The following essay is being published in conjunction with the “(In)hospitable Space Conference” which explores the human dimensions of space exploration and is cosponsored between the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology, and the European Astrobiology Institute.
A Masque at Whitehall
On the evening of January 6, 1620, a glittering assembly of political grandees gathered at Whitehall Palace in the heart of London for a program of festivities that included feasting, revelry, and a dramatic extravaganza known as a “masque,” the genre of choice for theatrical presentations at court. Owing to a fire that destroyed the palace’s lavish banqueting hall in 1619, guests had to assemble in a room that did not have purpose-built seating or a stage, but there was no lack of splendor to compensate for the loss. Courtiers danced in satin cloaks laced with silver. Ambassadors mingled with dukes and knights. Elegant ladies sparkled in their jewels. And King James I held court under a royal canopy, illuminated by a multitude of candles. No one in England could have hoped to find a more extravagant or prestigious party.
Alongside aristocrats and foreign dignitaries, the assembly at Whitehall also included Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, acclaimed author of the evening’s entertainment. In keeping with standard conventions for the genre, Jonson’s masque featured a carefully structured combination of poetry, music, and dance, with professional actors taking all the main speaking roles. But even though professionals did most of the talking, no one could hope to outshine the production’s star performer, Prince Charles, who danced alongside a company of fellow elites dressed in taffeta with white plumes. For Jonson, the event offered an invaluable opportunity to impress the uppermost tier of English society, and to reaffirm a reputation for resplendent wit. In characteristically grandiloquent fashion, he gave his masque a title that projected novelty, topicality, and extraterrestrial wonder: News from the New World Discovered in the Moon.
In the reading that follows, I will argue that the lunar fantasy staged at Whitehall in 1620 offers an early example of confluence between colonial ideology and fictionalized visions of outer space. By describing the moon as a newly discovered “world,” Jonson weaves the rhetoric of overseas expansion into a story of astronomical revelation, thereby transforming the heavens into a speculative frontier where discourse surrounding news culture, imperial ambition, and topical controversy can appear within a playful, but critical, framework. To bring the substance of this argument into focus, I will offer some historical observations on three key terms: news, New World, and moon.
I. News
In the closing decades of the sixteenth century, popular interest in foreign affairs, courtly gossip, and topical debate gave rise to an insatiable market for commercial news and a professionalized, for-profit news industry. By 1620, London’s bookstalls were brimming with inexpensive pamphlets that channeled dispatches from around the world, typically with a self-conscious emphasis on authenticity and veracity. Note the conspicuous repetition of “true” in the following titles:
For Jonson, London’s growing obsession with current events was symptomatic of a troubling tendency to prioritize fashionability and frivolous chatter above genuine learning and common sense. Throughout his entire career, he repeatedly dismissed commercial news as a commodified form of rumor, peddled by unscrupulous vendors to a gullible, gossipy public. News from the New World Discovered in the Moon is an especially sharp expression of that critique.
As the masque begins, a pair of old-fashioned Heralds offer to share reports with three representatives of the commercial news industry: a Printer, a Chronicler (or recorder of official affairs), and a Factor (or newsletter writer). For the Heralds, news is a public good that ought to circulate on a not-for-profit basis, irrespective of personal interest. But the other newsmen do not agree. After inquiring about fees, the Printer cheerfully expresses an inclination to purchase any story, “true or false,” as long as it’s sufficiently novel — a sentiment echoed by the Chronicler and the Factor, neither of whom show the slightest concern for truth or substance. Ultimately, all three characters are indicative of a common threat: when news becomes a commodity, profit motives will inevitably erode the veracity and quality of information.
II. The New World
By including the term “New World” in his title, Jonson was making an unmistakable allusion to discourse surrounding colonial ventures in the Americas, a topic that attracted intense excitement and criticism throughout the first few decades of the seventeenth century. In 1606, almost two-thirds of the would-be colonists from an expedition to Jamestown died as a result of starvation and exposure to disease, thereby unleashing a wave of public criticism that echoed throughout London’s information ecosystem. Desperate to sway popular opinion and shore up investment, the Virginia company responded by commissioning a pro-colonial series of pamphlets and printed sermons, most of which were circulating by 1610. The following excerpt from Robert Johnson’s Novo Brittania is fairly typical in terms of tone and rhetorical positioning:
The country itself is large and great assuredly, though as yet no exact discovery can be made of all. It is also commendable and hopeful every way, the air and climate most sweet and wholesome, much warmer than England, and very agreeable to our natures. It is inhabited with wild and savage people, that live and lie up and down in troops like herds of deer in a forest. They have no law but nature; their apparel skins of beasts, but most go naked. The better sort have houses, but poor ones. They have no arts nor science, yet they live under superior command such as it is. They are generally very loving and gentle, and do entertain and relieve our people with great kindness. They are easy to be brought to good, and would fain embrace a better condition. The land yields naturally for the sustentation of man abundance of fish, both scale and shell; of land and water fowl, infinite store; of deer, kine and fallow, stags, coneys, and hares, with many fruits and roots good for meat.
In a description that brackets the harsh realities that had defined England’s experience with colonial ventures up to that point, Johnson reimagines Virginia as an earthly paradise, unencumbered by hardship or poor weather, and overflowing with bounty. Notably, however, engagement with this fantasy requires readers to project themselves into the role of imperial overlords, loftily consuming resources while a compliant population of “loving” subalterns does all the work. As noted, Londoners had good reason to treat these sorts of promises with doubt: the most common outcome for colonists was death within their first few years abroad.
Nevertheless, by 1619, Jamestown had begun to make steps toward financial stability, an improvement facilitated in large part by the skyrocketing popularity of tobacco. In hope of building on this newfound success, promoters flooded news stalls with yet another wave of pro-colonial pamphlets — but a more complicated story was also beginning to emerge. Polish craftsmen organized the colony’s first labor strike in response to exclusionary voting practices. The Virginia Company dispatched a shipment of ninety “tobacco brides” to correct a severely imbalanced sex ratio. And a group of English privateers exchanged twenty or so captive Africans for food and supplies at Point Comfort, a landmark moment in the development of chattel slavery. In short, a “new world” really was beginning to take shape, but it had very little in common with the rosy fantasies nurtured by commercial news products.
III. The Moon
In the winter of 1609, Galileo Galilei pointed a leather-wrapped, wooden telescope at the heavens and made an astonishing discovery. Contrary to conventional presumption, the surface of the moon wasn’t smooth or evenly contoured, but surprisingly irregular, with features that bore a striking resemblance to the topography of Earth. Shadows traced the outline of unnamed mountains. Darkness pooled in sloping valleys. And sunlight sat in circles around the mouths of massive craters, illuminating bumps and depressions that stared down from amongst the stars. For Galileo, these discoveries were of a piece with a wholly new view of the universe and earth’s relation to other planets. In the following year, he published his findings in a pamphlet entitled Sidereus Nuncius, or “Starry Messenger,” and astronomical understanding took a giant leap forward.
As Sidereus Nuncius traveled across Europe, it inspired a wave of fictional artworks inviting readers to imagine the possibility of lunar inhabitants, societies, technologies, and adventures. Key examples include Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1608; pub. 1634), Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moon (1638), John Wilkins’s The Discovery of a World in the Moon (1638), and Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World, or The States and Empires of the Moon (1657). Centuries later, critics would recognize these works as incipient iterations of the genre now known as science fiction, or speculative fiction. News from the New World Discovered in the Moon belongs to that tradition—but also to a much older tradition of works that use fantastic settings as the basis for social satire.
As Jonson’s masque moves forward, the Heralds share a sensational account of lunar discovery that parodies the fraudulence of news products in general, and colonial promoters in particular. According to their conceit, a poet has just returned from the moon with reports of a thriving civilization:
FIRST HERALD. Our relation, I tell you still, is news.
SECOND HERALD. Certain and sure news—
FIRST HERALD. Of a new world—
SECOND HERALD. And new creatures in that world.
FIRST HERALD. In the orb of the moon—
SECOND HERALD. Which is now found to be an earth inhabited!
FIRST HERALD. With navigable seas and rivers.
SECOND HERALD. Variety of nations, polities, laws.
FIRST HERALD. With havens in’t, castles, and port towns!
SECOND HERALD. Inland cities, boroughs, hamlets, fairs, and markets!
FIRST HERALD. Hundreds and wapentakes! Forests, parks, cony-ground, meadow-pasture, what not?
As their report continues, the Heralds go on to develop a portrait of the moonworld that satirizes a range of excesses in Jacobean society. For example, in contrast to the discord and litigiousness of early modern London, the moon-dwellers communicate in a harmonious language of “signs and gestures” that has rendered all of the lawyers “dumb as fishes” because “they have no controversies to exercise themselves in.” On a similar note, religious factionalists can only “hum and ha,” rather than prophesizing or proselytizing, and all of the narcissistic courtiers have died off or gone mad for lack of tailors to suit them in the latest fashions. In short, the moonworld is a mock-utopia: its’ ironic idealizations index a range of social faults.
In a final flourish that concludes their report, the Heralds describe a lunar locale known as the “Isle of Epicenes,” where men and women alike have short-cropped hair and wear doublets with accessories such as broad-brimmed hats and ornamental daggers. As contemporary audiences would have surely recognized, the practices attributed to these gender-bending moon-dwellers are consistent with the practices of London’s so-called “roaring girls,” a subculture of fashionable ladies who attracted widespread criticism by accentuating their outfits with elements of male attire. In contrast to London, however, androgyny on the moon is consistent with a radical pattern of sexual deviancy. Rather than procreating in the conventional manner, islanders lie side by side, fully clothed, stabbing at each other with their daggers — and rather than giving birth in the conventional manner, women lay eggs that yield monstrous bird-men known as “Volatees.”
To complement the Heralds’ description of these bizarre sexual practices, a covey of elaborately-feathered Volatees enter to perform an antic dance that apparently involved a lot of hopping and erratic movement. Shortly thereafter, Prince Charles and his coterie arrive in their taffeta costumes with white plumes, and the masque shifts to a much more elegant series of dances interspersed with songs in praise of James I, the “knowing king,” whose name “all ears will take… and in the tune rejoice.” And on that note, the masque comes to a conclusion.
Ultimately, the effect of Jonson’s satire is to turn colonial rhetoric inside-out: in place of an aggrandizing fantasy of imperial domination, he presents a moonworld whose inhabitants expose the vanities and vacuities of Jacobean culture. At the same time, however, he also helps to usher in an emergent era of colonial subjectivity, partly by suggesting the possibility of regarding the entire universe as a potential frontier, and partly by reiterating an animating impulse to map, categorize, and occupy. Thus, less than ten years after Galileo’s revelation of a variegated lunar topography, Europeans had already begun to imagine the moon as an object of exploration, settlement, and control, apprehended through the same rhetorical framework that anchors astro-colonial imagining in the present age.
