The Triumph of Peace

The Triumph of Peace was a Caroline era masque, "invented and written" by James Shirley, performed on 3 February 1634 and published the same year. The production was designed by Inigo Jones.

The masque was lavishly sponsored by the four Inns of Court, through a political and social motive. In 1632 the Puritan controversialist William Prynne (himself an Inns of Court man) had dedicated his anti-theatre diatribe Histriomastix to the Inns; since Histriomastix was perceived as insulting to Queen Henrietta Maria, the masque was the Inns' signal of their total rejection of any connection with Prynne's book or his views.

Shirley was chosen to write the masque because he was a member of Gray's Inn. He was not a law student or a lawyer; rather, he was a gentleman boarder, an arrangement preferred by some literary figures of the time. (John Ford was another gentleman boarder). Shirley produced an acceptable text — though he was bold enough to offer some tactfully-phrased advice to his king.

The masque was entered into the Stationers' Register on 24 January 1634 and was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on the date it was acted, 3 February 1634. (Some sources give the date for the masque as 1633, failing to compensate for the difference in Old Style and New Style dates.)

The work was published in the same year, in a quarto printed by John Norton for the bookseller William Cooke. The quarto exists in three impressions, with slight differences between the first and second and greater changes in the third. (W. W. Greg wrote an article titled "The Triumph of Peace: A Bibliographer's Nightmare.")

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