Luminalia

Luminalia or The Festival of Light was a late Caroline era masque or "operatic show", with an English libretto by Sir William Davenant, designs by Inigo Jones, and music by composer Nicholas Lanier. Performed by Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies in waiting on Shrove Tuesday, 6 February 1638, it was one of the last and most spectacular of the masques staged at the Stuart Court.

Modern critics have disputed how much of the masque's text was actually generated by Davenant. The current view is that "Davenant was responsible for the songs, and perhaps for the prose descriptions, but the action and argument were plagiarized from Italian sources by Inigo Jones." This was in keeping with Jones's primacy in the courtly masque in the 1630s. After Chloridia in 1631, Jones's contentious, quarter-century-long masquing collaboration with Ben Jonson came to an end; in their long-running contest of wills and egos, Jones had won and Jonson had lost. With Aurelian Townshend's 1632 masques, Albion's Triumph and Tempe Restored, Jones's influence became paramount. Jones, however, was not a literary man; the text of Luminalia has been called "in terms of poetry and literary ideas...the most incoherent and meaningless of the masques...."

Davenant's-or-Jones's story for the masque involves the Muses of classical Greek mythology. Driven from Greece by Thracian invaders, and then from Italy by the Vandals and Goths, the Nine wander in search of a new home, finally finding it in Britain, "the garden of Britanides," with a welcoming king and queen. The production was unusual in that the comic and grotesque figures in the anti-masques were played by "gentlemen of quality," including the Duke of Lennox and the Earl of Devonshire. This was a major departure from earlier practice: when Jonson first introduced the anti-masque in his The Masque of Queens (1609), the roles in the anti-masque were filled by professional actors, and no aristocrat would have lowered himself to such an activity.

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