INTRODUCTION

When, in Thomas Jordan's masque Fancy's Festivals, the character Fancy drops ‘a bundle of Masking toyes’ she also loses ‘two Papers’. A poet, finding the fallen objects, details what he picks up: first the props, ‘Ribons, Bells, bawbles, Masks, and dancing shooes’; then ‘two papers’ of which ‘this is the Plot,/And this the language’. Here ‘plot’ is kept together with ‘language’, but does not occupy the same papers, so that ‘plot’ denotes not a generalised or vague account of a story, but a variety of text in its own right. Given that the masque appears to have been recently completed, what, in this instance, is ‘the plot’?

The ‘plot’ in Fancy's Festivals might be the Argument or summary of the masque sometimes given out to an audience and described in chapter 3, except that such plots, designed to be distributed in multiple quantities, are unlikely to have been carried around singly with the playscript. It might be the ‘author-plot’ or scenario from which the writer constructed his play or masque in the first place, except that the masque in Fancy's Festivals has already been hastily completed and is now about to be performed, as the gathering of props related to it indicates. Either use of ‘plot’ would be interesting because either would highlight the way separate written papers that did not constitute the actual playtext still flanked the playbook without ever being integrated into it.