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Expounding the Owl

Expounding the Owl JEAN LAMBERT Ben Jonson s The Masque of Owls In his politicized satire The Masque of Owls,1 Ben Jonson adapts the owl trope to create a subtle interaction between Jacobean policy and the body politic. Jonson’s version of expounding the owl blurs its usual sense—as complaint, prodigy, or folly—in an ambivalent device designed to warn Prince Charles of popular anxieties about the impact on the country of major government strategies.2 He presented the masque before Charles at Kenilworth on 19 August 1624 while James was at Warwick negotiating a French marriage contract and hunting. The King’s absence provided Jonson with an opportunity to use his entertainment to counsel the future monarch. As a response to contemporary political realities the masque represents a quasi-state-of-the-nation speech on the eve of Charles’s succession; a richly informative cultural document for us. Surprisingly, however, apart from James Knowles’s recent paper, it has received scant critical attention.3 In this essay, I shall endeavor to illustrate its historical value. Specifically, I shall consider the performed elements of Jonson’s piece in terms of J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative: as a “perlocutionary”4 linguistic act designed to effect governmental change by persuading Charles to redress current http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Ben Jonson Journal Edinburgh University Press

Expounding the Owl

LAMBERT, JEAN
Ben Jonson Journal , Volume 15 (1): 19 – May 1, 2008
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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© the Editors, 2008
ISSN
1079-3453
eISSN
1755-165x
DOI
10.3366/E1079345308000072
Publisher site
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Abstract

JEAN LAMBERT Ben Jonson s The Masque of Owls In his politicized satire The Masque of Owls,1 Ben Jonson adapts the owl trope to create a subtle interaction between Jacobean policy and the body politic. Jonson’s version of expounding the owl blurs its usual sense—as complaint, prodigy, or folly—in an ambivalent device designed to warn Prince Charles of popular anxieties about the impact on the country of major government strategies.2 He presented the masque before Charles at Kenilworth on 19 August 1624 while James was at Warwick negotiating a French marriage contract and hunting. The King’s absence provided Jonson with an opportunity to use his entertainment to counsel the future monarch. As a response to contemporary political realities the masque represents a quasi-state-of-the-nation speech on the eve of Charles’s succession; a richly informative cultural document for us. Surprisingly, however, apart from James Knowles’s recent paper, it has received scant critical attention.3 In this essay, I shall endeavor to illustrate its historical value. Specifically, I shall consider the performed elements of Jonson’s piece in terms of J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative: as a “perlocutionary”4 linguistic act designed to effect governmental change by persuading Charles to redress current

Journal

Ben Jonson Journal – Edinburgh University Press

Published: May 1, 2008

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