found access more readily than the citizens themselves.[1] It is difficult to say how many the room would hold. One of De la Boderie's dispatches speaks of 10,000, which was probably a considerable over-estimate.[2] Many of those who besieged the doors must of course have been disappointed, and perhaps many of those who got in experienced more satisfaction than comfort.[3] In order to save space, it was decreed in 1613 that no ladies should be admitted in farthingales, and the repetition of the Irish Mask of 1613 and the Mercury Vindicated of 1615 may have been due in part to an unsatisfied demand for seats as well as to the intrinsic merit of the performances.
The mask, beginning after supper, was prolonged far into the night. That at Sir Philip Herbert's wedding lasted three hours; Tethys' Festival was not over until hard upon sunrise. The pent-up audience dissolved in some confusion. Apparently the Tudor custom of finishing the proceedings by rifling the pageant and the dresses of their decorations had not been wholly abandoned.[4] A hardly less riotous scene followed. A banquet was spread in another room, the great chamber in 1605, the presence chamber in 1616, the specially
- ↑ Four Plays in One, 2, 'Down with those City-Gentlemen, &c. Out with those I say, and in with their wives at the back door'; Love Restored, 'By this time I saw a fine citizen's wife or two let in; and that figure provoked me exceedingly to take it'. Here Robin Goodfellow is recounting his various attempts to secure admission, as an engineer, a tirewoman, a musician, a feather-maker of Blackfriars and the like. Carleton wrote of the mask on 27 Dec. 1604 (S. P. Dom. Jac. I, xii. 6), 'One woeman among the rest lost her honesty for which she was caried to the porters lodge being surprised at her bassnes on the top of the taras'.
- ↑ Ambassades, iii. 13.
- ↑ Osborne, James, 75, 'So disobliging were the most grateful pleasures of the Court; whose masks and other spectacles, though they wholly intended them for show, and would not have been pleased without great store of company, yet did not spare to affront such as come to see them; which accuseth the King no less of folly, in being at so vast an expense for that which signified nothing but in relation to pride and lust, than the spectators (I mean such as were not invited) of madness, who did not only give themselves the discomposure of body attending such irregular hours, but to others an opportunity to abuse them. Nor could I, that had none of their share who passed through the most incommodious access, count myself any great gainer (who did ever find some time before the grand night to view the scene) after I had reckoned my attendance and sleep; there appearing little observable besides the company, and what Imagination might conjecture from the placing of the Ladies and the immense charge and universal vanity in clothes, &c.'
- ↑ Jonson, Mask of Blackness, 7, 'Little had been done to the study of magnificence in these, if presently with the rage of the people, who (as a part of greatness) are privileged by custom to deface their carcases, the spirits had also perished'; cf. Halle, i. 27, 117. At Tethys' Festival the Duke of York and six young noblemen led off the maskers 'to avoid the confusion which usually attendeth the desolve of these shewes'.
