The Masque of Queens EN Jonson's The Masque ofQueens (1609) begins with an antimasque B in which twelve witches, representing Ignorance and its associated vices, are plotting to disturb the courtly celebrations and the order of the universe. Their conspiracy is effortlessly prevented by Heroic Virtue and his daughter Good Fame, and the witches are vanquished. Then the entertainment moves to the main masque: the triumph of Fame, embodied by twelve renowned queens, who in the actual performance were personified by Queen Anne and her ladies.In this way the masque purports to establish a clear moral opposition between Ignorance and Fame. Ian Donaldson situates this opposition among other instances when Jonson contrasts extreme ends of the moral spectrum: "Between a Volpone and a Celia, between a Catiline and a Cicero, between the witches of The Masque of Queenes-those 'opposites to good Fume', who 'do all thinges contrary to the custome of Men'and the ladies of that masque who represent true heroical virtue, there can be no real meeting; such figures inhabit opposite sides of the moral globe, antipodeans to each other."' Similarly, Stephen Orgel argues that Jonson's witches and queens, representing Ignorance and Fame, are antithetical. Their absolute separation parallels that of the antimasque and the main masque, which are the mutually exclusive worlds that these two abstractions inhabit: "His antimasque figures are hags or witches, sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc., the opposites to good Fame (I ~-16)-they are devised, that is, as the abstract antitheses I . Ian Donaldson, The World Upside-Down: Comedyjom Jonson to Fielding (Oxford, I970), P. 78. 268 0 2002

This article examines the celebrations organised for the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary in three American locations: Wellesley, MA; Atlanta, GA; and Grand Forks, ND. By focusing on these hitherto neglected events, the article extends the investigations, initiated by Thomas Cartelli and Coppélia Kahn, into the ways in which the Tercentenary activities in the U.S.A. participated in the contemporaneous debates concerning American national identity. These investigations have until recently concentrated almost exclusively on the Tercentenary festivities organised in the metropolitan centre of New York City. An examination of the provincial celebrations in regions as diverse as New England, the South, and the Midwest, indicates that the Shakespeare Tercentenary provided a platform for a negotiation of a complex network of interrelated, and sometimes conflicting, national and local identities.

This introduction situates this special issue in the context of ongoing debates surrounding the "cultural mobilization" of Shakespeare during the Great War. The key areas of these debates include the degree to which Shakespeare could successfully be appropriated during the war for totalizing -nationalist and imperialist -purposes; the challenges to such appropriations (for instance, from the colonized nations); ideological fractures produced by seeing Shakespeare, simultaneously, as "universal" and "national"; and tensions between "global" and "local", "public" and "private" uses of Shakespeare.

No abstract

No abstract