Masques of Difference

Masques of Difference presents an annotated edition of four seventeenth-century entertainments written by Ben Jonson for the court of James I. These masques reflect both the confidence and the anxieties of the English aristocracy at a time when notions of monarchy, empire, and national identity were being radically redefined. All four masques reflect the royal court's self-representation as moral, orderly, and just, in contrast to stylized images of chaotically (and exotically) "othered" groups: Africans, the Irish, witches, and the homoeroticised figure of the Gypsy.