Conclusion

Summary

Shakespeare's interest in wonder as an element of drama begins with his earliest work. However, careful consideration of his treatment of the emotion reveals that his attitude towards it differs substantially from those of either the dramatic theorists or the more avant-garde practitioners of his day – and in particular from the version of the theatre of wonder propagated in the court masques of Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson. Rather than signing on to the fashion for the masque in his later plays, Shakespeare's employment of masque-like structures and scenes in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest frames a considered rejection of the poetic implications of masque practice at court. This may shed light on Shakespeare's failure to write for the royal forum that attracted the talents of most of the contemporary Jacobean playwrights at one time or another. For the court masque is at once complacent and coercive in its spectacular articulation, or, if it suggests conflict, carefully sublimates that conflict into a polarity between images rather than evoking it within the response of the spectators. Masques tend to tell us what we ought to see and how we ought to see it. They are even inclined to shout about it, as Silenus does in Oberon, the Faery Prince: “For this indeed is he, / My boys, whom you must quake at when you see.” Even when not so insistent, the overall “poetics of spectacle” of the masque still seeks a Neoplatonic clarity of image that smoothes the surface and points recognition all one way.