Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 1).pdf/238

This page needs to be proofread.

for song and dance by banquets, weddings, and rustic merry-*makings. And if all else fails, what more easy than to introduce a dumb-show in a dream or as a specimen of the magician's art?^[1] A somewhat paradoxical type of incorporated spectacle is the play within the play, as we find it, for example, in Hamlet, where indeed the inner play has the further elaboration of its accompanying dumb-show.^[2] And with the play within the play comes the mask within the play. In the intermedii the mask, as already suggested, tended to lose its individuality. There were dancers, no doubt, and the dancers were disguised, and might be masked; and there are signs of an extended use of the term 'mask' to cover such an entertainment.^[3] But the characteristic feature of the mask proper, the taking out of spectators to dances, did not lend itself to the conditions of performances given while the spectators sat at meat, or of performances on the raised and isolated stage of an interlude. When a mask proper was closely associated with an early Tudor play, it was as an after-piece rather than as an inter-act. The dancers of the intermedii kept to themselves, and if the sexes intermingled it was in a 'double' choir. But when the spectacles became episodes, instead of intermedii, the central incident of the mask could be restored. Dancers who were personages of a play could obviously 'take out' spectators who were also personages of the same play; and the introduction of a mask, generally as a revel in a royal feast or wedding banquet, becomes a regular dramatic device at least from the last decade of the sixteenth century onwards. Perhaps the first example is in an academic play, Gager's Ulysses Redux of 1592, where at the beginning of Act II 'Proci larvati alicunde prodeunt, saltantque in scena', and as we learn from the criticism of Rainolds, some of Penelope's handmaids, seated amongst the audience, were 'entreated by the wooers to rise

↑ For the spectacle as dream, cf. Henry VIII, iv. 2; Cymbeline, v. 4, which, like the epiphany in A. Y. L. v. 4, perhaps illustrates the point all the better in that it is probably an interpolation; for the spectacle as magic show, Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, 515, 721, 1263; Macbeth, iv. 1; Tempest, iii. 3, and the mock magic of Merry Wives, v. 5. The mask of Tempest, iv. 1, is of course both mask and magic.
↑ Hamlet, iii. 2. 146. On the play within a play, cf. H. Schwab, Das Schauspiel im Schauspiel zur Zeit Shaksperes (1896).
↑ In Spanish Tragedy, i. 5, Hieronimo brings in a 'pompous jest' in which three knights hang up their scutcheons and capture three kings. This is called a 'mask' (l. 23), but there is no dance, only a dumb-show interpreted by Hieronimo. Similarly the 'Maske of Cupid' in Spenser, F. Q. III. xii, is merely an allegorical procession, without a dance. Later, Dekker and Ford's play of The Sun's Darling (1656) is described on the title-page as 'a moral masque'.

[1] For the spectacle as dream, cf. Henry VIII, iv. 2; Cymbeline, v. 4, which, like the epiphany in A. Y. L. v. 4, perhaps illustrates the point all the better in that it is probably an interpolation; for the spectacle as magic show, Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, 515, 721, 1263; Macbeth, iv. 1; Tempest, iii. 3, and the mock magic of Merry Wives, v. 5. The mask of Tempest, iv. 1, is of course both mask and magic.

[2] Hamlet, iii. 2. 146. On the play within a play, cf. H. Schwab, Das Schauspiel im Schauspiel zur Zeit Shaksperes (1896).

[3] In Spanish Tragedy, i. 5, Hieronimo brings in a 'pompous jest' in which three knights hang up their scutcheons and capture three kings. This is called a 'mask' (l. 23), but there is no dance, only a dumb-show interpreted by Hieronimo. Similarly the 'Maske of Cupid' in Spenser, F. Q. III. xii, is merely an allegorical procession, without a dance. Later, Dekker and Ford's play of The Sun's Darling (1656) is described on the title-page as 'a moral masque'.

[1]

[2]

[3]