“Virtue’s eternal spring”: The management of time in Thomas Middleton’s Masque of Heroes

• Authors: Agnieszka Żukowska
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In his Masque of Heroes (1619), a festive entertainment commissioned by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, Thomas Middleton glorifies and immortalises his performers and audience, using strategies of temporal manipulation constitutive for the entire masquing genre. The conventional images of disorder opening court entertainments are here clearly time-related and complemented with the notion of humanity’s subjection to time; the masque-specific vision of harmony involves an ephiphanic scenic display of the costumed Templars, described as heroes “in lasting honour spher’d.” Investigating Middleton’s careful management of temporal relationships evolved in the entertainment in question, this article aims to prove that his Inner Temple commission – which has not attracted much critical attention – is an epitomic example of the quasi-theatrical genre referred to as the Stuart masque, where the timeless realm exposed on the stage was supposed to spread out into the auditorium, eventually detemporalising the spectators.

Keywords

EN

Thomas Middleton; Masque of Heroes; Inner Temple; time; masque

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Gdański
• Journal: Beyond Philology: An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching
• Year: 2012
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 137-150

Contributors

author

Agnieszka Żukowska

• Instytut Anglistyki i Amerykanistyki, Uniwersytet Gdański

References

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Identifiers

ISSN

1732-1220