Banishing “Franticks” in a Royal Wedding Celebration: Campion’s The Lords’Masque

Abstract

When scholars cite the fascination with madness in early modern England, they cite its representation in Jacobean plays, the many treatises written on it, the many patients who consulted with doctors over it, and the frequent references to Bedlam, the Bethlehem Hospital then dedicated to the care of the insane.1 To this list we can add an antimasque of insane dancers in the Jacobean court masque The Lords'Masque, written by Thomas Campion to celebrate the marriage of King James I's daughter Elizabeth to the German Prince Frederick V, Elector of Palatine, in February 1613.2 If it weren't for these other examples illustrating the popularity of representations of the insane at this time, we might think that a group of mad people emerging from a cave to dance wildly might be a strange feature in an entertainment commissioned by the king to celebrate a royal wedding.The court masque grew out of earlier forms of musical and dramatic entertainment for celebration at royal courts across Europe and, by the Jacobean period in England, had become an magnificent spectacle of song and dance where an elaborate set and extravagant costumes lent a mysterious air to a performance arranged around a brief narrative frame often allegorical or mythical in nature. Drawing on the neo-Platonic concept of music and dance as representations of divine accord, court masques were designed to imitate cosmic harmony through the symmetrical movements of dancers in attune with carefully balanced measures of music in order to display eternal truths through allegorical representations.3 On occasion, the monarch him-or herself participated in the masque, usually as a dancer, so