus, and Horace are waiting for Virgil. The arrival of Virgil is announced just as Augustus explains that he prizes poetry for the capacity of ‘the liquid Marble of her Lines’ to make immortal the virtues and achievements of the Roman state. The poet enters and the Emperor rises and greets him warmly. The initial exchange between the men is worth quoting at length: [Caesar] . . . Where are thy famous Aeneids? Doe us grace To let us see, and surfet on their sight. Virgill. Worthlesse they are of Caesars gracious Eyes, If they were perfect; much more, with their wants; Which are yet more, then my Time could supply: And, could great Caesars expectation Be satisfied with any other service, I would not shew them. Caesar. Virgill is too modest; Or seekes, in vaine, to make our longings more. Shew them, sweete Virgill. Virgill. Then, in such due feare, As fits Presenters of great works, to Caesar, I humbly shew them: Caesar. Let us now behold A humane soule made visible in life; And more refulgent in a senselesse paper, Then in the sensuall Complement [ceremony] of Kings . . .15

Following this remarkable description of the manuscript, Augustus returns it to Virgil and asks him to recite. Virgil had presumably been kneeling for the presentation but Augustus now invites him to sit on a 15

Poetaster, 5. 2, ll. 6–20.

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chair that has been directly to the right of his own: ‘Vertue, without presumption, place may take j Above best Kings, whom onely she should make’ (ll. 26–7). Gentlemen of the Chamber are ordered to guard the door from intruders and the group, silent and attentive, gathers around Virgil. Both actors have behaved perfectly in accordance with the Classical model of gift-giving codified by Seneca (as discussed in Chapter 4). The Emperor understands the value of the gift: the poet can grant him immortality. Seating Virgil next to himself is a signal of favour, but his insistence on decorum elsewhere in the play assures us that it is not indicative of a lack of imperial dignity. His banishment of the outside world and the cares of rule for the duration of the reading is, like the empty corridors behind the Queen depicted in Gascoigne’s drawing, a powerful signal of privileged access. Nor is the Emperor primarily interested in the physical gift itself: he feels its power as the word made manifest but hands it back as Virgil will be the better reader. The ephemeral gesture of presentation—the prettily ornamented book and the rituals of the court—are irrelevant next to the work itself, although it is through courtly gestures that he acknowledges Virgil’s greatness. Virgil for his part is shown to be lacking in ambition in anything but his poetry and, as is proper for any royal gift, he insists that his offering is inadequate to the recipient. There is an important difference between the way Jonson represents the relationship between poet and monarch and the way it had been understood a generation earlier by Gascoigne. In the illustration and especially the preface to his manuscript of Hemetes, poetry is described as a functional skill on a par with martial prowess, drawing, or translation; it is an accomplishment that demonstrates the poet’s worthiness of royal employment. But to Virgil and his Emperor poetry is an end in itself with a transcendent value. By making Virgil’s Aeneid, Rome’s literary masterpiece, the poem at the centre of the exchange, Jonson ensures that his point is proved. He has again pre-judged the outcome because we the audience already know that the Aeneid is equal to the Emperor’s august words: In her sweete streames shall our brave Romane spirits Chace, and swimme after Death, with their choyse deedes Shining on their white shoulders; and therein

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Shall Tyber, and our famous Rivers fall With such attraction, that th’ambitious Line Of the round World shall to her Center shrinke, To heare their Musicke: And for these high Parts, Caesar shall reverence the Pierian Artes. (5. 1, 25–32)

With these beautiful words and high expectations, Jonson’s Augustus proposes an aesthetic in which poetry and political power are mutually dependent. Offering a poem as a royal gift implies a claim to the laurels, however much you might hide it in self-denying prefatory words. But how was the work’s worthiness to be judged? It is only in the double timeline of fiction that the royal gift can be a poem already known as a classic. If it was the verdict of posterity that was to legitimate your claims, then how were you to respond to the gift of the work before that distant verdict was reached? This is one reason why royal presentations tend to be nervously hedged about with justifications and abnegations. And just as a poet might fail to be Virgil, monarchs were rarely as sympathetic as Jonson’s Augustus. Poetaster was first performed in 1601 or 1602, at which time the Emperor’s treatment of Virgil would have been in obvious contrast to the parsimony of Queen Elizabeth and especially to the fate of Spenser, the loudest Elizabethan claimant to Virgil’s laurels, who, according to Jonson, ‘died for lake of bread in King Street’.16 The Masque of Queenes was not of course a work with the intended scope of Virgil’s epic, but Jonson’s presentation of a manuscript of it to Prince Henry raises similar issues to Virgil’s presentation in Jonson’s play. This gift was prefaced by an epistle that echoes the idealized act of presentation in Poetaster. Jonson praises the young man’s many virtues: Your favor to letters, and these gentler studies, that goe under the title of Humanitye, is not the least honor of your wreath. For, if once the worthy Professors of these learnings shall come (as heretofore they were) to be the care of Princes, the Crownes theyr Soveraignes weare will not more adorne theyr Temples; not theyr stamps live longer in theyr Medalls, than in such Subjects labors.17

16 17

Conversations with Drummond, in Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, i. 137. BL, Royal MS 18.A.XLV.

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This is the same claim that Jonson had earlier placed in Augustus’ mouth: the poet supported by the prince could be that prince’s longest-lasting legacy. Jonson entangles poetry with power yet more deeply further on in the epistle. The effort of producing the manuscript has been considerable: Yet, now I have overcome it, the reward that meetes mee is double to one act: which is, that therby, your excellent understanding will not only justefie mee to your owne knowledge, but decline the stiffness of others originall Ignorance, allready armed to censure.

Jonson here answers the questions raised above—how to judge the value of a poetic offering—by taking the royal reader as providing exemplary judgement. Throughout his work Jonson is consistent in seeking the approbation of exemplary judges rather than popular praise. True judgement often resides with political power in his work, for example when, in the preface to Sejanus, he conjures up a hostile ignorant mob that wishes to destroy his work: protection requires not just the exemplary reader’s discerning judgement, but also (implicitly) his power to disperse the mob. Another example is in Poetaster, where the character of Horace is an accurate and sensitive judge but requires the Emperor’s authorization of his judgement of Crispinus and Demetrius to bring the play to a successful conclusion.18 According to this reciprocal arrangement, the great poet is recognized as such by the discerning ruler, and the poet thus protected by the ruler’s judgement will write poems in praise of his greatness. It is with such a promise that Jonson ends his epistle to the Prince, hoping to survive to see his adult actions: ‘that I may write, at nights, the deedes of your dayes; I will then labor to bring forth some worke as worthy of your fame, as my ambition therin is of your pardon’. The reciprocal relationship articulated here has the manuscript itself at its beginning, not its conclusion: Jonson does not claim that the masque itself is a lasting monument to the Prince but proffers such a work as a future service. A gift like the Aeneid that equals the worth of the recipient is of use only as an ideal. To claim such status for your own work would be to play your 18 Peter Womack discusses the monarch as ‘the formal source of power and value’ in the comical satires in Ben Jonson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 58–9. The approval of a critic or a poet can also mark distinction, for example Epigrammes, XVII and XCVI.

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part badly, because the gift, no matter how excessive, is always exceeded by the attributes of the recipient. The poetic gift is never adequate because the point is to create disequilibrium. A presentation manuscript is typically an attempt to forge a binding tie: it points to the future by inviting the recipient to give the poet an opportunity to express thanks for the gratitude and protection the recipient has shown him and his unworthy gift; it suggests the happy consequences of gratitude before it has, in fact, been forthcoming. The Masque of Queenes was the Queen’s masque, not her son’s, and passing over the original patron seems like one of Jonson’s more audacious self-assertions. He explains it away in the Queen’s inscribed presentation copy of the printed text, in which the dedication to the Prince becomes a sign of her royal character since ‘Princes (out of a religious respect to theyr modesty) may wiselye refuse to be the publique patrons of theyr owne actions’—although he nevertheless felt it necessary to remark that ‘a hearty desire to please deserves not to offend’.19 Remarkable as Queen Anna’s modesty might have been, it probably had less to do with Jonson’s choice of her son as dedicatee than the consideration that he was shortly to establish his own household, which would massively increase his capacity as a patron. It is likely to have been the nature of his employment by the Queen that allowed Jonson to feel free to transfer patronage of The Masque of Queenes. He had been contracted to provide a narrative and speeches for a masque for a fee of probably £40, and once this obligation had been fulfilled he may not have felt that the patron had any lingering authority over the text.20 The pattern of dedications in printed masque texts suggests that this was a common attitude. The masques and entertainments are the only section of the 1616 Workes without a dedication, nor is one to be found in any of Jonson’s other masque quartos. Samuel Daniel did not dedicate The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses to the Queen who commissioned it but to his long-standing patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford, who had probably got him the commission. The Lord Hayes Masque includes commendatory verses on the King and the married

19

BL, C.28.g.5, sig. A2v. The incomplete surviving financial accounts do not include payments to Jonson. See Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, x. 491–4. 20

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couple, but it is only Inns of Court masques that were regularly dedicated to those who paid for their production.21 The manuscript of The Masque of Queenes that Jonson presented to Prince Henry was different from courtiers’ ostentatious New Year’s gifts, although this does not indicate any lack of attention to its physical appearance. The manuscript has the appearance of a gift not from a courtier but a scholar-poet who is setting forth his learning to an appreciative reader. It is entirely a product of Jonson’s labour, being laid out and written entirely in his own hand. Jonson wrote the manuscript on the high-quality Venetian paper that has been mentioned in previous chapters as having been used in, for example, Lord North’s copy of the Theobalds entertainment and the Earl of Salisbury’s copy of the Merchant Taylors’ entertainment. The writing space was constructed with great care: Jonson scored the page both to guide the left and right margins and to space the main text against the marginalia, and he also pricked the page to provide guidance for line-spacing. All this work was done on the rectos and the show-through was used to guide the layout on the versos.22 The margins of the manuscript as it survives are relatively wide but they have been heavily cropped, probably (as Mark Bland has remarked) when it was rebound in the eighteenth century. The current page area of 210  170 mm has been reduced from 255  180 mm, which has not only decreased the luxurious scale of the white space surrounding the text but has altered the shape of the volume, especially as most of the cropping has been to the head and foot: it looks like a square-ish quarto but is in fact a folio gathered in single sheets.23 21 The Inns of Court masques with dedications are Chapman’s Memorable Masque (London: George Norton, 1613), Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn (London: Felix Kingston for George Norton, 1613), The Masque of Flowers (London: Robert Wilson, 1614), and Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace (London: John Norton for William Crooke, 1634). 22 There is additional scoring on fos. 3r, 7r, 9r, 11r; prick-marks are visible on fo. 4r. The use of show-through to guide the layout on the verso is most obvious on fos. 13–18, where the marginalia appears to the right of the body of the text on the recto but to the left on the verso. 23 See Mark Bland, ‘Jonson, Biathanatos, and the Interpretation of Manuscript Evidence’, Studies in Bibliography, 51 (1998), 154–82. The measurement of an untrimmed page is taken from Jonson’s holograph epigrams to Robert, Earl of Salisbury (Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 266, fos. 315–16), which is on paper from the same stock with a watermark of a double pennant and the initials G3, exactly consistent with Bland’s beta-radiograph (c), also found in Queenes.

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The careful and complex layout of the page was necessitated above all by the addition of the marginalia. As Jonson reminds the Prince, this addition was itself a considerable effort: ‘it hath prov’d a worke of some difficulty to mee to retrive the particular authorities (according to your gracious command, and a desire borne out of judgment) to those things, which I writt out of fulnesse, and memory of my former readings’. The manuscript is a result of private labour performed willingly on request. The extensive marginalia are an example of the excess which characterizes presentations; they are an addition specifically for presentation, a personalized adornment that almost overwhelms the original text. A display of erudition was particularly appropriate in a gift to a young prince as it placed the poet in a semi-pedagogical role. A number of other writers adopted similar strategies when presenting manuscripts to Prince Henry. Sir John Harington added notes and marginalia to a copy of Bishop Francis Godwin’s (printed) Catalogue of the Bishops of England (1601) that he gave to the Prince in 1608, while the anonymous writer of Davids delights or: A President for a Prince quoted and enlarged upon passages from the Psalms illustrative of the life of David: ‘Him I propose for a president to your Highnes to imitate; and this as the chiefe object of your daylie delights’.24 What marks the manuscript above all as a product of Jonson’s laborious effort is that it is entirely the work of his own pen. This is a feature that also makes it unique among the manuscripts discussed in this volume, and we need to consider the value attached to the literary autograph in the early seventeenth century in order to understand the significance of Jonson’s gift to Prince Henry. The notion that handwriting gives an insight into the selfhood of the writer, which underpins graphology in particular but is implicit in the wider cultural value given to literary autographs, is associated with developments in physiognomy and related quasi-scientific disciplines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.25 It was also in the nineteenth century that the habit of collecting autograph letters and cut signatures as specimens or samples of handwriting became popular. When it came to ownership signatures in books, for example, even the 24 Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harrington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 203–35; BL, Royal MS 17.C.XXXI, fo. 3r. 25 A. N. L. Munby, The Cult of the Autograph Letter in England (London: Athlone Press, 1962).

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name of someone as well known as Ben Jonson was often erased by a new owner rather than being prized as adding value and interest to the volume.26 Nor did the authorial manuscript always have the unique status among editors and scholars as providing the best possible text that later generations accorded it, and drafts of early modern literary works tended be preserved infrequently and accidentally, not as objects to be looked at afresh by each generation of editors. None of this is to say that early modern readers did not sense the special aura of the autograph: ‘How warmly we respond whenever we receive from friends or scholars letters written in their own hands! We feel as if we were listening to them and seeing them face to face.’27 Erasmus describes the presence with which the autograph is uniquely imbued; he also associates it with a certain intimacy, as proper to friendship or at least personal address, and to scholarship.28 The intimacy of the autograph is reflected in apologetic excuses found in many early modern letters for the use of a secretary when writing to a close friend or relative. The closest thing the seventeenth century had to the autograph album was the Album Amicorum, and Jonson left inscriptions in two of these.29 These albums were Germanic in origin and were often compiled by students: they would be inscribed by fellow students and teachers with sententiae as well as their name. The handwriting of the person was only a part of the value of the inscription, and the album—as the name suggests—was a memento of a community and set of relationships rather than a more abstract collection of famous names. These albums could certainly be ambitious, for example including handcoloured coats of arms, and some compilers included as many entries as possible by the powerful and famous: Francis Segar’s album was signed among others by King James, Prince Henry, the Emperor Maximilian III, the Elector Palatine, Sir Walter Ralegh, Ben Jonson, and 26

Twenty out of a total of 206 inscriptions by Jonson are erased, according to the list by David MacPherson in ‘Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia: An Annotated Catalogue’, Studies in Philology, 71 (1974), 3–106 (numbers 1, 11, 14, 22, 31, 36, 49, 54, 114, 124, 153, 155, 159, 179, 180, 184, 199, and 204). 27 D. Erasmus, De Recta Graeci et Latini sermonis pronuntiatione, trans. in Scribes and Sources: Handbook of the Chancery Hand in the Sixteenth Century, ed. A. S. Osley (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 29–36 at 29. 28 For an overview of writing and ‘presence’ see Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 141–8. 29 Transcribed in Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, viii. 664–5.

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Inigo Jones.30 Segar could hardly claim all of these persons as personal friends, but the entries were made during personal meetings (Segar was a councillor to Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse) and it is this history of meetings that the album records. Unlike later autograph albums, an album amicorum would not include letters and cut signatures that had been bought and sold among collectors and where no personal meeting between collector and collected need have taken place. Jonson’s use of his own hand in the Masque of Queenes manuscript was indicative of scholarly endeavour and a physical sign of the personal labour and service which he was willing to invest for his patrons: it added value to the manuscript by adding intimacy. It is similar to the gifts of autograph copies of poems and epigrams or inscribed printed works given to friends and patrons which, taken together, show Jonson to have been one of the first English poets to leave inscriptions consciously written out as mementoes of himself.31 When called for, as in the Masque of Queenes, he could write in an extremely neat and attractive hand. He leaves considerable space between words within the line, but the lines of text themselves are relatively close together, with the result that ascenders and descenders often intersect with the neighbouring line, which was against best practice as defined by writing masters like Martin Billingsley.32 However neatly Jonson wrote, his handwriting is distinctive and unlike copybook forms or the handwriting of professional scribes. Like much handwriting of the first half of the seventeenth century, it mixes secretary and italic letter-forms.33 There were strong recognized models for both italic and secretary hands and neat professional scribes could largely erase individual distinctiveness 30

Huntington Library, MS HM 743. Frederick Beal, Index to English Literary Manuscripts, i: 1475–1625, 2 parts (London: Mansell, 1980), Pt. 2, p. 234; Beal notes (pp. 233–4) that at least five presentation copies of the 1616 folio survive, as do nine autograph fair copies of poems (the poems on Inigo Jones in the Huntington library are, contra Beal, not autograph; see Mark Bland, ‘Biathanatos’, 168). 32 See Martin Billingsley, The Pens Excellencie (London: Jo. Sudbury and George Humble, 1618), sig. D2r. 33 Italic graphs predominate in Jonson’s hand but he makes some use of secretary forms for most letters. To some extent this is systematic, for example secretary ‘a’ is only found in the initial position (although not every initial ‘a’ is secretary) while ‘h’ is always in italic except for the ‘gh’ ligature. The two forms of ‘e’ are reversed and epsilon. Capitals are mostly italic. 31

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from their writing, but mixed hands like Jonson’s, which use both italic and secretary graph forms, were never taken as exemplary by writing masters and are often highly distinctive.34 One scribal skill that Jonson (like many other writers of a mixed hand) does lack, to the detriment of the Masque of Queenes manuscript, is the ability to write different hands that consistently distinguish between descriptive passages, verses, and glosses. Passages in Latin and other text that would in a more skilled hand (or in print) be distinguished by the use of italic are simply underlined by Jonson, and the size of the script is the only consistent distinguishing feature of the marginalia. The story of the masque text does not end with the manuscript. Despite being carefully written out by the poet himself as a personal and intimate gift with an epistle to Prince Henry and marginalia laboriously added apparently at the Prince’s request, Jonson then published a quarto edition of The Masque of Queenes that included not only the marginalia but also the epistle. The masque was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 22 February 1609, just twenty days after the performance. This is not much time for Jonson to have marshalled together his sources for the marginalia and written out the manuscript, so there is little doubt that he always intended the manuscript to be followed by a printed publication. Publication threw open to public view the privileged and intimate exchange in which Jonson had been engaged, advertising his access to the court and Prince Henry. The epistle was not reprinted in the 1616 Workes, but by then the Prince was dead. Jonson’s publication of a private presentation was not without precedent. When King James was engaged on his triumphant progress through England in April 1603, he was presented by Samuel Daniel with an autograph manuscript poem, A Panegyrick Congratulatorie on his accession.35 Rather like the Masque of Queenes, this manuscript has wide margins, care has been taken over layout, and it is in the author’s own hand, which is a distinctive and legible italic hand with a few 34 Italic has sometimes been taken as particularly impersonal; see Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Love, Scribal Publication, 109–10. However, secretary forms could also be highly impersonal, and better examples still would be the rigidly codified legal hands. For professional disapproval of mixed hands see Billingsley, The Pens Excellencie, sig. C3v. 35 BL, Royal MS 18.A.LXXII.

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secretary graphs, but is somewhat uneven and not a conspicuous display of penmanship. The poem was an attempt to attract the new King’s attention and made an indirect plea for patronage in the hope that the King would sponsor his incomplete Civil Wars.36 In the event, Daniel was able to draw a significant benefit from the presentation even without gaining support for his epic work: the King’s mere acceptance of the gift allowed him to print the Panegyrick as the first and most prestigious in a series of poems addressed to notable figures, and proudly record on the title page that it had been ‘Delivered to the Kings most excellent majesty at Burleigh Harrington’.37 PRINTED PAMPHLETS: CREATING THE MASQUE AS A LITERARY GENRE Jonson’s concerted efforts gave the court masque a significance as a literary genre as well as a court performance. His masques lie at the beginning of a literary lineage that finds its greatest expression in Milton’s Maske at Ludlow Castle and continues onward through such works as Dryden’s Secular Masque. Jonson achieved this not only because he wrote better and more sophisticated poetry than his predecessors, but because he made specific and repeated claims for the validity of his masques as literature. He made plain his ambitions as an author by the way he presented the texts in print as well as through presentation manuscripts. There are two forms of rhetoric which can be adopted in order to explain why a text like a masque is worth reading: the primacy of the performance can be acknowledged and the text legitimated as a faithful report of a spectacular and important event; or the text can be claimed as a legitimate subject of interest in its own right, an expression of artistic unity which may in fact have been imperfectly realized in performance. Jonson insisted on the literary legitimacy of the masque 36 ‘Which worke must now be finished by thee [his muse] j That long hath layne undonne, as destined j Unto the glorie of theas dayes, for which j Thy vowes, and verse have labored so much’ (fo. 8r). 37 The poem was printed by Valentine Sims for E. Blount with six additional verse epistles, although the location of the poem’s delivery was only recorded on the title page of the second (STC 6259) and successive editions.

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and emphasized the dichotomy between the ephemeral performance and the permanent literary artefact that he had produced. Although he promoted the literary qualities of his other occasional works, for example his speeches at the time of King James’s coronation, through such features as a clear authorial voice in the narrative and the emphatic placement of his name on title pages (see Fig. 6.2), it was in the masques that he made the point most emphatically and repeatedly.38 So whilst the tension between text and performance was always present—Wendy Wall has drawn attention to its presence in Elizabethan occasional texts— Jonson’s rhetoric ensured that this tension was much more acutely felt within the Stuart court masque.39 Jonson was explicit in his ambition to transcend the moment of performance, claiming for himself the ‘soul’ of the masque: It is a noble and just advantage, that the things subjected to understanding have of those which are objected to sense, that the one sort are but momentarie, and meerely taking; the other impressing, and lasting: Else the glorie of all these solemnities had perish’d like a blaze, and gone out, in the beholders eyes. So short-liv’d are the bodies of all things, in comparison of their soules . . . This it is hath made the most royall Princes . . . not onely studious of riches, and magnificence in the outward celebration, or shew . . . but curious after the most high, and heartie inventions, to furnish the inward parts . . . which, though their voyce be taught to sound to present occasions, their sense . . . should alwayes lay hold on more remov’d mysteries.40

Masque texts were mostly promulgated in printed form and, in terms of establishing the genre, the pamphlets printed of Queen Anne’s masques in the first decade of the seventeenth century are of greater importance than Jonson’s royal presentations. The first of these masques was The vision of the 12. goddesses by Samuel Daniel, performed on 8 January 1604—an extravagant performance in which the Queen herself appeared, attired along with her ladies in dresses taken from the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth. It clearly attracted public interest because the text 38 For Jonson and the coronation see Paula Johnson, ‘Jacobean Ephemera and the Immortal Word’, Renaissance Drama, NS 8 (1977), 151–71. 39 Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 111–67, esp. 159–67. 40 Preface to Hymenaei, in Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vii. 209.

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Fig. 6.2. Title page of Ben Jonson, His Part of King James His Royall and Magnificent Entertainment (London: Valentine Sims and George Eld for Edward Blount, 1604), reproduced by permission of Sotheby’s.

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soon appeared in print in a small quarto of fourteen pages published by Edward Allde under the following title: The true discription of a royall masque Presented at Hampton Court, upon Sunday night, being the eight of January. 1604. And personated by the Queenes most excellent Majestie, attended by eleven ladies of honour. This is similar to titles found in scribal transcripts in that it details the date, occasion, and sponsor, but not the name of the author. It also served the familiar purpose of making the details of the performance available to those who had not been able to attend, as the Earl of Worcester wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury: ‘youer Lo. saythe youe wear never perticularly advertised of the Maske, I have been at 6d. charge with youe to send youe the booke, which wyll inform youe better then I can, having noted the names of the Ladyes applyed to eche Goddes’.41 Allde’s publication was not authorized by the author and Daniel responded to its appearance by issuing an octavo edition of his own, giving the masque its proper title for the first time (there being, of course, no place for a title in the performance itself): The vision of the 12. goddesses presented in a maske the 8. of January, at Hampton Court: by the Queenes most excellent Majestie, and her ladies (London: T[homas] C[reede] for Simon Waterson, 1604). Daniel’s name was still not on the title page (see Fig. 6.3), but his authorship was made clear by the addition of a dedicatory epistle to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, which also provided a detailed explanation of the device and more or less doubled the length of the text. Jonson provided most of the major masques at court from 1605 onwards. He had included his entertainment of the Queen at Lord Spencer’s residence at Althorp in his pamphlet on the royal entry of the King into London in 1604, but his first masque pamphlet was of Hymenaei, his masque for the ill-fated marriage of the Earl of Essex to Lady Frances Howard performed on 5 January 1606. The title page follows the same basic pattern as Daniel’s: an evocative title (Hymenaei: or The Solemnities of Masque, and Barriers) followed by date, place, and occasion of performance. The presence on the title page of Jonson’s name as author and a Latin epigraph taken from Catullus mark the literary aspirations of the publication, but it is the preface (quoted at length above), with its eloquent claim that the writer alone provides the 41 Worcester to Shrewsbury, 2 Feb. 1604, in John Nichols, Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of James I, 4 vols. (London: Nichols, 1828), i. 317.

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Fig. 6.3. Title page of Samuel Daniel, The vision of the 12. goddesses (London: Thomas Creede for Simon Waterson, 1604). Reproduced by permission of Sotheby’s.

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‘soul’ of the masque, that truly marks the literary ambition of Jonson’s text above that of Daniel. Jonson buttresses his claims by incorporating extensive marginalia that demonstrate the learning and literary antecedents lying behind the text, as he had previously done in his 1604 pamphlet on the speeches for the Royal entry into London and in the quarto of his play Sejanus.42 Although Jonson was thereafter producing a masque at court most years, he only saw two further masque pamphlets into print before 1616. Two years after Hymenaei he published another pamphlet, this time containing three of his masques: Blacknesse, his first masque performed in 1605, its sequel Beautie, and the wedding masque for the marriage of Lord Haddington, both performed in 1608.43 The third was probably a late addition as it is neither specified in the Stationers’ Register nor on the title page. This was followed in 1609 by the Masque of Queenes. These two pamphlets are fairly similar in format to Hymenaei, with epigraphs, prefaces, and marginalia. After Queenes, however, none of Jonson’s masques written before the publication of the 1616 Workes survives in quarto editions, and it seems that these texts were instead gathered together and published for the first time in collected edition. Given the ephemeral nature of these publications, however, some printed editions simply may have not survived: this possibility is suggested by the presence in some booksellers’ catalogues of the later seventeenth century of masques for which no separate edition is now known, namely Oberon (1611), The Irish Masque (1613), The Vision of Delight (1617), and the Mask of Owls (1624).44 On the other hand, it could be that the booksellers were listing as separate items the editions 42

For Jonson’s use of printed marginalia see John Jowett, ‘“Fall before this Booke”: The 1605 Quarto of Sejanus’, TEXT, 4 (1988), 279–95. 43 The characters of two royall masques The one of blacknesse, the other of beautie. 44 These appear in Edward Archer’s An Exact and perfect Catalogue of all the Plaies that were ever printed, printed as a supplement to Massinger, Middleton, and Rowley, The Excellent Comedy, called the Old Law (London: Edward Archer, 1656), and Francis Kirkman’s Exact Catalogue of all the playes that were ever printed, a supplement to Tom Tyler and his Wife (London: Francis Kirkman, 1661). For the catalogues, including the full texts, see W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1939–59), iii. 1319–56. The presence of these anomalous masques is noted by Lauren Shohet, ‘The Masque in/as Print’, in Marta Staznicky (ed.), The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 176–202 at 189–91.

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of these masques that had appeared within the two volumes of Jonson’s collected works, perhaps because disbound copies were broken up and sold piecemeal. Leaving aside bibliographical ghosts, masques written by two writers other than Jonson appeared as pamphlets during the period up to 1614. The year after Jonson wrote Hymenaei Thomas Campion was commissioned to provide the season’s main masque, this time celebrating the marriage of Lord Hay. The pamphlet that soon appeared (it was entered in the Stationers’ Register twenty days after the performance) quite clearly represents itself as a literary product, although it does not match Jonson in poetic ambition or execution. As well as a scattering of explanatory marginalia, it includes a number of ‘other small Poemes’, epigrams, and other verses addressed to royalty and courtiers, connected only by their common authorship. Intriguingly, the pamphlet also attempts to address the multimedia nature of a court masque: musical scores to the songs are printed after the text of the masque itself, and on the verso of the title page is a woodcut of a masquer. In a striking contrast to heavily illustrated Continental models (often subsidized by royal courts), this is one of the only uses of illustration in the printed texts of entertainments in early modern England, the others being the cut in the Elvetham entertainment and Stephen Harrison’s much more visually ambitious record of the pageants in King James’s triumphal entry into London, The Arches of Triumph (1604). Samuel Daniel’s second masque was Tethys Festival of 1610. Daniel retained a very different attitude to the masque from Jonson. The masque was printed as just one part of The order and solemnitie of the creation of the High and mightie Prince Henrie, eldest sonne to our sacred soveraigne, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornewall, Earle of Chester, &c., although it did have a separate half-title with a literary title similar to other early Jacobean masques. It also records that Daniel was a Groom of the Queen’s Privy Chamber, thus giving him a personal relationship with the Queen (Jonson could claim no equivalent position at court). As well as having his text embedded within a description of the occasion of which it formed part, Daniel provided a preface which was clearly a riposte to Jonson’s preface to Hymenaei. Daniel makes his usual claim about being dragged unwillingly into print, explains that he sees no need to draw all of his imagery from Classical sources, and opines that ‘long experience of the world’ has taught him the folly of attempting to

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justify one’s writing: ‘shall we who are the poore Inginers for shadowes, & frame onely images of no result, thinke to oppresse the rough censures of those, who notwithstanding all our labour will like according to their taste, or seeke to avoid them by flying to an Army of Authors as idle as ourselves?’45 This could hardly have been better calculated to infuriate Jonson. The preface also includes perhaps the most straightforward, palpably unenthusiastic, and honest explanation of why the text came into print at the time and the manner that it did: shewes and spectacles of this nature, are usually registred, among the memorable acts of the time, beeing Complements of state, both to shew magnificence and to celebrate the feasts to our greatest respects: it is expected (according now to the custome) that I, beeing imployed in the busines, should publish a discription and forme of the late Mask . . . in regard to preserve the memorie thereof, and to satisfie their desires, who could have no other notice, but by others report of what was done.46

The basic form of masque pamphlets was established through the creative tension between Jonson and Daniel: their versions of what a masque signified, their layout of the text, and especially their insistence on authorship being recognized. Both influences can be seen in the pamphlets that appeared of masques celebrating the great royal occasions of 1613–14: those of Beaumont, Chapman, and Campion in celebration of the royal marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector Palatine; and those by Campion (again), and the unknown author of the Masque of Flowers for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset to Lady Frances Howard.47 That only one of these masques is by an 45

The Order and Solemnitie of the Creation of the High and mightie Prince Henrie . . . Prince of Wales . . . Whereunto is annexed the Royall Maske, presented By the Queene and her Ladies (London: John Budge, 1610), sig. E1v. Jonson’s argument with Daniel is discussed in Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Printing and “The Multitudinous Presse”: The Contentious Texts of Jonson’s Masques’, in Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen (eds.), Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (London: Associated University Presses, 1991), 168–91. 46 The Order and Solemnitie . . . Whereunto is annexed the Royall Maske, sig. E1r. 47 Francis Beaumont, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Grayes Inn; Chapman, The Memorable Masque; Thomas Campion, A relation of the late royall entertainment given by the Right Honorable the Lord Knowles, at Cawsome-House neere Redding: to our most gracious queene, Queene Anne . . . Whereunto is annexed the . . . Lords maske, presented . . . on the mariage night of the high and mightie, Count Palatine, and . . . the Ladie Elizabeth (London: [William Stansby] for Iohn Budge, 1613); Campion, The Description of a Maske: Presented . . . at the Marriage of the . . . Earle of Somerset (London: E. A. for

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unnamed author is a contrast to Elizabethan entertainment pamphlets, and although none follows Jonson in adding marginalia to their texts, most acknowledge a difference between the ‘body’ of performance and ‘soul’ of original literary concept by explaining in some detail the significance and learning that lie behind the devices. The involvement of authors in the publication of masque pamphlets is shown indirectly through the identity of the texts’ publishers, several of whom had strong literary connections: Simon Waterson, who published the authorized edition of The vision of the 12. goddesses, was responsible for almost every work of Daniel’s that came into print, while Thomas Thorpe, who published two of the three Jonson masque pamphlets (Hymenaei (1606) and The characters of two royall masques (1608)), also published the two plays Jonson composed at around the same time (Sejanus (1605) and Volpone (1607)). That said, by no means all of the stationers who became involved in publishing masques seem to have been primarily interested in literary works. John Budge specialized in publishing occasional and journalistic works, and he presumably included in that genre both The Order and Solemnitie of the Creation of the High and mightie Prince Henrie . . . Prince of Wales (1610), in which Tethys Festival was printed, and Campion’s A relation of the late royall entertainment given by the Right Honorable the Lord Knovvles, at Cawsome-House neere Redding: to our most gracious queene, Queene Anne . . . Whereunto is annexed the . . . Lords maske (1613). It is unlikely to be coincidental that the stationers behind the publication of Inns of Court masques, George Norton (Chapman’s Memorable Maske and Beaumont’s The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn (both 1613)), Robert Wilson (The Masque of Flowers (1614)), and John Browne (Middleton’s The Inner Temple masque. Or Masque of Heroes (1619)), all had shops located very close to the Inns, whose members must have been their core market. The Jacobean court was no more involved in these publications than its Elizabethan predecessor had been. However, there were examples of subsidized publications readily to hand in the form of London’s Lord Mayors’ pageant texts. These had first appeared in the Elizabethan Lawrence Lisle, 1614); The Masque of Flowers. Somerset’s marriage was also celebrated in Jonson’s Challenge at Tilt and Irish Masque, both first published (with reference to the occasion discreetly suppressed) in the 1616 Workes.

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period and were published regularly from 1611 onwards. It was common practice for the Livery Company of the new Mayor to pay for the text of the pageants to be brought into print, although responsibility for seeing the text into print was—like costume and many other areas of expertise—usually contracted out to the hired poet.48 The publication of a text was both a means of advertising the honour done to the company in the appointment and part of the largesse that custom demanded of the new mayor. The attitude of the civic authorities may have been the result of the circumstances of performance, the large numbers of texts produced in a print run perhaps making it a particularly fitting commemoration of an occasion that was far more publicly visible and widely accessible than a court masque. These pageant texts were influenced by court masques and especially the masque pamphlets, as can be seen in the development in them of a concept of authorship similar to that found in the masque texts, and of literary rather than descriptive titles. Ongoing work by Tracey Hill on the texts of Lord Mayors’ Shows will no doubt make possible a more detailed comparison between those texts and masque pamphlets. The influence also went the other way, and in the second half of King James’s reign a pattern of subsidized print publication was adopted for court masques. LATER JACOBEAN MASQUES INCLUDING PRE-PERFORMANCE PAMPHLETS The appearance of small quarto masque pamphlets that were apparently printed privately, most likely with the financial support of elements at court, marks a significant change in the nature of masque texts. None of these pamphlets has a publisher’s imprint, they are very short (often consisting of two quarto gatherings of four leaves), and most survive in very small numbers.49 The first example of this practice is Jonson’s

48 A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640, ed. Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon (Malone Society Collections, 3; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. xxxii–xxxiii. 49 Lovers Made Men (London, 1617) and Time Vindicated (London, 1623) both survive in only one copy; there are three recorded copies of Neptune’s Triumph, four of The Masque of Augures, and seven of The Fortunate Isles.

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Lovers Made Men, sponsored by Lord Hay and performed before the French Ambassador Henri, Baron de la Tour, in February 1617. Similar pamphlets were then published of the final four great masques of the reign: The Masque of Augures (1622); Time Vindicated to Himself, and to his Honors (1623); Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624); and The Fortunate Isles, and Their Union (1625). James, Lord Hay, was famously profligate and his 1617 entertainment of the French Ambassador was a notably extravagant affair: according to John Chamberlain, it ‘stode him in more than 2200li, being rather a profusion and spoyle then reasonable or honorable provision’.50 Part of this expense appears to have been for the publication of a text of the masque Jonson wrote for the occasion. Lovers Made Men is one of three surviving masques for which Hay was responsible, the others being his wedding masque of January 1607, written by Thomas Campion, and the later Essex House Masque of 1621 in honour of another French ambassadorial visit. The texts all circulated in different forms: there is a manuscript of songs from the 1607 wedding masque among the Cecil Papers, suggesting scribal circulation, but the whole masque was then published in a quarto (as discussed earlier in this chapter); the Essex House masque survives in a single later manuscript transcript deriving from the papers of one of the performers, although it may well have enjoyed some wider manuscript circulation at the time of performance.51 Unlike earlier pamphlets, these texts of 1617–25 were sent to the press before the masque was performed, a distinctive feature noted by Herford and Simpson and enlarged upon by W. W. Greg, who categorized the group as pre-performance publications.52 The clearest evidence for this is that several of them give the wrong date of performance, for 50

Chamberlain to Carleton, 8 Mar. 1617 (SP 14/90/105). Hatfield House, Cecil Papers 144/319–20; University of Nottingham Library, Portland Papers, MS PwV 6, fos. 108v–112v. See also Timothy Raylor, The Essex House Masque of 1621: Viscount Doncaster and the Jacobean Masque (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2000). 52 Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, x. 567; Greg, Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, iv, p. ci. Shohet, ‘The Masque in/as Print’, 185–6, is sceptical of the category of ‘pre-performance quarto’; however, the only bibliographical evidence she offers is that non-registration in the Stationers’ Register is insufficient evidence of private publication: this is certainly true but the Greg/Herford and Simpson argument does not rest on the Register. 51

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which the likeliest explanation is that the date was changed after the text had gone to press. The title pages to the Christmas masques of 1622–5 all give the date of performance as Twelfth Night, which was the traditional date for the great court masque, but several masques in the 1620s were delayed by diplomatic disputes over precedence: Time Vindicated was delayed until 19 January 1623, and the following year Neptune’s Triumph was cancelled altogether. After these two incorrect imprints the printer adopted a more cautious approach on the title page to The Fortunate Isles, describing the masque as ‘design’d for the Court, on the Twelfth night’; this caution proved to be justified as once again the performance was delayed, taking place on 9 January. These pamphlets give stage directions in the present tense, while descriptions of sets and costumes are either entirely absent or (at best) minimal when compared to publications from the first half of the reign. Also, the only reference to Jonson as the author is a parenthetical afterthought in The Masque of Augures. The text survives in two states: the first state is anonymous but the second state has a short concluding paragraph that was added to the text during printing. This is subscribed ‘B. J.’ but his initials are only introduced so he can acknowledge the role played by others in preparing the masque. The tone suggests a readership that was well aware of Jonson’s role in the masque: For the expression of this, I must stand; The invention was divided betwixt Mr Jones, and mee. The Scene, which your eye judges, was wholly his . . . The Musique compos’d by that excellent paire of Kinsemen, Mr Alphonso Ferrabosco, and Mr Nicholas Lanier. An sint Musis & Apolline digna, penes vos esto. B.J.53

The format and appearance of these pamphlets marks a clear retreat from Jonson’s earlier assertions that masques should be read as literary artefacts with an existence independent of their performance. This is seen in the absence of the author’s name and also in the use of the present tense and the lack of paratexts, which direct the reader back towards the ‘present occasion’ that Jonson had previously scorned. Despite the absence of the authorial name, the texts all share features that strongly suggest Jonson’s personal involvement in their publication. All but one have an Latin epigraph taken from classical authors 53

c.34).

Masque of Augures, sig. B4v. This paragraph is only found in one copy (BL, C.39.

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favoured by Jonson (Ovid, Tibullus, and twice from Martial), they all have a similar format and literary title, care was taken over the accuracy of the texts, and Neptune’s Triumph even has marginalia citing classical sources.54 Publication was presumably paid for by someone at court, although no surviving financial records confirm this, and the system was probably similar to the Lord Mayors’ pageant pamphlets, where the responsible Livery Company paid the author a flat fee for seeing the text through the press. The reason that Jonson did not trumpet his authorship of these masques in print was probably that the pamphlets were designed for an exclusive readership who would have been well aware of his position as the court’s principal masque writer. The pamphlets were almost certainly not produced as commercial publications—the absence of a publisher’s name and their small and uneconomical size suggest this— and they had a closer relationship to the performance of the masque than did earlier publications. They could even have been distributed at the performance itself: the 1661–2 revels of the Prince de la Grange at Lincoln’s Inn included ‘A clownish Carrier with a Packet of Books to be distributed by the Master of Ceremonies, wherein is described the whole designe’, and perhaps this followed earlier practice at the court of the 1620s.55 We have previously seen, however, that texts were more commonly circulated after the performance, and that copies tended to be most attractive to those who had not seen the performance. Unfortunately, none of the known letters describing these masques makes any reference to the pamphlets so it is not possible to be sure when or how they were distributed. Some copies did reach the book trade: as Shohet reminds us, Robert Burton and Humphrey Dyson both owned copies of The Fortunate Isles, and both The Fortunate Isles and Neptune’s Triumph are listed in a 1656 bookseller’s catalogue.56 The pre-performance quartos are only one way in which masque texts changed in the second half of King James’s reign, and these changes were a result both of changing fashions at court and of decisions made 54 Another distinctively Jonsonian feature, the marginalia in The Masque of Augures, is only found in the 1640 folio text, which represents a revised version of the masque (which was performed a second time on 6 May 1622) with an additional antimasque. 55 Quoted in A. Wigfall Green, The Inns of Court and Early English Drama (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 138. 56 Shohet, ‘The Masque in/as Print’, 190–2.

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by Jonson, to whom fell almost every major commission of a court masque after 1614—the main exception being Chapman’s Masque of 12 Months of 1619, performed when Jonson was in Scotland.57 Between the Masque of Queenes in 1609 and Lovers Made Men in 1617, none of Jonson’s masques appeared in print in the aftermath of their performance; he probably kept them back deliberately in anticipation of his collected Workes, which appeared in 1616. After that date, even though there was no immediate likelihood of a further collection of his works, Jonson did not return to the pattern of publication seen in the first half of the reign, and those of his masques that did not appear as preperformance quartos (i.e. those of 1616–18 and 1620–1) were not printed until 1640, after the author’s death, in the second volume of the Workes. Although the latter years of James’s reign saw the court beginning to take a direct interest in masque texts for the first time, this was not a matter of increased authoritarianism or a move to exploit the genre as propaganda. Not only were the aims of the pre-performance quartos fairly limited, but the second half of the Jacobean period saw the continued flow of manuscript texts and their varied appropriations by diverse readers. The absence of printed texts led on some occasions to the demand for masque texts being met by manuscript copies. Not much is known about the performance of Jonson’s lively Christmas His Masque from 1616 (which despite the title is not really a masque at all), but a complete text survives in manuscript, entitled Christmas his Shewe, as do at least four copies of the song at the heart of the masque, and the text evidently circulated beyond the narrow courtly circle involved in the performance.58 Textually the manuscript Christmas his Shewe is fairly accurate. It is probably more or less contemporary with the performance, although it lacks brief descriptive passages found in the printed text. The manuscript is a separate bound up into a composite volume with other literary texts from the first two decades of the 57 See Martin Butler, ‘George Chapman’s Masque of the Twelve Months (1619)’, English Literary Renaissance, 37 (2007), 360–400. 58 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS J.a.1, fos. 168–74, contains the complete masque while the songs are in BL, Harley MS 4955 (The Newcastle MS), fos. 46–7; Bodleian, Rawl. poet. 160, fos. 173–174r; Huntington Library, HM 198, part 1; and Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn MS b.197, pp. 152–5.

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seventeenth century, and there is clear internal evidence that the various items were together in the seventeenth century.59 Among the pieces it contains are several works of drama in both Latin and English, most of which are of academic rather than courtly origin. Unfortunately the only clear provenance is the nineteenth-century bookplate of the Marquises of Cholmondeley so it is not possible to confirm whether or not it was within courtly circles in the seventeenth century. The later copies of the song are found in large poetical miscellanies dating from the 1630s that are not of courtly origin. In several manuscripts the song is given the title ‘Ben: Johnsons Masque Before the Kinge’ and, as with other examples, it was probably a version of the text deliberately abbreviated for ease of transcription. Manuscript copies were made of at least two of the major Whitehall masques. Chapman’s 1619 Masque of 12 Months was printed by John Payne Collier in 1848 from a manuscript, but the manuscript itself has never surfaced. From Collier’s transcription we can judge that it must have been fairly rough and informal: it did not provide author, date, or title; it may have been written on loose disordered sheets or alternatively may have been misbound (either would explain how Collier printed the text out of order); and the songs were evidently on a separate leaf of paper.60 In contrast to this lost messy transcript is the beautiful manuscript of Pleasure Reconcil’d to Vertue (1618) at Chatsworth House, a small octavo containing twenty-two pages of text in the accomplished hand of the professional scribe Ralph Crane. Although it is not known for whom it was written, its origin is certainly noble and among the aristocratic families whose papers are in part now at Chatsworth are the Cavendishes, Earls then Dukes of Devonshire, the Cliffords, Earls of Cumberland, and the Boyles, Earls of Cork. The Chatsworth manuscript is the only survivor of what appears to have been a group of scribal copies of Pleasure Reconcil’d. When Edward Sherburn wrote about the masque in a letter to Dudley Carleton, that long-standing connoisseur of court entertainments, four days after its performance, he enclosed a 59 Several items have annotations in the same 17th-c. hand. For a detailed description of the manuscript see R. H. Bowers, ‘Some Folger Academic Drama Manuscripts’, Studies in Bibliography, 12 (1959), 117–30, and three items are printed in Jacobean Academic Plays, ed. Suzanne Gossett and Thomas L. Berger (Malone Society Collections, 15; Oxford: Malone Society, 1988). 60 See Butler, ‘George Chapman’s Masque’, 362–4.

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manuscript with the comment that ‘your Lordship will peceive the conceipt by perusing this little book’.61 There is indirect evidence for a third manuscript: the masque must have been read by John Milton before 1634, since it served as a source for his own Maske at Ludlow Castle, but this manuscript is unlikely to have been either the Chatsworth or the Carleton copy. Perhaps a copy had been made for a member of the Egerton family who later made the manuscript available to Milton when he was employed to provide a masque for the family at Ludlow. A privately owned manuscript, in the hand of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, sold at Bonham’s in London on 10 November 2009 (lot 56), is perhaps a fragment of an entertainment of c.1617. Masques and entertainments performed away from Whitehall, of the kind that have been the focus of previous chapters, also continued to circulate in manuscript form. In 1616 came the inauguration of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales and among the festivities was a tiltyard entertainment performed by Inns of Court men, the speeches for which are found in manuscript form.62 A manuscript copy of a civic entertainment, a device by Thomas Middleton to accompany a mayoral feast, also survives in its original stabstitched vellum binding.63 The second major progress of King James’s English reign was his trip to Edinburgh in 1617 and a number of entertainments performed during that progress survive in manuscript, mostly in somewhat later verse miscellanies: an entertainment hosted by the Earl of Cumberland at Brougham Castle, for which Thomas Campion was brought up to Cumbria; a speech of welcome at Hoghton Tower, Lancashire; and speeches of civic welcome at Linlithgow, Ripon, Durham, and York (the last in the form of a speech by the River Ouse).64 When 61

National Archives, SP 14/95/10. London, Guildhall Library, MS 4160, fos. 1–5; see D. S. Bland, ‘The Barriers: Guildhall 4160’, Guildhall Miscellany 6 (1956), 7–14. 63 National Archives, SP 14/129/53. This item is from the Conway Papers. 64 The song ‘Dido was of Carthage Queen’ from the Brougham entertainment is found in at least six verse miscellanies, although the songs were also printed in George Mason and John Earsden, The ayres that were sung and played, at Brougham Castle in Westmerland, in the Kings entertainment (London: Thomas Snodham, 1618); the Hoghton entertainment is found in a mid-17th-c. verse miscellany possibly produced for a man called Peter Daniel (Bodleian Library Eng. poet. c.50, fo. 72) and described in The Journal of Nicholas Assheton, ed. F. J. Raines (Chetham Society Publications, 14; 1848), 42–5; the various civic speeches are cited in C. E. McGee and John C. Meagher, ‘Preliminary Checklist of Tudor and Stuart Entertainments, 1614–25’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 30 (1988), 17–128, 49–50. For the progress, and especially the visit to Brougham, see R. T. Spence, ‘A Royal Progress in the North: 62

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King James visited Sir Thomas Watson at Halstead on 25 June 1618 (or perhaps William Pope at Wroxton in 1619), the host’s infant girl was presented to the King and the poem that was spoken to introduce the child survives in a number of more or less contemporary copies, with significant variants in the text.65 Although these other forms continued, by the 1610s the masque—as developed by Jonson and others in the previous decade—had become the dominant form of aristocratic dramatic entertainment, and was increasingly adopted for performances away from Whitehall and without royalty in attendance. A significant number of non-royal masques circulated in manuscript. These included two masques performed at the London residences of noblemen as part of the court’s Christmas festivities, Lord Hay’s Essex House Masque and also The Running Masque, which survives in the form of an early separate from the collection of Edward Conway; Cupid’s Banishment, a masque performed before the Queen at a school in Greenwich in 1617 that survives in the form of a presentation manuscript to the Countess of Bedford; a masque performed by the daughters of Sir John Croft before the King at Little Saxham, Suffolk, in the early 1620s, which survives in the manuscript miscellany of Tobias Alston; and a masque performed at the Leicestershire home of Sir Thomas Beaumont before various (non-royal) dignitaries in 1621, which is known through a modern transcript of an earlier lost manuscript.66 The masque also became increasing prevalent at the James I at Carlisle Castle and the Feast of Brougham, August 1617’, Northern History, 27 (1991), 41–89. 65 BL, Cotton, Titus C. VII, fo. 96; Huntington, MS 46323; Bodleian, MS Mus. b.1, fo. 35; Bodleian, MS Eng. poet. f.25, fo. 16v; Bod. MS Eng. poet. d.152, fo. 16v; John Wilson, Cheerfull Ayres or Ballads (Oxford: W. Hall, 1660); and a later transcript in West Yorkshire Record Office (Bradford), Hopkinson MS 34, p. 110. See C. E. McGee, ‘More than One Way to Skin a Cat(holic)’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 34 (1995), 1–14. 66 The Running Masque (BL, Add. MS 23229, fos. 3–8) was performed several times over the Christmas season of 1619–20; see James Knowles, ‘The “Running Masque” Recovered: A Masque for the Marquess of Buckingham (c.1619–20)’, English Manuscript Studies, 8 (2000), 79–135; the Essex House Masque, sponsored by Viscount Doncaster and discussed above, formed part of the Christmas festivities of 1620–1; the manuscript of Cupid’s Banishment is J. Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.A.1296, and it was printed in C. E. McGee, ‘Cupid’s Banishment: A Masque Presented to Her Majesty by Young Gentlewomen of the Ladies Hall, Deptford, May 4, 1617’, Renaissance Drama, NS 19 (1988), 226–64; Croft’s masque, given the modern title The Visit of the Nine

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Inns of Court, and the texts of two such masques circulated in manuscript: the Inner Temple’s 1615 Ulysses and Circe, and Gray’s Inn’s 1618 The Masque of Mountebanks (of which six manuscript copies survive).67 A number of entertainments are included in the Newcastle Manuscript, a compilation of verse put together for William Cavendish, Earl (later Duke) of Newcastle, and in the hand of his secretary John Rolleston.68 The manuscript was produced in the 1630s and includes—in addition to important selections of verse by Jonson and especially John Donne—two entertainments which Jonson wrote for Newcastle when he entertained Charles I (The King’s Entertainment at Welbeck and Love’s Welcome to Bolsover), as well as an earlier entertainment by Jonson for the Cavendish family, the Entertainment at Blackfriars written for the christening of Charles Cavendish (son of Newcastle’s cousin the 2nd Earl of Devonshire). Since these were all family entertainments their presence in the Newcastle Manuscript does not necessarily suggest that they enjoyed any wider circulation. Finally, also in the Newcastle Manuscript is a copy of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, Jonson’s 1621 provincial masque written at the command of the Marquis of Buckingham, who was himself the principal masquer. This enjoyed the widest and most complex circulation of any late Jacobean masque or entertainment. With its bawdy humour and irreverent tone, the masque was a tremendous success with the King and was performed, with revisions, three times in August and September at Goddesses by C. E. McGee, is in Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn MS B.197, pp. 169–73, and is discussed and printed in McGee, ‘“The Visit of the Nine Goddesses”: A Masque at Sir John Croft’s House’, English Literary Renaissance, 21 (1991), 371–84; the masque performed at Beaumont’s home of Coleorton House (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Dyce MS 36) is printed in Court Masques, ed. David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 126–35. 67 Ulysses and Circe survives in two manuscript copies (Emmanuel College, Cambridge, MS 68, and a private collection). The manuscripts of The Masque of Mountebanks, performed at Gray’s Inn and then Whitehall, are: British Library, Add. MS 5956, fos. 74–87; Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. d.1021, fos. 1–16; Huntington Library, MS HM 21; Gray’s Inn Library MS 29; Arbury Hall, Warwickshire, MS A.414, fos. 1–12; and Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36/37. Most of these are in booklet form, but the latter two are incomplete. A detailed discussion of this masque and its texts forms chapter 6 of Gabriel Heaton, ‘Performing Gifts: The Manuscript Circulation of Elizabethan and Early Stuart Royal Entertainments’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003). 68 BL Harley MS 4955. See Hilton Kelliher, ‘Donne, Jonson, Richard Andrews and the Newcastle Manuscript’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 4 (1993), 134–73.

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three different locations (Burley-on-the-hill, Belvoir Castle, and Windsor Castle). These three versions and the large number of surviving texts give rise to considerable textual and editorial complexities, as is discussed in James Knowles’s edition of the text in the forthcoming Cambridge edition of Jonson. The Newcastle Manuscript provides one of two manuscript copies of the entire masque, both of which have an aristocratic pedigree, the other having been produced for a member of the Egerton family, probably John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, and now in the Huntington Library.69 As in other cases a shortened version of the text, centring on the teasing verse fortunes which the gypsies provide to members of the court, also circulated; among the surviving copies of this version is one from the collection of Edward Conway.70 Furthermore, two songs from the entertainment became popular stand-alone pieces and are found in many poetical miscellanies of the period, ‘Cock-lorell’ (twenty-nine copies recorded by Beal) and ‘From a Gypsie in the morning’ or the ‘Blessing of the Senses’ (seventeen copies recorded by Beal). The popularity of Gypsies was undoubtedly connected with its success with the King, and more generally in its dramatization of the intimacy between King and favourite. Although most of the copies of the songs give no indication of their original dramatic context, their royal origins were often recorded. The royal connection was particularly important for the ‘Blessing of the Senses’, which is specifically addressed to the King and prays that he be protected from various ugly sights, cacophonous sounds, vile smells, nasty tastes, and things unpleasant to the touch. This gave rise to a libellous answer poem (‘From such a face whose Excellence’), which prays for the King’s protection from sensual pleasures to which he was all too susceptible: especially the body of his favourite (‘Such a smooth, and beardlesse Chinn j As may provoke, or tempt to sinn’), but also such temptations as ‘wyne that can destroye the braine’, ‘Spanish treaties that may wound j Our Countries peace the gospell sound’. This answer poem was enormously popular—a recent edition records twenty-six manuscript copies—and was often written 69

Huntington Library, MS HM 741. National Archives, SP 14/122/58 (the Conway copy); Bodleian Library, Rawl. MS poet. 172, fo. 78; Bodleian, Tanner MS 306, fos. 252–3. John Chamberlain enclosed a copy in a letter to Dudley Carleton on 27 Oct. 1621 (SP 14/123/62). 70

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directly next to Jonson’s original poem.71 There is no better example of how the flexible nature of the manuscript medium allowed for radical recontextualization of a kind that could take a court entertainment far from its original meaning: from elegant royal presentations to roughly transcribed libels, the masque text was appropriated for a wide range of purposes. The fifty years covered by this study saw many shifts in entertainment culture, including the flourishing of the manuscript separate from the 1590s, the development of the masque text by Daniel and Jonson, and the shift in the contours of entertainment culture that occurred with the death of Elizabeth and accession of James. A considerable distance has been travelled to take us from the chivalric romance of Hemetes the Oxfordshire hermit to the somewhat louche coterie wit of Jonson’s Rutland gypsies. It was not just the mode and sophistication of the writing that had changed, but the very nature of authorship. We have seen that as early as the 1570s writers like George Gascoigne made good use of the opportunities for self-promotion provided by royal entertainments, but Jonson established the masque as an acknowledged literary genre, and although his pre-eminence was lost in the 1630s he had by then changed the terms in which masques were understood. The celebrated quarrel with Inigo Jones was over who was the greater artist, not over whether the form had artistic validity. It is inconceivable that such a dispute could have occurred among Jonson and Jones’s workmanlike Elizabethan predecessors. The number of surviving manuscript texts of the two songs from Gypsies dwarfs that of any earlier, or indeed later, entertainment, but this does not mark any structural shift in how texts were disseminated; it is simply that they became available to prolific scribal communities and found their way into bound miscellanies that are particularly likely to have been preserved. Although I have provided examples of manuscript separates of entertainments circulating in the 1570s, the heyday for this form of dissemination was a thirty-year period beginning 71 . The editors of ‘Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources’ (Alastair Bellany, Andrew McRae, Paul E. J. Hammer, and Michelle O’Callaghan) have also identified a second answer poem to Jonson’s ‘Blessing’ which is largely a copy of Jonson’s poem but with the prayer for protection being offered to Buckingham instead of the King ().

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in the early 1590s. The major Caroline masques of the 1630s were commercially printed and the reign saw a fairly decisive shift from manuscript to print as the preferred textual medium for royal entertainments, although some regional and non-royal pieces continued to circulate in manuscript. It had always been entertainments away from Whitehall that were most likely to circulate in manuscript, and the increasingly centralized Caroline court provided fewer possibilities for such performances to take place. Throughout the period covered by this book the structure of entertainments—produced in collaboration, written on behalf of a courtier, addressed to the monarch, and performed before the watching court— remained the same, and so did their central underlying theme: the relationship between host and the royal visitor. Jonson’s entertainment for the Duke of Buckingham flaunted his intimacy with the King, as Sir Henry Lee had made his circumscribed favour with Queen Elizabeth his central theme, or as Sir John Davies’s words had expressed the lavish welcome of anxious hosts at Harefield. This central dynamic has been at the heart of all the performances described in this book. We have seen how a change of reign fundamentally altered the tone and form of entertainments, and with the accession of Charles I bawdy gypsies became as unwanted as fairy queens. Few entertainments were performed in the second half of the 1620s (or at least few texts have survived) but the court masque flourished once again in the 1630s, freshly inspired by Neoplatonism and awe of absolute majesty. However, not only were there far fewer entertainments away from royal palaces, but the active participation of both King and Queen in Charles’s court masques meant that the crucial dynamic of the performing courtier or his proxy addressing the monarch was less strongly present as a feature of Caroline entertainment culture. It therefore seems appropriate that the period also saw a decline in the messy and idiosyncratic manuscript separate as a means of disseminating entertainment texts. The vibrant culture of royal entertainment that I have explored did not die with James I, nor indeed did it die entirely on the scaffold with Charles I, but the period covered by this book was undoubtedly its golden age. At no other time have England’s political elite found such extraordinary ways to address their ruler as they did in the fifty-year period when they used such writers as Gascoigne, Davies, Daniel, and Jonson to find ingenious ways to speak on their behalf.

Conclusion: Selling Entertainments This book has examined why the texts of entertainments were produced, and how they circulated in early modern England; it has been built on fragmentary insights into the culture in which entertainments were written and read provided by individual leaves of paper and reconstructed moments of time. But the material texts that have been my focus did not stop circulating in the 1620s or at the outbreak of the Civil War. If the manner in which these texts passed from one person to another—as a gift from an author to a prince, as an enclosure in a letter, or as a purchase in the marketplace—reveals how those texts were valued and understood at that particular moment of exchange, then the later circulation of those same texts can tell us something about their changing value, and about the later understanding of early modern entertainment culture. The provenance of these objects provides a collecting history, a glimpse of how these texts—and the culture that they represent—have been read and valued in the four centuries since their original production. Provenance is something that can be more satisfactorily traced with reference to printed texts than manuscripts, chiefly because the printed texts have tended to be more commonly bought and sold, so (in something of a reversal from the rest of this book) it is printed pamphlets that are the main focus here, although both media are considered in the pages that follow. COLLECTING ELIZABETHAN ENTERTAINMENT PAMPHLETS Elizabethan pamphlets, of which a total of about sixty copies are known to survive, provide a useful subgroup of printed entertainment texts: the number is large enough to allow patterns to emerge but small enough

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to remain manageable, and the texts are sufficiently similar for them to be considered as a group. This group of publications was introduced in Chapter 3: it includes the coronation pageant, the pamphlets of the Kenilworth, Woodstock, and Norfolk progress entertainments of the 1570s, Goldwell’s A Briefe Declaration of the Shews and the Callophisus challenge broadside of the 1580s, and from the 1590s the Elvetham and Cowdray entertainments as well as the Speeches delivered to Her Maiestie this last progress and the descriptive poem Polyhymnia. There are in total sixteen distinct editions of these various entertainments, of which a number are exceedingly rare.1 The most common are one of the two editions of Laneham’s Letter (twelve surviving copies), Churchyard’s A Discourse of The Queenes Majesties entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (eight copies), one of the two editions of the Coronation entry (seven copies), and the two editions of The Joyfull Receyuing of the Queenes most excellent Majestie into hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich (six copies and five copies).2 Of the eleven other editions, five are known to survive in three copies and six are known through a single copy. No copy of any of these pamphlets has passed through any of the major auction houses in the last thirty years, but it is likely that a few copies unrecorded in the ESTC are to be found in private collections. 1

These editions are: Richard Mulcaster, The Quenes Majesties Passage Through The Citie Of London (London: Richard Totill, 1559) [STC 7589.5] and The Passage of our most drad Soueraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth (London: Richard Totill, 1559) [STC 7590]; Robert Laneham, A Letter whearin part of the entertainment vntoo the Queenz maiesty at Killingwoorth Castl . . . is signified from a freend officer attenant in coourt ([London], 1575) [STC 15190.5 and 15191]; Thomas Churchyard, A Discourse of The Queenes Maiesties entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578) [STC 5226]; Bernard Garter, The Joyfull Receyuing of the Queenes most excellent Maiestie into hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578) [STC 11627 and 11628]; Henry Goldwel, A Briefe Declaration of the Shews (London: Robert Waldegrave, 1581) [STC 11990]; The Queenes Maiesties Entertainment at Woodstocke (London: Thomas Cadman, 1585) [STC 7596]; The Honorable Entertainement gieven to the Queenes Maiestie in Progresse, at Eluetham in Hampshire (London: John Wolfe, 1591) [STC 7583]; The Honorable Entertainement . . . Newlie corrected, and amended (London: John Wolfe, 1591) [not in STC]; The Honorable Entertainment Given to the Queenes Maiestie in Progresse, at Cowdrey in Sussex (London: Thomas Scarlet for William Wright, 1591) [STC 3907.5] and The Speeches and Honorable Entertainment . . . (London: Thomas Scarlet for William Wright, 1591) [STC 3907.7]; Speeches delivered to Her Maiestie this last progresse (Oxford: Barnes, 1592) [STC 7600]; George Peele, Polyhymnia (London: Richard Jhones, 1590) [STC 19546]; Philip Howard, The Challenge of Callophisus (London: John Charlewood, 1581) [STC 13868.5]. 2 These are respectively STC 15191, 5226, 7590, and 11627.

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Tracing the provenance of these fifty-nine books reveals a history that can be divided into six phases. The first was the book’s original purchase, for which evidence remains in only one or two cases. The second phase was the collection of these books by antiquarians as historical records, which begins in the early seventeenth century. This was followed by a gradual shift in the later seventeenth and eighteenth century towards collectors closely associated with the universities (usually Oxford). The fourth phase marks a much more pronounced shift: in the nineteenth century these little pamphlets became prized collectors’ items and were bought to line the shelves of a new generation of magnificent English country house libraries. In the early decades of the twentieth century another shift occurred as most of the great Victorian private libraries (which were always fairly fluid collections) were broken up. Many copies then passed across the Atlantic and into a number of mammoth collections built up in the United States. In the mid-twentieth century, the great private collections of Henry Huntington and Henry Folger were established as permanent publicly accessible collections. These pamphlets had been drifting into public collections (almost always through bequest rather than purchase) ever since the eighteenth century, and the major American bequests in the mid-twentieth brought almost every known copy of every Elizabethan entertainment pamphlet into a publicly accessible collection. This sixth and final phase in these texts’ history was therefore the end of their commercial circulation. There are two trajectories that run right through this history. First, these objects have become increasingly prized and increasingly expensive. Secondly, over time they have become collected less as documentary sources and more for their literary value and associations. The surviving copies constitute a tiny proportion (perhaps in the order of one or two percent) of the number originally printed. They were flimsy and ephemeral productions and the vast majority of these losses will have occurred in the years immediately after publication. It is clear that these pamphlets were rare by the eighteenth century. The provenance information of almost all copies is incomplete: they typically only become visible to the historical record when they enter substantial and well-recorded libraries, most often in the nineteenth century, by which time sale records and library catalogues provide a more or less comprehensive account of movements.

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One of these pamphlets can be traced back to its original owner, another to an Elizabethan collector, and circumstantial evidence may connect a third to its first owner. Aside from a few scattered references to purchases in letters and personal accounts these are the only details we have of the printed pamphlets’ readership—a striking contrast to the rich evidence provided by the manuscripts.3 Two of the pamphlets are bound together in a volume that once belonged to Archbishop Richard Bancroft (1544–1610) and is now in Lambeth Palace Library. This composite volume includes a copy of the coronation pamphlet (which, since it was printed when Bancroft was a boy, is likely to have had an earlier owner) and the Elvetham entertainment (which he almost certainly acquired at publication). Although rebacked, the volume is still in its seventeenth-century calf boards with a border in gilt and blind, and foliate centrepiece with Bancroft’s initials stamped in gilt.4 Bancroft succeeded to the See of Canterbury in 1604 and left his library of over six thousand volumes to his successors, thus providing the nucleus of the present Lambeth Palace Library.5 In the early 1590s Bancroft was much at court and popular with the Queen; he had been for many years the chaplain of Sir Christopher Hatton and was a Canon of Westminster. It is not clear whether this ambitious and well-connected clergyman acquired the Elvetham pamphlet because of a general interest in court news, as a souvenir of events that he had witnessed at Elvetham, or as a gift from the entertainment’s host, the Earl of Hertford, who is known to have been involved in the publication (see Chapter 3). The only other possible link to an Elizabethan owner comes from a late nineteenth-century inscription in the only known copy of the earlier edition of the 1591 Cowdray entertainment (STC 3907.5), now in the British Library. This may connect the book to the household at Cowdray itself. The book contains the bookplate of Sarah Spencer of 28 St James’s 3 For example Henry Clifford (1591–1643), son of the 4th Earl Clifford, purchased two masque books in 1633 (for 6d. each), and another in 1635 (Walter W. Woodfill, Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth I to Charles I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 259), while Humphrey Dyson recorded the purchase of several masques and entertainments (Francis R. Johnson, ‘Notes on English Retail Book Prices, 1550– 1640’, The Library, 5th ser., 2 (1950), 83–112). 4 Lambeth Palace Library, classmark (ZZ)1593.28. 5 Ann Cox-Johnson, ‘Lambeth Palace Library, 1610–1664’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 2 (1954–8), 105–26.

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Street, and a pencil inscription on the front endpapers shows that it was given by her as a gift: ‘Spencer j from his affe[ciona]te sister j Sarah Spencer j Oct[obe]r 27th 1894 j a relic from our mother’s Home.’6 Sarah Isabel Spencer (1838–1919) was the sister of John Poyntz, 5th Earl Spencer (1835–1910), and the family home of their mother, Georgiana Elizabeth ne´e Poyntz, was none other than Cowdray House itself.7 It is an alluring association, but it is not clear from the inscription whether this book, which summons up the past glories of a lost house, is a literal or figurative relic of Cowdray: Sarah Spencer’s connection with the house is clear enough, but Cowdray had burned down in 1793 with the loss of most of its contents. There is therefore an outside possibility that Sarah simply happened upon this incredibly rare pamphlet and bought it because of the family association with the original occasion. A clearer pattern emerges in the second phase of these pamphlets’ history: seventeenth-century collectors. The most important of these was Humphrey Dyson (d. 1633), notary public, antiquary, and book collector, who probably owned more entertainment texts than any single individual before or since. Dyson collected Jacobean and Caroline pageant texts (masques and Lord Mayors’ shows) more or less systematically on publication, and also acquired significant numbers of earlier publications including Elizabethan entertainments. He owned copies of Laneham’s Letter, Garter’s Joyfull Receyving, the Elvetham entertainment, and the 1592 Speeches Delivered to Her Majestie this last progresse. Three of Dyson’s Elizabethan entertainment pamphlets are all found in a remarkable volume in the British Library (classmark C.33.e.7), which is without question the most important single source of pre-Civil War printed entertainment texts (his copy of Laneham’s Letter is in a more miscellaneous volume predominantly comprising mid-sixteenth century news pamphlets).8 The BL volume is a composite of twenty-two titles, including Elizabethan entertainments, Jacobean masques, and 6 This volume, BL, C.142.dd.23, is a relatively recent acquisition: it is stamped 30 May 1976. 7 The Poyntzs were direct descendents of Anthony, 1st Viscount Montagu, who had entertained Queen Elizabeth at Cowdray; Georgiana’s mother Elizabeth had inherited the house in 1793 from her brother, the 8th Viscount Montagu, when he died young and unmarried. 8 St John’s College, Cambridge, classmark Ee.13.30 (Laneham’s Letter is item 10 in the volume).

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Lord Mayors’ shows.9 It includes the unique surviving copies of four texts (three of them Lord Mayors’ pageants) and another eleven which are known in five copies or fewer.10 The volume remains in its original simple and cheap binding of limp vellum with yapp edges, a form of binding found on a number of other of Dyson’s books.11 The volume was not properly sewn but was held together by being stab-stitched three times through the text-block and vellum (the stab-holes are still visible at the gutter of each opening), although the spine of the text-block has now been glued and sewn with three fabric cords in an expert piece of modern conservation. Stab-stitching is not well suited for such a thick volume (it is over 300 leaves in length) and it must have been a fragile and unwieldy book to read before conservation. It is not surprising that internally the condition is often poor, with a number of leaves having been lost; it is more surprising, in fact, that the volume has survived more or less intact. The vellum covers are heavily stained, and further 9 These are, in the order in which they appear: William Hart, The Examinations, Arraignment & Conviction of George Sprot (London: Melch. Bradwood for William Aspley, 1609); Garter, Joyfull Receyuing; Anthony Munday, The Triumphes of re-united Britania (London: William Jaggard, 1605); Ben Jonson, The Fortunate Isles and Their Union (London, 1624); The King of Denmarkes Welcome (London: Edward Allde, 1606); Munday, The Triumphs of the Golden Fleece (London: T.S., 1623); id., Metropolis Coronata (London: George Purslowe, 1615); Thomas Campion, A relation of the late royall entertainment . . . at Cawsome-House (London: John Budge, 1613); The Honorable Entertainement . . . at Elvetham; Thomas Dekker, Brittannia’s Honor (London: N. Okes and J. Norton, 1628); The Royall Passage of Her Majesty from the Tower of London, to her Palace of White-hall (London: S. S. for John Busby, [1604]); Samuel Daniel, The Order and Solemnitie of the Creation of . . . Prince Henrie . . . Prince of Wales (London: J. Budge, 1610); Thomas Middleton, The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue (London: Nicholas Okes, 1622); Munday, Chrysanaleia: The Golden Fishing (London: George Purslowe, 1616); The Royall Passage of Her Majesty (S. S. for Jone Millington, 1604); Thomas Churchyarde, A Handful of Gladsome Verses, giuen to the Queenes Maiesty at Woodstocke (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1592); Dekker, Troia-Nova Triumphans. London Triumphing (London: Nicholas Okes for John Wright, 1612); Middleton, The Sunne in Aries (London: Ed. Allde for H. G., 1621); Speeches Delivered to Her Majestie this Last Progresse; Munday, Sidero-Thriambos. Or Steele and Iron Triumphing (London: Nicholas Okes, 1618); Samuel Daniel, The True Discription of a Royall Masque (London: T. C. for Simon Waterson, 1604); Munday, Himatia-Poleos. The Triumphs of olde Draperie (London: Edward Allde, 1614); Camp-Bell: or the Ironmongers Faire Feild (London: E. Allde, 1609). 10 The four unique items are Churchyard, A Handful of Gladsome Verses, and three of Munday’s Lord Mayor’s shows: The Triumphes of the Golden Fleece, Sidero-Thriambos, and Himatiapoleos. 11 See David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles 1450–1800: A Handbook (London: The British Library, 2005), 146–54 for cheap vellum bindings.

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disfigured by a number of (mostly illegible) scribblings, where it was used to jot down some calculations. On the spine is written ‘Pageants j Progresses j &c. j 1558–1628’. The first of the endpapers is also heavily defaced with casual notes including three alphabets, a name partially legible as ‘Margry’, and extensive calculations relating to the number of ‘Brickes in the forst kilne’. The treatment of the volume does not suggest that the pamphlets were considered particularly valuable by their early owners. There is no recorded provenance for the volume after its sale by Dyson’s heirs until it turned up in the mid-nineteenth century in the library of the Revd Richard Brooke of Gateforth House in Selby, Yorkshire, from where it passed to the British Museum via the Lords of the Committee of Council on Education (the forerunner of the Department of Education) in August 1868.12 Despite the volume’s later cavalier treatment, it is clear that Dyson considered these pamphlets worthy of collection and preservation (although, as Alan H. Nelson points out, we cannot be entirely sure that all the items in the volume belonged to Dyson).13 Entertainments fit into a wider pattern of systematic collecting through which Dyson, the public notary, hoped to preserve a historical record: he collected under two main headings of ‘Ecclesiastical’ and ‘Temporal’ texts, and searched out texts that recorded public events in recent English history, many of which were fairly ephemeral pieces, rather than more obviously collectable books. He valued these pamphlets as the record of significant public events rather than as literary works and categorized them along with other ‘Temporal’ history, such as his important collection of Elizabethan proclamations.14 12 The volume has a small oval British Museum stamp dated ‘13 February [18]69’. This is now a greenish colour but would originally have been yellow (the colour used for donations between 1768 and 1944). British Library DH53/5, Department of Printed Books: Donations August 1866–April 1871, p. 226; British Museum Estimates, entry dated 10 June 1870, Department of Printed Books, p. 8. This information was kindly provided by Lynn Young, Corporate Archivist of the British Library (personal email, 19 Jan. 2007). For the Brooke family see W. Wilberforce Morrell, The History and Antiquities of Selby (Selby: W. B. Bellerby, 1867), 325–7. 13 Alan H. Nelson, private communication, 8 Jan. 2007. I am very grateful to Professor Nelson, who is currently working on a catalogue of books from Dyson’s library for the Oxford Bibliographical Society, for discussing Dyson with me. 14 For the importance of Dyson’s ‘A booke, containing all such proclamations as were published during the raigne of the late Queene Elizabeth’ (British Library shelfmark G.6463) see W. A. Jackson, ‘Humphrey Dyson and his Collection of Elizabethan Proclamations’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 1 (1947), 76–89.

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The full extent of Dyson’s collection is difficult to assess but he owned at least one other volume of masques and entertainments. This second volume is not known to survive but it evidently included some very early entertainment texts and reveals the extent of his collection of entertainments. In his will, Dyson requested his friend William Jumper to sell his library on behalf of his children, and a substantial portion was purchased by the bibliophile Richard Smith; the 1682 auction catalogue (among the earliest English book auction catalogues) produced when Smith’s library was dispersed is therefore a crucial record of Dyson’s collection.15 Included in the section of the catalogue entitled ‘Bundles of Stitcht Books English, in Quarto’, was the following volume (lot 162): Manner of King Hen. 8 Triumph at Callice and Bullein, (very old) Traduction and Marriage of Queen Katherine to K. Hen. 8. The Triumph at the Coronation of Queen Anne 2d wife to K. Hen. 8 th. 1533, Sir Jo. Cheke’s Elegie on K. Edward the 6 th. Funeral of K. Edward the 6 th. 1560 Funeral Solemnities of K. James, divers Noblemen, E. of Essex, &c. with tracts relating to Triumphs and Solemnities, to the number of 28 more.

The account of the pageantry accompanying the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn survives in a single copy (not known to be Dyson’s); the ‘Traduction and Marriage’ actually described Catherine of Aragon’s marriage to Henry’s older brother Prince Arthur in 1501; the elegy for Edward VI refers to a 1610 edition in which the text was spuriously attributed to Cheke; the pamphlet on Henry VIII’s ‘Triumph at Callice and Bullein’ has not been identified but was probably concerned with the successful siege of Boulogne in 1544.16 The volume therefore included at least one lost work and perhaps others among the twenty-

15 R. L. Steele, ‘Humphrey Dyson’, The Library, 3rd ser., 1 (1910), 144–51; E. Gordon Duff, ‘The Library of Richard Smith’, The Library, 2nd ser., 8 (1907), 113–33; Richard Chiswel, Bibliotheca Smithiana: Sive Catalogus Librorum (1682); the sale took place 15 May–19 June 1682. 16 The only copy of The Noble Tryumphaunt Coronacyon of Quene Anne (London: Wynkyn de Worde for Johan Goughe, 1533), is BL, shelfmark C.21.b.24; The Traduction [and] Mariage of the Princesse ([London: Richard Pynson, 1500]); the elegy was by William Baldwin and first published in 1560 (STC 1243); the 1610 edition attributing it to Cheke is STC 5112.

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eight unlisted books. It was sold for 12s. 6d. to the Earl of Peterborough, but its later history is unknown.17 Another systematic seventeenth-century collector was the Oxfordbased antiquary Anthony Wood (1632–95), and among the 6,758 titles recorded in his library is a copy of Garter’s Joyfull Receyving now at the Bodleian.18 Wood’s collecting habits were in some ways similar to those of Dyson, and the volume in which Garter’s pamphlet appears bears comparison to the British Library Dyson volume. Furthermore, because the care paid by Wood to the organization and binding of his books is well recorded, we can be confident that the order and binding of this volume was his.19 The volume (Wood 537) comprises twenty-one titles relating to pageantry and royal entertainment carefully arranged in chronological order, beginning with a copy of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation entry (in a 1604 edition, with the signature and cipher of Edward Hoby on the title page), and continuing with accounts of other royal progresses and entertainments, royal visits and ceremonial events, masques and Lord Mayors’ shows, mostly of the early Stuart period but continuing through to Thomas Jordan’s London’s Resurrection to Joy and Triumph, expressed in Sundry Shews . . . to the . . . Lord Mayor (London: for Henry Brome, 1671). A second composite volume includes further titles relating to royal entertainments, speeches, and ceremonies, mostly from the Restoration period.20 Wood’s collection of pageant texts falls into a much wider pattern of his antiquarian collecting interests, and especially his careful preservation of popular ephemeral publications. As with Dyson, this makes his collection a rich source of otherwise rare texts, albeit principally of the seventeenth century rather than the Elizabethan period. 17 The auctioneer’s copy of the Bibliotheca Smithiana is in the Bibliotheca Lindesiana (microfilm copy at BL, Mic.A.1343); the volume is not found in A Catalogue of the Select and Valuable Library of Books . . . of the late Earl of Peterborough, sold at auction by William Stewart, 13–14 July 1815. 18 Bodleian Library, shelfmark Wood 537(2). For Wood’s library see Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Anthony Wood (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2002). 19 Wood took care that composite volumes contained items on similar subjects and were arranged chronologically, that marginal annotations were not lost by the binder cropping the volumes, and (in part to ensure his instructions were followed by the binder) he prepared detailed tables of contents that were sent with the bundles of publications to the binder and bound as endpapers at the front of the volume (see Kiessling, Wood, pp. xxii–xxviii). 20 Bodleian, Wood 398.

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Dyson and Wood were exceptional in systematically collecting entertainments as part of larger projects to preserve a historical record. Other seventeenth-century collectors who owned at least one Elizabethan entertainment pamphlet included Robert Burton, Elias Ashmole, and John Selden (all of these copies are now at the Bodleian Library).21 The rationale for these men’s acquisition of entertainment pamphlets was different: all three had copies of Laneham’s Letter, and it was probably the author’s experimental orthography rather than the content of the pamphlet that primarily interested these scholarly readers. Throughout the eighteenth century it continued to be the case that entertainments were insignificant inclusions in major and well-recorded collections. Most of these collectors were men closely associated with the universities, who were unlikely to have much interest in these frivolous pieces of ephemera except perhaps for their local antiquarian interest, which probably explains why the bequest of Bishop Thomas Tanner to the Bodleian included A Discourse of The Queenes Majesties entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk.22 These pamphlets were also now exceptionally rare. Only the difficulty of obtaining copies can explain why the great scholar and collector of Elizabethan drama, Edmond Malone, had just two Elizabethan entertainment pamphlets in his collection.23 Malone is the nevertheless the first collector of these works whose primary interest was the dramatic literature of the period. A significant new phase began in the nineteenth century, when these pamphlets became established as valuable bibliographic rarities. Like other rare and collectable books, the relatively few surviving available 21 Shelfmarks Arch. G.f.3(3) (see Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), no. 937); Ashm. 705; 8o.Z.8(2) Jur. Seld. 22 Shelfmark Tanner 745(5). 23 These two pamphlets formed part of the 1821 Malone bequest to the Bodleian with the following shelfmarks: Churchyard’s A Discourse of The Queenes Majesties entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk, Mal[one] 215 (8), and Garter, The Joyfull Receyuing, Mal[one] 847. For Malone as a collector see James M. Osborn, ‘Edmund Malone: Scholar-Collector’, The Library, 5th ser., 19 (1964), 11–37. The books now in the Bodleian do not constitute Malone’s entire collection. A Catalogue of the Greater Portion of the Library of the Late Edmond Malone was issued by Sotheby’s for a sale held on 26 November 1818 and for seven days following. There were 2,544 lots, and of the relatively small drama section (about 170 lots), the only entertainment was a copy of William D’Avenant’s Triumph of the Prince D’Amour (1636), which sold for 3s. 6d., to Field.

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copies passed between the great libraries of the age for ever-increasing prices. The surviving ownership records for previous periods are massively incomplete, but from now on we can be fairly confident that most transactions are preserved. The value of these pamphlets was no longer as a record of historical events—not least because most texts were now more readily accessible through reprinted editions, notably John Nichols’s Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London: Nichols, 1788–1821, revised 1823)—but as rare books resonant of the golden age of Gloriana and Shakespeare. Binding is a clear indicator of the vastly increased value attached to these titles: where early collectors had them economically and practically bound in thick composite volumes, the copies that circulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are almost all finely and individually bound in gilt morocco or similarly lavish bindings, early examples of which can be seen in bequests to the British Museum: the copy of Laneham’s Letter from the library of George III (presented to the nation in 1823), and the three titles from the magnificent collection of Thomas Grenville (bequeathed in 1846), are all in gilt tooled morocco with armorial stamps in gilt.24 Elizabethan entertainments had a place in many of the finest English country house libraries of the nineteenth century. Mark Masterman Sykes’s beautiful library at Sledmere, dispersed by his brother after his death in 1823, included copies of Goldwell’s Brief Declaration of the Shews (1581) and Speeches delivered to Her Majestie this last progresse (1592).25 The first of these passed to Thomas Jolley, who also owned copies of Garter’s Joyfull Receyuing (1578) and the unique copy of The Speeches and Honorable Entertainment . . . at Cowdrey (1591), while the Sykes copy of Speeches delivered to Her Majestie passed to Richard Heber, who also owned a copy of Churchyard’s A Discourse of The Queenes Majesties entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (1578) and 24 Shelfmark C.12.e.1 is a copy of Laneham’s Letter in green morocco with a single gilt fillet panel and central gilt stamp, being the crowned monogram of George III. The Greville volumes are Churchyard’s Discourse of The Queenes Majesties entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (G[reville].11238) and two copies of the coronation entry (shelfmarks G[renville].6133 and C.33.d.17). The latter was acquired at the sale of the library of William Barnes Rhodes at Sotheby’s in 1825: it does not have a Grenville classmark but his armorial stamp is found in gilt within an elaborate gilt panel on the red morocco covers. 25 BL, shelfmark C.33.a.4; Huntington (shelfmark is STC number).

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a copy of Garter. When the Heber library was itself dispersed in the 1830s, the Speeches delivered to Her Majestie was bought by the 6th Duke of Devonshire, while the copies of Churchyard and Garter reached the library of William Henry Miller (1789–1848) at Britwell Court, Buckinghamshire. The magnificent Britwell Court library (augmented by later generations of the family) also contained a copy of the coronation entry that had once belonged to Horatio Walpole. Other major collections contemporary with Britwell Court included the enormous library developed by the banker Henry Huth (1815–78) and his descendents, which included copies of Garter and Laneham (the latter ‘A beautiful copy in the original vellum cover, with strings. From the library of Sir John Percivale, of Burton in the County of Cork, with his book-plate, dated 1702’).26 Also important was the library assembled by the 6th Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, both at auction and most notably by his purchase in 1821 of the theatrical library of John Kemble (1757–1823), which included copies of Churchyard and of Polyhymnia. These valuable but relatively obscure Elizabethan texts formed just a tiny part of the vast Britwell Court, Huth, and Devonshire collections, but they were rather more central to a fourth Victorian library, that of the poet Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821–95) in Rowfant, Sussex. One of the main focuses of this collection was the Elizabethans, and the library held copies of Churchyard, Garter, and the unique (and incomplete) copy of The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke (1585), which was then bound in vellum.27 What all of these collectors had in common (apart, of course, from their bibliophilia), and what set them apart from previous generations of Oxford gentlemen scholars, was very significant inherited wealth. Their inheritances were measured in hundreds of thousands of pounds, whether coming from land (such as Sykes, Heber, and Devonshire), from banking (as in the Huth dynasty), or from trade (Locker-Lampson inherited from his father-in-law a fortune made in the fur trade and through investment in the transatlantic telegraph). It is also striking that these magnificent collections had little longevity: libraries assembled by one generation were commonly dispersed by the next, who wished to invest their capital in 26

The Huth Library: A Catalogue (London: Ellis and White, 1880), iii. 816. The Rowfant Library: A Catalogue of the Printed Books . . . Collected by Frederick Locker-Lampson (London: Quaritch, 1886). 27

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other assets. The value of these collections of course increased the incentive for dispersal, and, unlike previous generations of collectors, these men did not typically have close associations with the universities so were less likely to leave them their books. The only copy of an Elizabethan entertainment acquired by a major private library in the early nineteenth century and which still remains in that family’s ownership is the unique copy of the second edition of Elvetham, purchased for the royal collection at Carleton House and now at Windsor Castle.28 Like other rare and valuable books, these pamphlets were now luxury items that transmogrified capital into an expression of taste and learning. This process continued in the next phase of their circulation as, in the first decades of the twentieth century, many copies crossed the Atlantic. Luxuries follow money, so these books moved inexorably into the hands of American millionaires in a miniature example of a much larger movement of cultural property, and a potent display of the new dominance of American capitalism. All of the English country house libraries discussed above were dispersed between 1900 and 1930: the Rowfant library was sold to an American dealer and dispersed in 1905; the Kemble-Devonshire play collection was privately purchased by Henry Huntington in 1914; the Huth library was sold in a series of sales at Sotheby’s between 1911 and 1920; and the Britwell Court library was similarly sold at Sotheby’s between 1916 and 1927. Both of the Elizabethan entertainments in the Huth sales were purchased by Henry Huntington; Garter for £30 and Laneham for £100.29 The price differential here reflected less the relative scarcity of the two books than the unusual orthography and attractively idiosyncratic style of Laneham’s text, which had always given it particular appeal to collectors. Prices were significantly higher at the Britwell Court sales a few years later, and Huntington had more serious competition: the Britwell copy of Garter sold for £110, almost four times the price achieved ten years previously (the buyer, Quaritch, was not on this occasion acting for Huntington, and this is the only one of these books that is currently unlocated); the coronation entry sold for a modest £35 to Henry Huntington; the most spectacular price, however, was for the

28 29

This copy has recently been identified by H. Neville Davies. 2 June 1913, lot 3140 (Garter); 7 July 1914, lot 4238 (Laneham).

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Britwell copy of Churchyard, which was bought by Sir Leicester Harmsworth for the enormous sum of £250.30 None of these twentieth-century collectors obtained their wealth from land, and although most—like their Victorian predecessors— inherited massive fortunes, they tended to be active themselves in the business world. The greatest and wealthiest was Henry E. Huntington, a second-generation rail magnate who inherited from his uncle Collis P. Huntington. The collection of eight Elizabethan entertainment pamphlets acquired by Huntington was larger than that of any other private collector since Humphrey Dyson nearly three hundred years earlier. He eventually owned the coronation pamphlet (Britwell), two copies of Laneham’s Letter (Huth and Bridgewater, although the latter was auctioned off as a duplicate and is now in the Chapin Library, Williams College), two copies of Churchyard (Rowfant and Devonshire), two copies of Garter (Huth and Rowfant; the latter was then bought by Henry Clay Folger in a duplicate sale in 1918), Goldwell’s Briefe Declaration of the Shews, Speeches delivered to Her Maiestie this last progresse (Sykes–Heber–Devonshire), and Churchyard (Devonshire). Perhaps the only comparable Elizabethan collection assembled in the early twentieth century was that of Henry Clay Folger, president (later chairman) of the Standard Oil Company of New York, a direct ancestor of ExxonMobil. By 1920 he had purchased copies of both editions of Garter, one a Huntington duplicate (previously at Rowfant), the other from the sale at Sotheby’s of Lord Amherst of Hackney’s library (previously in the library of Thomas Jolley). These purchases were augmented by the collection’s trustees after Folger’s death in a move to expand its scope beyond its founder’s focus on Shakespeare. A major Folger acquisition was the collection of English books built up by Sir Robert Leicester Harmsworth (1870–1937), a member of the Harmsworth dynasty of newspapermen. The Harmsworth collection included both a copy of Churchyard purchased at the Britwell sale (previously Heber), as mentioned above, and a copy of Speeches delivered to Her Majestie this last progresse which he had purchased (via Quaritch) at Sotheby’s on 3 June 1935, lot 119, for £54 (the last time that any of these Elizabeth pamphlets has appeared at auction). The Folger also acquired the unique copy of 30 1 Apr. 1924, lot 270 (Garter); 6–10 Feb. 1922, lot 264 (Coronation); 10 Mar. 1921, lot 29 (Churchyard).

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Callophisus’s challenge and a copy of Laneham’s Letter which provides a final word on the ever-expanding pedigrees that characterized this period of these texts’ circulation: it had previous passed between the libraries of George, 5th Duke of Marlborough (1766–1840), the postal administrator Francis Freeling (1764–1836), the scholars Thomas Corser (1793– 1876) and James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820–89), and the Rhode Island industrialist Marsden J. Perry (1850–1935). Folger and Huntington neither gifted their collections to existing libraries nor allowed their heirs to sell their libraries; instead, in the American tradition of philanthropy, they endowed them to create two new institutional libraries, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The collections of Folger and Huntington were not unique: at least two other major collectors, Carl Pforzheimer and Alfred Clarke Chapin, built up libraries that included copies of Laneham’s Letter, and both collections then passed into institutions (respectively the University of Texas at Austin and the Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.). Other copies of Elizabethan entertainment pamphlets were acquired by such handsomely endowed institutions as Harvard, Yale, and the Newberry Library in Chicago.31 By the mid-twentieth century almost all of the fifty-nine known copies of these Elizabethan pamphlets had become fixed in institutions mostly found in southern England and the eastern and western seaboards of the United States. They are of course far more accessible to researchers than at any time in the past but in the foreseeable future the books themselves will not circulate any further. Although the history of these books breaks down into distinct phases, the changes in the ways in which they have been understood and valued have tended to move along clear trajectories. The earliest collectors such as Dyson and Wood were motivated by an antiquarian impulse and tended to value these pamphlets as records of notable events. These early antiquarian collectors saw a practical value in the pamphlets: they contained content that was not otherwise available. From the eighteenth century onwards their value has gradually shifted as they have increasingly been prized as literary relics from the age of Shakespeare, reflecting 31 There are copies of Laneham’s Letter at the Newberry Library (Case F 4549.478), and the Houghton Library, Harvard (STC 15190.5 and STC 15191); and a copy of Garter at the Beinecke Library, Yale (shelfmark Byz N83 578g).

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the developing identification of this period as the golden age of English Literature. From the late eighteenth century onwards the texts of these pamphlets tended to be available in modern edited form, but this did not diminish the value of the pamphlets themselves. They became trophy items rather than reading texts as the interest of collectors shifted towards the books as objects: this shift is reflected in, for example, the increasing care taken over binding and discrimination over condition. The monetary value of these pamphlets has increased over time as a consequence of their decreasing availability. In the nineteenth century they became luxuries imbued with an aura of rarefied sophistication, affordable to an increasingly elite group of collectors, as an ever increasing proportion of copies became locked up in institutional collections. The phases and trends that have been identified in the history of collecting Elizabethan printed entertainments also hold, at least in a fairly general way, for other groups of entertainment texts. Early Stuart masques were valued for their literary qualities from an earlier date so they were less likely to find their way into early antiquarian collections, but the pattern from the later eighteenth century onwards is largely the same, although there were some different individuals involved in the historic circulation of the masque quartos—such as Alexander Dyce among nineteenth-century British collectors, and Carl Pforzheimer among the twentieth-century American collectors. THE C IRC ULATION OF ENTERTAINMENT MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts have followed a somewhat different pattern of circulation from that of the printed pamphlets. Whereas entertainment pamphlets were deliberately collected as relics of courtly and theatrical culture, the manuscript entertainments were usually found in larger volumes or groups of papers that were rarely acquired because they included entertainment texts; the later history of the manuscripts is therefore less revealing about changes in cultural attitudes towards the English Renaissance court and drama. Scholars and antiquaries have figured much more strongly in their history and overall the manuscripts have tended to circulate much less than the printed texts. There was, on the whole, no place for these manuscripts in the great English country house libraries of

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the nineteenth century, but they were acquired by the major twentiethcentury American collectors. This pattern can be traced through the provenance of a small sample provided by the combined total of seventeen manuscripts of the 1602 Harefield and 1607 Theobalds entertainments. The most striking difference from the printed pamphlets is that almost a quarter of these manuscripts remain with descendants of their original owners. The French translation and the final song at Theobalds remain among the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House, still owned by the descendants of the Earl of Salisbury. The copy of Harefield sent to the Newdigate family remains in the family archive, which is on deposit at Warwickshire Record Office, and Archbishop Hutton’s copy of the same entertainment remains among the papers of the Hutton family of Marske deposited at North Yorkshire Record Office. Two further manuscript copies of the Harefield entertainment are in archives that remain largely intact, although they have passed into institutional ownership: the copy sent to Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, remains part of the Talbot Papers which were sold by the College of Arms to Lambeth Palace Library in 1983, while Dudley Carleton’s copy is among his correspondence and papers that have long been integrated into the State Papers in the National Archives. In all of these cases the manuscripts have been dealt with as part of an individual or family archive rather than a library. Archives are less prone to dispersal than libraries for several reasons: an archive is more intimately connected to the history of a family, house, and estate than is the library; despite often being highly heterogeneous, archives are more likely to be treated as integral wholes than are libraries when they are sold; and they are also (and always have been) a less liquid asset. Even those manuscripts that have not remained in large archives have tended to change ownership rather less frequently than printed books, but the pattern of provenance is similar. Two of the manuscripts—both of which have particularly great antiquarian interest—belonged to great eighteenth-century scholar-collectors and then passed into institutional collections: the volume of Yelverton papers that includes a copy of the Theobalds entertainment came into the possession of Narcissus Luttrell (1657–1732), and was given to All Souls, Oxford, by his descendant Luttrell Wynne, who was a Fellow of the College; while the ‘diary’ of John Manningham belonged to Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, whose collection became one of the foundation collections of the British

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Museum in 1753. A third manuscript, John Kaye’s copy of Theobalds (now at the Folger), was once—along with other Kaye family papers— the property of another eighteenth-century antiquary, John Wilson of Broomhead Hall (1719–83); a fourth, Lord North’s copy of Theobalds (now in the BL), belonged to the antiquaries Peter le Neve and Thomas Martin.32 Some manuscripts continued to circulate in the nineteenth century, but whereas the printed pamphlets were now finding their way into morocco bindings and increasingly exclusive library shelves, the manuscripts were still largely the province of antiquaries of less prodigious means, although one item, the Kaye copy of Theobalds, was purchased by the monomaniacal and deep-pocketed manuscript collector Sir Thomas Phillipps. The reasons that manuscripts were considerably slower to become established as valuable luxury items than the printed pamphlets are not hard to find: most of these manuscripts are physically unimpressive and their importance as a medium for the dissemination of texts was not widely understood. The Lord North/Peter le Neve collection of separates (including Theobalds) passed through the hands of a succession of antiquaries including Sir John Fenn and William Frere (a lawyer and Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, who eventually became Vice Chancellor of the University) before being purchased by the British Museum at auction in 1866.33 Philip Bliss (another man who worked in University administration, as the registrar of Oxford University and Keeper of the University archives) acquired the fascinating poetical miscellany that includes a unique version of parts of the Harefield entertainment from the dealer Andrews of Bristol in 1845 (for £6. 6s.), and this was also purchased by the British Museum at auction at the sale of Bliss’s library in 1856.34 It was also in the mid-nineteenth century that the Conway papers were dispersed, including his copies of both Harefield and Theobalds. While the copy of Theobalds ended up 32 Heaton, ‘The Copyist of a Ben Jonson Manuscript Identified’, Notes and Queries, 246 (2001), 385–8, discusses the provenance of the Kaye manuscript in more detail, and id., ‘ “His Acts Transmit to After Days”: Two Unpublished Poems by Aurelian Townshend’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 13 (2007), 165–86, discusses the provenance of the North manuscripts. 33 The Library of Sir John Fenn, Puttick and Simpson, 17 July 1866, lots 420–2. See Heaton, ‘ “His Acts Transmit” ’, 171–5. 34 Sotheby’s, 21 Aug. 1856, lot 189.

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at the Public Record Office (see Chapter 5), and other entertainments were presented to the British Museum, his copy of Harefield was considered a duplicate (the PRO already housed Carleton’s copy of the entertainment) and ended up as the property of J. W. Croker, who, as Lord Hertford’s executor, had taken responsibility for the dispersal of the papers.35 The manuscript then passed to another man of antiquarian tastes and relatively limited funds, the Revd Francis Hopkinson of Malvern Wells in Worcestershire.36 The period at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century that saw the break-up of many great English county house libraries also saw the dispersal of manuscripts from similar sources. The Francis Fane volume that includes Theobalds was one among a group of eleven volumes acquired by the British Museum following the sale of the family seat, Apethorpe, in 1892. Collectors of the twentieth century were more interested in the manuscripts than their Victorian predecessors had been. When the Carew archive at Crowcombe Court in Somerset was dispersed at auction at the beginning of the twentieth century, the manuscript volume that includes part of the Harefield manuscript ended up in the collection of Henry Clay Folger.37 The Folger also acquired the Conway–Hopkinson copy of Harefield and the Kaye Theobalds manuscript.38 Finally, James Osborn acquired a manuscript from the British trade that included a copy of the Harefield entertainment and which is now found, with the rest of his collection, in the Beinecke Library at Yale.

35

A transcript of the manuscript was deposited at the PRO (SP 12/285/59 (fos. 151–7)). Revd Hopkinson is a little-known figure but he had a remarkable collection of manuscripts which also included, for example, an album of receipts and expenses relating to Nell Gwyn (Sotheby’s, English Literature, History, Children’s Books, and Illustrations, 17 July 2008, lot 5). Hopkinson’s papers were briefly calendared in the Third Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission (London: HMSO, 1872), 261–7. 37 The manuscript is listed among the Carew Papers in the Fourth Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission (London: HMSO, 1874), 372, and was sold at Sotheby’s, Catalogue of Valuable Books and Manuscripts including a Portion of the Library of the Late Baron de Hochepied Larpent, the Collection of I. E. Maitland, esq., and Other Properties, 18–20 June 1903, to J. Pearson and Co., from which it was acquired by Folger. See Seymour De Ricci, Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, 2 vols. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1935), i. 294. The manuscript is now Folger MS Z.e.28. 38 Bibliotheca Phillippica, new series, first part, Sotheby’s, 28 June 1965, lot 9. 36

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Today almost all entertainment texts, whether they are in manuscript or print, are in institutional collections. Although it would be impossible for any collector today to put together a collection of these texts (or indeed of English Renaissance literature more generally) on the scale that Henry Huntington did a century ago, a few of the Jacobean texts do still circulate commercially. Since the 1970s there have been half a dozen sales at auction of Thomas Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment (1604), an account of King James’s coronation procession, most recently at Sotheby’s in 2007 when a copy sold for £4,800.39 Two copies of Jonson’s contribution to the coronation, B. Jon: His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainement (1604), have sold at auction over the same period (most recently, excluding the copy bound up in the Macclesfield volume discussed below, at Christie’s New York in 1995), and it has a similar commercial value to Dekker’s pamphlet. Much more significant is a volume that recently came to light in the library of the Earl of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle. Much of this magnificent eighteenth-century library was sold at Sotheby’s in a series of twelve auctions, the success of which made it the most valuable library ever to have been sold at auction. The volume of entertainments was included in the eleventh part of the sale, on 13 March 2008. It contained six titles, all published in 1604: the first authorized edition of Daniel’s The vision of the 12. goddesses, one of the two reprints that year of Mulcaster’s Royall Passage of her Majesty, B. Jon: His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainement, Dekker’s Magnificent Entertainment, Gilbert Dugdale’s Time Triumphant, and The King’s Majesties Speech in the Lords on 19 March 1604.40 Although it was in an eighteenth-century Macclesfield binding, there is little doubt that the group had been assembled around the time of publication. Although fascinating as a group, the volume’s highlight was Daniel’s masque. Not only is this the first great Stuart masque, but this edition was otherwise known in only two copies (Malone’s copy at the Bodleian and the Britwell Court copy at the Huntington) and this copy was in remarkably fresh condition and even retained deckle edges (it was of a smaller format than the other books in the volume so was tucked inside and 39

English Literature, History, Children’s Books and Illustrations, 12 July 2007, lot 64. The Library of the Earls of Macclesfield removed from Shirburn Castle part eleven: English Books and Manuscripts, 13 Mar. 2008, lot 3941. 40

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protected from wear, dust, and insensitive binders). The volume was purchased by a private collector for £94,100. The exceptional price achieved by the Macclesfield volume not only shows the premium that is attached to truly exceptional books in today’s marketplace, but also that entertainment texts remain highly desirable to collectors even though they are so rare that it would be impossible to assemble a collection of more than a handful of titles. These little pamphlets and scruffy manuscripts have distinctive qualities: the contrast between their humble appearance and the magnificence of the occasions that they record; their compelling combination of playfulness, literary ambition, and court politics. We have now seen not only that they appealed to a range of readers at the time of production, but that they have continued to fascinate scholars, readers, and collectors right down to the present day.

Bibliography I. MANUSCRIPTS United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland Alnwick Castle, Northumberland MS 525 Bradford, West Yorkshire Archive Service Hopkinson MS 21 Hopkinson MS 34 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Add. 6861 Add. 8915 Ff.5.14 Cambridge, Downing College Botwell MSS, ‘Wickstede Thesaurus’ Cambridge, Emmanuel College MS 68 Chatsworth House, Derbyshire Bolton Abbey MSS, Sundry Documents 54 Hardwick Drawers/43/16/1 Dublin, Trinity College MS 802 Hatfield, Hatfield House Cecil Papers, vol. 21 Cecil Papers, vol. 80 Cecil Papers, vol. 90 Cecil Papers, vol. 140 Cecil Papers, vol. 144 Cecil Papers, vol. 195 Cecil Papers, vol. 266 Cecil Papers, Bills, 22 Cecil Papers, Bills, 35 Kendal, Cumbria Record Office WD/Hoth/1986/6 Leeds, Brotherton Library MS 295 (Wilson Papers)

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London, College of Arms M.6 Tournament Cheques Portfolio London, British Library Add. 5956 Add. 12497 Add. 21432 Add. 22601 Add. 23229 Add. 24195 Add. 24665 Add. 27406 Add. 27407 Add. 27408 Add. 34217 Add. 34218 Add. 34220 Add. 34221 Add. 40838 Add. 41499A Add. 61821 Add. 73087 Cotton Titus C.VI Cotton Titus C.VII Cotton Vespasian E.VIII Egerton 2623 Egerton 2877 Harley 280 Harley 286 Harley 298 Harley 541 Harley 4955 Harley 5353 Harley 6947 Lansdowne 88 Lansdowne 90 Lansdowne 99 Royal 12.A.XLVII Royal 14.A.X Royal 14.A.XI Royal 14.A.XIX

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Royal 17.B.VII Royal 17.B.XXXI Royal 17.C.XXXI Royal 18.A.XXXI Royal 18.A.XLV Royal 18.A.XLVIII Royal 18.A.LXI Royal 18.A.LXVI Royal 18.A.LXXII Sloane 1832 Stowe 166 London, Worshipful Company of Clothworkers Orders of Courts, 1605–25 Quarter Warden’s Account Book, 1606–7 London, Gray’s Inn Library MS 29 London, Guildhall Library Merchant Taylors’ Company, Account Books, vol. 9 Merchant Taylors’ Company, Ancient Manuscript Book 12 Merchant Taylors’ Company, Minutes of the Court of Assistants, vol. 5 MS 4160 London, Inner Temple Library Petyt 538 London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 933 MS 936 MS 2858 MS 3201 London, The National Archives OBS 1/886/12 SP 9/51 SP 9/95 SP 9/193 SP 12/254 SP 12/284 SP 12/285 SP 12/286 SP 14/27 SP 14/90 SP 14/95 SP 14/122

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SP 14/123 SP 14/129 SP 14/153 SP 14/180 SP 70/139 SP 70/140 London, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library Dyce 36 Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies U 1475, C8/135 U 1475, C12/26 Northallerton, North Yorkshire County Record Office ZAZ 1286/8282–89 Northampton, Northamptonshire County Record Office Finch Hatton 2414 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office RAY 25 Nottingham, Nottingham Archives DD/SR 1/D/14 Nottingham, Nottingham University Library Portland Papers, MS PxV.6 Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole 36–37 Eng. poet. c.50 Eng. poet. d.152 Eng. poet. f.25 Mus. b.1 North. adds. e.1 Rawl. d.692 Rawl. d.1021 Rawl. poet. 61 Rawl. poet. 160 Rawl. poet.172 Tanner 79 Tanner 169 Tanner 306 Oxford, All Souls College MS 155 Oxford, The Queen’s College MS 121 Warwick, Warwickshire County Record Office

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CR 136/B 2454 CR 136/B 2455 Microfilm MI 351/3 [Arbury Hall MS A.414] Worcester, Worcester Record Office X496, BA 9360/A-14 United States of America New Haven, Beinecke Library MS 394 Osborn b.197 Osborn fb 9 New York, J. Pierpont Morgan Library M.A. 1201 M.A. 1296 San Marino, Calif., Huntington Library EL 122–27 EL 6862 HM 21 HM 198 HM 741 HM 46323 Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library J.a.1 V.b.213 V.b.214 W.b.482 W.b.483 W.b.484 X.d.172 X.d.445 X.d.446 X.d.448 X.d.475 Z.e.28 II. PRINTED TEXTS Pre-1800 Archer, Edward, An Exact and perfect Catalogue of all the Plaies that were ever printed, in Massinger, Middleton, and Rowley, The Excellent Comedy, called the Old Law (London: Edward Archer, 1656).

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Beaumont, Francis, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Grayes Inn (London: George Norton, 1613). —— and Fletcher, John, Comedies and tragedies (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1647). Billingsley, Martin, The Pens Excellencie (London: Io. Sudbury and George Humble, 1618). Breton, Nicholas, An Excellent poeme, upon the longing of a blessed heart (London: R. Bradock, 1601). Camden, William, Remaines (London: Simon Waterson, 1605). Campion, Thomas, The Description of a Maske: Presented . . . at the Marriage of the . . . Earle of Somerset (London: E. A. for Lawrence Lisle, 1614). —— A relation of the late royall entertainment given by the Right Honorable the Lord Knowles, at Cawsome-House neere Redding: to our most gracious queene, Queene Anne . . . Whereunto is annexed the . . . Lords maske, presented . . . on the mariage night of the high and mightie, Count Palatine, and . . . the Ladie Elizabeth (London: [William Stansby] for Iohn Budge, 1613). Carey, Robert, Memoirs of the Life of Robert Cary, Baron of Leppington, and Earl of Monmouth. Written by Himself, And now published from an original Manuscript in the Custody of John Earl of Corke and Orrery. With some explanatory notes (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759). A Catalogue of the Large and Valuable Collections of Manuscripts of John Anstis . . . Also of his Son John Anstis . . . Which will be sold by Auction, Baker and Leigh [i.e. Sotheby’s], 12–16 Dec. 1768. Cecil, Robert (?), An Answere to Certaine scandalous Papers (London: Robert Barker, 1606). Chapman, George, The Memorable Masque (London: George Norton, 1613). Chiswel, Richard, Bibliotheca Smithiana: Sive Catalogus Librorum (London, 1682). Churchyard, Thomas, Churchyards Challenge (London: Edward Allde for John Wolfe, 1593). —— A Discourse of the Queenes Maiesites entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578). —— The Firste parte of Churchyardes Chippes, contayning twelue seuerall Labours (London: Thomas Marshe, 1575). —— A sparke of frendship . . . Whereunto is joyned, the commoditie of sundrie sciences, the benefit that paper bringeth . . . with a description and commendation of a paper mill, now and of late set up . . . by . . . M. Spilman (London, 1588). Coghan, Thomas, The Haven of Health (London: Henrie Midleton, 1584).

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Collins, Arthur, Letters and Memorials of State, 2 vols. (London: T. Osborne, 1746). Daniel, Samuel, The Order and Solemnitie of the Creation of the High and mightie Prince Henrie . . . Prince of Wales . . .Whereunto in annexed the Royall Maske, presented by the Queene and her Ladies (London: John Budge, 1610). —— A Panegyrick Congratulatorie (London: E. Blount, 1603). —— The vision of the 12. goddesses (London: Thomas Creede for Simon Waterson, 1604). Davison, Francis, A Poetical Rapsody (London: V. S[immes] for Iohn Baily, 1602). —— A Poetical Rapsodie (London: Nicholas Okes for Roger Jackson, 1608). Dekker, Thomas, Troia-Nova Triumphans (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612). —— The Whole Magnifycent Entertainment: given to King James . . . upon the day of his Majesties tryumphant pasage (London: E. Allde for Tho. Mann, 1604). Garter, Bernard, The Joyfull Receyuing of the Queenes most excellent Maiestie into hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578). Gascoigne, George, A delicate Diet, for daintemouthde Droonkardes (London: Richard Jones, 1576). —— The droomme of Doomes day (London: Cawood, 1576). —— The glasse of governement (London: John Charlewood for Richard Jhones, 1575). —— A Hundreth Sundres Flowres (London: Henry Bynneman for Richarde Smith, 1573). —— The Steel Glas. A satyre . . .Togither with The complainte of Phylomene (London: Richard Smith, 1576). —— The whole woorkes of George Gascoigne Esquire (London: Abell Jeffes, 1587). Gesta Grayorum (London: W. Canning, 1688). Goldwel, Henry, A Briefe Declaration of the Shews (London: Robert Waldegrave, 1581). Harington, Sir John, Nugae Antiquae (London: for J. Frederick, 1769–75). Heywood, Thomas, Londini Emporia or Londons Mercatura (London: Nicholas Okes, 1633). The Honorable Entertainment Given to the Queenes Maiestie in Progresse, at Cowdrey in Sussex (London: Thomas Scarlet for William Wright, 1591). The Honorable Entertainement gieven to the Queenes Majestie in Progresse, at Elvetham in Hampshire (London: John Wolfe, 1591). The Honorable Entertainement . . . Newlie corrected, and amended (London: John Wolfe, 1591). Howard, Lord Henry, A Defensative against the poyson of supposed prophesies (London: John Charlewood, 1583).

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Index album amicorum 224–25 Allde, Edward 73, 230 Althrop, Entertainment at 119–20 Anglo, Sydney 7 Anna, Queen 2, 119, 121, 165, 171, 184, 209, 212, 216, 221 Arundel, Philip Howard, 13th Earl of 10, 68–70, 74 Ashby, Entertainment at 3, 29 Augures, Masque of 236–38 Austen, Gillian 45 Bacon, Sir Francis 81–84, 86 Bacon, Nicholas 42, 45 Bancroft, Richard, Archbishop of Canterbury 251 Bedford, Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of 43 Bedford, Lucy Russell, Countess of 29, 196, 209, 221, 230, 243 Blacknesse, Masque of 12, 141, 184, 209–15, 232 manuscript of 210–15 Bland, Mark 159, 188, 222 Bliss, Philip 265 Breton, Nicholas 188 Briefe Declaration of the Shews see Four Foster Children of Desire Bristol, Entertainment at 4, 94, 144 Britain’s Burse, Entertainment at 165, 175–76, 205 Britwell Court library 259–60 Brougham Castle, Entertainment at 161–62, 242–43 Browne, Sir William 107–8, 111 Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of 195, 244, 246–47 Bull, John 151 Burby, Cuthbert 73 Burghley, William Cecil, 1st Lord 27, 30, 45, 71–72, 101, 166–69, 173 Burton, Robert 239, 257 Callophisus, tournament of 10, 60, 67–76, 249, 262 Camden, William 51–53

Campion, Thomas 149, 161–62, 233–34, 237, 242 Carew family of Crowcombe Court 266 Carey, Robert 76–77 Carleton, Sir Dudley 103, 107, 111, 189–90, 210, 241–42, 245, 264 Carlton House library 260 Cecil, Robert, see Salisbury, Earl of Chamberlain, John 103, 110, 189–90, 237, 245 Chambers, E.K. 25, 59 Chapin, Alfred Clarke 262 Charles I, King 2, 242, 247 Charlewood, John 69, 73 Cherbury, Edward Herbert, 1st Lord Herbert of 242 Chiswick, Entertainment at 95–96, 107 Christian IV, King of Denmark 165, 169, 174 Christmas His Masque 240–41 Churchyard, Thomas 33, 40, 42, 94–95, 99, 102, 144 A Discourse of the Queenes entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk 94, 99, 249, 257–59, 261 Clarke, Sir William 103, 107 Clothworkers’ Company 135–38, 142, 154–55 Coleorton Masque 3, 243–44 Collier, John Payne 172, 241 Compton, William Compton, 2nd Lord 77 Coningsby, Thomas 52 Connock, Richard 160, 190 Conway, Sir Edward 108, 111–13, 185–86, 192–95, 201, 243, 245, 265–66 Cordell, Sir William 33 Coventry, Oration at 92 Cowdray, Entertainment at 95, 249, 251–52, 258 Cumberland, George Clifford, 3rd Earl of 51, 62–63, 77–78, 91, 102 Cupid’s Banishment 243 Cynthia’s Revels 12, 208–9

302

Index

Daniel, Samuel 13, 120, 188, 192, 221, 226–28, 230–34 Davies, Sir John 11, 100–2, 114–15, 119, 190, 198, 203 Davison, Francis 115–16, 188, 196–97 Dehn-Rotfelser, Johann Georg 55 Derby, Alice Spencer, Dowager Countess of 29, 102, 104, 106, 119 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 6th Duke of 259–60 Ditchley, Entertainment at 24, 30, 60, 63–64, 79 Ditchley manuscript 53, 58–60, 74 Donne, John 194–96, 200–1, 244 Doran, Susan 26 Drury, Sir William 70–71 Dudley, Robert see Leicester, Earl of Dyer, Edward 24–25 Dymoke family, of Scrivelsby 58 Dyson, Humphrey 239, 251–56, 262 Edes, Richard 60 Egerton, Sir Thomas 102, 104–6, 141 Elizabeth, Queen Accession Day tournaments of 10, 19–20, 50, 55–63, 65, 76–89 coronation pageant of 3, 27, 58, 92, 249, 251, 256, 258–61 progresses of 1–2, 18, 92–96, 103 responses to entertainments 27–28, 48, 80–81, 106–7 roles played by in entertainments 22–23, 50, 57, 62–64, 74, 82–84, 97 Elvetham, Entertainment at 95, 97–98, 100, 130, 233, 2249, 51–52, 260 Entertainment texts, production of 8, 82–84, 96–100, 172–75, 212–13, 216 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of 10, 51, 78–89, 167, 197 Essex House Masque 237, 243 Fane, Sir Francis 186, 197–201, 203, 266 Fane, Mildmay 199–200 Fane, Rachel 199 Fenn, Sir John 265 Folger, Henry Clay 261–62, 265–66 Fortunate Isles and their Union, The 236–39 Four Foster Children of Desire, The 74–76, 249, 258, 261

Frere, William 265 Frye, Elizabeth 27 Gascoigne, George 9, 17–18, 29–48, 93, 100, 102, 217–18 Grief of Joye, The 44–45, 47–48 Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting, The 35, 45 Garrett, Robert 18, 31–34 Garter, Bernard (The Joyfull Receyving into Norwich) 94, 249, 252, 256, 258–61 Garter Kings of Arms, New Year’s Gifts of 37–38 Gawdy, Philip 55 George III, King 258 gift exchange 43–44, 91, 126–30, 151, 179, 218–26 Goldwell, Henry 75–76 Goodere (or Goodyer), Sir Henry 192–197, 201, 203–4 Gray’s Inn 115, 197, 235 Masque of Mountebanks 244–46 Green, Richard 86 Greg, W.W. 237 Grenville, Thomas 258 Gypsies Metamorphosed, The 244–46 Halliday, Sir Leonard 133, 137, 148 Halstead, Entertainment at 243 Hammer, Paul E.J. 80–82, 84–85 Harefield, Entertainment at 4, 11–12, 96, 100–16 manuscripts of 107–16, 189, 194, 264–66 Harington, Sir John 170, 175, 223 Harmsworth, Sir Leicester 261 Hay, James Hay, 1st Lord 157, 233, 237 Heber, Richard 258–59 Hemetes the Heremyte, Tale of 9, 17–18, 20–48, 93 manuscripts of 34–47, 59, 93, 217–18 hermits in entertainments 25, 60–62, 79–80, 168–69 Henry, Prince 2, 119, 138, 142–43, 153–55, 157, 176, 189, 191–92, 216, 219–20, 223–24, 226 Hoby, Edward 256 Hopkinson, Rev. Francis 266 Howard, Lord Henry (later 1st Earl of Northampton) 70, 78–79, 134, 157 Howes, Edmund 138, 157

Index Humphrey, Laurence 17 Hunsdon, Henry Carey, 1st Lord 51 Huntington, Henry 260–62 Huth library 259–60 Hutton, Matthew, Archbishop of York 108–9, 264 Hymenaei 165, 228, 230, 232–33 impresa 51–56, 72, 189 Indian Prince, Entertainment of the 78 Inner Temple 235 Masque of Ulysses and Circe 244 Irish Masque 232 James, King, VI/I and the Emperor Augustus 190–91 coronation pageant of 6, 120, 146, 228, 267 literary tastes of 120 progresses of 2, 169, 242–43 responses to entertainments 137, 154–55, 213 Joinville, Prince 176, 181–82 Jolley, Thomas 258 Jones, Inigo 170, 175, 177, 225, 238, 246 Jonson, Ben (see also under individual plays, masques, and entertainments) and ‘pre-performance quartos’ of masques 236–39 and the Earl of Salisbury 12, 164–66, 178–79, 183–85, 205–6 and the masque as literary genre 227–36, 238–39 and the Merchant Taylors’ Company 11, 144–47, 158 as royal poet 120, 208–10, 214–17, 219–23, 226, 239 ‘Epistle to Sir Edward Sackville, now Earl of Dorset’ 127–29 handwriting of 223–26 ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’ 153, 178 ‘Panegyre’ 214 ‘To Penshurst’ 178 Joyfull Receyving into Norwich, The, see Garter, Bernard Kaye, John 160, 186, 202–5, 265 Kenilworth, Princely Pleasures at 22, 25–28, 33–35, 47, 93, 99–100, 102 Kirkham, Robert 174, 183 Knowles, James 6, 175, 184, 245 Krueger, Robert 101, 198

303

Laneham, Robert, A Letter 93, 99–100, 249, 252, 257–59, 262 Lee, Sir Henry 9–10, 17–28, 30, 32–34, 39, 48, 50–51, 56–67, 69, 74 Accession Day tournament devices of 60–62, 65–66 and Queen Elizabeth 23–24, 65–67 retirement tournament device of (1590) 62–63 Lee, Sir Thomas 66–67 Leicester, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of 25–27, 34, 51, 94 Le Neve, Peter 186, 190, 265 Lincoln’s Inn 114, 200 Prince de la Grange, reign of, at 239 Locker-Lampson, Frederick 259–60 London, City of civic structures of 131 Lord Mayors’ Pageants 3, 6, 95, 141, 146–49, 155, 158, 235–36, 252–53, 256 relationship with Crown 126, 130–33, 151 Lord Hayes Masque, The 157, 221, 233, 237 Love and Self-Love, the Earl of Essex’s tournament device of 10, 76–89 manuscripts of 81–89 Love, Harold 5–6 Lovers Made Men 236–37 Ludlow Castle, Maske at 3, 183, 227, 242 Luttrell, Narcissus 73, 197, 264 Macclesfield library 267–68 Malone, Edmond 257 Manningham, John 55, 112, 114, 264 manuscript separates 90–96, 159–162 Marston, John 3, 29 Martin, Richard 160, 198, 203 Matthew, Tobie 33 Mauss, Marcel 125, 127 Merchant Taylors’ Company 11, 125, 130–35, 138–162, 204 Merchant Taylors’ Entertainment 138–62 manuscript copies of 158–60 Middle Temple 55, 202–3 Prince D’Amour, reign of, at 55 Middleton, Thomas 112, 136, 194, 235, 242 Milton, John 3, 183, 242 Mitcham, Entertainment at 4, 98

304

Index

Nelson, Alan H. 254 Neptune’s Triumph 236–39 Netherlands, United Provinces of the 108, 138–39, 143, 155 Newcastle, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of 244 Newdigate family, of Arbury Hall 108–10, 264 New Merchant Adventurers’, Entertainment of 136 New Year’s gifts 36–38, 47, 65 Nichols, John 258 North, Dudley North, 3rd Lord 185–92, 194, 265 Oberon (masque) 232 Ocean to Scinthia 36 Osborne, James 266 Osterley, Entertainment at 94 Owls, Mask of 232 Oxford, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of 70–74 pamphlets, of entertainments and masques 90–96, 227–239 Peck, Linda Levy 129 Peele, George 56, 95, 172 Pforzheimer, Carl 262–63 Pleasure Reconcil’d to Vertue 241–42 Pliny 148, 150 Poetaster 13, 215, 217–20 Pollard, Alfred 34 Polyhymnia 51, 256, 49, 259 Powle, Stephen 18, 31 Puttenham, George 37, 42 Queenes, Masque of 12, 141, 216, 219–227, 232 manuscript of 216, 219–27 Rivers, Anthony 106 Rubens, Peter Paul 129 Running Masque, The 194, 243 St John’s College, Oxford 32–33 Salisbury, Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of 12, 66, 95, 101, 135, 140, 143, 146–47, 157, 163–83, 189, 198, 200–1, 264 Savile, Sir George 105, 107, 110 Scott, William 30 Segar, Francis 224–25 Segar, William 55–57 Sejanus (play) 220, 232, 235

Seneca 53–54 De Beneficiis 43–44, 126–27, 151 Shakespeare, William 54, 87, 168 Shohet, Lauren 6, 232, 239 Shrewsbury, Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of 105, 107, 137, 230 Sidney, Sir Philip 27, 56, 59, 67, 70–71, 74, 94 Sidney, Sir Robert 107, 111 Simpson, Percy 174, 214, 237 Smith, Richard 255 Speeches Delivered to Her Majestie this last progresse at Bissam Sudley Ricorte 95, 99, 249, 252, 258–59, 261 Spencer, Sir Robert 119 Spencer, Sarah 251–52 Stone, Sir William 137–38 Strong, Sir Roy 50, 79–80 Sutton, James Matthew 167, 170–71, 174, 178, 184 Swynnerton, John 125, 133, 139–40 Swynnerton, Sir John 133–35, 139, 140–41, 144, 148–49, 151 Sykes, Mark Masterman 258 Tanner, Thomas, Bishop of St Asaph 257 Teshe, William 39 Tethys Festival 233–34 Theobalds 166–72 Theobalds, Entertainment at (1591) 27, 30, 168, 172–73 Entertainment of the King and Queen at (1607) 12, 163–64, 171–72, 176–206 manuscripts of 179–206, 264–66 Entertainment of the Two Kings’ at (1606) 169–71, 174 Hermit’s Oration at (1594) 88, 169, 173 Tilney, Edmund 55 Time Vindicated 236–38 Townshend, Aurelian 186 Twelve Months, Masque of 240–41 Ubaldini, Petruccio 38 Vision of Delight, The 232 Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, The 120, 170, 221, 228–31, 235, 267–68 Visit of the Nine Goddesses, The 243

Index Wanstead, Entertainment at 27, 94 Watts, Sir John 135–37, 142 Wells, Stanley 30 White, Rowland 79, 81 Wilson, John 202–3, 265 Wilson, Thomas 175–76 Windsor, Edward Windsor, 3rd Lord 70–71, 74 Wood, Anthony 256–57 Woodstock 19, 32

305

Woodstock, Entertainment at (1566) 30 (1574) 19 (1575) 9, 17–48, 59, 63, 93, 249, 259 Woodward, Rowland 200–1 Worcester, Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of 230 Worcester, Oration at 92 Wright, Richard 133–35, 140, 143, 146 Yelverton, Sir Henry 197–99, 264