SOURCE: “Ben Jonson's Haddington Masque and The Masque of Queenes: Stuart England and the Notion of Order,” in CLAJ: College Language Association Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3, March, 1987, pp. 362-78.

In the following essay, Marsh-Lockett examines Jonson's efforts to educate King James on the tenets of successful monarchy through The Haddington Masque and The Masque of Queenes.

In the canon of criticism of Ben Jonson's work, treatments of the masques and entertainments occupy relatively little space. For many years they were dismissed as subliterary types with little thematic significance, and only commentaries made by Jonson himself indicated a true appreciation of the literary merits of these works. In my consideration of the Jonsonian masque, however, I have found an apparent concern on Jonson's part with the idea of a “political Eden”; that is to say a concern with stable conditions of government. I have found, moreover, that the works fall...