SOURCE: Orgel, Stephen. “The Role of King.” In The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance, pp. 59-87. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Orgel interprets Jacobean and Caroline masques as a mirror reflecting the crown as it wanted to be seen. He asserts that for Charles I the masque was an expression of the strength of his royal will—even when, as in Shirley's The Triumph of Peace, it attempted to correct or advise the monarch.

Hostile critics saw in the royal histrionics only frivolity or hypocrisy, and even sympathic observers regularly referred to masques as “vanities.” This, indeed, is Prospero's term for his own masque, “some vanity of mine art.”¹ The description is exact and the charge irrefutable: these works are totally self-regarding. They are designed to be so. “All representations,” wrote Ben Jonson, “especially those of this nature in court...