Masque

Masque (originally Mask, the French spelling being first used by Ben Jonson), spectacular entertainment which combined music and poetry with scenery and elaborate costumes. It derived originally from a primitive folk ritual featuring the arrival of guests, usually in disguise, bearing gifts to a king or nobleman, who with his household then joined the visitors in a ceremonial dance. The presentation of the gifts soon became an excuse for flattering speeches, while the wearing of outlandish or beautiful costumes and masks, or visors, led to miming and dancing as a prelude to the final dance. The early, relatively simple, form of the masque was known as a disguising, and is part of the folk tradition that includes the mumming play. In Renaissance Italy, mainly under the influence of Lorenzo de' Medici, it became a vehicle for song, dance, scenery, and machinery, one of its non-dramatic offshoots being the elaborate Trionfo, or Triumph. At the French Court it gave rise to the simple ballet de cour and the more spectacular mascarade (from which is derived ‘masquerade’), and eventually the comédie-ballet. In the 16th century it came back under its new name to Tudor England, where maskers played before the king in elaborate dresses, with all the appurtenances of scenery, machinery, and rich allegorical speech. In Elizabethan times the formula proved useful for the entertainment of the Queen, either in her own palace or during her ‘progresses’ throughout the land. Shakespeare makes fun of a simple country masque in Love's Labour's Lost, and uses the form seriously for typical early ‘disguisings’ in Timon of Athens and The Tempest. This latter already shows some of the elaboration reached by the Court masques prepared for James I and Charles I by Ben Jonson (appointed Court Poet in 1603) and the scenic designer Inigo Jones. Their first joint work was the Twelfth Night masque of 1605, their best probably Oberon the Fairy Prince in 1611. One of Jonson's innovations was the anti-masque, known also as the ante-masque, because it preceded the main entertainment, or the antic masque, because it employed earlier elements of antic or grotesque dancing. First introduced in 1609, the anti-masque provided a violent contrast to the main theme, as Hell before Heaven, War before Peace, Storm before Calm. The simplicity of the early masque, in which the performers appeared in one guise only, later gave way to the double masque, in which they were seen in two different groups of characters—fishermen and market-women, for instance, or sailors and milkmaids. In time the literary content of the masque diminished, and the spectacular aspect, particularly the dancing, in which Charles I and Henrietta Maria became performers after the fashion of Louis XIV, became more important. This led Jonson, after constant altercations with Inigo Jones, to withdraw, his last masque being performed in 1634. The Civil War put an end to the masque, which was never revived; but it had provided the means of introducing into England the new Italian scenery, and the Restoration theatre was to take over many of its spectacular effects. The decorative frame set up for the masque in a ballroom became the proscenium arch, behind which Inigo Jones's movable shutters or wings, trebled or quadrupled, ran in grooves to open or close in front of a painted backcloth, or, less often, what Jones called a ‘sceane of releave’, consisting of cut-out pieces on various planes. As this had to be prepared in advance and shown to the audience by drawing back the shutters, it was termed a Set Scene, whence the modern use of the word set for the scenic components of a play.

Milton's Comus (1634), though entitled ‘a masque’, is in reality a pastoral, and was probably called a masque to distinguish it from the plays given in the public theatre.