TWENTY-FOUR
KING OF THE UNDERWORLD
Twelfth Night, 1611. The curtain drew back on darkness, ‘obscure, and nothing’. In the shadow loomed a rock face, ‘trees, and all wildness that could be presented’ on a stage. The moon rose off the shoulder of the rock, casting a small light. A satyr peeped over a boulder, giggled and called his friends to wake up. ‘Times be short, are made for play.’ Another popped up, and more and more, leaping from behind rocks, to dance, frolic, and chatter, ‘Are there any Nymphs to woo?’
‘If there be, let me have two!’ one called, stretching his body to display himself.
Old Silenus, companion and tutor to Dionysus, came in and clapped his hands. ‘Chaster language! These are nights/Solemn to the Shining rites/of the fairy Prince, and Knights,’ he commanded. ‘We await Oberon, King of the Underworld’, and ‘the height of all our race’.
The satyrs sprang about shouting: ‘What will he do for us? Will he give us pretty toys,/To beguile the girls withal?’
‘And,’ one sniggered, ‘to make them quickly fall’ onto their backs.
Interrupting their bawdy banter – a sound from the cliff face as it split open to show the translucent walls of a gloriously lit palace.
Silenus barked at the satyrs to shut up and bow their heads.
Concealed beneath the surface world, it was a magical kingdom, created by Inigo Jones. Fairies stepped forward playing musical instruments, carrying torches, singing, in the same way musicians preceded King James and Queen Anne in the outer kingdom. Within the fairy palace sat Henry’s friends, his masquing knights. The court spotted the earls of Southampton, Arundel, Essex, Lords Dingwall, Hay and Cranborne among them – the usual suspects.
At the deepest point – right opposite the king, his father – Oberon (Henry) stood in a chariot, with two polar bears harnessed to it. The fairy world mirrored the personnel but also the visual grammar presented to the audience in the hall: everything drew the eye in, from servants on the edges, to the grandees, to the ruler at the centre.
Henry returned the court’s gaze. He really was not a boy any more, but ‘tall, … strong and well proportioned … his eyes quick and pleasant, his forehead broad … his chin broad and cloven’, his whole ‘face and visage comely and beautiful … with a sweet, smiling, and amiable countenance … full of gravity’. He resembled his Danish uncle, King Christian IV: his mother’s side. His skin weathered from a life spent outdoors, Francis Bacon thought the prince’s emerging adult face showed a new leanness, ‘his look grave … the motion of his eyes composed’, above a big nose, and mouth tightly closed. This countenance, focused, stubborn, wilful and stern, gazed out at them.
‘To a loud triumphant music’, the King of the Underworld’s carriage moved forward. Ben Jonson announced a ‘night of homage to the British court,/And ceremony due to Arthur’s chair’. The fairy kingdom came to swear the ‘annual vows’ of obedience, the fairies said, and ‘all their glories lay’ before the king. King James ‘keeps the age up in a head of gold:/That in his own true circle still doth run/And holds his course as certain as the sun’. Jonson’s verbal footwork ran round to honour masque protocols, locating the ruler above everything. Crown and sun were stock symbols of the king. Jonson evoked James as another great unifier, the classical ‘all’, by imagining him as the universal god Pan.
If Henry was Oberon – King of the Fairy World and King of the Night – then Henry was also an earthly king tonight. If both were rulers, they were of equal status. Two kings ruled the same kingdom, one on the surface, one beneath it. At Henry’s investiture and his Epiphany ‘barriers’, he confirmed himself in his privileged, though subordinate, role as the most important British subject. Six months later here he was, already a king, ruling his own kingdom. His territory occupied the same horizontal footprint. The different narrative threads threatened a serious lapse of manners, inferring a potential usurper.
Adding to the tension, and holding the masque world and the ordinary world together, this Oberon had become a figure of English mythology since Shakespeare made him Titania’s consort in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Pan was the foreigner – a Roman, classical god. Was Henry/Oberon, the first prince born to rule the united kingdoms, the native ruler, and King James (Pan), ruler of Scotland for half his life, the alien here?
The popular, often revived A Midsummer Night’s Dream meant that the character of Oberon was well known to audiences. Subtitling this masque ‘The Faerie Prince’ recalled the court’s memory of Edmund Spenser’s great poem, The Faerie Queene – an allegory of Elizabeth I and her glorious reign. The late poet was back in many people’s minds this year, as Spenser’s works had been brought out in a special commemorative volume.
Jonson then turned the drama to restore convention. All know ‘the moon … borrows from a greater light’, he said. Henry/the Moon only shines because of his proximity to the Sun/James. Phosphorus, the Morning Star, rose now to reassert the natural order. ‘The moon is pale and spent … Give way,’ Phosphorus ordered, ‘as night hath done, and so must you, to day.’ Except, as Jonson focused the action back on the king, the masque narrative twisted back again.
The Sylvans’ parting song trilled:
What haste the jealous sun doth make
His fiery horses up to take,
And show once more his head!
Lest, taken with the brightness of this night,
The world should wish it last, and never miss his light.
They all heard it: the Sun – the king – was ‘jealous’ of the Moon, and bolted up to light the world, in case the world preferred moonlight.
With some relief, the masque opened out into the ‘common measures’ – the dancing. Henry’s masquers invited the ladies of the court to join them, dissolving permanently the boundaries separating the two worlds. ‘The Prince … took the Queen to dance, the Earl of Southampton the Princess [Elizabeth], and each of the rest his lady.’ Henry placed his mother at the centre of the masque stage.
Robert Johnson, Shakespeare’s lutenist, gave his royal patron dance tunes harmonious and complex, yet orderly. Henry and the queen in the centre, mirrored the king and Carr on the royal dais.
The musicians increased the tempo, announcing corrantoes and galliards for which the younger court ladies and gentlemen usually came up. Vigorous and sensual steps made the dancers move with animal vitality, rushing towards each other, stamping, twirling, pushing against each other.
Anne turned to leave the floor, but Henry seized her hand ‘for a corranto which was continued by others, and then the galliards began, which was something to see and admire’. Mother and son held the court’s gaze – royalty, fully alive on their stage. Abandoned to the dance, to the mastery of steps, individuality was given up in the perfection of movement as a group. To keep time as the dance speeded up signified a lofty spirit. Rhythm amidst the hurly burly of life was a quality Jacobeans cultivated and valued.
In Richard II, Shakespeare had Richard account for losing the throne by his failure to keep time, good ‘measure’. His sad reflections on music are a metaphor for power and his loss – the opposite of Prince Henry’s dance. ‘How sour sweet music is,/When time is broke and no proportion kept!/So is it in the music of men’s lives,’ Richard muses. ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ Henry, his mother, sister, and friends, kept ‘time’ in these ‘common measures’, showing fitness to rule.
When Henry finally let his mother go, his followers, including Southampton and Essex, came and took her up, keeping the queen in the centre of the stage. This part of the masque had no allotted timescale. They could dance all night if they had enough vigour. Carr did not join in with Henry’s set, denying James the pleasure of watching him as he danced. Around midnight – early for a masque – the king sent word they ‘should make an end’.
Oberon, the Faerie Prince was great entertainment and a neat political device. It endorsed and exposed the king and Henry’s relationship. No one would think otherwise than that Henry, in his masques, made statements about power and his relationship to it. The following day, the prince asked Jonson to annotate a copy of the text for him, so he could trace the sources of the ideas.
Art was political, but Henry and the new Stuart court, in common with their Renaissance contemporaries, also held the reverse to be true. The state should be a work of art. It must be harmonious in all its parts: a well-sharpened, beautifully made tool of power, in the hands of an expert. ‘The players,’ said Samuel Calvert to diplomat William Trumbull, ‘do not forbear to represent upon their stage the whole course of this present time, not sparing either King, State or Religion, in so great absurdity and with such liberty, that any would be afraid to hear them.’
The queen’s analysis of the state of the court played on 3 February 1611, Candlemas, or the Feast of the Purification of the Mother of God. Jonson called the piece: Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly. ‘The queen and the Prince [worked hard] preparing … the masques,’ moving in harmony to counterpoint the king and favourite with a power bloc to rival that of the bedchamber.
Onto the stage danced a sphinx with a woman’s head and body, a lion’s legs and eagle’s wings: a symbol of transgressive femininity. It/she was ‘leading Love’, pulling Cupid on the end of a rope. The Sphinx held Cupid’s bow firmly in her hand, having tied Cupid’s hands together using his own blindfold, which she had ripped from his eyes. Blindfold gone, Cupid was distraught. Love is not blind. He saw. He knew.
Love blind and bound implied the repression of sinful desire. Blindness in this sense was part of the ordering principle of sacred love, almost in the biblical sense, of ‘not letting thine eye offend thee’. Unbound, letting yourself look, chaos followed. For Henry’s society, Cupid contained the potential of both loves. Here, the Sphinx and Cupid unbound embodied a disordering force. The court knew the instant they took all this in: tonight was about the disordering effect of misguided love.
Cupid’s ‘bow’ was now a ‘sceptre’ in the Sphinx’s hands – disordered Love ruled with it. It was only a step to imagine who might have taken the king’s sceptre in his hand to try and rule with it.
Cupid pleaded with the Sphinx. ‘Without me/All again would chaos be’. He stood for, even fought for, ‘cosmic and divine love, whose arrows pierce the world to hold it together’. As a positive force, Cupid’s arrows of desire pinned diverse things together, and held them, safely contained.
The Sphinx dragged on other prisoners – the Queen of the Orient and her eleven ‘daughters of the Morn’ – played by Queen Anne and her ladies, including the Princess Elizabeth, Lucy Bedford, Penelope Rich, and Frances Howard, Countess of Essex.
Frances was regarded as the most beautiful woman at court. Court gossip questioned her conduct: she had begun an intensive flirtation with James’s beloved, Carr, and also with Prince Henry, friend of her husband. ‘Notwithstanding the inestimable Prince Henry’s martial desires, and initiation into the ways of godliness,’ wrote one court observer, Lady Essex had ‘first taught his eye and heart, and afterwards prostituted herself to him, who reaped the first fruits.’
Others agreed. Henry was ‘captivated by her eyes, which then found no match but themselves’. Might Frances become a royal mistress and initiate the prince into the erotic side of love, which most agreed had bypassed him till now? ‘The most beautiful and specious ladies of the Court and City’ thronged round him. Should a young man of sixteen not look and fantasise a little? Cornwallis noted Henry was stirred by ‘unbridled appetites’, but added that if he was not very ‘chaste in his inward thoughts, yet did he … cover them’.
Tonight, the court ladies paraded their sexual allure. Dresses cut to their navels exposed their breasts through translucent gauze, their limbs outlined against layers of diaphanous silks. Frances mesmerised. Essex was rapidly becoming angered, seeing his wife’s head turned by the attention received from every direction except her husband’s.
If he had desired her, most agreed Henry’s attraction to Lady Essex was short-lived. His ‘more heroic innate qualities … soon raised him out of the slumber of that distemper’. More likely, he saw Frances and Carr’s flirting – perhaps heard that Carr’s confidant, Thomas Overbury, was involving himself by writing Carr’s love letters for him – and saw the dangers. Knowing how his father loved Carr, the whole emotional mess may well have sickened the teenager.
Henry slighted Frances. ‘Dancing one time among the ladies, and her glove falling down, it was taken up, and presented to him, by one that thought he did him acceptable service; but the Prince refused to receive it … He would not have it,’ stating: ‘it is stretched by another’ – meaning Carr.
Whatever the truth beneath the coquetry, unless Cupid answered the riddle of the Sphinx, all the masque ladies would stay imprisoned by Disordered Love. Cupid eventually came up with the answer to the riddle: ‘Albion’ (meaning James). This word freed all of the prisoners.
The masque ended by uniting the Queen of the Orient (Anne) with her proper spouse, Albion (James), and cutting the Sphinx/Disordered Love out of the sacred circle of royal love. If only.
Out on the city streets, on the public stage, without the need to please a royal patron, Ben Jonson addressed a myriad of problems – favourites, the evil of flatterers, sexual and political corruption, right rule, and financial excess – in a different form. Neither Henry nor his father came out of it well. In August 1611, Jonson premiered Catiline, His Conspiracy at the Globe, acted by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. Based on Roman imperial history, Catiline explored corruption under a weak absolute ruler.
The state is an ‘iron yoke’, says Catiline. ‘Liberties’ curtailed, citizens are forced to witness:
The Commonwealth engrossed by so few,
The giants of the state, that do, by turns,
Enjoy and defile her.
They watch as the commonwealth, the common weal of the people, is gang-raped repeatedly.
Catiline is a dark revenge drama. The word ‘engrossed’ captured perfectly the image of the ‘giants of the state’ slaking their appetites on the commonwealth. Still not sated, they asset-strip the whole earth for their personal gain, and engross the commonwealth with it, almost impregnating her with their spoils.
All the earth …
Peoples and nations pay them hourly stipends;
The riches of the world flows to their coffers,
And not to Rome’s.
The powerful grasp ‘all places, honours, offices’. James offered honours for cash, lavished gifts on his favourites, while Salisbury sat at the top of a patronage pile that revolted many to behold; although, he was too powerful for anyone to risk challenging, except perhaps James or Henry. The ‘giants of the state’ only leave us:
The dangers, the repulses, judgements, wants,
Which how long will you bear, most valiant spirits?
It infuriated Catiline to witness the elite ‘swell with treasure which they pour’:
Out i’ their riots, eating, drinking, building,
Ay, i’ the sea; planing of hills with valleys,
And raising valleys above the hills, whilst we
Have not to give our bodies necessaries.
This was the voice of the other world that Jonson and Henry’s tavern wits frequented. So far, Henry could not be charged with corruption, but he was extravagant and indulged his desire to accumulate possessions that reflected his status and virtue.
How could the people enjoy their liberties when they were left too poor to act? Henry, his mother, Salisbury, Suffolk, Southampton, Pembroke, Arundel, the great ones of the land, poured fortunes into building, landscaping, collecting. By their actions, the rich might believe they enacted the popular neo-Platonic idea, in which all cultural expressions possessed the potential to transform those they touched. Their gestures did not reach most of the commonwealth.