masks

masks The word ‘mask’ is related to a masque or masquerade, which was a courtly performance popular during the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. Characterized by masks worn by the players, the entertainment was derived from their dancing and acting in a dumb show. The wearing of masks was part of a religious and liturgical tradition, linked to the thespians of ancient Greek theatre. Later, these masks were adopted and adapted for the Roman amphitheatre. Mapped onto the mask is a human emotion, belonging to a cast of theatrical conventions, which is more stylized than realistic. By 1705, Joseph Addison drew attention to the limitations of the mask, by asking: ‘Could we suppose that a Mask represented never so naturally the great Humour of a Character, it can never suit with the Variety of Passions that are incident to every single Person in the whole Course of a Play.’

Another important theatrical tradition is that of Japanese mask-making in relation to Noh dramaturgy, the ceremonial art of the Samurai warriors of the early sixteenth century. Noh theatre can be traced back to the Gigaku and Bugaku forms of mask dance drama, which originated in Korea in the seventh and eighth centuries and then went to China. These masks are a synthesis of Iranian, Indian, Indonesian, Manchurian, and Indo-Chinese traditions.

The first Japanese mask-makers were influenced by esoteric Buddhist sculpture and drew on imagery of the guardian spirits of Buddhism. Entering into an almost trance-like state, the artistry of the mask-maker lies in getting under the skin of the mask. The Japanese Noh masks express not only eternal beauty and human emotion, but also the inner mind. Through the Noh theatre, it was believed that the gods made themselves manifest through the mask. For this reason, it is forbidden to touch its face. In order to make the eyes, before the mask-maker bores through the finest Japanese cypress wood, out of which the mask is made, he must utter a prayer. According to tradition, it is at the point of being pierced that the mask becomes imbued with life and spirit.

The mask, as a sacred object endowed with magic powers, was a feature of the mask rituals of Mexico. The vestiges of such beliefs have been revived by the mask-maker, El Zarco Guerrero, the creator of the contemporary Nagual mask, which is central to the masked dance that takes place during the Dia de Los Muertos Festival in Arizona.

By contrast, in eighteenth-century England the mask was associated with degeneracy. Attributed with aphrodisiac properties, it was associated with prostitutes, as illustrated in Hogarth's moral cycle, The Harlot's Progress, of 1732. Masquerade was a licence for debauchery in Restoration and Georgian England. According to the anonymous author of Short Remarks upon the Original and Pernicious Consequences of Masquerades of 1721, the masquerade was nothing less than a ‘Congress to an unclean end’. Its carnivalesque and liberating anonymity is captured by eighteenth-century novelists such as Defoe, Fielding, and Smollet. Women, in particular, were released from moral constraints by the mask, which also served to protect their blushes.

From the way in which P. B. Shelley uses the trope of the mask in his social protest poem, The Mask of Anarchy (1819), to Jim Carrey's social comedy in the feature film, The Mask (1994), it is apparent that this is an artefact which continues to fascinate. The reason may not simply be that masks are representations of the universal aspects of ourselves, but also the recognition that what they hide beneath is a revelation of our inner self.

Marie Mulvey-Roberts

See also theatre.