A genre of entertainment that developed in England during the 16th and 17th centuries around a masked dance. Based on allegorical or mythological themes and involving poetry, music and elaborate sets, its finest achievement was in the court masques of the poet laureate Ben Jonson and stage architect Inigo Jones from 1605 to 1631. A lesser-noted but nonetheless important type was the theatre masque of the same period, which survived the demise of the court masque and reached its highest development in the dramas and semi-operas of the Restoration (1660–c1700), especially in the works of Dryden and Purcell.
MURRAY LEFKOWITZ
The origins of the masque are to be found in the festivals, pageants and revels of the Renaissance, particularly the English disguising and its Italian counterparts, the veglia and masquerie. From the Italian trionfo came the processions and elaborate pageant carts which presented symbolic figures and allegorical themes from classical mythology. The French ballet de cour and masquerade strongly influenced the dances and choreography of the masque and contributed to the growth of some loose dramatic continuity. The former, like the Italian intermedio, added significant advances in stage and scenic design. From the older tradition of mummings derived the element of dance pantomime, and additional prototypes for the comic dances of the antimasques existed in the ballet à entrées (see Ballet de cour), morescos, farces, jigs and various country dances of the period. The instrumental music of the masque was derived from popular and court dances of the 15th and 16th centuries (basses danses, measures, pavans, galliards, branles, voltas and others), and the vocal music was strongly influenced by popular as well as more sophisticated genres (choirboy songs, ayres, ballads, canzonets, madrigals, and the dramatic monodies, récits and continuo songs of the Italian, French and English courts).
The immediate prototype of the masque, the disguising, was known as such in England from the early 15th century. It developed from the native pastime of mumming, which had itself descended from the art of the troubadours. Based on allegorical or mythological themes and using elaborate stage machinery, the disguising was performed at night on special or festive seasonal occasions by both speaking and singing actors, with dance as the culminating event. Disguisings were popular at the court of Henry VII, especially during the Christmas season, when a Lord of Misrule was chosen to preside over the festivities (for a contemporary account of a lavish disguising performed for the wedding in 1501 of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon see Wickham, 1959–81, i, pp.208–9).
According to an account in Hall's Chronicle, Henry VIII introduced the Italian masquerie to the English court in 1512:
On the daie of the Epiphanie at night, the kyng with xi other wer disguised, after the manner of Italie, called a maske, a thyng not seen afore in Englande, thei were appareled in garmentes long and brode, wrought all with gold, with visers and cappes of gold, and after the banket doen, these Maskers came in, with sixe gentlemen disguised in silke bearynge staffe torches, and desired the ladies to daunce, some were content, and some that knewe the fashion of it refused, because it was not a thyng commonly seen. And after thei daunced and commoned together, as the fashion of the Maskes is, thei toke their leave and departed, and so did the Quene, and all the ladies.
Most likely the basic difference between the disguising and this form of ‘maske’ was that in the latter the masquers revelled with ladies of the audience in dancing, gallantry and intrigue. These revels became an essential feature of the English court masque.
In the course of the 16th century the masque merged with the disguising, assuming its scenic décor and other theatrical elements. Scenes like those of a castle, a ship, a mountain or a bower were either fixed or mounted on floats that carried the masquers in and out of the hall. From these stationary or movable tableaux the dancers made their entry and descent to the floor, often preceded by the presenter's prologue, an encomium to the king and queen, which was followed by a song or a chorus, or both. After the formal dance and the revels the masquers were called back to the set by another speech or song (sometimes both) and then made their exit. Allegory and symbolism were an important part of the poetry, the scenery, the costumes, the dances and the music. A masque of this kind was given by Henry VIII in 1527 for the French ambassador on the signing of an alliance between Henry and François I.
The increasing popularity of masques and other entertainments at court is reflected in the creation of the post of Master of the Revels in 1545, and in the selection of the poet George Ferrars as Lord of Misrule. Ferrars was responsible for works with such bizarre titles as The Masque of Covetous Men with Long Noses, The Masque of Cats and The Drunken Masque, written to amuse the boy King Edward VI. Activity decreased during the reign of Mary Tudor, but Elizabeth I, although frugal in her habits, was a devotee of music and dancing and participated in and supported a number of masque productions. Several of these depicted tradesmen: fishermen, swartrutters, foresters, mariners etc. For Elizabeth's projected meeting with Mary Stuart at Nottingham in 1562 a Masque of Peace was prepared, and, although the meeting never took place, a description has survived indicating that there were actually three masques to be presented on successive nights, each with its own theme. The last of these was to end with a chorus ‘as full of armony as may be devised’. A later production, The Masque of Gods (1578), was a processional masque to welcome Elizabeth to Norwich, and more closely resembled the ‘entertainment’ that had as its principal feature the offering of gifts.
During Elizabeth's reign masques were also presented by the four legal societies of the Inns of Court, each of which chose a Lord of Misrule to preside over its seasonal festivities. At Shrovetide 1595 the barristers of Gray's Inn performed a masque for the queen entitled The Masque of Proteus and the Adamantine Rock which, with the exception of the antimasque, contained all the elements of the Jacobean masques, and became the prototype for those of Ben Jonson.
The music for Tudor masques was composed by the leading musical figures at court: the Master of the Chapel Royal, members of the King's Musick or the organist of St Paul's. Under Henry VII Gilbert Banester and later William Newmark were in charge of such festivities; under Henry VIII, John Redford and William Cornyshe; during Elizabeth's reign, Richard Farrant and Richard Edwards. The musical performers were the instrumental consorts, choirboys and ‘singing-men’ of the King's Musick and the Chapel Royal, and on occasion the musicians and boys of St Paul's and Westminster Abbey. The vocal music consisted of consort songs to viols, lute-songs, partsongs for two to six voices and other more popular forms. The dances included a variety of measures, pavans, galliards, corantos, voltas, branles and country dances. Undoubtedly some of this music survives in manuscript and printed collections of the period, but specific identifications are difficult, perhaps even impossible.
The early Stuarts were sophisticated patrons of the arts, and the royal household included large numbers of artists, poets, musicians and savants who collaborated in producing some of the most lavish court diversions ever seen in England. Masques were increasingly exploited for political purposes, and foreign ambassadors intrigued for prominent places at performances. In addition to the traditional representations at Twelfth Night and Shrovetide, masques were staged for marriages, births, progresses, treaties, alliances and other occasions at court. Aping these elaborate productions, the prominent nobility, as well as the gentlemen of the Inns of Court, mounted their own less pretentious private masques for special occasions. Poets took advantage of public admiration of such spectacles by including masque-like episodes in their plays at the Bankside and in the new theatres in London.
The high literary quality of the Jacobean masque is largely due to Ben Jonson, who combined a sensitive feeling for lyric and dramatic poetry with depth and accuracy of classical scholarship. Familiarity with classical mythology is necessary for an understanding of the allegorical and symbolistic associations that are the essence of masque themes (also referred to as the ‘meaning’, ‘conceit’, ‘emblem’ or ‘soul’ of the masque). It was the task of the various poets, artists, musicians, actors and artisans of the court to personify the classical gods of antiquity and their godly virtues in the bodies of the English royal family. The courtiers were usually sufficiently educated to recognize these allusions; for his more obscure references Jonson engaged in more subtle didactic rhetoric.
Other fine poets, including George Chapman, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Middleton, John Marston, Thomas Campion and Samuel Daniel, also wrote masque texts. At the same time, under the gifted Inigo Jones, who borrowed heavily from foreign spectacles, the visual aspects of the masque – scenery, costumes, stage machinery including the deus ex machina, and even the hall itself – became increasingly elaborate, impressive and costly. More than 400 of Jones's sketches of the costumes and scenery for Jacobean and Caroline masques are in the Duke of Devonshire's Chatsworth collection (see figs.2–4, 6 and 7; a good selection is included in Simpson and Bell, 1924).
The court masques had no rigid structural formula but certain elements are common to most of them, and their general organization is as follows: (1) procession, (2) allegorical speech or dialogue, (3) antimasque songs and dances, (4) discovery of the scene of the masque, (5) song I, (6) entry dance of the masquers and descent to the floor, (7) song II, (8) main dance of the masquers, (9) song III, (10) revels with the audience, (11) song IV, (12) return to the stage and final dance of the masquers or a grand chorus. Variants of this plan sometimes omit the main dance, include an additional one, or place the revels at the end, as in the ballet de cour. A special dance for the torchbearers could also precede the entry dance, and often the masque was followed by a sumptuous banquet. An entire production lasted as long as four or five hours.
Jacobean masques were presented either in the Great Hall at Whitehall or in the Banqueting House, which was rebuilt by James I in 1606 and again in 1622 after the disastrous fire of 1619 (Inigo Jones was the architect). Scaffolding was erected for the spectators on three sides, and a raised dais of state was placed on the floor about two thirds of the way back from the stage. The central clearing was left open for the dancing and singing.
No complete score for a court masque has survived, for several reasons. The loose arrangement and collective nature of the composition of the music involved composers from various consorts of the King's Musick (e.g. the consort of violins for the dances, the lutenist-singers for the songs, the ‘loud’ music or wind band for processions and scene changes); indeed a division of labour even existed between the composer of the dances and the composer who orchestrated the dances for the king's violin band (Holman, 1993). Each leader composed the music and provided the parts for his own consort. Antimasques frequently used anonymous popular ballads, catches and dance-tunes as well as newly composed and choreographed dances, and were performed (danced) by professional actors from dramatic companies such as the King's Men. The songs in the published texts of the masques were usually printed in italics, and these show that the vocal music consisted mainly of individual numbers. The masquing and antimasque dances are indicated in the printed stage directions, but with a few exceptions none of the music was printed with the librettos, and scores and parts were rarely kept after a performance.
The earliest masque for which specific music survives is Jonson's Masque of Blackness (1605); only one song is extant, ‘Come away’ by Alfonso Ferrabosco (ii) (Ayres, 1609). This was the first masque to do away with dispersed scenery in favour of a stage and curtain, and was the first product of the collaboration between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, who, until their quarrel in 1631, produced about 30 works together. Ferrabosco seems to have been a third member of this partnership, especially for the earlier masques, of which he supplied seven with music. Later he contributed to Jonson's Masque of Augurs (1622); Jonson lauded him in his librettos, his Epigrams (cxxx and cxxxi) and elsewhere. Five of Ferrabosco's songs are extant from the Masque of Beauty (1608), more than have survived from any other Jacobean masque. One of them, ‘So Beauty on the waters stood’, is among his finest songs and illustrates his ability to create a flexible, expressive melody out of the simplest devices, in this case a long anacrusis held over the bar-line, followed by a leap of a 7th (ex.1). Three of the songs from the Masque of Beauty are linked as a continuous musical scene between the main dance and the revels, and are tonally organized in G minor. With its long sequential descent moving out of phase over ponderous harmonies, the final return from G major by way of F major is a forward-looking piece of dramatic-harmonic writing (ex.2). This continuous musical organization is seen again in Ferrabosco's music for Jonson's Love freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611), where it is almost the same; these may be the earliest instances of such dramatic writing in the masque tradition. Ferrabosco's music is strongly individual, and his masque songs are in a rudimentary declamatory style, easily recognized by the broad sweep of angular, triadic melody – almost instrumental in character; the setting of text is sometimes crude. 6ths and even 7ths are frequent in the vocal lines, some of which have a range of up to two octaves (ex.3). The opening held gesture is a hallmark of his songs.
Ferrabosco also wrote the music for Jonson's Masque of Hymenai (1606), a ‘double masque’ (one of men, another of women) for the marriage of the Earl of Essex and the Lady Frances Howard. Here the episode of the presenter's speech is a rudimentary dramatic situation in which extra characters are added and remain as participants in the ensuing action. The ‘device’ (theme) thus became a more dramatic and unifying factor in Jonson's masques. Allegorical and symbolic meanings were also deepened, and applied not only in the spoken lines but also in the décor and the choreography, the point of it all being the glorification of the king. In the Masque of Hymenai Jonson drew attention to the dancing-master and violinist Thomas Giles, who introduced the main (third) grand masquing dance; an ‘Essex Antick Masque’ and the three masquing dances are extant (GB-Lbl Add.10444, nos.92–5). Giles's choreography also included a processional paired entry, a circle, a chain of linked hands and the initials of the bridegroom.
In two of Jonson's masques of 1611, the Masque of Oberon and Love Freed, Ferrabosco was assisted by Robert Johnson, who composed music for the dances only. In Oberon, a masque for Prince Henry, Jonson confronted the problem of corruption posed by the antimasque to the theme of the masque proper, an overriding consideration in all his masques. He attempted to create a measure of unity and balance among the main masque, the antimasques and the revels, not only in the dramatic symbolism of the text but also in the dramatic function of the music which was dispersed throughout the masque and which now furthered the development of the theme. To achieve this goal he and Jones also introduced movable sliding flats to allow quick changes of scene. Ferrabosco's music for two of the songs for the main masque are extant: ‘Nay, nay, you must not stay’ and ‘Gentle knights’ (GB-Ob Tenbury 1018); the latter is one of his finest songs. Some music for the antimasque dances of satyrs and fairies has survived (Sabol, 1978; Chan, 1980), and a substantial number of documents are also available for this masque (Walls, 1996).
Two songs by Ferrabosco also exist for Love freed: ‘O what a fault’ and ‘How near to good’ (GB-Ob Tenbury 1018; ex.3). Here Jonson continued to develop the masque into a cohesive structure in which the audience itself became an integral part. Ferrabosco's music, even more than in Oberon, perfected his new declamatory style intermixed with tuneful melody. No music survives by him for any of the later masques, and, in fact, very little identifiable vocal music exists for any of the later Jacobean masques. Even among the considerable number of extant masque and antimasque dances few can definitely be associated with their masques, although attempts to do so have not been wanting (e.g. Cutts, 1954; Sabol, 1978; Walls, 1996).
When after 1612 Ferrabosco (for some unexplained reason) ceased writing music for Jonson's masques, Robert Johnson was one of the composers, with Coprario, Campion and Nicholas Lanier, who wrote both songs and dances. Johnson was also active as a composer and musician for the King's Men and seems to have transferred some of his dance-tunes from the masquing hall to the theatre stage. He wrote music for Shakespeare's Tempest (1611) – the most important play of the period to incorporate masque – and for several other dramatic works. He also provided music for two of the three masques presented in 1613 for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the Count Palatine of the Rhine: Campion's The Lord's Masque and Chapman's The Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn Masque. For the latter he composed both the songs and the dances and supervised the musicians, for which he received £45. He also wrote music for Jonson's The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621).
One of the most significant masque poets, Thomas Campion, was also a musician. In 1607 he wrote both the text and the music for the Masque in Honour of the Marriage of Lord Hayes. Thomas Giles set the dances with the assistance of Thomas Lupo the younger, the king's composer for the violins. The libretto describes the disposition of the vocal and instrumental groups:
on the right hand … were consorted ten Musitions, with Basse and Meane lutes, a Bandora, double Sackbott, and an Harpsichord, with two treble Violins; on the other side somewhat neerer the skreene were plac’t 9 Violins and three Lutes; and to answere both the Consorts (as it were in a triangle) sixe Cornets, and sixe Chappell voyces.
Campion's description of the musical part of the performance for the chorus of the transformation scene for the appearance of the grand masquers adds valuable details of performing practice:
This Chorus was in manner of an Eccho seconded by the Cornets, then by the consort of ten, then by the consort of twelve, and by a double Chorus of voices standing on either side, the one against the other, bearing five voices a peece, and sometime every Chorus was heard severally, sometime mixt, but in the end altogether . . . (their number in all amounting to fortie two voyces and instruments).
Of the seven vocal numbers in the masque, Campion printed only two: ‘Now hath Flora rob'd her bowers' and ‘Move now with measured sound’. Three dances by Lupo and Giles, presumably the grand masquing dances, were also included, but with words added later. Campion's music is somewhat conservative, quite unlike Ferrabosco's modern dramatic writing.
Coprario's masque songs are also conservative; in 1613 he wrote music for Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn and for Campion's The Masque of Squires. Coprario may also have contributed to the Masque of Flowers (1614), which was completely financed by Sir Francis Bacon. He reputedly participated in some of the earliest Italian operas during a sojourn in Italy, but Italian influence is not evident in his three extant songs from the Masque of Squires. However, he was the teacher of William Lawes, whose music does show Italian influences and who dominated the masque music during the Caroline period. Foreign influence on the masque increased during the second decade of the 17th century. The French and Italian borrowings of Inigo Jones, who had learnt his craft in those countries, are well known and documented.
By 1617 Ben Jonson also capitulated to continental literary ideas: his Twelfth Night masque of that year, The Vision of Delight, incorporated an antimasque of Burratines and Pantalones in direct imitation of the French Ballet de la Foire St Germain (1606), which employed the stock figures of the commedia dell'arte. He also borrowed extensively for the same masque from the spectacular intermedi and veglia presented at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 1608, the Notte d'amore. The Masque of Queens (1609) had already shown the influence of the pastoral comedy Giudizio di Paridi (1608) by the Italian poet Michelangelo Buonarotti the younger and the stage architect Giulio Parigi. The first intermedio (the ‘Palace of Fame’) was the prototype not only for a similar scene in the Masque of Queens, but also for another 30 years later in Britannia triumphans by Jones and Davenant.
The music was similarly subject to foreign influence, particularly that of the Italian stile recitativo. Monodies by Caccini, Notari and others were printed in England at this time and Ferrabosco himself wrote recitatives in Italian (ESLS, 2nd ser., xix), although there is a marked difference between these and his declamatory writing for masques. In the preface to his famous Lovers Made Men (1617), Jonson wrote that ‘the whole masque was sung after the Italian manner, stilo recitativo, by Master Nicholas Lanier, who ordered and made both the Scene and the music’, and the text shows that it was completely set to music. Jonson used the phrase ‘stylo recitativo’ again in The Vision of Delight, but the music to both masques is lost.
The extent of Italian recitative influence on English declamatory song has been questioned in favour of an indigenous development resulting from the need for a more dramatic style (see Spink, 1959–60), and it has also been pointed out that Jonson's reference to stilo recitativo did not appear in the 1617 librettos of his masques, but only in the 1640 editions (Emslie, 1960). There are in fact basic differences of style between the declamatory song and Italian monody, differences inherent in the languages themselves: the former, in observing English rules of declamation in speech rhythm, accent and inflection, is more melodic with frequent end-stopped lines. For these and other reasons it has been suggested that Lovers Made Men was probably set not as a continuous recitative but as a series of declamatory songs, dialogues and choruses, but without the music this cannot be proved. However, Lanier's early declamatory style may be examined in his one surviving song from the Masque of Squires (1613), ‘Bring away this sacred tree’, which contains both recitative and declamatory elements. Lanier visited Italy in 1625 to buy paintings for the king, and on his return in 1628 he wrote his famous dialogue Hero's Complaint to Leander in the recitative style; thus in either 1617 or 1628 he played a leading role in introducing continuous recitative – or declamation – into England (Walls, 1996). But the masque was certainly the principal vehicle for the development of the heightened speech of the English declamatory style. This development can be traced clearly from the masquing songs of Ferrabosco to those of William Lawes, Locke and Purcell, the four most prominent composers of music for the masque.
The songs in the masques have musical and dramatic significance to the spectacle as a whole, but they, like the text and the décor, play a secondary role to the dances. Indeed, one function of the songs was to allow the dancers to rest between numbers. The dances – both the formal dances of the three grand masquing dances and the social dances of the revels – were the raison d'être of the genre; in fact many of the songs are dancing-songs, not only in the antimasques, but during and in between the grand masquing dances and the revels. The main masquing dances were performed by cultivated aristocratic amateurs coached and accompanied by professional musicians and dancing-masters. The grand masquers themselves were lords or ladies currently in high favour at court; their number varied from six to 16 and they assumed some symbolic disguise, such as knights, heroes or other virtuous champions of the crown. At times the king or queen themselves took part. The masquers were taught their steps and rehearsed by dancing-masters like Giles, Jeremy Herne and the Frenchmen Bochan and Confesse, who also devised the ballets. The value attached to these dancing-masters can be seen in the fact that their pay often exceeded that of the poet or the composers. Especially important to these activities was the courts's band of violins, which accompanied the dancers in their rehearsals and in the performances (Holman, 1993).
The three grand masquing dances – entry, main dance and going-off – were always newly composed and newly choreographed. These set dances were often referred to as ‘measures’ (i.e. each dance was a newly choreographed unit), as were choreographed antimasque dances. The term was also used to refer to the more stately choreographed pavans that often led off the dance entries (Cunningham, 1965; Ward, 1988). The climax of the grand masquing dances was the main dance, a ballet involving symbolic figures, letters and geometrical patterns related to the theme of the masque. The dance types employed were measures, almans, ayres, pavans and corantos. Often a special dance of torchbearers preceded the entry of the masquers to illuminate the way for their descent to the floor: the torchbearers were chosen from among the young gentlemen of the nobility, and their dances were of the same type as those of the masquers but more simply patterned, befitting their youth and inexperience. They also took part in the figures of the grand masquers, their torches articulating the designs. Often, when the choreography required it, a third strain in triple time was added to the grand masquing dances; they were usually in duple time and numbered ‘1st’, ‘2nd’ or ‘3rd’. They reflect the majesty of the occasion, as can briefly be seen in the opening tune from the main dance, ‘The 2nd of the Temple’, which may be from Chapman's Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn (1613; ex.4).
The social dances of the revels, in which the masquers took partners of the opposite sex from the audience, included measures, almans, corantos, galliards, branles, voltas and various country dances, but these were not specially composed or choreographed for the occasion: they were mostly bipartite in form, and it is possible that in the improvised, paired and varied repeats of the strains, the music and the dance steps themselves were varied according to the prowess of the participants.
Burlesque dances – ‘anticks’ or ‘antemasques’ – were not innovations of the Jacobean masque. The commonly held belief that comic relief was introduced by Ben Jonson at the request of Queen Anne in the Masque of Queens results from a misinterpretation of Jonson's statement that the queen ‘commanded me to think on some dance or shew, that might precede hers, and have the place of a foil, or false masque’. Jonson introduced the term ‘antimasque’ in the next sentence in referring to the ‘antimasque of boys’ that he had included in his masque of the previous year, The Haddington Masque. In the Masque of Queens Jonson fulfilled Anne's request (she was one of the masquers) by contrasting the 12 noble queens with an antimasque of 12 disreputable hags. He used the term ‘antimasque’ to emphasize this dramatic contrast and to prevent the element of the bizarre from degenerating into low comedy. According to Welsford (1927) ‘the Masque of Queens fixed the norm of the masque for some years. From 1609 to 1617 Ben Jonson wrote masque after masque, all showing the same careful structure and unity of design, the antimasque being kept strictly in its place and serving as a foil to the main action’. As the antimasque became established as a permanent feature it borrowed heavily from the French ballet masquerade and the ballet à entrées.
For the antimasques composers used anonymous popular ballads, catches and dance-tunes, and also wrote new dances in fast duple or triple metre: jigs, country dances, morescos, voltas, galliards, corantos, almans etc. The choreographed measures of these often differ from the terminal dances in that they consist of a greater number of strains which are contrasted in tempo, mood and length; sections in fast jig time indicated by are common. Sometimes pauses over notes indicate certain held gestures. Frequently the titles of these dances refer to the characters of the antimasque, e.g. ‘The Satyrs Masque’, ‘The Ape's Dance at the Temple’, ‘The Cuckolds Masque’. A good example is ‘The Second Witches Dance’ from the Masque of Queens: a prankish tune (ex.5a) is succeeded by two sudden gestures, which are in turn followed by a series of short, metrically contrasted sections (ex.5b).
The reconstruction of the dances for the court masques can be only partly successful, not for want of the music, much of which is retrievable, but for want of the choreography for the antimasques and masquing dances. Many of the masque librettos do include descriptions of the patterns formed by the dancers, but specific details of the dances or ‘measures’ themselves are lacking. The major source for the music of Jacobean masque dances (GB-Lbl Add.10444) has been the subject of much research and controversy (cf Lawrence, 1922; Cutts, 1954; Willetts, 1965; Knowlton, 1966, 1967–8; Sabol, 1978). The manuscript includes 138 dances under such vague and fanciful titles as ‘The Old Anticke Masque’, ‘Gray's Inn Masque’, ‘The humming batchelor’, and ‘My Lord Essex’, but the association of these tunes with their proper masques is problematic, since the titles are ambiguous in many cases and can be ascribed to two or more works. Many of the dances are to be found with additional parts in William Brade's Newe ausserlesene liebliche Branden … a 5 (Hamburg, 1617), Thomas Simpson's Taffel-Consort (Hamburg, 1621) and, most extensively, in John Adson's Courtly Masquing Ayres (London, 1621); many are edited in Sabol (1978).
During the reign of Charles I and his consort Queen Henrietta Maria it became customary for the king and his lords to present a masque to the queen at Twelfth Night, and for the queen and her ladies to reciprocate at Shrovetide. The productions of this period became increasingly costly and more directly intended as political propaganda. The queen had brought her own musicians with her from France, and the several minor productions recorded between 1625 and 1631 are thought to have been heavily influenced by the ballet à entrées, but neither the text nor the music to any of them is extant.
In 1631 Ben Jonson produced his last two masques, Love's Triumph through Callipolis and Chloridia (no music has survived). In the latter the long and fruitful association between Jonson and Inigo Jones ended; deeply rooted jealousies and a basic conflict of artistic ideals made the break inevitable, though the immediate cause was the quarrel over who was to be in charge of their productions. Jonson's ideal was a scholarly, dramatic form that would have enduring value as literature, but Jones saw each masque as an occasional visual and aural entertainment, lingering only in the memories of those who were present. When Jonson printed his own name ahead of Jones's in the libretto of Chloridia and viciously attacked the architect in writing, he placed Jones in a position of defensive advantage and found himself ostracized from all future masque productions. Jonson's jibes in his famous Expostulation with Inigo Jones were cruel, but not without some foundation, since without significant literary content the masque did subsequently degenerate into mere spectacle. Jonson's irony was prophetic in the Expostulation when he cried:
O
shows, shows, mighty shows
The eloquence of masques! what need of prose,
Or verse or prose, t'express immortal you?
You are the spectacles of state, 'tis true . . .
Or to make boards to speak! there is a task!
Painting and carpentry are the soul of the masque.
Inigo Jones, now in complete charge, turned to lesser and manageable poets like Aurelian Townshend, who wrote the verses for both Albion's Triumph and Tempe Restored (1632).
Almost all the surviving vocal music for the Caroline court masque is in the autograph manuscript of William Lawes (GB-Ob Mus.Sch.B.2), which contains part of the music for James Shirley's Triumph of Peace (1634) and Sir William Davenant's The Triumphs of the Prince d'Amour (1636) and Britannia triumphans (1638) (ed. in Lefkowitz, 1970). Many of the dance-tunes for the Caroline masques are in John Playford's Court-ayres (1655) and Courtly Masquing Ayres (1662) (ed. in Sabol, 1978). As dramatic and lyric poetry the masques of this period are inferior to Jonson's, but as musically organized dramatic presentations they are far more developed and prepared the way for the later masques, semi-operas and operas of Locke, Blow and Purcell. They show William Lawes, best known for his string music, as the most important English dramatic composer of the first half of the 17th century.
The Triumph of Peace was probably the most elaborate of all court masques. It was presented to the king by the four Inns of Court at a cost of more than £21,000, and had distinct political overtones. In his Histriomastix, William Prynne, a Puritan barrister of Lincoln's Inn, had attacked participation by the aristocracy in stage plays and masques as licentious and ungodly. Taking this as an affront, the king requested a masque from the Inns of Court as a public testament to their love and affection for the crown. The masque was preceded by a magnificent pageant that paraded through the streets of London for hours before the performance. The original plans for this masque, made by the parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelocke, who was in charge of organizing the music, contain much information about this masque and its musicians (over 100) and about performing practice in general (see Lefkowitz, 1965, and Sabol, 1966). Diagrams show the exact position of the singers and instruments for specific musical numbers, which indicate that the larger musical scenes were performed on the floor in geometric figures with the voices and instruments integrated (fig.5). There is also a list of the instrumentation of the ‘symphony’, a consort of six lutes, a bass lute, a harp, a violin and three viols, which performed the ‘symphonies’ and accompanied the singers in the ceremonial part of the masque.
Most of the symphonies, songs and choruses for the Triumph of Peace have survived in Lawes's autograph. The missing music was probably composed by Simon Ives, who like Lawes received £100 for his efforts. The symphonies are two-part (treble and bass) bipartite instrumental dance forms of the alman variety, and serve the dual purpose of introducing the songs and covering the movement of the musicians from the stage to the dance floor. The songs are declamatory continuo songs in the tradition of those of Ferrabosco and Lanier: the third song is a declamatory dialogue between Eunomia (Law) and Irene (Peace). The choruses are homophonic or in madrigal style. The formal structure, symphony–song–chorus, is repeated as a series of musical scenes, and is a marked advance from the loose arrangement of individual songs in the Jacobean masque and Ferrabosco's earlier attempts at musical unity.
In The Triumphs of the Prince d'Amour William Lawes collaborated with his brother Henry, from whom we have only one surviving song, ‘Whither so gladly and so fast’. The masque was produced by the Middle Temple of the Inns of Court to honour the arrival in England of the king's nephews, the Palatine Princes Charles and Rupert. The title was taken from the name of the Christmas Lord of Misrule at Middle Temple. From the text of the first printed edition it is clear that the entire work (except the prologue) was set to continuous music, but it is not completely in recitative (declamatory) style. The careful structural plan of Jonson's masques has been abandoned for a freer mixture of antimasques, songs, formal dances and a banquet; it was prepared in haste and is short, has no spoken dialogue, only two antimasques, no revels and no exit dance. It shows strong French influence and closes with a grand chorus. William Lawes's music for the concluding two scenes is more unified than any previous English dramatic music: not only does the musical design symphony–song–chorus govern them individually, but in the last Song of Valediction they are linked together by a ritornello based on the second strain of the opening symphony (a device later used by Locke). The musical organization is conceived operatically; a continuous and varied musical and dramatic structure builds up to the final grand chorus. Symmetry of design, a unified sense of tonality (C minor with its related keys was Lawes's favourite), varieties of rhythms and textures, some expressive pictorialisms and a frequent use of the chorus are synchronized with the movements of the priests of Mars, Venus and Apollo from the stage to the dance floor and up to the dais to pay homage to the princes.
The music for Britannia triumphans is the most extensive surviving partial score for any of the court masques. It is also the last court masque for which music is known to be extant and has by far the best surviving iconography. Davenant's preface speaks of ‘Masques with shewes and intermedii’, and indeed there is much borrowing from the French and the Italian in the entries and in the scenic designs. The theme is both political and religious, seeking to justify the king's use of ship money tax and to ridicule the Puritans. It was acted on a Sunday, which infuriated Puritan leaders for more than half a century afterwards. It was for this masque that Charles I built a special masquing hall so as not to ruin the newly painted Rubens ceiling of the old Banqueting Hall with the smoke of many torches.
Dramatically
and musically Britannia triumphans is the most advanced of all surviving
court masques. E.J. Dent (1928) called attention to William Lawes's advanced
tonal organization in his other masques, but here it is even more striking. The
‘royal’ key of C is the tonal centre for a variety of related keys, including A
minor, D major, C minor and E
major. Of particular interest is the composer's handling
of major–minor tonal relationships and their close association with textual
expression. The clear distinction between declamatory airs and tuneful ballads
approaches a recitative-aria design, and three-part instrumental symphonies and
five-part choruses replace the two-part and four-part ones respectively. This
masque also contains one of the earliest instances of the use of the dramatic
ostinato in England, in the song and chorus of Fame, which Lawes entitled
‘Ciacona’. Some of the symphonies and dances for this masque appear in
Playford's Court-ayres, but none of the music for the antimasques has
been identified with certainty.
Davenant's last two court masques, Luminalia (1638) and Salmacida spolia (1640; fig.7), are completely dominated by foreign influence. The former is an adaptation of Francesco Cini's Notte d'amore and Parigi's Triumph of Peace. The latter is a ballet à entrées, with no fewer than 20 comic entries. The decline of the Jonsonian masque was complete, and the ensuing civil war provided the coup de grâce.
The court masques of this period are augmented by a number of works prepared for the lesser nobility, for the theatre and for the private schools. The most famous in the first category is Milton's Comus, performed at Ludlow Castle in 1634 for the investiture of the Earl of Bridgwater. It is far shorter than the conventional masque, having only one antimasque, one formal dance and no revels; five songs for it by Henry Lawes are extant (GB-Lbl Add.53723). Many short masque insertions are extant from contemporary plays, but one of the earliest full theatre masques was The World Tost at Tennis by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (1638), which omits the terminal dances and the revels as well. These are also absent from most of the masques inserted into plays performed at the public schools.
The influence of the court masque during the interregnum continued in the school masques and in new stage performances called ‘moral representations’ or ‘private entertainments’, which incorporated music and the dance, and ‘scenes and machines’, which Davenant and others used to circumvent the Puritan ban on stage plays. The popularity of school masques is affirmed by Pepys's diary entry for 26 April 1663, when during a family walk into the country his wife's maid entertained them with stories of a masque at her school in Chelsea some six or seven years earlier. Some poets became schoolmasters and turned their dramatic talents to school productions, like James Shirley whose The Triumph of Beauty was presented before about 1645 ‘by some young Gentlemen, for whom it was intended, at a private Recreation’. Its subject was the judgment of Paris, but it includes comic scenes (antimasques) for Shepherds, songs for Hymen and Delight, a chorus of Graces and Hours, and a final allusion to the legal nymphs, Irene, Eunomia and Diche, who were the central figures in Shirley's Triumph of Peace. One song, the three-part ‘Cease warring thoughts’ by William Lawes, is extant (excerpt in Lefkowitz, 1960). Another setting of this, and two songs by the theatre musician John Gamble, were printed in his Ayres and Dialogues (1659).
The interdiction of stage plays by the Puritans during the Commonwealth did not include a prohibition on concerts or on private musical dramatic productions, which were presented under such titles as masques, operas and ‘moral representations’, even though they were really plays with musical interludes. Instead of ‘acts’ the masque term ‘entries’ was used. Davenant's Siege of Rhodes (1656), for example, which was set to continuous music (now lost) and is often referred to as the first English opera, contained five entries in lieu of acts. As in the masques the composition of the music was a collective affair, including in this instance works by Henry Lawes, Captain Henry Cook, Locke, Charles Coleman and George Hudson. A similar but less pretentious work, Davenant's First Day's Entertainment at Rutland House by Declamations and Musick (a kind of lecture concert), was produced earlier in the same year. Davenant continued his musical dramatic productions with The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659). Both are described in their titles as operas (music for both was written by Locke), yet neither work is actually an opera. They too are divided into entries and they contain important elements of the masque, including both comic and serious dance scenes and instrumental and vocal music recitatives, songs, dialogues, choruses and a variety of dances. In 1663 Davenant revived the two works as Acts 3 and 4 of The Playhouse to be Let.
The true masque tradition survived during the Commonwealth only in Shirley's Cupid and Death, performed in honour of the Portuguese ambassador on 26 March 1653, but possibly written for an earlier school performance. It was revised by Locke in 1659 for a presentation at the military grounds in Leicester Fields, with music by Locke and Christopher Gibbons (the music for the 1659 version is in Locke's autograph in GB-Lbl Add.17799, published in MB, ii, 1951, 2/1965). Locke himself described it in his autograph as a ‘Morall Representation’, although the printed 1653 text refers to it as a ‘Masque’ (the printed 1659 text calls it a ‘Private Entertainment’). Some of Gibbons's music is known to have been included in the 1653 version. Locke probably added substantial sections of recitative in the last two entries in the revision. The dances were arranged by the English ‘hop-merchant’ (dancing-master) Luke Channel, who was master of a boarding-school in Broad Street (Pepys, 24 September 1660). It is not known for what occasion or by whom the 1659 version was performed, though it was presumably for the Military Company in the Meeting House of the Military Grounds (Harris, MB, ii).
Cupid and Death is in fact the only complete extant score of a 17th-century English masque. It is not a court masque, but musically it is close to the form as it is known from William Lawes's partial scores. It is thus reasonable to assume that we have here almost the full musical schema of the earlier genre – without, of course, the participation of royalty in the grand masquing dances or the social dances of the revels. Unlike the court masques, Cupid and Death has a substantial plot which is based on Aesop's fable of the unknowing exchange of arrows between Cupid and Death. Shirley's source for this was undoubtedly John Ogilby's paraphrases of 1651. The masque is divided into five entries, each consisting of a suite of dances – alman, courant, saraband or jig or galliard – and a sequence of solo song, dialogue, recitative or duet (or a combination of these), followed by or interspersed with (or both) one or several short choruses. Substantial dialogue occurs in each of the first three entries but thereafter music or dance (or both) are almost continuous to the end of the final chorus. As in the court masque the action builds up to the Grand Dance of the principal characters, but by contrast with the court masque there is no clear delineation between the comical first half and the ceremonial second half of the masque. The antimasques occupy a prominent position in each of the entries and are directly related to the plot itself; they are the central focus of the entertainment.
Dent (1928) pointed out that the key scheme of Locke and Gibbons's score is not entirely congruous, and suggested that Locke alone was probably in charge of the 1659 production and that he was probably obliged to include some of Gibbons's music from the 1653 version, even though it did not fit into his own scheme of tonalities. The masque begins in G and ends in A, which is regressive by comparison with Lawes's well-balanced key schemes, or even with Locke's own later dramatic productions. In other ways, too, Locke did not make advances beyond Lawes; he used a five-part chorus only once and then only in the eight-bar finale. The use of four-part writing, however, can be viewed as a progressive feature of Locke's style. Like Lawes he wrote some scene changes for two trebles and a bass and did not specify the instruments; but he did supply an independent violin part for the final grand chorus. A comparison with The Triumph of Peace shows strong parallels with Lawes's score and suggests that Locke was well acquainted with Lawes's music.
Locke's most original contribution lay in his recitatives for the fourth and fifth entries, which are the earliest extended English dramatic recitatives extant. They not only further the action of the plot, they also contain dramatic movement. While the first three entries include songs as well as spoken dialogue, the longer and more dramatic recitatives are reserved for the fourth and fifth entries, which for the most part are performed by the allegorical and mythical beings; the mortals speak mainly in dialogue. Significantly, both the dialogues and the recitatives are in free, unrhymed blank verse. Locke's declamation combines a strict attention to the natural rhythm of the spoken word with the normal inflections of speech, as well as a subtle use of agogic accent and more obvious pictorialisms. He also managed to combine the angular English declamatory style with the more emotional Italian idiom. The intensified parlando contrasts sharply with widely ranging, disjunct, almost erratic lines, which sometimes traverse an 11th in little more than a bar: the effect is intensely dramatic, as at the beginning of the fourth entry, when Nature attempts to warn some of the lovers of the approach of Cupid bearing his deadly darts (ex.6).
It was in these extended recitatives that Locke confronted and managed to solve the problem of successfully setting the English language to music in a dramatic context. Indeed, this was a salient feature of his legacy to Purcell.
One important reason for the success of Cupid and Death is the fact that the major dramatic roles in the fourth and fifth entries were specified and had to be performed by musicians, whereas the spoken dialogues of the first three entries were probably performed by actors who could not manage the difficult recitatives. Indeed, the songs in the first part of the masque are blank songs sung by unspecified soloists and chorus, whereas the dramatic action of the finale is carried forward in music performed by the main characters of the masque rather than by faceless commentators on the periphery of the action, as was the case in earlier masques and plays presented by actor's companies (and in many later ones as well). Locke's recitatives especially benefited from this, and enabled him to produce what is probably his finest dramatic writing for the stage and certainly the most successful dramatic score leading from the earlier court masques to the semi-operas of the Restoration.
During the Restoration influences from the earlier masques were manifested in two distinct groups of entertainment: plays with musical interludes (which proliferated after the reopening of the theatres), and the more substantial theatre and court masques. Of the two groups the first were the more numerous.
Davenant's ‘operas’ of the 1650s were the immediate models for the musical plays of the 1660s, a number of which therefore included theatre masque entries. The tradition of musical interludes had been popular with the English theatre public since the 16th century (Reyher, 1909, pp.497–8 lists some 80 plays written between 1588 and 1700 that contain masque scenes). Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest contain two of the most extensive examples from the earlier period. Sometimes their use in plays was functional, as in the case of Henry VIII (Act 1 scene iv), where the king meets Anne Boleyn when he selects her as his dancing-partner in the revels of a masque. In the Restoration theatre, however, these short insertions were generally placed at the end of acts and were not usually related to the plot. Each resembles a single entry of the court masque type, including a dance or a suite of dances, a song or a recitative (or both), a dialogue or chorus (or both) and a closing dance or suite. Differences do however exist between entries used in tragedies and those found in comedies (Price, 1979). Thus entries might be comic in the nature of the antimasque, ceremonial in the nature of the main masque, or, as in some of the tragedies, dramatically integrated into the plot. Often allegory and the deus ex machina were retained.
The increasing popularity of the theatres was encouraged by both Charles II and James II. The former granted licences to two major theatre companies: the Duke of York's Company, led by the dramatist William Davenant and the great Shakespearean actor Thomas Betterton, which performed first at Lincoln's Inn Fields and later at the new Duke's Theatre in Dorset Gardens; and the King's Men Players, led by Thomas Killigrew at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Composers such as Locke and Banister wrote almost exclusively for the Duke of York's Company, while Nicholas Staggins was the chief composer for the King's Men Players. These composers like the other court musicians, came from a musical tradition in which plays and masques were the main entertainments at court, and it is not surprising that they carried over the musical practices of their earlier plays and courtly masques into their music for the new theatres.
But the musicians, poets and artists of the English court were forever ruled by the tastes of their royal patrons. Charles II, his brother James, Duke of York (later James II), and Charles's illigitimate son James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, were all in France at various times during the Interregnum. They greatly admired the French musical establishment of Louis XIV and in particular the poetry, music and dancing of the ballet de cour, and the comédie-ballets and tragédie-ballets of Lully. Monmouth himself was an accomplished dancer, and a patron and possibly a former student of the famous French ballet-master St Andrée. During the 1670s Charles II sent Betterton to France to recruit musicians and dancers and to find dramatic material for his own court entertainments. Thus Restoration English plays and masques took on French characteristics, notably in the choreography, poetry and scenic design. The attempt by a French faction at court, supported by Charles II, to replace the masque tradition with French opera was abandoned after the unsuccessful production, in French, of Pierre Perrin's Arianne (1674) with music (now lost) by Louis Grabu and Robert Cambert. Neither the English court nor English theatre audiences could accept a play set continuously to music, let alone one in French; besides, the English theatre companies were too firmly entrenched to allow foreign opera a foothold in England.
Nevertheless, Restoration theatre audiences did demand musical interludes in their fare; well over 40 of the plays written and produced between 1663 and 1703 contain masques (see Price, 1979). Sir Robert Stapylton's The Slighted Maid (1663) with music by Banister had no fewer than three masques, and his The Step-mother (also 1663) with music by Locke had two. The pastoral drama offered other notable examples, such as Richard Fleckno's Love’s Kingdom (1664) and Thomas Shadwell's The Royal Shepherdess (1669), which has, in addition to much other music, a ‘masque of Shepherds and Shepherdesses’ that includes a song in stilo recitavito.
Restoration musical theatre productions were variously called masques (Crowne), plays with musical interludes and elaborate scenery (Davenant), operas (Locke), semi-operas (Roger North), or dramatic operas (Dryden). (To Pepys ‘the opera’ was a nickname for the Duke’s Theatre at Dorset Gardens.) The terms semi-opera and dramatic opera are now used interchangeably for a small number of 17th-century heroic dramas which include spoken dialogue as well as substantial masques or masque-like scenes, which may or may not relate to the drama, and which normally occur at the end of the acts.
The more substantial of these Restoration theatre or court masque productions are few indeed. Each is a work sui generis; together they do not represent a significant repertory or a distinguishable genre of entertainment; rather, they are the result of a mixture of traditional English masque elements and incidental theatre music with French ballet and dramatc poetry. A ‘grand ballet’ was performed at court in 1671 which, from several contemporary accounts, was in fact a court masque of considerable importance; some of the songs and dances have survived (see Holman, 1993), but unfortunately many details about this work are unknown. Equally obscure is information regarding four masque-like entertainments given at court between 1664 and 1668 and mentioned by John Evelyn in his Diary.
In 1673 Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco included in Act 4 scene 3 a substantial masque of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (fig.8). The music by Locke (in GB-Occ 692; ed. in MB, li, 1986) contains an extensive recitative that, more than in any other Restoration play, ingeniously furthers the action of the plot. In the play a young queen is tricked into murdering her own husband by her mother-in-law (the empress) during the presentation of a masque. Since this ‘plot within a plot’ is itself a tragedy continuously set to music, it is in fact a true opera in miniature and may well have served as the model for Blow's Venus and Adonis and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (Lewis, 1947–8); it is a significant departure from both the thematic symbolism of the court masque and the dramatically unrelated entries of the theatre masque. Locke's musical characterization and his flexible recitative-arioso enhance Settle's text considerably. The music vacillates between melodious recitative in duple metre and lighter triple-metre airs. Locke's declamation is sometimes quite effective, as in Orpheus's opening recitative ‘The groanes of Ghosts’. Notable also is Orpheus's last song, ‘For this signal Grace’, in 4/4, which is repeated in triple time in the final four-part chorus. The play initiated a pamphlet war between Settle and Dryden and was later burlesqued by Thomas Duffet.
The many Restoration revivals and adaptations of Shakespeare also borrowed the trappings of the masque. Davenant and Dryden's version of The Tempest (1667) included masque music; in 1674 it was again adapted, with enormous success, by Shadwell, and it included spectacular scenic effects and additional music by Pelham Humfrey for a new concluding masque of Neptune and Amphitrite. The music for both versions was a collaborative undertaking that included vocal music by Humfrey, Banister, Pietro Reggio and James Hart, instrumental music by Locke and dances by G.B. Draghi. The exact association of composers and music for the two productions poses a problem that continues to vex musical scholars (a score for the 1674 version was reconstructed by Tilmouth in MB, li, 1986). This ‘operatic’ revival of The Tempest proved an outstanding financial and popular success. The Duke's Company, and Betterton in particular, were convinced that the future lay in the inclusion of more music, more dancing and more ‘scenes and machines’; indeed, the more spectacle, the more the audience liked it. In 1673 there seems to have been an elaborate revival of Macbeth set as an ‘opera’ with music by Locke that contained a very popular antimasque for the witches. Masque music from this production was included in all the many popular revivals throughout the 17th and 18th centuries (although the famous score by William Boyce is probably not by Locke but very possibly by Richard Leveridge). In 1678 Shadwell also adapted Timon of Athens with music by Grabu, a theatre masque that was to be reset, more successfully, by Purcell in 1694. Both the 1673 Macbeth and the 1674 Tempest pointed the way towards the later semi-operas.
French influence was specially strong in Shadwell's Psyche, which was published in 1675 but probably staged in 1674 (see Arundell, 1957; Lefkowitz, 1979-80; Holman, 1993) and was the first dramatic musical score to be printed in English. This work was modelled on the tragédie-ballet Psyché (1671) by Molière, Corneille, Quinault and Lully, and set to music by Locke (entries and vocal music) and Draghi (dances). The French dancing-master St Andrée choreographed and danced in both the English and the French versions (see Lefkowitz, 1979-80), but although the dancing, poetry and choreography were heavily influenced by French practices, the music itself remained thoroughly English and closely related to masque traditions, and not all the text was set to music. Locke entitled his score ‘The English Opera’ and justified it as follows:
… it may justly wear the title (i.e. opera) though all the Tragedy be not in musik: for the Author prudently considere’d that though Italy was, and is the great Academy of the World for that Science and way of entertainment, England is not: and therefore mixt it with interlocutions, as more proper to our Genius.
Psyche became a subject of controversy between the English and French factions at court over the failed attempt by Grabu to establish a French-style academy for opera. Locke and Shadwell had the support of Batterton and of the Duke of Monmouth. The latter was the dedicatee and it was he who brought St. Andrée over from Paris: he also rehearsed the dancers and danced in the performances.
Psyche is the most extensive English dramatic score written before Purcell. It was produced at enormous expense and involved the complete artistic resources of the royal court and the Duke of York's Company. When Locke's vocal score is collated with Shadwell's text, which includes many additional indications for the music, instrumentation and dancing, a more complete view emerges: the production involved more than 100 actors, singers, instrumentalists and dancers; 15 musical scenes (symphony-recitative-air-chorus type), seven dance entries, nine complete scene changes, six antimasques, extensive use of deus ex machina and a large variety of musical instruments and consorts (see MB, li, 1986). Locke's original and forward-looking score may indeed be called a short score: its mainly four-part texture includes directions for various instruments and a rudimentary orchestration previously unknown in England. The music itself is thoroughly integrated into the plot, and the musical scenes expand the symphony-recitative-song-chorus formal design developed by Lawes. Importantly, these scenes are unified by a variety of ritornellos, used with impressive originality.
When compared to Cupid and Death or The Masque of Orpheus, Locke's music for Psyche is, however, disappointing. The recitatives are stiff and for the most part dramatically uninteresting, partly because Shadwell's detailed directions to Locke for composing the music were restrictive (Shadwell stated, in his preface, that he did not like to write tragedy, and he did not like recitative or writing in rhymed couplets), and partly because most of the major roles except Venus were not sung but spoken, having been written for actors of the Duke's Company, most of whom did not sing. There are some fine pieces in Psyche, however: the chant-recitative of the Chief Priest, ‘By sacred hyacinth’, in the Song of the Priests of Apollo in Act 2 is excellent dramatic writing, and as Westrup pointed out (NOHM, v), the scene of the Despairing Lovers is one that Purcell himself would have been proud to have written. The grand finale, a particularly forward-looking and extended musical scene knit together by a series of ritornellos and symphonies, is certainly the highest point yet reached in the development of musical drama in England. Together with his scores for Cupid and Death and the ‘Masque of Orpheus’ in The Empress of Morocco, Locke's Psyche represents the most important link between the earlier court masques of Lawes and the later semi-operas of Purcell. Locke must indeed be given credit both for transforming the court masque into theatre masque and semi-opera and for charting the course towards English opera.
The influence of the French ballets is again evident in John Crowne's Calisto (1675), produced at the Hall Theatre at enormous expense. Much of the music for this major court production is extant, all of it by Staggins (GB-Lbl Add.19759; EIRE-Dtc 413; and possibly US-NYp Drexel 3849; see Holman, 1993). Though entitled a masque, Calisto bears little resemblance to pre-Restoration court masques except in so far as the royal princesses, the Duke of Monmouth and several other members of the court – all costumed as symbolic figures – took part in the dancing. The prologue is actually an allegorical masque, and the rest of the singing and dancing consists of masque entries between the acts and at the end. A large number of documents for Calisto have survived (see Boswell, 1932, Holman, 1993 and Walkling, 1996), revealing much about the musicians and the expenditure on personnel, costumes, scenery and the like, including the fact that a sizeable instrumental group occupied the enclosed pit in front of the stage, with another placed behind the scenes; at least 21 of the musicians were French. The influence of French court ballets is seen in the use of a French overture, an allegorical prologue, the formal design of the acts, the musical intermedi and the style of the costumes and scenery. Most of the music, however, holds firmly to the musical traditions of the English masque and is easily recognizable as such.
Elements of the masquing tradition can also be found in the three short through-composed real operas of this period. Blow's Venus and Adonis (c1683), entitled a ‘masque for the entertainment of the King’, is a miniature opera despite its lack of dramatic conflict; and it includes short masque-like dance movements (e.g. the spelling lesson of Venus and the cupids). In 1685 Dryden wrote the opera Albion and Albanius, which he originally conceived as the prologue to his epic dramatic opera King Arthur; Grabu's uninspired score caused Dryden to select Purcell as the composer for King Arthur. Albion and Albanius is a political allegory, with dance, deus ex machina and other features of the masque. The third opera, Tate and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689), unifies the recitatives, choruses and dances of the masque tradition with the choral ballet plan of Lullian opera and with the clearly differentiated styles of aria and recitative of contemporary Venetian opera (see Moore, 1961, pp.43f). Dido and Aeneas itself was subsequently introduced as a masque interpolation in Gildon's arrangement of Measure for Measure (1700) and in other early 18th-century plays.
The most successful dramatic form of the Restoration was the heroic drama, which contained both spoken and musical scenes. It was also the most significant in perpetuating the masque interludes demanded by the growing audiences that frequented the new theatres (Lincoln's Inn Fields, Dorset Garden, Drury Lane and the Duke’s Theatre). The interpolation of these masque episodes into the heroic plays greatly influenced English dramatic opera, especially the outstanding works of Dryden and Purcell. Masque and antimasque scenes are indispensable ingredients of Purcell's semi-operas, where they are exploited not only for their popular appeal but also as structural links between the acts of the play. Purcell's most extensive masque is that celebrating the triumph of love in the last act of Dioclesian (1690). In King Arthur (1691) he incorporated three masque episodes, including the comic Frost Scene and the more ceremonial tableau in which Merlin (as in Britannia triumphans) waves his magic wand and brings forth the Fairest Isle. The Fairy-Queen (1692), an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, is in fact more masque than opera or drama. Its construction resembles that of the French comédie-ballet with detachable masques added at the end of each of the five acts, including the humorous scene of the Drunken Poet, a direct descendant of the antimasque. Purcell's other masques include those for the 1695 revival of The Tempest, which remained popular throughout the 18th century, and for The Indian Queen (by Dryden and his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard). The final masque in this production, The Masque of Hymen, was set by Purcell's brother Daniel, which suggests that Henry may have died before finishing the score.
Newspaper advertisements of the early 1700s testify to the continued popularity of English dramatic opera and the use of music in the theatre, and include special notices of the masques and musical interludes to be performed (M. Tilmouth: ‘A Calendar of References to Music in Newspapers’, RMARC, no.1, 1961); but the theatre masque tradition was threatened by the imported Italian opera. A group of artists, including the musicians J.C. Pepusch, John Eccles and J.E. Galliard, and poets led by John Hughes, Colley Cibber and William Congreve, refused to accept the immigrant genre and continued to write short semi-operas which they called masques. The affinity of these pieces with earlier masques lies in the classical or pastoral context of their plots, their comic sub-plots (antimasques), the use of recitative, songs and choral finales, and the careful attention paid to scenery and dancing.
These early 18th-century masques were ordinarily divided into two ‘interludes’ or ‘entertainments’ and were sometimes performed between the acts of larger dramatic works; they were as popular as the numerous Shakespeare revivals and Purcell's dramatic operas. One of the most notable during the first decade was Eccles's Acis and Galatea (1701) to a libretto by P.A. Motteux. In the same year a contest was held for the best musical score for Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris, and prizes were awarded to Eccles, Daniel Purcell, John Weldon and Gottfried Finger. During the second decade Pepusch was specially productive in this field; he furnished the music for Cibber's Venus and Adonis (1715), Barton Booth's The Death of Dido and Hughes's Apollo and Daphne (1716). Even closer to the earlier masque was Lewis Theobald's Decius and Paulina (1718), with music by Galliard.
Handel, no less than his English contemporaries, was influenced by the masque tradition: he studied Purcell's semi-operas and was well acquainted with Thomas Britton's library of earlier English music. Acis and Galatea (1718) was called a masque in more than one edition, and it was Handel's early version of The Masque of Esther that was later to become his first English oratorio. In his setting of Congreve's Semele (1743) Handel showed a new mastery of styles, synthesizing the best musical features of English masque and semi-opera with those of Italian opera. Further influences from the masque are evident in his music drama Hercules, the oratorio Solomon, the opera Alcina and elsewhere.
The newer 18th-century genres, such as John Rich's pantomime operas and the immensely popular ballad operas, were partly indebted to the masque tradition, and the tenacity of the tradition is clearly observable in the stage works of Thomas Arne, who had a particular interest in early masque librettos and wrote new music for revivals of Dido and Aeneas (1733), Comus (1738; ed. in MB, iii, 1951), The Tempest (1746), Dioclesian (1758), The Judgment of Paris (1740) and Alfred (1740, with the final chorus ‘Rule, Britannia’). Masques are also included in Sheridan's burlesque The Critic (1779), and in William Pearce's Windsor Castle or The Fair Maid of Kent and Peleus and Thetis (1795). The last, with music by J.P. Salomon, was performed for the marriage of the Prince of Wales.
Occasional masques were written during the 19th and 20th centuries for specific celebrations such as the marriage of the Prince of Wales in 1863, for which John Oxenford wrote Freya's Gift, with music by G.A. Macfarren. There have also been some 19th-century revivals, notably of the Masque of Flowers for the jubilee at Gray's Inn (1887) and again for the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria (1897). 20th-century revivals include several in both England and the USA of Campion's Masque in Honour of the Marriage of Lord Hayes, Shirley's Cupid and Death and a reconstruction of Davenant's Britannia triumphans produced by the Juilliard School of Music in 1953 in honour of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The influence of the masque tradition in the 20th century is strongest in the works of Vaughan Williams, especially in his Job, a Masque for Dancing, The Bridal Day: Masque for Dancing and On Christmas Night. Other masque-like works are Constant Lambert's Summer's Last Will and Testament, a masque for orchestra, chorus and baritone solo (1937), ‘words taken from the pleasant comedy in that name’ by Thomas Nashe (1593); Menotti's The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore, a madrigal for chorus, ten dancers and nine instruments (1956); and Malcolm Arnold's Song of Simeon, a nativity masque for mimers, soloists, mixed chorus and orchestra, to words by Christopher Hassall (1960). These few sophisticated 20th-century analogues and historical revivals do not, however, constitute the continuation of a viable tradition.
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