The documentary masque archive contains transcriptions of all manuscript and printed eye-witness accounts of performances of Jonson’s masques and entertainments, as well as all surviving records of their preparation and financing. The records comprise correspondence drawn from the State Papers Domestic and other archival and printed sources; Declared Accounts and exchequer documentation, such as warrants and orders for payment; bills and accounts relating to the provision of costumes and materials; extracts from the diaries of Lady Anne Clifford and Sir Simonds D’Ewes; notes from John Aubrey’s Lives; descriptions of masques and triumphs in John Stow’s Annals; details of ambassadorial attendance from John Finet’s Finetti Philoxenis; and eyewitness accounts and reports from the ambassadors and foreign agents themselves. Records relating to Jonson’s entertainments additionally comprise material from the minutes of the London livery companies, as well as documentation of the Court of Common Council and the Court of Aldermen.

The archive reveals the court’s enthusiastic support of spectacle and entertainment. James I frequently subsidized masque performances, although the records reveal his dissatisfaction with some of those he attended. Correspondence in the State Papers Domestic records how other audience members received particular masques: John Chamberlain records that The Irish Masque ‘was not so pleasing to many’ (SP 14/76/2), for example, and Nathaniel Brent’s letter to Sir Dudley Carleton reports of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue that ‘ye poёt is growen so dul yt his devise is not worth ye relating, much lesse ye copiing out. divers thinke fit he should returne to his ould trade of bricke-laying againe.’ (SP 14/95/12) Mercury Vindicated, on the other hand, ‘was so well liked and applauded that the king had yt represented again the sonday night after, in the very same manner’ (SP 14/80/4). Other sources identify those who participated in masques and entertainment, such as Carleton’s letter to Chamberlain naming the gentlewomen who danced The Masque of Blackness (SP 14/12/6). The archive also includes a list of defendants who answered the Prince’s challenge in Barriers (BL, Cotton Vespasian C.xiv: not previously reproduced), and a list of tilters who participated in A Challenge at Tilt to celebrate the marriage of Robert Carr and Francis Howard (BL, Harley 5176).

The King and Queen’s profligacy was causing increasing anxiety in the early years of the seventeenth century. A letter dated 10 Jan. 1605 from Vincent to Benson (Masque of Blackness, 7) records the ‘wastfull and idle expence’ of the revels at Christmas 1604-5 which included the celebration of the marriage of Sir Philip Herbert and the creation of Prince Charles as Duke of York, as well as the performance of Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, danced on Twelfth Night and rumoured to have cost between £4000 and £5000 (SP 14/12/16). Records of the Queen’s extraordinary expenses confirm that the sum set aside for the masque had risen to at least £4000 (SP 14/14/59). For The Masque of Queens, four years later, a single payment to the King’s silkman for materials delivered for the Queen’s masque came to nearly £2000 (NA, E403/2729). Chamberlain details the rich jewels with which masquers were furnished in his report of The Masque of Beauty (SP 14/31/4); he also records the extravagant gifts offered to Lord Haddington at his wedding, celebrated with Jonson’s Haddington Masque (SP 14/31/26), and recalls the ‘multitude of iewells’ on display at the performance of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (SP 14/95/11). Other correspondence details elaborate stage production and scenery; for example, John Pory’s letter to Robert Cotton, dated 7 Jan. 1606, gives a detailed eye-witness description of Inigo Jones’s elaborate devicefor Hymenaei (BL, Cotton Julius C.iii). Occasionally, descriptions of the texts of the masques themselves survive. A plot summary of The Masque of Queens is preserved in BL, Harley 6947, and the proposed device of Britain’s Burse is summarized in a letter from Thomas Wilson to the Earl of Salisbury (Cecil Papers 195, fol. 168).

A large proportion of the archive relates to the court’s financing of Jonson’s masques and entertainments. This material, drawn largely from the Declared Accounts, has never before been fully and coherently presented. Since the revision of the Exchequer’s auditing system in 1560, the Declared Accounts had comprised the court’s principle system for processing and storing details of its financial transactions. Treasurers and other office-holders submitted to the Exchequer a Ledger, or Office Book, detailing monies disbursed. Extracts from these including varying degrees of detail were then prepared in duplicate, with copies filed in both the Audit Office (on paper) and in the Pipe Office (on parchment). (For further details of Tudor state finance, see W. R. Streitberger, Court Revels, 1485-1559 (University of Toronto Press, 1994) and M. Dorothy George, ‘Notes on the Origin of the Declared Account’ in English Historical Review, 31 (1916), 41-58.) For almost every masque, extracts are drawn from the Declared Accounts of the Chamber, which describe the preparation of masquing venues; and the Works Office, which record payments for repairs and maintenance of the same. Less commonly, masque payments appear in the Privy Purse Declared Accounts which catalogue the personal expenditure of the King, Queen and Prince. Most Declared Accounts are held at the National Archives; occasional draft and office book copies survive in the British Library and the Bodleian. The Revels Declared Accounts present a particular problem. Although the Office of the Revels participated in the choice and preparation of court masques, only the draft office books, rather than the annual Declared Accounts, make mention of specific masques. The Revels Book for 1604-5, for example, lists payments to wiredrawers on the night of the performance of The Masque of Blackness (NA, AO 3/908), whereas the Revels Declared Accounts for the same year give only a generalized total for wages issued annually. For this reason, transcriptions from Revels accounts in this archive are drawn from the office books where possible. Many warrants and enrolled warrants to the Exchequer also survive, as well as various entry books such as the Pells’ Order Books, which detail orders for payment by the Treasurer (via the tellers of the Exchequer) to representatives who had received advances for purchasing materials for masques, or to individuals, including Jonson and Jones, who were paid retrospectively for their services. The archive also includes some more general household accounts such as the extraordinary expenses of the Queen and Prince, including a payment of more than £300 for jewels given as prizes at Prince Henry’s Barriers (NA, E351/2794). When payments for masquing materials comprise part of a longer list, the record gives an indication, where possible, of the total sum spent.

Among the records relating to costuming, a letter from Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain reports the ‘curttisan-like’ apparell of the Queen and her ladies in The Masque of Blackness, lamenting ‘that strangers should see owr court so strangely disguised’ (SP 14/12/6). Payments for ‘spanishe lether bootes’ as well as ‘forheades and beardes vsed in the maske’ survive among Exchequer accounts for Oberon, and the records of Sir David Murray, keeper of the Privy Purse to Prince Henry, detail payments to silkmen, haberdashers and embroiderers (NA, E403/2730; E351/2794). For Love Freed, a bill of charges lists the Queen’s expenditure on copper lace, fustian, silk ribbon, satin and calico (NA, E407/57/1). The account books of the Masters of the Wardrobe to Prince Charles itemize buckram, tinsel, and canvas used to make masquing suits for Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, News from the New World, Time Vindicated, and Neptune’s Triumph (E101/434/9; E101/435/4; E101/436/2). Meticulously detailed payments to musicians, and to the suppliers of materials and costumes, survive in the form of bills and receipts for the Entertainment at Theobalds,the Salisbury Entertainment and the Entertainment at Britain’s Burse, all arranged and privately financed by the Earl of Salisbury.

Continental material also bulks large in the archive, as court festivals were important occasions for showing favour to ambassadors. Preparations for masques and their performances are frequently and lavishly described in the reports sent home by diplomats from France, Spain, Venice, Florence, Savoy, and the Spanish Netherlands – even if the ambassadors did not always fully grasp what they saw, or were more focused on the honour done to them as guests than on the show itself. The Venetian State Papers are a particularly rich source of information, given the quantity in which they survive, and the regularity and detail with which successive ambassadors reported on court festival. Almost all the Venetian dispatches are circumstantial and richly informative, and the series includes what is arguably the period’s most valuable eye-witness narrative of any masque, the long description by Orazio Busino, chaplain to the Venetian embassy, of the performance of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. Other continental archives containing miscellaneous material relating to the masques are the State Archives in Turin and Florence, the Bibliothèque Nationale (particularly for the papers of Antoine le Fevre, Seigneur de la Boderie, who witnessed several early Jacobean masques), and the General Archives in Brussels. We have been especially fortunate in benefiting from the new discoveries of ambassadorial reports made by John Orrell in the 1970s in the state archives in Florence and Turin, material which has here been integrated into commentary on Jonson for the first time. All the French and Italian dispatches have been freshly transcribed and re-translated. Also related to this body of documents are the letters in English sent to and from William Trumbull (James’s agent at Brussels), now preserved as the Trumbull Papers (and originally calendared as the Downshire MSS, HMC 75). These often mention preparations for masques and give some details of the ambassadorial arrangements.

Among the early modern printed material represented in the archive are extracts from the notebooks of Sir John Finet, Master of Ceremonies to James I and Charles I, posthumously published in 1656 as Finetti Philoxenis, as well as extracts from another notebook which had until recently remained unpublished. Finet scrupulously recorded how and why certain ambassadors were invited to masque performances, and others excluded; his accounts of the precedence disputes, particularly the spat which broke out between the French, Spanish, and Venetian ambassadors at the time of the performance of Love’s Triumph in 1631, show how the masques functioned as instruments of diplomacy and political embarrassment. Also represented in the archive is the correspondence of Ralph Winwood, edited by Edmund Sawyer as Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I (1725); John Donne’s letters to Sir Henry Goodere, printed in 1651, describing preparations for Mercury Vindicated and The Masque of Queens; and Sir Charles Cornwallis’s description of Prince Henry’s Barriers, printed in his Life of Henry in 1641.

The archive includes all manuscript and printed sources which can confidently be associated with a particular Jonsonian masque or entertainment. Quotations have often been extracted from much larger documents, and some explanatory context is retained where appropriate in order better to illustrate each document’s significance. When a record may relate to more than one masque, or perhaps to masques by Jonson’s contemporaries, the difficulty is noted. Payments for Jonson’s masques are often difficult to distinguish from those for other performances as all dramatic payments for a single year are totaled together in the annual Declared Accounts. This is a particular problem in the busy 1613-14 Christmas season when the Earl of Somerset’s marriage to Frances Howard was celebrated: Jonson’s A Challenge at Tilt and The Irish Masque were both performed twice, Campion’s Masque of Squires was danced shortly beforehand, and the Masque of Flowers and Middleton’s Masque of Cupids followed shortly afterwards. Principles for the inclusion of material are slightly different for the lost entertainments, namely The Lord Mayor’s Speeches, The Merchant Taylors’ Entertainment, The Salisbury Entertainment, The Merchant Adventurers’ Entertainment and Charles I’s Royal Entry (1625). In the absence of surviving Jonsonian texts, all material which relates to the municipal preparation for the entertainments is included, in order to reconstruct as fully as possible the nature of the occasion. Detailed extracts are therefore included from the minutes of the Merchant Taylors’ Company from June to August 1607. These record who was invited to and excluded from the entertainment, and detail the planned reparations to the hall before the royal visit (Guildhall Library, Accounts, vol. 9; Court Minute Book, vol. 5). Likewise, the accounts of the Haberdashers’ Company which record the purchase of materials in preparation for the 1604 Lord Mayor’s triumph are quoted at some length (Guildhall Library MS 15869).

The initial calendar of sources relating to the masques and entertainments was compiled from a number of sources. A valuable starting point was C. E. McGee and J. C. Meagher’s ‘Preliminary checklist of Tudor and Stuart entertainments’ published in several parts in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama: 1603-13 in vol. 27 (1984), 47-126; 1614-25 in vol. 30 (1988), 17-128; and 1625-34 in vol. 36 (1997), 23-95; and 1635-42 in vol. 38 (1999), 23-85. This was supplemented by the commentaries to Jonson’s masques and entertainments in H&S and Orgel & Strong, as well as the extracts from court and municipal records published in the Malone Society Collections, particularly MSC 3 (Records in the accounts of the Livery Companies of London), MSC 6 (Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber), MSC 10 (Declared Accounts of the Office of Works), and MSC 13 (Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts). For some references to unpublished documents at Hatfield House relating to The Salisbury Entertainment and Britain’s Burse, the general editors are grateful to James Knowles; reference was also made to Scott McMillin’s ‘Jonson’s early entertainments: new information from Hatfield House’, Renaissance Drama (1968), 153-68. Thanks also to Barbara Ravelhofer for providing references to documents in the National Archives relating to wardrobe and costuming; and to Kirstin Inglis for providing a newly identified document relating to the feast which accompanied Love’s Welcome at Bolsover.

The masque archive retains old-spelling throughout. The transcriptions aim to represent the original documents faithfully, while at the same time ensuring the material is readable and accessible. A detailed list of transcription conventions is available in the CWBJ Guidelines, together with a list of abbreviations and expansions adopted. In general, supplied letters appear in italic; deletions in strikethrough; interlinear insertions in [half-square brackets] ; and illegible text in <diamond brackets>.