It was intrinsic to the ethos of court festival that masques were intended to be seen once and once only, the amount of money squandered on those unique occasions being testimony to the magnificence of the dynasty that could afford such things. There is, then, for many of Jonson’s masques no stage history beyond their initial performances, and these are discussed in detail in the introductions to individual texts in the print edition. Nonetheless, in later times a small number of masques have been revived or adapted, mostly in circumstances quite different from those for which they were originally designed. This composite essay surveys the masques’ scanty afterlife on the few occasions when some returned to the stage. The densest number of revivals came in the first decade of the twentieth century, a period when, for aesthetic and antiquarian reasons, there was a temporary vogue for masques, from which Jonson benefited alongside other writers of court festivals. This sudden upsurge of revivals is described by Roger Savage in section B of this essay. Sections A and C, by Martin Butler, glean what little there is to tell about masque revivals before 1900, and the slender but more significant trickle after 1910.
A. Masque performances from 1603 to 1900
Although Jonson’s masques were usually meant for unique occasions, a minority were in fact given repeat performances in or shortly after the same Christmas season, as the festive aspirations of the early Stuart court became more ambitious. For ease of reference, a list follows of the original performance dates of Jonson’s masques, tilts, and entertainments, and this makes the pattern of repeats clearly apparent:
| The Entertainment at Althorp | 25 and 27 June 1603 |
| The Magnificent Entertainment | 15 March 1604 |
| The Highgate Entertainment | 1 May 1604 |
| The Masque of Blackness | 6 January 1605 |
| Hymenaei | 5 January 1606 |
| Barriers | 6 January 1606 |
| The Two Kings’ Entertainment | 14 July 1606 |
| The Entertainment at Theobalds | 22 May 1607 |
| The Merchant Taylors’ Entertainment | 16 July 1607 |
| The Masque of Beauty | 10 January 1608 |
| The Haddington Masque | 9 February 1608 |
| Entertainment at Salisbury House | 5-11 May 1608 |
| The Masque of Queens | 2 February 1609 |
| Britain’s Burse | 11 April 1609 |
| Prince Henry’s Barriers | 6 January 1610 |
| Oberon | 1 January 1611 |
| Love Freed | 3 February 1611 |
| Love Restored | 6 January 1612 |
| A Challenge at Tilt | 27 December 1613; second part, 1 January 1614 |
| The Irish Masque | 29 December 1613; repeated 3 January |
| Mercury Vindicated | 6 January 1615; repeated 8 January |
| The Golden Age Restored | 1 January 1616; repeated 6 January |
| Merchant Adventurers’ Entertainment | 8 June 1616 |
| Christmas his Masque | December 1616 or January 1617 |
| The Vision of Delight | 6 January 1617; repeated 19 January |
| Lovers Made Men | 22 February 1617 |
| Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue | 6 January 1618 |
| For the Honour of Wales | 17 February 1618 (revised repeat of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue) |
| News from the New World | 6 January 1620; repeated 29 February |
| Pan’s Anniversary | 6 January 1621; repeated 11 February |
| The Gypsies Metamorphosed | 3 August 1621; repeated 5 August, 31 August - 9 September |
| The Masque of Augurs | 6 January 1622; repeated 5 May |
| Time Vindicated | 19 January 1623 |
| Neptune’s Triumph | January 1624 (unperformed) |
| The Masque of Owls | 19 August 1624 |
| The Fortunate Isles | 9 January 1625 |
| Royal Entry | Summer 1625 (unperformed) |
| Love’s Triumph through Callipolis | 9 January 1631 |
| Chloridia | 22 February 1631 |
| The King’s Entertainment at Welbeck | 21 May 1633 |
| Love’s Welcome at Bolsover | 30 July 1634 |
As this list shows, for a period of ten years in the middle of James’s reign, 1613-22, Jonson’s principal Christmas masques were regularly repeated, a courtesy which was extended to the one major masque in the period which Jonson did not write (Chapman’s Masque of the Twelve Months, 1619). This was a decade when Whitehall was increasingly dominated by James’s favourites, the Earl of Somerset and Duke of Buckingham, and the masques functioned as seasonal showcases for these men’s hold over the King’s affections, and for Buckingham’s dancing skills in particular. The Irish Masque was danced for Somerset’s wedding and was the first Stuart masque by any writer to have a second performance. Somerset’s rival Buckingham was introduced onto the public stage in Mercury Vindicated, and he subsequently became a principal masquer in all the others, with The Gypsies Metamorphosed, seen three times at Burley, Belvoir, and Windsor, being Jonson’s most overt celebration of the intimate bond between monarch and man. But after The Masque of Augurs a period of political tension intervened, and Stuart Christmas festivities acknowledged the changed climate by returning to the old formula of single performances. In the Caroline period, a few non-Jonsonian masques would be repeated – The Triumph of Peace in 1634 (a masque presented to the court, not by it); The Temple of Love in 1635 (three, maybe four performances); and Salmacida Spolia in 1640 – but for Jonson and all other masque writers, the custom of single performance generally prevailed. Too many or too frequent repeats risked diluting the ethos of the form.
There is, however, a remote possibility that some of the material used in the masques occasionally percolated onto the public stages, especially if professional players were creating songs, dances or costumes that had some residual value beyond the Whitehall performances. This seems to have happened with some dances from Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn (1613) which were apparently reused in performances of The Two Noble Kinsmen. The one putative Jonsonian example is the satyrs’ dance included in The Winter’s Tale, which may have recycled music and costumes from Oberon. The servant introducing the twelve dancers claims that three of their group, ‘by their own report … hath danced before the king’ (WT, 4.4.332-33): this perhaps means King James rather than Polixenes, and implicitly acknowledges that the company was reusing material from the recent court show. According to Simon Forman’s diary, The Winter’s Tale was on stage in May 1611, just five months after the court performance of Oberon. If, as seems likely, The Winter’s Tale was written in 1610, the satyrs’ dance could have been incorporated into performances staged in the wake of the masque. Alternatively, since the play was revived in 1612-13, 1618, and 1619, and since its text was relicensed in 1623, it is possible that the dances were added in at some point before the publication of the first folio, though the likeliest scenario is that any crossover took place early, in 1611. Whatever the date, if the satyrs were indeed refugees from Oberon, they are the sole surviving indication that Jonson’s masques had some contemporary stage life beyond Whitehall.
With the collapse of the Stuart court in 1642, the social and political circumstances which underpinned masques as a genre disappeared, and the impetus for masquing was diverted into other cultural forms. The late seventeenth-century stage saw a vogue for spoken plays into which masque-like episodes were interpolated. For these, the term ‘opera’ was used, while the label ‘masque’ was, confusingly, applied to texts we now think of as operas (such as Venus and Adonis and Dido and Aeneas). Some of these drew on masques by Davenant and Shirley, though no Jonsonian borrowings have as yet surfaced. The only Stuart court masque to have any currency on the eighteenth-century stage in its substantially original form was Milton’s Comus (in an adaptation by James Dalton, with music by Thomas Arne, first seen in 1738 and enduring in the repertoire until well into the nineteenth century), but we have to wait until the 1770s before an attempt was made to restage or adapt any of Jonson’s masques. During this decade, two shows described as ‘masques’ and based on Jonsonian originals were mounted: The Fairy Prince (1771) and The Druids (1774). These were professional productions staged at the London patent theatres, and neither was a revival in the modern sense, for they were not respectful of their sources’ original form or intention. Rather, they freely appropriated and rearranged material from Jonson’s masques in order to create diverting and quasi-operatic spectacles in contemporary style.
Before these two, the sole theatrical borrowing from any Jonsonian masque seems to have been a very brief passage in David Garrick’s operatic adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Fairies (1755). Garrick’s severely compressed version of Shakespeare’s play is enlivened with songs from Milton, Waller, Dryden, and others, and its second act ends with a scene in which Oberon and Puck command the fairies to pursue their work. The dialogue for this is contrived out of two passages taken from Hymenaei (378-70 and 300-05), combined with the air ‘Nay, nay, you must not stay’ from Oberon (310ff.), adapted as ‘But you must not yet long delay’. These borrowings are unacknowledged in the printed text. Garrick owned a substantial collection of Jonson quartos, and he was probably led towards the masques by his dealings with Peter Whalley, whose collected Jonson edition, published the following year, drew on his library (Lockwood, 2005, 21; Whalley, 1756, 1.xxxiv-vi). Eight years later, when Garrick collaborated with George Colman the elder on a full-scale adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he silently dropped the Jonsonian passages.
It was George Colman who was responsible for the adaptation of Oberon staged at Covent Garden in 1771 under the title The Fairy Prince. Colman (1732-1794) would accumulate a significant Jonsonian track-record: he adapted Epicene in 1776 and in 1784 wrote The Monthly Review’s critique of Francis Waldron’s continuation of The Sad Shepherd (Lockwood, 2005, 18). His version of Oberon turns it into a grand, patriotic piece: the advertisement for the premiere promised to show ‘the Principal Solemnities at the Installation of the Knights of the Garter’ rather than Jonson’s satyrs and fairies, which were merely the frame for a political celebration (G. W. Stone, 1962,3.1584) . Its impetus came from the public enthusiasm stirred up by the Garter investiture held at Windsor Castle in July 1771, the most spectacular such ceremonial for ten years. Ten noblemen were invested, including the eight-year-old Prince of Wales and his brother, Prince Frederick, the Bishop of Osnabruck. Drury Lane had responded to the excitement by mounting a ‘masque’ by Garrick, The Institution of the Garter, or Arthur’s Roundtable Restored. This afterpiece, with a cast that featured Edward III, the Black Prince, Sir Dingle his fool, the Genius of England, and a battery of Druids and Spirits, was ‘got up at vast expense both in scenery and dresses’ and ran for thirty-three nights from 28 October 1771 (Garrick, Plays, ed. Pedicord and Bergmann, 2.338-9) . The Fairy Prince was Colman’s answering Garter extravaganza at Covent Garden. First staged on 12 November, it ran continuously for four weeks and intermittently into the next year, with its thirty-sixth and final performance coming on 28 May 1772.
Since Oberon appeared in Whalley’s edition of Jonson with the subtitle ‘A Masque of Prince Henry’s’ (5.368), Colman must have felt it was a suitable choice. The correspondence between one youthful Prince of Wales and Prince George Augustus Frederick was too good to overlook. Colman explained that he intended to entertain the public ‘by the combined powers of the most eminent proficients in the Arts of Musick, Painting, and Poetry’ (Arne, The Fairy Prince, 1771, sig. [A3]), and the masque did indeed create an overwhelming patriotic spectacle. A prime highlight was the scenography, which included views of Windsor Castle and park, and ‘a Vision of the inside of St George’s Chapel … with the original Knights in their several Stalls’ (14). These scenes were designed by the court painter Giovanni Battista Cipriani in collaboration with the theatre painters Nicholas Dall and John Inigo Richards. The masque was given full operatic treatment by Thomas Arne, who was paid £120 for writing the music, and a condensed score, containing the dances, airs, and choruses but without the recitative, was published by Peter Welcker, printer to the Bishop of Osnabruck, at six shillings. The music is fully edited, and the details of the production are analyzed, by John Cunningham in the Music Archive of the present edition.
The performers included:
| Silenus | Frederick Reinhold |
| First Satyr | George Mattocks |
| Second Satyr | Du Bellamy |
| Third Satyr | Phillips |
| Fourth Satyr | Baker |
| Fifth Satyr | Fox |
| Sylvan | Robert Owenson |
| Fairies | Master Wood |
| Miss Brown | |
| Nymphs | Mrs Baker |
| Mrs Woodman |
The fairies were child performers making their stage debuts. Four years later, Miss Brown (the future Mrs Cargill) achieved fame when she created the role of Clara in The Duenna – and some notoriety because of her scandalous private life.
Colman’s adaptation skilfully creates a spectacular and varied pageant, mixing Jonsonian pastoral with robust political celebration of the kind favoured by eighteenth century audiences. There are three parts, each of which culminates with sensational scenery and music. The first part opens in ‘A wild country’ and compresses the first half of Oberon, with the dialogue between the satyrs and Silenus leading into a scene-change which discloses the Sylvans asleep in front of St George’s Chapel. The first air is an echo song, and carillons are used to accompany ‘Trap our shaggy thighs with bells’; ‘Buzz, quoth the blue fly’ is set as a lively catch. Colman adjusts the text to suggest that the new-come fairy prince brings about a moral reformation amongst the satyrs: they sing ‘Farewell Bacchus! We will serve / Young OBERON’ (5). But then, in place of the satyrs’ song to the moon, Colman introduces a pair of Wood-nymphs, who sing an adapted version of ‘See, see, oh see who here is come a-maying’ from Jonson’s Highgate Entertainment, with musical imitations of bird-song. Colman continues to stitch in new material with an exhortation to dance adapted from Hymenaei, after which the scene changes to represent the ‘Vision’ of the Chapel mentioned above, and a chorus is sung praising Windsor as a ‘Mansion of Princes’, borrowed from Gilbert West’s dramatic poem The Institution of the Order of the Garter (1742). The nymphs then have a recitative and air describing the sweetness of the court: this is adapted from lines sung by Delight at the start of The Vision of Delight. A final chorus in the energetic Handelian style for which Arne was renowned concludes this part with ‘LONG LIVE THE KING!’
In part two, set in the courtyard of Windsor Castle, a troop of fairies takes over, led by the two young principals. They sing airs and duets adapted from three songs accompanying the main masque dances in Oberon: ‘The solemn rites are well begun’, ‘Seek you majesty to strike’, and ‘Melt earth to sea’. These were linked with a passage of recitative based on the instructions given to the fairies by Mistress Quickly, disguised as the Fairy Queen, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 5.5.54-73. The fairies then introduce a grand procession to St George’s Chapel, led by the King and Garter knights, which is the spectacular highpoint of part two. In part three, set in Windsor Great Park, the fairies return for another dance, introduced by a duet based on the song ‘Nay, nay, / You must not stay’ from Oberon, and prefaced by a dialogue combining an Oberon fragment (‘the coarse and country fairy / That doth haunt the hearth or dairy’) with lines filleted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.2.380-9. Finally, a last grand scenic discovery takes place, revealing the interior of St George’s Hall with a procession of knights and the ceremonies of their feast, after which a hymn is sung to the glory of King George III, adapted from the chorus ‘Renown, assume thy trumpet’ that ends Dryden’s Albion and Albanius, probably using the original music written by Louis Grabu (Fiske, 1986, 360-3) .]. There may even have been additional spectacle not marked in the printed libretto, for the music includes a passage marked for ‘when St George descends’ (Arne, The Fairy Prince, 1771, 44).
The Achilles’ heel of this remarkable pastiche is the lack of correspondence between the structural centrepiece of Jonson’s original – the disclosure of Prince Henry in the role of Oberon – and the absence of any such figure from The Fairy Prince. In Covent Garden, the real Prince of Wales could not be made to appear, so although the Fairy Prince is talked about, as a character he is nugatory. Instead, the dramatic impact turned on the scenic revelations and the parade of knightly personnel, even though what the audience saw of the Garter noblemen was mimetically unconnected with the fairies of parts 2-3 who were, notionally, the prince’s companions but bore little relation to what was seen. In this respect, the use of material from Merry Wives offered some useful cement, bridging as that play does fairies, Windsor, and the Order of the Garter. The structural difficulty is further underlined by the disunity between part one of The Fairy Prince (the satyrs and nymphs) and parts two and three (the fairies). This shift of personnel corresponds broadly to the gap between Jonsonian antimasque and masque, and indicates how the aesthetic economy of court festival, shaped as it was by the physical presence of James and Henry, inevitably left a formal disunity when the masque moved into a new performance context. Moreover, the technical overkill at Covent Garden, where each of the three parts ended with new scenic revelations, contrasts with the simple elegance of Jonson’s structure, in which the masquers’ disclosure is the hinge of the whole text. Colman’s manoeuvres in adapting the text – the way that he stitched in passages from three other masques, and borrowed from Shakespeare, Dryden, and West – tells us something about the difficulty of reshaping Oberon in terms that could be made relevant to 1771. Nonetheless, Colman’s knowledge of the Jonson canon is impressive and suggests that he read widely in Whalley’s edition, and musically The Fairy Prince has scope, energy, and unity within its pleasing variety. Its combination of airs, duets, dances, and processional marches make it one of Arne’s most attractive pieces, an accomplished example of the vigorous patriotism in vogue at this time. The Fairy Prince also helped to provoke a small Jonson revival, for during its run it was offered as an afterpiece to two performances of Every Man In His Humour and five performances of Volpone.
Four years later, the performances of The Druids at Covent Garden were a quite different business. No author’s name survives for this farrago, advertised as ‘a new pastoral Masque and Pantomime interspersed’ (G. W. Stone, 1962, 3.1850), but the composer was John Abraham Fisher (1744-1806), whose other output included music for the pantomime Harlequin Jubilee (1770) and a witches’ scene for Macbeth (1780). An extravagant and farcical mixed entertainment, The Druids was designed to compete with a show at Drury Lane called The Maid of the Oaks, which was an intrigue involving lovers at cross-purposes, enlivened with an enchanted druid, a fête champêtre, a dance of Cupids and Hymen, and scenery ‘beyond description fine’ (G. W. Stone, 1962,, 3.1846). The Druids reworked and elaborated these motifs but with little concern for unity and logic (its title refers only to one element in a complicated mix), and interleaving everything with a laboured harlequinade. The printed songs make little sense on their own, and to explicate them one needs to refer to the synopses printed in The Westminster Magazine (1774), 602-3 and The Public Advertiser, 21 November 1774 – though even with the synopsis the masque remains pretty incoherent. It opened with pastoral songs and the Druid’s cave, but was quickly overtaken by knockabout episodes involving Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon and the Clown, that ranged through quick changes, collapsing ladders, flying teapots, magical transformations, and much acrobatic buffoonery. Into this silly variety show, for no apparent reason, arrived a Jonsonian Venus, in search of her runaway child Cupid, and accompanied by the Graces. She caught Cupid, but was rebuked by Hymen for neglecting her duties and commanded to bless the wedding of a noble bride and groom, whose marriage ceremonies – in another unexpected plot turn – were then elaborately played out. But these were interrupted by the return of Harlequin and more interminable pantomime, until the burlesque was reined in by a Druid, and a Pastoral Nymph called on the company to celebrate the wedding with revels and dancing.
As will be evident, the central episode of The Druids involving Venus, Cupid, and Hymen was borrowed from Jonson’s Haddington Masque, using a dozen lines from Venus’ first speech and the second Grace’s first stanza, followed by Cupid’s address to his Sports, his explanation that he must ‘light the bride’, and two lines from Hymen’s rebuke to Venus. Much of the remaining material was a mosaic of borrowings from Jonson and elsewhere. Hymen’s air directing Venus to wait on the bridal couple adapted the lines that Garrick’s The Fairies had taken from the introduction of the masquers in Hymenaei, and Venus’s reply combined lines from Haddington and Hymenaei. The ensuing duet between Venus and Hymen used part of the epithalamion appended to Hymenaei, and the chorus to the duet between bride and groom took lines from the Haddington epithalamion. The opening song from Hymenaei was given to one of the Druids as an air, the Pastoral Nymph’s invocation was a song from Hymenaei urging the masquers to dance, and the words of the final chorus used further lines from the Hymenaei epithalamion. In addition, some of the other material given to the Druid as an invocation and air was taken from Thomas Carew’s masque Coelum Britannicum (1634), in which, handily, a chorus of druids participates. The opening vapid pastoral verses were from ‘Day, a Pastoral’, published in 1766 by the popular minor poet John Cunningham (1729-1773), and the air ‘That beauty thus smiling and gay’ was adapted from Cunningham’s ‘On the approach of May’ in The Poetical Calendar (1761). Cunningham’s links with the contemporary school of landscape poetry and the masque’s use of the druid motif amply attest to its canny exploitation of modish themes in late eighteenth-century culture.
The Druids opened on 19 November 1774, and The Westminster Magazine (1774), 603complained severely about its stupidity: ‘Such are the outlines of The Druids, which is a heterogeneous jumble of monstrous absurdities; and, if considered merely as a vehicle for music, dances, and decorations, is, in our opinion, far inferior to the dramatic monstrum horrendum of the other theatre [The Maid of the Oaks]. Both pieces, however, are equally an insult on the understanding and judgments of the Public, and exhibit striking proofs of the miserably depraved state of the English Theatre, whose entertainments are at present conducted by Managers either destitute of taste and abilities, or actuated by no other than the paltry, despicable motives of vanity, prejudice, and avarice.’ But despite such condescending criticism, The Druids was enthusiastically received: it ran for nearly sixty performances, the last being on 11 May 1775. Judging by the advertisements, the big draw was not Venus and Cupid but the pantomime and dances, and at several points in the run new scenes or new material were added – notably a wild beast in masquerade, and a novelty act, Signor Rossignol, who did birdsong imitations and somehow played a concerto on a violin without strings (G. W. Stone, 1962, 3.1860, 1877). The cast for the early performances overlapped significantly with that for The Fairy Prince:
| Bridegroom | George Mattocks |
| First Druid | Frederick Reinhold |
| First Shepherd | Du Bellamy |
| Second Shepherd | Fox |
| Hymen | Master George |
| Cupid | Master Loader |
| Speaking Druid | Booth |
| Bride | Miss Dayes |
| Venus and Pastoral Nymph | Miss Brown |
| Graces | Mrs Baker |
| Mrs Ogilvie | |
| Mrs Willems |
The Fairy Prince and The Druids help to show why Jonson’s masques made only a limited impact on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stages. It is perhaps surprising that the masques had so little appeal, for their grotesque humour, fanciful characters, and scenic inventiveness could easily have been elaborated in the same way that (for example) Shakespeare’s Tempest was, at this time, subject to endless spectacular development. But the compilers of The Fairy Prince and The Druids had little interest in the original purposes of the masques, and turned to Jonson mainly for the sake of his lyricism and sententiousness, while neglecting the opportunities for comedy and contrast that lurked in the antimasques. Probably the masques’ humour seemed too embedded in the historical past, whereas their idealizing and moralizing aspects could at least be translated into readily apprehensible terms. This produced in The Fairy Prince a coherent and successfully integrated text, albeit one radically transformed from its original purpose; by contrast, the authors of The Druids approached Jonson merely a quarry for conveniently picturesque plot points. Neither adaptation showed much sense of the structural economy of the Jonsonian masque, or of the opportunities for controlled aesthetic contrast so germane to the form.
Arguably, the one great eighteenth-century artist who might have appreciated the masques’ dramatic power was Henry Fuseli, who, alongside his better-known illustrations to Shakespeare, also produced two paintings based on The Masque of Queens: The Mandrake: A Charm, exhibited in 1785 and now owned by the Mellon Collection at Yale, and The Witch and the Mandrake, exhibited in 1812 and now owned by Galerie Bollag, Zurich. Both are derived from the verses in which the third Hag describes using a mandrake in her charms. The earlier picture shows the witch crouching on the ground in search of the mandrake, and in the later she sits gloomily contemplating the humanoid plant she has harvested. Fuseli later made a pair of engravings based on these designs, sketches for which are in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Tomory, 1972, 123-4; Brown, 1979). The startlingly obscure and nightmarish quality of these images suggests that Fuseli responded to The Masque of Queens in terms quite different from those exhibited in the two contemporary adaptations, bringing an imaginative power to them akin to that he instilled into his illustrations for Macbeth. These were not opportunities which any theatre of the time managed to translate into usable practice, though the witches did achieve some musical popularity in a glee, The Witches’ Song and Chorus, written in 1799 by Richard John Samuel Stevens (1757-1837). Stevens was a founder of the Harmonists’ Society, a gentleman’s glee club that met privately in London for the singing of partsongs. His Witches’ Song sets twenty-six lines from the masque and is a long, lively piece, alternating solos from four witches with vigorous choral writing in which the hags celebrate their orgies. It was sung at a concert for the Princess of Wales at Blackheath in 1799, then repeated at the Harmonists’ annual vocal concert in 1803, 1805, and 1810, and at private dinners in 1822, 1823, and 1827. Stevens printed The Witches’ Song in 1808 in a collection of his glees; the words alone were collected by the musical antiquary Richard Clark in The Words of the Most Favourite Pieces Performed at the Glee Club, the Catch Club, and Other Public Societies (1814). It is fully reproduced and documented in the Music Archive to the present edition.
It would be another 125 years before there was any repetition of the brief flurry of eighteenth-century performances. Outside the collected Jonson editions, the masques remained for the Victorians largely unvisited territory, and apart from Comus, no Stuart masque was restaged until the landmark revival of The Masque of Flowers at Gray’s Inn in 1887. One possible exception to this general neglect is Lewis Carroll, who, as Edmund Wilson (1938) , 218 observed, echoed the tumbling rhythms of Fant’sy’s nonsense speech in The Vision of Delight in some of his own nonsense poetry. ‘I passed by the garden and marked with one eye / How the owl and the panther were sharing the pie’ seems to develop from an appreciative reading of ‘Yet would I take the stars to be cruel, / If the crab and the rope-maker ever fight duel’ (etc). But the absence of a taste for the masques and the lack of comprehension about the form are evident in Thomas Carlyle’s sympathetic yet perplexed account of Jonson’s masques for Prince Henry:
Certainly it is a circumstance worth noticing that surly Ben, a real poet, could employ himself in such a business, with the applause of all the world; it indicates an age very different from ours. An age full of pageantry, of grotesque symbolising, – yet not without something in it to symbolise. That is the notable point. Innumerable masques and masqueradings: a general social masquerade, it almost seems to us, with huge bulging costumes and upholstery, stuffed out with bran and tailors’ trimmings: yet within it there still is a reality, though a shrunken one, an ever farther shrinking one. Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and other such can still work as tiremen for it. How could it stand on its own feet otherwise? A social masquerade fallen altogether empty collapses on the pavement, amid the shrieks of the bystanders, – as in these last times of ours we see it sorrowfully do! To the heart of Ben, of Francis, and of all persons, here was still a real king and a real prince; whose knighthoods, cavalcadings, and small and great transactions, the melodies and credibilities had not yet disowned …
Carlyle uses the masques as a stick with which to beat his own age, but he is unable to escape the negative perception that they were essentially frivolous extravagances and ‘grotesque symbolising’. For him, the masques have insufficient redeeming ethical purpose: they do not speak meaningfully to the present time, and it remains a besetting paradox that ‘surly Ben’ should have contributed to such things. It was not until the twentieth century that theatre companies, music historians, and amateur performers began to retrieve the masques in their own terms, and see possibilities in them that had hitherto been almost completely overlooked.
B. Reviving the Masques in the Early Twentieth Century: ‘A Quarry for Profitable Working’; by Roger Savage
B.1. London Shows: The Haddington Masque , The Vision of Delight and Christmas His Masque
Perhaps the most remarkable phase in the theatrical revival of Jonson’s masques was that between 1902/03 and 1911. There were six stagings. The Haddington Masque came first in 1902/03, staged under its Gifford-given name The Hue and Cry after Cupid in an al fresco double bill with Milton’s Comus: the first show mounted by the Mermaid Society for the Production of Old English Plays, a group founded and directed by Philip Carr (1874-1957) (see Gale Research, 1978, 1.387). Carr was clearly alert to various fin-de-siècle phenomena: the newly widespread enthusiasm for the plays and lyric verse of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the interest in open-air stagings of Renaissance drama, the commitment of such people as Robert Bridges, Walter Crane, Edward Gordon Craig, W. B. Yeats, and C. R. Ashbee to the masque as a viable modern form, and not least the practical revival by the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn in July 1887 (to mark Queen Victoria’s jubilee) of the anonymous Masque of Flowers (R. Judge, 1993), an entertainment their Inn had given before King James in 1614. In 1897 H. A. Evans’s pioneering anthology of Stuart masques was published; in it The Masque of Flowers was said to have ‘the unique distinction of a modern revival’ (Evans, 1897, 100) . Carr and his company would challenge and change that.
The Mermaids may have given their Comus-Cupid double bill privately at Thorpe Lodge, Airlie Gardens, Campden Hill in the summer of 1902. Percy Simpson in his commentary on the masques mentions such an event and includes a cast list for it that seems trustworthy (H&S, 10.483) ; but it is possible that he records the year of the Thorpe Lodge performance incorrectly, 1904 being more likely than 1902. However, the double bill’s performance at the Botanical Gardens, Regent’s Park, on 1 July 1903 was definitely the show’s unveiling to press and public. (Simpson’s implication of 1902 for this is misleading.) The opening was happy and seemingly auspicious. After a fortnight’s run in repertory with Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, the double bill, according to Nigel Playfair (the Comus in Carr’s production), went on tour — among other places to Peterborough and Sheffield (Playfair, 1930, 169) . (The Oxford Companion to the Theatre would add Oxford to the list of cities visited, but there seems to be no corroboration for this: Hartnoll, 1983, 542). The following summer the show was revived; the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald for 15 July 1904 reviews an open-air performance on the lawns close to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.
Playfair tells us that the show’s named characters were played by professionals, while the ‘rabble’ – he’s referring to Comus but doubtless they doubled as the dancers and other supers in Hue and Cry – were mainly art students (Playfair, 1930, 168). At least two casts of Hue and Cry principals were involved in the project as a whole:
|
Thorpe Lodge 1902 or ’04 Stratford 1904 |
Botanical Gardens, July 1903 | |
| Venus | Ada Potter | Elizabeth Kirby |
| Cupid | Geraldine Wilson | Philip Tonge |
| Hymen | Mr Wegg [Thorpe Lodge] | Henry Latimer |
| Aglaia | Mary Marbin / May Martin | Margaret Bussey |
| Thalia | Hilda Fletcher | Bertha Kingston |
| Euphrosyne | Miss Taylor | Elizabeth Wardell |
(A ‘Hymen’ appeared at Stratford too, but the Herald, while mentioning the character, omits the performer’s name.) These cast details, along with other evidence from the reviews, suggest that Carr’s production used the first 180-or-so lines of Jonson’s text, up to and including at least part of Hymen’s first speech, and that the show also included all or some of the closing Epithalamion, ‘agreeably recited’ (the Athenaeum reported) by Venus and the three Graces. But there is general silence about Jonson’s character of Vulcan and the spectacular – arguably central – episode of the zodiac he is given in the original. Clearly he and it were cut by Carr. Since these were open-air performances, the original scene-and-machine ideas were cut too. As for music and dance, given that for the Comus the musical director, Charles W. Smith, used Henry Lawes’ 1634 songs supplemented with numbers taken from Playford and Locke (Smith, 1904) , it is likely the music for Hue and Cry (played by a hidden ensemble) was also to an extent ‘historically informed’. The Stratford Herald’s review of Hue and Cry mentions ‘an enchanting dance’ which followed the entrance of Cupid ‘attended by boys’, and a ‘procession of bride, bride-groom, and brides-maids . . . [to] beautiful music’, which may well have involved more dancing. Presumably the musically supported wedding procession (interspersed perhaps with those recitations from the Epithalamion) was Carr’s formal equivalent to Jonson’s dance-scene of zodiac-signs and priest-musicians.
The Mermaid Society seems to have faded out around 1905, but Carr was prepared to return to Hue and Cry and mount a further staging on 19 May 1911 at the St James’s Theatre, as part of a charity matinee (Schafer, 1999a, 157-9). The accounts of this revival in the Daily Chronicle and Stage suggest that, broadly at least, the show (lasting ‘about half and hour’) retained the scenario of the early 1900s production. Thus there was charming comedic play with Cupid (now Valerie Fleming to Evelyn Millard’s Venus), the entry of an anonymous bride and groom (played by Marie Löhr and Ben Webster), dances and processions, a spoken Epithalamion, incidental music ‘collected from the work of Seventeenth-Century composers’ – and no evidence of a Vulcan speaking or showing off his zodiac-device. The masqueof course was now an indoor show: the greensward had to be artificial, and a playful Cupid stepped out over the footlights, eventually bringing the bridal party up through the auditorium. It was also now a show staged for a good theatrical cause, with a lot of the profession eager to be involved, so Venus and the Graces were joined by quite a synod of divinities for the hue and cry itself, and they stayed on for the wedding celebrations, Juno, Ceres, and Iris among them, which suggests, as Elizabeth Schafer (1999a), 157 says, ‘a considerable cross-fertilisation from The Tempest’. The Times (20 May 1911) recorded that the ‘whole host of charming actresses and children and several male wedding guests’ together constituted ‘a star cast’, while The Daily Chronicle (20 May 1911) was Aesthetically lost for words to describe the grace and opulence of it all.
The animator of the 1911 charity show was the actress Lena Ashwell, who by that date must have known Philip Carr for about fifteen years, very probably seeing his Mermaid Society productions in the 1900s. This would not only explain why she asked him to re-stage his Hue and Cry, but also suggest a link between its first Mermaid staging and her production at the Kingsway Theatre of another Jonson masque, The Vision of Delight (Ashwell, 1936, 168). Ashwell had become the Kingsway’s lessee and manager in 1907, and was in charge of the benefit matinée given there in the afternoon of 14 May 1908 at which an all-female cast paid its respects to the actress and teacher of actresses Adeline Billington, 82 years old and ‘mother of the stage’. Ashwell, an eager suffragist and one of the most ‘new-womanly’ of female theatre managers at that time, had things to demonstrate about the roles and position of women in theatre. Said The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News of the benefit, ‘the ladies who undertook it proved fully able to dispense with the assistance of mere men’ (23 May 1908). The Vision itself was given at the end of a long afternoon: a canny choice of a Jonson masque for an all-woman troupe, since it’s the only one in which all the speaking and singing parts are either gendered feminine or not gendered at all.
The review of the Vision in The Times (15 May 1908) implies that its text was done pretty much complete, including part at least of Phant’sie’s big speech beginning ‘Bright Night, I obey thee’, though ‘the anti-masque . . . [was] left out’. Ashwell herself played Phant’sie, Lilian Braithwaite Wonder, Constance Collier Delight, Marion Terry Peace, and Marie Löhr Laughter, while ‘half a dozen other ladies of high position in the theatrical world took part with them in an elaborate ballet-scene arranged by Madame Cavallazi.’ The printed programme indicates that there were also a female chorus and groups of female Phantasms and Beauties of the Spring dancing, miming or striking poses plastiques. Men were in evidence backstage, however. Production was by Edward Knoblauch. The Times records that ‘clever’ music – Elvie Greene sang Night’s song and Cicily Gleeson-White Aurora’s – had been specially written by William Henry Bell in a ‘graceful and wholly original’ style, and the design of the ‘gorgeous and picturesque’ costumes (Edith Craig helped with their execution) was credited to Charles Ricketts. Bell later settled in South Africa, and the Bell Archive in the Cape Town University Library holds a manuscript score and some instrumental parts of his Vision music: a dozen numbers, including some action- and mélodrame-pieces, at least five dances and several solo songs and choruses. None of the literature concerning Ricketts mentions the Vision, however, so it is possible that costumes of his that had been designed earlier for other plays, fancy-dress parties and such were used in the masque.
Three years later, the theatrical profession was putting together a grand gala, to be given under Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s direction at His Majesty’s Theatre on 27 June 1911, in honour of George V’s coronation. As things turned out, this too included a staging of The Vision of Delight, though it was a late addition to the programme. Lena Ashwell was again the instigator. At the time the gala’s bill of fare was being decided, only a few major actresses were detailed to take part in what was to be very largely a men’s show; but Ashwell insisted that there should be something ‘in which all the women might appear’ and, after a little astute moral blackmail, got her way. Presumably because time pressed for putting out publicity and for the printing of the souvenir programmes, she was ‘given twenty-four hours to get the approval of the actresses and find a suitable play’. But
both these obstacles were easy to overcome as everyone wanted to be included, and I had already produced ‘The Vision of Delight’ by Ben Jonson for a benefit performance at the Kingsway and had had special music written for it. On that memorable [royal gala] night this lovely little masque ended the programme.
(Ashwell, 1936, 167-168; cf. Schafer, 1999a, 156-157)
At the gala Ashwell repeated her role of Phant’sie, Marion Terry reprised Peace, and Collier, Braithwaite, and Löhr reappeared too, though in different parts from their 1908 ones. Prompt-copies for the 1911 performance in the Bristol University Theatre Collection reveal that a six-stanza dawn poem by Herbert Trench, ‘Larks in Multitude’, was added, probably at the end of Phant’sie’s big speech, each stanza being given to a different attendant on Delight, presumably so that these ladies would at least have a little to say or sing. The souvenir programme credits Bell with ‘music specially composed’ for the Vision; but it is clear that ‘specially’ here means specifically for Ben Jonson’s script, not uniquely for this gala, for there is an acknowledgement that the music had been ‘kindly lent by Miss Lena Ashwell’.
Bell’s solo singers were even more starry in 1911 than in 1908: Agnes Nicholls was Aurora and Clara Butt Night. And not only were the singers new. Tree was now the director. (He was no suffragist (Ashwell, 1936, 164), but at least he had been in the audience for the 1908 Billington benefit, as the Era review of it had noted.) Lillie Langtry and Lillah McCarthy joined the speaking ladies; indeed, most of the female stars of the day took part as named characters or supernumeraries, except for Lady Tree, Adelaide Calvert, Winifred Emery, Madge Kendal, Marie Tempest, and Ellen Terry, who had appeared in one celebrated dramatic extract or another earlier in the gala evening. Dresses were credited to Percy Anderson, scenery to R. McCleery, choreography to Fred Farren. Herbert Trench’s prologue to the Vision, a theatrum mundi invention spoken by Mrs Patrick Campbell and reprinted complete in the Era’s review (1 July 1911), begins:
Princes, behold a Masque, a vizored Image of things,
A merry Shadow of things eternal – dust of a rose
Gathered three centuries gone for a merry-making of Kings –
Life it hath still and fragrance, infinity and repose.
The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (8 July 1911) did find some life in it and printed a group-sketch by Thomas Downey of its more vocal leading ladies, showing them very Edwardianly (or rather just-Georgianly) coiffured and gowned. Other trade- and picture-papers found fragrance in the piece but not a great deal more. The Stage noted – and the prompt-copies confirm – that ‘the scene of the masque was a simple arrangement with columns, two in the foreground and two upstage, which gave an air of grace and simple grandeur to the scene’, and that, at the end, ‘the various characters, each holding a cornucopia filled with flowers, scattered them in the auditorium’.
William Henry Bell is probably unique in having had a hand in the music for two Jonson masques at two different locations in the same month. June 1911 for him meant not only The Vision of Delight at His Majesty’s but also Christmas his Masque at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, where an open-air theatre seating 10,000 had been specially erected – albeit not only to stage Jonson’s Christmas piece! For the previous eighteen months or so, Bell had been involved as Master of the Music in the preparations for the enormous Pageant of London directed by Frank Lascelles, the centrepiece of a ‘Festival of Empire’ which had been planned for the summer of 1910 but postponed because of the death of Edward VII. The Pageant was eventually premiered in June 1911 in the Crystal Palace grounds so as to chime with the coronation of King George, its four extensive parts being given in repertory over the summer months (Lomas, 1911; Ryan, 1999). Bell had the job of composing or arranging – or of prevailing on colleagues to compose or arrange – incidental music to go with each of the show’s historical scenes (Savage, 2003, 13). He himself saw to Scene 2 of Part 3, ‘The Meeting of the Old World and the New’, devised by the archivist Sophie Lomas and conflating elements from three courtly masquing events of 1616-1618: the performance of Christmas his Masque itself before King James, the visit of Princess Pocahontas to his court to see another masque (ironically, The Vision of Delight), and James’s famous fit of impatience during the staging of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. From these Lomas confected a Jacobean soirée in which the king receives Pocahontas, is bored by some of the formal dancing performed by his courtiers, and is then presented with the traditional English pleasures of Christmas his Masque. In the substantial Souvenir that Lomas edited of the whole Pageant, she claims that this particular masque ‘fits well into our Pageant scheme, for the players were [in 1616] city lads all, “come out of the lanes of London”’ (Lomas, 1911, xi, xv, 99-107, 164).
The masque was staged by members of the Crystal Palace School of Art, with choreography by Mlles. Forestier and Ginner. The Souvenir records that for the scene as a whole Bell arranged pieces from circa 1600 by Byrd, Gibbons, Pilkington, and Rosseter, adding Edward German’s celebrated ‘Pastoral Dance’ (from circa 1900!) for good measure. But clearly these were all intended for the sequence of formal courtly dances that Lomas places before the Christmas masque: a sequence that earns both a drawing and a photograph in the Illustrated London News. The Souvenir does not reveal what tunes were used for Jonson’s lyrics in the masque itself or for its dance of city lads; and unfortunately there is no relevant material in the Cape Town Bell Archive. We do know, though, that Lomas was aiming generally at a measure of ‘authenticity’. She tells us enthusiastically in the Souvenir that ‘of this Masque we have not only the text, but every detail of character and costume’, so that a modern audience can be shown the Real Thing. The size and acoustic hazards of Lascelles’ open-air stage may have made for problems, however. Because of these, in the Pageant-tetralogy as a whole there was much more singing than speech, and much more pure movement, often to instrumental music, than either. What then to do with Jonson’s words? To judge by the script for Christmas his Masque as Lomas prints it in the Souvenir, a working compromise was reached. Jonson’s stage directions all appear, as does his verse, which must have been sung near-complete. (The long ‘Hum drum, sauce for a coney’ is printed in extenso, but with a scrupulous footnote saying that ‘only part of this song will be sung’.) As for his prose dialogue, Christmas’s opening tirade is printed, and so presumably was boomed out; but the three later dialogue-episodes are reduced to brief two- or three-line summaries. One could speculate that these episodes were done in dumb-show, or as some kind of semi-farcical slapstick with a few crucial Jonsonian words shouted out.
B.2. A Stratford-upon-Avon Show: Pan’s Anniversary
Edwardian and Georgian stagings of Stuart court masques were not limited to those originating in London, though it may well have been the Mermaid Society’s out-of-town touring of Hue and Cry with Comus after their London run that stimulated such provincial revival work as there was. Thus the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald’s review of Carr’s double bill as given in the grounds of the Memorial Theatre in 1904 notes pointedly that ‘it is the first time, and one sincerely hopes that it may not be the last, that the Masques of the seventeenth century have been presented in Shake-speare’s town’ (15 July 1904). That hope may well have been shared by the committee of the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Club; and if they decided to act on it, they had only to look into Evans’s anthology of English Masques to find a Jonson piece that they could themselves mount in the open air as part of the municipal Shakespeare festivities the following year: Pan’s Anniversary, which Evans encouragingly describes as ‘a summer entertainment . . . requiring but little scenery’ (H. A. Evans, 1897, 161). Further, perhaps responding as warmly as had the Times critic to Carr’s inclusion in Comus of ‘a Pavane, a Morris dance [and] an admirably managed Rout’, they may have remembered that there was a folk-dance troupe only about six miles away at Bidford-on-Avon: one which had visited Stratford on Shakespeare’s Birthday in 1904 itself (Jaggard, 1960, 76) and which could certainly field a Morris dance if not a pavan (Graham, 1907). So mightn’t the Bidford team be cast as the antimasque-troupe the Pan’s Anniversary text called for? It might, and was.
Surviving evidence about the Pan’s Anniversary staging at Stratford in April 1905 under the Club’s auspices is extensive. It includes an embarrassingly quaint but admirably fact-filled printed programme, several reviews and letters, scores of the music used, and so on. Much of this material is preserved in the Library or the Records Office of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon). The principal exception, the cache of manuscript scores by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and the copyists who worked for them, is at the British Library (Add. MSS 57909 and 71476-7). The show’s music had an interesting pre-history. The Shakespeare Club, per the project’s secretary F. W. Evans, contacted the musicologist William Barclay Squire of the British Museum’s music library to ask if there was an extant original score for Pan’s Anniversary. (They were perhaps hoping to emulate the Mermaid Society’s use of the original Lawes score for Comus.) On 2 March 1905, Squire wrote them ‘no’ and recommended Nicholas Gatty or Vaughan Williams to write new music for them: music which might, he thought, include orchestrations of some dances from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, which Squire himself had recently co-edited with J. A. Fuller Maitland. Squire outlined the musical items that would be needed, and hoped to send a photograph of that seminal Gray’s Inn Masque of Flowers (a show he had had links with). The Shakespeare Club took his advice; Vaughan Williams duly became their composer-in-chief on 6 March – ‘it is a work that I should be very interested to undertake’, he told them – and there followed a practical correspondence between Evans and the composer covering every aspect of the production (Cobbe, 2008, ch. 1, nos. 34-36) . Since time pressed so, Vaughan Williams co-opted Holst to orchestrate dance- and song-material taken from the folk and from Elizabethan resources so as to provide music for the formal dances and revels, while he himself undertook to set Jonson’s four ‘hymns’ and write some brief instrumental numbers. He would eventually provide an explanatory note for the programme about composers, musical sources etc.: a note reprinted in full by Michael Kennedy in his catalogue of Vaughan Williams’s works (Kennedy, 1998, 28-29) .
The Stratford Pan’s Anniversary was given on 24 April – an Easter Bank Holiday Monday – as part of the three-week, April-May season of Shakespeare birthday celebration festivities, ‘with a view’, the Stage’s review suggested, ‘to increasing the attraction of the festival’ (27 April 1905; cf.Jaggard, 1960, 76-77). (Shakespeare’s official Birthday was 23 April, but in 1905 that was Easter Sunday, and Lord’s Day Observance forbad secular spectacle.) After various traditional civic birthday events in the morning, the masque was performed at 2.30. The cast was: first Nymph – Cissie Saumarez; second Nymph – Elaine Sleddall; third Nymph – Kate Cordingley; the Fencer – Edgar Waithman; the Old Shepherd – Henry Hickling, with local gentlemen and (sic) ladies in eight couples as the Arcadian masquers and the Shake-spearean Bidford Morris dancers as the antimasquers. There were also sixteen schoolgirl maypole-dancers. The chorus and orchestra of the Stratford-upon-Avon Choral Union were conducted by Vaughan Williams, the orchestra augmented at his request by players from the town band and theatre band. Messrs Hickling and Waithman, the Shepherd and Fencer, were both members of the Shakespeare Club’s Committee of Management for the masque and so could have been useful liaison officers with the cast. There seems to have been no ‘director’ as such. At least one cast-member, Cissie Saumarez, was a member of the Frank Benson Company, resident at the time in the Memorial Theatre for the Shakespeare Celebration. Benson seems to have lent costumes for the principal speaking and singing characters in the masque, while the dancing masquers’ finery, according to the Stage review, was hired from the costumiers Messrs Harrison. The Bidford Morris Dancers may well have carried an air of authenticity with them: their previous visits to Stratford had included one during their glory-year of 1886, when the Herald noted that D’Arcy Ferris, their squirarchical founder, had ‘taken great pains in reviving the dance as it was produced in Shakespeare’s time’ (Judge and Chandler, 1985, 24 ; cf. Judge, 1984 ); and, as we have seen, there was another visit in 1904 when, as the Herald of 24 April described it, ‘the band went dancing and pranking up and down in every part of the town . . . It seemed like a veritable bit of the “Merrie England” of olden days fallen curiously upon these strenuous times.’ Though possibly modified here and there, the verse and prose of Jonson’s original text were seemingly uncut in Stratford’s Pan’s Anniversary, except for a very likely slimming and trimming of the Fencer’s first scene, which may well have struck the Shakespeare Club as over-long, over-allusive, not easy to grasp in the open air, and anyway hard in some parts to square with the antimasque performers taking part. The scene runs for over one hundred lines in the original; contrast The Stage’s comment that ‘the dialogue of the masque is very brief’ (27 April 1905).
The show was given on and around a large platform set up in the Bancroft Gardens, close to the north face of the old Memorial Theatre. ‘Tall budding poplars’ formed the wings. Chorus members, placed on each side of Pan’s altar, joined the Nymphs in the singing of Vaughan Williams’s hymn-settings. The masquers made a danced entrance (to a number orchestrated from William Ballet’s Lute Book) and after the second hymn performed a pavan, their main ‘Elizabethan Daunce in Court enfoldings’. Through an odd misreading of Jonson’s geography, it was assumed that the ‘Boeotians’ and ‘Thebans’ of the antimasque were two distinct tribes or teams which enjoyed a ‘wholesome rivalry’, so each was given its own musical intrada and Morris Dance (at lines 127 and 217 respectively); and the masque’s ‘revels’, conceived as a display of Merrie England-type country merrymaking, included a contest between the two teams in tilting, fencing and wrestling at the quintain (following a hint in the Herald’s first speech), along with a further courtly dance from the Arcadians (a galliard) and ‘a Maypole Daunce by ye Schole Maydens’ to folk-melodies.
The papers liked the show and were impressed by the size of the audience. The Leamington Spa Courier (28 April 1905) felt it was ‘impossible to compute accurately the numbers who witnessed this quaint al fresco entertainment’ but settled for ‘thousands’, which might seem hyperbolic except that the day was Easter Monday and three railway companies had run special Bank Holiday excursions to Stratford. Though for many in the audience ‘the words of the masque never reached their ears’, the Courier felt that they all enjoyed the music, the dancing, ‘the brilliant combinations of colour in the rich Elizabethan dresses, the fantastic garb of the more homely dancers . . . [and] the chaste dresses of the little maypole dancers’. The second antimasque Morris (to ‘Shepherd’s Hay’) especially intrigued The Stratford Herald (28 April 1905): ‘with their skins of goats the [Bidford] dancers presented a very quaint appearance, but the scene, though somewhat grotesque, did not lack picturesqueness, and the performers were cheered to the echo as they tripped away into a seclusion.’ All in all, declared the Courier,
congratulations are due to the organisers of this ‘glimpse of Arcadia’; . . . during the performance the delighted audience were carried back to the days of Rosalind, the dream only being dispelled when they were reminded by the singing of the National Anthem that they were subjects of King Edward.
B.3. Approaches to masquing, 1902-1911
How did the theatrical subjects of King Edward and King George approach the original texts when they looked to the Stuart masque as a ‘quarry in which they could profitably work’ (as the Times critic had put it in 1887 after seeing the anonymous Masque of Flowers)? Evidence can be marshalled around four things central to seventeenth-century court masquing: (i) the theatrically exploited presence of the monarch; (ii) the spectacular machine-epiphany likely to be given to supernatural beings and to the principal masquers; (iii) the antimasque; and (iv) the danced revels that followed the chief masquers’ display-dances.
There seems to have been no sense of actual royal presence in the masque-performances of 1903, 1905 and 1908. It is likely that in Hue and Cry Philip Carr excised Jonson’s lines for Hymen honouring the new Aeneas, King James, as a preliminary to his certain excision of Vulcan’s zodiac episode honouring the newly-wed Elizabeth Radcliffe and Viscount Haddington. If he did (and the hypothesis is supported by the remark of The Times on 2 July 1903 that Hymen had only a ‘few lines’), then the resulting show, joining the Cupid-lost-and-found episode to the Epithalamion by means of some lines from the Hymen scene and perhaps a few from the Pyracmon one, would become a celebration of love and marriage in general: a piece of art pour l’art on Carr’s part, with no mention of specific historical names or places, little learned moralising and no focus on kingly presence. With Pan’s Anniversary at Stratford-upon-Avon, though it seems to have retained all Jonson’s verse if not necessarily all his argumentative prose, accounts of its staging convey no sense of royal presence in it either, showing no awareness on anyone’s part that in Jonson’s allegory Pan the god and James the king are one and the same. Who then was Stratford’s Pan? Perhaps the Shakespeare Club thought of him simply as a vague numinous being – part of the Pan cult that was pandemic in the early 1900s (cf. P. Green, 1959, 136-46, 252-4) – who could be presented as having his anniversary at the time of year when anniversaries were foremost in people’s minds at Stratford. The masque, after all, was being staged as near as the by-laws would allow to 23 April, anniversary-day of Shakespeare and of St George too. But it may be that Pan was seen as actually uniting those two figures. It so happens that, at midday on 24 April 1905, two and a half hours before Pan began, the Rev. George Arbuthnot, Vicar of Holy Trinity, as he presided over the annual ceremony of decking Shakespeare’s grave with wreaths and flowers, delivered an address (reported by the Stratford Herald on 28 April) which linked poet and saint. So maybe the members of the Shakespeare Club’s committee saw the masque’s flower-strewing Nymphs and Arcadian shepherds as representing the good folk of Stratford as they took a respectful day’s holiday to honour the super-uniquely English genius, Shakespeare-St-George, who watched over them.
Three years after the Stratford Pan, who was the presenceful figure ensuring a perpetual spring in Lena Ashwell’s all-female Vision of Delight as given at that benefit performance for Mrs Billington? Was it perhaps the venerable Mrs B herself, with Jonson’s ‘Behold a King’ becoming ‘Behold a Queen’? This is unlikely: the reviews would surely have mentioned it (and besides, ‘King’ appears in Bell’s vocal score at this point). Another hypothesis seems more promising and plausible. The Times’s review of the masque specially mentions the performance by a dancer, ‘the Little Olivia’, as Cupid, for all that Cupid is not a character in Jonson’s text. The programme also gives prominent billing to Olivia/Cupid, and Bell’s score places a ‘Cupid’s Dance’ immediately after Phant’sie’s ‘Behold a King’ speech. This suggests that the presence in the 1908 Vision was that of a Cupid whose charisma made the vernal world go round, the masque thereby becoming a triomphe de l’amour. And when the production was to an extent re-staged in 1911 as part of the royal gala – King George V conspicuous in the dress circle of His Majesty’s Theatre – Cupid’s epiphany at ‘Behold a King’ was remarkably kept in. (The prompt-copies have ‘Enter Cupid’ and ‘Cupid Dances’.) Even in the actual presence of the British monarch, the company seems to have been reluctant to involve it or invoke it. Fourth-wall convention and/or the modesty of constitutional monarchy forbad, apparently, and the distinguished audience seems only to have been acknowledged directly by the performers in the final cornucopious flower-scattering. Indeed, the only masque revival at this period which we can be sure did positively evoke the presence was Christmas his Masque at the Crystal Palace. There the actors impersonating the London lads who had played Christmas’s children could pay homage directly to a King James and Anne of Denmark impersonated by other actors in this ‘authentic’ reconstruction.
As for machines, the cheerfully low-life Christmas his Masque has none, but those prominent in the original texts of the Haddington Masque, Pan’s Anniversary, and The Vision of Delight are passed over comprehensively in our revivals. True, two of the shows (Pan and the first Hue and Cry) had the excuse that they were taking place in the open air, and flying one’s Venus in over Regent’s Park on an airborne chariot, cleaving a rock enclosing a zodiac-sphere there, or suddenly revealing a Fountain of Light in the Bancroft Gardens at 2.30 p.m. would probably have been beyond Edwardian pageant-technology. Significantly, however, Venus didn’t fly or the wheel turn even when Carr took his Hue and Cry indoors in 1911; and in the two Visions of Delight (both of them mounted from the start in roofed theatres with back-stage facilities) there is no record of Night hovering her chariot or a Bower of Zephyrus being spectacularly revealed. The Coronation gala Vision’s ‘simple arrangement with columns’ suggests that baroque scenography was frowned on and the hand-written stage-directions in the prompt-copies indicate that allegorical characters manifested themselves simply by entering or stepping forward or being revealed in a spotlight – all in machine-less ways. This chimes with The Times’s remark that Carr’s 1903 Hue and Cry was ‘shorn, of course, of the mechanism that played so large a part in the original performance, and shorn, probably, to advantage’ (2 July 1903) and with The Daily Chronicle’s admiration of Carr in 1911 because he ‘avoided all cheaply theatrical effects’ (20 May 1911). Presumably the way scenic illusionism had developed in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that the types of scenic device Jonson and Jones had dealt in now seemed all too reminiscent for high-toned masquing of the world of the annual grand pantomime at Drury Lane, or of J. M. Barrie’s whimsical Peter Pan of 1904.
If there is a general trend to be found in the treatment of antimasque elements in these shows, it is that steps are taken in each (Christmas his Masque again apart) to reduce the sharp confrontations of style and of subject that are so characteristic of the Stuart masque. In the Vision and Hue and Cry productions, the reduction in confrontation worked by simple amputation. Thus in 1908, the Vision’s comically nightmarish she-monster antimasque was, as The Times approvingly put it, ‘of course left out’ (15 May 1908). It was left out in 1911 too. (According to the prompt-books, over 40 lines of Phant’sie’s bravura speech went in 1911 as well, and The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News reported that the masque’s speeches were ‘all short ones’: 8 July 1911.) In Philip Carr’s Hue and Cry, the knife cuts the other way. His removal of the zodiac scene and the related masquers’ dances – most of the main masque, that’s to say –leaves a pleasantly homogenised entertainment, cheerful and lyrical: something which does not have to accommodate the gravitas of Vulcan’s speeches and so can beguile the Times critic (perhaps not over-familiar the original) into calling the masque ‘Jonson at his lightest’ (2 July 1903) and the Stratford Herald ‘a delightful whimsicality’ (15 July 1903).
The staging of Pan’s Anniversary at Stratford in 1905 is more challenging, keeping as it does the shape, plot and most of the words of the Jonson, yet choosing to cast the Bidford Shakespearean Morris dancers as its antimasquing Boeotians and Thebans. Jonson’s original antimasquers and their dances in 1620 are clearly meant to be grotesquely comic: amusing enough in a contemptible sort of way, as the Shepherd allows, but essentially gross and stupid. Were these damning judgements really pronounced by the Shepherd on the Bidford Troupe at Stratford? (Sadly, it seems no prompt copy has survived.) Were the Bidford men dancing ‘straight’, or were they – an unlikely possibility surely – guying themselves to justify an unchanged Jonson text? As we have seen, The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald allowed that the Bidford dancers ‘did not lack picturesqueness’ and were much applauded (28 April 1905). This suggests another softening of seventeenth-century antithesis; so perhaps the words of the script were softened as well, or perhaps the Shepherd was played as an old fuddy-duddy sadly blind to the allure of ‘Boeotian’ folk-art (i.e. to the just-nascent English Country Dance Revival). It would be interesting to know whether there was any sort of parity implied in the production between courtly-style and folk-style dancing, or whether class hierarchy (genteel masquers over peasant antimasquers) prevailed in the end.
The Stratford show’s revels, involving masquers, antimasquers and school-children, would certainly have startled Jonson. The Shakespeare Club doesn’t seem to have considered that the revels in Pan might have been (and might still be) a matter of Arcadian gentlemen-masquers choosing gentlewomen in the audience to dance with, as the third Hymn suggests. And in the 1908 and 1911 Visions of Delight (the other masque of our four in which Jonson definitely provided for social revels-dancing), the case is again altered. The revels here, elided with the masquers’ main dances, are reinterpreted in such a way as to keep the sexes apart, not bring them together. In Ashwell’s all-female staging at the Kingsway, her cast of ‘ladies of high position in the theatrical world’ take part in ‘an elaborate ballet-scene’ which is clearly a feminist statement about professional women’s self-sufficiency. The 1911 staging of the Vision before the new monarch also climaxes in all-female dances for the Hours, for a travesti Cupid and for everyone on stage at the ‘main dance’–‘revels’ point. Yet this surely had a very different symbolic effect from the ballet-scene at Ashwell’s theatre three years before. Owen Seaman’s jauntily knowing general prologue to the whole Coronation gala sets up expectations of a bevy of lovelies in its concluding masque (‘a pretty dish to set before a King’), which the reviews suggest the Vision duly fulfilled. King George would see ladies
fair of face,
Lissom of limb, a galaxy of grace,
Secured to illustrate our best traditions
(With their respective managers’ permissions)
– which is surely less a feminist statement than an oglingly ‘Edwardian’ one. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News couldn’t resist punning the ‘galaxy’ of Seaman’s prologue into an ‘unapproachably “pretty gal”-axy of talent and charm’ (8 July 1911). The Vision becomes, as the Era review put it (1 July 1911), a matter of ‘beautiful women clad in exquisite costumes’: a kind of mannequin parade, which – especially as it came only a year after Harley Granville Barker’s ironic use of such a parade in Act III of The Madras House – might be thought to illustrate the old patriarchal theatre’s worst traditions.
C. Other Twentieth-Century Revivals
Beyond the performances described above, there have been around a dozen masque revivals recorded since 1900, which demonstrate the existence of a slender tradition of Jonsonian masquing across the twentieth century. Many of these revivals have arisen in the context of amateur theatrical initiatives, or reflect the recognition that, however puzzling the masques were as dramatic texts, their lyric poetry could be admired of itself – rather as Stephen Dedalus, in chapter 5 of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (1916), is to be found enjoying Aurora’s song from The Vision of Delight. A significant proportion of these revivals occurred in educational contexts, or were historical reconstructions undertaken as part of the early music or early theatre performance movements. Only on a handful of occasions have the masques found any significant purchase in the professional theatre.
The academic tradition begins in America, in a relatively dilute form, with four Jonsonian revivals during 1906-20, staged as part of May Day festivities held annually by the students of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. The Haddington Masque (under the title The Masque of Cupid) and The Masque of Queens were on the bill for 1 May 1906; The Haddington Masque (now named The Hue and Cry after Cupid) was revived again on 1 May 1910 and on 7-8 May 1920. The Bryn Mawr May Day revels typically involved an enthusiastic but approximate historicism. Festivities always opened with a procession of performers, including (variously) Queen Elizabeth, the Lord and Lady of the May, Robin Hood and his men, a maypole drawn by oxen, chimney sweepers, milkmaids, the Nine Worthies, and Will Kemp with his morris dancers and hobby-horse. The Jonson masques were mounted several times over on each day in tandem with short shows such as Nice Wanton, The Old Wive’s Tale, The Masque of Flowers, Pyramus and Thisbe, The Revesby Sword Play, and The Shoemaker’s Holiday, all chosen to contribute to this ersatz Elizabethanism.
Nothing remains of the 1906 performance of The Haddington Masque beyond the programme, but there is a full cast list for the 1910 version, and a cast list and script for 1920. The main performers were:
| 1910 | 1920 | |
| Venus | Helen Barber | Elizabeth Taylor |
| Graces | Jean Stirling | Edith Stevens |
| Cynthia Stevens | Harriet Scribner | |
| Catherine Terry | Loretta Grim | |
| Vulcan | Agnes Murray | Margaret Ballou |
| Cupid | Anita Boggs | Helen Tuttle |
| Hymen | Margaret Montgomery | Elizabeth Titcomb |
Each version had twelve Sports who accompanied Cupid, and a band of musicians dressed as Priestesses of Hymen. In 1920, there was a wedding party, to whom the dancing was addressed, and twelve ‘Zodiacs’ or ‘sacred powers’ presented by Vulcan. The 1920 script opens with the bridal party entering to music from Gluck’s Alceste, and gives an almost complete account of the dialogue between Venus, Cupid, and the Graces, and Grace’s song (shorn of its darker stanzas 7 and 9). After this, the Sports danced to the song ‘Amaryllis’. Hymen and his Priestesses then entered to the Pantomime from Alceste, and a compressed version of the Venus, Hymen, and Vulcan dialogue followed. The Cyclopes carried in Vulcan’s sphere, and the ‘Zodiacs’ danced around it to music by Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (the inventor of eurhythmics), after which the cast dispersed, once more to Gluck. The whole was timed to take 45 minutes.
A script also survives for The Masque of Queens, as do some photographs (reproduced in Maurer, 1989, 259) which show the witches clad in loose robes and crouching on a lawn, and the queens wearing a medley of pseudo-classical costumes, two holding swords. There is no attempt to historicize the setting, for the performers stand in front of an incongruously modern building. Jonson’s twelve witches and queens were reduced to seven and eight, respectively (these are the numbers in the programme and photographs, though the text has parts for two more witches). The programme lists the cast as:
| Hecute [sic] | Marie Reimer |
| Ignorance | Anna D. Greene |
| Suspicion | Margaret Nichols |
| Credulity | Emily R. Cross |
| Falsehood | Edith Ashley |
| Execration | Elise Gignoux |
| Bitterness | Clara Case |
| Pentheselea [sic] | Martha White |
| Camilla | Mrs E. B. Wilson |
| Artenusia [sic] | Sarah T. Moeller |
| Berenice | Helen Sturgis |
| Candace | Sarah S. Palmer |
| Boadicea | Madge Miller |
| Zenobia | Dorothy Arnold |
| Belanna [sic] | Anna Tucker Phillips |
The script adjusted the plot to the occasion, by depicting Hecate’s envy as being aimed at the audience, in the absence of her nominal antagonist, King James. With the direction ‘Looking at spectators’, she threatened them, ‘Let not this fair sight / This pageant linger to resist our might’ (replacing Jonson’s lines 109-10); ‘darken all this scene, / Let nought remain to show what once has been’ (replacing Jonson’s 213-14). Jonson’s opening invocations were given almost complete, and four of the six charms were used. Each witch had her verses addressed to Hecate, and her own prop (a skull, snake, bone, etc.); the directions specify them crouching, kneeling, and swaying, then weaving arms and dancing at accelerating speed as their charms became more desperate. The ending was more radically altered, as the male figure of Heroic Virtue did not appear but was replaced by the Amazon Penthesilea. She introduced the queens with a truncated and freely rewritten version of Heroic Virtue’s rebuke to the witches, concluding: ‘We’ve come from distant lands to grace this day – / From misty north and the far off Cathay – / To these renouned [sic] Queens all honor pay. / It is their right upon this first of May.’ This somewhat illogical claim was matched by the no less improbable statement in the programme that, at the first performance, Queen Elizabeth had appeared as Belanna. Such inconsistencies suggest that, like the revivals of The Haddington Masque, this light-hearted performance did not aim to achieve anything more than a broad approximation of a Jacobethan past. Nonetheless, the choice of these two masques, with their predominantly female casts, and the daring gender switch at the end of Queens, indicate the appeal that festivities focussing on or celebrating early modern women might have to a modern female readership. This is a point which has only belatedly been acknowledged in the critical tradition.
Also in this period, two teacher training colleges in America and Britain were responsible for revivals of Pan’s Anniversary. The first was held at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, an institution founded in 1887 to train teachers for the poor children of New York. Pan’s Anniversary was staged in the gymnasium on 27 April 1916 by students from the physical education department, as a piece of practical work and to raise funds for college equipment. The performers divided into masquers, ‘warriors’, and ‘wood and water nymphs’, and the masque’s theme was interpreted as showing ‘the power of nature’s forces as opposed to the skill derived from formal mechanical drill’. The shepherd was played by Rachel Shwab and the fencer by Louise Evarts; Gladys Cook, Nell Baker and Frances Curtis were priests of Pan, and a ‘pantomime’ was contributed by Madame Alberti’s pantomime class, with costume, music and dancing prepared by the physical education department (Teachers College Record, 17/3, 1916, 286-288).
In Britain, an ambitious performance of the same masque was staged at Avery Hill College, Eltham, on 7 July 1928, to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of the college’s founding. Now part of the University of Greenwich, Avery Hill was in 1928 a women’s residential teacher training college validated by the University of London. The masque was staged without scenery, al fresco on the lawns around the college’s fountain. Percy and Evelyn Simpson have a brief eyewitness account, and report that ‘a dance of the first group of masquers with rustic attendants was followed by a second group of Arcadian shepherds with an antimasque of robots’ (H&S, 10.608) . Presumably these ‘hideous robot-like creatures’ (Avery Hill Reporter, July 1928) substituted for the sheep into which the antimasquers are changed in Jonson’s text. Photographs in the college archives, belonging to the students Eleanor Marianne John and Mabel Vickery, show a large body of several dozen performers gathered in groups on opposite sides of the lawn. Their roles are sharply differentiated by costume: the priestesses in long robes carry instruments and baskets of flowers for strewing; the shepherds wear bodices, gowns, and mob caps; figures who must be the Boeotians have lower-class vernacular dress. According to the Simpsons, music by Geoffrey Shaw was used: this would have been his Three Hymns from ‘Pan’s Anniversary’ for Female Voices (published in 1917) , which comprises ‘Of Pan we sing’, ‘Pan is our all’, and ‘If yet Pan’s orgies’. The Simpsons note that ‘there was also a morris dance, and finally the performers unmasked and led forth their guests for the revels.’ This suggests that the Avery Hill event may have ended with some genuine choreographical interaction between masquers and audience.
Another musical setting of Pan’s Anniversary cropped up the following year in Pastoral: ‘Lie Strewn the White Flocks’ for chorus, flute, and string orchestra written by Arthur Bliss (1891-1975), a beautiful and large-scale example of musical neo-paganism. The first movement sets the three nymphs’ verses that open Jonson’s masque, treated as an invocation to Pan, after which Pan’s pipe is heard. Succeeding movements use lyrics by Fletcher, Poliziano, Theocritus, and the Georgian poet Robert Nichols to convey a picture of the pastoral landscape and the shepherds, reapers, and demi-gods who inhabit it. At least one contemporary reviewer complained that Jonson’s circumlocution ‘the lips of cows’ for ‘cowslips’ was clumsy (The Musical Times, 1929, 407), but the work has a substantial performance history and several modern recordings are available. The dedicatee of this work is Sir Edward Elgar, and it is worth noting here that there was a masque dimension to The Spanish Lady, the abortive operatic project that Elgar was working on before his death in 1934. This was based on The Devil is an Ass and never came to anything, but embedded in the extraordinary libretto constructed by Elgar and Barry Jackson were many short extracts from the masques, including lyrics or lines from The Althorp Entertainment, Hymenaei, The Masque of Beauty, The Haddington Masque, The Masque of Queens, Oberon, Love Restored, The Golden Age Restored, The Vision of Delight, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, Time Vindicated, Neptune’s Triumph, and Love’s Welcome at Bolsover (see the careful analysis by Percy M. Young in Elgar, 1991, xv-xvii). One of the most extensive fragments to survive from the sketches is a setting of ‘When Love at first did move’ from The Masque of Beauty. A performing version of the fragments (arranged by Percy Young) was staged at Cambridge in November 1994 and was broadcast on BBC radio in 1995.
The only revival of a Jonson masque in the professional theatre during the pre-war years was Chloridia at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, London, on 19 July 1935, in a double bill with Milton’s Comus. All the information about this comes from Percy and Evelyn Simpson (H&S, 10.686) , who state that the production used Jones’s costume designs for the Nymphs, Spring, the Dwarf Post, the Lackeys, Cupid, and Jealousy, with appropriate costumes for the other characters: ‘Tempest wore a dark robe and brandished a thunderbolt.’ The open-air setting was appropriate to the masque’s vernal theme, and the evening began with the arrival of King Charles and his courtiers, who occupied the front seats. The cast was led by the Danish ballet star Nini Theilade (b. 1915) as Chloris. She had recently danced as the first fairy in Max Reinhardt’s film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where she was featured in the central pas de deux; she subsequently became a principal with the Ballets Russes. Zephyrus was played by Leslie French (1904-1999), at this time famous as Ariel to Gielgud’s Prospero (Eric Gill’s sculpture of Ariel on Broadcasting House is modelled on him): in the Comus production, he played the Attendant Spirit. Other performers included:
| Spring | Nora Colton |
| Dwarf Post | Pamela Stanley |
| Cupid | Joan French |
| Jealousy | Freda Gaye |
| Disdain | Blanche Locke |
| Fear | Marjorie Field |
| Dissimulation | Elva Stuart |
| Tempest | Maurice Brooke |
| Juno | Eve Lynd |
| Iris | Adelaide Stanley |
| Fame | Sybil Envers |
| Poesy | James Topping |
| History | George Henschel |
| Architecture | John Thompson |
| Sculpture | Franklyn Kelsey |
A prologue was supplied by the poet John Drinkwater, who was associated with the Regent’s Park Theatre as a performer.
In the later 1940s, there appeared almost simultaneously two printed adaptations of Christmas his Masque designed for amateur performance. The first, by the architectural historian and glass engraver Laurence Whistler (1912-2000) is called The Masque of Christmas: Dramatic Joys of the Festival Old and New, and was printed in 1947 as part of a short-lived arts periodical The Masque (and reprinted in The Masque Library, 1950). It gives an abbreviated text of the masque, concentrating on the dialogue and largely omitting the ballad. It is based on Herford and Simpson’s edition, but carries over some readings from Henry Morley’s Masques and Entertainments by Ben Jonson (1890) . Very nostalgic about old-fashioned Christmases, it has a general essay on Christmas masques, and reproduces designs by Jones and others. The following year, Lynette Feasey published On the Playbill in Old London (1948)] a compendium of plays which includes a reduced version of Jonson’s text under the title ‘The Masque of Christmas: A Christmas Entertainment’. This text, based on F2, has the ballad in abbreviated form, elaborate novelized stage directions and scene setting, and some new impromptu touches by the editor. Feasey improbably thought the show was intended for Prince Henry and was staged as the antimasque to some other larger event. Her text is offered for performance by amateur groups such as choirs, musical societies, and dancing classes. She advises that art and needlecraft clubs should supply the costumes, and that the whole should end with community singing. There is, however, no record of any amateur group ever performing either her version or Whistler’s.
Some of Jonson’s masque lyrics received an airing in 1953, albeit unattributed, when they were adapted by William Plomer as part of his libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera, Gloriana. The opera includes a pastiche of the progress entertainment that was presented to Queen Elizabeth at her visit to Norwich in 1578. Plomer did not use the text that had historically been written for her by Thomas Churchyard, but contrived his own entertainment. This begins with lines from the song ‘Melt earth to sea’ from Oberon, and has a stanza sung by country maidens which is partly derived from the flower catalogue in Pan’s Anniversary. This section of the opera has earned its own successful independent life in the concert hall as The Choral Dances from ‘Gloriana’.
Also impressive was The Masque of Cupid, staged at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, on 29 May 1956. This was a composite text, stitching together material from The Haddington Masque, Love Freed, and Time Vindicated, with Cupid as the figure uniting these elements. It was devised by W. Nugent Monck (1877-1958), who as director of the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich (a quasi-Elizabethan playhouse) left his mark on the 20th-century historical performance movement. The Masque of Cupid belonged to a series of masques mounted by Monck at Blickling, and shows what could be achieved by a director with an intuitive sense of the masque’s aesthetics and historical functions. It dramatizes the masque by setting it within a story that helpfully frames the performance: an unnamed Earl and Countess are celebrating the marriage of their daughter, at which wedding a masque is staged in the presence of the King and court. The promptbook, now in Norfolk Record Office (SO 26/22 504X6), opens with the parents discussing the costs and problems:
and then those dreadful folk from town,
Inigo Jones and Jonson, are at war
On which should have the mastery in this,
The Poet, or Designer of the revels.
Mannerless boor is Jones, he ripped the dress
From off our daughter’s back, and said he’d not
Have Venus wearing any farthingale,
But keep a classic line.
‘These artist folk / Do lack proportion’, the Countess concludes. But things settle down when the King, Queen, and Princes arrive to see the show. The masque begins with the ‘Cupid runaway’ dialogue between Venus and the Graces from The Haddington Masque (six stanzas of the Graces’ song are sung), then jumps neatly to Love Freed, explaining Cupid’s disappearance as the consequence of his capture by the Sphinx from that masque. Cupid is brought in as the Sphinx’s prisoner, and a cut-down version of the antimasque dialogue from Love Freed follows, culminating with the dance of She-Fools (here eleven rather than twelve), and the Sphinx’s baffling by the Muses’ priest (here a single figure, not a group) who sings ‘Gentle Love, be not dismayed’ (for which unrelated music by Philip Rosseter was used). After his release, Cupid speaks Hymen’s lines from The Haddington Masque commanding Venus to do honour to the King, and an entry of morris dancers, posing as Cupid’s Sports, is performed. The plot now shifts to Time Vindicated, and takes over almost all of that masque’s dialogue between Cupid and Sport, poking good-natured fun at the King, lords, and ladies, before returning to The Haddington Masque for words from Cupid to introduce the general dancing. Finally, the masque concludes with ‘What gentle forms are these that move’ from Love Freed, again sung to a setting adapted from Rosseter. Departing, the King compliments the performers and author: ‘Master Ben / Is much to be commended. We must have / These airy nothings at our Court this Christmas.’ The whole evening ended with the national anthem and John Dowland’s madrigal ‘Awake sweet love’. This charming, delicate entertainment was a small but significant high-water mark in the revival of Jonson’s masques. Although too early to register the modern academic revaluation of the masques, it devised a text which worked for a modern audience while remaining sensitized to masque structures and to the historical context and purposes of court festivity.
Most subsequent masque revivals have been driven by academic advances in knowledge about court festivity, and by the impetus provided by the early music and dance movements. The earliest scholarly attempt to create a full musical setting for any Jonson masque was Andrew J. Sabol’s edition of A Score for ‘Lovers Made Men’ (1963) . This example is problematic because no original songs or dances survive for this masque, and Sabol adapted pre-existing music by Lanier and Ferrabosco to Jonson’s words; there is no record of his adaptation having been performed. The first significant impression made by the early music movement was a semi-staged performance of The Masque of Queens at the Haslemere Festival, Surrey, on 11 July 1972. The festival was founded in the 1920s by Arnold Dolmetsch to promote authentic performances of early music. In 1972, what seems to have been a reasonably complete text of Queens was performed twice by the Dolmetsch Dancers in the unpromising surroundings of Haslemere Hall. The queens were cut to eight, and the programme notes that their three chariots were omitted because of constraints on space. The dances were choreographed by Marie-Louise Carley, costumes were based on Jones’s designs, and a modest ensemble of lute, harpsichord, violin, cornet, viola da gamba, and flute and tabor provided the music. Two years later, in November 1974, a concert performance of the music to Oberon, with actors reading the text and scene descriptions, was given at the Whitehall Banqueting House, London, as part of a larger programme including Campion’s The Somerset Masque and a cut-down version of Shirley’s Triumph of Peace. The event was directed by Peter Holman, Peter Walls edited the vocal music, and the dances were set to the lutes by Tim Crawford. Holman’s reconstruction of a complete score for the masque, using music from other sources than the ten items that survive, is an important staging-post, as it would become the basis of the more ambitious Oberon revivals described below (Walls, 1996, 339-40 ; Peter Holman, personal communication).
A revival of a different kind was held at Dulwich College in 1982, the independent school founded by the actor Edward Alleyn in 1619: a performance of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, adapted and produced by the head of English, Dr Jan Piggott, in a triple bill with a dramatic version of The Waste Land and scenes from Twelfth Night. As described by ‘R. J. S.’ in the school magazine, The Alleynian, for 1982, this ‘idiosyncratic production steered a judicious course between formality and music-hall.’ Photographs in the magazine show classically-dressed Bacchantes and Bacchus in his chariot (a bath chair), Hercules wrestling with Antaeus, small boys running away with Hercules’ club, the chorus dressed as bishops, the ‘eloquently dyspeptic’ Belly, and antimasque dancers – memorably costumed as outsize bottles of gin, Cointreau, Martini, and a can of Guinness – cavorting in a ‘lurching pavan’. Behind them stands a painted flat representing Atlas, with the goddesses Pleasure and Virtue on his shoulders, and from here the ‘Virtuous Princes’ emerged to dance with the ‘Court Ladies’. Music by Matthew Locke was used. Hercules was played by the head boy, Nicholas Fenner, wearing ‘a lion skin from somebody’s floor’, according to Dr Piggott (private communication); other named performers included Nick Martin-Clark (Daedalus), and Martin Griffiths (Mercury) who sported goose wings and descended from the skies in a builder’s cradle. Dr Piggott continues: ‘We wrote in two minor sly jokes about the Prefects and the Economics department … Hardly anyone understood it, but we all had a wonderful time. A lady in the front row said “Disgusting!” out loud at Comus’s opening speech about farting and belching.’ This imaginative production demonstrates that at least some modern revivals had at last caught up with the combination of bold humour and lyrical elegance that is so distinctive of the masques.
In 1993, Peter Holman and Ross W. Duffin collaborated on the musical arrangements for fully-staged reconstruction of Oberon mounted at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, as the centrepiece of an academic conference on the masque. The performance was filmed and was later issued on video and DVD, with interviews and supplementary material from Peter Holman, Ross Duffin, and Tom Bishop. This was the most complete attempt to date to restage a Jonsonian (or indeed any Stuart) masque. Danced in the Excelsior Ballroom at Case Western – a space similar in size to the Banqueting House – and with Agnar Pytte, president of the university, dressed in a cloak and standing in for King James, this version of Oberon was rooted in historically informed scholarship and adopted styles as close as possible to the original production. Its sets and costumes were based on Inigo Jones’s designs, and at its centre was an extended sequence of formal masque dances and public revels with appropriate historical choreography, including dances which spelt out symbolic patterns, such as the King’s name, IACOBUS. Watching the recording, one is inevitably conscious of certain shortfalls: the performance budget cannot match the sheer splendour that the original occasion would have called forth, and there are some controversial touches, such as the prominent phalluses sported by the satyrs (a signature of the theatre director, Barrie Rutter, who had used similar costumes in staging Tony Harrison’s satyr-play, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, 1988). Nonetheless, the reconstruction conveys a clear practical sense of the masque’s shape and impact, gives full weight to the mixture of drama, song, and dance, and brings out strongly the evening’s social dimensions, such as the interaction between performers and audience and the starring dance role given to ‘Prince Henry’. The cast includes:
| Satyrs | Pete Behmke |
| Deborah Fisher | |
| Robin Lockshine | |
| Duane Noch | |
| Lana Zannoni | |
| Silenus | Reuben Silver |
| Sylvan Guards | Mark Duer |
| Daniel Gangloff | |
| Singing and Dancing Satyrs | Lelani Barrett |
| Kent Quade | |
| Quentin Quereau | |
| Bears | Hilary Graham |
| Natasha Galkina | |
| Singing Fays | Coeli Ingold |
| Gail West | |
| Dancing Fays | Crys Gee |
| Seema Haria | |
| Shannon McCullough | |
| Michaelene Maddocks | |
| Elizabeth Myers | |
| Audrey Sniezek | |
| Oberon | Ken Pierce |
| Gentlemen Masquers | Lelani Barrett |
| Kent Quade | |
| Desmond Tillman | |
| Singing Fay | Ian Miceál Gallagher |
| Phosporus | Paula Bartkowicz (speaker) |
| Janet Youngdahl (singer) |
Music direction was by David Douglass of The King’s Noyse, choreography by Ken Pierce (early dance specialist at the Longy School of Music, Cambridge, Mass.), and stage direction by Barrie Rutter (artistic director of the Northern Broadsides theatre company based in Halifax, Yorkshire). Design and technical direction were by Eugene Hare; the producers were Tom Bishop, Ross W. Duffin, and David Evett.
The musical reconstruction made by Peter Holman in 1974 also became the basis of a commercial recording of the masque music made in 1997 by Philip Pickett and the Musicians of the Globe and issued on the Philips label. The performers for the CD include Libby Crabtree, Julia Gooding, Meredith Hal, Helen Parker (sopranos), Paul Agnew, Joseph Cornwell, Simon Davies, Andrew King (tenors), Tom Finucane, and Jacob Heringman (lutes). The disc includes no speeches and gives little sense of the masque’s dramatic outlines. Instead, the three surviving songs and seven dances are bulked out with other vocal and instrumental music to provide an admittedly approximate version of the musical texture as a whole. Holman’s setting of ‘Melt earth to sea’ was also used in Terrence Malick’s film about Pocahontas, The New World (2005), during the sequence in which the princess arrives at the Jacobean court. Regrettably, nothing appears in the film from The Vision of Delight, which was the masque that historically Pocahontas saw.
In the last twenty years, three other Jonsonian rarities have been seen. After James Knowles’s discovery of The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse was announced in February 1997, this text was given a staging at the Etcetera Theatre, London, on 30 May (Etcetera is an intimate fringe venue in a space above the Oxford Arms public house on Camden High Street). Directed by Don Taylor and designed by David Gooderson, it had lute music by Lanier arranged and performed by Anthony Rooley of the Consort of Music. The production was filmed as part of a documentary about the masque made by Petri/Visser (Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 38, 1999, 94) .
The second rarity was once again at Dulwich College, a version of the speeches from The Magnificent Entertainment, staged on Founder’s Day in 2004 – an appropriate choice for the school, since its founder, Edward Alleyn, originally spoke the part of Genius in 1604. The speeches were delivered in an outdoor setting in front of a large screen reproducing Stephen Harrison’s Londinium arch, and two of the elaborate costumes, based on Jonson’s descriptions, are reproduced in The Alleynian, 2004. The director was Dr Matthew Edwards; the Genius was played by Daniel Peters, Thamesis by Jonathan Hawkes, and the Flamen by Charlie Talassie. Dr Edwards comments that ‘all three boys realised that their performances required a kind of extravagant, not to say magnificent, solemnity. Costumes and rhetoric alike demanded ‘an impressive effect … gestures were bold, voices commanding and clear’ (The Alleynian, 2004, 79). The event was subsequently repeated at the Globe theatre as part of the ‘Shakespeare’s Rivals’ exhibition.
Thirdly, on 1 March 2011 a version of Love Freed was staged by the experimental theatre company Jericho House at Wilton’s Music Hall in London’s East End – at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the Banqueting House, but a place with a combination of faded grandeur and intimacy. This was the curtain-raiser to a season of performances themed around the year 1611, and a fund-raiser. Only 180 tickets were available, sold at the operatic price of £150 each. Tickets included a meal, intended to replicate the style of Jacobean banqueting: reviewers complained that the menu was a succession of meat and poultry dishes. Jonson’s text was pared down and interleaved with other material, including Prospero’s ‘Our revels now are ended’, spoken by Janet Suzman. The songs were sung by the early music specialist Emma Kirkby, and dance supplied by members of the Royal Ballet company. There was no scenery, and photographs show elegant costume in a broadly 18th-century style. Kate Bassett (Independent on Sunday, 6 March 2011) reports that the evening was charming, though Jonson’s story was incomprehensible.
Love Freed and The Magnificent Entertainment are the only Jonsonian festival texts to have been revived anywhere in the present century (unless one counts the brief, impressionistic recreation of Love’s Welcome at Bolsover included in the information film for tourists at Bolsover Castle). The British playwright Garry Lyons is working on a play based on Christmas his Masque, but at the time of writing this has yet to appear. The revival of masques has been fuelled by academic interest in the form and by historical shifts that have renewed interest in the period’s culture, but it is inevitably impeded by the cost of mounting such performances, the difficulty of finding an audience and an occasion, and the need to coordinate several simultaneous but different kinds of artistic input. The reconstruction of Oberon exemplifies what can be achieved by a group of academics in different fields pursuing a common cause, but the audience for this is specialized, and repetition of this work for other masques is impeded by the patchy survival of masque components. Although we have all the words, we do not have the complete music for any one Jonson masque, and in most cases we have only fragments of the designs. So too the political and intellectual complexity of Jonson’s masques continues to militate against their revival. It is notable that the masques most frequently quarried in modern times have been texts like The Haddington Masque, Pan’s Anniversary, and Christmas his Masque – that is, masques that are relatively free-standing, can be played without too much reference to the presence of the monarch, and do not need elaborate explication of their meaning or historical significance. On this basis, some texts can still be made into amusing and coherent entertainments for modern audiences, but, with rare exceptions, many of Jonson’s other masques are fated to be seen only in glimpses.
Reviews of masque revivals 1903-1911
The Hue and Cry after Cupid, 1903-4
The Athenaeum, 11 July 1903
The Stage, 9 July 1903
The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 15 July 1904
The Times, 2 July 1903
The Hue and Cry after Cupid,
The Daily Chronicle,20 May 1911
The Stage,25 May1911
The Times,20 May 1911
Pan’s Anniversary, 1905
The Birmingham Weekly Post, 29 April 1905
The Leamington Spa Courier, 28 April 1905
The Stage, 27 April 1905
The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 28 April 1905
The Vision of Delight, 1908
Era, 16 May 1908
The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 23 May 1908
The Times, 15 May 1908
The Vision of Delight, 1911
The Athenaeum, 1 July 1911
Era, 1 July 1911
The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 8 July 1911
The
Stage, 29 June 1911 (and cf. 1 June 1911)
The Times, 26, 27, and 28 June 1911
Christmas his Masque, 1911
The Athenaeum,10 June 1911
Reviews of later revivals
Teachers College Record, 17:3 (1916), 286-288
Avery Hill Reporter, July 1928
The Musical Times, 1929, 407
The Alleynian (1982)
The Alleynian (2004), 79
Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, 6 March 2011