Sandra Tuppen
Shrove-tide Dancing: Balls and Masques at Whitehall under Charles II
Accepted manuscript of an article published in The Court Historian: the
International Journal of Court Studies, Vol. 15/2 (2010), 157-169.
Abstract: The tradition of the Shrove-tide court entertainment with dancing and music, strong in the first half of the seventeenth century in England, was restored with the monarchy in the 1660’s. Shrove-tide masques, balls and plays, along with dishes of pancakes and fritters, remained a feature of the court calendar to the end of Charles II’s reign. As well as borrowing elements from the Jacobean court masque, some of the entertainments presented before Charles II were modelled on French entertainments staged for Louis XIV. John Blow’s court opera Venus and Adonis may have received its first performance at a Shrove-tide event in 1682/3.
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In England in the first half of the seventeenth century, elaborate masques – theatrical entertainments featuring music, dancing, lavish costumes and often complex stage machinery – were habitually staged at court on Twelfth Night, and sometimes also on
Shrove Monday or Tuesday.1 During the reign of Charles I, it became common for the
King to stage the Twelfth-Night masque in honour of the Queen, and for the Queen to
1 Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, for example, was performed on Twelfth Night (6 January) in 1604/5; his Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue was performed both on Twelfth Night and on Shrove Tuesday (17 February) in 1617/18.
1 reciprocate with a masque for the King at Shrove-tide.2 Court masques were sometimes also performed on Candlemas Day (2 February).3 In England, as in many other parts of
Europe, 2 February heralded the start of the Carnival season, a period of merrymaking which concluded with the festivities of Shrove Monday and Shrove Tuesday, and which was succeeded, on Ash Wednesday, by the sober season of Lent.4
At the Restoration, Charles II might have been expected to eschew the masque, it being a form of entertainment associated with the extravagant courts of his predecessors.
However, both Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn describe the presentation of masques at court in the 1660’s, and official court records provide additional information about such entertainments. For example, the Office of Works accounts reveal the occasions when carpenters were called upon to make alterations to the stage in the theatre at Whitehall in order to make it suitable for dancing, and the Lord Steward’s records show when provisions such as food, drink, coal and candles were required for masques and balls.5
Some, but by no means all, of these masques and balls have been calendared by scholars of the Restoration theatre.6 However, few of those entertainments held in the first part of the year have hitherto been identified as Shrove-tide entertainments.7
2 Enid Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship between Poetry & the Revels (Cambridge, 1927), p. 217. Shrove-tide is usually defined as the three days before Ash Wednesday, namely Quinquagesima Sunday and Shrove Monday and Tuesday. Its dates vary each year, being dependent on the date of Easter. 3 Jonson’s Masque of Queens, for instance, was performed at court on 2 February 1608/9. 4 In France, for example, the festival of La Chandeleur, on 2 February, heralded the start of Le Carnaval, which ran until Lent. 5 The comments of Pepys and Evelyn will be outlined later in this article. Relevant records from the Office of Works accounts at the National Archives are transcribed in Eleonore Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, 1660-1702 (Cambridge, Mass., 1932) and J. Milhous and R. D. Hume (eds), A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660-1737 (Carbondale, 1991). The Lord Steward’s records, also held at the National Archives, have hitherto been little studied in this context. 6 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage; W. Van Lennep, E. L. Avery and A. H. Scouten (eds), The London Stage 1660-1800. Part 1 1660-1700 (Carbondale, 1965); Andrew R. Walkling, ‘Masque and Politics at the
2
Pepys’s diary reveals that the long tradition of feasting and playing games on Shrove
Tuesday continued after the Restoration: on 26 February 1660/1, the first Shrove Tuesday of Charles II’s reign, Pepys marked the day by eating fritters and watching ‘the flinging at Cocks’.8 The records of the Lord Steward show that the King partook of pancakes and fritters on Shrove Tuesday throughout his reign.9
On Shrove Tuesday in 1660/1 (26 February), Edward Gower wrote to Sir Richard
Leveson: ‘No more plays at Court after this night, and but three days the week at the play houses.’10 Eleonore Boswell has inferred from the first clause of this sentence that a play was performed at court on the night of 26 February.11 This may indeed have been the case, though no other evidence for a performance has been found. Gower’s comment suggests that the coming of Lent the following day would not only bring about a reduction in the number of performances on the public stage but also put a temporary ban on theatrical performances at court. Given this, it seems likely that the court would have marked Shrove-tide with a performance of some sort.
Restoration Court: John Crowne’s Calisto’, Early Music, 24 (1996), pp. 27-62; Peter Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540-1690 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 359-388. 7 Andrew Walkling has shown that Calisto was conceived as a Christmas-tide entertainment but postponed first to Shrove Tuesday and subsequently to early in Lent (Walkling, ‘Masque and Politics at the Restoration Court’, pp. 28-30). Eleonore Boswell noted that masques took place in 1666/7 and 1667/8 on Shrove Monday and Shrove Tuesday respectively (Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 137). 8 R. Latham and W. Matthews (eds), The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription (London, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 43-44. Throwing at cocks was a somewhat barbarous game traditionally played on Shrove Tuesday. Participants competed to kill a cock by throwing missiles, such as cudgels, at it. 9 See, for instance, LS 1/11 (1669) and LS 1/16 (1674), which contain separate lists of ingredients for the pancakes and fritters of the King and Queen respectively. 10 Historical Manuscripts Commission, 5th Report, Part 1 (London, 1876), p. 202. 11 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, pp. 278-9.
3 The next year, a play was certainly presented on Shrove Tuesday, though it is not clear which play was performed, and the King himself did not attend. In his diary entry for
Shrove Tuesday (11 February 1661/2), John Evelyn wrote: ‘I saw a Comedy acted before the Dutchesse of York at the Cock-pit. The king was not at it.’12
The following year, Charles II appears to have taken a keener interest in pre-Lenten court festivities. On 9 February 1662/3, he wrote to his sister, the Duchess of Orléans, revealing that he had strongly urged the Queen to follow the example of the Queen
Mother in France in staging a masque at court before the end of the Carnival season.13
The letter shows that, although the King had decided on the general outline of the masque, his plans had thus far come to nothing, as he could not find a single statesman at court with the dancing skills to perform a bearable entrée [masque dance]. The King noted that the Queen had begun to develop a taste for such entertainments, arranging for country dances to be performed in her room. 14
It is not clear whether Charles’s desire to stage a masque before the start of Lent came to anything, but Pepys implies that there was dancing of sorts at court that Shrove-tide. On 7
March 1662/3, four days into Lent, he described a situation that had arisen at a ball a few days earlier, when Charles refused to dance with Lady Gerard because she had spoken ill of his mistress, Lady Castlemaine, to the Queen.15 It is unlikely that the ball would have taken place during Lent, so it probably took place on or just before Shrove Tuesday (3
12 E. S. de Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford, 1955), vol. 3, p. 315. 13 Charles de Baillon, Henriette-Anne d’Angleterre, duchesse d’Orléans: sa vie et sa correspondance avec son frère Charles II (Paris, 1887), p. 109-110. In 1662/3, the carnival season ended on 3 March. 14 Ibid. 15 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 4, p. 68.
4 March). Unfortunately, Pepys did not attend himself, but only recounted what the naval administrator John Creed had told him about the Gerard incident.
Dancing was certainly arranged at Shrove-tide for the King’s entertainment in 1663/4. On
22 February, Shrove Monday, Pepys recorded that a ball was to be held that evening at the Great Hall at Whitehall, in the presence of the King. Apart from revealing that the
Great Hall was to be guarded by the Horse Guards, Pepys did not give any details of the occasion.16
Pepys is more informative regarding a masque that took place at court the following year, shortly before Lent. On 3 February 1664/5, five days before the start of Lent, he wrote:
Then Mrs. Pickering … did, at my Lady’s command tell me the manner of a
Masquerade before the King and Court the other day – where six women (my Lady
Castlemayne and Duchesse of Monmouth being two of them) and six men (the
Duke of Monmouth and Lord Aron and Monsieur Blanfort being three of them) in
vizards, but most rich and antique dresses, did dance admirably and most
gloriously. God give us cause to continue that mirth.17
16 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 5, p. 56. 17 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, p. 29.
5 This event had apparently taken place only the day before. John Evelyn’s diary entry for
2 February 1664/5 reads: ‘Saw a fine Masque perform’d at Court by 6 Gent: & 6 Ladys, surprizing his Majestie, it being Candlemas day’.18
Between February and April 1665, major alterations were made to the Great Hall at
Whitehall to turn it into a fully-functional theatre. The surviving accounts, for ‘making and fitting the Great Hall for Masking, Plays and Dancing’, have been described in detail by Eleanore Boswell.19 The development work cost over £730, and resulted in a stage thirty-nine feet long by thirty-three feet wide and raised five feet from the ground, with a proscenium and scenery, and dressing rooms for the actors and musicians. However, it was not possible to use the new facilities for Shrove-tide festivities in 1665/6 because of the plague then sweeping through London.
In the Office of Works accounts for October 1666 is the first of many references to joisting and boarding a floor over the pit in the Great Hall, now named the Hall Theatre, to extend the stage and thus provide a suitable space for dancing.20 That month a warrant was issued for canvas and green baize to cover the stage ‘for her Maties: Daunceinge’.21 It was in the Hall Theatre that Charles II’s Shrove-tide entertainments took place thereafter.
A bill survives from February 1666/7 for boarding over the pit in the hall for dancing, and for ‘making seates for the musick’.22 This was presumably in time for the event
18 The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 397. 19 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, pp. 243-5. 20 WORK 5/9, quoted in Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 245. 21 LC 5/138, p. 74, quoted in Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 301. 22 WORK 5/9, quoted in A Register of English Theatrical Documents, p. 82.
6 attended by John Evelyn on Shrove Monday (18 February), which he described, rather uncertainly, as a ‘Ball or Masque’:
I saw a magnificent Ball or Masque in the Theater at Court, where their Majesties
& all the greate Lords & Ladies daunced infinitely gallant: the Men in their richly
imbrodred most becoming Vests.23
On Shrove Tuesday of the following year (4 February), another lavish entertainment was presented at court. This was a performance by court amateurs of Katherine Philips’s adaptation of Corneille’s Horace, with dancing between the acts of the play. Evelyn was at the performance and wrote:
This Evening I saw the Trajedie of Horace (written by the virtuous Mrs. Philips)
acted before their Majesties: ’twixt each act a Masque & Antique: daunced: The
excessive galantry of the Ladies was infinite.24
A play was also acted at court at Shrove-tide in 1668/9, again in the presence of the King and Queen: Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, performed on Shrove Monday (22
February). Unlike the production of Horace the previous year, this appears to have been a
23 The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 476. The festivities continued the following day, when Evelyn saw a wrestling-match staged before the King in St James’s Park, at which large sums were betted. 24 The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 505.
7 performance of a straight play; Pepys attended, with his wife, but did not mention any dancing.25
Table 1 provides a summary of the Shrove-tide entertainments at court in the 1660’s.
Table 1: Shrove-tide entertainments at court in the 1660’s
Year Date Type of entertainment
1660/1 26 Feb (Shrove Tuesday) A play?
1661/2 11 Feb (Shrove Tuesday) A play
1662/3 ca. 3 March (Shrove Tuesday) A ball
1663/4 22 Feb (Shrove Monday) A ball
1664/5 2 Feb (Candlemas Day and the Thursday before A masque
Lent)
1665/6 - no Shrove-tide entertainment
because of the plague
1666/7 18 Feb (Shrove Monday) A ‘Ball or Masque’
1667/8 4 Feb (Shrove Tuesday) a play, Horace, with inter-act
dancing
1668/9 22 Feb (Shrove Monday) a play, Bartholomew Fair
25 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 9, p. 456. His only comment concerned the candlelight in the theatre, which affected his sore eyes.
8 1670’s and 1680’s
There are fewer surviving descriptions of Shrove-tide festivities at Charles II’s court in the 1670’s and 1680’s, but a certain amount of information can be gleaned from court documents, such as the Lord Steward’s records. Certain other productions which are known to have taken place at court cannot be dated precisely, and may also have taken place during Shrove-tide.
I have found no record of court entertainments at Shrove-tide in 1669/70 or 1671/2. In
1670/1, a lavish entertainment, described as the Queen’s Masque or Queen’s Ballet, was staged in February. Evelyn’s diary entry for 9 February reads: ‘I saw the greate Ball danced by the Queene & greate Ladies at White hall Theater’.26 The Lord Steward’s bills show that provisions were provided for it on three evenings in February.27 Boswell asserted that two of the performances were on Shrove Monday and Tuesday.28 This is not the case, however: Shrove Monday and Tuesday fell late that year, on 6 and 7 March.
Although the Queen’s Ballet was not a Shrove-tide work, it was performed in the weeks running up to Lent, and may have been devised as a Carnival entertainment in emulation of French entertainments traditionally staged between 2 February and the beginning of
Lent.29
26 The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 569. 27 LS 8/7, ff. 161-163. 28 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 139. 29 I explore the French connection later in this article.
9 I have found no firm evidence of Shrove-tide performances in 1672/3 or 1673/4. Elkanah
Settle’s play with music The Empress of Morocco was probably performed at court early in 1672/3 by courtiers, and a French entertainment entitled Ballet et musique pour le divertissement du roy de la Grande Bretagne was performed there early in 1673/4, but the actual performance dates of these works are unknown. In 1674/5, the lavish masque
Calisto was performed at court. As Andrew Walkling has shown, the first formal performance slipped from Shrove-tide into Lent.30
There was, however, an event at court to mark Shrove-tide the following year. The Lord
Steward’s records reveal that candles and torch staves were provided ‘for the Ball, the 8th of February being Shrove Tuesday’.31 An Office of Works bill for February 1675/6 mentions the setting up and removal of rails in the theatre, ‘whene ye danceing was there’.32 This was probably for the Shrove Tuesday ball.
In 1676/7, a French theatrical troupe may have entertained the King at Shrove-tide. A warrant of 5 February required the Hall Theatre to be prepared for the French comedians.33 (Shrove Tuesday was on 27 February that year.) In 1677/8, the Lord
Chamberlain’s papers mention costumes for a masque that was due to take place on 8
February, which would have been the Friday before Lent.34
30 Walkling, ‘Masque and Politics at the Restoration Court’, pp. 28-30. 31 LS 8/12, p. 18. 32 WORK 5/26, quoted in Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 258. 33 LC 5/141, p. 528. 34 LC 5/65, f. 42; LC 5/143, p. 32, quoted in Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 140.
10 I have not found any evidence for Shrove-tide dancing between 1678/9 and 1681/2, though the Office of Works accounts are incomplete for that period. The Lord Steward’s bills include candles and other provisions for ‘the Players’ in March 1678/9,35 so it is possible that an ordinary play was produced at Shrove-tide. (Shrove Tuesday was on 4
March and it seems unlikely that the players would have been performing later in March, in Lent.) The political upheaval between 1679 and 1682 – with the Popish Plot and
Exclusion Crisis – may have led to a reduction in the number of court entertainments.
During the last two Shrove-tides of Charles II’s reign, however, large-scale entertainments with music and dancing did take place at court. The Lord Steward’s records show that in 1682/3 there was a series of balls at Shrove-tide. The records call for provisions to be supplied for a ball in the Queen’s Presence Chamber on 14 February – the Wednesday before Ash Wednesday – and again for a ball in the Great Hall on 19
February, Shrove Monday.36 It is possible that there was also a ball on the Saturday: the
Lord Chamberlain’s records contain a warrant of 13 February to cover the stage in the
Hall Theatre for dancing ‘upon Saturday next’ (17 February).37 Elsewhere, the Lord
Steward’s records for 1682/3 refer to food provided for ‘several Balls in the Queens
Presence Chamber & in the Hall in February’.38
In 1683/4, Rochester’s adaptation of Fletcher’s Jacobean tragedy Valentinian, featuring substantial amounts of dancing, was performed by the United Company at court on 11
35 LS 8/14. 36 LS 1/25. 37 LC 5/144, p. 360, quoted in A Register of English Theatrical Documents, p. 237. 38 LS 8/18.
11 February, which was Shrove Monday. The Lord Chamberlain’s records include a warrant addressed to His Majesty’s Comedians at the Royal Theatre: ‘These are to require you to act the Play called the Tragedy of Valentinian at Court before his Majesty upon Monday night next, being the 11th of the month.’39
Table 2 summarises the performances that took place in or near Shrove-tide at Charles
II’s court in the 1670’s and 1680’s.
Table 2: Entertainments at court in or around Shrove-tide in the 1670’s and 1680’s
Year Date Type/Name
1669/70 -
1670/1 9, 20?, 21? Feb (Shrove Tuesday was 7 Queen’s Ballet
Mar)
1671/2 -
1672/3 early 1672/3 The Empress of
Morocco
1673/4 early 1673/4 Ballet et musique pour
le divertissement du roy
de la Grande Bretagne
1674/5 22 Feb (postponed from Shrove Tuesday, Calisto
16 Feb)
1675/6 8 Feb (Shrove Tuesday) A ball
39 LC 7/1.
12 1676/7 ? Feb (Shrove Tuesday was 27 Feb) French comedians
1677/8 8 Feb (Friday before Lent) A masque
1678/9 ca. 4 March (Shrove Tuesday) A play
1679/80 -
1680/1 -
1681/2 -
1682/3 19 Feb (Shrove Monday) A ball
1683/4 11 Feb (Shrove Monday) Valentinian
It is clear, then, that during Charles II’s reign, and particularly in the 1660’s and in the two years before he died, Shrove-tide entertainments featured prominently in the court calendar. Apart from the straight plays, what were these entertainments like? Many of the references to Shrove-tide events have been to balls, while a few were described by contemporaries as masques or masquerades. Evelyn, as already noted, rather unhelpfully called the Shrove Monday event of 1666/7 a ‘Ball or Masque’.40 The terms certainly were not used in a clearly defined way: the Lord Steward’s records frequently referred to an event as a ball when elsewhere the terms masque, mascarade or even play were used for the same occasion, so it is not safe to assume that entertainments described as balls always comprised social dancing only, and no theatrical masque dances.
40 The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 476.
13 Lavishly-decorated costumes were evidently an important element of these entertainments: Pepys, as mentioned above, drew attention to the ‘rich and antique dresses’ and the masks worn by the participants in the Candlemas masque of 1664/5, while Evelyn commented on the ‘richly imbrodred most becoming Vests’ worn by the male dancers on Shrove Monday in 1666/7.41 Embroidered costumes also feature in a description of a Restoration court masque in the semi-fictional memoirs of the Count de
Gramont. The author explains that the Queen had contrived
a splendid masquerade in which the dancers she had chosen would represent
different countries. She allowed some time for preparations and during this time, as
you may imagine, tailors, dressmakers and embroiderers were not short of work.
To the consternation of everyone, Gramont arrived at the ball not in a masquing costume, but in ordinary court dress. He explained that he had arranged for a costume to be made in Paris, and that twelve embroiderers had worked night and day on it; unfortunately, though, his servant had lost it in quicksands near Calais. 42
Displays of fabulous jewels were another feature of these occasions. Evelyn, watching a rehearsal of Calisto on 15 December 1674, noted that the two royal princesses and his friend Margaret Blagge, who took the principal role, were all covered with jewels.43 At another rehearsal attended by Evelyn on 22 December, Margaret Blagge lost one of the
41 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, p. 29; The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 476. 42 Anthony Hamilton, Count Gramont at the Court of Charles II, edited and translated by Nicholas Deakin (London, 1965), pp. 23-31. 43 The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 4, pp. 49-50.
14 jewels, worth, according to Evelyn, about £20,000.44 Evelyn included the following sentence, with an expletive deleted, in his description of the jewels worn by the King’s mistress Lady Castlemaine during the Shrove-tide performance of Horace in February
1667/8:
Those especialy on that … Castlemaine esteemed at 40000 pounds & more: & far
out shining the Queene &c.45
A letter written the same day suggests that they were valued at rather more than £40,000, and reveals that they were in fact the Crown Jewels:
This night there is a play Acted at Court by the Dutchess of Monmouth Countess of
Castlemain and others. The Countess is adorned with Jewells to the Value of
£200,000, the Crowne Jewells being taken from the Tower for her. There are none
but the Nobility admitted to see it. The play is Madam Phillips translation of
Corneiles Horace, finished by Sr John Denham.46
Little is known about the interludes between the acts of Horace: Evelyn merely noted that there was a ‘Masque & Antique’ between each act.47 (The antic dance, also called the anti-masque dance, had been a feature of the Jacobean masque and was a grotesque or comic dance in which characters such as witches or spirits were portrayed.) The dances in
Horace are not mentioned in the printed edition of the play until the very end of the drama, when a rather feeble transition is made from the play to the dancing: at the
44 The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 4, pp. 50-1 45 The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 505. 46 Letter to Sir Willoughby Aston, British Library, Add. MS 36916, f. 62, quoted in The London Stage, vol. 1, p. 129. 47 The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 505.
15 conclusion of the King’s final speech – after much blood has been spilt – are the lines
‘Some hearing of this great deliverance, Are come, Sir, to present you with a dance’.48
The Shrove-tide production of Horace acted by amateurs at the court, the Duchess of
Monmouth and Countess of Castlemaine among them, in front of the King and Queen, and with danced interludes between each act, prefigured Calisto, which was performed at court in much the same way a few years later. As well as borrowing elements from the
Jacobean court masque, both works exhibit signs of the influence of the contemporary
French comédies-ballets performed before Louis XIV. The comédie-ballet was a theatrical form that combined drama and dance. It did not have a rigid form, however: in some examples, music and dancing were freely interwoven into the body of a play.49
Others, including Les Fâcheux (1661), the first work of this kind written by Molière, consisted of a conventional spoken play in several acts, between which danced interludes were performed. Calisto and the Shrove-tide production of Horace both have the same shape as Les Fâcheux in that each comprises a play in distinct acts, between which danced interludes were performed. In the case of Calisto, there is an all-sung prologue before the first act, and, after each act, including the last, a musical episode. Its musical episodes feature singing as well as dancing.
One of the key elements of the comédie-ballet and related genres was the pastoral scene between named shepherds and shepherdesses, who performed dialogues for the entertainment of the protagonists. Such pastoral dialogues are found in many comédies-
48 Katherine Philips, Poems ... to which is added ... Corneille's Pompey and Horace, tragedies. With several other translations out of French (London, 1667). 49 See, for instance, Le Sicilien of Molière and Lully, performed at Saint Germain-en-Laye in 1667.
16 ballets of the 1660’s, including La Princesse d’Elide, La Pastorale comique, and Le
Sicilien. The interludes in Calisto are similarly reliant on singing and dancing pastoral characters. However, in most comédies-ballets there is just one pastoral episode. Calisto, on the other hand, is striking in its use of the same group of pastoral characters in each of its interludes, and a plot independent of that of the main play. There are, though, two examples of French comédies-ballets in which the pastoral characters appear in more than one interlude. La Princesse d’Elide exhibits some of the same continuity as Calisto in depicting events in the lives of a set of pastoral characters in four of its six interludes.
Molière and Lully’s later production Le Grand divertissement royal de Versailles, first performed in 1668, also tells two parallel stories: the main play, Molière’s Georges
Dandin, is punctuated by interludes that tell, entirely in music, a pastoral story of two shepherds and their shepherdesses. The structure of this work is particularly close to that of Calisto. In both, the main play includes no musical scenes, and does not include contributions from any of the characters appearing in the pastoral interludes. These interludes feature musical dialogues between two pairs of love-sick pastoral characters, in
Le Grand divertissement royal, Tircis, Philène, Climène and Cloris, and in Calisto
Strephon, Corydon, Daphne and Sylvia. In both works, the shepherdesses reject their suitors; later, believing them dead, they come to regret their decision, and are reconciled with their shepherds when they eventually reappear. Le Grand divertissement royal was almost certainly known in England by the mid-1670s, some of Lully’s instrumental music from it survives in an English source from that time.50 There is a strong probability that
Le Grand divertissement royal was the model for the interludes in Calisto.
50 Yale University Music Library, Filmer MS 7, ff. 38v-39r.
17 Dancing, as well as sung dialogues, plays a big part in the interludes of both works. There are dances for the shepherds and shepherdesses, for the followers of Bacchus and for six
‘Bateliers’ in Le Grand divertissement royal, while, in Calisto, each interlude contains at least one dance. The musical interludes seem to have given John Crowne, the author of
Calisto, some trouble. He was evidently not working to this design out of choice, as he wrote:
The last, and not the least, difficulty imposed on me in the Entertainment, was in
the Chorusses; I was oblig’d to invent proper Occasions, to introduce all the
Entries; and particularly, for the closing of all with an Entry of Africans.51
In the end, he had an Entry of Basques in the first interlude, a dance of Cupids and Winds in the second, dances for Gypsies and Satyrs in the third, Bacchusses, so called, in the fourth and Africans in the fifth. These dances are far removed from the jigs and social dances found in realistic situations in ordinary Restoration plays. In their irrelevance to the plots of either the main play or its interludes, they are much closer to the tradition of the French comédie-ballet, where exotic foreigners and mythological characters featured prominently.
Calisto and the Shrove-tide version of Horace are not the only Whitehall entertainments to have been influenced by the French comedie-ballet in the 1660’s and 1670’s. The
Queen’s Ballet, staged at court in the Carnival season of 1670/1, provided a showcase for
51 Preface to Calisto.
18 examples of Italian, French and English songs and dances, from which the king selected his favourite number. Peter Holman has identified some of the music: the Italian contribution came from Giacomo Carissimi’s serenata ‘I Naviganti’, while the English section included three songs by the Restoration composer Pelham Humfrey: ‘I pass all my hours in a shady old grove’, ‘A wife I do hate’, and ‘A lover I’m born and a lover I’ll be’.52 Holman has also discovered a manuscript of violin music containing a seven- movement suite of instrumental music by John Banister that was almost certainly composed for the same production. One of the movements bears the title ‘Entry queens
Ballett.1671.whitthal Br’. 53 Although Holman does not make any comment on the possible French contribution to the entertainment, he points out that the resulting concoction would ‘have been not unlike those French stage works, such as Campra’s
L’Europe galante of 1697, that portrayed the humours of different nations in music and dance’.54 L’Europe galante was not the first French work to employ this device. Molière and Lully’s comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, first performed in 1670, had concluded with a grand ballet, the Ballet des nations, which purported to illustrate the musical styles of the Spanish, Italian and French.55 The Italian section, for instance, includes dances for Scaramouche and Harlequin, and highly Italianate recitative. The section representing the French begins with a minuet for five-part strings, which is then performed as a vocal solo. A second minuet (a characteristic Lullian trio for oboes) follows, and is also transformed into a vocal number.
52 Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers, pp. 362-4. 53 National Library of Scotland, MS 5777, ff. 41v-44v. See Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers, pp. 364-5. 54 Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers, p. 366. 55 All the music was by Jean-Baptiste Lully.
19 The design of the Ballet des nations, with its dances and songs in different regional styles, is remarkably similar to that of the Queen’s Ballet of 1670/1. Was this a blatant attempt by Charles II and his Queen to emulate the spectacular entertainments produced on the other side of the Channel in their Carnival entertainment, and, specifically, the
Ballet des nations? We know a little about the Italian and English contributions to the
Queen’s Ballet, through Peter Holman’s research, but what about the French element?
Although Le Bourgeois gentilhomme had been performed just a few months earlier, it seems that knowledge of it had reached the English court. In the violin book mentioned above, positioned between two of the dances of Banister for the Queen’s Ballet, are two pieces in C major headed ‘Mr Baptista’.56 These are transcriptions of the two minuets from the French section of the Ballet des nations. Their inclusion among music for the
Queen’s Ballet suggests that the Ballet des nations was not merely the model for the
English entertainment, but that the French section of it may have been borrowed, as a typical example of the French instrumental style, to represent France in the English work.
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, to which the Ballet des nations belongs, was certainly known in England in the early 1670s: Edward Ravenscroft adapted Acts I-IV to form his comedy
The Citizen Turn’d Gentleman, performed in 1672.
56 MS 5777, ff. 42v-43r.
20 The entertainment on the penultimate Shrove Monday of Charles II’s reign, 19 February
1682/3, was clearly a large-scale event. The Lord Steward’s records show that substantial quantities of bread, beer and wine were required ‘for the Musick and Dancing Masters’
(in other words, professional musicians and dancers), and coal was also ordered ‘for
Ayring the Tiring roomes’ (Figure 1).57
Figure 1: Bill for items for the ball at Whitehall on 19 February 1682/3. The National Archives, LS 1/25.
57 LS 1/25.
21 The event appears to have been something more than an ordinary ball, as it required the services of professional dancers and musicians and warm dressing rooms for professional performers. The same sorts of quantities of bread, beer and wine were supplied for the professional cast of Calisto and Valentinian. It is possible that this event on Shrove
Monday 1682/3 was the occasion on which John Blow’s court opera Venus and Adonis was premiered. The work is known to have had its first performance at court between about 1682 and early 1683/4. It was subsequently performed, in April 1684, at Josias
Priest’s school in Chelsea. James Winn has argued that the librettist of Venus and Adonis was Anne Finch, a Maid of Honour to the Duchess of York.58 She became a Maid of
Honour in 1682, which would fit with a performance date of February 1682/3 for Venus and Adonis. The lead roles in Venus and Adonis were taken by Mary or ‘Moll’ Davis, one of Charles II’s mistresses, who played Venus and who had also performed in Calisto, and
Lady Mary Tudor (the daughter of Moll Davis and the King), who played Cupid. There were also roles for dancers, including a shepherd and a huntsman, parts that would probably have been taken by professional dancers. (A similar division of labour between professional dancers and musicians, and people associated with the court, is seen in
Calisto.) Venus and Adonis could very plausibly have been designed as a Shrove-tide entertainment: Shrove-tide masques, at least in Charles I’s day, were primarily entertainments for the King, while the Queen was entertained on Twelfth Night. The title of Venus and Adonis as it appears in the earliest-known manuscript source is ‘A Masque for the Entertainment of the King’.59 Whatever form the entertainment at court on Shrove
58 James A. Winn, ‘“A Versifying Maid of Honour”: Anne Finch and the Libretto for Venus and Adonis’, Review of English Studies, 59 (2008), pp. 67-85. 59 British Library, Add. MS 22100.
22 Monday in 1682/3 took, it marked, with Valentinian the following year, the culmination of a long series of Shrove-tide balls, masques and plays at the court of Charles II.
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