is a similar scene in Beaumont and Fletcher's Four Plays in One, a piece which consists of three short playlets, divided by 'triumphs' or intermedii, and concluded by a mask. This may be regarded as an experiment, in which the influence of the mask-tradition has exceptionally modified the typical structure of the drama. Nor does it stand quite alone. Peele's Arraignment of Paris is of course spectacular throughout, and the last scene, in which the golden apple is handed to Elizabeth, is clearly, in its recognition of the audience, a divergence from the normal detachment of the drama.[1] Perhaps the same may be said of the epithalamic end of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, but as a rule the element of mask remains an episode, and does not dominate the play which admits it.
The debt of the mask to the play may be traced in the increased skill in which the later masks are arranged around a 'device' or dramatic idea. The mask had had its presenters as far back as Lydgate. Even in a learned court, the more recondite forms of allegory or mythology sometimes require explanation. The maskers proper seem to have been traditionally mum and therefore unable to explain themselves. Let us remember that they were not professional actors, but English men and women of good birth and breeding, and that therefore their limbs could more easily be trained than their wits and voices. If explanation was required, it must be given in an introductory speech by a subsidiary performer. Such a spokesman seems to have been known to the Elizabethan Revels as a 'truchman' or interpreter.[2] In addition to his function of elucidation he became the natural vehicle of whatever compliment was to be paid by the mask, and when Arthur Throgmorton wished to turn the heart of
- ↑ I do not wish to exaggerate this detachment. Peele builds upon the customary prayer for the queen or lord at the end of an interlude (cf. chh. x, xviii, xxii), and there are the plays with inductions, such as The Taming of the Shrew and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, in which the personages of the induction mediate between the action and the audience.
- ↑ I find 'tronchwoman' (Feuillerat, Eliz. 217), 'troocheman' (Feuillerat, Eliz. 287), 'trounchman' (Gascoigne, i. 85), and as interpreters of mimetic tilts 'crocheman' (Halle, i. 13), 'trounchman' (Peele, Polyhymnia, 47); also 'an interpreter or a truchman' accompanying the 'orator speaking a straunge language' in the train of the Lord of Misrule in 1552-3 (Feuillerat, Edw. and M. 89, 123). W. D. Macray has the following note to 'truckman' which appears in the text of Clarendon, History, i. 75, 'i. e. truchman = dragoman. In the old editions the word "interpreter" was substituted as an explanation; in the last editions "trustman" was given as the reading of the MS.'. N. E. D. gives the earliest use of the word as 1485 and derives through Med. Lat. turchemannus from Arab. turjamān, interpreter, whence also dragoman.
