Assessing "Cultural Influence": James I as Patron of the Arts

Abstract

RECENT cultural history has seemed inclined to foster a concept of King James and his English court based on seemingly contradictory but interdependent views. On one hand, many essays have depicted James I as a royal patron of arts. We are often reminded, for example, that his first act in literary realm was to take theaters under his patronage because as part of his entertainment James demanded court performance of plays. He cared enough about public drama, it seems, to have assumed Shakespeare's own company under new name of the King's Men, and even to have assigned remaining London troupes to other members of royal family. Although these changes in status of theater companies are of themselves unreliable indices of James's preoccupation with London stage, (1) such evidence has encouraged scholars to make related assumptions about role of new king in other important initiatives--such as furthering brilliant and fruitful collaboration of Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson in their series of opulent masques at court, appointing poet John Donne Dean of Paul's, and, to be sure, ordering translation project that resulted in King James Bible. The other side of this particular conceptual coin, curiously, is a concomitant view of new king as somewhat incompetent--as lax, self-indulgent, and even slightly unsavory. An extreme example of such an attitude may be found in observations of Roy Strong, who describes James as the bloated, pedantic middle-aged father [of Prince Henry], careless of affairs of state, prepared to accept appeasement at any price, bent on pleasure of chase, totally unaesthetic, whose penchant for handsome courtiers was hardly becoming. Earlier, G. P. V. Akrigg's book on Jacobean court, still popular with literary scholars, viewed James as a spend-thrift king, always absorbed in his current male favorite to detriment of state, and concerned with losing status if he did not maintain himself as generous benefactor to his supporters, a practice which depleted royal budget. (2) Interestingly, this dualistic construction of James--as royal, generative patron of arts or cultural icon, on one hand, and as corrupt dawdler, on other--has not been understood as troublingly inconsistent because indifference to politics and personal indolence in a learned king seem to many commentators to augur well for arts--presumably, they flourish in such compost. It is almost as if absorption in affairs of is incompatible with practice of statesmanship, or vice versa (at least in case of James). This essay, part of a larger effort to determine structure and purpose of high cultural practices at court during first decade of Stuart reign, would interrogate implications of James's dual image for our construction of early court scene. In undertaking this limited analysis, I think it important to view James's situation not solely from vantage point of his investment in belles lettres, but also in terms of kinds of regnal problems to which he addressed himself at his accession. In other words, in order to reconfigure misleading premises in so many portraits of king, it is important here to assess James's relationship to development of arts in England in terms of his parallel assumption of monarchal responsibilities. Accordingly, in what follows I shall be arguing two points. First, I would like to challenge narrative of James's self-indulgent political ineptness, focusing primarily on representative activities surrounding accession. Second, I hope to counter view of King James as primary instrument of high culture in Stuart court by identifying parameters of his intellectual interests, and by suggesting his own relative remoteness from contemporary currents of change in arts. There are, however, important caveats that need to be established in connection with both these points at outset. …

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