SOURCE: Grantley, Darryll. “Masques and Murderers: Dramatic Method and Ideology in Revenge Tragedy and the Court Masque.” In Jacobean Poetry and Prose: Rhetoric, Representation and the Popular Imagination, edited by Clive Bloom, pp. 194-212. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.

In the essay below, Grantley discusses how Jacobean playwrights subtly projected their own ideological principles onto both aristocratic and popular audiences through the dramatic media of the court masque and the revenge tragedy, or a combination of the two theatrical forms.

Jacobean revenge tragedy, with its turbulent, bloody and uncertain topos, might be thought to have little relationship in terms either of dramatic method or of philosophical concerns with the masque of the court of James I, a dramatic genre of ceremonial serenity and metaphysical certainties. The origins of these two forms of drama were different, as were the purposes they were designed to serve and the audiences for...