‘Hail, reverend Structure!’ Questioning Patriarchal Parenthood in the Aquatic Imagery of Grottoes in Court Masques

I: Guardini. ‘Hail, reverend Structure!’ Caterina Guardini ‘Hail, reverend Structure!’ Questioning Patriarchal Parenthood in the Aquatic Imagery of Grottoes in Court Masques Jonson’s Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624), Daniel’s Tethy’s Festival (1610), and Jonson’s Love’s Triumph through Callipolis (1631) explore the representation of royal private and political patriarchy within the Stuart courts of James I and Charles I. By questioning the representation of gender and parenthood, this paper aims at conjecturing the conflictual variety of audience-responses to the aquatic imagery of Mannerist garden grottoes at work in these shows in order to investigate whether the motherly agency of Queen Anna is really erased by James I’s imagery of aquatic patriarchy or if it survives in Charles’s mnemonic reception during his later performances on the masquing stage. Abstract II: I masque Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion (Jonson, 1624), Tethy’s Festival (Daniel, 1610), e Love’s Triumph through Callipolis (Jonson, 1631) mettono in scena, in modi diversi, la rappresentazione del potere patriarcale nelle corti Stuart di Giacomo I e Carlo I, sia sul piano privato che su quello politico. A partire dall’analisi della rappresentazione di genere e genitorialità, questo saggio si propone di confrontare le immagini acquatiche di grotte manieriste che compaiono in questi tre spettacoli al fine di ricostruire la complessa ricezione, alla luce dei ruoli materni e paterni di Anna di Danimara e Giacomo I, da parte di Carlo I, e di come essa ne abbia influenzato l’iconografia nei successivi spettacoli di corte. In 1603, James I Stuart was saluted by the English people not only as king, but also as the father of a royal dynasty. The new monarch applied a patriarchal model to both his reign and his family: by opposing his iconography to that of the previous ‘virgin queen’, in several speeches to Parliament James presented himself as the husband to “the whole Isle” and compared the king of a nation to a parens patriae, “the politique father of his people” (McIlwain 1918: 271; 307). However, James I confronted conflicting interests in matter of both parenthood with his wife, Anna of Denmark1, and of foreign politics with his two sons: Henry, who prematurely died in 1613, and Charles, who would succeed his father in 16262. Among Renaissance festivals, Stuart masques were a private form of court theatre 1 Following C. McManus (2002: 1) and other scholars, the queen will be referred to as Anna, as she used to do herself, rather than by the English version of her name, Anne. 2 For a biographical insight on the personal relationships at work within the royal family of James I, see Bergeron (1991).