3 - English masques

Summary

English masques were allegorical entertainments with dance and music, costumes, songs and speeches, and festive scenery. As a protean phenomenon, which flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, masques might assume the character of a low-key countryside event, a civic festivity, a high-profile state occasion, a university rompor a jollification at the Inns of Court in London. Plays of the early modern period often treated their audiences with a masque en miniature: silent dancing highlighted pivotal moments in the action and added to the suspense. Shakespeare's The Tempest includes a wedding masque whose “graceful dance” of nymphs and reapers “in country footing” is dangerously interrupted by invaders. In Restoration operas, masques showcased magical characters and dazzled spectators with spectacular ballet and scene transformations. Masques fused English traditions with foreign performance practices. With their abundance of danced pantomime, they represent an important precursor to John Weaver's balletic drama in the eighteenth century. This chapter will provide a brief history of this multifarious genre, and explore in greater depth the impact of continental balletic forms on masques performed in London during the early seventeenth century.

Masque-like mummeries had been popular since at least the early Tudor period. Henry VIII is said to have introduced disguisings in Italian style to the English court. In 1512, the king and his courtiers celebrated epiphany

disguised, after the maner of Italie, called a maske, a thyng not seen afore in Englande, thei were appareled in garmentes long and brode, wrought all with gold, with visers and cappes of gold, & after the banket doen, these Makers came in, with sixe gentlemen disguised in silke bearyng staffe torches, and desired the ladies to daunce, some were content, and some that knewe the fashion of it refused, because it was not a thyng commonly seen. And after thei daunced and commoned together, as the fashion of the Maskes is, thei toke their leaue and departed, and so did the Quene, and all the ladies.

Audience participation remained a crucial element in “masks”. As the Milanese ambassador reported about nightly revels in 1514, the king was dancing “in his shirt and without shoes” with the ladies, and leaping “like a stag”.