berta cano - echevarría and mark hutchings The Spanish Ambassador and Samuel Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses: A New Document [with text] R ecent scholarship has explored how masques and court entertain- ments combined playful diversion with more weighty matters, sometimes registering tensions and sources of conflict while conform- ing nonetheless to the protocol that the festivities complimented and praised the most important member of the audience, the monarch. 1 But above all the masque was an event, as well as, subsequently, a published representation as a text—the form in which it must be experienced today.The masque is particularly interesting because it was an occasion when the court staged itself: in new historicist formula- tions it was power as “illusion” or “display,” whereby the privileged audience participated in the enactment or rehearsal of a political world in which they themselves played a part. 2 Masques, then, were always more than the texts that survived into print. Fortunately for scholars We would like to thank the archivists at theArchivo General de Simancas for their assistance, the staff of Gladstone’s Library, Flintshire, where it was completed, and the Spanish Govern- ment’s financial support by funding the Proyecto I+D+i Libros, viajes, fe y diplomacia: inter- pretación y representación del intercambio cultural entre España e Inglaterra en la Edad Moderna. FFI–. . See, e.g., Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d:The Culture of the Stuart Court, – (Manchester, ); The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester, ); Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge, Eng., ), and The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge, Eng., ); Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage:Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (–) (Manchester, ); Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford, ); and Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge, Eng., ). . See Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, ), and Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display:The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (London, ).  ©  The Author(s) English Literary Renaissance ©  English Literary Renaissance Inc. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,  Garsington Road, Oxford OXDQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA.