A decade ago, if you embarked on a project devoted to masques and entertainments in early modern England, you did so alone. Sure, there were a handful of earlier studies to consult, mostly of either an antiquarian or proto–New Historicist bent, and there was a modest cluster of newer articles unpacking the local political implications of individual masque events. But there was little, if anything, available in the way of sustained, up-to-date criticism on entertainment culture, more broadly. All of this has changed drastically. The last several years have seen the publication of at least five or six monographs on masques and entertainments, and more are on the way. Gabriel Heaton's Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments is the latest in the onslaught of new scholarship and it makes an original contribution to this rapidly expanding subfield. If the occasional emphasis of most of these studies has led their authors to focus on the things that would have been most important at the moment of performance — music, dance, costume, audience arrangement — Heaton reminds readers that masques and entertainments also had rich, complicated textual lives. Paying particular attention to how masques and entertainments were disseminated in manuscript form, Heaton expertly unfolds new ways of assessing how and why these strange, opulent productions were valued by members of the early modern elite.
Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments is divided into two sections, one on the Elizabethan period, the other on the Jacobean, each of which is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on a single event (the tale told to Queen Elizabeth by the hermit, Hemetes, during her visit to Woodstock in 1575) and a single text (the presentation manuscript of The Tale of Hemetes, prepared by George Gascoigne and given to Queen Elizabeth) to show how the textual afterlife of an entertainment could shape the power relationships among royal audience, host, and author in surprising ways. Chapter 2 opens out to the larger topic of Elizabethan tilting. Drawing on the archive of surviving tiltyard speeches, Heaton shows how courtiers like Sir Henry Lee and the earls of Arundel, Oxford, and Essex used these events, both as performance and text, to help articulate their own social and political agendas. Chapter 3 looks at the production and circulation of texts for country house entertainments, reconstructing in fascinating detail how these texts, both manuscript and print, reached elite and non-elite circles of readership. Chapter 4, the first chapter of the Jacobean section, explores how an entertainment mounted by the Company of Merchant Taylors in 1607 negotiated political tensions between the court and the city. It considers, moreover, why the Merchant Taylors subsequently encouraged the dissemination of the entertainment in manuscript. Chapter 5 centers on how the manuscript circulation of a domestic entertainment written by Ben Jonson in 1607 helps us make connections between the social world of elite hospitality and the literary world of coterie poetry. Chapter 6 deals with the Jacobean masque and, especially, with what surviving texts can tell us about divergent conceptions of what a masque was and on what terms it found meaning.
Gabriel Heaton's achievement with Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments is double. If his immediate aim is to instill among scholars overly sensitive to the occasional, spectacular, and ritualistic dimension of entertainments a sense of urgency about how the evolving textual lives of these events have serious social and political implications, he certainly achieves this. In addition to this, though, in successfully navigating, documenting, and making sense of this complex textual archive, Heaton erects the scaffolding from which (one hopes) many new, exciting projects might be assembled.
