Giordano Bruno and the Stuart court masques.

It has long been known that Bruno's fourth Italian dialogue, Lo spaccio della bestia trionfante, written and published in London in 1584, was used as a source by Thomas Carew for his masque Coelum Britannicum.(1) This was Carew's only masque; but it was by no means a minor event within the Stuart calendar of court entertainments. However, in spite of general agreement on the quality of Coelum Britannicum as one of the major entertainments of the Stuart court, the use by Carew of Bruno's dialogue has never been extensively or satisfactorily commented on. Both Bruno and Carew scholars have clearly been ill at ease with the relationship and have tended to dismiss it with a few brief and evasive remarks.

There are few contributions of any significance to what is a very fragmentary discussion. In 1949 Rhodes Dunlap in his edition of The Poems of Thomas Carew supplied in his commentary on the masque a useful, if partial, list of the passages in the Spaccio that Carew took over and integrated into his text.(2) In 1964 Frances Yates referred to Dunlap's work in her book on Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, raising the question of the Bruno-Carew relationship briefly in a chapter on Bruno and Tommaso Campanella. Yates thought that the two Italian philosophers shared a common mystical cult of the French and British monarchies that Carew incorporated into his masque.(3) In 1973 Orgel and Strong raised the question of Carew's source in their essay on "Platonic Politics" in the edition of Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court.(4) Orgel and Strong accepted without question Yates's Hermetic interpretation of a Bruno with pronounced mystical leanings. Carew's masque, on the other hand, was read by them as a powerfully poetical but also keenly intellectual Machiavellian as well as Neoplatonic celebration of absolute monarchy far removed from Bruno's esoteric and occult mysticism. Orgel and Strong concluded that Carew was only superficially interested in Bruno's text: he took from it only the fable while the meanings of the masque remained original to Carew and Inigo Jones.

The widespread influence of this much-quoted essay by the major authorities on the Stuart masque has had the effect of quelling further discussion of Carew's use of Bruno. Subsequent scholars have rarely bothered any longer even to name Bruno as a source in their discussions of Carew and his masque. Among the few notable exceptions are Annabel Patterson's interesting pages on "Thomas Carew: 'a privileged Scoffer?'" in Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, where the ambiguities of Carew's masque are underlined. A few years later John Kerrigan's British Academy lecture on Carew recognized the political sympathies expressed in Bruno's Spaccio as a classical republicanism filtered through Machiavelli. Kerrigan notes that Bruno's sense of universal vicissitude renders Jove and the Olympian Gods subject to fate and decay. Added to the openly heretical and anti-Christian polemic that is such a notable aspect of Bruno's dialogue, Carew's choice of source, in Kerrigan's opinion, hardly promises "a celebration of that royal asterism, the King as Defender of the Faith."(5) To these examples may be added the brief remarks by Joanne Altieri in her essay "Carew's Momus: A Caroline Response to Platonic Politics," where the "prevailingly unpanegyric eye" of Bruno's Momus is seen as the inspiration for what the author considers as Carew's brilliant but at the same time ambiguous undercutting of Mercury's Platonic idealizations.(6)

This paper will attempt a more searching and widespread inquiry into the presence of Bruno's philosophical dialogues in the fragile, refined, and essentially illusory world of the Stuart court masque. What political considerations, literary choices, or possible misreadings led to the unlikely intrusion of the Nolan philosophy into the elegant vistas of Inigo Jones's royal banqueting hall in Whitehall? For Bruno's attitude to the courts and monarchs of his time was disturbingly ambivalent. It is known that during his years in London between 1583 and 1585 Bruno moved a little uneasily on the outer edges of the radically Protestant, aristocratic circle of the Earl of Leicester and his nephew Sir Philip Sidney.(7) Bruno's first Italian dialogue written in England, the Cena de le ceneri, which argues for a post-Copernican infinite universe, mentions Leicester's kindness and generosity and warmly praises the cultural and courtly brilliance of Sidney and his friend Fulke Greville.(8) The Spaccio itself and Bruno's last Italian dialogue written in London, De gli eroici furori, both carried important dedicatory letters to Sidney.(9) Bruno further tells us that he was received more than once at court by Elizabeth I as one of the gentlemen attendants of the French Ambassador Michel de Castelnau, and his praise of the "Diva Elizabetta" was so ardent that it was brought up against him in Italy at his trial.(10) Some years after his departure from. England in 1585, in the first work of his Latin masterpiece known as the Frankfurt trilogy, the De triplici minimo published in 1591, Bruno makes a glowing reference to the marriage of James VI of Scotland with Anne of Denmark in 1589, and he presents the future James I of England as one of the heroes of his times.(11) On the other hand, Bruno is careful not to present himself in a courtly role in his works. Rather he tends to underline his humble origins and his clerical poverty. In the Cena he presents himself as unassuming and unkempt, with buttons missing on his jerkin, creating a satirical contrast with his bejewelled and begowned opponents from Oxford in the cosmological debate that the dialogue describes. In the last work of the Frankfurt trilogy, the De immenso, he takes leave of his reader in the guise of a virile satyr: "Nature made me rough and shaggy, and I shall never learn how to wear emerald rings on my unkempt hands, how to curl my hair or color my face with rouge, how to adorn my head with perfumed jasmine, walk elegantly, dance languidly, speak in affected tones."(12) These are words that seem to define Bruno as a critic of the decadent and declining Renaissance court. They suggest that had he survived into the seventeenth century, he might even have had some sympathies with those unquiet spirits who in 1633, when Carew wrote his masque, were already pressing in around the magic circle of Whitehall and would later claim the head of its defeated king.

This ambivalence on the part of Bruno would make him a strange presence indeed in the world of the masque if its Platonic politics exhausted themselves in a linear and ever-repeated celebration of royal power and its divine authority, as the interpretations of Orgel and Strong tend to suggest. Recent readings of many of the masques, however, especially of the Caroline period, have tended to notice the subversive tensions playing under the surface of the apparently smooth and unclouded fabric of the masquers' world. It is necessary to bear in mind the severe pressures to which poets and artists were subjected in those years of absolute monarchical rule, when criticism and political discussion could only be attempted in oblique and muted forms. And to bear in mind too the particular characteristics of the masque form, with its codified moves and messages, and elaborate, spectacular rituals that nevertheless could be, and sometimes were, stretched at the seams to include indications and variants strangely at odds with the necessary celebration of monarchical power. Seen in these terms, it seems to me possible to see the reference to Bruno and the Nolan philosophy as a deliberate and significant one - and not only on the part of Carew. I shall be suggesting in this paper that Bruno's presence can be detected in other Stuart masques as well, going back to their beginnings in the reign of James I. I shall also try to show that Bruno's ethical concept of correctly wielded political power - his reforming zeal that lay behind the purge of the corrupt constellations of the zodiac in the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante or the heroic pursuit of knowledge in De gli eroici furori - provided the masquers who turned to his texts with powerfully suggestive imagery and themes.

In an early but important and influential essay on "Bruno and the Emblematic Conceit in the Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences," Frances Yates pointed out that parts of Bruno's De gli eroici furori read like a Renaissance emblem book, with the difference that the emblems are described in words instead of in pictures.(13) It could equally well be pointed out that the final sequences of the Furori are cast in a form that seems to derive directly from the masque. I refer to the fifth dialogue of the second part where the nine heroic lovers who are searching for divine truth after being blinded by the enchantress Circe finally reach the temperate and healing shores of the river Thames. Here the chief nymph of the region - who can certainly be identified with Queen Elizabeth I, although the identification is not made explicitly by Bruno in his text - breaks the seal of a vase given to the blind men by Circe and sprinkles their eyes with its healing liquid. The blind men's sight is restored, and they gaze into the two eyes of the nymph who reveals to them the double truth of heaven and earth, body and mind, the physical and the metaphysical perceived as a single principle of unity and truth. This is Bruno's version of the ultimate good, which as he underlines is an ultimate good on earth; for, as he had already insisted in La cena de le ceneri, the divinity is within us, closer to us than we are to ourselves. Uplifted by this revelation of a divine truth that lies about and within them, the nine lovers sing a song that expresses their new sense of the harmony pervading all things. This is not the harmony of the spheres of Neoplatonic philosophy, but an earthly harmony that the lovers create themselves, each on his chosen instrument and each singing a song of his own composition. Finally to song they add dance, wheeling around in a circle of ecstatic praise of the unique nymph and the infinite universe. This comprises the reigns of both Ocean and Jove whose treasures run parallel to each other in a process of eternal vicissitude and change.(14)

It seems to me probable - although as far as I know the suggestion has never been made - that this final sequence of De gli eroici furori was suggested to Bruno by Baltasar de Beaujoyeulx's Balet comique de la royne presented at the French court of Henry III in Paris in 1581 when Bruno was there.(15) The entertainment was more a masque in the English sense than a ballet, with a written text and illustrations that were published soon after the event. This means that Bruno could have studied the Baler comique in detail, even if his status in Paris was not such as to admit him to the court for the event itself. In either case he would have found a masque based on the concept of a struggle between Circe and the higher virtues.(16) The entertainment began with the introduction of a mythological tableau figuring Circe in a sumptuous garden with Pan just outside its confines playing on his pipes in a little wood. Beyond the garden and the castle of Circe could be seen in the distance the streets of a town intersecting at a focal point in line with the base of the throne from which the King watched the entertainment. The perspective of the scenography thus underlined according to a long established tradition the centrality of the presence of the monarch within the world of the court drama. In the course of the long and complicated mythological action, interspersed at frequent intervals with music and dance, Circe managed to enchant the naiads and with them Mercury, the messenger of the Gods. To solve the crisis Jupiter and Minerva appeared on the scene and with the aid of Pan and his rough satyrs defeated the enchantress with their divine powers, although allowing her to remain free within the precincts of her garden. Released from the enchantments of Circe, the naiads then combined in an intricate geometrical dance during which they managed always to remain facing the figure of the king. The French queen then presented the king with a gold medal figuring a dolphin swimming in the sea, while the other ladies of the court presented their gentlemen with gifts which were all "things of the sea" decorated with representations of the sea-nymphs. The sea-imagery that dominated the central sequences of the entertainment had the function of reminding the king and his courtiers of their human dimension by linking them to a process of perpetual generation and mutability.(17) The dolphin, however, by leaping out of the sea, frees itself from the process of mutability and participates in a celestial sphere that the figure of the king represents on earth. In the final sequences of the French court entertainment Circe has been defeated by the royal presence, and her garden, purged of base mortality, appears in its full glory, flanked by high towers and decorated with sparkling diamonds.

This mythical and emblematic entertainment of the French court was one of the most elaborate and discussed of the last decades of the sixteenth century; and it is highly probable that Bruno had it in mind when he composed the final sequences of the Furori. His use of his source, however, was subtly critical. Bruno's unique nymph remains herself a part of - indeed, a symbolic expression of - the world of corruptibility and mutability that the blind men rediscover in all its variety and vitality under her guidance. Like Bruno's Jupiter in the Spaccio, she is herself involved in a universal process that is seen as the very process of life itself. She might dominate the sphere of history and time for an instant, and if she does that with intelligence, her contribution to history will be great while the process of metempsychosis may allow her, through industry and wisdom, to rise even further in the universal scale of being. But she can never escape from the vicissitude and play of contraries that define a universe conceived now as the infinite expression of infinite plenitude. Bruno goes further. The songs of the seventh and eighth blind men conceive of the process of infinite vicissitude as essentially a revolutionary process. Just as day follows night and knowledge progresses revealing what earlier was hidden, so the same vertiginous process of change and decay "suppresses the eminent and raises the lowly." This re-elaboration within a philosophical context of an infinitistic naturalism of the traditional image of Fortune's wheel, imposes on the figure of the monarch an undeniably human dimension: if the monarch is a representation of divinity, so to some degree is everybody else, and indeed every aspect or atom of the infinite whole. Elizabeth I was no fool, and she appears to have understood very well what Bruno was getting at. In the only recorded remark that she made about him, she called him a man of no faith and no respect.(18)

All this would seem to suggest that Bruno had no role to play in the Stuart court masque and that if he did end up there, it was through a process of misreading and misunderstanding. But I shall be arguing that this was not the case. One of the first masques in which his presence can, I believe, be traced is Tethys' Festival by Samuel Daniel; and it so happens that Daniel was one of the few components of the Stuart court who had almost certainly known Bruno during his years in London and was in a particularly favorable position to have read with care, and understood, the terms of his philosophy. One of the few well-known and indisputable references to Bruno in England in contemporary English texts is in the anonymous preface signed N.W. to Daniel's translation from the Italian of an emblem book, The Worthy Tract of Paulus Iovius, published in London in 1585. Bruno's name is invoked here at a literary rather than a philosophical level: he is recalled as a scholar who, while speaking at Oxford, had defended the importance of translations. Daniel was an Oxford man, and although the reference to Bruno has to be attributed to the still unidentified N.W., its prominence seems to suggest that Bruno himself had played a part in stimulating the translation made by Daniel, who may well also have been present at Bruno's Oxford lectures. Later on he would marry the sister of John Florio, the closest of Bruno's friends in London and, as his English-Italian dictionary witnesses, an enthusiastic reader of Bruno's works.(19) Further biographical details suggest that Daniel might have kept up a relationship with Bruno after his departure from England. Bruno left London in October 1585 in the retinue of the French ambassador who was recalled to Paris for diplomatic reasons at that time. We know that Daniel too was in Paris from the end of 1585 until August 1586, which exactly coincides with Bruno's brief second stay in that city. Later on, Daniel traveled to Italy, and his knowledge of the language was undoubtedly sufficient for him to read Bruno's works with care.(20) Daniel's philosophical poem Musophilus, containing a general defense of learning, which was published in London in 1599, is in the form of a dialogue between the poet Musophilus and a figure called Philocosmus. The poem is dedicated to Fulke Greville in whose house Bruno's Ash Wednesday supper, with its dramatic defense of the Copernican cosmology, is supposed to have taken place.(21) Daniel's poem is full of echoes of Bruno's works. It contains the idea of a heliocentric infinite universe and propounds an ideal of learning familiar to the reader of De gli eroici furori. Daniel's men of learning "set their bold Plus ultra far without / The pillars of those Axioms age propounds. / Discov'ring dayly more and more about, / In that immense and boundlesse Ocean / Of Natures riches, never yet found out."(22)

It is well to remember that at the end of the sixteenth century the concept of a boundless or infinite universe, which contradicted in full the still officially accepted Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos of the closed spheres, was closely connected with the name of Bruno. Scientists such as Kepler in Prague or Thomas Harriot and the group around the Ninth Earl of Northumberland in England all discussed the question of the infinity of the universe through an explicit reference to Bruno's cosmological dialogues.(23) For in works such as his De l'infinito, written and published in London in 1584, and his De immenso et innumerabilibus, published in Frankfurt in 1591, Bruno had been the first to expand Copernican heliocentricity in terms of an infinite universe containing an infinite number of worlds. The Lucretianism of these works is clear and explicit. Indeed the De immenso, which is largely a scientific poem, openly takes the De rerum natura as its literary as well as its philosophical model. The metaphor of the infinite universe as an unbounded ocean, although it could have been derived directly from Lucretius himself, is found repeatedly in the cosmological debate of this period in references to and readings of Bruno. Someone so closely connected as Daniel was to Florio, who includes Bruno's De l'infinito among the texts used for the compilation of his dictionary, can be assumed to have known the modern Brunian derivation of this pregnant metaphor, with its subversive metaphysical implications. For if the natural universe itself is an infinite ocean of divine life and being, a crisis tends to occur with respect to the concept of a transcendental God.

Ocean imagery is the basis of Daniel's second mask, Tethys' Festival, in which King James I's queen appeared as the figure of Tethys, Queen of the Ocean and wife of Neptune, and her ladies in the shapes of nymphs presiding over several rivers. This mask was presented on 5 June 1610 as part of the lengthy celebrations that marked the creation as Prince of Wales of the young Prince Henry, who was soon to die before reaching maturity. Its text was published in the same year with an interesting preface by Daniel himself who claimed that "shewes and spectacles of this nature are usually registered among the memorable acts of the time, being complements of state."(24) Later on, however, Daniel admits to having received "rough censures" for his masque, although he fails to say what kind of censures they were. We do know that he was not invited to compose another masque, and it was Ben Jonson who would become the official court poet, with Inigo Jones as his scenographer. Daniel's effort had clearly not been appreciated. In his preface he excuses himself as being only a "poore inginer for shadowes" who frames "images of no result": a remark which indicates that Daniel saw his masque in terms of that fleeting, umbral concept of being to which Bruno had given powerful expression in his De umbris idearum.(25)

Daniel's spectacle is centered around water imagery, with naiads and tritons who sing to musical instruments a celebration of spring as the new prince is created. Tethys, the Queen of Ocean, is associated with the "intelligence which moves the sphere of circling waves," and her principal attendant is a "lovely Nymph of stately Thames." The scarf that is presented by Zephirus to the prince on behalf of Tethys is clearly associated with the pervading imagery of water and waves, underlining the prince's participation in the sphere of mutability and vicissitude rather than his supernatural or divine attributes. The other gift, a precious bejeweled sword, symbolizes his power to dominate the ocean of vicissitude with action and with thought, a dualism reminiscent of the two shining eyes of the nymph of the river Thames who opens Circe's magic vase and heals the blindness of the heroic searchers in the final sequences of Bruno's Furori. In Daniel's masque, as in Bruno's dialogue, the Oceanic sphere, when comprehended in its infinite life-giving wonder, is one of "Love and Amitie," and the prince is exhorted not to attempt to move outside the pillars that define its boundaries. Apart from the anti-metaphysical implications of this warning, which are surprising enough in a court masque, there seem to be some unexpected anti-imperialistic emotions at play here. The prince is told not to envy the treasures and riches brought to Spain by her discovery and dominion of new continents, but to search for more certain riches at home: "For Nereus will by industry unfold / A chemicke secret, and turne fish to gold." The new science appears in Daniel's view to offer more than the new colonial adventures, a position that suggests a further influence of Bruno's Italian dialogues where the anti-imperialistic note is a powerful one. For Bruno was convinced that Europe could only take with her to the new world the corruption and disease of her own sick civilization.(26)

After the presentation of the gifts to the prince, Daniel and Inigo Jones mounted a richly elaborate sea-scene dominated above by the opening of the heavens, which appeared as three circles of lights and glasses, one within another, which began to move circularly. Daniel's description of this part of the masque emphasizes the use of number symbolism, which has been acutely analyzed by John Pitcher in an interesting study of Tethys' Festival.(27) Pitcher, however, fails to consider this elaborate scenic mechanism as an attempt to represent through a play of multiple movements and reflections Bruno's infinite cosmology. It was a central tenet of Bruno's cosmology that there is no sphere of fixed stars, that all the celestial bodies move, even if most of them, imperceptibly to the human eye, and also that all movements in the infinite universe are in some way linked together as reflections or echoes of each other.(28) This last idea was further expressed by Daniel and Jones where Tethys and her nymphs emerge from the sea-world and meander up river beds until they reach the tree of victory that links the earth to the revolving skies. The tree was a symbol frequently used in the court masques in Neoplatonic terms. In this case the skies, into which the tree extends its highest branches, appear as they always do in Neoplatonic philosophy, as the gateway to a fully transcendent and superior sphere of being. However the tree could also be used as a neo-Epicurean symbol, as Bruno used it in the same Italian dialogue in question here, the Furori. There a gnarled and mature oak appears as a symbol of the Epicurean philosophy itself, which unites the natural universe at all levels in an organic and infinite vitality and harmony.(29) This natural harmony is expressed in Daniel's masque, as it is in the final pages of Bruno's Furori, by song and soft music accompanied by lutes. The words are formed of three lyrics that praise the rich variety of the natural universe in terms that distinctly recall the songs of Bruno's nine heroic lovers after their release from blindness by the unique nymph of the Thames. The theme of illumination that Bruno had expressed through the image of the gleam in the nymph's eyes is here underlined by a flash of sudden lightning that pervades the scene while the nymphs sing: "Feed apace, then, greedy eyes, / On the wonder you behold; / Take it sudden as it flies, / Though you take it not to hold: / When your eyes have done their part, / Thought must length it in the hart." The world of vicissitude is a world of shadows from which not even royal masquers can escape. In Daniel's masque, as in Bruno's' philosophy, it is only memory and thought that can serve to lengthen the shadows into meaningful shapes and forms. Perhaps it is not surprising that Daniel received "rough censures" for his only attempt to write a court masque.

Leaving Daniel means addressing the problem of the long series of court masques composed by Ben Jonson between 1605 and 1630. The problem is a complex one, and would require treatment on its own, including a consideration of whether in the sphere of the drama rather than the masque a play like Jonson's Alchemist may not have been influenced by Bruno's comedy Candelaio where a group of fake alchemists are as mercilessly satirized as they are in Jonson's text. There certainly are signs that Jonson might have read, or at least heard about, Bruno's works, particularly the Furori, which seems to be echoed in more than one of his masques. But it should be borne in mind that this may have been due to Bruno's use of Neoplatonic imagery and masque-like formal techniques in the final sequence of his dialogue, and may not necessarily imply a take-over of his metaphysics or his political philosophy.

Bruno's presence in Jonson may possibly be traced back to his earliest masque, The Masque of Blackness, performed in 1605, some years before Tethys' Festival.(30) The structure of the masque bears some similarities to the final sequences of Bruno's Furori. A spectacular oceanic opening is centered on a group of vaguely Ethiopian nymphs who journey from Niger to the shores of the Thames to find cleansing illumination on her shores. The masque contains interesting philosophical implications, as the African origins of the nymphs is explicitly linked to an Egyptian and Hermetic concept of knowledge and nature. This is perceived in the masque to be a valid foundation of pristine knowledge, but ultimately insufficient and in need of a higher form of intellectual illumination. The theme of illumination on the basis of a Graeco-Roman concept of beauty symbolized by a group of British courtly nymphs is developed in a later but related masque, The Masque of Beauty, performed in 1608.(31) And we still find possible traces of the furori in one of Jonson's latest masques, Love's Triumph Through Callipolis, performed in 1631 shortly before his quarrel with Inigo Jones.(32) There Jonson repeatedly uses the phrase "heroic love" and actually portrays Charles I as a specifically "heroic" lover whose proper place is the center of the temple of all beauty. In both cases, however, the possible reference to Bruno on the part of Jonson seems to me overlaid by more generally Neoplatonic influences that hardly allow the Nolan philosophy in this case to be considered as a major source, or even necessarily as a source at all.

Jonson was clearly little impressed by the post-Copernican cosmological speculations that were a foundation stone of Bruno's concept of universal vicissitude and reform. Indeed Jonson's masque of 1620 entitled News from the New World Discovered in the Moon treats the new post-Aristotelian cosmos with elegant but satirical wit.(33) For Bruno's universe was based on the idea of a homogeneous material substance of infinite dimensions in which constantly changing bodies assume fleeting forms through the agency of a world soul. This idea destroys at one blow the carefully graded hierarchies of universal being that were contemplated by the traditional cosmology and created an unfathomable gulf between the world at the center and the celestial bodies above. In Bruno's universe the celestial bodies could be seen as simple variations of the same substance that forms our own world, and space travel becomes at once a theoretical possibility. Bruno can thus be seen to be literally light-years away from both the metaphysical and the imperialistic implications of Jonson's masques. For Jonson constructs for the English court a sophisticated series of Neoplatonic fictions based on a cosmology that is not just earth-centered but England-centered. The Masque of Beauty ends with a song in which the island kingdom is exalted as the "fixed" center of the universe. Its monarch, although surrounded by the ocean, "never wets/His hair therein." Outside and above the universal process of vicissitude, he is a perpetual and constant sun whose beam never sets. Surely D. J. Gordon in his pioneering studies of these masques was right to emphasize what he called Jonson's "outrageous compliments" to his King.(34) Jonson's monarch will never decay like Bruno's Jove; nor is there any Momus in his world to remind him of his limits or his mortality.(35)

With Jonson's departure as a writer of masques in 1631, Inigo Jones found himself creating the scenery for what turned out to be the final spectacular entertainments of the Stuart court. On a political level, the new monarch Charles I was trying to impose on England a prerogative of absolute power without parliamentary control. On a religious level, he had just appointed Archbishop Laud to carry out his dreams of far-reaching, anti-Puritan religious reform. These were the last years of Charles's rule, before he led his court into catastrophe and his country into civil war. It is increasingly recognized that even the crystallized and formal rituals of the court masque began at this point to show unquiet signs of political dissidence and to open cautiously out toward a contestation of the monarch they were supposed to be celebrating.(36)

Of particular significance in this context, by all accounts, was the masque of 1633-34 called The Triumph of Peace invented by the Inns of Court and written by John Shirley of Gray's Inn.(37) This is often called "The Lawyers' Masque," and it is recognized as a spectacle in which the lawyers were trying to edge Charles I toward a return to a regime of parliamentary law and justice.(38) The occasion of this masque was the publication by William Prynne of his Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge or Actors Tragedie dedicated to "His much Honoured Friends" of Lincolnes Inne and the four Innes of Court. Prynne's puritanical and anti-monarchical attack on all forms of dramatic representation as works of the devil, or "sugared soppes of Satan," had infuriated the king whose Star Chamber had sentenced Prynne to life-imprisonment, a heavy fine, and the loss of both his ears and his Oxford degree. The lawyers therefore found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having on one side to ingratiate themselves with their angered sovereign while on the other wishing to make him aware of the barbarity of Star Chamber justice and the tyranny of personal rule.(39)

The lawyers showed considerable cunning and skill in using the complicated mythological machinery of the masque to carry their message. They did this through reference to a celestial reform in the heavens, or what they called "Jove's upper court," which they presented as having been invaded by corruption and vice. These have recently been quelled by the triumphant forces of Peace, Justice, and the Law and have fled to the earth where they seem (in what had already become a familiar topos in English Renaissance literature) to reside mainly in Italy. There they are to be found in a "Forum or Piazza of Peace," where they form the subjects of a series of anti-masques that, under the comic surface, are surprisingly violent and threatening, striking an entirely new note in the formalized and ritualized world of courtly masquing. Peace, Law, and Justice prepare to clean up the piazza of the lower world as well, to see that the menacing forces of vice are replaced by their equivalent virtues. These inevitably find their emblems in the figures of the English king and queen, who are celebrated as the representatives of divine and human justice in the world.

Although it has not, so far as I know, been recognized, there can be little doubt that Bruno's Spaccio della bestia trionfante was being used by the lawyers as a source for this idea of a universal reform carried out in the name of justice and the law. This is particularly clear in the first part of the masque where the climax is reached with the appearance on a cloud of the three figures of Peace, Law, and Justice, with Law calling to Justice: "Descend and help us sing/The triumph of Jove's upper court abated/And all the deities translated." The presentation of the triumph of peace and justice in the lower world as a triumph of the absolute monarch was not completely foreign to the lawyers' source, as Bruno too had allowed the "Diva Elizabetta" and Henry III of France to appear at his climax in these terms. However, as the lawyers may have been aware, Bruno's criticism of monarchy in the course of the Spaccio had been powerful and unambiguous. The constellation involved here is precisely that of the Lion, standing for monarchy: "a Lion," writes Bruno, "who brings in his wake the terrors of tyranny, fear, and arrogance, a dangerous and odious authority, glorying in presumption and the pleasure of being feared rather than loved. This is a sphere of severity, cruelty, violence, and suppression, tormented by the shadows of fear and suspicion; but into this heavenly space ascend Magnanimity, Generosity, Splendor, Nobility, Excellence, who administer to Justice and Mercy."(40)

Bruno's revolutionary view of vicissitude within an infinite universe was a long-term one. As the worlds rolled round in their unceasing dance, with time all the continents would become seas and vice versa, just as all those on high would become low and the low become high. Within his own time, however, Bruno was more concerned in Machiavellian terms to persuade the present princes to face political realities and reform their ways. He was prepared to celebrate them, praising the English queen as the "diva Elizabetta" and figuring the French Henry III "translated" into the constellation of the Tiara at the end of the Spaccio. Such ideas made him an ideal point of reference for the lawyers, whose concern at this point was not to depose their king but rather to persuade him to return to parliamentary legality. It is generally conceded that they managed to unite a celebration of the Caroline court with some surprisingly explicit criticisms of its shortcomings. Bulstrode Whitelocke, in his memories of this masque, recorded in 1682 that one of the anti-masques, requesting a patent of monopoly for a new food for capons composed of raw carrots, "pleased the spectators the more, because by it an information was covertly given to the King, of the unfitness and ridiculousness of these projects against the Law."(41) The "Projects against the Law" were the royal monopolies that had been officially banned by Parliament in 1624, but that Noy (who was one of the lawyers involved in the masque) had been persuaded to reintroduce during the period of the royal prerogative. Orgel and Strong in their essay on "Platonic Politics" recognize in the lawyers' masque a daring and ingenious attempt to question the prerogative itself.

When Carew wrote Coelum Britannicum,(42) which was presented at court five days after the lawyers' masque, he referred to and developed in even more precise terms the same Brunian source, the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante. Many readings of his masque find in Carew's refined and elegant poetry, united to some of Inigo Jones's most splendid and spectacular scenery, a last triumphant restatement of that monarchical idea that would be so rudely shattered by the Long Parliament and the civil war. This is the reading proposed by Orgel and Strong in their essay on "Platonic Politics."(43) They see Coelum Britannicum as a counterstatement to the criticisms and political sniping of the lawyers' masque. Carew in their opinion presents "the King's own view of his place in the commonwealth" in a spectacle that they judge as "unquestionably" the greatest of the Stuart masques. As far as Bruno is concerned, Orgel and Strong, as we have seen, think that Bruno is essentially a mystic, in the perspective of the Hermetic reading of his philosophy suggested by Frances Yates. As they find few signs of this mysticism in the highly rationalized and, in their view, exquisitely Neoplatonic justification of absolute monarchy elaborated by Carew, they conclude that he was little attracted by Bruno. The Spaccio appears to Orgel and Strong to have been read by Carew only superficially, and without any real interest in Bruno's philosophy of reform.

I shall be developing readings both of Bruno and of Carew's masque of a rather different order. In my opinion the reference to Bruno on the part of Carew is constant and essential to the meaning of his spectacle. It goes much further than the borrowings already noticed and listed by Dunlap. Carew's use of the Spaccio is far more systematic and direct than any other reference to Bruno found in the Stuart masque with the exception of Daniel's Tethys' Festival. Carew, however, gives us much more of a text than Daniel did. His work is in large part a direct translation of parts of Bruno's work, and when he is not translating literally, he is nearly always looking for appropriate translations into spectacular terms of the ideas promoted in his work by Bruno. These ideas were not in my opinion only or even primarily mystical. They were an effort to rethink in the context of a post-Copernican and infinite universe the ethical bases of a society that had lost its traditional hierarchical points of reference. A corollary of this process of rethinking was an effort to curtail the arrogance of corrupt and oppressive forms of power whose cosmic justification was looking more and more problematical. Carew turned to Bruno as a source not only for his fable but for the political meaning of his masque, which appears to me to have been written in line with the lively but indirect forms of criticism of absolute monarchy that had inspired the lawyers' masque only a few days earlier.

The opening of Carew's masque is centered on a witty dialogue between Mercury and Momus. This is Bruno's Mercury, sent from the "high senate of the gods" to refer the examples of corruption and decadence that have led to a reform of the heavens - a Mercury who, as in Bruno, stands specifically for memory as "the registration of acts" in the tables of time. Carew's touch is light and delicate. His Momus could well be taken as no more than a refined, court wit joking elegantly with Mercury about the fact that in every inn between earth and Olympus there is a book "where your present expedition is registered, your nine thousandth nine hundred ninety-ninth legation." Nine was a sacred number, associated with the Muses, knowledge, and wisdom. But the exchange is not a joke: it is a reminder to the king that time will remember his acts too, recording in the annals of universal history not only the short comings of the celestial Jove but those of the earthly one as well.(44)

Bruno's Momus in the Spaccio was one of his most brilliant creations. Identified with the intellect in its search for meaningful action within the bewildering vicissitudes of an infinite universe, his strength lies in his lively skepticism and ironic irreverence for Jove's illusions of absolute power. Momus's skepticism is not just a critical attitude of the intellect as a voice of political dissidence, but recognition of the necessary limits of human action within the overwhelming vistas of infinite space and eternal time. In this new and frightening cosmological perspective, not even the celestial Jove can command more than a limited awe and respect, for he too is involved in the vortex of vicissitude; and in Bruno's cruel and devastating portrait of him, he has grey hair and decaying teeth. Carew takes over Bruno's Momus with brilliant verve and makes of him a wittily disturbing voice of satirical dissidence. When Mercury chides him with the words "Peace, railer, bridle your licentious tongue,/And let this presence (that is, the king) teach you modesty," Carew's Momus replies astonishingly, "Let it if it can."(45) This is really letting historical realities intrude into the rarefied fictions of the court masque, just as the lawyers had done earlier when they introduced the common people on to the stage claiming that they had never seen a masque, but were going to now.(46)

Carew conducts his masque through a continued direct reference to Bruno's text, adapting the thematic and rhetorical strategies of the original brilliantly to his own historical situation and, as the lawyers had done before him, to the conventions of the masque. The anti-masque is once again used to represent "the monstrous shapes" of the vices that are being chased out of the unsullied heaven of the idealized English court. As in the lawyers' masque, the anti-masques assume a disturbing frequency and force, suggesting that the shadow in which they are represented may not be so easy to dissipate and destroy. Carew is further aware of the cosmological foundations of Bruno's philosophy that are introduced explicitly for the first time into the carefully stratified world of the masque by his Momus. Gone are the eight, nine, or ten revolving spheres of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology, while the dimensions of the new post-Copernican universe stretch out to a new and exciting but also disturbing infinity. "Here is a total eclipse of the eighth sphere, which neither Booker, Allestre, nor your prognosticators, no, nor their great master Tycho were aware of."(47) And with what is again astonishing daring and license, Momus proceeds to gossip about Jove's celestial reform with reference to what he calls "the eighth room of our celestial mansion, commonly called Star Chamber." The suggestion that the celestial reform might be contagious and lead to a "total eclipse" of the dreaded royal chamber of justice - one of the principal organs of Charles's absolute rule - is explicitly made by Momus who literally warns the king that there may be those about who intend to "unfurnish and disarray our foresaid Star Chamber of all of those ancient constellations which have for so many ages been sufficiently notorious, and to admit into their vacant places such persons only as shall be qualified with exemplar virtue and eminent desert."(48) It needed Carew's delicate touch for this to pass as a joke.

It has already been recognized by previous commentators that the long dialogue that follows between Plutus and Poenia takes over in a fairly direct form the episodes in Bruno's Spaccio in which Riches and Poverty both plead, without success, for a place in the heavens.(49) Many passages in this part of the masque are literal translation, and yet one of the most interesting aspects of Carew's use of his source material here is his critical attitude toward Bruno's discussion on a minor but intriguing point. Carew's Momus introduces the figure of Plutus by pointing out the dangers of cupidity and riches, just as Bruno had done at rather more length before him. Using a complex mixture of metaphors, Carew sees gold as a poison hidden in the bowels of the earth, an excrescence that men seek to their destruction, "this being the true Pandora's box, whence issued all those mischiefs that now fill the universe." In spite of the close reference to Bruno's original here, the image of Pandora's box is in fact introduced by Carew. It is not used by Bruno in the Spaccio, although it is used by him in another work and in another context altogether. Bruno uses it in the argument of De gli eroici furori, in a page of strong anti-Petrarchan polemic addressed to Sir Philip Sidney in which he sees the sighs of the courtly lover and sonneteer as "poisonous instruments of death issuing from a Pandora's box."(50) Carew is clearly not prepared to dismiss the courtly Petrarchan lover with such exuberant verve as Bruno does, and he distances himself from this theme by making Plutus the "true" Pandora's box. The point is an interesting one, suggesting as it does that "Carlomaria," the idealized neo-Petrarchan union of the king and queen of English courtly love in the 1630s, was still a cherished convention, whereas the theme of luxury and overspending was one more open to satire and debate. Orgel and Strong's edition of Coelum britannicum gives detailed information on the high cost of the production, which caused some caustic comment even at the time. Carew, who was clearly himself a lover of courtly luxury, appears to be enjoying the ironies of the debate.

In another passage of this same debate between Poverty and Riches, Carew's Mercury takes leave of Poverty in terms that are an interesting comment on Bruno's apparent praise of her and seem to refer to an English development of the discussion that had intervened between the Spaccio and the masque. In Bruno's dialogue Poverty had not been awarded a place in the heavens, but nevertheless she had been praised handsomely by Jove as a friend of all those who are content to follow the laws and ways of nature, leaving the ambitious to the "poverty" of riches. In particular Jove had praised her for associating with philosophers whose intimate meditations would be disturbed by the crowds and confusion attendant on wealth. Bruno's attitude is clearly ironical here: the passage is a wry comment on the poverty that accompanied him throughout his life. It would certainly be a mistake to read Jove's praise of poverty straight: it is a sermon - probably a memory of Bruno's monastical origins - that is being parodied in both its substance and its tone.(51) Why, after all, should the studious and the cultured be condemned to a "clerical" poverty? This very question is asked at the end of Jove's speech by Momus, who wonders under his breath what injustice of fate regularly leads to riches staying away from those who could be claimed most to deserve her company. Jove, however, proves inflexible: unreasoningly (and, Bruno is suggesting, unreasonably) he decrees that fate will continue to be unjust on this point.

Carew picks up the argument from there, adding to it what may well be echoes of Francis Bacon's open praise of riches and opulence in his New Atlantis, published in 1623. In Bacon, too, there is no shame in praising riches, which he sees as the just and proper outcome for the men of learning of his new scientific society. Carew's Mercury appears to associate himself with this attitude by severely maligning Poverty as one who "Degradeth nature and benumeth sense/And Gorgon-like turns active men to stone." "We," continues Carew's Mercury (and it is difficult to decipher if this is a royal "we" or if it refers to the courtiers present, or to the moderns, or to the English specifically) "advance such virtues only as admit excess,/Brave bounteous acts, regal magnificence,/All-seeing prudence, magnanimity/That knows no bound."(52) Although Carew too may be indulging here in a note of irony at the expense of his luxury-loving royal master, it would clearly be a mistake to overestimate his critical attitude to the opulent world of courtly masques and ceremony.

The subsequent appearance of Fortune on Carew's scene recalls briefly Bruno's own discussion of the subject. In the Spaccio, as in the masque, this follows directly on the episode involving Poverty and Riches, who so clearly illustrate Fortune's caprices and her power.(53) This is recognized as far-reaching and awesome, particularly in the now infinite vastness of a universe involved in perpetual and bewildering processes of change. Fortune herself claims her right to a place in the heavens on the basis of a kind of rough justice depending on her blindness, which refuses to listen to specious arguments of favoritism or influence. Before Fortune all are equal: a good enough reason, she maintains, to justify her election to a celestial seat. However both Bruno and Carew refuse her entry to the heavens. Bruno had claimed that Fortune has no real identity, insofar as what seems a caprice of Fortune to the limited mortal eye is really only part of a larger providential scheme. Carew's Mercury echoes this reasoning, inviting Fortune to vanish "And seek those idiots out/That thy fantastic god-head hath allowed."

The real question at stake here is what concept of providence is involved, and what kind of reference to its powers is being invoked. The point is a delicate one on which Bruno suggested a solution likely to have proved congenial to Charles I, at least insofar as it denies what is seen both by Carew and by Bruno as a "lazy" Protestant fideistic solution: what is advocated is rather the ongoing search for knowledge of the intimate workings of the universal whole.(54) Knowledge of and power over the natural world will ultimately uncover the hidden workings of a higher providence and save mankind from the blind caprices of an unjust fate. Carew once more faithfully translates Bruno's thought into his masque where Mercury dismisses Fortune's "vain aid" by claiming that "Wisdom, whose strong-built plots/Leave nought to hazard, mocks thy futile power."

Carew continues with his close reference to Bruno's celestial reform by introducing immediately after the figure of Fortune that of Hedone or Pleasure. Carew defines her negatively as a siren who leads inquiring man away from his serious study of the course of things: a poison as subtly attractive as riches who displays "th'enameled outside and the honeyed verge/Of the fair cup where deadly poison lurks." This passage has been considered by nearly all Carew's critics as an original addition, at variance with Bruno's Epicurean tendencies. But this is not the case. It faithfully reproduces Bruno's episode of the constellation known as the Goblet, following him in the distinction that recurs throughout his work between a just and controlled principle of pleasure and severe condemnation of overindulgence in the material goods of life.(55) Historically this distinction goes back to Epicurus himself and forms the basis of the Epicurean movement as a serious school of philosophical thought. Later it would be picked up by Roman writers such as Cicero. By following Bruno in this classical distinction of a base hedonism from a controlled and sober principle of pleasure, Carew underlines the ethical and philosophical seriousness of his masque.

The reference to Lo spaccio de la bestia trionfante continues throughout Carew's masque. In insisting on this I am once again going against received critical opinion which has always claimed that the final sequences of Coelum Britannicum, which begins with a particularly fine scene by Inigo Jones depicting Stonehenge, where the royal masquers return to their origins and find renewed moral and historical vigor, have nothing to do with Bruno's text at all. It is certainly true that Bruno nowhere mentions Stonehenge. However, he does refer several times to the Druids and their sun-worshiping religion as well as their belief in metempsychosis, and he links their "prisca theologia" to that of Pythagoras and the ancient Egyptians.(56)

The Stonehenge sequence in Carew's masque, in my opinion, represents a faithful "translation" into English terms of the long quotation from the Hermetic text of the Asclepius that Bruno introduces into the final dialogue of the Spaccio.(57) Not, of course, a literal translation, but a faithful transposition into English terms of that return to distant, uncorrupted origins that is the message proposed by Bruno through his quotation from the Asclepius. The return to Egyptian origins in Bruno signifies the reestablishing of a correct relationship between humanity and a universe in which the gods have not yet retreated into some impenetrable region in the skies. The Egyptians, as Bruno's Sophia says in her comment on the passage from the Asclepius, searched for divinity in the forms of beasts and plants, ascending to the divine through the secret and magic heart of things. Bruno sees this return to a most ancient origin in which the universe is unsullied and unspoiled, its magic resonances and harmonies intact, as a necessary foundation of any valid metaphysical or ethical philosophy for modern humanity. Carew follows him, making the genius of his Stonehenge invoke for the king and queen the Druid circle's "aged priests and crystal streams/To warm their hearts and waves in these bright beams."(58)

However this philosophical primitivism, or "prisca theologia," was not in my opinion the final outcome of Bruno's philosophy, only the establishment of the foundations on which it must be built. In the final sequences of the Furori, the subject is developed by Bruno through the figure of Circe. The heroic lovers' passage through her kingdom and their initiation into her magic is a vital stage of their passage toward a revelation of the true harmonies of the universe. But Circe's magic leaves them blind, and it is only the two eyes of the unique nymph of the Thames who can restore their sight. This vitally important moment in the progress toward knowledge is called by Bruno himself one of "illumination." There is a recovery of an intellectual principle in the Graeco-Roman philosophical tradition, at least in some of its manifestations: Pythagoras, the Pre-Socratics, Epicurus, the Stoics, the Skeptics and Cynics, something of Plato, and even some aspects of the despised Aristotle.

Once again I believe that Carew found remarkably appropriate "translations" into his masque form of Bruno's ideas. From Stonehenge the scene changes to "a new and pleasant prospect clean differing from all the other, the nearest part showing a delicious garden with several walks and parterras set round with low trees, and on the sides against these walks were fountains and grots, and in the furthest part a palace from whence went high walks upon arches, and above them open terraces planted with cypress trees, and all this together was composed of such ornaments as might express a princely villa."(59) This is a surprising description, especially if we pay sufficient attention to that "might." This is seventeenth-century Europe. But the princely villa, it seems, can no longer be taken for granted; and in any case it is not the center of the scene, which is rather the garden. This is strikingly similar to the argument of the second dialogue of The Ash Wednesday Supper where Bruno describes the "picture" of his universe, using the metaphor of a painting. Here too there is a royal palace, but it is only one of a number of elements that make up the contemporary scene, "a royal palace here, a forest there, a glimpse of the sky above, and on one side the half of a rising sun."(60) Carew's garden possibly goes too far in leading us toward a rather too formalized, rationalistic landscape, clearly of French inspiration. Bruno's representation fifty years earlier gave a freer reign to nature. His greatest philosophical work, the De immenso, finishes with a description of gentle, fertile hills and vales, with the philosopher who is invoking the sound of their echo which reverberates over the landscape. This is not Egypt, nor the mountain of Circe, which were Bruno's point of departure. His landscape of arrival has been inhabited by the nymphs and the naiads for many centuries: it may make us think of the hills of Tuscany, for example, or indeed (which is where Bruno conducts us at the end of the Furori) the valley of the Thames.

Carew's masque does not finish with the scene of the garden, which is only the terrestrial space in which the masquers enjoy their nightly revels. When these are over Carew and Inigo Jones mount a final scene that represents the celestial outcome of the universal reform. The reference to Bruno's Spaccio remains a close one, particularly where the terrestrial and the celestial spheres are conceived of as parallel reflections of each other's treasures rather than separated spheres of being. Carew uses the same image as Bruno had done to represent this concept: that of the River Eridanus whose privilege it was "In heaven and earth to flow, / Above in streams of golden fire, / In silver waves below."(61) Carew then proceeds to apply to his English monarchs the terms of praise that Bruno had reserved for the French Henry III in the final pages of the Spaccio.(62)

These represent some of Bruno's most subtle and enigmatic pages. They formed the basis of Frances Yates's claim that Bruno was expressing a mystical cult of monarchy,(63) but I think this is a misreading of the text. The two central images used here are the altar, occupied by the centaur Chiron, and the constellation of the Crown, or the Tiara, which Bruno reserves for Henry III. Chiron, with his double nature, half man and half beast, is used by Bruno as a metaphor for Christ's double nature as half God and half man, so it does look as if Bruno is presenting the French king as also part human and part divine, as well as a defender of the faith. Bruno's Momus, however, ridicules this whole complex of ideas by saying that he will never believe that half a trouser and one sleeve add up to more than a whole trouser and two sleeves. That is to say, Momus conceives of the divine presence in the universe in terms of a total immersion or immanence rather than as an emanation of a transcendental god. He is sternly invited to keep quiet and to believe that profound mysteries are at work here that he should not inquire into. Momus agrees to believe in the idea of a pure, divine mind of which Chiron is half a representation, although making it clear that his belief is held only to please Jove: in other words, he has no choice. Jove, for his part, goes on to say that Chiron, or Christ, will be venerated as the priest of his altar because altars are necessary and because Christ is the priest of the moment. He might even be the eternal priest, but this is not certain, and fate may have decreed otherwise. This is a Machiavellian concept of religion as a social and pragmatical necessity, and its mystical overtones are the means by which it is imposed on an ignorant populace.(64) Bruno's choice of Henry Ill for translation into the constellation of the Crown is also Machiavellian in tone. He is chosen not on a principle of divine right, but because he maintains his kingdom in peace and order. It is not even certain that he will in the end be assumed into the Crown: we are waiting on time, concludes Bruno's Jove, to see who will be most deserving of such a merit.

Carew was necessarily less reserved than this in his praise of Charles I and his queen. He does not allow his Momus to intrude with his corrosive wit into the final moments of the masque with their inevitable royal apotheosis. And he does appear to allow the royal couple a timeless and motionless perfection that places them outside and above the process of vicissitude and change. But Carew gives with one hand only to take away with the other; for he abandons the traditional image of the sovereign as the sun, allowing him only to figure as a star, though a greater and more eminent one than the rest. By doing this he maintains the new infinite cosmology as his universal background up to the end; for, as in Bruno's universe, every star has become a sun with its own planets and satellites revolving around it. The revolving spheres no longer exist, and earth itself has become a negligible point in the boundless cosmos: a "decrepit sphere grown dark and cold." It is the royal stars who glow with heat and light, shedding their resistless influence on "the uncertain tide" of human change. Carew concludes by claiming that propitious stars will crown every royal birth "whilst you rule them, and they the earth." This sounds perfectly respectable as an ending of a court masque. But if we bear in mind Carew's source, the praise says rather less than it appears to. For the whole point of Bruno's Spaccio was that it had eliminated one by one the talismanic signs of the zodiac, and with them the astrological concept that the stars do in fact rule the earth. In the final picture of Carew's masque, there are no stars left in the heavens but only a serene sky "after which," the text tells us, "the masquers dance their last dance, and the curtain was let fall."

Serious scholars of those tense years of the 1630s that led up to the Long Parliament and the civil war, rightly warn against the dangers of interpreting them in the light of hindsight. There are, however, signs that in referring to Bruno's dialogue in the context of a court masque, Carew was quite aware of what he was doing. Bruno's unique nymph at the end of the Furori, as we have seen, initiated the blind searchers after knowledge into a double sphere of being, made up of both matter and mind, body and soul - both being inextricably linked as two aspects of a single truth through the image of the divine nymph's eyes. Bruno did not deny the existence of a higher plane of being, which he identified with the divine, although he refused to think of it as purely spiritual and maintained that in any case it remained outside the field of human vision. Nevertheless in the pages of dedication to Prince Julius of Brunswick at the beginning of his Frankfurt trilogy he praises the prince as a Trismegistus: three times wise. And one of the aspects of his wisdom is the witnessing of divine truth on earth.

What appears to be a justification of the idea of divine right, however, inevitably becomes ambiguous in the course of Bruno's trilogy. For the sphere of the divine increasingly assumes the form of an infinite plenitude of which the whole infinite universe is the seal, shadow, or reflection, while the three spheres of Neoplatonic being merge into the three dimensions of Euclidean space. The mind participates in the divine through its reflections in the three-dimensional infinite universe, so that it is doubtful if the monarch can be distinguished from other forms of universal life in any terms other than the particular glow with which his mind warms to the divine intimations of immortality. Once again Carew found remarkably apt translations of Bruno's concepts; for it seems inescapable that the monarchical principle, through reference to Bruno's philosophy, had become involved in a universe of relativity that voided the traditional Neoplatonic schemes of courtly masquing. Carew appears to have been aware of Bruno's preoccupation with the number three: the trinity that had to be understood in new and demanding ways as the structural principle of the infinite universe itself. Carew's masque was not only given in 1633, but it was presented on Shrove Tuesday of that year, which fell on 18 February. The previous day, 17 February, was the anniversary of Bruno's death at the stake thirty-three years earlier; the following day was Ash Wednesday, for which Bruno had written a Supper in which he had claimed that the divine is within us all, closer to us than our very selves.(65)

I have argued that it is misleading to dismiss Carew's reference to Bruno as marginal and slight. By following some of the central episodes of Bruno's celestial reform outlined in Lo Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, Carew succeeded in presenting the action of a masque peculiarly suited to the tensions of the moment: spectacular mythological machinery was at hand to satisfy the art of Inigo Jones and the courtly taste for pageantry, while the presence of Momus offered a focal point of elegantly subversive wit. Through the reference to Bruno's infinite cosmology, Carew could subtly question the absolutism of Charles I while at the same time developing his masque within the terms of a coherent moral and metaphysical discourse of universal reform. It would be interesting to know if the Venetian ambassador was aware of Carew's Italian source when he referred to Coelum Britannicum as a "very stately and solemn" masque.(66) However that may be, the reference to Bruno, as I have tried to show in this paper, was central to what Carew was trying to do. I have further attempted to show that Bruno's presence in the Stuart court masques was a constant one from the beginnings of the form in the reign of James I. It was not a neutral presence. It made itself felt above all in those masques that were posing in increasingly problematical terms the political statement of absolute monarchy that the form was presumed to assert.

If my argument is correct, then we have to address the question of the originality of Daniel, of the lawyers of the Inns of Court, and of Carew, in their attempt to oppose, within the schemes of courtly masquing, the increasing absolutism of the Stuart monarchy. The attempt by Orgel and Strong to eliminate Bruno from their reading of Coelum Britannicum appears to be largely determined by an anxiety to leave Carew as the effective author, if not of the fable then at least of the concept of power being propounded through it. It is not clear, though, why, since the studies of D. J. Gordon, a generally conceded reference to Plato and the Florentine Neoplatonists as the intellectual basis on which the apology of the Stuart monarchy was founded is to be considered acceptable, and not in contradiction with the originality of Ben Jonson and his followers, while a reference to Bruno has to be so fastidiously avoided in order to save the originality of Carew. The fact is that none of those concerned with the making of the English masques, beginning with the consummate artist of the Stuart court, Inigo Jones, were political philosophers with a proposal of reform of their own to put forward in what were clearly also political messages. They were only showing themselves well informed and abreast of the tide of the times in making references to the major intellectual movements reaching them from Renaissance Europe.

It is clear that the name of Giordano Bruno even then was a more difficult one to digest than those of the revered Plato or his Florentine followers, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, with their close links with the Medici court. Bruno was, after all, a lone wanderer through Europe, an exile for most of his adult life. He had, furthermore, denied the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ and had been punished publicly and dramatically for doing so. His name was studiously avoided by most throughout the seventeenth century, even where his influence, as recent studies have shown, was undoubtedly felt, at times in decisive terms.(67) For Bruno had proposed a rethinking of the cosmic order that was making itself felt, if at times surreptitiously, in the most advanced areas of the new science. His cosmic vision had further been accompanied by a proposal for universal moral reform based on an advanced concept of the rights of the individual and of liberty of thought and expression, which had clear anti-absolutist implications.(68) On the other hand, Bruno was not a rationalist of the Enlightenment. His doctrine of universal vicissitude tended to deny the possibility of human reason to dominate a universe whose own laws obeyed an intellectual principle of infinite complexity and perfection. Bruno's attachment throughout his life to symbolic and emblematic forms of expression is intimately linked to his awareness of the limits of the human reason. His sense of the mysterious powers of images and words to combine to create meanings whose ultimate sense eludes the human mind linked his philosophy to the expression of poets and artists, whose inquiry he considered as equally valid as that of philosophers themselves.(69) Given that he himself used at times expressive techniques that he appears to have taken from the courtly masques of Renaissance Italy and France, he may well have seemed an ideal point of reference to those poets of the English court who were looking for an alternative philosophy of power to oppose to the absolutism they feared.

It is not surprising that the reference to Bruno being discussed here was not publicly declared. This reticence on the part of the English masque-writers, which was shared with many others of the time, nevertheless creates some still unsolved problems in a study of his influence on the genre. Who brought him into the picture in the first place? Was it Inigo Jones himself, whose Italian was undoubtedly sufficient to permit him to approach Bruno's complicated and idiosyncratic texts? It is interesting to note that Jones was the scenographer for all the masques in which Bruno's influence is clear. It seems unlikely that he would have been kept in ignorance of the source being used, even if it was proposed by the poets in the first place. However the library list of Jones's books, although it contains numerous Italian works in the original, has no book in it by Bruno.(70) In the present lack of documentary evidence, it would appear that it was Daniel, whose close links with John Florio are a documented fact, who acted as the way in for Bruno. It may well have been the explicitly admitted failure of Daniel's early masque that led to the long period of unsullied Neoplatonism under the vigilant eye of Ben Jonson. It was surely not by chance that Bruno surfaced again in the unquiet years of the 1630s when things began to be said, or at least murmured, in the court itself that helped to lead, only a few years later, to the dramatic crumbling of the crystal walls of absolutism so carefully constructed around their world by the Stuart king and queen.

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA ("LA SAPIENZA")

1 The identification of the Spaccio as Carew's source was first made by Robert Adamson in an article on Carew in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1875-89).

2 Dunlap, 275-76.

3 Yates, 1964, 392-93.

4 Orgel and Strong, 1:49-75.

5 Kerrigan, 348.

6 Altieri, 339.

7 For Bruno's years in England, see Aquilecchia; Ciliberto, 1986 and 1990; and Gatti, 25-34. I am not convinced that the documents presented have proved the thesis of Bruno as a spy advanced by Bossy.

8 Bruno, 1958, 1:69-70.

9 Ibid., 2:549-70 and 927-48. For a recent comment on the dedicatory letter of the Furori, see Farley-Hills.

10 Bruno, besides praising Elizabeth I warmly in both The Ash Wednesday Supper and The Cause, Principle and One, spoke to the inquisitors during his trial about his visits to her court in the company of Castelnau. See Spampanato, 734.

11 Bruno, 1879, 1:133.

12 "Ergo ego setosum quia me natura creavit, / Non discam rudibus digitis aptare smaragdos, / Cincinnare comam, roseumque per ora ruborem / Fundere, odoratis caput instrophiare hyacinthus, / Promere flexibiles gestus, mollemque choream, / Gutturis et de me vocem exentrare tenelli." Ibid., 1:317-18.

13 First published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 (1943): 101-21, and now in Collected Essays 1:180-209.

14 Bruno, 1958, 2:1173-78.

15 Frances Yates refers briefly to the Balet, but only with reference to Bruno's earlier work on memory, the Cantus Circaeus. See Yates, 1964, 202.

16 For a discussion of this ballet within the artistic and historical context of the court entertainments of Renaissance Europe, see Strong, 1984, pt. 2, ch. 3.

17 Strong sees in the dolphin image an allusion to the desired birth of a royal son and heir. Bruno, 1958, 2:796, himself, however, in an interesting discussion of some recurrent Renaissance emblems, sees the dolphin as representing philanthropy, or a benevolent love of man and the universe.

18 This remark is attributed to the queen by Julio Caesare La Galla in his De Phoenomenis in orbe lunae, Venice, 1612, where it is quoted in Greek. The text of this work was republished in A. Favaro's edition of Galileo's Opere, vol. 3, Florence, 1930, 352. It is quoted by Giovanni Aquilecchia in his edition of Bruno's La cena de le ceneri (Bruno, 1955), 128, n. 13. It is known that Queen Elizabeth I possessed a volume of Bruno's works bound in black leather. The volume contained La cena de le ceneri, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, De la causa principio et uno, and De l'infinito universo et mondi. For the importance and history of this volume, see Sturlese, xxiv-v.

19 See Rees, for the biography of Daniel.

20 Eccles, 148-67.

21 Giovanni Aquilecchia, in his edition of the Cena (Bruno, 1955), points out that the itinerary followed in dialogue 2 indicates that the supper was not held in Fulke Greville's private house in Brooke Street, Holborn, but in his chambers in the Royal Palace at Whitehall. On 3 June 1592 the Venetian inquisitors conducting the first phase of Bruno's trial asked him if in any of his writings he had ever mentioned an Ash Wednesday supper, and if so what did he mean by it? Bruno replied that he had composed a book entitled The Ash Wednesday Supper in five dialogues that investigated the movements of the earth and that the dispute held with some doctors took place in England during a supper given on Ash Wednesday by the French ambassador whom he was serving and to whom it was dedicated (Spampanato, 1933, 121). This account clearly suggests that the supper actually took place. Bruno at his trial may have placed it in the unlikely setting of the French ambassador's house rather than Fulke Greville's chambers as the text clearly states from a lapse of memory or because it sounded a more respectable location than the Protestant Greville's rooms.

22 Daniel, fol. 103.

23 Gatti, 56-57.

24 The text of Daniel's masque, complete with preface, was first republished in The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James I, ed. John Nichols (New York, 1828), 346-58. See now Orgel and Strong, 1:191-96.

25 This is Bruno's first published work to have survived. It appeared in Paris in 1582 in reply to a request from the French king, Henri III, to know more about Bruno's art of memory. See the critical text edited by Rita Sturlese as the first publication of a new edition of Bruno's complete Latin works.

26 Ricci, 204-21.

27 Lindley, 33-46. This reading of Daniel's masque strongly contests the negative criticism of it in the works of Orgel and Strong. See in particular Strong, 1986, 155-60.

28 The idea is repeated many times in Bruno's works. It finds one of its earliest and strongest expressions in the first dialogue of The Ash Wednesday Supper. See Bruno, 1958, 1:33-34.

29 Ibid., 2:1051-54.

30 Orgel and Strong, 1:89-93.

31 Ibid., 1:93-96.

32 Ibid., 1:405-07. For a possible influence of Bruno, see Parry, 186.

33 Orgel and Strong, 1:307-12.

34 Gordon, 184.

35 At the most, Jonson's feelings about the inadequacies of the Stuart court seem to have taken the form of nostalgia for that of Elizabeth I. See Barton, ch. 14, "Harking Back to Elizabeth: Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia."

36 Opinions diverge as to how fully the court masques reflected the increasing state of political crisis, as well as which ones were more open to the signs of the crisis. For studies of the political situation as it was reflected in the court culture of the 1630s, see Smuts. For a study of the last of the Stuart court masques, Salmacidia Spolia, as a specifically political statement reflecting the crisis of the times, see Butler, 1990.

37 England was still using the old Julian calendar according to which the year finished on 25 March. As the events we are considering took place in February, the year would have been considered 1633 by British contemporaries but 1634 on the continent and in the writings of modern scholars. For the text of Shirley's masque, see Orgel and Strong, 2:546-53.

38 Orgel and Strong, 1:49-75, recognize the critique of the Court in this masque. For more detailed discussions, see Butler, 1987; and Venuti.

39 See Prynne; and for the historical background to the publication of Prynne's book and his punishment, see Carlton, ch. 10.

40 Bruno, 1958, 2:566: "Mena seco il Leone il tirannico Terrore, Spavento e Formidabilita, la perigliosa ed odabile Autoritade e Gloria della presunzione e Piacere di esser temuto piu tosto che amato. Versano nel campo del Rigore, Crudelta, Violenza, Suppressione, che ivi son tormentate da le ombre del Timore e Suspizione; ed al celeste spacio ascende la Magnanimita, Generosita, Splendore, Nobilta, Prestanza, che administrano nel campo della Giustizia, Misericordia. . . ."

41 Orgel and Strong, 2:542. Bulstrode's first-hand account of The Triumph of Peace, given in his Memorial of the English Affairs, London, 1682, 18ff., is republished in full in Orgel and Strong.

42 Orgel and Strong, 2:570-80.

43 See also, in line with this reading, Anselment; and Veevers.

44 Orgel and Strong, 2:571; and for the Brunian passage Carew is using as his source Bruno, 1958, 2:645.

45 Orgel and Strong, 2:571.

46 Ibid., 2:552. Sharpe, 197, notes that Carew's Momus imparts to Coelum britannicum a second, often undermining voice. "A tone of realism and cynicism pervades this masque. Momus is a warning that we should not reduce the masques, before we have carefully studied them, to monotone or monochrome. They may resonate with more tones and reflect more complex images than we have realized."

47 Orgel and Strong, 2:574.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 574-76; and for the relative pages in Bruno, 1958, 2:666-79.

50 Bruno, 1958, 2:928.

51 Ibid., 2:677-78.

52 Orgel and Strong, 2:576.

53 Ibid.; and in Bruno, 1958, 2:683-96.

54 The terms of Bruno's anti-Protestant polemic have been much stressed in recent years. See "Nascita dello Spaccio: Bruno e Lutero" in Ciliberto, 1987; and Ingegno, 1987. For an attempt to understand why in spite of his strong anti-Protestant stand Bruno wrote and flourished above all in aggressively Protestant centers of culture such as London and Wittenberg, see Gatti, 8-14.

55 Orgel and Strong, 2:576-77; and in Bruno, 1958, 2:821-23.

56 Bruno, 1958, 2:797 and 885.

57 Ibid., 2:784-86. These pages have been at the center of much critical discussion of Bruno's philosophy. Yates, 1964, 211-15, considered them the main foundation of her Hermetic interpretation. For a critical consideration of the Yatesian reading of these pages, see Ciliberto, 1986.

58 Orgel and Strong, 2:578. It should be remembered that Inigo Jones thought that Stonehenge was not a prehistoric monument, but that it was built by barbarian invaders at the end of the Roman occupation. His reconstruction of it, which was published posthumously, underlines what he sees as a classical regularity and harmony in the original plan and discusses it as a work of the Roman decadence. Thus, in what is already a concept of the Enlightenment, Jones sees the return to valid ancient origins as including a dimension of classical antiquity. See Jones.

59 Orgel and Strong, 2:579.

60 Bruno, 1958, 1:11. For an interesting critical discussion of Carew's poem To my Friend G.N. from Wrest, where the country house of Henry de Grey, eighth Earl of Kent, appears to become a substitute for the rapidly declining court already fighting against the Puritan Scots to impose Charles I's religious policy, see Parker. It is to Wrest in this poem rather than the Stuart court that Carew transfers his desire for harmony and order in both a social and a natural context. It is interesting to note that in the subsequent events of the 1640s, which Carew would not live to see, Henry de Grey became a Parliament man, although he took no part in the trial and death of Charles I.

61 Orgel and Strong, 2:578. For Bruno's treatment of the river Eridanus, Bruno, 1958, 2:808-09.

62 Bruno, 1958, 2:826-27; and Orgel and Strong, 2:579-80.

63 Yates, 1964, 360-98.

64 The importance of Bruno's reading of Machiavelli for his religious and social thought has been clearly documented and underlined in recent years by Italian scholars. See in particular Ingegno, 1985; and Ciliberto, 1986 and 1990.

65 It seems to me that these three dates are brought deliberately together, but it should be remembered that the first and the last correspond to the old style Julian calendar and the second, the date of Bruno's execution in Rome, to the new Gregorian calendar.

66 See the Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1632-36, 190.

67 See Ricci, 1990.

68 See Calogero; and Gatti, 17-19.

69 For Bruno's identification of true poets and true painters with true philosophers, see Bruno, 1879, 2:133.

70 Published as Appendix 3 in Harris.

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