SOURCE: “The Masque,” in English Drama to 1710, edited by Christopher Ricks, Barrie & Jenkins, 1971, pp. 354-69.

[In the following essay, Orgel, a noted scholar of the masque, places the genre in the context of the history of literature, outlining its distinctive characteristics and development.]

The masque is only in a very qualified sense a chapter in the history of English drama. Its origins are to be found in Christmas mummings, in courtly dances and in spectacular entertainments, but not until the seventeenth century is the composition of court masques regularly undertaken by a professional playwright. Ben Jonson gave the masque its most characteristic form, and we might begin by observing that his selection as masque writer for the court of James I, and—initially at least—his remarkable success, had more to do with his qualities as a poet than as a playwright. Indeed, his gradual development of the form is paralleled by a growing dissatisfaction with and withdrawal from the world of drama and the public stage. Nor are Jonson's occasional rivals in the field associated on the whole with drama; and when professional playwrights like Chapman and Beaumont do undertake the composition of court masques, they produce works that are sufficiently different from stage plays to make it clear that they feel the masque to be a quite separate genre.

Understanding the nature of the genre is complicated by the fact that, for the modern reader, a masque is necessarily represented by its text. Indeed, the texts of Ben Jonson's twenty-seven court masques constitute a considerable literary achievement, and one that he recognized as such by including them in his published works. But to the contemporary spectator the text was only part of a masque, and not necessarily the most important part at that. The form was by nature a composite one, the joint creation of poet, designer, composer and choreographer; and in the seventeenth century it nearly always culminated in an hour or more of ballroom dancing in which both courtly masquers and spectators participated. This was called the revels, and it came to be a defining feature of the genre. This element alone indicates the extent to which masques were necessarily involved with court protocol, and serves more than anything else to set them off from the world of the public theatre: masques were games as well as shows, balls as well as ballets; what the spectator watched he ultimately became. Thus all the rules of court decorum had to be observed in masques. Courtiers might dance but not take speaking parts; dancing is the prerogative of every lady and gentleman, but playing a part belongs to the world of the common actor. Hence all the speaking roles in masques were played by professionals—and under James I, usually by The King's Men, Shakespeare's company—who naturally did not join in the revels.

It is a little misleading to speak of the masque as a form, since novelty was in itself a virtue in such entertainments, and therefore its norms were constantly changing. But certain requisites were present from the very beginning, and those seventeenth-century writers who, like Jonson, first strove to treat the genre as literature faced a number of special problems that were in a sense historically determined. We may briefly trace the history of the genre to see what traditions and, more important, what expectations, lay behind the Jacobean and Caroline masque.

The word in the sixteenth century implied simply an entertainment that involved the wearing of masks or disguises: the disguisers could be either courtiers or professional players. Anything from the simplest masquerade and grotesque acrobatic entertainment to the most elaborate allegorical display was a masque—the term implied nothing about form, structure or subject matter. But one element was constant, and that was its function on the simplest level as an entertainment of the court, and on the most complex level as a celebration of the court it entertained. The more elaborate the work, the more likely it was to involve allegorical or symbolic representations of its strictly occasional subjects, so that the court was diverted with idealizations of itself and hymns to its own glory, in which particular moments were translated into myth.

Although productions of this sort are recorded throughout the fifteenth century, and even earlier, it is not until the reign of Henry VIII that the term ‘masque’ becomes current, and that the form takes on real consistency. The king's love of dancing and disguises went hand in hand with his determination to make the English court as cultured as any on the continent. The historian Edward Halle's account of the masque for Twelfth-night, 1512 makes clear both the novelty of the performance and its provenance:

On the day of the Epiphany at night, the king with eleven other were disguised, after the manner of Italy, called a masque, a thing not seen afore in England. … After the banquet … these masquers came in … and desired the ladies to dance. Some were content, and some that knew the fashion of it refused, because it was not a thing commonly seen. And after they danced and commaned together, as the fashion of the masques is, they took their leave and departed, and so did the queen and all the ladies.¹

Obviously both court balls and disguisings had been seen in England before 1512; what was new and Italianate was the wholehearted entry of the king into the spectacle, the sudden appearance of the monarch as masquer. But the most startling innovation was the introduction of the revels, the merging of masquers and spectators in a final dance. What the ladies objected to was precisely that Italianate quality that made it so attractive to the king; for ladies to dance and ‘common’ with disguisers carried overtones of licentiousness and breaches of decorum. But once the chief courtier has become the chief masquer, the court cannot refuse to enter into the spectacle with him.

Henry's interest in the masque remained throughout his reign energetic and lavish, and under his sponsorship the form appears to have taken on a consistency and scope that were not reached again for almost a century. Such entertainments were used to celebrate any extraordinary event, and became staples of the Christmas season: disguisings had always served to express the saturnalian aspects of Christmas, and were, of course, especially appropriate to the revelations of Epiphany. Henry's masques were regularly prepared by the Master of the Chapel Royal, who also provided the king's music. The choice can hardly have been accidental, for the king liked to think of himself as a composer and musician; and it meant that until 1523 he had at the service of his revels the great composer William Cornysshe.

No texts of Cornysshe's productions remain, but from a number of synopses and descriptions it is possible to determine what the mature Tudor masque looked like. Here is an account, taken again from Halle, of a masque of 1527, devised by Cornysshe's successor William Crane as an entertainment for the French ambassadors:

After a speech about the new concord between England and France, eight choristers entered singing at either side of the hall, bringing with them two richly dressed figures. These two then debated the relative merits of riches and love. Unable to agree, each summoned three knights, who fought at barriers across a golden bar that suddenly dropped from an arch in the centre of the hall. Again the outcome was inconclusive, and the knights withdrew. ‘Then,’ recounts Halle, ‘came in an old man with a silver beard, and he concluded that love and riches both be necessary for princes; that is to say, by love to be obeyed and served, and with riches to reward his lovers and friends; and with this conclusion the dialogue ended.’ Immediately the masquing began: ‘Then at the nether end, by letting down of a curtain, appeared a goodly mount’ with a fortress; the mount was studded with precious stones and planted with roses and pomegranates. On it were eight lords gorgeously dressed, who descended, took partners from the audience, and danced. Then out of a cave issued out the Lady Mary, daughter to the king, and with her seven ladies,’ who danced with the eight lords of the mount; ‘and as they danced, suddenly entered six personages’ in silver and black; ‘their garments were long, after the fashion of Iceland,’ and they wore ‘visors with silver beards so that they were not known.’ They too took partners from the audience and ‘danced lustily about the place.’ Then suddenly the king, who had secretly left the hall, entered with seven lords in Venetian dress, their faces vizarded with beards of gold. ‘Then with minstrelsy these eight … danced long with the ladies, and when they had danced their fill, then the queen plucked off the king's visor, and so did the ladies the visors of the other lords and then all were known’.²

Both the composite nature of the work and its highly sophisticated organization are apparent. Each of the elements is clearly defined—the dialogue, with its interlude of barriers, followed by the masque dances and revels—but the parts are also connected both symbolically and dramatically. The opening debate resolves the apparent antithesis of riches and love; at once a pageant enters displaying symbols of their reunion and bearing masquers. The dances then become a kind of ballet on the theme of the dialogue, and the final merging of richly constumed disguisers with loving courtiers completes the resolution.

Henry VIII spent enormous sums on such entertainments, in which he himself regularly took part. The masque is by its nature heavily dependent on patronage, and it did not flower again in so complex and spectacular a form until the reign of Charles I, another monarch who loved to conceive himself as the centre of an idealized fiction, and was willing to spend a fortune on doing so. The reigns of Edward VI and Mary Tudor were too troubled to support so extravagant an indulgence of the royal fancy, though Mary did retain Nicholas Udall to provide the court with plays and masques; and Elizabeth, whose strength, like that of her grandfather, lay in a firm grasp of the realities of her situation, was content to leave the idealization of herself to her subjects. This does not mean that the court went without masques after the death of Henry VIII, but that under his three children the form became, with occasional exceptions, markedly less ambitious. In 1551, for example, ‘the masks … were of apes and bagpipes, of cats, of Greek worthies, and of “medyoxes” (“double visaged, th'one syde lyke a man, th'other lyke death”)’.³ Here the taste for both grotesquerie and pageantry is obvious. Such productions were, of course, performed by professional actors and acrobats, but they would have been followed by a general dance of courtiers, and hence the basic structure of the Tudor disguising is still visible. This sort of ‘antic masque’ continued to be a staple of court entertainments until the Civil War brought an end to masques of all kinds. Ben Jonson made dramatic capital of it by incorporating it into the structure of his idealized courtly visions as an introductory antimasque, where it served to embody the disorder or vice over which the world of the revels ultimately triumphed.

The few more ambitious productions are those of the small number of Elizabethan poets who began to regard the masque as a viable literary form. Viewed in this way, the work became a type of occasional poetry, and the central dramatic problem was to invent a fiction within which the monarch and court could properly be included, and the revels justified. As early as 1575, George Gascoigne published a wedding masque among the ‘flowers’ of his Posies; in 1578, for a visit of Queen Elizabeth to Leicester's estate at Wanstead, Sir Philip Sidney, the most admired court poet of the age, produced The Lady of May, a model of the literary entertainment; and a few other instances assure us of the literary potential of the form. Nevertheless, the Elizabethan masque suffered under the good sense of the queen, and had no real home at court. The most elaborate productions were provided by courtiers for the entertainment of Elizabeth on her occasional progresses, and thus the quality of continuity so evident in the Stuart masques is wholly lacking.

The situation changed radically with the accession of James I in 1603. The new king took the form seriously; he had, indeed, composed a masque himself.⁴ For the first time in half a century, professional writers were retained to devise the texts of the royal entertainments, and—ultimately more important—the greatest theatrical designer of the age was called upon to create a spectacular context for them. By far the most serious, prolific and successful Jacobean masque writer was Ben Jonson, who between 1605 and the king's death in 1625 produced twenty-five court masques, more than one a year. (Most prolific after Jonson was Campion, who wrote three; and under Charles I, D'Avenant, who wrote five.) His collaboration with Inigo Jones produced nothing less than a radical transformation of the English stage.

It is primarily Jonson's doing that we are able to find in the Stuart masque some measure of continuity. After 1605 the form was, in a sense, his to define, and therefore a summary of his career as masque writer is in order. His earliest productions are characterized by arcane symbolism and didacticism. The masques of Blackness and Beauty, and the two wedding masques Hymenaei and The Haddington Masque, rely heavily on emblematic devices and ‘mute hieroglyphs’, and are supported by an enormous weight of scholarship, both classical and modern, which in the printed versions Jonson anatomizes in detailed marginal glosses. The hermetic and abstruse qualities of these productions formed part of their attraction for contemporary audiences: the Renaissance spectator enjoyed being in the presence of mysteries that expressed (or concealed) the wisdom of the ancients; and for those few who comprehended the symbols and allusions, or who subsequently deciphered them with the help of Jonson's notes, there was the added pleasure of feeling confirmed as a member of an intellectual élite. The masques through 1612 were prepared not for the king but at the command and expense of Queen Anne and Prince Henry, the young Prince of Wales, for whom Jonson composed Prince Henry's Barriers in 1610 and Oberon in 1611. In part Jonson seems to have conceived the function of his masques as the education of this prince, who commissioned the learned annotations to both The Masque of Queens and Oberon. After the prince's early death in 1612 the most obviously didactic aspects of the form disappeared. Nevertheless, Jonson continued to treat the masque as basically moral and educative, leading the court toward that ideal world his poetry was creating.

But hand in hand with the didacticism of the early masques went a tremendous spectacular bias; the emblems, symbols, allegorical actions and moral confrontations demanded for their realization the full resources of Inigo Jones's theatrical ingenuity, and it was for these productions, not for plays, that Italian stage machinery and illusionistic settings were first imported and domesticated. The spectacle, indeed, produced the strongest part of the effect of a masque in performance, and contemporary commentators make it clear that this was an effect radically different from that provided by even the most elaborate private playhouses. It is a measure of the consistency of Jonson's imagination that he was able to make the spectacle integral to the structure of his masques, and to find means of expressing in the printed texts the significance and at least a little of the wonder of Jones's marvellous transformations. How different this sort of theatrical experience was from drama may be briefly illustrated by considering two spectacular moments in the masques of Beauty (1608) and Queens (1609).⁵

Here a curtain was drawn in which the night was painted, and the scene discovered, which … I devised should be an island floating on a calm water. In the midst thereof was a seat of state, called the Throne of Beauty, erected, divided into eight squares, and distinguished by so many Ionic pilasters. In these squares the sixteen masquers were placed by couples; behind them in the centre of the throne was a tralucent pillar shining with several-colored lights that reflected on their backs. From the top of which pillar went several arches to the pilasters that sustained the roof of the throne, which was likewise adorned with lights and garlands; and between the pilasters, in front, little Cupids in flying posture, waving of wreaths and lights, bore up the cornice, over which were placed eight figures representing the elements of beauty. … This throne, as the whole island moved forward on the water, had a circular motion of it own, imitating that which we call motum mundi, from the east to the west, or the right to the left side. The steps whereon the Cupids sat had a motion contrary, with analogy ad motum planetarum, from the west to the east; both which turned with their several lights. And with these three varied motions at once, the whole scene shot itself to the land.

(Beauty, lines 144-223)

It is obvious that the stage here has become a dramatic entity; that is, it is not the setting in which actions take place, but is itself the action. At the same time, the meaning of this moment in the masque is dependent on Jonson's account of it, which relates the eight figures to the elements of beauty, the ‘three varied motions at once’ to the movement of the cosmos. Since there is no way for the spectator to be aware of the identity of the figures, or of the symbolic point of the island's motions, Jonson's text is both less than the masque in production, and much more.

The Masque of Queens opens upon ‘an ugly hell, which flaming beneath, smoked unto the top of the roof’ (lines 21-22). One after another twelve witches appear, singing incantations and performing grotesque dances. They are conceived, Jonson says, as the antithesis to the moral virtues embodied in the queens of the title, who are to be danced by Queen Anne and her ladies. The witches are abstract figures, ‘sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc., the opposites to good Fame’ (lines 15-16), and hence the worlds of antimasque and revels are mutually exclusive. The moral victory, then, the triumph of virtue, is accomplished not through dramatic action, but through Inigo Jones's stage machine, which Jonson employs to make a symbolic statement about the world of his fiction:

In the heat of their dance on the sudden was heard a sound of loud music, as if many instruments had made one blast; with which not only the hags themselves but the hell into which they ran quite vanished, and the whole face of the scene altered, scarce suffering the memory of such a thing. But in the place of it appeared a glorious and magnificent building figuring the House of Fame, in the top of which were discovered the twelve masquers sitting upon a throne triumphal erected in form of a pyramid and circled with all store of light.

(lines 334ff.)

The structure of the masque does not simply allow for this spectacular machine, but requires it. The transition from antimasque to masque is a metamorphosis, and the theatrical machine is crucial to its achievement. Symbolically the total disappearance of the witches and their hell demonstrates that the world of evil is not real. It exists at all only in relation to the world of ideals, which are the norms of the masque's universe. So the antimasque, for all its energy, is in fact powerless, and ultimately, when the transition takes place, without status even as a concept, ‘scarce suffering the memory of such a thing’.

Though the spectacular potentialities of this sort of theatre are considerable, it lacks flexibility, especially as the context for action of some dramatic complexity. Within two years, Jonson and Jones had moved beyond it to a significant redefinition of the form in Oberon (1611). The masque is set in fairyland; its antimasquers are satyrs, unruly but goodnatured, whose pleasures are courtly ones, dancing and drinking. These figures need not be banished by the advent of the Fairy Prince, for Silenus, the exemplar of wisdom, presides over them. Through him they are educated to the virtues of reason and decorum, and led to submit to the rule of Oberon.

Jones's designs for this masque have been preserved.⁶ Jonson's direction for the opening scene (or is it his description of it?) calls for ‘all wildness that could be presented’ (line 22), but in fact Jones's landscape, like the figures it contains, is clearly controlled by principles of decorum, balanced and symmetrical. This was presumably painted on one or more pairs of shutters. Halfway through the masque, ‘the whole scene opened, and within was discovered the frontispiece of a bright and glorious palace whose gates and walls were transparent (lines 97-8). In this second scene the stage is now framed by high rocks—the outermost panels from the first scene have not been removed—and the palace is a curious combination of rustication and elegance, a medieval fortress with a Palladian balustrade and pediment, surmounted by a very Italian dome. Here as in the action of the masque, the ideal is classic order, attained by gradual stages. With the opening of the next set of shutters, the full depth of the perspective scene finally appears:

There the whole palace opened, and the nation of fays were discovered, … and within, afar off in perspective, the knights masquers sitting in their several sieges. At the further end of all, Oberon, in a chariot.

(lines 213-16)

The spectator now sees the inside of the palace. Unlike the illusionistic settings of the first two scenes, the third is a pavilion from the emblematic theatre of earlier masques, a Renaissance classical temple; but we see through it and beyond it down the whole length of a perspective scene. It is from the depths of this image of order, now fully realized, that Oberon's chariot comes forth, and that the masquers at last move out into the Renaissance classical world of the audience, the columned and galleried banqueting house at Whitehall.

Jones's stage here is wholly co-ordinated with Jonson's text, and indeed may be considered an aspect of it. The setting is the medium for action; unlike the floating island in Beauty it has no independent existence. More than this, the world it represents, however idealized, is a version of the spectators' own world, and scenic realism has become a prerequisite of symbolic glory.

By the end of the decade Jones had devised a scenic machine that enabled him to control visual illusions to an unprecedented degree. The stage was conceived as a total picture, working inward and backward from a proscenium wall. It is worth stressing the point that no English theatre of the period offered anything like this sort of visual experience; and it was not until 1634 that an English play was presented with such a setting, at which time the effect was rightly considered revolutionary. For the student of drama, the most significant aspect of the court masque is the stage that was invented for it, which transformed not only the spectator's experience of the action of a play, but the very nature of the action that a playwright could represent. It opened the way for a theatre of marvels and illusions, but also, paradoxically, for a new kind of realism. But most important, it transformed the theatregoer's experience from a basically auditory one to a basically visual one, turning audiences into spectators, remaking the drama from an essentially rhetorical structure into a succession of scenes.

The most important developments in Jones's stage were achieved after his return from Italy in 1614, and Jonson's response to his collaborator's machines and perspectives is evident in the masques of the years immediately following. Despite their famous quarrel, the poet's awareness of the potentialities of the new theatre was clearly unambiguous; the masque became for the first time a unified form, fully coordinating action, settings and text. For the masque of 1615, The Golden Age Restored, Jones devised another series of perspectives—rocks and clouds, then Elysian bowers, then ‘the scene of light’. Jonson, abandoning drama, allowed the scenic metamorphoses full rein. The masque is a set of lyric statements; the Iron Age is banished and the Golden Age restored by poetry, finally embodied in the persons of Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and Spenser, who are summoned up for the occasion. In the next year, the two artists created Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court. Its antimasque is a tiny comic drama, and it opens on something we would recognize as a full dramatic stage, a detailed and realistic alchemist's workshop. Its very consistency would have been part of the masque's point for the audience at Whitehall: the alchemists are practising below stairs at court. When the transformation comes, it is from naturalism to Nature: ‘the whole scene changed to a glorious bower wherein Nature was placed, with Prometheus at her feet, and the twelve masquers standing about them’ (lines 172-74). For The Vision of Delight (1617) Jones's stage is even more flexible. The masque is again non-dramatic; it anatomizes the true nature of courtly pleasures in a series of scenes which constitute a gradual progression from the baser delights to the higher, from anti-masque to revels. The stage moves from the perspective street of Italian comedy to a cloudy dream world to a pastoral bower, from afternoon to night to morning, from winter to spring. Part of this is accomplished illusionistically, part symbolically. Jones was able to use the conventions of both emblematic and realistic theatres without feeling a sense of strain.

The masque for 1618 was Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. In Jonson's moral fable, Hercules is the courtly hero; he banishes the pleasures of Comus—gluttony, drunkenness, riot—in favour of the rational delights of song and formal dancing. For this production, Jones provides a central symbol, Mount Atlas, the embodiment of wisdom, and this device commands the scene throughout the performance. According to Jonson, the peak of the mountain was ‘the figure of an old man, his head and beard all hoary and frost as if his shoulders were covered with snow’ (lines 1-3). A contemporary observer adds the information that it rolled its eyes and moved itself very cleverly.⁷ The action begins in an ivy grove at the foot of the mountain; when Comus is banished, the grove vanishes, revealing musicians and the goddesses of Pleasure and Virtue. Presently the masquers are called forth from the lap of the mountain, which remains open during the dances and revels, after which the masquers ‘returned into the scene, which closed and was a mountain again as before’ (lines 318-19). Everything in the masque proceeds from the mountain or disappears into it. Always in view, it serves as both symbol and locale and provides both unity of place and unity of action.

It is worthwhile considering the implications of Jones's new stage. Perspective settings establish their particular kind of reality by depending on a set of assumptions that the English spectator was not, on the whole, used to exercising in the theatre. These assumptions are not moral ones, such as that beauty is better than blackness or that man is a microcosm, but empirical ones, involving not what we believe but how we perceive our world. Actions on such a stage begin necessarily to take on the quality of empirical data: the abstract vices and virtues of Queens gradually become the exemplary figures of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue; and, in part, the increasing appearance of dramatic characters in the masque, rather than symbolic figures, is an aspect of this movement. The transition obviously was neither immediate nor self-conscious, and nothing in The Golden Age Restored suggests that Jonson was aware of the implications of his collaborator's new stage. Theatrical historians regularly chide Jonson for failing to give detailed accounts of Jones's settings, but the very lack of commentary in the texts reflects the character of the new theatre: symbols must be explained, but facts are self-evident. This bears also on the movement of the later masques toward comedy, with its empirical assumptions and worldly realities. This is an organic movement, part of the joint development of poet and architect. It grows directly and logically out of the new stage and Jonson's response to its nature and possibilities.

While masques were making a gradual approach toward drama during the Jacobean age, the drama was finding considerable use for the masque. This subject deserves a separate study, but a few brief notes may serve to point some useful directions. Playwrights were naturally attracted to the form for its spectacular qualities, but often too for the special nature of its action and view of the world. The action of masques is not limited by chronological time or dramatic interchange; their metamorphoses could provide potent alternatives to the demands of politics or mutability; their idealized or symbolic figures could move the drama, however momentarily, away from a world of action and passion and toward the realization of another sort of possibility. Thus—to limit our consideration to only the most brilliant example—Prospero's masque in The Tempest has at its centre Ceres and Juno: the goddess of agriculture directs the play back to a world of civilized nature, away from Caliban's search for pig-nuts, ‘young scammels’, dams for fish; and the goddess of both majesty and marriage points the way to a resolution of the play's political conflicts, to the proper exercise of authority and the uniting of ancient enemies in the harmony of marriage. The agent of all this is Iris, the rainbow, pledge of God's providence after the universal flood. And the action of the masque, in what is temporally the most tightly and precisely organized of all Shakespeare's plays, moves in its brief span from ‘spongy April’ through spring and the fruition of summer to the entry of ‘sunburnt sicklemen, of August weary’, after which (as Ceres assures Miranda and Ferdinand) there will be not winter but

Spring come to you, at the farthest,
In the very end of harvest!

(4. 1. 114-15)

So the masque's world is able to banish even winter; its natural cycle contains no death. Appropriately, it is at this point that the magician interrupts this ‘vanity of mine art’ to recall himself and his play from the dangerous pleasures of fantasy to the realities of the world of action. ‘I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban’ (4. 1. 139-40): it is precisely death, in the persons of Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, that threatens at this very moment. Prospero's awareness of time—both the masque's time and the play's—constitutes both his art and his power, his vision of his world as an ‘insubstantial pageant’ on the one hand, and on the other, his total command of the action moment by moment. Nowhere else in the age is the immense and ambiguous vitality of the masque's world-view better exemplified than in The Tempest.

The last real court masque in England was Inigo Jones's and William D'Avenant's Salmacida Spolia, produced on the eve of the Civil War, in January 1640. The spoils of Salmacis are the spoils of peace; staged with unparalleled splendour, the masque presented the banishment of Discord by the wisdom of Charles, followed by a superb vision of the riches and harmony of his reign. Doubtless it seemed ironic to a fair number of contemporary spectators. Still, Jones's and D'Avenant's sense of the moment did allow their idealizing fable to include a little of Prospero's tragic perspective, though necessarily muted and coloured for the occasion:

If it be Kingly patience to out last
          Those stormes the peoples giddy fury raise,
Till like, fantastick windes themselves they waste,
          The wisedome of that patience is thy prayse.(8)

This was the culmination of a decade of complex and brilliant masques by such poets as D'Avenant, Thomas Carew and Aurelian Townshend. The guiding spirit throughout was Jones; Jonson had fallen from favour with the death of King James in 1625. The productions were visually far more elaborate than any Jones had designed with Jonson; and their texts, conceived by more courtly imaginations, rely heavily on both French and Italian entertainments and the rich symbolism of contemporary neo-Platonic philosophy. Unlike James, his son and daughter-in-law took active roles in their masques, and consequently the form focused with a new intensity on the king and queen, and on the nature of royalty. Charles's notion of kingship was at the centre of Jones's greatest masques, and when that notion died, the masque died with it.

But the extent to which the theatre took on the qualities of the masque may be gauged from Antony à Wood's account of a production of William Strode's play The Floating Island, in 1636:

It was acted on a goodly stage reaching from the upper end of the hall almost to the hearth place, and had on it three or four openings on each side thereof, and partitions between them, much resembling the desks or studies in a library, out of which the actors issued forth. The said partitions they could draw in and out at their pleasure upon a sudden, and thrust out new in their places according to the nature of the screen, whereon were represented churches, dwelling-houses, palaces, etc., which for its variety bred very great admiration. Over all was delicate painting, resembling the sky, clouds, etc. At the upper end a great fair shut[ter] of two leaves that opened and shut without any visible help. Within which was set forth the emblem of the whole play in a mysterious manner. Therein was the perfect resemblance of the billows of the sea rolling, and an artificial island with churches and houses waving up and down and floating, as also rocks, trees and hills. Many other fine pieces of work and landscapes did also appear at sundry openings thereof, and a chair was also seen to come gliding on the stage without any visible help.⁹

It is the stage as a scenic machine, a purely visual phenomenon, that commands Wood's total attention here. He recognizes this as new to the theatre; it is in fact directly adopted from the masque. The significance of this moment in the history of English drama can hardly be overestimated, for the masque machine was to become the normal dramatic stage for the next three hundred years.

Notes

1. The passage (here modernized) is cited and discussed in the context of the Tudor masque generally in my book The Jonsonian Masque, Cambridge, Mass., 1965, pp. 27ff.

2. The Jonsonian Masque, pp. 29ff.

3. E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, Oxford, 1903, i, 406.

4. In 1588. See Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. J. Craigie, Edinburgh, 1958, ii, 134-44.

5. Beauty was not designed by Jones, but the production was strictly in his style. All quotations are from the Yale edition of Jonson's Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel, New Haven, 1969. Line numbers in parentheses are references to the texts in this edition.

6. See P. Simpson and C. F. Bell, Designs by Inigo Jones for Masques and Plays at Court, Oxford, 1924, nos. 40-55.

7. The whole account is reprinted in C. H. Herford, P. and E. Simpson, Ben Jonson, Oxford, 1925-52, x, 580-84.

8. London, 1639, fol. div.

9. Reprinted in Herford and Simpson, x, 410-11.

Bibliography

Editions

Of the Jonson masques: C. H. Herford, P. and E. Simpson, Ben Jonson, Oxford, 1925-52. The standard modern edition. Volume ii contains the Introduction, volume vii the texts, volume x the notes.

* Stephen Orgel, Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, New Haven, 1969. A modernized edition with fuller critical commentary than Herford and Simpson.

A good general selection of Stuart masques is in H. A. Evans, English Masques, London, 1897. A less good selection, erratically edited, is in a A Book of Masques, Cambridge, 1967.

Criticism

Apart from the relevant chapters in E. K. Chambers' Mediaeval Stage and Elizabethan Stage, the only good general work is still, surprisingly enough, that of Paul Reyher, Les Masques Anglais, Paris 1909. The sole general study in English, Enid Welsford's The Court Masque, Cambridge, 1927, is unscholarly, confused and misleading. Stephen Orgel's The Jonsonian Masque, Cambridge, Mass., 1965, though primarily a literary study of Jonson, includes an introductory historical survey; and John C. Meagher's Method and Meaning in Jonson's Masques, Notre Dame, Ind., 1966, treats the masques in relation to the Renaissance intellectual context.

On production and stage history, Allardyce Nicoll's Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage, London, 1937, is useful.

In many respects most enlightening of all, as models of approach and method, are the following specialized studies by D. J. Gordon:

‘Ben Jonson's “Haddington Masque”: the Story and the Fable,’ Modern Language Review, xlii, 1947, 180-87.

‘Hymenaei: Ben Jonson's Masque of Union,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, viii, 1945, 107-45.

‘The Imagery of Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blacknesse and The Masque of Beautie,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vi, 1943, 122-41.

‘Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel Between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xii, 1949, 152-78.