The Fortunate Isles and Their Union

The Fortunate Isles and Their Union is a Jacobean era masque, written by Ben Jonson and designed by Inigo Jones, and performed on 9 January 1625. It was the last masque acted before King James I, (who died two months later on 27 March), and therefore the final masque of the Jacobean era.

The masque had, as its theme, the vision of a unified British kingdom under the guidance of a wise king. "It reflected perfectly the image that he [James] had tried, in his rough-hewn way, to cultivate — even if history, in alloting him part of the blame for the catastrophe that was to befall his son, would be less generous to his reputation."

The Fortunate Isles opens with the entrance of Johphiel, "an airy spirit" who is supposedly "the intelligence of Jupiter's sphere." Johphiel has a long conversation with Merefool, "a melancholic student," which involves much material on the then-new and controversial subject of "the brethren of the Rosy Cross." Jonson devotes this masque to his skeptical and satirical view of the Rosicrucians, just as he had taken a similarly jaundiced view of alchemy in his masque of the previous decade, Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists (1615).

A more specifically English cast to the masque comes with the introduction of the two poets John Skelton and Henry Scogan. The English theme is stronger in the anti-masque, which, in addition to generic figures ("four knaves"), introduces the figures of Mary Ambree, Elinor Rumming, Long Meg of Westminster, and Tom Thumb. Later come the stereotypical mythological figures of the masque form — in this case, the minor sea gods Proteus, Portunus, and Saron. Inigo Jones's staging featured a floating and moving island (another element that would have appeared in the cancelled masque of the previous year).

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