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Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century – By Lauren Shohet

2011; Wiley; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1477-4658.2011.00754.x

1477-4658

Neil Forsyth,

Fashion and Cultural Textiles

What was it like to attend one of the early modern spectacles that we know as masques?There have been few modern attempts to recreate the experience -odd amateur performances here and there, often execrable, several of Comus, which is hardly typical, productions of The Tempest of course (a magical one in Stockholm recently, for example) including films of the play, again hardly typical, otherwise very little.One exception is that the wonders of YouTube have recently brought back from oblivion a remarkable 1989 Channel Four TV recreation of the Florentine Intermedi from Una Stravaganza Dei Medici with Japanese subtitles (my thanks to Stephen Orgel for the reference), which re-imagines the musical interludes of a wedding celebration, with many of the ingredients of masques apart from spoken dialogue.You may have thought you got some idea from the performances in Roland Joffé's brilliantly imagined film Vatel (2000), but to judge from this book, quite apart from the differences of Louis XIV's and English courts, that would be far from the mark.Shohet trawls through masses of contemporary documents, including letters and newsbooks, in order to show us how the English masque may have felt, and it does not sound as if a very wide audience these days would tune in.Music, yes, but dialogue and staging?Silly.Masques have excited scholarly attention in recent years because of renewed interest in the connections between literature and representations of political power.Shohet reviews this scholarship in thorough, informed and sometimes surprising ways while presenting her own approach, which is to interpret masques from the point of view of their impact or reception.This in turn leads to one of the book's most important moves, the linking of masques with other genres.Vulgar ballads and aristocratic masques quote each other, and this is an important discovery.Minor details are also reported in contemporary letters, given the widespread fascination with a genre so popular at court.The prince (Charles, newly installed as Prince of Wales following his elder brother Henry's death) 'excelled them all in bowing', we learn about one performance, and 'cut a few capers, very gracefully', but the king became bored with the dialogue and interrupted: 'What did they make me come here for?The Devil take you all, dance!'There is necessarily a lot here about Ben Jonson, though many contemporaries get equal time.Indeed, the book begins with an analysis of Davenant's Britannia Triumphans and returns to it several times.Though it was presented before Charles in the Banqueting Hall, its performance also involved much 'negotiation' with the interests of the merchant classes in the city -necessarily, given that the performance took place at the height of the Ship Money crisis in 1638.Sea-nymphs praise Britanocles as a naval ruler, and the masque devotes the 'greatest amount of stage-time and the most stunningly spectacular special effects' to the image of the great fleet that moors in the hall while the court dances.Representations of the kingdom within the masque, such as 'English houses of the old and newer forms', are suggestive not so much of absolutist pretensions, according to Shohet, as of a conversation among various models of