The World Tossed at Tennis is a Jacobean era masque composed by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, first published in 1620.
[1] Middleton and Rowley conducted one of the most interesting collaborative efforts in English Renaissance drama; together they produced significant works, The Changeling and A Fair Quarrel.
In their other collaborations, Middleton takes primary responsibility for the main plot, and Rowley handles subplot materials – usually comic, but also serious, as in A Fair Quarrel.
The masque also contains unusual characters; the Induction is a conversation among three personified English royal palaces, St. James's, Richmond, and Denmark House.
To appropriate music – "a light fantastic air" and "a ridiculous strain" – five figures representing coloured starches, white, blue, yellow, green and red, "come dancing in."
The Starches are examples of what Jupiter calls the "Deceit and Pride" of the age, characterised by "The frenzy of apparel," "masculine painting," and "Vain-glory, fashion, humour, and such toys."
It had long been standard in Elizabethan and Jacobean clothing to wear starched white ruffs and cuffs, commonly called "bands."
The fashion became famous and notorious when Turner, an associate of Simon Forman and a denizen of the Jacobean demimonde, was executed on 15 November 1615 for her role in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.