Love's Triumph Through Callipolis
Love's Triumph Through Callipolis was the first masque performed at the Stuart Court during the reign of King Charles I, and the first in which a reigning monarch appeared. The work was written by Ben Jonson, with costumes, sets, and stage effects designed by Inigo Jones, and music by Nicholas Lanier. This play Also played in Greece national theatre in 1979 together with the Johnsons masques Oberon, the faery prince and News from the new world discovered in the moon.
Masquing resumed
At the start of his reign in 1625, Charles discontinued the practice of staging annual masques during the Christmas season, which had prevailed throughout the reign of his father
King and courtiers
Love's Triumph Through Callipolis, performed at
Both the text of the masque and Charles's personal participation in it supported his traditionalist position of absolute royal authority. Yet three of the noblemen who participated in the masque with Charles, the Earls of Pembroke, Newport, and Holland, were dissenters from Charles's policy of personal rule; they were part of the Parliamentary party at Court that would assert itself a decade later.[2]
Platonic love
Both of the 1631 masques deal with the theme of
Publication
Shortly after their performances, both 1631 masques, Callipolis and Chloridia, were published together in a quarto issued by the bookseller Thomas Walkley. (The 1631 quarto was dated "1630," since prior to 1751 England started the New Year on 25 March instead of 1 January. See: Old Style and New Style dates.) Callipolis was reprinted in the second folio collection of Jonson's works in 1641.
Notes
References
- Britland, Karen. Drama in the Courts of Henrietta Maria. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- Leapman, Michael. Inigo: The Troubled Life of Inigo Jones, Architect of the English Renaissance. London, Headline Book Publishing, 2002.
- Mulryne, James Ronald, and Margaret Shewring, eds. Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Orgel, Steven, ed. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1969.