SOURCE: “The English Masque and the Functions of Comedy,” in The Elizabethan Theatre VIII, P. D. Meany Company, 1982, pp. 144-63.

[In the essay below, Waith compares late sixteenth and early seventeenth century masques to earlier comedies, arguing that the masque assumed many characteristics of the comedy.]

Thanks to a number of distinguished critics, it has become a staple of comment on masques to note the crucial importance of the occasions on which they were performed. They are, in fact, perfect examples of occasional art, not intended to endure, but praiseworthy in so far as their creators found or devised suitable forms. This is not to say that when a masque was performed it was appreciated in exact proportion to what we would recognize as its degree of formal coherence. We know how often the very opposite was the case. But now that the applause for the unique performance has long since died down, or the lack of applause has been largely forgotten, there is still some interest in appraising the ingenuity of those early creators in adapting various kinds of available material to their uses. If the results were sometimes a rather haphazard sequence of numbers, as in many a twentieth-century revue, they were sometimes remarkably shapely and strikingly apt.

My aim is to call attention to some of these successes and to suggest they they were due, at least in part, to the appropriation of some of the functions traditionally assigned to comedy. Two of these have for centuries been taken as distinguishing features of the genre: first, to ridicule the defects of ordinary people (to “sport with human follies, not with crimes,” as Jonson put it); and secondly, to enact the ultimate surmounting of obstacles by the sympathetic characters. The first of these functions is part of the classical distinction from tragedy, in that the characters of comedy are assumed to be less than illustrious and their misdeeds less than criminal. This function thus establishes certain expectations not only about the characters but about the plot. The second function could be described as a structure or, in Frye's terms, a mythos: the movement from a society dominated by blocking characters to a new and freer society, favourable to the desires of the hero and heroine.¹ Sometimes the change is the result of successful trickery; sometimes it is closer to transcendence. With each function is associated a repertory of forms, some of which closely resemble the forms of other genres. Some ways of ridiculing folly bring comedy close to satire, while some happy endings resemble those of romance. One of the virtues of Frye's scheme is the clarity with which it shows these generic relationships, in which the masque also became involved when it borrowed from comedy.

The usual occasion for a masque, as for the diverse entertainments out of which it grew, was a feast day, a bethrothal or marriage, an important event in the life of the ruler, or the visit of a distinguished guest, and the inevitable function was to celebrate the occasion. So it was natural that the comic mythos and laughter at the expense of fools should have been found appropriate; but we know that the devisers of these shows experimented with many other forms, some inherited from the Middle Ages, some derived from the newly rediscovered classics. Banquets, dances, jousts and processions (sometimes presented as trionfi) were all suitably festive, as was the performance of a play. Best of all, in any case, was an entertainment explicitly tied to the occasion or to the distinguished person or to both. Hence borrowed forms must be adapted to serve not only their original functions but this new one as well. The discovery of the great usefulness of comedy did not take place immediately.

Since the history of courtly entertainment has been so well covered by D'Ancona, Reyher, Prunières, Welsford, Orgel² and others, we are free to choose examples arbitrarily here and there with no attempt at representing the development as a whole or even the mainstream. We can concentrate, instead, on a number of solutions to the problem of suiting form to function. Among the earliest Renaissance court entertainments none has been more frequently discussed than Poliziano's Orfeo, and rightly so, since it can claim to be the first serious secular play in the Italian vernacular, the first pastoral drama, and the first step toward opera. For my special purposes it makes an unusually good point of departure.

Poliziano, temporarily at odds with his patron, Lorenzo de' Medici, wrote Orfeo in 1480 at the request of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga to be performed at Mantua, probably as an entertainment to celebrate two Gonzaga betrothals.³ Like the sacre rappresentazioni which it resembles in so many ways, it opens with a messenger announcing the subject of the play. Instead of an angel it is Mercury, described as “annunziatore della festa,” and the action concerns a pagan, not a Christian, martyr: when Eurydice dies fleeing from Aristaeus, Orpheus visits the underworld to rescue her; he loses her and meets death and dismemberment at the hands of the maenads. The enactment begins with a brief pastoral dialogue in which Aristaeus reveals to two other shepherds his love for Eurydice and then leaves to pursue her. It may be that the spectators were to see her cross the stage from the side where the country landscape was presumably represented in part of a simultaneous set.⁴ No sooner have Eurydice and Aristaeus disappeared than Orpheus appears with his lyre on a mountain (that conventional piece of medieval scenery put to different use), and descends singing some Latin verses, not for the edification of the flora and fauna, but in praise of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga. He is interrupted by the news of Eurydice's death brought by a shepherd, moves to the other side of the stage, where the underworld was represented (shades of the hellmouth), charms Pluto and Proserpina, and begins the trip back. In the space of only a few lines he makes his fatal turn, laments his fate, and after inveighing against the disastrous consequences of love for a woman, meets the Bacchae. Most of the remainder of this brief drama is given over to their festive song as, holding the head of their victim, they honour Bacchus.

At first sight the murder of Orpheus by a rout of drunken women might not seem to be the ideal fable for a double betrothal, but there is a broader view, much broader. For Richard Cody “The Orfeo is a love rite, composed by the Laureate of Ficino's academy, in which the passion of the founder of poetic theology is celebrated.”⁵ This is part of the author's argument that Platonism opens up a prospect on “the landscape of the mind” in pastoral poetry, and even though Ida Maïer is probably right in denying that Poliziano loads his playlet with the full weight of humanist interpretation of the myth (p. 395), Orfeo could hardly have failed to suggest to some of the audience at the Gonzaga court the relationship between an ideal love and the power of music and poetry, or perhaps even the power and perils of the contemplative life. As Cody says, “an Orpheus poem should be hermetic,” and he may not be extravagant in suggesting that “with the scene of his playing the lyre, Orfeo enters upon a ministry which reveals him as Apolline prophet and Bacchic man of sorrows” (p. 40).

The scene of Orpheus's first appearance, singing his Latin eulogy of the cardinal, troubles many critics, as does most encomiastic poetry in an age which often brands such writing as purely venal and relegates it to the same category as television commercials. Yet here the evidence of a kind of Platonizing is the clearest. Here, if anywhere, the audience is invited to see into or through the visible manifestation to an ideal form. The mythic Orpheus addresses the patron of the feast as a prince who cares for poets and poetry with the exemplary generosity of Maecenas and the imagination of Virgil.⁶ It is the longest of Orpheus's speeches, and serves the vital function of relating the entertainment to its host as well as, more generally, to the court where it is being given. If it is, in a sense, Platonic, it is also essentially courtly—a combination that Daniel Javitch has fruitfully treated in his Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England.⁷ In Poliziano's Orfeo the connection is cemented by the assignment of the role of Orpheus to a Florentine gentleman, Bartolomeo (or “Baccio”) Ugolini, an associate of Lorenzo de' Medici's. As Orpheus descended the mountain the audience was to see the mythic dimension of its host as it also recognized an eminent Florentine visitor in the guise of the mythic hero. We customarily praise an actor for totally becoming the character he impersonates, but in a courtly entertainment there is a special interest in detecting the person beneath the mask. It is important that both the actor and the princely object of the encomium should be perceived with double vision, losing neither the contemporary man nor the mythic figure for whom he stands.

If Poliziano related poetry and courtliness in the choice of his principal actor and in his compliment to the cardinal, he did so too in the tone of his comments on the play in a prefatory letter published with the first edition. There he says that he wrote Orfeo in two days in the midst of continuous tumult, and professes to wish that his illformed little entertainment might have been exposed, like a defective Spartan baby, and left to die instead of being preserved in print (Poesie, p. 19). Surely Castiglione would have found this a superb example of sprezzatura, very proper for a courtier-playwright.

It is peculiarly ironical that we cannot be sure whether or not the feast for which Orfeo was so knowingly tailored ever took place (Maïer, p. 390), but the description by DeSanctis of the hypothetical occasion shows a keen appreciation of the way the play might have been received. Comparing it to a medieval joust he says:

Just as the burghers, dressed up as knights, reproduced the world of chivalry, these new Athenians reproduced the world of the ancients, and certainly must have thoroughly enjoyed watching each other parade in the costumes of the older days. There was enormous enthusiasm when Baccio Ugolini, dressed as Orfeo and holding a zither in his hand, came down the mountainside singing the praises of the Cardinal in magnificent Latin verses, “Redeunt saturnia regna.” The ancient days of Athens and Rome seemed to have come back again.⁸

An attitude similar to this becomes a defining characteristic of the entertainments we are considering.

Generically Orfeo is an anomaly. Originally called a favola or fabula, in the neutral sense of “dramatic poem,” it was later somewhat altered, divided into five acts, and called Orphei Tragoedia in certain manuscripts discovered in the eighteenth century.⁹ Although students of Poliziano do not now attribute this reworking to him, it provides for a useful comparison. Destined for a later occasion at Ferrara, it properly omits the eulogy of Cardinal Gonzaga, the prominent centre-piece of the favola. But it ends, even in this “tragic” form, on the festive note of the ecstatic chorus of Bacchantes. To call it comic would be excessive, but in neither version is there the emphasis on loss found in even so celebrative a tragedy as Tamburlaine:

My body feels, my soul doth weep to see
Your sweet desires deprived my company,
For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.(10)

There is none of this in Orfeo. The end, however ironic it may seem, is dance, intoxication and song, with the repeated “Bacchus, Bacchus, evoe.” Perhaps we should think of the final destination of the head and of the transcendent survival of the Orphic voice. In any case, the requirements of the occasion seem to have exerted a shaping influence on the material.

Given the nature of the desired response to courtly entertainment, classical mythology was an obvious source of inspiration. Suggesting not only the return of a great period in western history but also an ideal world beyond this one, it conferred upon the courtier-actor and upon his audience the very qualities to which they aspired. Nothing is less surprising than the large number of intermezzi, ballets de cour and masques which revived or refashioned Greek and Roman myths. The gods and godlets of mountains, woods, fields and streams had the special appeal that both underlay and then was reinforced by pastoral poetry. Bacchus, his foster-father Silenus, Pan, and their attendant fauns, satyrs, nymphs, oreads, and dryads were all, at one level of interpretation, expressions of the natural forces which any courtier extravagantly admired as the antithesis of the effete court, while doing his best to avoid them. Cinthio chose precisely this mythological milieu for his pastoral drama Egle in 1545, performed at the author's house in Ferrara twice in the presence of Duke Hercules II and his brother Cardinal Ippolito d'Este. Paid for by the university law students, the entertainment celebrated no happy event other than Cinthio's attempt to revivify the satyr-play, but like more precisely courtly entertainments, it was presented to the best people, had music specially written for it and scenery specially designed. A gentleman named Sebastiano Clarignano da Montefalco, whom Cinthio considered the Roscius of their time, was the principal actor.¹¹ But the most compelling reason for mentioning Egle in a study of the forms adapted for masques is that Cinthio, taking the Cyclops of Euripides as his model, produced in fact a predecessor of pastoral tragicomedy, and in so doing devised a kind of action which would be most useful to the authors of masques. In a brief essay on the satyr-play he says that it differs from comedy and tragedy, “partaking of the pleasantness of the one and the gravity of the other.”¹² Here he comes close to anticipating Guarini, who wrote that “He who composes tragicomedy takes from tragedy its great persons but not its great action …; from comedy laughter that is not excessive, modest amusement, feigned difficulty, and above all the comic order.”¹³ The combination of great persons and a comic order was just right also for the masque.

The comic action was very simple: Egle, the mistress of Silenus, undertakes to help the sylvan deities prevent the Olympian gods from taking away the nymphs with whom they are all in love. After an unsuccessful attempt to reason with the nymphs, Egle devises a trick which goes disastrously wrong for the sylvan deities. When they rush unexpectedly on the nymphs, who have been lured into dancing with seemingly harmless little satyrs, Diana frustrates the would-be rapists by transforming her followers into fountains, rivers and trees; Pan's Syrinx becomes a reed. Instead of fooling a wicked Polyphemus, as in the Cyclops, Silenus and his merry men are routed by the superior power of chaste Diana. Only for her nymphs can the ending be considered happy, and only then if total identification with the landscape is seen as desirable. Still, salvation by transformation has its own Ovidian attraction, which was not lost on later court entertainers. Equally ripe for future exploitation were the incidental laughs provided by the drunken satyrs.

Silenus, satyrs, nymphs and also Bacchantes had already appeared in some intermezzi performed for the wedding of Cosimo i in Florence in 1539. The similarity of the source material makes all the clearer the very different plan which underlay this sort of entertainment. Orfeo and Egle were little plays; the Florentine intermezzi of 1539 were spectacular divertissements performed before and after a play and between its acts. What Guarini called “the comic order” was unmistakably present in the play by Antonio Landi, which was modelled on Roman comedy, but the design of the evening's entertainment as a whole was a baroque elaboration of comic design. The intermezzi served in part to emphasize the play's temporal unity: before the first act dawn was presented by a rising sun and an impersonation of Aurora; after the third act, when it was noon, a drunken Silenus was shown drowsing in a grotto; aroused, and asked to sing, he complied with praise of the Golden Age; after the fourth act eight nymphs in hunting costume appeared as if returning from the hunt “to show that evening was coming,”¹⁴ and after the last act Night, dressed in black silk, sang to the accompaniment of four trombones; finally ten satyrs in hairy breechclouts danced with ten Bacchantes and chanted “Evoe” like the Bacchantes of Orfeo, though to very different effect.

The intermezzo following Act i was related to this scheme in that it contained a hymn to the sun, but more important than the sun were the singers, who were twelve shepherds. More obviously pastoral than the other intermezzi, this one was characteristic of them all in presenting a sharp contrast with the urban setting of the comedy. The stage represented the town of Pisa with its famous tower and baptistry, various “bizarre and capricious” palace façades, and street perspectives (Nagler, p. 9). Apparently these remained in view all evening, even when country shepherds, nymphs or gods appeared in the intermezzi. In the shepherds' scene, as Alois Nagler points out, “Closeness to nature was stressed in their rustic costumes: two shepherds wore costumes of bark, another pair appeared in red goatskins, and a third wore a bird's costume” (p. 10). He speculates that for the intermezzo with Silenus “a grotto set piece … was simply rolled into the Pisa decor” (p. 11), and we know from Pier Francesco Giambullari, who described the festivities, that the huntress nymphs walked across the urban set (p. 143). Thus an implied or very simply suggested mythic landscape was periodically imposed on the comic world of neighbouring Pisa. The contrast foreshadowed one often used in the masque.

The intermezzo after the second act brought the contrasting worlds of court and country together in a significant way. Scantily dressed sirens and nymphs emerged from a canal at the front of the stage, seeking the bride, Eleonora of Toledo, who had left Naples to become Duchess of Florence. The sirens, lamenting her desertion of the sea for the Arno, made her seem for the moment a kind of sea-goddess, out of her native element. It was the only instance in that evening's entertainment of outright courtly compliment.

With its classical time-scheme and divisions into five acts, Landi's comedy provided a logical structure for a sequence of spectacularly mounted “numbers” which had little to do with each other and which, in theory, were there to embellish the play. From the attention given to them by Giambullari, however, we may guess that the guests were at least as interested in the elaborate ornaments as in the edifice which they adorned.

That the intermezzi, important precedents for the masque, often swamped the plays with which they were performed is well known. A striking instance was a seventeenth-century performance of Tasso's Aminta, a pastoral play only tangentially related to the development of the masque, but so generally influential that it must be mentioned, if only briefly. It was first performed for the court of Ferrara in 1573 by the Gelosi, the famous company who acted plays and commedie dell' arte in both Italy and France.¹⁵ The story is one of misfortune avoided. Silvia, saved by Aminta from the brutal advances of a satyr, refuses to reward her faithful lover. In his despair he gets a false report that she has been killed by a wolf (for the wolf, too, is in Arcadia). By the time that Silvia's friend Dafne has found out that Silvia is alive, Aminta has gone to commit suicide. Silvia now repents of her cruelty, and after supposing her lover dead, finds that he too is alive. The end is reconciliation. It is, of course, the kind of plot that became a pattern for tragicomedy.

Highly regarded as the Aminta was and still is, it did not hold the attention of the audience at a gala performance in Parma in 1628 honouring a Medici-Farnese wedding. What everyone commented on, as Nagler remarks (pp. 143, 152), was the intermezzi, or, more truly, the spectacular staging of the intermezzi. Had Tasso been alive he might have complained as Jonson did of Inigo Jones. The intermezzi were not even related to the Aminta except in the very general way that many of them dealt with love. They presented Bradamante and Ruggiero, Dido and Aeneas, a dispute between the Olympians over love and chastity, the story of the Argonauts, and a joust between the gods led by Pluto and Jupiter respectively. A high point was the moment when Jupiter's knights, mounted on their horses, were lowered in a machine to the stage—equi et equites ex machina.

If the 1628 Aminta represents a centrifugal extreme to which such entertainments might fly, the famous Ballet Comique de la Reine of 1581 is a counter-example of a varied entertainment which incorporated in a coherent action some of the most successful features of its predecessors. More spectacular than Orfeo or Egle, and having more of a story than the intermezzi, it was more thoroughly integrated into the occasion than any of these by presenting the Queen, some of her ladies, and several courtiers as performers. Thus it also absorbed the tradition of the masquerade, in which not only disguising but declamation, song, and dance were expected features.¹⁶ The result was dramatic ballet, and the dramatic model was comedy of a rather special sort, closely related to mythological plays, satyr-plays, pastoral drama, and tragicomedy.

To celebrate the marriage of his sister-in-law to the Duc de Joyeuse, Henry iii of France arranged a number of festivities. The Queen, seeing all that was planned in her sister's honour, asked an Italian violinist and valet de chambre at the court, Baltasar de Beaujoyeulx (or Belgiojoso), to devise a further entertainment to outdo them all. He was in touch with the activities of the new Académie de Musique et de Poésie and apparently familiar with what had recently been written at the Italian courts. Prunières speculates (p. 80) that he may have seen a performance of the Aminta by the Gelosi in Paris, since the gallant tone of the dialogue in the ballet recalls Tasso's pastoral. Beaujoyeulx responded to the Queen's request with plans so elaborate that they could not be executed until three weeks after the other festivities, but his ballet was none the less their high point and was recorded in a profusely illustrated little book published the next year.

In an address to the reader Beaujoyeulx explains the combination of forms which constitutes his brilliant invention.¹⁷ He says that he called it a “ballet comique” to do honour to the dance with the first word and to indicate by the second more “the beautiful, tranquil, and happy ending” than the rank of the characters, who are almost all gods, goddesses or other heroic personages (rather than the everyday folk of classical comedy). Having mixed comedy and ballet, he could not call the hybrid “ballet” without wronging comedy “distinctly represented in acts and scenes,” nor call it “comedy” without prejudice to the ballet, which he says “honors, enlivens, and fills out with harmonious speeches the fine idea of the comedy.”

The ingenious structure that Beaujoyeulx devised is made up of alternating “acts” and what he refers to as “intermèdes,” the equivalents of intermezzi, already familiar in French entertainments. But here the mixing of comedy and ballet is such that although the “acts” present the major developments of the story, the “intermèdes” are progressively drawn into it.

Since both the comic action and the related intermèdes were precisely calculated to fill the space in which they were performed, I must remind you of the often-reproduced illustration showing the hall of the Petit Bourbon on the night of the performance. You will recall that at one end of the long room one sees the backs of the King, his mother, Catherine de' Medici, and their entourage. At the opposite end is the garden of Circe beneath an over-arching trellis, with two smaller trellises to the right and left. In the garden, behind a parade of animals headed by a stag and an elephant, is the enchantress herself, holding her magic wand, and behind her a castle gate, over which can be seen a tower, part of what Beaujoyeulx describes as a “town in perspective” (fol. 6v). It is not entirely fanciful to see in the royal dais and Circe's garden polar opposites comparable to heaven and hell in a medieval religious play, for despite the Renaissance perspective, the staging of this ballet owes much to the old simultaneous set. To the right and left of the hall, half-way between the two ends, are two more localities: a wooded grotto where Pan sits (actually veiled by a curtain at the beginning of the ballet) and a golden vault concealing many musicians.

The action begins with a rapid movement from Circe's end of the hall toward the King, as a fugitive gentleman (played by a courtier in the service of the Queen Mother) escapes from the garden and asks King Henry for help against the enchantress. Circe then rushes out of her garden in pursuit, but is unable to see her victim, kneeling at the King's feet. After uttering an angry complaint she goes back through her garden and leaves the room. Beaujoyeulx says that the spectators marvelled at these two “acts” (fol. 10). They must have marvelled far more at the ensuing intermède, which seems at first to be as unrelated to the story of Circe as any Italian intermezzo. It is essentially a spectacular parade of marine creatures, followed by a magnificent fountain-chariot, on which are seated, amongst sculptured nereids, tritons and dolphins, Glaucus and Tethys, impersonated by the composer and his wife, and twelve naiads, impersonated by the Queen and other distinguished ladies of the court. To the accompaniment of instrumental and vocal music the procession approaches the royal dais, and Glaucus and Tethys sing a song in which he asks her help against Circe, who has transformed his beloved Scylla. But Tethys replies that she has given her power to the chief naiad, Queen Louise. So the parade is, after all, tied to the story and to the courtly audience. Once the procession has made the circuit of the hall and disappeared, the naiads leave the chariot and reappear to dance the first entry of the ballet.

Circe brings the intermède to an abrupt end when she again comes out of her garden in a fury, and with her wand turns the dancers into statues as she silences the music. Her attack not only involves the characters of the intermède more thoroughly in the main action, but introduces the chief complication of that simple plot. All the rest of the ballet consists in moves and countermoves by Circe and her enemies.

It is not necessary to tell all the rest of the story once again, but only to comment on certain distinctive moments. The low point in the fortunes of the naiads comes when Mercury, who has freed them from the spell, is himself overcome, and Circe leads them all captive into her garden. The naiads disappear, Mercury lies helpless on his back, and Circe diverts herself with a procession of animals into which she has transformed her previous victims. The space at the King's end of the hall is empty while the magic garden seems to be the sole locus of power.

The second intermède begins a renewal of the forces opposed to Circe, as various rustic divinities enter the action. A song by satyrs, a moving wood, and an address to the King by dryads from the wood precede the unveiling of the remaining fixed location, Pan's wooded grotto. Responding to the appeal of one of the dryads, he agrees to fight against the enchantress.

The third intermède joins the four virtues and Minerva to the woodland gods, and leads to another adress to the King, in which Minerva says that the castle of Circe is the only one in France still unconquered by the King, the wielder of Jupiter's sceptre. She claims to have responded to the King's call for help, and promises to overwhelm Circe. Though she now prays to her father Jupiter, it is clear that both of them are acting as a favour to the King of France. The inevitable end is the humbling of Circe, who is led to the heavenly end of the hall and made to sit at the King's feet. Finally the disenchanted naiads come out of the garden, left empty at last, and dance the main ballet before the King.

Although the final episodes recall earlier entertainments in which a castle was besieged and finally captured, Beaujoyeulx was not wrong to call his design comic. Circe, enemy of the dance, is a blocking character par excellence, if that is not a paradox. Sometimes, like Medusa, paralysing, sometimes transforming, she always demeans and reduces her victims. The society which triumphs over her is one in which human beings mysteriously partake of the nature and power of the divinities who rule the sea, the woods and the heavens. For the privileged persons who inhabit this special world the ending will always be happy. Or so, at least, the ballet leads one to suppose.

A comic action of this sort, concerning illustrious rather than ordinary characters, became an invaluable, though by no means the sole, resource of the English masque, giving its poetry, dance, and spectacle a clear and simple shape. As the catastrophe of classical comedy, which, as Donatus says, “is the change of the situation to a pleasant outcome,”¹⁸ came to be rendered in the masque mainly by means of spectacle and dance, the function of the comic mythos was subordinated to the principal function of the masque, to honour the occasion and its participants. The moment of comic triumph became a kind of apotheosis of the masquers.

We may note more than one kind of comic action. In one of Jonson's earliest masques, The Masque of Blackness of 1605, the plot falls in that part of the comic gamut closest to romance. It is the long quest of the Daughters of Niger for a land where their complexions may be miraculously blanched. The masquers, in black face and elegantly exotic gowns, were Queen Anne and her ladies. Of their quest we see only the moderately happy ending—their arrival in Britannia, described as “a world divided from the world,”¹⁹ where they receive the promise of transformation the following year. The Masque of Beauty, in which the promise is carried out, was delayed for two years, by which time four more fugitives had joined the expedition, and all sixteen had been transformed by the power of Albion, or James I. The brief but spectacular masque shows the arrival of these beauties on a floating island, their thankful dances, and their greeting by Albion's deputy January, lord of the Twelfth Night feast, enthroned in the middle of the hall. Notice that if Jupiter did favours for Henry III of France, England's king was a sufficient deity in himself on these occasions to perform the necessary miracles.

A quest again provides the structure for Davenant's Temple of Love, written for Queen Henrietta Maria, who impersonates Indamora, Queen of Narsinga, and reinstates the Temple of Chaste Love on her Indian island. Hearing of it, noble Persian youths set out to find it. Despite the efforts of certain magicians to sidetrack them, the Persians, played by courtiers, arrive and dance their dance, but the true climax is the arrival of the Queen of Narsinga and England with her ladies in a chariot drawn by sea-monsters. When they have finished their dances, the Queen is seated on the state with the King as, for the first time, the Temple of Chaste Love to which she has come is fully revealed on the stage facing the royal dais. In earlier sets it has been seen at a distance or in clouds, but now it is in the foreground of a space which is India and Whitehall. The temple is a reflection of the throne, as we see when Chaste Love and the priest and priestess of the temple move out to the state to sing the closing apostrophe to Charles and Henrietta. For the quest must end in the banqueting house, whether it be called Britannia or Narsinga.²⁰

Jonson's Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611) has a more standard comic action, in which Love, at first frustrated, manages to outwit his captor, the Sphinx, release the Daughters of the Morn, and bring about the marriage of the eldest to Phoebus, enthroned in the west. Love, appropriately enough, is here the clever trickster, who guesses the sphinx's riddle, assisted, to be sure, by the priests of the muses. He has been told “to find a world the world without” (1. 147). If he had seen The Masque of Blackness he would not have needed anyone to tell him that Britain was this special world. Once he knows this he is freed from ignorance and folly and able to carry out his mission. Queen Anne is again reunited, for the moment at least, with her James.

Anyone familiar with English masques will readily think of other scenarios that constitute comic actions; Reason and the Powers of Juno end the strife of humours and affections to bring about reconciliation and wedding; Love is rescued from the wiles of Pluto; Mercury is vindicated from the alchemists at court; Juno puts an end to the jealous Cupid's interruption of the rites to Chloris. Again and again obstacles are overcome and society renews itself; again and again the ending not only fulfills the aims of the protagonists but becomes a celebration of the forces they represent. The Platonizing which Cody sees in pastoral operates here to push comedy in the direction of ritual.

The world in which these comic actions take place is more remote than familiar—a world of gods and heroes, “a world the world without”—and yet in certain ways familiar to the select audience of the court both because the masquers themselves are known and because of the devices which involve the King in the action. In fact the ambiguity about the world of the masque is part of what makes it effective panegyric. Orgel speaks of every masque “transforming the courtly audience into the idealized world of the poet's vision” (Complete Masques, p. 2), and one might add that this transformation, which affects both the masquers and the audience, is an analogue of the comic action, in which a superior power transforms a bad situation into a good one.

In all these comic actions there are opposing forces, blocking characters, to whom we must finally give some attention. They come in varying degrees of effectuality. While Circe in Beaujoyeulx's ballet is relatively formidable and active, the only opposition in The Masque of Beauty is Night, whose attempt to delay the Daughters of Niger has already failed by the time that we are told of it. In The Temple of Love the magicians have several threatening speeches, but give up with very little struggle. The Sphinx of Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly is more troublesome, but even she is more foolish than criminal, as befits a comic antagonist. Thanks mainly to Ben Jonson, the opposing forces in the English masque came to be treated as the objects of satire and presented to be laughed at in an antimasque. Before this development there had been lighter moments and bits of grotesquerie in courtly entertainments in England and on the continent. Where the setting was pastoral the satyrs and Silenus were natural choices for this sort of diverson, as in Egle or the Florentine intermezzi of 1539, but other “antics” also appeared, and hence the term “antic-masque” enters confusingly into the history of the antimasque. Jonson describes the dancers of his “antimasque of boys” in The Haddington Masque as “twelve boys most anticly attired.” They do “a subtle capricious dance to as odd a music, … nodding with their antic faces, with other variety of ridiculous gesture, which gave much occasion of mirth and delight to the spectators” (Complete Masques, pp. 112, 123). The famous antimasque of witches in The Masque of Queens is similarly antic. The achievement of these early antimasques, however, was not the introduction of laughter or of new material but the establishment of a clear function for this sort of comic moment and of a firm structure into which it could be placed. I could even suggest that when the popularity of antimasques led to their notorious multiplication their function was not lost and the structure was not destroyed.

The nature and function of the antimasque appear with great clarity if we compare Beaujoyeulx's Circe with its refashioning by Aurelian Townshend and Inigo Jones as Tempe Restored. The Ballet Comique was not funny unless Circe herself made her tantrums so, as some of Beaujoyeulx's descriptions may suggest. He describes her on one occasion, for instance, as returning to her garden like a victorious captain (fol. 23), which might have been made into an amusing moment. It is also possible that the parade of her victims transformed into animals was played for laughs, though nothing in the text tells us that it was. Here Townshend and Jones elaborate by turning her brief self-entertainment into a series of antimasques “consisting,” we are told, “of Indians and Barbarians, who naturally are bestiall, and others which are voluntaries, and but halfe transformed into beastes.”²¹ Perhaps this does not sound hilarious, but the satirical intention of the antimasques is unmistakable, especially in the fourth, consisting of “3 Apes. An Asse like a Pedante, teaching them Prick-song” (Townshend, p. 88). These are presumably some of the “voluntaries,” the willing victims of the enchantress, who are thus held up to ridicule. At the same time Circe becomes somewhat less sinister and more of a humour character, when Townshend's chorus sings about “the distemper'd Heart, / Of sullen Circe, stung with Cupids dart” (p. 87). The blatant racism of his comment on the antimasques suggests a standard comic point of view which is turned to a special use in the masque; the point of view from which we seem to see a total difference between “us” and “them.” If Indians and Barbarians hardly share a common humanity with the spectators in Whitehall, it is equally evident that the willing victims of an enchantress share none of the spectators' wisdom and self-discipline. Thus the distance, or refusal of sympathy, which we know to be a precondition for satirical laughter becomes another means of glorifying the participants in one of these great occasions.

It is entirely characteristic of Jonson that he often defines this distance as a contrast between folly and wisdom. In addition to the Sphinx, who represents ignorance and folly, one thinks of Merefool in The Fortunate Isles or the “Curious” in Time Vindicated, “ignorant admirers” of the unprincipled poet Chronomastix. Sometimes the demonstration of folly constitutes what Orgel calls “a tiny comic drama” (Jonsonian Masque, p. 73), very similar to a scene in one of the comedies, and he rightly says that for Jonson the antimasque “served to give meaning to the masque,” to explain it, to make the audience understand (p. 93). These last comments are part of Orgel's discussion of the poetic Cook of Neptune's Triumph, who defends antimasques against the disapproving Poet. The Cook insists that the understanding must be approached by way of the senses, and forces the Poet to grant that “even a Triumph likes fun” (11. 40-47, 220-23). Yet even here, where the Cook is allowed to score against the purism of the Poet, the fun of the antimasque, like the fun of Jonsonian comedy, is at the expense of the foolish. If Jonson delights in their portrayal he leaves no doubt about the judgment he passes on them, and in the masques the distance between ridiculed and sympathetic characters is more absolute. The Cook's olla podrida of foolish court characters helps us to understand the noble masquers only by being totally different.

In The Temple of Love Davenant goes a step further by allowing one character in the antimasque to make fun of some of the masquers. A “Persian page” leaps on the stage after the preceding entry of the antimasque, warning the ladies of Narsinga (and England) that they may be disappointed in the noble Persian youths who are just arriving,

For I must tell you that about them all
There's not one grain but what's Platonical.

(ll. 319-20)

As in his play The Platonic Lovers, Davenant dares to laugh at the cult made fashionable by the Queen and honoured in this masque. For this irreverence he has precedents in the anti-Petrarchan moments of Petrarchan poetry and the anti-Platonic jibes of other works devoted to Platonic love, but the device is exceptional in the masque. And even here no real adjustment of point of view is demanded. There is nothing laughable about the noble Persian youths when they arrive, and chaste love is an easy victor onstage and in the Whitehall of that evening.

The pastoral masque Pan's Anniversary, performed at Greenwich for King Jame's birthday, June 19, 1620, shows how the comic action itself may be little more than the acting out of a contrast between the foolish and the admirable—the aristoi. The scene in Arcadia, where nymphs, encouraged by an old shepherd, are strewing flowers for the “yearly rites” of Pan, as his alter ego King James looks on from the state in the midst of the hall. Then the scene opens to reveal a “fountain of light,” around which are seated the masquers (Prince Charles and certain lords), accompanied by musicians in the guise of priests of Pan. Here the celebration is interrupted by the arrival of a foolish Fencer, ushering in “certain bold boys of Boeotia … to challenge the Arcadians at their own sports.” The Boeotians, whom the Fencer describes before they dance the antimasque, are a Tinker of Thebes, a tooth-drawer, a juggler, a corn-cutter, a maker of mousetraps, a tailor, and a clerk. If it were not for the mention of Thebes, one might well think this motley crew belonged in London. Several, indeed, seem to have come from Bartholomew Fair. In the presence of “the best and bravest spirits of Arcadia” they offer their rival entertainment, for which, according to the old shepherd, the best they can expect is forgiveness. Their diversion belongs to everyday Smithfield (or Thebes); the solemn hymns and dances that follow are appropriate to the Arcadian holy day of Pan's annniversary and the birthday of King James. The contrast is between the trivial and the significant, between the world of city comedy and that of courtly entertainment, between a band of self-deceived fools and what the old shepherd calls a “true society.” The distinction between “them” and “us” could not be more plain—except to the fools, who “perceive no such wonder in all that is done here,” and return to offer another rival show. This time they appear as sheep, but what looks at first like a successful adaptation to environment turns out to be a different sort of proof of folly. They have only the stupidity of sheep, which they are told to take back to Boeotia. “This is too pure an air for so gross brains.” The masque then concludes with a prayer to Pan, addressed, one may suppose, to the throne. The happy ending is quite simply the expulsion of folly from the true society headed by the king.

Pan's Anniversary is a slight and unpretentious masque in comparison with many that were mounted at this time, but it was well suited to Greenwich in the summer—a more pastoral location in 1620 than now—and in it Jonson and Jones made very adroit use of the traditions we have been considering. It is not only a pastoral, but a comical-satirical-mythical-pastoral masque.

Notes

1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1952), p. 163.

2. Alessandro D'Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, (Turin 1891); Paul Reyher, Les Masques anglais (Paris, 1909); Henry Prunières, Le Ballet de cour avant Benserade et Lully (Paris, 1914); Enid Welsford, The Court Masque (1927; rpt, New York, 1962); Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

3. See Ida Maïer, Ange Politien; la formation d'un poète humaniste (Geneva, 1966), pp. 387-90.

4. See Maïer, pp. 403-4.

5. The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso's Aminta and Shakespeare's Early Comedies, (Oxford, 1969), p. 31.

6. Angelo Poliziano, Poesie italiane, ed. S. Orlando (Milan, 1976), pp. 116-18.

7. Princeton, N.J., 1978.

8. Francesco De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature, tr. Joan Redfern (1931: rpt. N.Y., [1960]), i, 383.

9. See Maïer, p. 392; Poliziano, Le Stanze, l'Orfeo e le rime, ed. G. Carducci (Bologna, 1912), pp. 393-507.

10. Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. I. Ribner (N.Y., 1963), p. 174.

11. Egle, Satira di M. Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio (s.l.n.d.), fol. 5, and see D'Ancona, ii, p. 414.

12. “Discorso sulle satire atte alle scene,” Scritti estetici di G. B. Giraldi Cintio, in Biblioteca rara, liii (Milan, 1864), p. 135; see also Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy (Urbana, III., 1955), p. 10.

13. Il Pastor fido e compendio della poesia tragicomica, ed. B. Brognoligo (Bari, 1914), p. 231; translation altered from Allen H. Gilbert's in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (New York, 1940), p. 511.

14. Pier Francesco Giambullari, Apparato et feste nelle noze dello illustrissimo Signor Duco di Firenze … (Florence, 1539), p. 143; and see Alois Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici 1539-1637 (New Haven, 1964), pp. 10-12.

15. See Giosuè Carducci, Su l'Aminta di T. Tasso (Florence 1896), p. 80; Prunières, p. 80.

16. See Prunières, pp. 58-94.

17. Balet comique de la royne (Paris, 1582), sigs, e3^v & e4; see facsimile, ed. G. A. Caula (Turin, 1962).

18. “A Fragment on Comedy and Tragedy,” in Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lauter (New York, 1964), p. 30.

19. Masque of Blackness, l. 218 in Ben Jonson, The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, 1969), from which all quotations from the masques are taken. See Orgel's note on this line, p. 473.

20. The text of The Temple of Love will be found in editions of Davenant's dramatic works and in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (London, 1973), ii, pp. 600-4.

21. Aurelian Townshend's Poems and Masks, ed. E. K. Chambers (Oxford, 1912), p. 87.