Response

Cowley's Muse arrives wearing "a wondrous Hieroglyphick Robe [… ] / In which all Colours, and all figures were, / That Nature or that fancy can create, / That Art can never imitate" — Cowley. The robe is described so that you see it. The figures on it are catalogued. The Muse is dressed, bodied, staged — and then the poem tells you what she means. This is the peelability problem made literal: the garment and the meaning it carries are two separate objects. You can lift the robe off the Muse and still have the Muse; you can read the allegory without the fabric. Cowley even tells you the robe "wanton'd in the Air" — it is loose, it floats free, it is not load-bearing. Compare this to the masque tradition, where the costume is not decoration on a body but the body's only mode of existence. Jonson's masque figures do not wear their meanings; they are their meanings. The antimasque of disorder does not represent disorder decorated with spectacle — the spectacle is the court watching itself perform its own coherence, and if you strip the staging you do not find a poem underneath, you find nothing. The robe does not wanton in the air because there is no air between the robe and the skin.

What the retrieved Cowley passage demonstrates, almost too neatly, is why the peelability test needs a third category beyond 'peelable' and 'fused.' Cowley is peelable — 'The Complaint' separates its figure from its argument with visible seams, and the seams are part of the aesthetic. Rochester is peelable too, though in a different register: "But where's the Artist that can frame a Line, / To Shadow or Eclipse the Glorious Shine / Of CHARLES'S Ray?" — Rochester. The painting conceit and the political argument run on parallel tracks; you can discuss either without the other. But Jonson's masques — and this is what makes them strange territory — are not fused in the way Donne is fused. Donne's hyperbole does the argument's work directly, as the Browning principle suggests: "do the thing shall breed the thought" — Browning. Jonson's masques do something else. They are occasional. They exist in a specific room on a specific night for a specific audience who are also the performers. The figure and the argument are not inseparable because the poet made them so through craft; they are inseparable because the occasion made separation impossible. The room was the poem. Once the room empties, what remains is a script — and a script is the peelable residue of something that was once unpeelable.

This is where Dryden's history of painting becomes unexpectedly useful. "A Coal, or Chalk, first imitated Man: / Perhaps, the Shadow, taken on a Wall, / Gave out-lines to the rude Original" — Dryden. The origin of representation is a trace — a shadow, an outline, something left behind after the body moves. Dryden is describing the birth of peelability itself: the moment when the image separates from the thing and becomes portable. Before that separation, there is no art, only presence. Jonson's masques sit at that threshold. In performance, they are presence — unpeelable, unrepeatable, the court's shadow still attached to the court's body. On the page, they are the outline after the body has moved. The peelability test does not fail when applied to occasional work; it reveals that peelability is not a property of the text but of the text's distance from its occasion. Herbert's 'The Collar' resists this drift because the occasion it enacts — the tantrum that is already the prayer, the rebellion structurally identical to the submission — is built into the syntax, renewable with each reading. The masque's occasion was a Tuesday in January 1611. It did not travel.