Perplexive Perspectives: The Court and Contestation in the Jacobean Masque

Abstract

A radically novel mode of visual representation emerged during the Florentine Renaissance as a potent means of representing the control of spaces: linear perspective. This new representational mode was developed in the context of Florentine economic centralisation and rationalisation; it was a function of the increasingly efficient mapping and planning of urban spaces subjected to a centralised ruling 'gaze'.1 Perspective was introduced into England at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth by painters such as Isaac Oliver and other artists aware of continental trends. One avenue through which it entered the English context was via the lavish scenery created by Inigo Jones to accompany Ben Jonson's masques at court during the reign of James I (1603-1625). The Jacobean court masque, however, was a multifaceted work of art in which perspective, as one element of the theatrical ensemble, appears to have been riddled by contradictions which made it a less than assured mode of asserting spatial control. In this transitional phase, before perspective representation attained hegemonic status as a configuration of visual space, its workings were laid bare by virtue of their imperfect functioning in a specific artistic situation.Court entertainments had constituted an element of earlier royal festivities, but the masques presented to James I surpassed prior celebrations in their exorbitant expense and in their employment of technical innovations. When Ben Jonson described the opening moments of the first documented masque at the court of James I, The Masque of Blackness (1605),2 his account of the scenery attested to a struggle to express the new form of visual organisation: 'First, for the scene, was drawne a Landtschap, consisting of small woods, and here and there a void place fill'd with huntings; which falling, an artificial sea was seene to shoote forth, as if it flowed to the land, raysed with waues, which seemed to move, and in some places the billow to breake, as imitating that orderly disorder, which is common in nature' (169-70: 24-30). Jonson's use of gothic script emphasises a visual mode evidently still felt to be foreign to an English context. Closely associated with the new 'landtschap' painting was perspective representation, whose intricacies Inigo Jones had familiarised himself with during his travels in Italy.3 The court masques provided a forum in which the new visual form could be introduced to English audiences, an undertaking apparently not without difficulties.If one commentator, Peter Hausted, remarked in 1632 that this form of theatre 'freely and ingenuously labored rather to merit then ravish an Applause' through its use of visual and dramatic artifice, it is nonetheless clear that the court masque, like other royal entertainments, constituted an exercise in political persuasion.4 Perspective gave plastic expression to aspirations to absolute rule. In this article, I shall argue that perspective, as a central element of the rhetoric of royal power, was however dogged by contradictions in its inaugural phase in the English context - partly as a result of its place in an heterogeneous ensemble which also included elements stemming from older theatrical traditions; and partly as a result of anomalies inherent to the workings of perspective representation itself. Conceived as a visual mode of spatial control, the newly introduced visual form inevitably encountered considerable resistance from court spectators. The uneasy coexistence of residual and emergent regimes of visual organisation created a contradictory and unstable complex of spatial forms which resonated with power struggles at the Jacobean court. In what follows, I will deal first with the regime of control evinced in perspective's place within the Jacobean masque, as well as with the structural contradictions of such modes of politicised representation. I will then go on to examine instances of contemporaries' scepticism with regard to perspective as a visual configuration of space, and the consequences of such scepticism in the context of the court of James I. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.