The masque had, as its theme, the vision of a unified British kingdom under the guidance of a wise king. "It reflected perfectly the image that he [James] had tried, in his rough-hewn way, to cultivate – even if history, in allotting him part of the blame for the catastrophe that was to befall his son, would be less generous to his reputation."
The Fortunate Isles opens with the entrance of Johphiel, "an airy spirit" who is supposedly "the intelligence of Jupiter's sphere." Johphiel has a long conversation with Merefool, "a melancholic student," which involves much material on the then-new and controversial subject of "the brethren of the Rosy Cross." Jonson devotes this masque to his skeptical and satirical view of the
Rosicrucians, just as he had taken a similarly jaundiced view of
alchemy in his masque of the previous decade,
Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists (
1615). A more specifically English cast to the masque comes with the introduction of the two poets
John Skelton and
Henry Scogan. The English theme is stronger in the anti-masque, which, in addition to generic figures ("four knaves"), introduces the figures of
Mary Ambree,
Elinor Rumming,
Long Meg of Westminster, and
Tom Thumb. Later come the stereotypical mythological figures of the masque form – in this case, the minor sea gods
Proteus, Portunus, and Saron. Inigo Jones's staging featured a floating and moving island (another element that would have appeared in the cancelled masque of the previous year). Though
The Fortunate Isles was the major entertainment of the 1624–25 Christmas season at the
Stuart Court, Jonson did not hesitate to re-cycle some lyrical passages from the previous year's masque, ''
Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion,
which had been cancelled due to Court scheduling controversies. (Jonson would re-use other material from Neptune's Triumph
for his next stage play, The Staple of News.'') ==Sources==