Masques of Amen House

The Masques of Amen House gathers the short dramatic entertainments Charles Williams wrote for his colleagues at the London office of the Oxford University Press, where he worked as an editor for nearly three decades. Amen House, on Amen Corner near St Paul's, was the Press's London headquarters, and Williams, who joined the staff in 1908, wrote these small masques for performance by the people he worked alongside. They belong to the years before his better-known novels and theological writing, and they were not published for a general audience in his lifetime. The volume that appeared in 2000 brings them into print as a single collection.

The masques are occasional pieces in the old sense of the word: light, ceremonious, full of in-jokes about publishing, printers, and the firm's own hierarchy. Yet Williams does not treat the office as merely comic material. He casts its members as figures in a courtly allegory, with the Press itself presented as a kind of realm governed by its own laws, loyalties, and rituals of courtesy. Out of the daily business of proofs, books, and committees he builds a world in which work is a form of service and ordinary fellowship has the dignity of ceremony. The verse is formal and playful at once. In small, deliberately modest compass, the masques already show the habit of mind that marks his mature work: the conviction that the common and the glorious are not separate orders, and that ordinary people and places can be taken up into a larger pattern of meaning.

The collection has continued to interest readers because it shows Williams before the supernatural thrillers, the Arthurian poetry, and the theology of romantic love and co-inherence made him a figure in the Inklings' orbit. Here the seeds are visible in unguarded form, along with the warmth of a man who took his colleagues seriously enough to write verse for them. For anyone trying to understand how Williams moved from an editor's desk to a distinctive Christian imagination, the masques are primary evidence.

Who should read this: readers who already know Williams's novels or poetry and want to see where his imagination began, and students of twentieth-century Christian literature interested in how vocation and workplace could feed a theological vision. It is not a good starting point for someone new to Williams, and it will disappoint anyone looking for sustained spiritual instruction or the doctrinal substance of his later books.