Some forty years after the work of Stephen Orgel first stimulated a new wave of studies of the early Stuart court masque, interest in the subject shows few signs of abating. The product of nearly two decades of research and reflection, this book demonstrates how far analysis in this field has progressed beyond the methodologies and assumptions of the 1970s. The whiggish picture of Stuart absolutism that framed Orgel's analysis gives way here to a more nuanced appreciation for the complexities of court politics, while literary and iconographical analysis is supplemented by concepts borrowed from anthropology. Despite these modifications, however, Butler retains Orgel's fundamental view of the masque as a cultural form deeply enmeshed in politics. Although he acknowledges the need to pay attention to aesthetic considerations, he seems most interested in a series of contextual readings that together generate “an encompassing narrative of political and cultural transformation” (1).

An early chapter reviews the history of masque criticism, from the disparaging views of early twentieth-century critics through the work of Orgel and New Historicist scholars inspired by him. In an appreciative but telling critique, Butler argues that Orgel and other critics of the 1970s and 80s exaggerated not only the absolutism of Stuart monarchs but the degree to which the king's privileged gaze dominated masque performances. This resulted in an overly monolithic view of how masques embodied forms of power, one that paid too little attention to the polycentric character of the royal court, “the to and fro of practical political life” (18) and ways in which performances allowed for “symbolic displays of rapprochement, mediation or accommodation” (26) between the king, masque performers and members of the audience. In place of the older view of masques as monolithic expressions of “absolutism,” Butler proposes to read them as complex sociopolitical rituals. Merely by restricting admission to performances, the court drew a boundary between court society and outsiders, in a “rite of social identity … shadowed by a threshold of anxiety about belonging and exclusion” (59–60). The opulence of the jewels and costumes warn by audience members as well as masque performers further emphasized the distinction between privileged insiders and excluded outsiders, thereby reinforcing the sense of “affinity” within the Banqueting House. Performances in which leading courtiers danced roles expressing their mutual cooperation and submission to the king extended the meaning of rituals in which “the crown's power of validation was conjured out of the audience's need to belong” (60).

Although this analysis seems convincing as a description of how masques were intended to work, whether the ritual bonding actually succeeded in practice is a far more difficult question to answer. Butler seems in danger of replacing the literary formalism that lurked just beneath the surface of many New Historicist studies with an anthropological formalism that assumes we can recover the significance of a performance simply by decoding its ritual structure with the aid of theories derived from studies of tribal societies. Given the highly sophisticated views of political ceremony expressed in this period—the contemporary awareness of rituals as potentially deceptive rhetorical performances—this seems overly sanguine. Indeed, Butler himself brings forward evidence that calls into question his belief in the efficacy of the masque's integrating rituals, by highlighting tensions that performances probably failed to resolve. Did the earl of Essex truly feel a greater sense of affinity with the Jacobean court, for example, after watching a masque that celebrated the remarriage of his former wife after a humiliating divorce trial? In the late 1610s, masques featured dances by male courtiers competing for the king's attention in what amounted to “a culture of faction” (208). In 1616, Somerset tried to sabotage a performance by his rival, George Villiers, by issuing invitations to attend to both the French and Spanish ambassadors, in hopes they would quarrel violently over seating arrangements. After an illuminating discussion of such examples of conflict, Butler explains away his own analysis: “In bestowing favours the monarch drew the threads of the social fabric into their unity. … Contests for position which loom so large to us may have seemed less troublesome to early modern audiences” (236).

Butler's desire to reach unequivocal conclusions also occasionally mars his contextual readings of the masques’ relation to politics, as in his treatment of tensions between the pacific imagery of Jacobean masques and the chivalric themes of several entertainments written for Prince Henry. Butler rightly criticizes earlier scholars like Roy Strong for seeing the relationship between father and son as one of straightforward opposition. He acknowledges that disputes over foreign policy issues involved pragmatic considerations as well as differences over religion and ideology, and that the Privy Council James appointed was divided in its attitudes toward European conflicts. Despite these qualifications, he unhesitatingly follows historical scholarship published in the 1970s and 80s in positing an “ideological” divide between the Prince's “interventionist” biases and James's “isolationist” commitment to peace and friendship with Spain. On one level, this is unexceptional, since Prince Henry undeniably became a focal point for militant Protestant aspirations that his father failed to fulfill. But the term “isolationist,” with its connotations deriving from debates over responses to Nazism in the 1930s, seems inappropriate for a king as involved in European diplomacy and intra-Protestant religious disputes on the continent as James I. The relation between the king's actual views and representations in the masques needed a more careful and nuanced treatment.

For the most part, however, Butler's contextual readings convince, and many are incisive. He surveys the entire early Stuart period, paying attention not only to the relatively familiar masques of Jonson and the Caroline period but to a number of performances neglected by previous work. His command of the secondary historical literature is equally impressive. This is a thoroughly researched and thought-provoking book that all students of the early Stuart court should take seriously.