Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue

Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue is a Jacobean era masque, written by Ben Jonson and designed by Inigo Jones. It was first performed on Twelfth Night, 6 January 1618, in the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace. The work's failure on its initial performance, and its subsequent revision, marked a significant development in Jonson's evolving masque technique.

The masque marked the début of the young Prince Charles, the future King Charles I, in the public life of the Stuart Court. Upon the death of his older brother Prince Henry in 1612, Charles had become the heir to the throne of his father, James I; but his youth and relatively poor health (he'd suffered from rickets as a child) kept Charles from assuming the kind of public prominence that Henry had earlier enjoyed. Dancing a role in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue marked a sort of "coming out" for Charles, just as Henry's appearance in the Jonson/Jones masque Oberon, the Faery Prince (1611) had been significant in his career. Orazio Busino, the chaplain to the Venetian ambassador to London and a member of the audience, described Charles as "an agile youth, handsome and very graceful."

Jonson's text for the masque was dominated by the usual figures of classical mythology — in this case, Hercules faces a conflict between the competing demands of duty and pleasure; under the guidance of Mercury, a mean between the two is found in the person of Daedalus. The appearance of Comus, the Bacchus-like god of festivity and mockery, at the start of the masque may have later inspired John Milton to make the figure a central focus of his own masque Comus in 1634. Jones's set for the masque featured a large mountain meant to represent Mount Atlas; the mountain's peak was shaped like a human head that moved its eyes and changed expression. The anti-masque featured a dozen followers of Comus, men dressed in barrels, and a dozen boys costumed as frogs. A second anti-masque featured a dance of pygmies.

...
Wikipedia