Masqued Poetics in Your Five Gallants: Middleton's Response to Jonson

Thomas Middleton's city comedy Your Five Gallants and Ben Jonson's “comicall satyre” Cynthia's Revels make a surprising pair, given the lower-class London criminals and raucous, physical humor of Middleton's play and the Ovidian-inspired premise and courtly setting of Jonson's. Although heretofore unrecognized, Middleton based Your Five Gallants, his Blackfriars debut, on Jonson's own Blackfriars debut, Cynthia's Revels. This relationship becomes most apparent in the final masques that end both plays. Middleton also modeled the masque in his play on the first Jacobean court masque, Masque of the Knights. This article argues that under Middleton's hand the staged masque served a poetic function: As playgoers to Your Five Gallants responded to the embedded final masque, they enacted their social knowledge and thus claimed social positions. Through their responses to the masque the audience could demonstrate how they understood their status vis-à-vis the subjects of the satire, and, in a further extension of both form and content, the masque enabled Middleton to unmask and censure the audience and to mount a critique of Jonson's author-centered poetics, offering his own audience-based approach as a rebuttal.