The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 1

by E. K. Chambers

V
THE MASK

[Bibliographical Note. The origins of the mask are treated in my book on The Mediaeval Stage (1903), ch. xvii, and, with its Tudor and Stuart developments, in R. Brotanek, Die englischen Maskenspiele (1902), and P. Reyher, Les Masques anglais (1909). An earlier study of merit is A. Soergel, Die englischen Maskenspiele (1882). R. Bayne contributes a chapter on Masque and Pastoral (C. H. vi.), and P. Simpson one on The Masques (Sh. England, ii. 311). I have not seen W. Scherm, Englische Hofmaskeraden. Useful material, handled with imperfect scholarship, is in M. Sullivan, Court Masques of James I (1913), and there are dissertations by A. H. Thorndike, The Influence of the Court-Masque on the Drama, 1608-15 (M. L. A. xv. 114), J. W. Cunliffe, Italian Prototypes of the Masque and Dumb Show (M. L. A. xxii. 140), W. Y. Durand, A Comedy on Marriage and some Early Anti-masques (J. G. P. vi. 412), and J. A. Lester, Some Franco-Scottish Influences on the Early English Drama (1909, Haverford Essays). Most of the scanty Elizabethan material is in A. Feuillerat, Documents relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (1908, Materialien, xxi, cited as Feuillerat, Eliz.), and the relation of the Revels Office to masks is studied in his Le Bureau des Menus-Plaisirs et la Mise en Scène à la Cour d'Elizabeth (1910, cited as Feuillerat, M. P.); cf. also ch. iii. Many of the contemporary descriptions of masks are edited amongst the works of the poets, and are also to be found, with the few that are anonymous, in J. Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth (1823), and Progresses of James I (1828); P. Cunningham and J. P. Collier, Inigo Jones, a Life; and Five Court Masques (Sh. Soc. 1848); and H. A. Evans, English Masques (1897). A valuable bibliography is W. W. Greg, A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. (Bibl. Soc. 1902). Analogous French texts are in P. Lacroix, Ballets et Mascarades de Cour (1868-70), and are studied in V. Fournel, Les Contemporains de Molière (1863), ii. 173, G. Bapst, Essai sur l'Histoire du Théâtre (1893), 193, and H. Prunières, Le Ballet de Cour en France (1914).]

THE mask is not primarily a drama; it is an episode in an indoor revel of dancing. Masked and otherwise disguised persons come, by convention unexpectedly, into the hall, as a compliment to the hosts or the principal guests. Often they bring them gifts; always they dance before them, and then invite them to join the dance. They bring torch-bearers and musicians, who light and accompany the choric evolutions. Their intention lends itself to elaboration by spokesmen or presenters, and to such spectacular decoration as a pageant or scene affords; thus it readily assumes a mimetic setting. It is necessary to lay stress on the fact that the guests mingle with the maskers in the dance. This intimacy between performers and spectators differentiates the mask from the drama to the end; its goal is the masked ball, not the opera. And as a corollary to this intimacy, the performers are of the same social standing as the audience; the mask is an amateur and not a professional performance.

I have attempted elsewhere to indicate a possible folk origin for the mask in the visits of excited worshippers, with fragments of a divine and immolated animal, from house to house of a village, in order that all may share the direct contact of the beneficent and potent thing. Those persistent vizards and torches may perhaps recall, the one the head and skin of the sacrificed victim, the other the brand snatched from the sacrificial fire, itself perhaps the survival of a sunshine charm even older than the sacrifice.[513] Obviously in the humanist and even sceptical court of Elizabeth any consciousness of the 'luck' of the mask must have been quite subliminal. It was a custom, like the rest, belonging of right to the twelve days of the Christmas rejoicing, but adaptable readily enough to a wedding or any other occasion of mundane festivity. As a medium of courtly compliment to a sovereign it is already well established in the fourteenth century. When Prince Richard, afterwards Richard II, was keeping Candlemas at Kennington in 1377, citizens of London, to the number of 130, rode to visit him with musicians and torch-bearers. They wore vizards and were dressed to represent the members of an imperial and a papal court. Entering the hall, they diced with the prince and his company for jewels, using loaded dice so as to be sure of losing. After the dicing the music sounded, and 'the prince and the lordes danced on the one syde and the mummers on the other a great while and then they dronck and tooke their leaue'. The whole proceeding is called 'mumming'.[514] It is to be noted that the 'lucky' character of the gifts is emphasized by the show of dicing, and that the fraternization of maskers and spectators in the dance is clearly marked. This is important, because during the changes of the fifteenth century this particular and primitive element was apparently forgotten. It was a period of literary and spectacular elaboration. The dance in disguise attracted to itself other forms of courtly entertainment that were then in vogue; the speech and dialogue of allegorical or mythological personages, the architectural pageant, the mimic tournament, even the interlude.[515] Splendid devices were shown in Westminster Hall before the sovereigns under their cloths of estate at the wedding of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Aragon in 1501.[516] On the first night three great pageants were successively wheeled in. The first was a castle drawn by four beasts and bearing eight disguised ladies. The second was a ship with mariners, whose 'counteynaunces speaches and demeanor' doubtless furnished an element of comedy. They brought Hope and Love, who were ambassadors from the third pageant, a Mount of Love, which bore eight knights. These descended and assaulted the castle, and finally the ladies yielded and knights and ladies danced together. On the second night the pageants represented an arbour and a lanthorn; on the third two mountains; on the fourth, at Richmond, a chapel. Very similar to these revels of Henry VII's reign are those described by the chronicler Halle during the early years of that of Henry VIII.[517] Many variations are possible. There is not always a pageant. The comic element may take the form of a 'morris'. The whole thing may form a setting or afterpiece to an interlude. Occasionally a dicing is introduced, and to this variety the term 'mumming' or 'mummery' appears by the sixteenth century to have been specialized.[518] The more generic term is 'disguising'. For all its elaboration, the early sixteenth-century disguising retained many of its original features. Vizards and torches are employed. The disguisers come in suddenly, as a surprise to the guests. But unlike the visitors of Richard II in 1377, they do not, so far as the records show, call upon the guests to take a part in the dancing. This characteristic feature of the primitive ceremony seems, under these particular conditions, to have dropped out. Generally, though not always, there are two sets of disguised persons, lords and ladies, corresponding to the 'double mask' of later days, and these dance together. When they go out, the guests very likely dance amongst themselves, before the 'void', or refreshment of wine and spices, comes in. But of direct contact between disguisers and guests, except in the old-fashioned 'mummery' with its dice-play, there is nothing.

This same divorce between performers and spectators seems to rule in the momeries and entremets, which correspond to the English disguisings in fifteenth-century France and Burgundy, and in many of the intermedii and trionfi of fifteenth-century Italy.[519] But somewhere in Italy, possibly in the carnival masks of Florence, the primitive practice must have survived; and from Italy it made its way back again to France, and also to England, under the rather unjustifiable colour of a novelty.[520] It was on the Twelfth Night of 1512, according to Halle, that 'the Kyng with xi other wer 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, and after the banket doen, these maskers came in, with sixe gentlemen disguised in silke bearyng staffe torches, and desired the ladies to daunce, some were content, and some that knew 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 leave and departed, and so did the Quene, and all the ladies.'[521] There has been much dispute as to what the precise nature of the innovation of 1512 was. I formerly thought that it lay in the introduction of some Italian detail of costume, probably the 'long gowns and hoods with hats' of which the contemporary Revels Account speaks.[522] But after a careful review of the earlier descriptions of disguisings, I now feel little doubt that those are right who find the point precisely in that 'commoning' between maskers and spectators which remained a characteristic feature of the mask throughout the days of its most sumptuous development, and which the good Halle could hardly be expected to recognize as merely a reversion to a fourteenth-century English usage.[523] Nor is there any reason to doubt that the impulse to the new-old mode, and perhaps also the name which, although in an English form, accompanied it, had an immediate origin in Italy.[524] Ronsard makes a similar acknowledgement for France:[525]

Mascarade et Cartels ont prins leur nourriture,

L'un des Italiens, l'autre des vieux François, ...

... L'accord Italien quand il ne veut bastir

Un Théâtre pompeux, un cousteux repentir,