Masque

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This article is about 16th- and early 17th-century court entertainments. 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

Louis XIV of France danced in ballets at Versailles with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully.[1]

Development

The masque tradition developed from the elaborate pageants and courtly shows of

Royal Entry
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 Grand dance. Masque thus lent itself to Mannerist treatment in the hands of master designers like Giulio Romano or Inigo Jones.

The

Medici court in Florence
could rival them.

Dumbshow

In English theatre tradition, a dumbshow is a masque-like interlude of silent mime usually with allegorical content that refers to the occasion of a play or its theme, the most famous being the dumbshow played out in Hamlet (III.ii). Dumbshows 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 Shakespeare collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre (III.i)—a tableau that is immediately explicated at some length by the poet-narrator, Gower.

Dumbshows were a Medieval element that continued to be popular in early

Elizabethan drama
, but by the time Pericles (c. 1607–08) or Hamlet (c. 1600–02) were staged, 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 dumbshow.

Origins

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.

Court masques in England and Scotland

In England,

Seven Deadly Sins in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (Book i, Canto IV). A particularly elaborate masque, performed over the course of two weeks for Queen Elizabeth, is described in the 1821 novel Kenilworth, by Sir Walter Scott. Queen Elizabeth was entertained at country houses during her progresses with performances like the Harefield Entertainment.[4]

In Scotland, masques were performed at court, particularly at wedding celebrations, and the royal wardrobe provided costumes. Performers at a masque at Castle Campbell dressed as shepherds.[5] Mary, Queen of Scots, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and David Rizzio took part in a masque in February 1566.[6] Mary attended the wedding of her servant Bastian Pagez, and it was said she wore male costume for the masque, "which apparel she loved often times to be in, in dancings secretly with the King her husband, and going in masks by night through the streets".[7] James VI and Anne of Denmark wore masque costumes to dance at weddings.[8]

After the Union of the Crowns, at the court of James VI and I and Anne of Denmark in England, narrative elements of the masque became more significant. Plots were often on classical or allegorical themes, glorifying the royal or noble sponsor. At the end, the audience would join with the actors 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. Samuel Daniel and Sir Philip Sidney also wrote masques.

Comus (with music by Henry Lawes) is described as a masque, though it is generally reckoned a pastoral play
.

There is a detailed, humorous, and malicious (and possibly completely fictitious) account by Sir

olive branches to slap anyone who was in her way.[10]

James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle, was a performer and sponsor of court masques. He wrote about the tight-fitting costumes, that it was the fashion "to appear very small in the waist, I remember was drawn up from the ground by both hands whilst the tailor with all his strength buttoned on my doublet".[11] Reconstructions of Stuart masques have been few and far between. Part of the problem is that only texts survive complete; there is no complete music, only fragments, so no authoritative performance can be made without interpretive invention.

By the time of the

English Restoration (1660), the masque was passé, but 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 18th century, masques were even less frequently staged. "

David Mallet with music by Thomas Arne which was first performed at Cliveden, country house of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Performed to celebrate the third birthday of Frederick's daughter Augusta
, it remains among the best-known British patriotic songs up to the present, while the masque of which it was originally part is remembered by only specialist historians.

Legacy

The most outstanding humanists, poets and artists of the day, in the full intensity of their creative powers, devoted themselves to producing masques; and until the Puritans closed the English theatres in 1642, the masque was the highest art form in England. But because of its ephemeral nature, not a lot of documentation related to masques remains, and much of what is said about the production and enjoyment of masques is still part speculation.

17th- and 18th-century masques

While the masque was no longer as popular as it was at its height in the 17th century, there are many later examples of the masque. During the late 17th century, English semi-operas by composers such as Henry Purcell had masque scenes inset between the acts of the play proper. In the 18th century, William Boyce and Thomas Arne, continued to utilize the masque genre mostly as an occasional piece, and the genre became increasingly associated with patriotic topics. Acis and Galatea (Handel) is another successful example. There are isolated examples throughout the first half of the 19th century.

Later masques

With the renaissance of English musical composition during the late 19th and early 20th century (the so-called English Musical Renaissance), English composers turned to the masque as a way of connecting to a genuinely English musical-dramatic form in their attempts to build a historically informed national musical style for England. Examples include those by Arthur Sullivan, George Macfarren, and even Edward Elgar, whose imperialistic The Crown of India was the central feature at the London Coliseum in 2005. Masques also became common as scenes in operettas and musical theatre works set during the Elizabethan period.

In the 20th century,

Job, a masque for dancing which premiered in 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. Vaughan Williams' protégé Elizabeth Maconchy composed a masque, The Birds (1967–68), an "extravaganza" after Aristophanes
.

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[12] was probably first presented before the Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps at his London seat, Lambeth Palace, in 1592.

List of notable masques

17th-century masques

18th-century masques

Notes

  1. ^ 'History of the Masque Genre'
  2. ISBN 0-521-59436-7
    ).
  3. ^ Ian Smith, 'White Skin, Black Masks', Jeffrey Masten & Wendy Wall, Renaissance Drama 32 (Evanson, 2003), p. 44.
  4. ^ Gabriel Heaton, 'Elizabethan Entertainments in Manuscript: The Harefield Festivities and the Dynamics of Exchange', in Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, Sarah Knight, Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 2007), pp. 227-244.
  5. doi:10.2307/j.ctv24tr7mx.9
  6. ^ W. Park, 'Letter of Thomas Randolph to the Earl of Leicester, 14 February 1566', Scottish Historical Review, 34:118 Part 2 (October 1955), p. 138.
  7. ^ R. H. Mahon, Mary, Queen of Scots, a study of the Lennox Narrative (Cambridge, 1924), pp. 99, 130: Thomas Finlay Henderson, Mary, Queen of Scots, her environment and tragedy, a biography, 2 (London, 1905), p. 659
  8. doi:10.1080/14629712.2019.1626110
  9. ^ Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 125-7: Clare McManus, 'When is woman not a woman?', Modern Philology, 105 (2008), pp. 437-74.
  10. ^ Henry Harington, Nugae Antiquae, vol. 1 (London, 1804), pp. 348-351
  11. ^ Lesley Lawson, Out of the Shadows: Lucy, Countess of Bedford (London, 2007), p. 55.
  12. ^ 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.

References

  • Burden, Michael (1994), Garrick, Arne, and the Masque of Alfred, Edwin Mellon Press.
  • Burden, Michael (1988). "A masque for politics; the masque of Alfred". Music Review. 41: 21–30.
  • Hart, Vaughan (1994). Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts. London, Routledge.
  • Ravelhofer, Barbara, (2006), The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music, Oxford University Press.
  • Sabol, Andrew J. (editor), (1959), Songs and dances from the Stuart Masque. An edition of sixty-three items of music for the English court masque from 1604 to 1641, Brown University Press.
  • Sabol, Andrew J. (editor), (1982), Four hundred songs and dances from the Stuart Masque, Brown University Press.

External links

New International Encyclopedia article "Masque
".
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