Love's Welcome at Bolsover
{{short description|Play written by Ben Jonson}}
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{{Use dmy dates|date=December 2021}}
{{Use British English|date=September 2012}}
File:Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire (geograph 291425).jpg]]
Love's Welcome at Bolsover is the final masque composed by Ben Jonson. It was performed on 30 July 1634, three years before the poet's death, and published in 1641.David Lindley, Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments (Oxford University Press, The World's Classics, 1995), pp. xvii, 194–199, 267–269.
At Bolsover
The masque was not produced by the Stuart Court in one of the royal palaces around London, as many of Jonson's notable early masques were. Rather it was staged by William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle (at the time, he was the Earl of Newcastle) at Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire, in honor of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria.Lucy Worsley, Bolsover Castle Guidebook (English Heritage, 2001), p. 35.
The Earl of Newcastle had put on a Jonson masque for his royal visitors at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire the year before: The King's Entertainment at Welbeck, performed on 21 May 1633. It was such a success that the King requested another on his 1634 royal progress. According to Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Duke spent between £14,000 and £15,000 on staging the Bolsover masque and providing for his royal guests and their attendants, which was more than double the £4,000 to £5,000 he had spent for the Welbeck entertainment the previous year.Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 152: C. H. Firth, [https://archive.org/details/cu31924091023931/page/n137/mode/2up The life of William Cavendish by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (London: Routledge, 1906), p. 78]Henry Ten Eck Perry, The First Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband as Figures in Literary History (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1918), p. 18. The Masque of Beauty, one of Jonson's early Court masques, had cost £4,000 to stage in 1608, and was considered exorbitantly expensive at the time.
Mathematical boys
File:Bolsover_Castle_(28363352205).jpg with its original panelling and restored decoration.Lucy Worsley, Bolsover Castle Guidebook (English Heritage, 2001), pp. 18, 20–21.]]
In Love's Welcome, Jonson continued the mockery of Inigo Jones that he had practiced for two decades, starting with Bartholomew Fair (1614) and continuing through The Masque of Augurs (1622), Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624), The Staple of News (1626), and A Tale of a Tub (1633).
In this masque, Jones is personified as "Colonel Iniquo Vitruvius", and encourages craftsmen to dance, including a metal-smith, a woodcarver, a mason, a plumber, and a glazier, as his "true mathematical boys",
Well done my musical, arithmetical, geometrical gamesters! Or rather, my true mathematical boys! It is carried in number, weight, and measure as if the airs were all harmony and the figures a well-timed proportion!David Lindley, Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments (Oxford University Press, The World's Classics, 1995), pp. 195–196, 268.
In the pillar parlour
The masque was staged in what was called the "little castle" at Bolsover, a then-recent (Jacobean) construction.Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (Yale, 1983), pp. 209, 297. The pillared hall or parlour was furnished with five brilliantly colored paintings on the theme of The Senses.Frederick Kiefer, Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 141–142. Jonson alludes to the paintings in his text,Timothy Raylor, "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue: William Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and the Decorative Scheme of Bolsover Castle", Renaissance Quarterly, 52: 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 412–415. {{doi|10.2307/2902059}} and their arrangement in the Neoplatonic hierarchy:
When were the senses in such order placed?
The sight, the hearing, smelling, touching, taste,
All at one banquet?David Lindley, Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments (Oxford University Press, The World's Classics, 1995), pp. 194, 268: Lucy Worsley, Bolsover Castle Guidebook (English Heritage, 2001), pp. 18-19.
The show was described by local witnesses as "stupendous," more than adequate to establish Newcastle's reputation as the greatest "prince...in all the northern quarter" of the kingdom.Julie Sanders, "Jonson's Caroline Coteries," in Kozuka and Mulryne, p. 285. Perhaps the most visually striking element in the masque lay in the two Cupids, Eros (Love) and Anteros (Love Returned), who descended "from the clouds" bearing fronds of palms.
Publication
The masque was published in 1641 in the second folio collection of Jonson's works, and was thereafter included in his canon, although it does not appear in Stephen Orgel's "Complete Masques of Ben Jonson". Manuscripts text of the masque are also extant, in the collection of Newcastle manuscripts including British Library Harley 4955.Lucy Worsley, Bolsover Castle Guidebook (English Heritage, 2001), p. 35.
References
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Further reading
- Kozuka, Takashi, and J. R. Mulryne, eds. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography. London, Ashgate, 2006.
- Orgel, Stephen, ed. The Complete Masques of Ben Jonson. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1969.
External links
- [https://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/works/bolsover/facing/# Love's Welcome at Bolsover: Ben Jonson Online]
- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJv4YUTiQjU English Heritage, Bolsover Castle Masque Project 2014]
- [https://brunel.figshare.com/articles/media/Bolsover_masque/4244897 Brunel University: Love's Welcome: The King and Queen's Entertainment]
- [http://www.derbyshireuk.net/bolsover_castle.html Bolsover Castle.]
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20061118084205/http://www.britcastles.com/bolsover.htm Bolsover Castle.]
{{Ben Jonson}}
Category:Masques by Ben Jonson