Entertainment at Theobalds | The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson

Edited by James Knowles

Introduction

Staged on 22 May 1607, An Entertainment at Theobalds was devised to mark the transfer to Queen Anne of Theobalds, the Hertfordshire home of Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury – although in reality the palace became one of James I’s hunting residences. Theobalds had been erected by Cecil’s father, William, Lord Burghley, to entertain Elizabeth I; Burghley had originally purchased the estate as a modest inheritance for Robert, his second son. The house became a byword for palatial magnificence, although Robert Cecil had replaced some of his father’s opulent interiors, including the famous indoor grotto, with more sober Jacobean work. In return for surrendering Theobalds, Cecil received extensive lands from the crown, including the Hatfield estate, where he constructed another house as a rural residence convenient for London and as a hunting retreat to entertain the King and Queen.

The parliamentary act for the exchange of properties that brought Theobalds to the crown stressed how Cecil ‘willingly and dutifully made offer . . . unto His Highness, . . . preferring therein His Majesty’s health and contentation before any private respect of his own’, even though Theobalds was ‘the only dwelling house left unto him by his father’ (PRO, SP14/27/31; cited in Heaton, 2003, 106). An Entertainment at Theobalds negotiates similar paradoxes in that it celebrates the alienation of Cecil’s patrimony, modifies the potential criticism that Cecil had engaged in the exchange for profit, and emphasizes the host’s departure rather than the guest’s entry. While the French ambassador, perhaps struggling with the conventions, described An Entertainment at Theobalds as ‘une espèce de comedie sur la presentation des clefs de la maison’ (NA, SP31/3/41; Masque Archive, Electronic Edition, Theobalds, 3), these material tensions strain the generic frame of the entertainment, and the entertainment’s central questions (61--74) articulate problems that can only be answered by a command to ‘obey and not expostulate’ (75).

As Wiltenberg (1988), 38, argues, the questions contained in Theobalds are ‘uncomfortably near the nerve’. The text recognizes that the ‘blessèd change’ is ‘no less glad than strange’ (110--11), although some of this awkwardness may have been the product of textual revision: the somewhat truncated version of the final choral song printed in F1 reduces the ‘joy’, ‘grace’, and ‘innocence’ of the occasion celebrated by the longer version (129--32). Some of the formal tensions are contained by the novelty of a text that moves decisively away from the ‘outdoor pleasantries’ of Althorp and Highgate (McMillin, 1968, 164). Indeed, McMillin describes Theobalds as innovative because it represents the first ‘fully-staged’ household entertainment, drawing on the technical facilities of theatrical and masque staging. Although many of the effects have their equivalents in other aristocratic shows (such as Marston’s An Entertainment at Ashby, staged 1607), the elaborate Lararium echoes the scenic discoveries of court masques, and the ‘striking effects of scenery, costume and lighting’ (McMillin, 1968, 165) accentuate Cecil’s modernity and mastery of technology. In particular, the neoclassical setting, perspectival ‘landtschap’ (a recently Englished term), and lighting and flying mechanisms create a style suitable to a new situation. The ‘wonder’ of ‘doubt’ (33) is replaced by theatrical wonder.

Much of the novelty, however, is not so much innovation as elaboration of devices found in earlier non-court masques. Theobalds develops the architectural conceits of Cecil’s own earlier entertainments for James, but the stage buildings of those occasions are replaced with an actual house. The staging in the ‘gallery’ (6n.) located events at the very centre of Cecil’s household, and the heraldic decor, reminding the audience of his lineage, stressed his nobility (an issue that the text skirts with some skill: see 18n. and 63–6). The elaboration was also financial, turning an awkward demand into a gesture of generosity, and demonstrating Cecil’s wealth, the ‘founder’s good expense’ (132 and n.). Described by the French ambassador as ‘un grand et magnifique festin’ (NA, SP31 /3/41), the impression given by F1’s stage directions and the surviving list of materials used (Masque Archive, Theobalds, 1) suggests an opulent occasion.

The Theobalds entertainment survives in two different kinds of text, the seven manuscript versions that circulated more or less contemporaneously, and the version as printed in the 1616 folio. Three manuscripts include only the speeches of Genius, Mercury, and the Fates: these are the Fane manuscript (JnB 576: BL MS Add 34218, fols. 23v–24v), the Kaye manuscript (JnB 578: Folger Shakespeare Library, MS X.d.475), and the Yelverton manuscript (JnB 575: All Souls’ College, Oxford, MS 155, fols. 319–21). Another, linked to Cecil’s household (JnB 579: Hatfield House, Cecil MS 144), contains two stanzas of the final song (110--21), corrected by one of Cecil’s secretariat; another important witness for the occasion preserved at Hatfield, a French transcript probably provided for the visiting French party, differs from any of the English versions (JnB 577: Cecil MS 140, fols. 110–111v). The remaining two manuscripts, associated with the courtier Sir Henry Goodere (JnB 576.5: PRO, SP9/51/41–2) and the antiquarian Peter Le Neve (JnB 575.5: BL MS Add 27407, fols. 127r–128v), transcribe the speeches for the main figures but also provide a four-stanza version of the final song (110--21, 123--24). However, the manuscripts most closely linked to Cecil both suggest that the shorter version of the final song was staged in 1607. A full account of each manuscript is given in the Textual Essay, Electronic Edition.

F1 prints a different version of the occasion. Its extensive changes include the addition of stage directions, headings, and an authorship ascription, which guide the readerly reconstruction of the event. It prints only the two-stanza version of the final song but contains a couplet explicating the genealogy of Mercury not found in the manuscripts (35--6) and has several other changes that suggest revision. As well as omitting spoken and sung elements found in all manuscripts (see 54, 60, 78, 82, and the Textual Essay), some of its verbal variations, such as ‘fathers’ for ‘father’ (18), or ‘might’ for ‘should’ (103), are typical authorial tinkerings.

The two different media, then, transmit different versions of the event with numerous localized changes. The most significant is the divergence between the two- and four-stanza versions of the final song. The two-stanza version is avouched for in two manuscripts associated with Cecil’s household and F1, but the four-stanza version derives from two manuscripts which have potential links to Jonsonian circles, one (the Le Neve MS), perhaps descending directly from one of Jonson’s associates, Dudley, Lord North. It seems, then, that two different versions of Theobalds were in near contemporaneous circulation: a patronal version associated with the event (with the two-stanza song), and an authorial version (with a four-stanza song).

It may be that these divergent copies arose out of the sometimes testy relationship between Jonson and Cecil. Equally, the final two stanzas return to the connections made between Theobalds’s queen-foundress, Elizabeth I, and Anne of Denmark (87–92), so that they almost merge as the central figures (123--6), leaving King James marginalized in the exchange of property between female creators and owners. The decision, then, to print in F1 the two-stanza version replaces an Anne-centred with a James-centred event. These political agendas complicate any simple division between patronal and authorial texts. Although Jonson produced masques for the Queen, there is little evidence of close collaboration between them, while Cecil, for all his assiduous cultivation of Anne, was also close to the King. It is certainly tempting to suggest that the different manuscript texts were circulated deliberately to appeal to different audiences, while the print version, produced after Cecil’s death and Anne’s political eclipse, may exemplify ways in which Jonson crafted even the occasional texts of his Works to represent himself as the King’s poet above all else. Indeed, the careful amplification of what may have taken place, and the equally careful suppression of facts that had become inconvenient after the event, illuminate the attention Jonson directed towards these fugitive pieces, even though such attentiveness is not necessarily obvious from the history of press corrections in F1.

As each chosen base-text brings losses and gains, it has been decided to present one coherent version – in this case the print text, F1 – but to supply a fully-annotated version of the manuscript text in the electronic edition (see the Manuscript Database, Theobalds MS). In addition, the final two stanzas of the song are included as an appendix to this edited version, so that readers may have easy access to what may have been the original concluding song. A transcript of the French manuscript is in the Masque Archive, Theobalds, 3 .

AN ENTERTAINMENT AT THEOBALDS

An Entertainment of King James and Queen Anne at Theobalds, when the house

was delivered up, with the possession, to the Queen by the Earl of Salisbury,

22 of May, 1607.

The Prince Joinville, brother to the Duke of Guise, being then present.

The King and Queen, with the Princes of Wales and Lorraine, and the nobility, being entered 5

into the gallery after dinner, there was seen nothing but a traverse of white across the room

which, suddenly drawn, was discovered a gloomy, obscure place hung all with black silks and

in it only one light which the GENIUS of the house held, sadly attired; his cornucopia ready

to fall out of his hand, his garland drooping on his head, his eyes fixed on the ground; when,

out of this pensive posture, after some little pause, he brake and began. 10

GENIUS

Let not your glories darken to behold

The place and me, her Genius, here so sad,

Who, by bold Rumour, have been lately told,

That I must change the lovèd lord I had;

And he, now in the twilight of sere age, 15

Begin to seek a habitation new,

And all his fortunes and himself engage

Unto a seat his fathers never knew;

And I, uncertain what I must endure

Since all the ends of dest’ny are obscure. 20

Here a voice was heard from behind the darkness, which bade him,

MERCURY

Despair not, Genius, thou shalt know thy fate.

And withal, the black vanishing, was discovered a glorious place figuring the Lararium,

or seat of the household gods, where both the Lares and Penates were painted in copper

colours, erected with columns and architrave, frieze and cornice, in which were placed divers 25

diaphanal glasses filled with several waters that showed like so many stones of orient and

transparent hues. Within, as farther off in landtschap, were seen clouds riding, and in

one corner a boy figuring GOOD EVENT, attired in white, hovering in the air with wings

displayed, having nothing seen to sustain him by, all the time the show lasted. At the other

corner, a MERCURY descended in a flying posture, with his caduceus in his hand, who spake to the 30

three PARCAE that sat low in a grate with an iron roof, the one holding the rock, the other

the spindle, and the third, the shears, with a book of adamant lying open before them. But

first the Genius, surprised by wonder, urged this doubt by question.

GENIUS

What sight is this, so strange and full of state?

The son of Maia making his descent 35

Unto the Fates, and met with Good Event.

MERCURY

Daughters of night and secrecy, attend!

You that draw out the chain of destiny,

Upon whose threads both lives and times depend

And all the periods of mortality, 40

The will of Jove is that you straight do look

The change and fate unto this house decreed,

And speaking from your adamantine book

Unto the Genius of the place it read,

That he may know, and knowing, bless his lot, 45

That such a grace, beyond his hopes, hath got.

CLOTHO

When underneath thy roof is seen

The greatest king and fairest queen,

With princes an unmatchèd pair,

One, hope of all the earth, their heir; 50

The other, stylèd of Lorraine,

Their blood, and sprung from Charlemagne;

When all these glories jointly shine

And fill thee with a heat divine

And these reflected do beget 55

A splendent sun shall never set,

But here shine fixèd to affright

All after-hopes of following night,

Then, Genius, is thy period come

To change thy lord. Thus, Fates do doom! 60

GENIUS

But is my patron with this lot content

So to forsake his father’s monument?

Or is it gain, or else necessity,

Or will to raise a house of better frame

That makes him shut forth his posterity 65

Out of his patrimony with his name?

MERCURY

Nor gain nor need, much less a vain desire

To frame new roofs or build his dwelling higher.

He hath with mortar busied been too much

That his affections should continue such. 70

GENIUS

Do men take joy in labours not t’enjoy?

Or doth their business all their likings spend?

Have they more pleasure in a tedious way

Than to repose them at their journey’s end?

MERCURY

Genius, obey and not expostulate. 75

It is your virtue, and such powers as you

Should make religion of offending fate

Whose dooms are just, and whose designs are true.

LACHESIS

The person for whose royal sake

Thou must a change so happy make 80

Is he that governs with his smile

This lesser world, this greatest isle.

His lady’s servant thou must be,

Whose second would great Nature see,

Or Fortune, after all their pain 85

They might despair to make again.

ATROPOS

She is the grace of all that are,

And as Eliza, now a star,

Unto her crown and lasting praise

Thy humbler walls at first did raise 90

By virtue of her best aspect,

So shall Bel-Anna them protect;

And this is all the Fates can say,

Which first believe and then obey.

GENIUS

Mourned I before? Could I commit a sin 95

So much ’gainst kind or knowledge, to protract

A joy to which I should have ravished been,

And never shall be happy till I act?

Vouchsafe, fair queen, my patron’s zeal in me,

Who fly with fervour, as my fate commands, 100

To yield these keys, and wish that you could see

My heart as open to you as my hands.

There might you read my faith, my thoughts – but, oh,

My joys like waves each other overcome,

And gladness drowns where it begins to flow! 105

Some greater powers speak out, for mine are dumb!

At this was the place filled with rare and choice music to which was heard the following song,

delivered by an excellent voice, and the burden maintained by the whole choir.

Song

SOLOIST

O, blessèd change! 110

And no less glad than strange!

Where we that lose have won,

And, for a beam, enjoy a sun.

CHORUS

So little sparks become great fires,

And high rewards crown low desires. 115

SOLOIST

Was never bliss

More full or clear than this!

The present month of May

Ne’er looked so fresh as doth this day.

CHORUS

So gentle winds breed happy springs 120

And duty thrives by breath of kings.

The Author, B.J.

ADDITIONAL STANZAS, IN THE MANUSCRIPT VERSION

SOLOIST

But thank that queen

Whose bounty it hath been

Such liking first to take, 125

And of our cell her palace make.

CHORUS

So prosper still those happy walls

That are not raised by others’ falls.

SOLOIST

Joy then fair place,

Joy in thy present grace, 130

Joy in thine innocence,

Joy in thy founder’s good expense;

CHORUS

So this great day shall still to thee

In reverence kept holy be.

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

An Entertainment at Theobalds (1607)

Edited by James Knowles

Introduction

AN ENTERTAINMENT AT THEOBALDS