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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In the introduction to his Masque of Queens (1609) Ben Jonson says that the Queen commanded him to ‘thinke on some Daunce, or shew, that might praecede hers, and have the place of a foyle, or false-Masque.’ In complying, he presents twelve witches, ‘not as a Masque, but as a spectacle of strangeness, producing multiplicitie of Gesture, and not vnaptly sorting with the current, and whole fall of the Deuise,’ and he refers to his earlier ‘foyle’ in the Haddington Masque (1608) as an 'Anti-Masque of Boyes.’ Over a period of twenty-six years Jonson gave his royal masters many such spectacles of strangeness. The differences among the several kinds of antimasque which Jonson produced in his career have often been pointed out but the similarities have never been satisfactorily explained.
1. Lovers Made Men(1617), written for the entertainment of the French Ambassador rather than a royal spectator, is different from Jonson's other masques in that even though it is in the ritual form its central image, lover's tears, has nothing to do with monarchy.
2. Panegyre, 163.