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Family Entertainments among the Salusburys of Lleweni and their Circle, 1595-1641 DAVID KLAUSNER The principal focus of this article is the career as a dramatist of Sir Thomas Salusbury of Lleweni (1612-43). Sir Thomas has been virtually unrecognized in this capacity; the most recent biographical notice, in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, quotes Anthony Wood, who describes Salusbury as 'a most noted poet of his time'.1 The dictionary continues, however, by claiming that 'the only work of his which still survives is The History of Joseph, a poem (London, 1636)'. While it is certainly true that The History of Joseph is the only work of Salusbury's to have been published during his lifetime, a considerable body of dramatic work, plays and masque-texts, also survives in manuscript. These enter- tainments were for the most part private and occasional, written for household performance in the establishments of his friends and colleagues as well as though the evidence here is much more scanty within his own household. My discussion is in three parts. First, a brief examination of the career of Sir Thomas Salusbury and the two friends for whom he wrote surviving masques; second, the evidence that survives for the physical situations in which these masques were performed; third, a detailed examination of the texts of the masques themselves, as well as (more briefly) the participants in the masques, as far as they can be identified. Sir Thomas was the son of Sir Hugh Salusbury, the first baronet, and his wife Hester, the daughter of the first Sir Thomas Myddelton, to whose family we will turn in a moment. Sir Thomas Salusbury matric- ulated at Jesus College, Oxford, but left for the Inner Temple in 1631. His law studies, too, remained incomplete, since his father died in July 1632 and Thomas returned to Denbighshire to administer the Lleweni estate. He was active in local politics as an elected burgess (from 1632) and alderman (1634-8, 1639) for Denbigh town, and Member of Parliament for the county from 1640 until his death in 1643. He was a committed Royalist, and may have fought in the Battle of Edgehill on 23