Lauren Shohet’s Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century is a valuable addition to scholarship on this seemingly ephemeral genre. Shifting focus from the production of masques to their reception and afterlife, Shohet initiates an important and invigorating new direction in work on the seventeenth-century masque in England. There is, of course, an extensive—indeed potentially daunting—body of research on the production, performance, and politics of the Stuart masque. One of the many impressive features of Reading Masques is its efficient synthesis of existing and sometimes diverse work on this multidisciplinary genre, incorporating more general analyses of Stuart court culture with discussions of specific patrons, scriptors, texts, and readers. Shohet’s prose is clear and always readable—a quality that is of particular importance given the thorough attention accorded to the theoretical landscape. And this is a handsome publication, with nine black-and-white figures (including, helpfully, music scores and printed masque texts) and four appendixes (which are used to illustrate the cataloguing and ownership of masque texts). The comprehensive bibliography of print sources cannot be bettered as a starting point for those wishing to study the seventeenth-century masque in England.

Shohet attends to the neglect of the role of readership and reception in existing work on the Stuart masque. Although this genre is usually (and, in part, correctly) perceived as an ephemeral one, Shohet avers that an analysis that focuses solely on production and performance inadvertently delimits the interpretive possibilities of the masque. Typically, Shohet suggests, it is the intentions of the patron and his or her scriptor(s) that are used to read the masque text. In fact, as is demonstrated across the five chapters of Reading Masques, masque texts “accommodate and indeed anticipate multiplicity of interpretation” (18–19)—something that is taken for granted in genres such as poetry and dramatic works produced for the public playhouses. The introduction situates this argument within relevant interpretive and theoretical contexts, including models of power in the Stuart court, histories of reading, historicist and New Historicist practices, and the category of the public sphere.

The five chapters that follow illustrate and elaborate this argument in broad thematic divisions, finding evidence of contested, divergent, and ambiguous readings in a range of forms, such as correspondence and eyewitness accounts, manuscript lyrics, parodies, ballads, and other performance texts. The possible forms that such evidence of readings and readerly engagements with the masque could assume are explored in chapter 1, and chapter 2 develops this work by considering the “strategies and modes of reading” (35) made possible by masque texts. In these opening chapters, and, indeed, throughout the book, Shohet draws on examples from a wide range of masques and seventeenth-century texts, but the analysis is at its most enlightening and persuasive in the use of specific case studies. Chapter 3 is devoted to two such studies: The Irish Masque at Court (1613) and For the Honour of Wales (1618). Here, Shohet focuses on the masques’ presentation of language and, specifically, the racial and national differences represented and performed by Scots and Welsh accents and usages at the English court. By the use of a range of fonts (with the attendant histories and associations of those fonts), these differences were translated from performance to printed text. These readings demonstrate one of the great strengths of Shohet’s work: the synthesis of detailed textual analysis alongside sensitivity to political, historical, and artistic context and pertinent theoretical concerns.

Chapters 4 and 5 of Reading Masques reinflect the focus to follow through some of the wider implications of a strategy that places greater emphasis on interpretive diversity and reception. Chapter 4 considers the masque in relation to news: how masques provided people (and not just those who attended the performance) with up-to-date information about domestic and foreign policy and how the language and conventions of masque culture helped shaped the ways in which news was formulated and received. The final chapter and conclusion moves the analysis further still to examine the masque’s role in helping create and contour emergent aspects of public culture in the seventeenth century, ending with a discussion of masque texts and dramatic adaptations in the late eighteenth century. This takes us into slightly different territory from that occupied by Britannia Triumphans (1638), the Caroline masque with which Reading Masques opened, but it is a sign of the ambition of Shohet’s argument and possibilities for further research.

Its brief incursion into eighteenth-century drama notwithstanding, the focus of this book is firmly on the seventeenth century. Of course, the masque did not appear fully formed and without precedent on the accession of King James in 1603. Elizabethan entertainments, from the Kenilworth festivities of 1575 to Davison’s Masque of Proteus (1594), have been treated in recent years to the kind of reading practices Shohet finds lacking from discussions of the seventeenth-century masque. Some consideration of scholarship on this earlier period, perhaps taking account of the work of David Bergeron, Curtis C. Breight, William Leahy, and Gabriel Heaton—none of whose publications are included in the bibliography—would have helped situate Shohet’s work within an interpretive tradition, one that does not (or at least should not) identify 1603 as marking a decisive break with earlier cultural practices. Equally, despite Shohet’s very convincing call to shift focus away from the masque within elite settings, the examples discussed are dominated by courtly productions.

Reading Masques insists on the importance of the “afterlife” of masques, their status “in history” (rather than simply “as history”; 35), and their resistance to single fixed interpretations. For these important interventions into masque scholarship, and for its many insightful readings of a wide range of seventeenth-century masques, Shohet’s work is an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of this period and how we engage with its diverse and sometimes contradictory textual traces.