Shakespeare
mentions the measures or revels several times. While measures
and revels could refer to dancing in general, they also denote
the specific part of a court masque or mumming when the performers
ask members of the audience to join them in dancing. An example
of this occurs in Henry VIII when the King and several
others in masks crash a party at the Cardinal's house and ask
the women present to dance with them.
The
court masque evolved out of two different types of
entertainments: silent mummings and disguisings,
and public tournaments, pageants, and triumphs. Boundary
crossing between audience and performer in the form
of dancing appeared in the mummings and disguisings.
The elaborate cars and processions Inigo Jones designed
for Ben Jonson's masques hearkened back to Medieval
tournaments and pageants, and imitated Roman triumphal
processions. The rarity of a masque also tied it
to the entertainments it evolved from. Each masque,
created for a particular occasion, was only performed
once. On occasion, if the noble host liked it tremendously,
it might be requested again, but ordinarily every
masque was a unique, singular act.39
The
court masque after 1609 had two parts, the antimasque
and the main masque (what used to be the entirety
of a masque). In the antimasque, professional actors
who, attired as witches, rustics, or inanimate objects
like bottles or trees, portrayed negative abstractions
like ignorance and gluttony by making spells, speeches,
and dancing about. Then a sudden event such as a
loud burst of music interrupted their festivities.
The humorous, often grotesque characters of the antimasque
were expelled and replaced by aristocratic court
members representing positive abstractions such as
chaste love or heroic virtue. The main masque followed,
beginning with the nobility's entrance in a procession
of fanciful cars and floats. The masquers danced
several choreographed numbers interspersed with songs
and speeches by actors, talented servants, or the
occasional nobleman. Then the masquers descended
from the stage and invited audience members to join
in the revels, the grand masque dance made up of
popular dances known to all courtiers. After an hour
or so of dancing, a speech or song called the masquers
back, they returned to their vehicles, and the procession
passed offstage.40
Ben Jonson
in addition to writing numerous plays also wrote more than a
dozen masques and was responsible for the introduction of the
antimasque. For The Masque of Queens (1609) Ben Jonson
devised the first antimasque at the request of Queen Anne. Jonson
had employed what he called an anti-masque for the Hadington
Viscount's marriage celebration, but that was only a small show
that occurred before the official masque. It had no particular
relation to the main masque nor did it differ in style. The
Queen, however, desired a dance prelude to contrast with the
main masque. As Jonson relates in his introductory notes:
And
because her majesty (best knowing that a principal
part of life in these spectacles lay in their variety)
had commanded me to think on some dance or show
that might precede hers, and have the place of
a foil or false masque, I was careful to decline
not only from others but mine own steps in that
kind, since the last year I had an anti-masque
of boys, and therefore now devised that twelve
women in the habit of hags or witches, sustaining
the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity,
etc., the opposites to good fame, should fill that
part; not as a masque, but a spectacle of strangeness
producing multiplicity of gesture and not unaptly
sorting with the current and whole fall of the
device.41
In
his attempt to satisfy the Queen's request, Jonson
inadvertently invented the dramatic form which some
critics consider England's sole original contribution
to dance and its theatrical conceptions until the
twentieth century.42
39
Robert M. Adams. "The Staging of Jonson's Plays
and Masques." In Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques.
Selected and edited by Robert M. Adams. (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), p. 315.
back
to text
40 Enid Welsford.
The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship
Between Poetry and the Revels. (Cambridge: The
University Press, 1927). back
to text
41Ben Jonson. The
Masque of Queens. In Ben Jonson's Plays and
Masques. Selected and edited by Robert M. Adams.
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), p.
321. back
to text
42 Walter Sorell.
Dance through the Ages. New York: Grosset
& Dunlap, 1967), p. 113. back
to text
