A Brace of Court Apes: James Shirley’s Masques

This chapter starts with present-absence, looking at masques without apes but which insist on using intertheatricality to recall them. It argues that Ben Jonson did not use an ape because, unlike other antimasquers, it refuses to be contained or converted by the power of kingly majesty. The chapter moves on to Shirley’s absent-present jokes in his The Triumph of Peace (1634), and his troupe of monkeys in Cupid and Death (1653). The intrinsic metatheatricality of apes meant that Shirley could use audience recollections of ‘baboons / In quellios’ to enable his ritual strategy for Peace. In Cupid and Death’s nods to paratheatrical ape-shows, attention is drawn to theatre displaced by the Civil War; and in its representation of the chaos caused by the confusion of the arrows of Cupid and Death, it foregrounds the topsy-turvy caused by collective purpose gone wrong. Shirley’s inverted world, where the ape-ward falls in love with his apes, becomes a microcosm of the political (dis)order of the 1650s.