PREFACE
Three hundred years alive on the 23rd of April, 1916, the memory of Shakespeare calls creatively upon a self-destroying world to do him honor by honoring that world-constructive art of which he is a master architect.
Over seas, the choral hymns of cannon acclaim his death; in battle-trenches artists are turned subtly ingenious to inter his art; War, Lust, and Death are risen in power to restore the primeval reign of Setebos.
Here in America, where the neighboring waters of his “vexed Bermoothes” lie more calm than those about his own native isle, here only is given some practical opportunity for his uninterable spirit to create new splendid symbols for peace through harmonious international expression.
As one means of serving such expression, and so, if possible, of paying tribute to that creative spirit in forms of his own art, I have devised and written this Masque, at the invitation of the Shakespeare Celebration Committee of New York City.
The dramatic-symbolic motive of the Masque I have taken from Shakespeare’s own play “The Tempest,” Act I, Scene 2. There, speaking to Ariel, Prospero says:
“Hast thou forgot The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy Was grown into a hoop? This damn’d witch Sycorax, For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible To enter human hearing was hither brought with child And there was left by the sailors. Thou ... Wast then her servant; And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate To act her earthly and abhorred commands, Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, By help of her most potent ministers And in her most unmitigable rage, Into a cloven pine, within which rift Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain ... Then was this island— Save for the son that she did litter here, A freckled whelp hag-born—not honor’d with A human shape ... that Caliban Whom now I keep in service. Thou best know’st What torment I did find thee in, ... it was a torment To lay upon the damn’d.... It was mine art, When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape The pine and let thee out.”
“It was mine art”.... There—in Prospero’s words [and Shakespeare’s]—is the text of this Masque.