Restoring Astraea: Jonson's masque for the fall of Somerset.

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

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

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

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

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