more tales of amusement from the early modern stage

[angevin2]

Well, the Jacobean court, but that's more or less the same thing -- you know those Stuarts. Anyway, another bit of trivia for you which amused me a great deal.

In 1618, the Venetian ambassador and his entourage attended a performance of Ben Jonson's masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, and chaplain Orazio Busino was good enough to write about it

Comments

[angevin2]

Oh, dear. ;) Though I don't suppose James had a wholly un-Saul-like personality...

[angevin2]

I think the "goddesses" thing refers to the fiction of the masque, such as it is -- but yeah, it is rather nice. :) Busino comments at some length earlier in the letter about how impressively the ladies were dressed -- at one point, he says that once the room they were in was brightly light, they shone like stars.

[yvesilena]

HA HAAA! Every king needs a campy Bucks to calm his angry rage. :):)

Hmmm, I think I know why the Venetians were half disgusted. They were homophobes but they *still* could not help but admire the Bucksy goodness.

I wonder what it means to cut 34 capers in succession? I've just realised I don't actually know what 'cutting a caper' looks like. I probably need to know to excise the image from my mind of a knight (in armour) doing the conjuring turn from CATS (i.e. spinning round on one leg) 34 times before falling over in a clanking heap.

I'm not sure if there's anyone else who'd find that as funny as I do. Need more CATS/Shakespeare geeks. (Or actually CATS/Renaissance geeks, since that had nothing to do with Shakespeare...) <3<3<3<3<3<3<3

[angevin2]

Well, it's metonymically Shakespearean, since Jonson wrote the masque and he's only a leap away from Shakespeare (whose plays were often performed at court, especially during James' reign -- his company was the King's Men after all -- but who didn't write courtly theatricals of this kind like Jonson did). ;)

And now there's a little voice in my head going

"The finest of courtiers have something to learn
From George Duke of Buckingham's capering turn..."

...and I really wish it would leave me alone, lest I feel compelled to pursue it. ;)

[yvesilena]

AAAAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAH! YOU MAKE ME SO HAPPY! *grins and cuts capers around you*

[angevin2]

*tips imaginary hat*

I used to be a tremendous fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber's works. Don't listen to him much anymore, but I still have all those songs stored away somewhere in my memory... ;)

[yvesilena]

...yeah, I realise it was completely anachronistic of me to use the term 'homophobes'. Y'know.

[angevin2]

Ah, well. Talking about issues of sexuality in the Renaissance is bound to get us all tied up in semantic knots. (I had a long paragraph in the works about various complications in dealing with homosexuality -- as we would understand it in the modern sense -- in early modern England and deleted it as rambling, since as I said trying to give an idea of the problems takes quite a bit of space, and you may well be aware of them anyway.)

Part of Busino's disgust, too, was just for the ostentation of the whole thing -- he's got a line shortly before the "half disgusted" remark at everyone clamoring around the food table "like so many harpies."

[angevin2]

I definitely need to see that movie one of these days...I'll have to rent it after exams.