The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

  • You are here:
  • /
  • Works
  • /
  • The Golden Age Restored (1616)

The Golden Age Restored (1616)

Edited by Martin Butler

INTRODUCTION

The Golden Age Restored was danced in the Whitehall Banqueting House on 1 January 1616, and repeated on Twelfth Night. The date ‘1615’ in F1 has created much confusion. W. W. Greg (1926c), 340–7, and the Oxford editors (H&S, 10.545–6), believing that all dates in the folio were reckoned according to the calendrical rather than the legal system (in which the new year was deemed to begin on 25 March), took it to mean that the masque belonged to 6 January 1615. But this made it difficult to locate Mercury Vindicated, the preceding masque in F1, which could not have been danced in 1614, the season when the Somerset marriage was being celebrated and the details of which are fully recorded. They therefore argued that Mercury Vindicated belonged to 1616, and that when Jonson printed these masques in F1 he reversed their sequence, placing Golden Age Restored last in order to give the volume a stronger conclusion (and the contextual material collected in volume 10 of the Oxford edition is unhelpfully arranged in reverse chronological sequence in order to reflect this assumption). But an eyewitness account of the evening of 6 January 1616 has now been found by John Orrell in the papers of Amerigo Salvetti, the Florentine agent, which conclusively demonstrates that The Golden Age Restored was the masque staged on that occasion (Orrell, 1978–9, 83–4; Masque Archive, Golden Age, 11). Hence F1’s order is correct, and its date, calculated by the legal reckoning, corresponds to ‘1615/16’.

Jonson’s theme, that under James a lost time of perfection had been recovered, is ambitious but familiar. He often used this trope to praise the Jacobean court (see King’s Ent., 2.423; Time Vind.; Epigr. 64 and 122; and Furniss, 1958, 89–179), and it was well established as a commonplace of European court panegyric. At Florence, Medici rule was repeatedly hymned in these terms; the Golden Age was drawn down at the wedding festivities for Virginia de’ Medici in 1586, and again by Astraea at Cosimo de Medici’s wedding in 1608. In France, the same imagery was used at Henri Ⅳ’s accession (Nagler, 1964, 62, 106; Levin, 1969a, 38–40; Strong, 1984, 71). Jonson’s depiction of his political idyll was worked up from the famous descriptions of the Golden Age in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it acquired an imperial colouring through echoes of Virgil’s ‘Messianic’ pastoral (Eclogue 4), which prophesies a new world order arising through the influence of Augustus. His special innovation was to link the return of the Golden Age to a conquest over the evils of the Iron Age, and to represent those evils as rebels against the gods. This idea was developed from the mythical gigantomachy, the attempt by the giants, children of Earth, to assault the heavens and displace the gods. Jonson particularly drew on the version as told in Claudian’s unfinished poem Gigantomachia, which is the basis for verbal and structural details of the antimasque. He further quarried Claudian’s De consulato Stilichonis (a source he had previously used in King’s Ent.) for some of the crimes of the Iron Age.

Behind this fable of moral and judicial renewal lies a sequence of events that were the most sensational of James’s reign, for the masque alludes in barely disguised terms to the recent disgrace of the royal favourite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset (see 46–7 and note). Long the dominant figure in James’s affections, and one of the most powerful courtiers through his office of lord chamberlain, Carr had consolidated his position at court in December 1614 by marrying the Lord Treasurer’s daughter, Frances Howard, formerly wife to the Earl of Essex but now divorced (see the Introduction to Hymenaei and Challenge at Tilt). In October 1615, it suddenly became public knowledge that, two years earlier, Frances had been involved in the death of Sir Thomas Overbury. Overbury was one of Carr’s close friends but, before Carr’s marriage, he was a determined opponent of his developing liaison with Frances, and when Overbury was imprisoned in the Tower in 1613 on an unrelated matter, she procured his murder. At the time of the performance, the Somersets were themselves in the Tower under investigation; their trial in May 1616 would be one of the reign’s great scandals. It was also a great opportunity, for Carr’s fall precipitated a large-scale transfer of court offices, and among those who reaped the advantage was Jonson’s friend the Earl of Pembroke, who in November 1615 took over Carr’s office of chamberlain. So in January 1616 the motif of Astraea’s return spoke resonantly to a court where royal justice was under intense scrutiny, and where radical change was presently coming about; indeed, no one there could have missed the circumstance that the masquers were led out by the Earl of Essex, Frances Howard’s first husband and Somerset’s great enemy (Masque Archive, Gold. Age, 11; Crino, 1957, 261). Jonson’s theme of iron being displaced into gold was not without its ironies, but in the circumstances it was perhaps as diplomatic a fable as could be envisaged.

In having the antimasquers transformed into stone in the course of the action, Jonson was innovating formally, for in previous masques such figures had been expelled at the arrival of the masquers rather than physically changed. Possibly this idea was suggested by the motifs of reverse transformation, from statues into men, that were used in Thomas Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque (1607), Lords’ Masque (1613), and Masque of Squires (1613). The action of Jonson’s masque was itself imitated in 1621 in the privately performed Essex House Masque, sponsored by Viscount Doncaster. This depicts nine rebellious giants being changed into stone by Pallas; subsequently Prometheus retransforms them into men. The name of the poet responsible for this is not recorded, but he may have been George Chapman (see Raylor, 2000a).

No designs or music survive for The Golden Age Restored. Speculating about the music, Peter Walls (1996), 90 notes that it is ‘impossible to distinguish between the parts of the masque that were spoken and those that were sung’. The whole text is in flexible verse without individual songs being typographically marked off, so that it is not clear (for example) whether Pallas’s opening lines were sung or simply spoken to the accompaniment of ‘a softer music’ (2). Walls is inclined to suppose that the musical setting could have been continuous. If so, this would have been a striking new departure, though the case can only be made inferentially.

The Golden Age Restored was printed for the first time in F1, where it stands as the volume’s last item. The text is generally good, but in a few copies the order of the concluding speeches is reversed, so that the final lines belong to Astraea rather than Pallas. H&S, followed by some later editors, regard this as a deliberate change made to strengthen the ending of F1, but bibliographical analysis of other mistakes made in the text and headlines of the final quire indicate that it was a printing-house error which was corrected early in the process of imposition (see the Textual Essay for a full discussion). The masque as written and performed must always have ended with Pallas.

 

THE GOLDEN AGE RESTORED
 in a masque at court,  1616, by the lords, and
  gentlemen the King’s servants

   Loud music.

  PALLAS in her chariot descending.

To a softer music.

PALLAS

 Look, look! Rejoice, and  wonder

That you offending mortals are,

For all your crimes, so much the care 5

Of  him that bears the thunder!


Jove can endure no longer

Your great ones should your less invade,

Or that your weak, though bad, be made

 A prey unto the stronger; 10


And, therefore, means to settle

 Astraea in her seat again,

And let down in his  golden chain

The age of better  mettle;


Which deed he doth the rather, 15

That even  Envy may behold

 Time not enjoyed his head of gold

Alone beneath his  father;


But that his care   conserveth,

As Time, so all Time’s honours too, 20

Regarding  still what heaven should do,

And not what earth deserveth.

  A tumult and clashing of arms heard within.

But hark, what tumult from yond   cave is heard?

What noise, what strife, what earthquake and alarms? 25

 As troubled Nature for her maker feared,

And all the  Iron Age were up in arms!


Hide me, soft cloud, from their profaner eyes,

Till insolent rebellion take the field,

And as their spirits with their counsels rise, 30

I frustrate all with showing but my  shield.

 

IRON AGE presents itself, calling forth the EVILS.

IRON AGE

Come forth, come forth! Do we not hear

What purpose, and how worth our fear,

The king of gods hath on us? 35

He is not of the iron breed

That would, though Fate did help the deed,

Let shame in so upon us.

 Rise, rise then up, thou grandame vice

Of all my issue, Avarice! 40

Bring with thee  Fraud and Slander,

Corruption with the golden hands,

Or any subtler ill that  stands

To be a  more commander.

Thy boys, Ambition, Pride, and Scorn, 45

Force, Rapine, and  thy babe last born,

Smooth Treachery, call  hither;

Arm Folly forth, and Ignorance,

And teach them all our  pyrrhic dance,

 We may triumph together 50

Upon this enemy so  great;

Whom if our forces can defeat

And but this once bring under,

We are the masters of the skies,

Where all the wealth, height, power, lies, 55

The sceptre and the thunder.

Which of you would not in a war

Attempt the price of any scar

To keep your own  states  even?

 But here, which of you is that he 60

Would not himself the weapon be

To ruin Jove and heaven?

About it then, and let him feel

The Iron Age is turned to steel,

Since he begins to threat her; 65

And though the bodies here are less

Than were the giants, he’ll confess

Our malice is far greater.

The antimasque and their dance, two drums, trumpets, and a confusion of martial music; at

the end of which, Pallas

,

 showing her shield:

70

PALLAS

  So change and perish, scarcely knowing how,

That ’gainst the gods do take so vain a vow,

And think to equal with your mortal dates

Their lives that are  obnoxious to no  fates.

’Twas time t’appear and let their follies see 75

’Gainst whom they fought, and with what  destiny.

Die all that can remain of you but stone,

And that be seen awhile, and then be none.

  They   metamorphosed, and the scene   changed, she calls Astraea and the   Golden Age.

Now, now, descend, you both beloved of Jove, 80

And of the good on earth no less the love;

Descend, you long, long wished and wanted pair,

And as your softer times divide the air,

So shake all clouds off with your golden hair,

For spite is spent; the Iron Age is fled, 85

And with her power on earth, her name is dead.

  ASTRAEA [and the GOLDEN] AGE  descending.

ASTRAEA, AGE

    And are we then,

To live again

With men?

ASTRAEA

Will Jove such pledges to the earth restore

As justice?

GOLDEN AGE

Or  the purer ore?

PALLAS

 Once more. 90

GOLDEN AGE

  But do they know

How much they owe

Below?

ASTRAEA

And will of grace receive it, not as due?

PALLAS

If not, they harm themselves, not you.

ASTRAEA

 True.

GOLDEN AGE

True.

CHOIR

 Let narrow natures, how they will, mistake;

The great should still be good for their own sake. 95

 

They are descended.

PALLAS

Welcome to earth and reign.

ASTRAEA, AGE

But how without a train

Shall we our state sustain?

PALLAS

Leave that to Jove. Therein you are 100

No little part of his  Minerva’s care.

 Expect a while.

 (She calls the Poets.) You far-famed spirits of this happy isle,

That for your sacred songs have gained the  style

Of  Phoebus’ sons, whose notes  the air  aspire 105

Of th’old  Egyptian or the  Thracian lyre,

That  Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Spenser  hight,

Put on your  better flames and larger light

To wait upon the age that shall your names new nourish,

Since virtue  pressed shall grow, and buried arts shall flourish. 110

[The] POETS descend.

TWO POETS

 We come.

TWO POETS

We come.

  ALL FOUR

Our best of fire

Is that which Pallas doth inspire.

PALLAS

Then see you yonder souls, set far within the shade,

  And in Elysian bowers the blessèd seats do keep, 115

That for their living good now  semigods are made,

And went away from earth, as if but  tamed with sleep?

These we must  join to wake, for these are of the strain

That justice dare defend, and will the age sustain.

CHOIR

  [Calling]  Awake, awake, for whom these times were kept! 120

O wake, wake, wake,  as you had never slept!

Make haste and   put on  air to be their guard,

Whom once but to defend is still reward!

PALLAS

Thus Pallas throws a lightning from her shield.

CHOIR

To which let all that doubtful darkness yield. 125

    The scene of light discovered.

ASTRAEA

Now  peace,

GOLDEN AGE

And love,

ASTRAEA

Faith,

GOLDEN AGE

Joys,

  BOTH

All,all increase!

TWO POETS

And strife,

TWO POETS

And hate,

TWO POETS

And fear,

TWO POETS

And pain,

ALL FOUR

All cease!

    A pause.

PALLAS

No  tumour of an iron vein. 130

The causes shall not come again.

CHOIR

But, as of old, all now be gold.

Move, move then to these sounds.

And do not only walk your solemn rounds,

But give those light and airy bounds 135

That fit the  genii of these gladder grounds.

The first dance; after which,

PALLAS

    Already? Do not all things smile?

ASTRAEA

But when they have enjoyed awhile

The age’s   quick’ning power, 140

GOLDEN AGE

That every thought a seed doth bring,

And every look a plant doth spring,

And every breath a flower;

PALLAS

Then earth unploughed shall yield her crop,

Pure honey from the oak shall drop, 145

The fountain shall run milk;

The thistle shall the lily bear,

And every bramble roses wear,

And every worm make silk.

CHOIR

The very shrub shall  balsam sweat, 150

And nectar melt the rock with heat,

Till earth have drunk her fill,

That she no harmful weed may know,

Nor barren  fern, nor  mandrake low,

Nor mineral to kill. 155

The main dance, after which,

PALLAS

 But here’s not all: you must do more,

Or else you do but half restore

The age’s liberty.

POETS

The male and female used to join, 160

And into all delight did coin

That pure simplicity.

Then  feature did to form advance,

And youth called beauty forth to dance,

And every grace was by. 165

It was a time of no distrust,

So much of love had naught of lust,

None feared a jealous eye.

The language melted in the ear,

Yet all without a blush might hear; 170

 They lived with open vow.

CHOIR

Each touch and kiss was so well placed,

They were as sweet as they were chaste,

And such must yours be now.

Dance with ladies.

175

ASTRAEA

  What change is here!  I had not more

Desire to leave the earth before

Than I have now to stay;

My silver feet, like roots, are wreathed

Into the ground, my wings are sheathed, 180

And I cannot away.

Of all there seems a second birth;

It is become a heaven on earth,

And Jove is present here;

I feel the godhead, nor will doubt 185

But he can fill the place throughout,

Whose power is everywhere.

This, this, and only such as this,

The bright Astraea’s region is,

Where she would pray to live, 190

And in the midst of so much gold,

Unbought with grace  or fear unsold,

The law to mortals give.

 

Galliards and corantos.

Pallas ascending calls them.

195

PALLAS

  ’Tis now enough. Behold you here,

What Jove hath built to be your sphere;

You hither must retire.

And as his bounty gives you cause,

Be ready still without your pause 200

To show the world your fire.

Like lights about Astraea’s throne,

You here must shine, and all be one

In fervour and in flame,

That by your union she may grow, 205

And, you sustaining her, may know

The age still by her name;

Who vows, against or heat or cold,

To spin you garments of her gold,

That want may touch you never, 210

And making garlands every hour,

To write your names in some new flower,

That you may live for ever.

CHOIR

To Jove, to Jove, be all the honour given,

That thankful hearts can raise from earth to heaven. 215


THE END 

Title In . . . court This is one of Jonson’s creatively ambiguous headers, in which the designation of place and date is expressed as an implied continuation of the main title. It is reproduced here as printed in F1, but the suggestion is that the action of masque itself ‘restores’ the golden age to Whitehall.
Title 1616,] Lindley; 1615. F1
gentlemen . . . servants As in the headers for Love Rest., Irish, and Merc. Vind., this phrase refers to the minor courtiers and members of the royal household who danced alongside some of the greater lords. The phrase has sometimes been taken as referring to the acting company the King’s Men, who may have performed some of the spoken parts, but actors were never described on the title-pages to their plays as ‘gentlemen’. See the notes to the title of Merc. Vind.
1 No scene is described, but 24 and 28 indicate that there must have been a cloud and a cave.
1 Loud music, 2 softer music This distinction in a masque’s musical vocabulary is between consorts featuring wind instruments such as cornetts, flutes, oboes, and sackbuts, and consorts dominated by more sophisticated (though, in large numbers, not necessarily quieter) instruments such as lutes. See Walls (1996), 152.
1 PALLAS Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom; usually depicted as an armed woman, with helmet, spear, and shield. She has no mythic link with the Golden Age, but in Jonson’s main source for the antimasque, Claudian’s Gigantomachia (‘The Battle of the Giants’), she and Mars are the two gods who defend the heavens against the rebellious giants. Her presence in the masque implies that social renewal has been brought about by James’s divine wisdom.
3 SH] not in F
3 wonder] G; wonder! F1
6 him . . . thunder Jove, who brandishes his thunder in Hym., 225. Cf. Lear, 2.4.227: ‘I do not bid the thunder-bearer shoot.’
10–11 ] stanza break, F2(1); printed as continuous verse, F1
12 Astraea Goddess of justice, who in Ovid (Met., 1.149–50) is the last of the immortals to leave the earth; she departed at the onset of the Iron Age, when men became driven by greed, warfare, and violence. Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, 6, prophesies that under Augustus the Golden Age will be renewed and Astraea will return. Queen Elizabeth was often complimented in panegyric under the name of Astraea, as in Sir John Davies’s Hymns of Astraea (1599). There is a full, if sometimes uncritical, account of the trope in Yates (1975), 29–87. In the masque Astraea seems to have been depicted as a shining angelic figure: she had wings and silver feet (see 179–80) and was robed in gold (209).
13 golden chain In Homer’s Iliad, 8.18–27, Zeus warns the gods not to dispute his will: ‘Come, you gods, . . . let down out of the sky a cord of gold; lay hold of it all you who are gods and all who are goddesses, yet not even so can you drag down Zeus from the sky to the ground, not Zeus the high lord of counsel, though you try until you grow weary. Yet whenever I might strongly be minded to pull you, I could drag you up, earth and all and sea and all with you . . . So much stronger am I than the gods, and stronger than the immortals’ (trans. Lattimore, 1951). Jonson’s marginal note 42 to Hym. quotes Macrobius’s allegorical interpretation of this passage, which represents the chain as the cosmic principle that, link by link, binds together all levels of the universe. Cf. also the moral explanation in Ripa’s Iconologia (1603), 146: ‘It signifies . . . the joining and binding together of human things with divine, and a bond connecting the human race with its great creator, who, when he pleases, draws men to himself and elevates our minds to the highest heaven, to which otherwise we could never attain by our earthly effort; therefore the divine Plato maintained that this chain was the force of the divine spirit and of his heavenly fervour, by which spirits of great worth are often inspired to notable undertakings.’ See also Forest 11.47.
14 mettle temperament; punning on ‘metal’ = gold.
16 Envy] F3; enuie F1
17 Time Kronos (known to the Romans as Saturn), the last of the Titans, ruled over the Golden Age, when men were virtuous by instinct, the earth gave food without men having to cultivate it, and all was at peace (described in Hesiod, Works and Days, 109–20, and Ovid, Met., 1.89–112). In the late classical period the deity Kronos – who was originally an agricultural god and had no connection with time – eventually became etymologically identified with the abstract entity Chronos = ‘time’ itself, and their stories and symbolic attributes were thereafter conflated. See Time Vind., 16n.; Hym., marginal note 64; and Panofsky (1939), 73–4.
18 father Uranus, whom Kronos deposed and castrated. The Golden Age ended when Kronos was in turn overthrown by his son, Zeus (Jove to the Romans), but Pallas implies that Jove’s times, too, will be golden.
19 conserveth,] Wh; conserueth F1
19 conserveth keeps in safety.
21 still continually.
23 ] in margin F1
24 cave Jonson’s Evils appropriately erupt from below the ground. In Claudian’s Gigantomachia, 1–5, the giants, stepbrothers of the Titans, are children of Earth, a monstrous birth issuing from her womb to a noise of thunder. Classical myth associated them with eruptions, believing that after their rebellion was defeated they were buried under the volcanoes. See also Hesiod, Theogony, 185, and Apollodorus, 1.6.
24–6 Cf. the Gigantomachia, 60–2, describing the onset of the assault: ‘The clouds echo the blast of heaven’s trumpets; on this side Heaven, on that Earth, sounds the attack. Once more Nature is thrown into confusion and fears for her lord’ (Loeb).
26 As As if.
27, 64, 85 Iron Age] F1 (iron-age)
31 shield which carried the image of the gorgon Medusa, who turned men to stone by looking at them; see Homer, Iliad, 5.737–42; Ovid, Met., 4.790–803. According to Apollodorus (2.4.3), when Perseus slew Medusa, he gave Pallas her head. Jonson alludes to Pallas’s shield in the Ode ‘If men and times’, 37–41: ‘Throw, holy virgin, then / Thy crystal shield / About this isle, and charm the round, as when / Thou mad’st in open field / The rebel giants stoop, and gorgon envy yield.’ Perseus similarly uses Medusa’s head to defeat the witches in Queens.
32 IRON AGE Described in Hesiod (Works and Days, 169–201) and Ovid (Met., 1.127–63). In this age of the world, men fell prey to deceit, wickedness, and violence; discovering precious metals, they became greedy for wealth and fought among themselves; all proper affection was lost, might became right, and virtue was despised. Ovid adds that at this time the giants attempted to assail the gods, piling up mountains in order to reach the heavens, but Jove threw them down again (Met., 1.151–62). Jonson’s treatment is unusual in actually personifying Iron Age as an entity. For her speech, cf. Earth’s exhortation to the giants in Claudian’s Gigantomachia, 14–28: ‘Children, you shall conquer the gods, everything that you see, you will win in the fight. Victory brings you the whole world. At last, the son of Saturn will feel my wrath and will recognise earth’s power. Can any force conquer me? Are Cybele’s sons greater than mine? Why does the earth have no honour? Why am I always oppressed by bitter injury? Is there any form of pain I have not suffered? Over there unlucky Prometheus hangs in the Scythian valley, feeding the vulture on his living breast; and there Atlas’s head supports the weight of the starry heavens and the harshest cold freezes his grey hair. Do I need to mention Tityus, whose guts are renewed every day to suffer the savage vulture’s heavy punishment? But you, avenging army, come at last, free the Titans from their chains; defend your mother’ (trans. Peter Culhane).
39–48 For Avarice and her children, cf. King’s Ent., 744–50, and the source in Claudian’s De consulato Stilichonis (‘On Stilicho’s consulship’), 2.111–16: ‘first and foremost you banish Avarice, mother of crimes, greedy for more than she possesses, searching ever open-mouthed for gold; with her you drive out her most foul nurse Ambition, who watches at the gate of the powerful’ (Loeb). The poem goes on to rebuke Lust and Pride.
41 Fraud . . . Slander] F2; fraud . . . slander F1
43 stands offers itself as candidate.
44 more greater.
46–7 thy . . . Treachery A barely concealed allusion to the recent and shocking disclosure that two years before the masque the courtier Sir Thomas Overbury had been poisoned at the instigation of Frances Howard, wife-to-be of Overbury’s friend Robert Carr (the future Earl of Somerset and favourite of James I). This crime had become apparent only three months before the performance of the masque; for a summary of the scandal, see the Introduction.
47 hither;] Nichols; hither, F1
49 pyrrhic dance war-dance, practised by the ancient Greeks. This suggests that the dancing at 69–70 mimed military gestures. In the Essex House Masque (see headnote) the giants performed a ‘warlike dance’ to ‘loud music’ (Raylor, 2000a, 20). Cf. also the war dances of the Roman warrior priests alluded to in Augurs.
50 We So that we.
51 great;] Orgel; great, F1
59 states state of affairs, conditions.
59 even stable, unthreatened.
60–2 An echo of Earth’s self-destructive offer in Gigantomachia, 29–32: ‘Here are seas and mountains, limbs of my body, but care not for that. Use them as weapons. Never would I hesitate to be a weapon for the destruction of Jove. Go forth and conquer; throw heaven into confusion, tear down the towers of the sky’ (Loeb).
70 showing her shield It is unclear what this action consisted of, though there was probably some sort of spectacular lighting effect. The visual climax of the masque comes with the ‘scene of light’ at 126, but since the dialogue there says that ‘Pallas throws a lightning from her shield’ (124) the shield must have been uncovered twice, and each time as a visual highpoint.
71–8 An action developed from Gigantomachia, 91–103 (a passage also alluded to in Cat., 5.677–83): ‘Minerva rushed forward, showing the glittering Gorgon’s head on her breastplate. She knew the sight of this was enough; she did not need to use a spear. She first changed Pallas [here not the goddess, but the name of a giant], raging from afar, into a rock. He, still far away from his enemy, without a wound, felt himself suddenly fixed to the ground and he felt the lethal head turn him to stone. And when he was almost all stone, he said, “What is happening to me? What stone is creeping through my limbs? What is this numbness that binds me with this marble disease?” Scarcely had he spoken these few words, when he was entirely stone, as he feared. Fierce Damastor, when he sought a weapon to drive back the enemy, threw the stiff body of his brother instead of a rock’ (trans. Peter Culhane).
71 SH] G; not in F1
74 obnoxious to subject to, dependent upon; from Lat. obnoxius (H&S).
74 fates.] F2; fates, F1
76 destiny.] F2 (subst.); destinee F1
79 ] in margin F1
79 metamorphosed The SD is laconic, but presumably the antimasquers were transformed into statues. In the Essex House Masque, which clearly imitates Gold. Age (see the Introduction), this same transformation from rebellious giants into stones is more emphatically staged. See Raylor (2000a), 17–22.
79 changed having been changed.
79 Golden Age] Wh; golden age F1
87 ] 1. Astraea. 2. Age descending. F1 (and F1 uses ‘1.’, ‘2.’ to distinguish Astraea and Golden Age in SHs throughout 88–93 and 127, and prints ‘Age’ for SH ‘Golden Age’ throughout)
87 descending The eyewitness account by Amerigo Scarnifiggi mentions that these characters were let down from the heavens in a ‘chariot’ (Masque Archive, Golden Age, 8). Their descent is not completed until 96, so they sing as they come down.
88 ] indentation, this edn; three lines, with ‘With men?’ only indented, F1
88–95 The lineation of this song is very confusing in F1, as the indentation does not match the pattern of the verse. Essentially it is constructed as eight pentameter lines, four of which are divided either between three voices or three rhyme words. To display this, I have offset the internally rhymed lines, and divided the split-voice lines, but each pentameter group has been counted as one line. A similar but more regular effect occurs at 112 and 127–8.
90 the . . . ore gold.
90 ] indentation, this edn; F1 treats ‘As iustice? 2. or the purer ore?’ as a composite line, and centres ‘Pallas. / Once more.’ as two lines beneath, with ‘Once more’ italicized as if it were a stage direction
91 ] this edn; three lines in F1, with ‘Belowe?’ only indented
93 True. / True.] this edn; one line, centred F1
94 SH] F1 (Qvire) (and so throughout masque)
96 ] in margin F1
101 Minerva The Roman name for Pallas.
102 Expect Wait.
103 SD] in margin F1
104 style title.
105 Phoebus’ Belonging to Apollo, god of poetry.
105 the] F2; they F1
105 aspire breathe; a Latinism, from spiro,–are, to breathe.
106 Egyptian i.e. hermetic; relating to the mystical philosopher Hermes Trismegistus, who was identified by the Greeks with Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, and hence was a type of unimaginably ancient knowledge. See Fort. Isles, 141n.
106 Thracian Relating to the mythical and semi-divine Greek poet Orpheus, who lived in Thrace, and was the imagined prototype of poetic inspiration.
107 Chaucer . . . Spenser These four English poets are probably chosen for their association with the laureateship. Jonson regarded Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate as fountainheads of early English style, for in the Grammar he repeatedly quarried illustrative examples of English idiom from them (together, the three are cited 70 times). But he probably also saw them as leading examples of English poets in the service of public life, and may well have known John Skelton’s poem The Garland of Laurel, in which Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate appear, as if in a dream, to validate Skelton’s own claims to laureate status: ‘And as I thus sadly among them avysid, / I saw Gower, that first garnished out Englysshe rude, / And maister Chaucer, that nobly enterprysyd / How that our Englysshe myght fresshely be ennewed; / The monke of Bury then after them ensuyd, / Dane Johnn Lydgate. Theis Englysshe poetis thre, / As I ymagenyd, repayrid unto me, / Togeder in armes, as brethren, enbrasid; / There apparel farre passynge beyonde that I can tell; / With diamauntis and rubis there tabers were trasid, / None so ryche stones in Turkey to sell; / Thei wanted nothynge but the laurell’ (Skelton, Poems, ed. Scattergood, 1983, 323). This poem had last been printed in 1568, but for Jonson’s awareness of Skelton, see Fort. Isles, 174, and Tub, 5.7.24. Many of Skelton’s individually printed poems carried the designation ‘Poet Laureate’ on their title-pages (though he had received the title from Louvain University, not from the court). Spenser is presumably added to this group as the poet who came closest to the laureate ideal in Jonson’s own lifetime. In Informations, 14–15, Jonson is critical of Spenser’s stanzas and ‘matter’, and in Discoveries, 1281–2, criticizes his language, though is tolerant of his ‘matter’. After this masque, he was to purchase and annotate a copy of the 1617 Spenser folio (Riddell and Stewart, 1995). Perhaps the use of Alexandrines at 109–10 implies a further tribute to Spenser.
107 hight are named (archaic).
108 better flames For the common Jonsonian association of poetic rapture with fire, cf. Epigr. 76.1, Forest 10.29, Und. 25.12, 59.7; Discoveries, 157–8; ‘Shakes. Beloved’, 5.638–42, line 60 and ‘Ode to Himself (Come, leave)’, 6.310, line 44.
110 pressed oppressed. Perhaps alluding to the palm tree (an emblem of truth), which flourishes the more it is pressed (Lindley).
112, 128 two poets] 2. F1
112, 128 all four] 4. F1
115 And] F1; That G
116 semigods demigods. H&S compare Chapman’s translation of Hesiod (1618), 1.254: ‘Divine heroes, that the surnames bore of semigods’.
117 tamed . . . sleep Hesiod (Works and Days, 109) says that, to the men of the Golden Age, ‘Death came as sleep’ (cited by Whalley).
118 join enjoin.
120 SH] F1 (The Qvire.)
120 Awake, awake A characteristically Jonsonian formula; cf. Cat., 1.409; Und. 15.1.
121 as as if.
122 put on air Because, as spirits, these semigods need to assume bodies of condensed air in which to manifest themselves: cf. Donne, ‘Air and Angels’, 23–4. Hesiod says that after their deaths the race of men who lived in the Golden Age were ‘hidden in the ground, but still they live as spirits of the earth, holy and good, guardians who keep off harm’ (Works and Days, 123–5; cited by Gifford).
122 air] F2 (subst.); arie F1
126 ] in margin F1
126 scene of light One of Inigo Jones’s signature effects. The masquers would be surrounded with candles whose light was intensified by reflectors arranged to create a stunning refulgence: here it suggests the glorious ‘Elysian bowers’ (115). Cf. the whirling region of fire in Hym., 195, and the ‘great throne with countless lights’ that the Venetian ambassador observed in Oberon; in Townshend’s Tempe Restored (1632), Jupiter had a ‘glory’ shining behind him (Orgel and Strong, 1973, 2.482).
127 F1 prefaces this line with ‘1. Astrea. 2. Age.’ and uses ‘1.’ and ‘2.’ as SHs to indicate line division
127 both] 1.2. F1
129 ] in margin F1
129 A pause Presumably the opportunity was taken for the audience to admire the stage picture discovered at 126, before the masquers moved into their first dance. Cf. Time Vind., 291–363n.
130 tumour swelling; punning on a bodily ‘vein’, and vein of iron in the earth.
136 genii tutelary gods (like the Genius in Theobalds).
138 SH] as part of 137 F1
138–55 This song is developed from classical accounts of the Golden Age. Cf. Ovid, Met., 1.101–2: ‘The fertile earth was free, untouched by spade or plough, and yielded of itself everything enough’; Virgil, Eclogues, 4.24–5, 30: ‘snakes will die, and so will fair-seeming poisonous plants . . . Then shall honey sweat like dew from the hard bark of oaks.’
140 quick’ning power power to give life.
140 quick’ning] F1 (quickning); quickening G
150 balsam medicinal resin.
154 fern Believed to be seedless, hence ‘barren’. At this time it was not yet understood that ferns propagate themselves through spores that are almost invisible to the naked eye (H&S).
154 mandrake mandragora; a poisonous plant. The mandrake is ‘low’ because its most familiar feature is its forked root, thought to resemble the human form and to shriek horribly when pulled from the ground.
157–74 This song’s emphasis on sexual reform testifies to the emergence of notions of companionate marriage in this period, but it more specifically responds to anxieties about the moral character of the Jacobean court provoked by the recent Overbury scandal. In order to marry Robert Carr, Frances Howard had to be divorced from her first husband, the Earl of Essex, and since the grounds were non-consummation, the legal action involved formal investigations into his sexual capacity and her claim of virginity. After the revelations about the murder, it was easy for people to suppose that the Somersets’ relationship had been tainted all along, and that Frances in particular was morally and sexually degenerate. Lindley compares the song’s picture of ‘innocent sexual frankness’ to Spenser’s Garden of Adonis (The Faerie Queene, 3.6).
163 feature . . . advance individual shapes were perfected into ideal ones: terms from Platonism (Orgel).
171 An allusion to Persius, 2.7, aperto vivere voto (‘live in the use of prayers to which all may listen’). The context is a contrast between prayers that are made to the gods in secret, because they ask for things that would sound shameful to others, and petitions that are voiced publicly, because made with a clear conscience.
176–94 ] F1 state 2; placed after 215 F1 state 1
176–215 In a few copies of F1, Astraea’s and Pallas’s speeches are reversed, so that the masque concludes with Astraea’s promise to stay, and the general direction for ‘Galliards and corantos’. But close analysis of textual variants across the whole masque shows that this is a printing-house error, and that the masque was always intended to conclude with Pallas. The Cambridge text follows the corrected order as printed in the majority of surviving copies of F1. For a full discussion of the problem, which is misrepresented in some modern editions, see the Textual Essay.
176–7 I . . . before Referring to the end of the first Golden Age, when Astraea fled the earth as a reaction against the crimes of men.
192 or fear or with fear. These awkwardly expressed lines (censured by H&S as ‘scarcely grammatical’) refer to the paradox that the ethical value of the Golden Age was proportionate to the absence of material gold. Gold itself was not mined in the classical Golden Age, and (at 42 above) Corruption ‘with the golden hands’ is a feature of the Iron Age; but Astraea’s justice, being golden in the immaterial sense, is neither bought with ‘grace’ (undeserved favour) nor sold with ‘fear’ (tyranny). Cf. King’s Ent. on how James’s reign will permit Justice to ‘look as when / She loved the earth, and feared not to be sold / For that which worketh all things to it, gold’ (647–9).
194 Galliards and corantos Social dances; the evening’s ‘revels’.
196–8 Probably this refers to the Elysian bower that was discovered at 126, into which the dancers retreated – the same arrangement as in Oberon, Merc. Vind., and Pleasure Rec. Some critics have suggested that there was a final scene change after the revels, so that Pallas refers here to a new structure into which the masquers withdrew. But such last-minute changes became customary only in later masques; it was an expensive device, and was generally used only in conjunction with extra action. Time Vind. is the earliest Jonson masque that demonstrably has a scene change after the revels. There is no certain evidence for it here, and it would have been contrary to the arrangements of all Jonson’s other masques in this period.
196 SH] not in F1
A NOTE ON THE MASQUERS The only masquer named in the documentation is the Earl of Essex (Masque Archive, Gold. Age, 11).
Smooth Treachery, call See more
See more