SOURCE: “The Masque and the Marvelous,” in Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous, University of Nebraska Press, 1997, pp. 99-129.

In the following excerpt, Platt contrasts the rational literary aspects of the masque as embodied in Ben Jonson's work with the fantastic and visual qualities of Inigo Jones's contributions.

To wonder first, and then to excellence, By virtue of divine intelligence. 

—Ben Jonson, Love's Triumph through Callipolis

An examination of the masque necessarily involves encountering staged versions of several conflicts treated in earlier chapters: reason and wonder, word and image, the naturalistic and the marvelous. By investigating wonder in the masque—and especially the tension between verbal and visual that unfolds—I explore from a slightly different angle the mutual dependence of politics and theater, statecraft and stagecraft, that has been covered relentlessly in recent criticism.¹ The very structure of the masque not only revealed wonder and epistemological confusion...