letters very signifying to the name of the bridegroom', and again in the Mask of Queens one of the dances was 'graphically disposed into letters, and honouring the name of the most sweet and ingenious Prince, Charles, Duke of York'. These graphic dances, which Bacon deprecates, were also used in the French Ballet de Monseigneur le Duc de Vandosme of 1610.[1]
It is of a piece with the intimacy between maskers and spectators that the former appear always to have been volunteers, and that to dance in a mask, at any rate at court, was not derogatory even to persons of the highest rank. I have no proof that Queen Elizabeth ever masked in person, as her father and brother certainly did, but in view of her notorious fondness for the exercise of the dance it is extremely probable. Unfortunately we know very little of the personnel of the Elizabethan masks. The Revels Accounts, a source of generous information on many points, never name the maskers. Scattered notices elsewhere suggest that they may not infrequently have been the maids of honour. It was so when Brantôme was present in 1561, and at Anne Russell's wedding in 1600, when Elizabeth, contrary to the ordinary rule of sex-exchange, was 'taken' out by Mary Fitton. Among the stray names of revellers that have floated to us down the stream of time are those of George Brooke, who came to the scaffold in 1603, and Sir Robert Carey, who boasts of his share in all court triumphs in 1586.[2] Naunton is the authority for the statement that Sir Christopher Hatton first appeared before Elizabeth in one of the masks which were sent from time to time as the contributions of the Inns of Court to the royal gaiety. [3] Lists of the dancers in most of the Jacobean masks are preserved. That of James himself is not among them; he was ungainly and indolent except on horseback. But Anne danced in her own 'Queen's' masks of 1604, 1605, 1608, 1609, 1610, and probably 1611, and allowed herself to be 'taken out' as a compliment to her hosts at Caversham as late as the summer of 1613. With her in 1610 was the Princess Elizabeth, and in 1608 and 1610 the Lady Arabella Stuart. Henry was 'taken out' as a boy and 'tost from hand to hand like a tennis bal' by the ladies in the Twelve Goddesses of 1604.
- ↑ Lacroix, i. 256, 262.
- ↑ Goodman, i. 70, 'George Brooks . . . brother to Cobham . . . was a great reveller at court in the masques where the queen and greatest ladies were'; Carey, 6, 'In all triumphs I was one; either at tilt, tourney, or barriers, in masque or balls'.
- ↑ Naunton, 44, 'Sir Christopher Hatton came into the court . . . as a private gentleman of the inns of court in a mask, and for his activity and person, which was tall and proportionable, taken into favour'.
