1. Problématique du masque (JMG)
2. Le masque et Dionysos (JVD)
3. The English court masque (RN)
4. Textualité du masque africain (JMG)
1. Problématique du masque (JMG)
2. Le masque et Dionysos (JVD)
3. The English court masque (RN)
The early history of the masque is a subject of considerable scholarly debate, but the marriage ceremonial of the Duke of Milan in 1489, which included an allegorical pageant written by Bergonzio di Botta, is frequently described as a significant starting point. The Epiphany celebrations of 1512, presented for Henry VIII, seem to have been one of the earliest English occasions in which the aristocracy took part in a consciously sophisticated Italianate and modish performance , «the kyng with a xi other were disguised, after the maner of Italie, called a maske, a thyng not seen afore in England». But beneath Henry VIII's courtliness lay the original of his ceremonies; the popular folk mumming games, in which groups of medieval townsmen would don masks and journey from home to home performing various dances and tricks. Such festivities were no doubt rooted in pagan rituals. Together with elements from Royal and municipal processions, sword-dances, jousts and tournaments, they provided the materials for the more sophisticated court entertainments of the Renaissance. Throughout the sixteenth century in England the integration of a dramatically presented moral issue, as in Italy, with the elaborate spectacle of the Tudor court, developed to produce the unique form of the Court Masque, in which the magnificence of the performance and the solemnity of the ideas are interwoven and interact with each other.
The books of Office of the Revels during the sixteenth century testify to a rapidly increasing expenditure on costumes and properties for the ever more popular masque. Costumes for pagan deities and exotic foreign monarchs, symbolic clothes appropriate, for example, to a masque of death, and elaborate heraldic devices appear frequently in the records and demonstrate the court's love of show. The developing technology of theatre architecture in Continental Europe improved the potentialities of the masque as an exciting physical spectacle. Perspective paintings and angle wings, described in Sebastiano Serlio's Regole generali di architetturra (1545, translated into English in 1611), and the use of various mechanical devices, perhaps best seen in Nicola Sabbattini's Pratica di fabricar scen e machine ne'teatri (1637), maintain the sophistication of visual delight. Something of the variety available to the seventeenth century stage manager may be inferred from Sabbattini's famous Chapter XXXIV, «How to make dolphins and other sea monsters appear to spout water while swimming».
By the 1590's, the masque seems to have established its classic form in England; a flimsy plot using an opening dialogue, a procession and dance of masquers, a general dance involving the audience and return of the masquers to the stage, often to present an elaborate compliment to the monarch or the most noble person present. Gaudy costumes and the most spectacular sets possible seem to have provided the major source of delight.
Contemporary comment on the masque tends to focus on the elaborate setting. The statement of Samuel Daniel, the poet and dramatist who directed the Queen's Masque in 1610, is typical; «In these things, the only life consists in shew; the art and invention of the Architect gives the greatest grace and is of most importance». That this «art and invention» was brilliant indeed is demonstrated by the directions for Stuart masques. The collaborations of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, for example the celebrated The Masque of Blackness (1605), utilise some extraordinary techniques --an artificial sea with waves and billows blowing, six moving Tritons, half human, half fish, the masquers revealed within a huge concave shell which rises and floats on the waters, and several giant swimming sea monsters, each carrying a torch bearer on its back. Yet Jonson specifically rejected the overvaluation of the machinery, as his preface to Hymenaei (1606) makes clear; «It is a noble and just advantage that the things subjected to understanding have of those which are objected to sense; that the one sort are but momentary, and merely talking; the other impressing and lasting». He refutes the opinions of those who praise the spectacle; «though bodies oftime have the ill-luck to be sensually preferred, they find afterwards the good fortune (when souls live) to be utterly forgotten». The masque libretti that he wrote during his distinguished career regularly stress the significance of the words, and attempt to make the stage machines emblems, as it were, of his meaning rather than mere flashy delights. Typical of his determination to make the masque more validly dramatic is his development of the antimasque-- a grotesque dance, usually performed by professionals, acting as a contrast to and commentary on the serious action of the courtly masquers. The antimasque became commonplace in the English Stuart masque. His commitment to his art caused inevitable friction between him and Jones, and in 1631 they finally quarrelled and disolved their partnership. Jonson clarified his position with lively irony in his Expostulation:
Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque.
Pack with your pedling poetry to the stage,
This is the money-got, mechanic age.
While through the early years of the seventeenth century theatre architecture and techniques advanced, the dramatists and poets in general continued, perhaps out of dutiful loyalty to Ben Jonson, to grumble at the popular taste for sensational effects. In several plays of the 1630's, James Shirley, for instance, shows lively scorn for the irrationality of the masque:
Your dance is the best language of some comedies,
And footing runs away with all; a scene
Express'd with life of art, and squared to nature,
Is dull and phlegmatic poetry.
But he, like many of his colleagues, is prepared to make good use of the form when the occasion presents itself. His celebrated Triumph of Peace, presented in February, 1634, by the Inns of Court as a gesture of loyalty to the Royal family, is perhaps the finest spectacle in the century. «A great Masque and show», «a numerous, stately and glittering cavalcade», as it was called by spectators, it cost some £30,000 to mount, and used 263 performers, 160 horses, six magnificent chariots, five changes of elaborate scenery under the direction of Inigo Jones and a great deal of descending from and ascending into the heavens in clouds and machines. The lavish scenery, designs for which are preserved in the Chatsworth collections, amply demonstrates the complexity of Jones's art, but it would be improper to devalue the contribution of the writer: Shirley's songs are excellent, the serious speeches suitably dignified and the comic scenes of the antimasque imaginative and amusing. There would appear, indeed, to be something of a discrepancy between the conventional assessment of the masque as a kind of exotic and faintly decadent toy, and the actual achievements of the masque writers, who can produce impressive and moving dramas.
John Milton's famous Comus (1634), a «dainty piece of entertainment», is a notable example of the way the masque form can produce viable drama. The dances, the elaborate sets, the antimasque of Comus and his crew, and the presentation of the children to their real parents at the end are all fittingly incorporated into the central theme --the conflict between riot and order, and the value of chastity in a world of delusory sensuous delights.
During the early years of the seventeenth century, masques were frequently inserted into plays, partly as an excuse to use the sensational delights of stage machinery, and partly to provide a variety of scene and tone. Such masques generally appear as «plays within the play»-- that is, the entertainment is presented before an audience made up of characters from the main action. The effectiveness of such masques and of the plays in which they occur depends largely on the extent to which the masque is related to the action and meaning of the play. The wedding masque in Shakespeare's The Tempest is a distinguished example of a successfully integrated piece. The frequency with which masques appear in revenge plays is noteworthy; no doubt the dramatists wish to point the striking contrast between the masque --as the epitome of courtly elegance and high moral dignity-- and the brutality of the revenge theme.
After the Civil Wars, the masque never regained its vitality, although some of the spectacular skills of the masquers were transferred, almost unchanged, to the opera as developed by Sir William Davenant. From time to time since then, public events have been celebrated with new masques, imitating the old forms, but they have generally been slight things of no enduring interest. The term has also been used loosely to apply to moral verse in dialogue form but without specific theatrical intention, as in Robert Frost's fine A Masque of Mercy (1947).
Richard Morton
McMaster University, Ontario
4. Textualité du masque africain (JMG)
Poetics of the masque
The English court masque
Reyher, P.- Les masques anglais, 1909.
Sand, Maurice.- Masques et bouffons.- Paris: M. Lévy, 1860. 2 vol..
Simpson, P.; C.F. Bell ( eds.).- Designs by Inigo Jones for Masques and Plays at Court, 1924.
Welsford, Enid.- The Court Masque, 1927.
Allardyce, Nicoll.- Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage, 1937.
The African mask