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Magic and Festivity at the Renaissance Court: The 1987 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Thomas M. Greene
Thomas M. Greene*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

The relationship between hermetic beliefs and Renaissance court festivity is by no means a novel object of study. Both literary and intellectual historians have been aware of its interest for many years, and this awareness shows no signs of declining. Although in practice the presence of occult beliefs in the intentions of a court impresario is not always easy to demonstrate, what we know of the court productions and what we know of the culture that generated them suggest that we should be alert to this potential presence. Recently Roy Strong's revision of his book Splendour at Court (1974) under the new title Art and Power (1984) places heightened emphasis on this element in Renaissance courtly and civic festivity.

Type
From the 1987 National Conference
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , Winter 1987 , pp. 636 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1987

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References

1 Among the most important studies have been those of Yates, Frances: The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947)Google Scholar, The Valois Tapestries (London, 1959). and Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975). Other major books include McGowan, Margaret M., L'Art du Ballet de Cour en France, 1581-1643 (Paris, 1963)Google Scholar, Orgel, Stephen and Strong, Roy, Inigo Jones; The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (London, 1973)Google Scholar, Gordon, D.J., The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Orgel, Stephen (Berkeley, 1975)Google Scholar, and Walker, D. P., Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance (London, 1985).Google Scholar The book by Brooks-Davies, Douglas, The Mercurian Monarch: Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope (Manchester, 1983)Google Scholar, devotes a chapter to the court masque but its interpretations should be weighed with caution. The three volumes of articles edited by Jean Jacquot and entitled Les Fêtes de la Renaissance (Paris, 1959, 1960, 1975) constitute rich sources of information concerning many aspects of Renaissance court festivity. Perhaps it should be added that Yates's general view of the history of occult ideas has been challenged by some scholars; the controversy has been surveyed in the Introduction to Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge, 1984). Other relevant studies will be mentioned in subsequent notes.

2 Strong, Roy, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1984), p. 62.Google Scholar Strong's earlier version, Splendour at Court. Renaissance Spectacle and Illusion was published in London in 1973. Stephen Orgel would appear to take issue with his collaborator on the subject of magic in the masque in The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 55-57.

3 SirFrazer, James, The New Golden Bough, ed. Gaster, Theodor H. (New York, 1968), pp. 3–124.Google Scholar Gaster's “Additional Notes,” pp. 125-42, survey the directions taken by anthropological research in this area since Frazer's classic was published.

4 Bloch, Marc, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, tr. Anderson, J. E. (London, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Fra Tolomeo is quoted by Bloch on p. 76.

5 See Sherwood, Merriam, “Magic and Mechanics in Medieval Fiction,” Studies in Philology, 44 (1947), 567-92.Google Scholar

6 Mandeville's Travels, tr. P. Hamelius from the French cf Jean d'Outremeuse (London, 1919), p. 156.

7 Donaldson, E. T., ed. Chaucer's Poetry (New York, 1958;, p. 289, 11. 430-42.Google Scholar

8 Loomis, Laura Hibbard, “Secular Dramatics in the Royal Palace, Paris, 1378, 1389, and Chaucer's Tregetoures,’” Speculum, 33 (1956), 242-55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See Kipling, Gordon, “Richard II's ‘Sumptuous Pageants’ and the Idea of the Civic Triumph” in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theatre, ed. Bergeron, David M. (Athens, Ga., 1985), pp. 83–105.Google Scholar

10 For the Burgundian influence on English pageantry and courtly festivity, see Kipling, Gordon, The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance (Leyden, 1977), especially chapters 4 and 5.Google Scholar

11 Quotations from the anonymous account of this disguising are taken from The Antiquarian Repertory, ed. F. Grose and T. Astle (London, 1808), II, 299-302.

12 See Loomis, Roger Sherman, “The Allegorical Siege in the Art of the Middle Ages,” American Journal of Archaeology, II, 23 (1919), 255-69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar According to Loomis, many ivory-cases and caskets are extant, probably dating to the early fourteenth century, representing the mock-siege of an allegorical castle containing women.

13 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, II vols. (Oxford, 1925-52), VII, 225. Future quotations from Jonson will be taken from this edition and will be indicated parenthetically within the text. Quotations will be drawn from vol. VII unless another volume number is given.

14 See Anglo, Sydney, “The Evolution of the Early Tudor Disguising, Pageant, and Mask,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 1 (Evanston, 1968), 3–44.Google Scholar

15 Geertz, Clifford, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Culture and its Creators, ed. Ben-David, Joseph and Clark, Terry Nichols (Chicago, 1977), p. 151.Google Scholar

16 Macrobius, , Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, tr. Stahl, W. H. (New York, 1952), pp. 195-96.Google Scholar

17 This passage from Ficino's De triplici vita is quoted by Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination, p. 123.

18 See the quotation in McGowan, , L'Art du Ballet de Cour, p. 20.Google Scholar

19 Any account of these would have to include, in addition to Pythagorean doctrines, Plato's Timaeus, his myth of Er in the tenth book of the Republic, the seventh book of the Laws, Boetius, Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, and the thought of the neoplatonic Alexandrian school active from the second to the fourth centuries A.D. A somewhat impressionistic history can be found in Leclerc, Hélène, Du mythe Platonicien aux Fetes de la Renaissance: “L'Harmonie du Monde,” Incantation et Symbolisme, Revue d'Histoire du Théatre, 1959-2, pp. 107-71.Google Scholar

20 Gombrich, E. H., “Icones symbolicae,“Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948), 176.Google Scholar

21 For this machine and for the relationship of Renaissance theatrical “heavens” to their medieval anticipations, see Beijer, Agne, “Visions célestes et infernales dans le Théâtre du Moyen-Age et de la Renaissance” in Fêtes de la Renaissance I, 405-17.Google Scholar

22 Strong writes: “The heavenly astrological aspect of the entertainment could indicate that one of its purposes was talismanic, an effort to draw down the good influences of the heavens on the nuptials” (Art and Power, p. 37). For the libretto, see Bellincioni, Bernardo, Le Rime (Bologna, 1878).Google Scholar For the description, see Solmi, Edmondo, Scritti vinciani (Florence, 1976), pp. 412-18.Google Scholar

23 These festivities are described in detail by Nagler, A. M., Theatre Festivals of the Medici 1539-1637 (New Haven, 1964)Google Scholar on pp. 2lff., pp. 39ff., pp. 62ff., and pp. 70ff., respectively. On the 1589 intermezzi, see especially Molinari, Cesare, Le nozze degli dei (Rome, 1968)Google Scholar as well as other discussions amply catalogued in Strong, , Art and Power, p. 208 n. 11.Google Scholar

24 Warburg, Aby, “I costumi teatrali per gli intermezzi del 1589,” Gesammelte Schriften, 2 vols. (Leipzig-Berlin, 1932), I. 280.Google Scholar Cited by Gombrich, E. H., Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1978), p. 234.Google Scholar

25 On these devices, see Kernodle, George, From Art to Theatre (Chicago, 1944)Google Scholar, passim and especially p. 15.

26 Le Balet Comique by Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx. A facsimile with an Introduction by Margaret M. McGowan (Binghamton, 1982), p. e.iiir. and p. 44V.

27 McGowan writes that in the typical ballet de cour and specifically in Le Ballet de M. de Vendosme (1610), “il s'agit toujours d'une enchanteresse jalouse de son pouvoir qui met les forces de la nature à son service, qui renverse l'ordre des choses et provoque un trouble qui s'étend à tous les domaines de la vie… . Le rôle du roi est de libérer son peuple des chaines de cette magicienne et de restaurer l'ordre dans un monde bouleversé par la magie.” L'Art du Ballet de Cour, p. 72.

28 Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma,” p. 157.

29 Montrose, Louis Adrian, “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Power and Gender in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 2 (1983), p. 84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Montrose's “Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship.” Renaissance Drama n.s. 8 (1977), pp. 3-35.

30 Orgel, and Strong, , Inigo Jones, I, 19.Google Scholar

31 “These, therefore, were tropically brought in, before Marriage, as disturbers of that mysticall bodie, and the rites, which were soule unto it; that afterwards, in Marriage, being dutifully tempered by her power, they might more fully celebrate the happinesse of such as live in that sweet union, to the harmonious lawes of Nature and Reason. ”(213)

32 The Renaissance Imagination, virtually passim, but see in particular the first essay “Roles and Mysteries,” pp. 3-23. This scholar seems to me to have missed occasionally the implications of his own work. He writes, p. 21: “Masques are often described by modern critics as acts of mimetic magic, as exorcism. This seems to me utterly misguided.” He goes on to defend this view by abandoning masques and discussing an engraving by Rubens. There is in fact much in his valuable book that would lend support to the description he opposes, especially his analyses of Hymenaei and The Masques of Blacknesse and Beautie.

33 It is noteworthy that Samuel Daniel, author of the first true masque performed after James's accession, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, seems explicitly to repudiate neoplatonic ideas in his prefatory epistle to the published version. Beginning with a discussion of night and sleep in poetry, and going on to discuss their embodiments in his masque, Daniel writes: “These apparitions and shows are but as imaginations and dreams that portend our affections, and dreams are never in all points agreeing right with waking actions: and therefore were they aptest to shadow whatsoever error might be herein presented.” Later Daniel directs his scorn at more pretentious composers of such productions: “Whosoever strives to show most wit about these punctilios of dreams and shows are sure sick of a disease they cannot hide and would fain have the world to think them very deeply learned in all mysteries whatsoever.” A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 28, 30. Daniel's polemic seems directed at Jonson and his idealized conception of courtly entertainment, at a date (1604) when this conception had scarcely had time to define itself.

34 De Man's fullest discussion of allegory appears in his essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” now most easily accessible as chapter 10 of the second edition of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, 1983), pp. 187-228.

35 Gombrich, , Symbolic Images, p. 176.Google Scholar

36 Jonson, Ben, Selected Masques, ed. Orgel, Stephen (New Haven, 1970), p. 2.Google Scholar

37 The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford, 1964), p. 184, 11. 1125-26.

38 Inigo Jones, I, 1, 15.

39 Quoted in The Book of Masques, p. 340.

40 The Book of Masques, p. 361, II. 455-56