Enter IRIS.

IRIS                 Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas

Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and peas;

Thy turfy mountains where live nibbling sheep,

And flat meads thatched with stover them to keep;

Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims,

Which spongy April at thy hest betrims

To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broomgroves

Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves,

Being lass-lorn; thy pole-clipped vineyard,

And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard,

Where thou thyself dost air—the queen o’th’ sky,

Whose watery arch and messenger am I,

Bids thee leave these, and with her sovereign grace,

JUNO descends.

Here on this grass-plot, in this very place,

To come and sport. Her peacocks fly amain.

Approach, rich Ceres, her to entertain. (4.1.60-75)

 

This is utterly perverse. I don’t know if I’ve really looked closely at the text of the masque before, but it’s proto-Miltonic in its syntax. Yes, that is a single sentence, stretching over fourteen and a half lines (a sonnet and then some…), with its main verbs delayed until the last two lines. And it’s not just the syntax and grammar that’s hard here: the speech is an invocation to Ceres, goddess of the harvest and, more generally, of agriculture, but she naturally doesn’t appear until it’s over; it’s Juno, the queen o’th’ sky, wife of Jupiter, goddess of marriage, who descends during the speech. And the speaker, Iris, doesn’t identify herself as Juno’s (and the gods’) messenger, and as the rainbow, the watery arch until late in the speech either. It’s a crash course in the craziness, the density, and the elevated diction and poetry of court masques. What on earth did they make of it in the yard? But there would have been spectacular things to look at…

What is Iris actually saying? Her speech is a rich, vivid (if arcane) evocation of the natural world – not in its natural state, but rather cultivated, lush, and fertile. (This is a marriage masque.) She praises the rich leas, the meadows (even in the early seventeenth century, lea was a poetic usage) where crops grow, both grain and grasses and other plants (vetch, stover) used for sheep fodder. A mead is also, unsurprisingly, a meadow; that it is thatched with the stover is a reminder that thatch is made from reeds, and that the meads are flat suggests that the landscape is sweeping down to the river, flat water meadows, reed beds, perhaps. The nibbling sheep, meantime, live on the turfy mountains (it is difficult not to read that, at least initially, as Live! Nibbling Sheep, munching away in real time). The banks are pioned and twilled at their edges, which means—well, it’s properly obscure. A pion might be a ditch or trench, as dug by a pioneer (a lowly ditch-digging soldier, not an explorer) and twilled, in fabric at least, is a weave that is patterned with diagonal lines, which appear slightly raised. So it’s not impossible that another feature of this human-engineered agricultural landscape is a pattern of ditches and dykes, enabling better drainage, better yields. (The main projects to drain the Fens in eastern England didn’t begin until the 1630s, but smaller-scale drainage schemes, and ditch-digging, were ancient.) Whatever, the banks of the watercourses are described as covered with spring flowers, watered by spongy April (April showers…) and the flowers will make garlands for chaste nymphs (that chill is the ghost of Ophelia, and the cold maids evoked by Gertrude…) There are groves of yellow-flowered broom, here apparently favoured by young men as providing shade in which they can lament to themselves the cruelty of women, when they are lass-lorn, love-melancholic. There is a neat pole-clipped vineyard (either pollarded, pruned short, or surrounded with or growing on poles), and there is a sea-marge, margent, coastline, a beach, sterile and rocky-hard, where Ceres herself likes to take the air. Leave all of these which I have just described, in this astonishing fly-over, and come here, says Iris; Juno is summoning you to this grass-plot, this very place. Juno descends, from the heavens, in her chariot drawn amain, speedily, by peacocks – but it’s Iris’s astonishing panoramic sweep of a speech, a technicolour drone-flight, which makes Juno, and the audience, fly.