Masque

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For other uses, see Masque (disambiguation).

Costume for a Knight, by Inigo Jones: the plumed helmet, the "heroic torso" in armour and other conventions were still employed for opera seria in the 18th century.

The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in sixteenth and early seventeenth century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy. (A public version of the masque was the pageant.) Masque involved music and dancing, singing and acting, within an elaborate stage design, in which the architectural framing and costumes might be designed by a renowned architect, to present a deferential allegory flattering to the patron. Professional actors and musicians were hired for the speech and song aspects of masquing. Often, the masquers who did not speak or sing were courtiers: James I's Queen Consort, Anne of Denmark, frequently danced with her ladies in masques between 1603 and 1611, Henry VIII and Charles I performed in the masques at their courts, and the Queen's ladies performed the masque of Florimène at the court of Charles I in 1642, just before the outbreak of the English Civil War. Other times, professionals were joined by amateurs in a final dance. In the tradition of masque, Louis XIV danced in ballets at Versailles with music by Lully.

The masque tradition developed from the elaborate pageants and courtly shows of ducal Burgundy in the late Middle Ages. Masques were typically a complimentary offering to the prince among his guests and might combine pastoral settings, mythological fable, and the dramatic elements of ethical debate. There would invariably be some political and social application of the allegory. Such pageants often celebrated a birth or marriage and invariably ended with a tableau of bliss and concord. Masque imagery tended to be drawn from Classical rather than Christian sources, and the artifice was part of the charm. Masque thus lent itself to Mannerist treatment in the hands of master designers like Giulio Romano or Inigo Jones. The New Historians probe the political subtexts of masques in works like the essays in Bevington and Holbrook's The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (1998).^[1]

In English theatre tradition, a dumb show is a masque-like interlude of silent pantomime usually with allegorical content that refers to the occasion of a play or its theme, the most famous being the pantomime played out in Hamlet (III.ii). Dumb shows might be a moving spectacle, like a procession, as in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1580s), or they might form a pictorial tableau, as one in the stilted Shakespeare collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre (III,i)—a tableau that is immediately explicated at some length by the poet-narrator, Gower. Dumb shows were a Medieval element that continued popular in early Elizabethan drama, but by the time Pericles (c 1607–08) or Hamlet (ca. 1600–02) were aired, they were perhaps quaintly old-fashioned: “What means this, my lord?” is Ophelia's reaction. In English masques, purely musical interludes might be accompanied by a dumb show.

Of all the arts of the Renaissance, the ephemeral masque, which occupied the most outstanding humanists, poets and artists at the full intensity of their powers but was generally as utterly lost after its single performance as a fireworks display, (though some poetical texts might survive, and some preparatory drawings for scenery), is the artistic form most alien to audiences today. Until the Puritans closed the English theaters in 1642, the masque remained the highest artform in England.

"Rule, Britannia!" started out as part of Alfred, a masque about Alfred the Great co-written by James Thomson and David Mallet which was first performed at Cliveden, country house of Frederick, Prince of Wales. It remains among the best-known British patriotic songs up to the present, while the masque of which it was originally part is only remembered by specialist historians.

The masque has its origins in a folk tradition where masked players would unexpectedly call on a nobleman in his hall, dancing and bringing gifts on certain nights of the year, or celebrating dynastic occasions. The rustic presentation of "Pyramus and Thisbe" as a wedding entertainment in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream offers a familiar example. Spectators were invited to join in the dancing. At the end, the players would take off their masks to reveal their identities.

In England, Tudor court masques developed from earlier guisings, where a masked allegorical figure would appear and address the assembled company— providing a theme for the occasion— with musical accompaniment; masques at Elizabeth's court emphasized the concord and unity between Queen and Kingdom. A descriptive narrative of a processional masque is the masque of the Seven Deadly Sins in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (Book i, Canto IV). Later, in the court of James I, narrative elements of the masque became more significant. Plots were often on classical or allegorical themes, and were usually acted out by amateurs. At the end, the audience would join in a final dance. Ben Jonson wrote a number of masques with stage design by Inigo Jones. Their works are usually thought of as the most significant in the form. Sir Philip Sidney also wrote masques.

Shakespeare wrote a masque-like interlude in The Tempest, understood by modern scholars to have been heavily influenced by the masque texts of Ben Jonson and the stagecraft of Inigo Jones. There is also a masque sequence in his Henry VIII. John Milton's Comus (with music by Henry Lawes) is described as a masque, though it is generally reckoned a pastoral play.

The English semi-opera which developed in the latter part of the 17th century, a form in which John Dryden and Henry Purcell collaborated, borrows some elements from the masque and further elements from the contemporary courtly French opera of Jean-Baptiste Lully.

In the twentieth century, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote Job, a masque for dancing (premiered 1930), although the work is closer to a ballet than a masque as it was originally understood. His designating it a masque was to indicate that the modern choreography typical when he wrote the piece would not be suitable.

Constant Lambert also wrote a piece he called a masque, Summer's Last Will and Testament, for orchestra, chorus and baritone. His title he took from Thomas Nash, whose masque^[2] was probably first presented before the Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps at his London seat, Lambeth Palace, in 1592.

[edit] Notes

^ David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, editors, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque 1998 ISBN 0-521-59436-7).
^ It was a "comedy" when it was printed, in 1600 as A Pleasant Comedie, call'd Summers Last will and Testament, but, as a character announces, "nay, 'tis no Play neither, but a show." With Nash's stage direction "Enter Summer, leaning on Autumn's and Winter's shoulders, and attended on with a train of Satyrs and wood-Nymphs, singing: Vertumnus also following him" we are recognizably in the world of Masque.