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English Masques : with an Introduction

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English Masques : with an Introduction English Masques English Masques SELECTED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERBERT ARTHUR EVANS, M.A. BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED 50 OLD BAILEY, LONDON; GLASGOW, BOMBAY What masquing stuff is here ? The Taming of the Shrew. >JUN 9 Printed in Great Britain by Blackie & Son, Limited, Glasgow PREFACE. The debatable land which is occupied by the sub- ject of the present volume has never been thoroughly explored by English writers. Our dramatic and musical historians, preoccupied as they were by questions of greater interest and weightier import, and tacitly subscribing to Bacon's dictum that "these things are but toyes to come among such serious observations", have been able to make but improvised and desultory excursions into its terri- tories. Hence it is that the task of making a thorough exploration has been left to a German, and we are indebted to Dr. Oscar Alfred Soergel, of the University of Halle, for the first attempt at an adequate discussion of the Masque as a whole, .in its origin, development, and decay. To his admir- able little monograph, Die Englischen Maskenspiele, Halle, 1882, I desire to express my obligations, In fixing the dates of the several performances I have consulted with advantage Mr. F. G. Fleay's valuable works on the stage. In the case of dates from January i to March 24, it should be noted that throughout the book the year is assumed to begin on January I, and not on March 25. The text of each masque is printed in full, but in the case of the Masque at Lord Haddington's VI PREFACE. Marriage, the Masque of Queens, Oberon, and the Masque of Augurs, it has not been thought necessary to reproduce the whole of Jonson's learned annota- tions: the selections I have made from them are distinguished by his name. This volume contains sixteen of the fifty printed still accessible the reader who wishes for masques ; more will find the titles of the others in the list at the end of the volume. HERBERT A. EVANS. CONTENTS. Page INTRODUCTION ix ENGLISH MASQUES SAMUEL DANIEL I. The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses - - i BEN JON SON II. The Masque at Lord Haddington's Marriage - - 17 III. The Masque of Queens - 32 IV. Oberon - 59 THOMAS CAMPION V. The Lords' Masque ------ 72 FRANCIS BEAUMONT VI. The Masque of the Inner-Temple and Gray's Inn - 88 ANONYMOUS VII. The Masque of Flowers 100 BEN JONSON VIII. The Golden Age Restored 114 IX. Lovers made Men - - 123 X. News from the New World discovered in the Moon 130 XI. The Masque of Augurs 144 XII. Pan's Anniversary, or The Shepherd's Holyday - 161 XIII. Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion - - 171 XIV. The Fortunate Isles, and their Union - - - 186 JAMES SHIRLEY XV. The Triumph of Peace - - 203 SIR WILLIAM DAVEXANT XVI. Salmacida ----- 229 Spolia APPENDIX List of Kxtant Masques 247 vii This volume was originally issued in" The Warwick Library of English Literature", under the general editorship of Professor C. H. Herford. INTRODUCTION. all the diversions to which Englishmen of OF rank and wealth have devoted their idler hours none has ever formed a closer alliance with litera- ture than the subject of the present volume. The masque in one form or another was long a favourite amusement at the English Court; after a somewhat chequered career of two centuries some faint fore- shadowings of its literary glory are at length dis- cernible under the last of the Tudors, but it did not reach its full development, either in this respect or in any other, till after the Stuarts came to the throne. Although the outburst of splendour which then signalized its maturity was largely due to foreign influences, and although its very name was of foreign origin, we shall see that it has every claim to a pedigree indisputably English, and that as a literary product it attained a distinction to which its continental rivals could lay no claim. This position it owed to the commanding genius of one man. It was Jonson who first revealed to the age the literary possibilities of the masque, and lesser men were not slow to follow in the path which he had marked out Had it not been for Jonson, it is hardly too much to say that the masque would to- day be the exclusive property of the Court chronicler and the antiquarian, and of no more significance X THE MASQUE. to literature than a tilting match or a Christmas gambol. We have to thank Sir Robert Spencer, the repre- sentative of a house to which lovers of literature are still under obligations, for first enlisting the talents of the great poet and playwright in a subject apparently so trivial. In 1603 he was preparing to entertain at Althorp, Queen Anne and her son Prince Henry, who were about to pass through Northamptonshire on their journey from Scotland to London, and he commissioned Jonson to com- 1 pose a little rustic drama for their reception. So successfully did the poet execute his task that from that moment his position as purveyor-in-chief of the Court amusements was assured. Among these the place of honour was occupied by the Masque: but the masque as understood by Jonson and his contemporaries is distinguished in so many impor-. tant details from the far less elaborate amusement previously known by the same name, that it will be convenient to avail ourselves, as far as practicable, of a variation in the spelling of the word in order to emphasize this difference, and to distinguish the mask from the masque. Originally of Arabic origin, the word came into English through the French early in the sixteenth century, and according to the English fashion of treating French words was uni- formly spelt mask (or maske)? But about the end 1 This was the Entertainment, strictly so called, the nucleus of which was a speech of welcome. It must be distinguished both from the Masque, the nucleus of which was a dance, and from Barriers, the nucleus of which was a sham tournament. Examples of eaoh kind will be found in Jonson's works. *At this period the disguise for the face was known as a visor: see p. xviii, note 2. ORIGIN OF THE WORD. XI of the century the French spelling, masgue^ began to come into vogue, an innovation adopted by and hence it is that the of writers Jonson ; majority ever since have used the spelling masque in the sense of the entertainment, and mask in the sense of a visor. 1 But the fact that the name did not exist in England before the sixteenth century is no proof of the non-existence of the thing denoted by it, and it would be a mistake to interpret too strictly a passage in which Edward Hall, the chronicler, records the introduction in the year 1513 of "a " a not sene afore in maske, thing England ; we shall presently have to recur to this passage, and we shall then see that there is no reason to suppose that the performance in question was in all respects a novelty. The name no doubt was new, but there appears to have been also an important innovation in the thing, an innovation which henceforward became one of its established features, and which distinguishes it from the earlier stages of the same amusement. A brief review of these will explain our meaning. Throughout its history the most essential and distinctive characteristic of the mask, to which all 1 The earliest instance I have found of the spelling masque in the sense of entertainment is in the quarto of Cynthia 's Revels, London, 1601, where the spelling is consistently masque and masquer throughout. In the sense of disguise or pretence it occurs in The Masque of the League and the Spaniard discovered, a translation from the French by Anthony Munday, 410, London, 1592. Except in the case of such careful scholars as Jonson it is unsafe to argue from the printer's spelling to the author's, but in so far as it may be trusted, it will be found that Beaumont, Middleton, Carew, Shirley, and Davenant wrote masque; Daniel, Campion, Chapman, and Marston maske. xii THE LUDI DOMINI REGIS. others, such as dialogue and singing, were but subsidiary adjuncts, was the dance, and from an early period a dance in masquerade was one of the ordinary diversions of the European Courts, the English among the rest. Such a masquerade formed part of the ludi domini regis in 1 348, when Edward III. kept his Christmas at Guildford; among the properties required on this occasion were " eighty tunics of buckram of various colours, forty- is two visours of various similitudes ; that fourteen of the faces of women, fourteen of the faces of men with beards, fourteen of the heads of angels made with silver". 1 Sometimes the performers rode to the Court on horseback, in order to entertain the royal personages with dumb-shows and dancing: thus in 1377 on the Sunday before Candlemas 130 citizens rode from Newgate to Kensington with torches and music "for the disport of the yong 2 prince Richard, son to the blacke prince ", and in " 1401 when the Emperor of Constantinople" visited " England, the kyng helde his Christemasse at El- tham, and men of London made a gret mummyng to him of xii Aldermen and here sones, for whiche 3 they had gret thanke ". These formal visitations on horseback were known as mumming*, a name apparently equally applicable to the ordinary form of the entertainment, which at this time, and much 1 Collier, Annals of the Stage (1879), i.
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