Performed on 22 February 1617, Lovers Made Men contributed to diplomatic efforts to assuage French concerns over the decision to seek a Spanish match for Prince Charles and over James I’s support for French Protestants. It was staged by James, Lord Hay, to entertain the visiting French ambassador, Charles Cauchon, Baron du Tour. Lovers Made Men was danced by eleven gentlemen, including Sir Edward Sackville, Sir Henry Rich, Sir George Goring, and Sir Thomas Badger. The performance was held at the Wardrobe (probably the house in the Blackfriars which Hay occupied through his court office as Master of the Great Wardrobe), and contemporary accounts emphasize the scale of the feasting that accompanied it. Described as ‘equal to those [masques] . . . seen at Whitehall’, Lovers Made Men was supposed to have cost £2,200 (Masque Archive, Lovers MM, 4 and 5). The occasion was attended by ‘most of the English and Scottish lords and great ladies then in London’ (Masque Archive, 5), though not, apparently, by any members of the royal family. Lucy Percy, shortly to become Lady Hay, was absent despite her known interest in masquing (she planned to stage a Masque of Amazons in 1618: see Sanders, 2000, 451). Instead, according to John Chamberlain, the Countess of Bedford acted as hostess (Masque Archive, 2).

Hay had a reputation as a Francophile and an enthusiast for a French alliance. He spoke fluent French and was noted for his understanding of French mores, the painter and diplomat Rubens calling him ‘more French than Spanish’ (Rubens, 1955, 271–2). His continental connections are illustrated by the verses dedicated to him by G. R. Weckherlin, A Panegyric to the Most Honourable and Renowned Lord, the Lord Hays (Stuttgart, 1619), by poems from the exiled French writer Marc de Mailliet in Balet de la Revanche du Mespris d’Amour (1617), sig. A1, and ‘A la louange de Monsieur Hay’ (SP 14/198/20), and by his association with foreign musicians including Jacques Gaultier and Nicholas Lanier (Spink, 1964, 180; New Grove Dictionary, ed. Sadie, 14.248–50). In 1616 he had gone to France as extraordinary ambassador to Louis XIII, with a mission to congratulate the French king on his marriage and negotiate a possible French match for Prince Charles (Canova-Green, 1993, 41). The embassy was notorious for its extravagance – Lady Haddington cruelly said it was led by ‘three mignards, three dancers, and three fools’ (Nichols, Progresses, 3.177) – and Rich, Goring, and Badger had been among its members. Rich and Goring were later to be involved in the negotiations for Henrietta Maria’s marriage to Charles I, Rich eventually becoming her High Steward and Goring her Vice-Chamberlain and Master of Horse. Sir Edward Sackville, the addressee of Underwood 13, had also travelled in France, and would serve as ambassador to Louis XIII in 1621 and 1623. Several of these pro-French courtiers were key players in the fashion for elaborate games and private masques and shows that characterized court circles in the late 1610s (Knowles, 2000, 125). The quarto title-page description of Lovers Made Men as performed by ‘divers of noble quality, his friends’ encapsulates the significance of the informal alliances among this loose political and cultural grouping.

Lovers Made Men was an innovative text, and is sometimes referred to as ‘the first English opera’ (H&S, 10.566). Hay employed the royal lutenist and composer Nicholas Lanier to compose and perform the music, as well as to design the scenery, although, in the absence of detailed financial accounts, we cannot be certain whom he worked alongside. Most significantly, F2 claims that ‘the whole masque was sung (after the Italian manner) stylo recitativo’ – a term that recurs in the stage directions for The Vision of Delight (also first printed in F2).

The precise meaning of stylo recitativo continues to elude scholars. From the arrangement of the text, it seems clear that a greater proportion of Lovers Made Men was sung than usual; however, the stanzaic divisions, especially of lines 1–42, which are in regular quatrains, may indicate that the music was closer to the extended declamatory ayre, the standard form for the court masque, than it was to Italian recitative (Walls, 1983–4, 32). Indeed, given the delayed date at which the phrase appears in print – it is conspicuously absent from the quarto, and The Vision of Delight was not printed before 1641 – some musicologists have regarded it as a later interpolation or as a post hoc reinterpretation of the masque’s performance in the light of the introduction of recitative by Lanier in the late 1620s. So, while on one hand Mary Chan (1980), 273, states ‘the settings were probably declamatory ayres’, the most recent study concludes that, although ‘discrete ayres . . . could not have been used’, the masque’s extended dialogues must have differed from Italian recitative (Walls, 1996, 102). Walls (1983–4), 40, argues that the term stilo recitativo reflects a ‘perceived analogy’ rather than direct, identifiable influence. Without surviving music, the nature of the performance, beyond the sense that more was sung than usual, cannot be determined, although the phrase used in Vision of Delight that the verses were ‘spake in song’ (4) is highly evocative.

Lovers Made Men was also innovatory in its form, for it has resemblances to contemporary French ballets in which courtiers took one or more parts in the entrées and then reappeared gloriously dressed in the grand ballet. Welsford (1927), 205, noted a ‘trace of the French influence’ in the way the lovers reappear ‘changed’ (62), and Raylor (2000), 58, observes similarities to several recent French ballets, including Le Ballet des Argonautes (1614) and La Déliverance de Persée (1617). The masquers’ transformations may echo other masques associated with Hay, such as Thomas Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque (1607), in which knights of Apollo metamorphosed into trees change back to human form, but they also point towards the anonymous ‘running masque’ (performed around London and Newmarket in 1621) and Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed, in which aristocratic performers took antimasque roles and were then translated back into themselves. Other French influence may have come from the ‘kind of masque or antique’ (Chamberlain, 1939, 2.56) mounted in February 1617 by Anne of Denmark’s French musicians at Somerset House, with staging by Inigo Jones. This was possibly Marc de Mailliet’s Balet de Revanche du Mespris d’Amour, which featured a series of entries by faithful, rebellious, and ridiculous lovers introduced by Cupid, and perhaps anticipated the ‘fantastic shades’ (22) of Lovers Made Men. More generally, Wheeler (1938), 21, relates Jonson’s fiction to Lucian’s dialogue, ‘The Downward Journey, or the Tyrant’, which describes Hermes and Clotho loading Charon’s boat with ‘seven [who] committed suicide for love, among them the philosopher Theagenes for the courtesan Megara’ (Lucian, 1965, 4.13). However, the tone of Lovers Made Men is less cynical and more lyrical than this.

Lovers Made Men was printed in a small quarto in 1617, possibly with a view to distribution at the performance. A slightly revised text, adding the information about stylo recitativo, was printed in F2; our edited text is based on the quarto. No music or designs for the masque survive.