The Memorable Masque, 1613

This chapter looks at the first of two simian wedding masques given in 1613 to celebrate the marriage of James I’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to the Elector Palatine. Baboons were all the rage in the 1613 antimasques, possibly influenced by Andrew Battell’s recently published travellers’ tales of great apes, and appeared first in George Chapman’s The Memorable Masque. The chapter argues that Chapman used monkeys as part of an ‘antic’ mode featured in the character Capriccio who keyed to Virginian expansion, the circle around Prince Henry and to the old fable of the pedlar and the apes, filtered through Coryate’s Crudities.