sarino's main idea, of the inhibition of the dance by the magic of Circe until the gods come to the rescue, may fairly be regarded as responsible for the several episodes of disenchantment or transformation which recur in the work of his successors.[1]
Jonson's mask for the Ramsay-Radcliffe wedding in 1608 represents a stage of importance in the evolution of the dramatic form. The entry of the maskers is preluded by a dance of the torch-bearing Joci and Risus. In describing his Mask of Queens of the following year, Jonson says, 'And because her majesty (best knowing that a principal part of life in these spectacles lay in their variety) had commanded me to think on some dance, or shew, that might precede hers, and have the place of a foil, or false masque, I was careful to decline, not only from others, but mine own steps in that kind, since the last year, I had an antimasque of boys; and therefore now devised that twelve women, in the habit of hags or witches, sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, &c., the opposites to good Fame, should fill that part, not as a masque, but a spectacle of strangeness, producing multiplicity of gesture, and not unaptly sorting with the current and whole fall of the device'. I am not quite sure what Jonson intends by the distinction here drawn between a 'masque' and a 'spectacle', for in fact the Hags dance 'a magical dance full of preposterous change and gesticulation', which is interrupted by a burst of loud music and an alteration in the face of the scene, heralding the introduction of the Queens in the House of Fame. However this may be, Jonson's innovation, with its obvious advantages of added variety, must have been immediately successful, for in practically all subsequent examples of the period the antimask appears as a fixed element in the scheme, preceding and setting off what Beaumont calls the 'maine' mask, and usually divided from it by a change of scene.[2] There are some slight further elaborations to record. In Oberon, in the Lords' Mask, and in Chapman's Mask, the antimask is followed by a dance of torch-bearers, to which also Chapman gives the name of 'antimask'. Beaumont's Mask, the Mask of Squires, Mercury Vindicated, and Browne's Mask have each two regular
- ↑ Gesta Grayorum; Hay Mask; Lords' Mask; Mask of Squires; Mask of Flowers; Browne's Mask (introducing Circe). As late as 1632 Aurelian Townshend and Inigo Jones borrow the episode of Circe and the Fugitive in Tempe Restored.
- ↑ An exception is Love Restored, where the place of an antimask is taken by the long comic induction by Masquerado, Plutus, and Robin Goodfellow.
