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Updated: May 31, 2025
It was not until the celebrated Inigo Jones designed scenery for certain masques given at the Court of King James that the traditional bareness of the boards was covered, and it was not until the time of Charles II. that women began to make their appearance upon the boards and unite the stage with the second estate.
On the other hand, they undoubtedly served to introduce an elaboration of plot and complexity of dramatic structure which is altogether lacking in the earlier eclogues and masques, but without which the work of Tasso and Guarini could never have occupied the commanding position that it does in the history of literature.
The masques introduced into plays were necessarily, for the most part, of a slighter and less elaborate character than those performed at court, or for the entertainment of persons of rank.
To this rule the personages of Love in Several Masques are no exception. They are drawn rather from the stage than from life, and there is little constructive skill in the plot. A certain booby squire, Sir Positive Trap, seems like a first indication of some of the later successes in the novels; but the rest of the dramatis personae are puppets.
During the eighteen years when public dramatic performances had been prohibited, he had secured permission now and then to produce an opera upon a private stage. For these musical entertainments he took as a model the masques, or court celebrations, which had been the most popular form of private theatricals in the days of Elizabeth and James.
Johnson . Even here, however, we learn little concerning the condition of pastoralism in general, from the highly specialized form employed to a specific purpose. As in all the regular masques of the Jonsonian type the characters and situations exist solely for the opportunities they afford for dance and song.
The credulity and superstition of the age, and its belief in the supernatural, and the sumptuousness of masques and pageants at the court and in the city, of which we read so much in the old chronicles, are abundantly reflected in the pages of Jonson, Shakespeare, and other writers.
In the highest society the Elizabethan women might take some part in masques or pageants without rebuke, but the appearance of a woman on the public stage in Shakespeare's day would have aroused something like the emotion that would be caused by the appearance of a Moslem woman unveiled in the chief thoroughfare of a fanatical Mohammedan city, or a suffragist in the House of Commons.
Generally, let princes and states choose such ministers, as are more sensible of duty than of using; and such as love business rather upon conscience, than upon bravery, and let them discern a busy nature, from a willing mind. Of Masques And Triumphs THESE things are but toys, to come amongst such serious observations.
But from the moment of his arrival at Milan the Florentine artist was employed by his new master to paint portraits and frescoes, to construct canals, arrange masques and pageants, or invent mechanical contrivances for use on the stage or in the house.
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