[628] Romeo and Juliet, i. 4. 38, 'I'll be a candle-holder and look on'; cf. Reyher, 90, citing W. Rankins, Mirrour of Monsters (1587), 'There were certain petty fellows ready, as the custom is in maskes, to carry torches'; Westward Hoe, i. 2, 'He is just like a torch-bearer to maskers; he wears good clothes, and is ranked in good company, but he doth nothing'; Overbury, Characters (1614, ed. Rimbault, 55, An Ignorant Glory Hunter), 'In any shew he will be one, though he be but a whiffler or a torch-bearer'.
[629] A disguising of 1501 had already 'a goodly pageant made round after the fashion of a lanthorne cast out with many proper and goodly windows fenestred with fine lawne wher in were more than an hundred great lightes' (Reyher, 503).
[630] Before 1610 torch-bearers may have been omitted from Hymenaei and the Haddington Mask; after 1610, they are only noticed in Oberon, the Lords' Mask, and Chapman's Mask.
[631] The descriptions often say nothing of vizards, but probably they take them for granted, for as late as 1618 Chamberlain writes of the Gray's Inn Mask of Mountebanks (Birch, ii. 66), 'I cannot call it a masque, seeing they were not disguised, nor had vizards'. Similarly the unmasking is rarely described (Indian and Chinese Knights; Twelve Goddesses; Hay Mask), and may have been omitted as a formal stage, especially when the maskers danced off into the pageant.
[632] Cf. p. 168.
[633] Cf. ch. xxiii (Daniel, Twelve Goddesses).
[634] Cf. ch. iv.
[635] R. J. i. 5. 95; Hen. VIII, i. 4. 95,
I were unmannerly to take you out.
And not to kiss you.