Standard accounts of the masque in British culture between 1600 and 1640 have tended to give primary attention to those presented at court at the festival seasons of Christmas and Shrovetide. Thematically, they have concentrated on the artists who had a major responsibility in making themBen Jonson and Inigo Jones (with less attention to musical composers and choreographers, whose contributions to the entire event must have been of great importance, but of whom we know less). Politically, they have taken the masque's function of encomium and endorsement of the monarch as a sign of crisis, growing to its most ironic excess in Salmacida Spolia, written by William Davenant, presented in January and again in February of 1640. What C. V. Wedgwood emblematically identified as “the last masque” in fact happened twice.C. V. Wedgwood, Truth and Opinion (London: Collins, 1960).