The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 1

by E. K. Chambers

So far as published documents go, the Balet Comique is closely the prototype of the fully developed 'ballet' or court mask, as we find it both in France and in England.[587] The Gray's Inn mask of 1595, with its printed description and its theme of enchantment, confesses an influence; and there were only two directions in which the devisers of Henri IV and of James I were able to make any notable advance upon Baldassarino's model. One of these was the introduction of the antimask, to which it will be necessary to return; the other was the concentration of the scenic setting. The setting of the Balet Comique is not concentrated but dispersed. It is not even all stationary. The interest of the spectators is not merely divided amongst the Garden of Circe at the foot of the hall, the Grove of Pan on the right, the musicians' vault on the left, and the cloud overhead. It is claimed at certain points by the movable fountain upon which the maskers enter and the chariot of Minerva. This dispersed setting recurs in the first of Queen Anne's great masks, Daniel's Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, in 1604. A mountain stood at the lower end of the hall in Hampton Court, and at the upper end a Cave of Sleep on one side and a Temple of Peace on the other. A contemporary observer notes an inconvenience of this arrangement. 'The Halle was so much lessened by the workes that were in it', writes Dudley Carleton, 'so as none could be admitted but men of apparance.' This difficulty proved fatal to the dispersed setting, and in all later Jacobean masks the setting was concentrated in a scene erected at the lower end of the hall, and ample space was thus left both for the evolutions of the dancers and for the seating of the spectators.[588]

This change at least synchronizes with the emergence of Inigo Jones and the beginning of the architectural domination which for nearly half a century he was destined to exercise over the mask. His is the first outstanding name which we can associate with the history of English scenic decoration. Under Elizabeth and her predecessors the apparel and pageantry of a mask were the care of the Revels officers, and they naturally called in such painters and other men of taste about the court as were likely to prove useful. These were often foreigners. Alfonso Ferrabosco, the musician, seems to have had the general oversight of an important mask in 1572, and amongst his collaborators was another Italian, Petruccio Ubaldini, while Hans Eottes drew the patterns. Eottes was similarly employed in 1573 and 1574, and Ubaldini was called upon again in 1579 to write out the speeches of a mask in his native Italian.[589] The responsibilities of Inigo Jones were much wider than those of any of these predecessors. His singular name has an Italian ring, but he was born of London parentage in 1573 and is said to have been apprenticed to a joiner.[590] Through the generosity of the third Earl of Pembroke he had opportunities of travel, and spent much of his early life in Italy and in the service of Christian IV of Denmark. He seems to have been back in England by 28 June 1603, when the accounts of the Earl of Rutland record a payment of £10 to 'Henygo Jones, a picture maker'. He is not known to have taken part in the masks of the following winter, but Jonson acknowledges that 'the bodily part' of the Mask of Blackness on 6 January 1605 was his 'design and act', and in August of the same year he took charge of the plays given before James in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, and contrived their changes of scene with the aid of revolving triangular screens of Italian design. His place as an architect of court masks was now assured, and even the poets, to whom the descriptions of the performances naturally fell, found it impossible to conceal the fact that his functions were at least as important as their own. Jonson in his earlier descriptions is punctilious in rendering due credit to his colleague.[591] So too are Daniel and Campion.[592]

It was not until Caroline days that the smouldering antagonism between Jonson and Jones broke out into open warfare, and stung Jonson to various indiscretions, amongst them the ironical outburst of the famous Expostulation—

Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque![593]

Of thirteen spectacular masks given at court from 1605 to 1613 nine were certainly contrived by Jones, and there is no positive evidence that the other four were not his.[594] He had also a share in the preparations for Prince Henry's barriers of 1610. When the prince set up his household in the following December Jones was appointed surveyor of his works. After Henry's death he obtained a reversion of a similar appointment in the royal Office of Works, but this reversion did not fall in until the death of Simon Basil on 1 October 1615, and after the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613 Jones paid a visit of some duration to Italy. He therefore took no part in the masks for the Somerset wedding during the following winter. For one at least of these, Campion's Mask of Squires, his substitute was Constantine de' Servi, a Florentine who had also been in the service of Henry as his architect; but Campion was not pleased with his coadjutor, and wrote that 'he being too much of himself, and no way to be drawn to impart his intentions, failed so far in the assurance he gave that the main invention, even at the last cast, was of force drawn into a far narrower compass than was from the beginning intended'. Jones was back in England by 29 January 1615, and was to plan many more masks before his death in 1652. But none can be definitely ascribed to him before Jonson's Mask of Christmas in 1617. During the latter part of his career he was busy as an architect, and the present banqueting-house in Whitehall, built during 1619-22, represents a fragment of one of his grandiose schemes for the complete reconstruction of the old palace.

The concentrated setting, as it took shape in the first period of Inigo Jones, appears to have been regularly designed on the principle of what is sometimes called the 'picture-stage'.[595] It was framed by a proscenium arch, from side to side of which stretched, at first view, a curtain. This arch was of a familiar Renaissance type. On either side were pilasters, or statuesquely modelled figures, or a combination of the two, which bore up a frieze. The decorations were in harmony with the theme of the mask and the frieze might contain a scroll or panel setting forth its title.[596] It cannot perhaps be demonstrated that Jones invariably used a proscenium from the beginning, but at any rate by 1608 (Haddington Mask) 'the arch' appears to have been a recognized element of a setting. The most elaborate description of a proscenium is that written by Jones himself for Tethys' Festival in 1610. On this occasion the proscenium was itself covered by a curtain until the audience were seated. It is possible, however, that it sometimes framed a front curtain. The use of curtains was, of course, no innovation. They had served, when concealment and revelation were required, both in the mobile and in the fixed settings of earlier days. Thus for an Elizabethan mask of 1565, of which the pageant was 'a rock or hill for the ix musses to singe vppone', the Revels Office had provided 'a vayne of sarsnett drawen vpp and downe before them'.[597] The Jacobean curtain itself might form part of the setting. It was painted to represent a wooded 'landtschap' (Blackness), clouds (Hay Mask, Tethys' Festival), night (Beauty), a red cliff (Haddington Mask), a city wall and gate (Flowers). But at an early moment it was removed, to 'discover' a more solidly constructed scene within. Often it is called a 'traverse', and when it is 'drawne' it may either 'slide away', or 'sink down' (Marston's Mask).[598] I have not come across a certain case in which it was drawn up, either directly by a roller, or diagonally by cords towards the corners of the proscenium; but these methods may also have been employed. In some masks the drawing of the curtain 'discovered' the maskers on the scene; in others their entry was deferred and variously contrived. The maskers, and sometimes the presenters, had, before the actual dances began, to come forward through the proscenium arch to the dancing place, which was on the floor of the hall, or on a stage only slightly raised above it, and was regularly laid with green cloth by the official 'mattleyer' of the court.[599] This advance was managed in divers ways. The old device of a movable pageant might be revived, as an element subsidiary to the fixed scene, and the maskers brought in on a chariot (Queens, Oberon), or enthroned on a floating isle (Beauty). They might be let down by a cloud from the upper part of the scene (Hymenaei, Lords' Mask). For the Mask of Blackness Jones made an artificial sea on a wheeled stage, which lifted them forwards in a concave shell. It was quite effective as a spectacle, if they stepped in their bravery down a slope (Hay Mask) or a double stairway (Chapman's Mask, Squires) leading from the scene to the lower level of the dancing place.

The adoption of the concentrated setting was a matter of convenience; it did not mean that the mask could dispense with the variety of interest which the multiplied scenes of the dispersed setting had afforded. Jones's chief problem as a producer was that of securing this variety of interest under new conditions, and if possible with some added sensation of curiosity or surprise. One device was to retain the multiplied scenes, and to juxtapose them, or to superimpose one upon another within the frame of the proscenium. It was easy enough to divide the curtain either vertically or horizontally and to 'draw' the sections separately. Thus in the Hymenaei, which was a double mask, the altar of Hymen and the globe containing the men maskers were first discovered below. Subsequently the 'upper part of the scene' opened, and the women maskers floated out on nimbi. In Lord Hay's Mask there was a 'double veil' of which the lesser part covered a Bower of Flora on the right of the stage, and the greater part covered a House of Night on the left, and a grove and hill crowned by a Tree of Diana in the centre. This method paid homage to the tradition of the dispersed setting; another, which could be used in combination with the first, was capable of more intricate development. The manœuvre of the front curtain might be repeated. The whole, or a fragment, of the inner scene might be shifted, so as to discover a new vision which had at first been concealed. Often this was only a local and particular transformation. Thus it was in the two masks just cited, when the globe behind the altar of Hymen revolved and showed the maskers seated in a cave, or the trees in the grove of Diana were drawn into the ground, and the maskers appeared out of their cloven tops. Similarly the splitting of a rock, to let out personages concealed therein, is an incident which recurs in more than one mask (Haddington Mask, Oberon, Chapman's Mask). The development of the antimask, with the emphatic contrast between the grotesque and the magnificent which this implied, seems to have been the motive which led to the introduction of more wholesale changes of scene. In the Mask of Queens the background for the antimask was a Hell, and when it was over 'the whole face of the scene altered, scarce suffering the memory of such a thing', and in place of the Hell appeared a House of Fame. In Mercury Vindicated, again, the Laboratory of the antimasks gave way to a Bower of Nature for the mask proper. In Oberon the antimask was before a cliff with a rising moon, and thereafter the scene twice opened, to disclose, first the 'frontispiece' and then the interior of a palace of Fays. The art of transformation was perhaps carried to its greatest extent during this period in the Lords' Mask for the Princess Elizabeth's wedding, of which the Venetian ambassador in his report to the Signory especially noted the three changes of scene as an outstanding feature. This elaborate spectacle affords examples of nearly all the devices of juxtaposition, superimposition, partial and complete transformation, by which a variety of scenic interest is reconciled with a concentrated setting. The original scene was horizontally divided. The lower half, which was first discovered, contained side by side a wood, a thicket of Orpheus, and a cave of Mania. Before this danced the antimask. Then a curtain fell from the upper part of the scene, and discovered amongst clouds Prometheus and eight Stars. The Stars were individually transformed to men maskers, and the clouds to the House of Prometheus. Beneath torch-bearers emerged and danced, still in front of the wood. The whole face of the scene was then overspread with a cloud on which the men maskers descended. The lower part of the scene was then changed from a wood to a façade of niches containing statues, which were individually transformed into women maskers. The mask proper followed, and when the dancing was over, there was a final change of the whole scene to a porticoed perspective, leading up to the obelisk of Sibylla. Even by 1613 the art of Jones had handsomely accomplished its task of ministering to the pride of the eyes. In his later or Caroline period he advanced to even greater triumphs, and did not shrink from the decorative and mechanical difficulties entailed by as many as five changes of scene.[600] The actual mechanism employed by Jones to obtain his effects is perhaps better known to us for this later period, in view of the numerous plans and designs preserved at Chatsworth and elsewhere, than for the earlier one. The action of a mask was in all cases 'continuous', and therefore he was happily debarred from the awkward modern convention of a drop-curtain. Jones ultimately worked out a system of back-cloths and shutters or flats, arranged and painted so as to produce a perspective and an illusion of solid scenery. These ran in horizontal grooves, so that those belonging to one scene could be placed close behind those belonging to another, and each set could be successively removed by lateral withdrawal. It was, in fact, a multiplied use of the primitive 'traverse' or sliding curtain. This system may have already been at his disposal in the Jacobean period; it was well adapted, in particular, for the splitting of a rock. But it is clear that he also used a device based upon a different principle, a machina versatilis, which by means of a circular motion was capable of displaying successively the different faces of a comparatively solid decorative structure placed upon it. Jonson applies the term machina versatilis to the House of Fame in the Mask of Queens. Presumably the rotating globe in Hymenaei and the rotating throne of Beauty in the Mask of Beauty are other examples; and yet another is furnished by Tethys' Festival, where however the truc was used, not to carry scenery, but to cover a change of scene by directing the attention of the spectators to three whirling circles of lights and glasses. It is hardly necessary to dwell upon such subsidiary devices as the trapdoors in the floor of the stage, or the pulleys by which floating clouds were let down from the heavens, for such obvious and primitive machinery had been familiar, long before the advent of Jones, as an element in the rudimentary technique of the popular theatre.[601]

The approximation of mask to drama entailed by the adoption of the concentrated setting was not the only point of interaction between these parallel forms of mimesis. In the first instance it was perhaps the drama, rather than the mask, which underwent an influence. The various forms of spectacular entertainment with which the mask became entangled during the fifteenth century might be introduced at more than one moment in the long story of a Renaissance festival. They were equally well adapted to enliven the intervals between the courses of a meal, and the intervals between the parts of an organized dramatic performance. The detached character of the Senecan chorus, and the Roman practice of dividing up tragedies and comedies into acts, which was itself a departure from the Greek principle of continuous action, facilitated this intrusive development; and in the history of the Italian stage, as it shaped itself at Ferrara and elsewhere from 1486 until the middle of the next century, nothing is more remarkable than the tendency to bury the actual play, tragedy or comedy, classical or modern, in a wilderness of decorative intermedii, ordinarily consisting of dances and song, framed in some ingenuity of allegorical, mythological, or other device.[602] It is, I think, a true affiliation which traces to the intermedii the analogous dumb-shows of English usage.[603] These belong primarily to the learned court drama, with its admitted classical and Italian inspiration. To some extent they found their way also on to the popular stage, which had, moreover, its own simpler devices for the avoidance of monotony in the way of 'jigs' and 'themes'.[604] But the influence of the dumb-show upon the drama is not wholly to be measured by the extent to which it was adopted as a formal element in the structure of plays. It introduced a spectacular tendency, which continued to prevail long after the position of the dumb-show as an interact had been surrendered. Indeed, the extreme Italian development of the intermedii constituted a danger against which the lovers of a purer dramatic art were soon in protest.[605] If tragedy and comedy had not succeeded in absorbing spectacle, they would have been overwhelmed by it. The first battle was won when it was admitted that the subjects of the intermedii ought to be related to the theme of the drama, which was by no means always the case at Ferrara; the second when the spectacle was taken out of the intervals between the acts and treated as an integral part of the action. This is the normal, although not of course the invariable, Elizabethan practice. Elizabethan drama is abundantly spectacular, and often enough the spectacle is irrelevant or excessive, but as a rule it is, formally at least, within the plot. There are the drums and tramplings of battles and trials and funerals. There are the divine epiphanies in mythological pieces. There are the endless opportunities afforded for song and dance by banquets, weddings, and rustic merry-makings. And if all else fails, what more easy than to introduce a dumb-show in a dream or as a specimen of the magician's art?[606] A somewhat paradoxical type of incorporated spectacle is the play within the play, as we find it, for example, in Hamlet, where indeed the inner play has the further elaboration of its accompanying dumb-show.[607] And with the play within the play comes the mask within the play. In the intermedii the mask, as already suggested, tended to lose its individuality. There were dancers, no doubt, and the dancers were disguised, and might be masked; and there are signs of an extended use of the term 'mask' to cover such an entertainment.[608] But the characteristic feature of the mask proper, the taking out of spectators to dances, did not lend itself to the conditions of performances given while the spectators sat at meat, or of performances on the raised and isolated stage of an interlude. When a mask proper was closely associated with an early Tudor play, it was as an afterpiece rather than as an inter-act. The dancers of the intermedii kept to themselves, and if the sexes intermingled it was in a 'double' choir. But when the spectacles became episodes, instead of intermedii, the central incident of the mask could be restored. Dancers who were personages of a play could obviously 'take out' spectators who were also personages of the same play; and the introduction of a mask, generally as a revel in a royal feast or wedding banquet, becomes a regular dramatic device at least from the last decade of the sixteenth century onwards. Perhaps the first example is in an academic play, Gager's Ulysses Redux of 1592, where at the beginning of Act II 'Proci larvati alicunde prodeunt, saltantque in scena', and as we learn from the criticism of Rainolds, some of Penelope's handmaids, seated amongst the audience, were 'entreated by the wooers to rise and danse upon the stage'.[609] Shakespeare has a mask in Love's Labour's Lost, and another in Romeo and Juliet, to which the episode is handed down from the ultimate source in Italian narrative.[610] Another early example is in 1 Richard II (iv. 2). Munday has a mask in his Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598; ii. 2), Dekker (ii. 204) in his Whore of Babylon (c. 1607) and his Satiromastix (1601; l. 2302), and Tourneur, if it was Tourneur, in his Revenger's Tragedy (c. 1607; v. 3). These are examples from the public theatres. When the boys' companies came into existence at the end of the century, dance and song proved well within their means; and their principal writers, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, Field, Jonson, all make use of the mask.[611] So do Beaumont and Fletcher, both in plays for boys and in plays for men.[612] But the enumeration of earlier names is of itself enough to dispose of the theory that to Beaumont and Fletcher is due, in some special way, the transference of the court mask to the popular stage, and in particular the introduction of Shakespeare to the supposed new idea. Doubtless the mask in A Maid's Tragedy is set out with somewhat greater elaboration of presentment than was usual in earlier plays, and doubtless the antimask of Beaumont's contribution to the Princess Elizabeth's wedding was furbished up again for the delight of a popular audience in The Two Noble Kinsmen. But it hardly follows that Shakespeare, after using the mask in Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet, had anything to learn from his younger rivals before he used it in The Tempest, and a writer who can assert that Ben Jonson 'did not mix his masques and plays' must have simply forgotten Cynthia's Revels.[613] The mask in this play is of special interest, because it is Elizabethan and antedates by some four years the first of the long series of Jonson's Jacobean masks. It occupies, in the quarto version, the greater part of the last seven scenes of the play. In iv. 5 Arete, a principal lady at court, desires revels for Cynthia, and Amorphus proposes a 'masque'. Arete undertakes to send for Criticus, and get his advice.[614] In iv. 6 Criticus hesitates to write for such revellers as Amorphus and his crew. Arete encourages him. The presence will restrain them when they are masked, and Cynthia needs the opportunity to reform them. Criticus then invokes Apollo and Mercury. In v. 1 Cynthia, awaiting the mask, holds flattering discourse with Arete on its author. In v. 2 enters 'the first masque'. Cupid 'disguised like Anteros', presents four virgins from the palace of Perfection, Storge, Aglaia, Euphantaste, and Apheleia. He interprets their devices, and presents on their behalf a crystal, in which Cynthia sees her own image. In v. 3 Cynthia discusses the mask with Criticus and Arete. In v. 4 enters 'the second masque'. Mercury presents and interprets the four sons of Eutaxia, who are Eucosmos, Eupathes, Eutolmos, and Eucolos. In iv. 5 'the masques joyne'. They dance the first, second, and third 'straine', while Cupid and Mercury converse, outside the cadre of the mask. The dancers do not proceed to 'take out' spectators, but that is presumably because they are interrupted by Cynthia, who bids them unmask and administers her reproof.

The masks inserted in plays are rarely described with anything like the fullness of Cynthia's Revels, although there is a fair amount of detail in The Maid's Tragedy and a somewhat less amount in Your Five Gallants and in No Wit, no Help, like a Woman's. It must be borne in mind that the main action of a mask was mute, and that the stage directions of the printed texts are not intended to be descriptive. Moreover, the structural place of the mask in a plot often leads, as in Cynthia's Revels, to its abrupt termination. The disguises cover an intrigue of murder (2 Antonio and Mellida, Revenger's Tragedy) or of robbery (A Mad World, my Masters), or of elopement (A Woman is a Weathercock). Or a quarrel breaks out (Dutch Courtesan), or a masker is discovered to be dead (Satiromastix). As a rule, too, the presenters' speeches are omitted or cut short, since it is spectacle, and not mere dialogue, that is required.[615] Nevertheless, in its main features, the dramatized mask confirms what we know of the mask from other sources. It has its dancers, its presenters, its torch-bearers, and its music.[616] Your Five Gallants adds 'shield boys' to carry the 'devices'. When the performers have finished their measures, they generally take out the ladies. At the end they unmask, 'honour' the guests (A Women is a Weathercock), and depart, or proceed to a banquet. And in some interesting points the dramatized mask supplements other information. To begin with, it is a simpler type of mask than is represented by the full Jacobean descriptions. For obvious reasons architectural pageantry could hardly be introduced. In The Maid's Tragedy there is a rock, in Satiromastix a chair; in May Day Cupid 'descends', a feat, as already noted, well within the compass of an ordinary theatre. And that is about all. You get the mask as it was practised at Elizabeth's court, rather than at that of James. Then there are sometimes subsidiary scenes, which throw light upon aspects of the mask, not much dwelt on in the Jacobean descriptions. Often there is a scene of preparation, when the 'maskery' is planned, and a 'device', 'imprezza', or 'mott' ordered of the painter, or 'a few tinsel coats' of the vizard-maker (1 Antonio and Mellida, Insatiate Countess, A Mad World, my Masters, Your Five Gallants, A Woman is a Weathercock). Or there is a scene of bustle, when a 'state' and canopy are set up in the 'presence' (Satiromastix) and room is made for the dancers, either by the cry of 'A hall, a hall!' (Romeo and Juliet, May Day) or by the more violent ministrations of the torch-bearers (A Woman is a Weathercock) or of court officials. Thus in The Maid's Tragedy the mask is preluded by the activities of Calianax, the lord chamberlain, who 'would run raging among them, and break a dozen wiser heads than his own in the twinkling of an eye', and of Diagoras the gentleman usher, who is keeping the doors against the impatient crowd without, and placing the ladies, all except those who come in 'the king's troop', in a gallery 'above'. There is a similar scene in Beaumont and Fletcher's Four Plays in One, a piece which consists of three short playlets, divided by 'triumphs' or intermedii, and concluded by a mask. This may be regarded as an experiment, in which the influence of the mask-tradition has exceptionally modified the typical structure of the drama. Nor does it stand quite alone. Peele's Arraignment of Paris is of course spectacular throughout, and the last scene, in which the golden apple is handed to Elizabeth, is clearly, in its recognition of the audience, a divergence from the normal detachment of the drama.[617] Perhaps the same may be said of the epithalamic end of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, but as a rule the element of mask remains an episode, and does not dominate the play which admits it.