masque

A courtly celebration composed of poetry, song, dance, and (usually) elaborate mechanical scenery, unified by a theme or emblematic story. It was often performed at banquets when the masked performers would engage spectators in the fictional game, and encourage participation in the dancing. Shakespeare introduced a short masque in The Tempest (1611), and music for Milton's masque Comus (1634) was written by Henry Lawes. The Royal masques of Tudor and Stuart England are best known for the collaboration of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones (1605–31).

The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in sixteenth and early seventeenth century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy. (A public version of the masque was the pageant.) Masque involved music and dancing, singing and acting, within an elaborate stage design, in which the architectural framing and costumes might be designed by a renowned architect, to present a deferential allegory flattering to the patron. Often, the masquers who did not speak or sing were courtiers: James I's Queen Consort, Anne of Denmark, frequently danced with her ladies in masques between 1603 and 1611, Henry VIII and Charles I performed in the masques at their courts, and the Queen's ladies performed the masque of Florimène at the court of Charles I in 1642, just before the outbreak of the English Civil War. In the tradition of masque, Louis XIV danced in ballets at Versailles with music by Lully.

The masque tradition developed from the elaborate pageants and courtly shows of ducal Burgundy in the late Middle Ages. The New Historians probe the political subtexts of masques in works like the essays in Bevington and Holbrook's The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (1998). In English masques, purely musical interludes might be accompanied by a dumb show.

Of all the arts of the Renaissance, the ephemeral masque, which occupied the most outstanding humanists, poets and artists at the full intensity of their powers but was generally as utterly lost after its single performance as a fireworks display, (though some poetical texts might survive, and some preparatory drawings for scenery), is the artistic form most alien to audiences today. It remains among the best-known British patriotic songs up to the present, while the masque of which it was originally part is only remembered by specialist historians.

The masque has its origins in a folk tradition where masked players would unexpectedly call on a nobleman in his hall, dancing and bringing gifts on certain nights of the year, or celebrating dynastic occasions.

In England, Tudor court masques developed from earlier guisings, where a masked allegorical figure would appear and address the assembled company— providing a theme for the occasion— with musical accompaniment; masques at Elizabeth's court emphasized the concord and unity between Queen and Kingdom. A descriptive narrative of a processional masque is the masque of the Seven Deadly Sins in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (Book i, Canto IV). Later, in the court of James I, narrative elements of the masque became more significant. Ben Jonson wrote a number of masques with stage design by Inigo Jones.

Shakespeare wrote a masque-like interlude in The Tempest, understood by modern scholars to have been heavily influenced by the masque texts of Ben Jonson and the stagecraft of Inigo Jones. John Milton's Comus (with music by Henry Lawes) is described as a masque, though it is generally reckoned a pastoral play.

The English semi-opera which developed in the latter part of the 17th century, a form in which John Dryden and Henry Purcell collaborated, borrows some elements from the masque and further elements from the contemporary courtly French opera of Jean-Baptiste Lully.

In the twentieth century, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote Job, a masque for dancing (premiered 1930), although the work is closer to a ballet than a masque as it was originally understood.

Constant Lambert also wrote a piece he called a masque, Summer's Last Will and Testament, for orchestra, chorus and baritone. His title he took from Thomas Nash, whose masque was probably first presented before the Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps at his London seat, Lambeth Palace, in 1592.