Pan's Anniversary, or The Shepherd's Holiday was a Jacobean era masque, written by Ben Jonson and designed by Inigo Jones.
The date of the masque's performance at the English Court has long been in dispute: while the earliest text assigns it to 1625, mid-twentieth-century scholars placed it on 19 June 1620,[1] the king's birthday, at the royal palace at Greenwich.
The point of this dialogue is to portray the fencer, and the martial spirit he represents, as exaggerated and rather clownish, in keeping with the pacifistic orientation of King James I.
[2] The two anti-masques feature Boeotians and Thebans (Grecian Thebes was the capital of Boeotia), while the masque proper reveals the principal masquers clustered around a "fountain of light" before they descend to dance.
Some of Jones's designs for the masque's sets survive; they consist, unsurprisingly, of forest and mountain scenes typical of the pastoral form.