THE ILLUSION OF POWER : NEPTUNE'S TRIUMPH AND THE POET'S DILEMMA

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Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion was composed as the Twelfth Night masque for the Court Christmas. Ben Jonson wrote the masque in answer to the request from Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham who had returned from a Spanish mission. Charles and Buckingham had made a secret journey to Spain to negotiate the prince's marriage with the Spanish Infanta and to bring her home to England. The Spanish match had been a favorite and ambitious project of King James. However, after long negotiations the prince and the duke returned home resentfully, and the Jacobean court was divided between James and Prince Charles concerning England's Continental policies. Jonson's masque dealt with the safe return of Prince Charles from his misson to Spain; and yet the subject-matter was to pay homage to King James's political wisdom and the consequent triumph for the victorious return of his son. Neptune and his court was dentified with James I and his court and the argument of the masque was presented as an ideal version of the recent political events. In fact, Charles's mission to Spain brought nothing fruitful to England; and much worse, King James was pushed into a new and hard course in foreign policy. Nevertheless, Jonson's loyalty to the State as the court poet urged him to rewrite English history and to create another myth of Jacobean England as the 'Fortunate Isles'. Jonson was convinced that the poet had obligation to serve the State and to sustain wise government by providing the monarch with good counsel. Yet Jonson was never ignorant of the fact that the masquewriter's function which the poet himself believed to be was not identical with the one that the court audience expected. Jonson's awareness of this gap was demonstrated in the comic dialogue between the 'Poet' and the 'Master-Cooke' of the masque. The main masque celebrated the ideal reign of James I by identifying it with the myth of Ocean God, Neptune. And, by the employment of the poet figure as masque-writer of the masque in progress on the stage, Jonson exposed that the masque world was an illusion, a fiction created by the poet. The meta-masque device introduced in Neptune's Triumph was thus a Jonsonian way of manifestation that the poet's invention alone could achieve the ideal transformation of the Monarchy.

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