Theater Reform and the Masque in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House

The signature scene shifts, pastoral settings, and perspectival instabilities of Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House squarely align the poem with the theatrical tradition of the court masque, a tradition that was effectively moribund at the time of the poem’s composition in 1651. The influence of the masque on Upon Appleton House (and other Marvell works) has been widely noted, but the significance of his poem in the longer history of English theater—specifically, in the discourse of theatrical reform—has not been fully considered. In Upon Appleton House, Marvell not only applies the strategies and techniques of the masque, but he also engages with ideas central to the ongoing debate between opponents and defenders of the stage. As such, his poem anticipates the reforms and innovations attempted by William Davenant, Richard Flecknoe, and others who campaigned to revive theater in Interregnum England. However, Marvell’s appropriation of masque theatrics is not tethered to the goals of reform. His poem is distinctly the product of the post-regicide, preProtectorate imagination, when the theaters are shuttered, dramatic performance is driven underground, and the fate of the Commonwealth is precarious. Accordingly, his method is not to establish a mode of theater palatable to republican interests, but instead to defamiliarize theatrical representation in a way that responds to the uncertainty of the moment.

And so far were they carried into the admiration thereof, that they thought in the chanceable hitting upon any such verses great foretokens of their following fortunes were placed. Whereupon grew the word of Sortes Virgilianae, when by sudden opening Virgil's book they lighted upon any verse of his making, whereof the histories of the emperors' lives are full: as of Albinus, the governor of our island, who in his childhood met with this verse Arma amens capio nec sat rationis in armis and in his age performed it. 3 In the logic of the Sortes Virgilianae, Sidney explains, Virgil's books are fraught with prophetic import. When readers turn to a page at random, they find their fates duly foretold there; the vatic authority entrusted to the poet elevates "chanceable hitting" above rank speculation. Marvell's speaker approaches the book of Nature with similar reverence, expecting actionable intelligence as the sortilege practitioners did with Virgil. He is, instead, overwhelmed with inducements to leisure and artifice, all gathered under the pretext of masque. If the British governor Albinus "performed" the bellicose motto revealed to him by the Aeneid and hence fulfilled the prophecy inscribed therein, Marvell's speaker is groomed for a different kind of performance, one that harnesses the unexpected chemistry of oracle and spectacle.
I highlight the episode because, in addition to being the sole reference by name to masquing in Upon Appleton House, it encapsulates the poem's uniquely intimate engagement with the masque tradition. The speaker's ability to channel a bombardment of stimuli into an impromptu burlesque of prelatical pomp suggests not just a keen improvisational aptitude, but also the lingering vitality-and surprising proximityof this seemingly passé mode in 1651. A decade removed from its Caroline vogue, the masquing habit remains warm and familiar and inhabitable, albeit prone to the strangeness that hangs about the not-long-forgotten past. In time Marvell would gain firsthand experience with producing a masque, contributing two songs to the wedding celebrations for Mary Cromwell and Lord Fauconberg in 1657. The two songs trade on nostalgia for the erotic pastoralism of the Elizabethan and early Stuart courts, providing a telling glimpse into the aristocratic proclivities of the Protectoral regime. Upon Appleton House presents a more ambivalent reckoning with the masque and its legacies. both remark the poem's intricate staging of a "masque of nature." 4 Muriel Bradbrook suggests that Marvell infuses the poem with the energy of an "obsolete political rite," that masque (along with pastoral, its close cousin) operates within his verse as a kind of "undersong" whose residual presence collides with the political realities of post-Civil War England to produce "tragic ironies." 5 Leah Marcus holds that "Marvell's is a masque that undoes masquing," with the poet mimicking the movements of the masque while signaling the loss of the idyllic milieu that birthed them. "The Cavalier paradise cannot escape the 'fallen' world of political conflict," writes Marcus, "but must bow to its reforging energies to emerge something other, quite new." 6 Two more recent studies point to a stark presentism that underlies the poem's attempts to navigate the aftermath of the civil wars. In an illuminating article on the sounds of Upon Appleton House, Gary Kuchar explores how the soundscapes of the poem immerse the speaker in the particularities of the Yorkshire landscape, engaging his senses with an acuteness that at once invites and frustrates metahistorical interpretation. For Kuchar the poem is an effort to give aesthetic form to real-time disorientation, less about generating meaning than evoking presence. 7 In Lyric Apocalypse, Ryan Netzley similarly notes Marvell's embrace of radical immanence in Upon Appleton House, wherein the poem's abstruse symbols are themselves eventsnot figures waiting to be decoded, but rather "executions of force" whose revelatory impact is felt in the here and now. 8 Netzley and Kuchar posit different arguments, but what they share is a sense that Marvell's poem registers profound unease with stabilizing narratives that seek to organize perception along the lines of a knowable, preordained history. Marvell respects the force of received pasts and imagined futures, but sees when they refuse to take their place in an orderly and intelligible chronology.
In this regard the conceit of the found masque is instructive, as it epitomizes the twin forces of familiarity and disruption that lend the poem its constitutive dynamic. The chance hit that Marvell's speaker absorbs in the Appleton wood may be viewed as a backdoor entry into the wider theatrical discourse of the revolutionary period, in all of its inchoate variety. Marvell's participation in this discourse has not been fully acknowledged, despite the notice given to his careful deployment of aural and visual techniques in Upon Appleton House and other works. Marvell's verse descriptions not only approximate the effects of the court masque, but they also prefigure its dispersal into a tangle of theatrical idioms during the 1650s. Furthermore, they show the poet staking a claim in moral and representational debates that, in short time, would be taken up under the overtly political banner of theatrical reform.
In this respect, Upon Appleton House is of a piece with the work of the musical  (1651), with its pretentious claims of producing epic literature on subjects distanced from the present time, its grand claims for poetry as high architecture (to be read by princes only), its preference for books (as opposed to the book of nature), and the influence in its preface of Hobbes's psychological and political theories. To all of these themes, Upon Appleton House replies in the negative. 9 If Gondibert reaches for timelessness, Upon Appleton House is manifestly an artifact of the pre-Protectorate imagination, a case that Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker have made by dating the poem to the "high summer" of 1651, when the prospect of incursion by Charles II and the Scottish Covenanters put the survival and legitimacy of the republic in real danger. Marvell's poem, they assert, is inflected at every turn by a respect for the radically contingent nature of the historical moment. 10

II
In his 2017 study of masque and opera in Cromwellian and Restoration England, Andrew Walkling provides a useful synopsis of the differences between the two forms.
According to Walkling, the "classic" Stuart court masque as devised by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones consisted of regicentric rhetoric couched in an entertainment focused on non-speaking courtly performers and largely devoid of conventional narrative structures. The masque was fundamentally declaratory rather than expository, existing outside of the Aristotelian strictures on "poetic" (i.e. dramatic) propriety, and drawing its authority from a Renaissance mythos of divinely ordained royal majesty and power. 11 Opera, meanwhile, reflected a contrary effort not to cast off the classical conventions of drama but rather to heighten them, deploying music as a means to enhance dramatic "speech" by articulating the passions of onstage characters, thereby elevating the audience's response. Opera's use of expressive musical gestures, including its deployment of the new "technology" of recitative, sets it apart from the masque, where forms of tuneful air and speech-inflected declamation similarly coexist, but with an entirely different purpose, namely to craft a musical language whose character is ceremonial rather than emotive. 12 Walkling illustrates that the distinction between masque and opera was real but not absolute, as English operatists absorbed masque influences such as "employment of music, scenic sophistication, pastoral and Olympian characters and themes, heightened poetic language, and even the upended world of the antimasque." 13 The chief influence of the masque, he observes, was theatrical rather than musical, owing to the difficulty of translating Italian recitative to an English idiom as well as entrenched skepticism of dramatic narratives in musical settings. And in the 1650s, the masque "dropped 11 Andrew R. Walkling, Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688(London: Routledge, 2017 Ibid., 8-9. 13 Ibid., 11. much of its explicitly courtly rhetoric," Walkling explains, "moving instead into the realm of morality and employing a more conventional dialogic and hence dramatic idiom." 14 Walkling's portrait of an intentional yet indeterminate movement toward dramatic reform can be seen in the works of Flecknoe and Davenant, two figures who not only navigated the era's restrictions on performance but actively fashioned themselves as reformers. Of the two, Flecknoe's productions were less celebrated and hardly performed, but no less varied or ambitious. In 1654 he published the play Love's Dominion a Dramatique Piece Full of Excellent Moralitie, Written as a Pattern for the Reformed Stage, whose scenic framework, musical interludes, pastoral milieu, and deference to the cult of love plainly evoke the masque even as Flecknoe presents the work as something more novel. The play's title encapsulates the tenor of stage representation during the early years of the Protectorate: broadly moralizing and nominally "dramatic," but generically fluid. In the preface, Flecknoe links reform of the stage to reform of the pulpit, "where of late there has been uttered more scandalous and libellous stuff, than ever yet was uttered on the Stage." 15 He argues that seeing and hearing dramatic works in performance makes audiences more receptive to religious instruction: Devotion, (like gilding to matter) cleaving not, nor sticking to rough and unpolish'd minds, unlesse they be first prepared with politeness of manners, and the tincture of good education, for the receiving it; which is best taught on the Theater, by how much those precepts move the mind more forcibly and efficaciously, which besides the allowance of the Ear, have a powerfull recommendation of the Eye. 16 Flecknoe breaks more cleanly from the masque tradition in another dramatic work he produces in 1654, Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found and Courted by Bacchus. Billed as "a dramatick piece apted for recitative musick," Ariadne Deserted shares credit with Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1656) as the first opera written in English. Flecknoe prefaces the work by stressing the emotive force of music combined with verse, as epitomized by Italian recitative. He strives to create a native recitative style that retains the force of the Italian despite the limitations of the comparatively feeble English language, whose "words die in a manner as soon as born, not being able scarcely to 14 Ibid.,9. 15  brook the air." 17 In Love's Dominion, Flecknoe nods to the socially salutary effects of drama, whereas here his aim is narrower: he submits recitative as an inherently regal idiom, whose effects are reserved accordingly: Tis many years since I proposed unto a Soveraign Prince the congruity, that as their persons, so their Musick should be elevated above the Vulgar, and made not only to delight the ear but also their understandings; not patcht up with Songs of different subjects, but all of one piece, with design and plot, accommodated to their several dispositions, and occasions; which they then gratiously pleased to be inclined and early 1650s, and particularly by the sensationalist psychology of his friend Thomas Hobbes, whose ideas figured prominently in those debates. 22 Most human beings, Davenant writes, are moved by sensory experience, not speculative reasoning; hence the goal of inciting them to virtue "can be compass'd no other way then by surprisall of their Eyes and Ears." 23 Accordingly, scene changes are of crucial importance. While the connoisseur class or "Virtuosi" may be moved by silent and static representations such as buildings, pictures, statues, medals, "common soules" require sound and movement: triumphs, pageants, cavalcades. These bustling entertainments induce what Davenant calls "abject admiration," an experience of strangeness or novelty that stirs the senses yet never rises to the level of curiosity. 24 By applying the kaleidoscopic 20 Davenant's interest in the stage as a means to promote social and political order is shared by earlier theater defenders such as Thomas Heywood, who observes the capacity of plays "to teach the subiects obedience to their King, to shew the people the vntimely ends of such as haue moued tumults, commotions, and insurrections, to present them with the flourishing estate of such as liue in obedience, exhorting them to allegeance, dehorting them from all trayterous and fellonious stratagems." See Heywood, An apology for actors Containing three briefe treatises.  23 Davenant,Proposition,11. 24 Ibid., 10-11. Jacob and Raylor note that Davenant's notion of admiration as specific to the common people is his own invention: "For Hobbes, curiosity follows inevitably and in all people from admiration. … Davenant, however, introduces a class distinction … [which] grafts a reading of Hobbesian psychology on to traditional aristocratic-humanist assumptions about the effects of theatre on different classes." See "Opera and Obedience," 224. effects of the masque to exclusively heroic subject matter, the reformed theater would effectively bedazzle its audience into submission to the state. Diogenes identifies the void at the heart of representation. One cannot fell a wood, mow a meadow, or fish a river that isn't there. His skepticism of painted scenes and moving lights follows the Hobbesian, anti-essentialist view that the nature of things is unknowable by the senses; to quote Hobbes directly, "motion produces nothing but motion. … the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another." 27 Aristophanes grants that sensory impressions are deceiving. But he divests this premise of its cynicism, insisting: Nor is that deception where we are prepar'd and consent to be deceiv'd. Nor is there much loss in that deceit, where we gain some variety of experience by a short journey of the sight. When [Diogenes] gives you advice not to lay out time in prospect of Woods and Medows, which you can never possess, he may as well shut up his 25 Davenant, The first days entertainment at Rutland-House, by declamations and musick: after the manner of the ancients (London, 1656), 2. 26 Ibid., 17. own little Window (which is the Bung-hole of his Tub) and still remain in the dark, because the light can only shew him that which he can neither purchase nor beg. 28 In A Proposition, the audience was presumed defenseless before the deceiving effects of sound and motion, whereas here Davenant trusts that his audience may prepare and consent to be deceived. The ancient Athenians are ostensibly a more sophisticated lot than the English, who are presented as tools of the Cromwellian state apparatus. the proscenium stage (another Jones innovation), as well as the poem itself. Together, these framing devices invite us to view the work simultaneously as architecture, theater, and poetry.
The organic unity of this spectacle is, however, suspect. Appleton's sober frame fits Fairfax's humble nature, yet in trying to contain his magnificence the "laden house" (6.49) sweats and swells, manifestly unsober mannerisms. The speaker rationalizes this anomaly partly by proverbializing ("Height with a certain grace does bend, / But low things clownishly ascend" [8.59-60]), partly by deflecting to an imagined past and future in which Fairfax's towering stature passes safely into legend. In stanza four he recalls a "more sober age and mind, / When larger-sizèd men did stoop / To enter at a narrow loop" (4.28-30); in stanza five he envisions an "after age" when visitors to the house will marvel at "how their extent / Within such dwarfish confines what Jane Partner calls the "extreme perspectival illusionism" that, during the leadup to civil war, was deployed to burnish the myth of an idyllic royalism. 36 Marvell, according to Partner, applies similar optical tricks to different ends in Upon Appleton House, ironically channeling Webb's expertise to stress the uncertainty of appearances and allegiances in the post-regicide landscape. 37 Partner locates this effect in the later stanzas of the poem, but it is also richly evident in stanza ten, where the speaker prepares to commence his tour of the estate grounds: But Nature here hath been so free As if she said, 'Leave this to me'.
Art would more neatly have defaced What she had laid so sweetly waste; In fragrant gardens, shady woods, Deep meadows, and transparent floods. (10.75-80) Surveying the entirety of the estate, the speaker assumes something akin to the perspectival privilege of the monarch at court, for whom the spatial and optical illusions of the masque achieve their optimal effect. 38 The speaker asserts that the landscape of Nun Appleton is the design of nature, and by extension, not the work of art. But the functionalities he ascribes to them, both premised on a curious combination of elegance and destruction, are strikingly similar; this is reinforced by the internal and end rhymes of "neatly have defaced" and "laid so sweetly waste." As a result, it is unclear who is responsible for the splendors and ravages recounted in lines 79 and 80. Nature and art are implicated in one another's work despite the speaker's outward claims to the contrary; he will experience that confusion firsthand once he sets foot in the grounds.  At the outset of his walking tour, Marvell's speaker suggested that nature had wrested control of the grounds and gardens from art ("Leave this to me"), setting the stage for a continuation of the "sober frame" narrative of the first ten stanzas. What has emerged instead is a wide-ranging experiment in spectatorial subjectivity, in which Marvell continually tests the bounds of decorum and the dynamics of perspective. The next frame of the poem-the speaker's progress through the scenic topography of Nun Appleton-forms an even more searching exploration of theatrical sensibility and affect. The meadows and woods of Nun Appleton are the site of the most sudden and dramatic scene shifts in the poem; they serve not merely as pastoral or topographical settings, but as crucibles of ethical experience. Notably, meadows and woods are also cited as illusion-prone spaces in Davenant's First Days Entertainment, the focal point of Diogenes's fears and Aristophanes's hopes for the impressionable spectator. The difference in Marvell's poem is that his speaker is embedded in those spaces, both viewing and participating in the masque-like spectacles around him. The movement from the garden to the meadow commences with the assertion of the lyric voice: "And now to the abyss I pass" (47.369), effectively declaring the speaker's heightened implication in the action of the poem. On entering the meadow, he finds himself instantly engulfed in "unfathomable grass," where men "like grasshoppers appear" and "grasshoppers are giants" (47.371-72). Colie situates the quick metamorphoses and scalar shifts that occur in the meadow scenes within a variety of seventeenthcentury visual traditions-not just the masque, but also catoptric and magic lantern displays, which projected serial images that permitted the viewer to "stand passive before shifts of scene." 45 Such displays, Colie explains, did not require the viewer to 45 Colie, "My Ecchoing Song," 210. make physical or mental adjustments to organize these images into a synthetic whole.
When the speaker remarks, "No scene that turns with engines strange / Does oft'ner than these meadows change" (49.385-86), he not only makes explicit the functional likeness of the meadow to the masque and adjacent optical technologies. He lets us into a kind of Hobbesian fever dream, where motion is so profuse that it can scarcely be imagined to produce anything but image or fancy.

The depiction of the meadow is tantamount to what Davenant had in mind in A
Proposition-rapid scene changes that would stun the viewer into submission-only instead of portraying heroic virtues worthy of emulation, Marvell delivers a densely layered mock-heroic poem that confounds the relationship between scene and spectator. The entry of the "tawny mowers," who cut through the "green sea" of grass and thus "seem like Israelites to be" (49.389-90), sets the stage for high burlesque, with the mowers' humble labor elevated to biblical proportions. The scene takes an unsettling turn, however, when one of the mowers accidentally kills a low-nesting rail.
He recoils at the violence he has done to the bird, fearing what its untimely, grisly death portends. No sooner does his shock settle into dread than he is upstaged by Thestylis, the nymph who serves up the bird as part of a providential feast and, in doing so, seems to reinforce the biblical arch-narrative introduced by the speaker: But bloody Thestylis, that waits To bring the mowing camp their cates, Greedy as kites, has trussed it up, And forthwith means on it to sup: When on another quick she lights, And cries, 'He called us Israelites; But now, to make his saying true, Rails rain for quails, for manna, dew. ' (51.401-8) The stanza begins with the problematic designation of Thestylis as "bloody," the same adjective used in the prior stanza to describe the blade of the scythe that killed the rail.
Has that same blood magically transferred to her person? Is she physically stained with the blood of the bird that was unknowingly "carved" by the mower, or rather is she bloody-minded in her rush to read the accident as divine providence? The viewer is not only blindsided by the unaccountably gory visage of a figure habitually associated with hay-ropes and herbs, but then left to wonder how she has so swiftly "trussed up" the bird that was slain in the grass moments ago. One setting has simply morphed into the next, and not quite in the manner of the "engines strange" that power the masque. The meadow does not so much approximate as accelerate the rapid scene-changing effects produced by turning devices and tractable scenes.
Amid the kinetic excess, the speaker loses the perspectival privilege he has enjoyed as an observer of events. Thestylis lays bare the poem's artifice through direct reference to the speaker, whose Exodus allusion she completes in grotesque fashion by comparing the appearance of a second rail to God's provision of manna and quail.
Presumably the rail is the presence she detects in line 405 ("on another quick she lights"), but the wording also refers obliquely to the speaker, thrust from anonymity by the luminous glance of the maiden. The scene before him remains the same, but in a metatheatrical turn, the focus expands such that he finds himself implicated in the carnage. Thenceforward he must answer for his bloody creation: in stanza fiftytwo he grieves the fate of the "unhappy birds," effectively countering the providential narrative that has grown out of his initial comparison of the mowers to the Israelites.
In having the speaker silence his own creation, Marvell points up the agency and complicity built into the spectatorial gaze.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the speaker's lament is rudely eclipsed by the mowers' antimasque, an even more flamboyant show of destruction: Or sooner hatch or higher build: The mower now commands the field; In whose new traverse seemeth wrought A camp of battle newly fought: Where, as the meads with hay, the plain Lies quilted o'er with bodies slain: The women that with forks it fling, Do represent the pillaging. (53.417-24) The miniature tragedy of the slaughtered rail pales beside the massacre that appears here. The mower (not the speaker) now commands the field, and it is his vision that is projected onto the "new traverse," or stage curtain, that marks the change of scene.
The traverse bears the image of a battlefield strewn with dead bodies, an image that theoretically may be focalized into the more palatable sight of a freshly harvested hayfield. However, the scene as presented precludes such a synthesis. As Marcus has argued, the reversal of vehicle and tenor in this stanza, in which the war metaphor used to represent the hay harvest transforms into a harvest metaphor representing war, makes "the iconography of this 'new Traverse' … remarkably difficult to read." 46 The parts of the metaphor never coalesce into a whole, as exemplified by the field women manneristically "representing" rather than doing the pillaging. As in the example of Thestylis outing the speaker, the stanza evokes the metamorphic features of the 46 Marcus,Politics of Mirth,250. masque: yet again, it is not an actual scene change but rather the indeterminate motion occurring within the scene that defamiliarizes the image. The speaker may strain to discern the object behind the image, to locate stasis amid the motion, but the meadow and its denizens persist in shifting shape.
Collectively, the prolific optical play of the meadow comprises a heightened iteration of masque theatrics, where the speaker's experience is similar to that of the sensorily inclined Hobbesian multitude. As the setting shifts to the wood, however, the poem delves more deeply into the ethics of spectatorship and, in the process, gestures toward a more complexly participatory theatricality. The visual tricks remain, but the question of the speaker's consent to be deceived by them looms anew as he drifts towards the center of the action; soon he will absorb the chance hit of the masque and become a full-fledged player. Ironically, the wood is introduced as a sanctuary from the meadow, which is overrun by floodwaters from the nearby Denton estate: Then, to conclude these pleasant acts, Denton sets ope its cataracts; And makes the meadow truly be (What it but seemed before) a sea. (59.465-68) The flood itself is presented as a theatrical device, the deus ex machina that resolves the illusions of the prior "pleasant acts" and propels the meadow to its aquatic destiny: "eels now bellow in the ox" (60.474), "boats can over bridges sail" (60.477), and "fishes do the stables scale" (60.478). Significantly, these amphibious mutations are ontological, not optical, in nature. The flood "makes the meadow truly be," and the speaker halts to explain images that, while plainly fantastical and grotesque, are not produced by ocular sleight of hand: "Let others tell the paradox" (60.473).
Consequently, when he leaves the flooded meadow and girds himself Noah-like in the primordial wood of the Appleton forest, the move does not represent a rejection of visual artifice or an embrace of essentialist ontology. On the contrary, it signifies the speaker's further incorporation into the theatrical fiction, whereby he explores not just the visual but also the intellectual, corporeal, and affective dimensions of immersive spectatorship. From the outside the forest suggests an impenetrable abyss-"Dark all without it knits" (64.505)-but within "It opens passable and thin; / And in as loose an order grows, / As the Corinthean porticoes" (64.506-8).
The covert theatricality of the wood represents perhaps the grandest illusion of all in Upon Appleton House, a nod to the surreptitious activity that carried on behind and beyond theaters' shuttered doors. Where once the speaker observed he now participates: sampling the musics of the wood (stanzas sixty-five and sixty-six); conferring with the birds and trees (stanza seventy-one); dabbling in the hermetic mystical arts (stanza seventy-three); basking in the sumptuousness of the grove (stanzas seventy-five to seventy-eight); and fishing on the banks of the River Wharfe (stanza eighty-one). He enjoys unprecedented performative license in the theater of the wood, weaving in and out of personas at a rate that, as Robert Cummings has noted, suggests "the bewilderment of a man whose own conceptions take him by surprise" and sets off the "relative fixity" of the rest of the poem. 47 The speaker's radical permeability to his surroundings, which encompasses visual as well as auditory and tactile stimuli, at once comprises a fuller articulation of the theatrical sensorium and a realization of its most feared proclivities. Marvell's description of the wood seems calculated to stoke anxieties about the amorphousness of the self, a commonplace of antitheatrical discourse in the early modern period. For instance, in Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), Stephen Gosson decries theater's excessive appeals to carnal delight, which "hindreth the course of reason" and "whets vs to wantonnes" in a variety of ways: [I]t withdraweth the minde from better studies, the minde like a stringe, being let downe, and pitcht, beneath his naturall compasse, to this key of carnall delight. … it breedeth a hunger, & thirst, after pleasure. For when the thing which our appetite enioyeth cannot bee receued all at once, but by succession, or change, we gape after more, as hee that hearing one halfe of a sentence, & delighteth in that, is very desirous to haue the rest. So in Comedies delight being moued with varietie of shewes, of euents, of musicke, the longer we gaze, the more we craue, yea so forcible they are, that afterwards being but thought vpon, they make vs seeke for the like an other time. 48 The wood scenes in Upon Appleton House bear out Gosson's dire warnings with nearcomic precision. In stanza seventy-four the speaker is literally jostled from his studies by the impromptu masque of nature that swells about him. From that point on, the resplendent variety of the wood spurs him to flights of sensual leisure, turning the once measured observer of events into the inveterate pleasure-seeker. "Languishing with ease" on "pallets swoll'n of velvet moss" (75.593-94), he gives thanks for the respite from reason he has been indulged: As the speaker gives himself over to his idyllic surroundings, his passivity evolves into a studied anti-agency. His rapid habituation to pleasure takes the form of a performative masochism, as he calls variously to be bound, chained, nailed, and staked down by the verdant vegetation about him; the longer he gazes, the more he craves. Only the unexpected sighting of Mary Fairfax snaps him from his reverie and prompts him to renounce "pleasures slight": "'Twere shame that such judicious eyes / Should with such toys a man surprise" (82.652-54). Shame, not spectacle, is the operative force in this formulation of theatricality. It delineates the boundaries within which the speaker consents to be transported beyond himself. In the secluded theater of the grove, he claims immunity to external suggestion: "How safe, methinks, and strong, behind / These trees have I encamped my mind" (76.601-2). After trying on a series of boldly luxuriant poses, he is chastened into an equally poignant selfawareness by Mary's "judicious eyes," which compel him to cease his narcissistic histrionics and rejoin the ranks of spectators. Like "loose Nature" (83.657) around him, he summarily gathers himself and gazes in awed admiration at the young heiress.
If the speaker's dalliances as "prelate of the grove" seem the product of the antitheatrical imagination, the shift to Mary as the poem's focal point serves as a reminder of the instructive, moralistic, and authoritarian functionalities of the stage. Nature and its constituents, like the imagined patrons of a reformed theater, are at once awed and ennobled by what they behold. Mary's benign influence is compared to that of the "modest halcyon" calming the seas: The viscous air, wheres'e'er she fly, Follows and sucks her azure dye; The jellying stream compacts below, If it might fix her shadow so; The stupid fishes hang, as plain As flies in crystal overta'en; And men with silent scene assist, Charmed with the sapphire-wingèd mist. (85.673-80) Ultimately Mary's potency exceeds that of the halcyon. Nature is quieted under the bird's fabled influence, whereas under hers it is transformed: "But by her flames, in heaven tried, / Nature is wholly vitrified" (86.687-88). Following the sumptuous dissolution of the wood scenes, the trope of vitrified nature and its connotations of apocalypse suggest a hard course correction, a sweeping containment of theater's subversive potential. Other than her judicious eyes, Mary is not described; her presence commands wonder, but not through formal display. The spectacle of Mary, such as it is, derives from the choreographed image of nature falling in line before her-that is, from the audience, now figured as masquers feting their guest of honor by imaging her virtue. The halcyon's impact is manifest in the "viscous air," "jellying stream," and "stupid fishes": but in line 679, with the appearance of the men who "with silent scene assist," Marvell reveals that the stilling act is a creation of theatrical optics.
David Carroll Simon likens the effect to a "semi-conscious masque" marked by a "torsion of perspective that blurs the edges of things while making them available for inspection," 49 while Nigel Mapp reads it as "theatre without the show … something like a phenomenology of fugitive colour." 50 As the details of Mary's influence are shaded in, the initial promise of a chastened retreat from theatricality fades into an exploration of theater's visual economy. The river congeals to allow the formation of a fixed shadow upon its surface, emblazoning the halcyon's presence while preserving her elusiveness. The fish in the river are subject to the reverse effect: they gain visibility and lose mystique, like flies trapped in crystal. Finally, the stagehands are "charmed with the sapphire-wingèd mist" that remains from the azure-infused "viscous air" described at the start of the stanza; they are moved by the scene they have a hand in creating, literally breathing it in.
The heady stillness that settles over nature is, in some sense, analogous to the "abject admiration" that features in Davenant's model of a morally instructive, socially palliative theater. Just as he believes in the power of sensory impressions to compel obedience and emulation, Marvell presents the sighting of Mary as the catalyst for nature to conform in lockstep to her example: 'Tis she that to these gardens gave That wondrous beauty which they have; She straightness on the woods bestows; To her the meadow sweetness owes; Nothing could make the river be So crystal-pure but only she; She yet more pure, sweet, straight, and fair, Than gardens,woods,meads, The suddenly immaculate landscape of Nun Appleton jars with the sprawling fantasia that the speaker lately fashioned from the same environs. As in the conquest and dispossession of the priory, the cleansing of nature turns on triumphant chastity and spectacular metamorphosis, stock masque tropes-only in this case, the casualty is the speaker, and the transformation is gradual, not instant. When Mary appears, the speaker is decentered from the action to the point of near invisibility. He reclaims something of the spectatorial privilege he had held before passing to the abyss of the meadow, sizing up the entirety of the landscape in a single, widescreen gaze and bending it to his imaginative will. However, the shame he feels on her arrival is not resolved. Rather, it is displaced onto nature, which he strives to remake in the image of chastity, even after it has been "wholly vitrified" by Mary's heaven-tried flames. He instructs nature to shelter the innocent pupil "till Fate her worthily translates, / And find a Fairfax for our Thwaites" (94.747-48), signaling the dynastic hopes that the Fairfaxes had for their only child: Employ the means you have by her, And in your kind yourselves prefer; That, as all virgins she precedes, So you all woods, streams, gardens, meads. (94.749-52) The prospect of nature reasserting its primordial excellence solidifies Nun Appleton's distinction from the world outside of it, which is "not, what once it was. … But a rude heap together hurled" (96.761-62). After indefinite digressions and illusions, the estate coalesces into an orderly space that mirrors the values of its owner: principled retirement, lineal regeneration, and spiritual and intellectual nurture. However, the speaker's experience there has been more problematic than this outcome would imply. His move to impose strict order upon a space that he happily disordered-and was happily disordered by-is categorically reactive. In turn, the blanket assertion of Fairfacian values seems an attempt at diversion, the work of a gazed-upon object who wants quickly to be unseen. Nun Appleton emerges at last as a theater of moral instruction, but for him it has served chiefly to force a reckoning with the amorality of lived sensory experience. proceeds by way of artful negotiations with the English masque tradition. The poem's gaze is neither forward nor backward, its sights trained neither on reform nor reaction.
It imagines theatricality from the inside out, from the perspective of a subject who by "chance's better wit" experiences the immersiveness of theater at a time when the institution itself lacks a constant referent. If dramatic performance survived prohibition by migrating to alternate spaces and assuming different forms, Upon Appleton House reminds us that such maneuvers, themselves acts of motion and metamorphosis, are inexorably theatrical. At Marvell's Nun Appleton, the conditions least hospitable to the enterprise of theater are instrumental to the art.