built 'marriage' room in 1613. It was not etiquette for the King to partake of this with his guests, but he usually conducted the maskers to the tables, and took a survey of them before he retired. Then the fray began. The banquet was 'dispatched with the accustomed confusion', says a chronicler in 1604. In 1605 it 'was so furiously assaulted that down went tables and tressels before one bit was touched'. Tethys' Festival in 1610 closed with 'views and scrambling'. At Beaumont's mask in 1613, 'after the King had made the tour of the tables, everything was in a moment rapaciously swept away'.[1] Tired and unfed, the ladies made their way out into the courtyards of the palace, perhaps to find, as in 1604, that chains and jewels were gone, and that they were even 'made shorter by the skirts'.[2]
Next day the poets sat down to turn the programmes into books, which the stationers could print and sell at sixpence each, and so save them from being pestered for copies of the verses.[3] And the Lord Chamberlain's Secretary sat down to compare his expenses with his imprests, and to draw up his accounts for endorsement by his lord and the Master of the Horse, and presentation at the Exchequer. Any estimate of the cost of masking that we can now form must be approximate in character. Under Elizabeth, so long as masks were the care of the Revels, their expenses naturally appear in the accounts of that office; but in part only, since requisitions appear to have been made upon the Wardrobe and the Office of Works, and the services rendered by these departments not charged to the Revels. Moreover, the methods of bookkeeping employed by the officers of the Revels did not provide for distinguishing expenditure upon masks and upon plays when, as was usually the case, both types of entertainment were in concurrent preparation.[4] It is therefore rarely that the cost of an Elizabethan mask can be isolated, and still more rarely that it can be assumed to be complete. Four masks in the winter of 1559 only cost the Revels £127 11s. 2d., and it was estimated that two more at Shrovetide would cost another £100. The spectacular mask in June 1572 cost £506 11s. 8d., but it is noted that the 'Warderobe stuf' was 'excepted'
- ↑ Cf. ch. xxiii; also Busino in V. P. xv. 114.
- ↑ Winwood. ii. 43.
- ↑ On 2 Feb. 1604, the Earl of Worcester wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury of The Twelve Goddeses (Lodge, iii. 87), 'I have been at sixpence charge with you to send you the book'. He adds that the books of another ballet were 'all called in'. After the Mask of Beauty Lord Lisle wrote to Shrewsbury (Lodge, App. 102) that he could not get the verses, because Jonson was busy writing more for the Haddington wedding.
- ↑ Cf. ch. iii.
