
[French. See mask.]
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A genre of entertainment developed in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. It involved poetry, music and elaborate sets, and reached its highest development in the court masques ofc 1600-30 and in the stage masques of the Restoration. It had its origins in the English disguising of the 15th century and its Italian counterparts, introduced to the English court by Henry VIII. The 16th-century court masque combined speech, songs and formal dances with ‘revels’, during which the masquers engaged in dancing, gallantry and intrigue with members of the audience.
In the early 17th century, court masques were given either in the Great Hall at Whitehall or in the Banqueting House; similar entertainments were put on at the Inns of Court. The high quality of the Jacobean masques is due largely to the poetry of Ben Jonson and the stage designs of Inigo Jones, who together produced about 30 works, 1605-31. They usually included four songs, with dances in between, and introductory and concluding numbers. No complete score is extant but many items by the main composers, Alfonso Ferrabosco (ii), Robert Johnson, Thomas Campion and Nicholas Lanier, survive. The songs are influenced by Italian recitative.
As dramatic presentations, Caroline masques were superior to Jacobean. Shirley s Triumph of Peace (1634) was probably the most elaborate, with music by William Lawes, the main dramatic composer of the time. Among masques performed for the lesser nobility, the most famous is Milton s Comus (Ludlow Castle,1634), with music by Henry Lawes. Shirley s Cupid and Death (1653) is the only surviving masque from the Commonwealth, with music by Locke and Christopher Gibbons. After the Restoration the masque survived in the theatre, as diversions resembling court masque entries at the ends of acts. They included dances, a song and/or recitative and a dialogue or chorus. Masque tradition influenced Purcell s Dido and Aeneas (1689) and his semi-operas. After 1700 the term ‘masque’ was applied to short semi-operas.
masque or mask, a spectacular kind of indoor performance combining poetic drama, music, dance, song, lavish costume, and costly stage effects, which was favoured by European royalty in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Members of the court would enter disguised, taking the parts of mythological persons, and enact a simple allegorical plot, concluding with the removal of masks and a dance joined by members of the audience. Shakespeare included a short masque scene in The Tempest (1611), and Milton's play Comus (1634) is loosely related to the masque; these are now the best‐known examples, but at the courts of James I and Charles I the highest form of the masque proper was represented by the quarrelsome collaboration of Ben Jonson with the designer Inigo Jones from 1605 to 1631 in the hugely expensive Oberon (1611) and other works. The parliamentary Revolution of the 1640s brought this form of extravagance to an abrupt end.
Theatrical presentations, usually performed by members of the nobility, which were popular at the English court in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were the English equivalent of the ballets de cour of France. Their origins were in traditional masked processions and mummings. Their subject-matter was allegorical or mythological, while music, mime, and singing featured along with the dance. The literary element was probably the most important component and among those who wrote texts for masques were Ben Jonson and John Milton. The architect Inigo Jones designed sets for various masques. Famous examples of the form include Jonson and Jones's Masque of Blackness (1605) and Masque of Beauty (1608). The form is rarely revived, although Leslie French staged a revival of Milton's masque Comus for International Ballet in 1946. Helpmann produced a mimed play based on the same Milton masque for Sadler's Wells Ballet in 1942. De Valois's 1931 Job, a ‘masque for dancing’, pays homage to the form.
Bibliography
See A. Nicoll, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage (1937); E. Welsford, The Court Masque (1927, repr. 1962); S. K. Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (1965); S. Sutherland, Masques in Jacobean Tragedy (1984).
1. to cover or conceal, as the masking of the nature of a disorder by the presence of unassociated signs, organisms, etc.; in audiometry, to obscure or diminish a sound by the presence of another sound of different frequency.
2. an appliance for shading, protecting, or medicating the face, e.g. a surgical mask.
3. the dark shaded markings on the face of some dog and cat breeds.

The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio (a public version of the masque was the pageant). A 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. Professional actors and musicians were hired for the speaking and singing parts. Often, the masquers who did not speak or sing were courtiers: King James I's queen consort, Anne of Denmark, frequently danced with her ladies in masques between 1603 and 1611, and Henry VIII and Charles I performed in the masques at their courts. In the tradition of masque, Louis XIV danced in ballets at Versailles with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully. [1]
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The masque tradition developed from the elaborate pageants and courtly shows of ducal Burgundy in the late Middle Ages. Masques were typically a complimentary offering to the prince among his guests and might combine pastoral settings, mythological fable, and the dramatic elements of ethical debate. There would invariably be some political and social application of the allegory. Such pageants often celebrated a birth, marriage, change of ruler or a Royal Entry and invariably ended with a tableau of bliss and concord. Masque imagery tended to be drawn from Classical rather than Christian sources, and the artifice was part of the Grand dance. Masque thus lent itself to Mannerist treatment in the hands of master designers like Giulio Romano or Inigo Jones. The New Historians, in works like the essays of Bevington and Holbrook's The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (1998),[2] have pointed out the political subtext of masques. At times, the political subtext was not far to seek: The Triumph of Peace, put on with a large amount of parliament-raised money by Charles I, caused great offence to the Puritans. Catherine de' Medici's court festivals, often even more overtly political, were among the most spectacular entertainments of her day, although the "intermezzi" of the Medici court in Florence could rival them.
In English theatre tradition, a dumbshow is a masque-like interlude of silent pantomime usually with allegorical content that refers to the occasion of a play or its theme, the most famous being the pantomime played out in Hamlet (III.ii). Dumbshows might be a moving spectacle, like a procession, as in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1580s), or they might form a pictorial tableau, as one in the Shakespeare collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre (III,i)—a tableau that is immediately explicated at some length by the poet-narrator, Gower. Dumbshows were a Medieval element that continued to be popular in early Elizabethan drama, but by the time Pericles (c. 1607–08) or Hamlet (c. 1600–02) were staged, they were perhaps quaintly old-fashioned: “What means this, my lord?” is Ophelia's reaction. In English masques, purely musical interludes might be accompanied by a dumbshow.
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. The rustic presentation of "Pyramus and Thisbe" as a wedding entertainment in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream offers a familiar example. Spectators were invited to join in the dancing. At the end, the players would take off their masks to reveal their identities.
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). A particularly elaborate masque, performed over the course of two weeks for Queen Elizabeth, is described in the 1821 novel Kenilworth, by Sir Walter Scott. Later, in the court of James I, narrative elements of the masque became more significant. Plots were often on classical or allegorical themes, glorifying the royal or noble sponsor. At the end, the audience would join with the actors in a final dance. Ben Jonson wrote a number of masques with stage design by Inigo Jones. Their works are usually thought of as the most significant in the form. Sir Philip Sidney also wrote masques.
William 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. There is also a masque sequence in his Romeo and Juliet and Henry VIII. John Milton's Comus (with music by Henry Lawes) is described as a masque, though it is generally reckoned a pastoral play.
Reconstructions of Stuart masques have been few and far between. Part of the problem is that only texts survive complete; there is no complete music, only fragments, so no authoritative performance can be made without reconstruction.
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.
The 18th-century masques were less frequently staged. "Rule, Britannia!" started out as part of Alfred, a masque about Alfred the Great co-written by James Thomson and David Mallet which was first performed at Cliveden, country house of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Performed to celebrate the third birthday of Frederick's daughter Augusta. 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.
Of all the arts of the Renaissance, the masque is the artistic form most alien to audiences today.[citation needed] The most outstanding humanists, poets and artists of the day, in the full intensity of their creative powers, devoted themselves to producing masques; and until the Puritans closed the English theatres in 1642, the masque was the highest artform in England. But because of its ephemeral nature, not a lot of documentation related to masques remains, and much of what is said about the production and enjoyment of masques is still part speculation.
While no longer popular, there are some later examples of the masque. In the 20th century, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote Job, a masque for dancing which premiered in 1930, although the work is closer to a ballet than a masque as it was originally understood. His designating it a masque was to indicate that the modern choreography typical when he wrote the piece would not be suitable.
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[3] was probably first presented before the Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps at his London seat, Lambeth Palace, in 1592.
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Dansk (Danish)
n. - maskespil, maske
Nederlands (Dutch)
korte allegorische opvoering (16de/17de eeuw), maskerade, verkleding/masker, verkleed bal
Français (French)
n. - (Théât) mascarade
Deutsch (German)
n. - Maskenspiel, Maskerade
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μάσκα, θεατρικό είδος του 17ου αιώνα
Italiano (Italian)
masque (rappresentazione allegorica)
Português (Portuguese)
n. - baile de máscaras (m)
Русский (Russian)
театр масок, притворяться, маскировать
Español (Spanish)
n. - mascarada
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - maskspel
中文(简体)(Chinese (Simplified))
化装舞会, 假面具
中文(繁體)(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 化裝舞會, 假面具
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) نوع مسرحيه من القرن السابع عشر
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - הצגה מוסיקלית, בייחוד במאות 61-71, התחפשות
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