‘A sun throned in the west’; Apollo and King James in the early Stuart masque

James I did not participate in the masques of his reign, but, as the privileged spectator, functions as their principal addressee. His watching presence is frequently integrated into the masques themselves through his mythological characterisation as Apollo. In this paper I intend to map some of the ways in which different writers, including Campion, Chapman, and Jonson, used the image of King-as-Apollo to animate and direct both the narrative and symbolic structure of their masques.