Revellers of fate': Thomas Salusbury's 'An Antimasque of Gypsies' performed at Chirk Castle on 30 December, 1641

Sir Thomas Salusbury 2nd’s “An Antimasque of Gypsies” was performed at Chirk Castle, Denbighshire, North Wales on 30 December 1641 as part of the wedding celebrations of Sir Thomas Myddelton 2nd’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth Myddelton, to George Warburton of Arley Hall, Cheshire. This essay considers how Salusbury engages with the figure of the early modern gypsy (a popular trope across literary genres) to anchor the antimasque in its occasion - crystallising a moment of family unity amidst the looming divisions of civil war. The influence of Ben Jonson’s Gypsies Metamorphosed (performed 1623, published 1640) highlights the interconnections between court performance, print culture and entertainment in the provinces. Additionally, the article uncovers biographical information on those guests whose fortunes were told as part of the “Show” which provides a rare snapshot of Myddelton’s innermost circle of friends and kinsmen. Despite this moment of unity, the fracture lines were already visible that would dissolve the wedding party into opposing factions at the outbreak of civil war. This omnipresent, disruptive theme of war chimes both with Simon Barker’s longstanding, invaluable research into early modern drama and the culture of war, and with a key tenet of War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2007) that ‘the victims of war deserve to be remembered as real people rather than mere subjects of academic enquiry’ (p. vii).