are omitted or cut short, since it is spectacle, and not mere dialogue, that is required.[1] Nevertheless, in its main features, the dramatized mask confirms what we know of the mask from other sources. It has its dancers, its presenters, its torch-bearers, and its music.[2] Your Five Gallants adds 'shield boys' to carry the 'devices'. When the performers have finished their measures, they generally take out the ladies. At the end they unmask, 'honour' the guests (A Women is a Weathercock), and depart, or proceed to a banquet. And in some interesting points the dramatized mask supplements other information. To begin with, it is a simpler type of mask than is represented by the full Jacobean descriptions. For obvious reasons architectural pageantry could hardly be introduced. In The Maid's Tragedy there is a rock, in Satiromastix a chair; in May Day Cupid 'descends', a feat, as already noted, well within the compass of an ordinary theatre. And that is about all. You get the mask as it was practised at Elizabeth's court, rather than at that of James. Then there are sometimes subsidiary scenes, which throw light upon aspects of the mask, not much dwelt on in the Jacobean descriptions. Often there is a scene of preparation, when the 'maskery' is planned, and a 'device', 'imprezza', or 'mott' ordered of the painter, or 'a few tinsel coats' of the vizard-maker (1 Antonio and Mellida, Insatiate Countess, A Mad World, my Masters, Your Five Gallants, A Woman is a Weathercock). Or there is a scene of bustle, when a 'state' and canopy are set up in the 'presence' (Satiromastix) and room is made for the dancers, either by the cry of 'A hall, a hall!' (Romeo and Juliet, May Day) or by the more violent ministrations of the torch-bearers (A Woman is a Weathercock) or of court officials. Thus in The Maid's Tragedy the mask is preluded by the activities of Calianax, the lord chamberlain, who 'would run raging among them, and break a dozen wiser heads than his own in the twinkling of an eye', and of Diagoras the gentleman usher, who is keeping the doors against the impatient crowd without, and placing the ladies, all except those who come in 'the king's troop', in a gallery 'above'. There
- ↑ The maskers in Wit at Several Weapons, v. i, are 'something like the
abstract of a masque'; cf. R. J. i. 4. 3—
The date is out of such prolixity.
We'll have no Cupid hoodwink'd with a scarf,
Bearing a Tartar's painted bow of lath,
Scaring the ladies like a crow-keeper;
Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke
After the prompter, for our entrance. - ↑ Satiromastix, 2325, 'The watch-word in a maske is the bolde drum'.
