Martin Butler

Ben Jonson's Pan's Anniversary and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral

fall Jonson’s masques, Pun’s Anniversary has perhaps been the most difficult to interpret in relation to Jonson’s usual preoccupations in the masque form. Dated as it normally is to the summer of 1620, it seems stranded in a curious no-man’s land remote from the customary territory of the Jonsonian masque, which was typically designed for performance on Twelfth Night during the ostentatious Jacobean Christmas seasons. As a pastoral masque, its formal simplicity seems to set it apart from Jonson’s other late entertainments. While other masques make use of pastoral elements, only Pun’s Anniversary is set entirely in Arcadia, and it appears altogether slighter than the more elaborately mythologized masques: it has not yielded the same dense texture of philosophical reference as have many comparable masque texts. It is also significantly less spectacular than most Jacobean festivals. Although the scene opens to discover a “Fountain of light” (1. 48),’ the set as a whole does not undergo transformation and the masque lacks the gallery of classical superheroes that usually populates the genre. Only one design by Inigo Jones has been associated with it by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, and that no more than tentatively.2 Not surprisingly, the history of comment on Pun’s Anniversary is nearly non-exi~tent.~

George Chapman's Masque of the Twelve Months (1619) [With text]

George Chapmans Masque of the Twelve Months was first printed by John Payne Collier in 1848, with no authors name attached and in scrambled form. Although it was discovered in 1950 that the author must have been Chapman, it has never been reprinted or drawn into the Chapman canon. This essay re‐edits the text, and shows that it was the masque performed at Whitehall by Prince Charles and the Marquis of Buckingham on Twelfth Night 1619; three scene designs by Inigo Jones can also be linked to it. The masques theme concerns the Stuart succession, and the need to protect the Jacobean peace at a time when Europe was just beginning to descend into what would become the Thirty Years War.