And they did
something
more.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
“In the
acting thereof they brought in five or six men almost naked which
were much disliked by the Queen and Ladies. ' It needed the
entreaties of the chancellors of both universities to prevent the
king leaving before half the comedy had been ended. ' On the
following night, James saw Ajax Flagellifer. James would have
done well to imitate his predecessor in countermanding', as he
'was very weary before he came thither, but much more wearied
by it, and spoke many words of dislike. ' Nor did matters fare
.
much better on the third evening, when Vertumnus sive Annus
Recurrens, by Matthew Gwinne of St John's, was performed on
the Christ Church stage. Though it was well acted by a company
consisting chiefly of St John's men, the king fell asleep in the
middle. But the play produced on the following evening ‘made
amends for all. ' It was The Queenes Arcadia of Samuel Daniel,
'
memorable as the first English pastoral drama written for the
academic stage? Guarini's Il Pastor Fido had been acted a short
time previously at King's college, Cambridge, in a Latin version,
Pastor Fidus. Parthenia, a similar version of Luigi Groto's Pen-
timento Amoroso, preserved in manuscript at Emmanuel college,
Cambridge, is of uncertain date. Daniel, as was natural, followed
the general lines of Italian pastoral drama; but the statement of
a contemporary Cambridge visitor to Oxford, that it was drawn
out of Pastor Fidus,' is misleading. So far as Daniel's play owes
a direct debt to a foreign original, it is to Tasso's Aminta rather
than to Guarini's work, while the conception of the plot, though
not of a number of episodes, must be put down to the English
poet's own credit. It deals with the entanglements and evils
produced in Arcadia by the machinations of sophisticated re-
presentatives of the outer world. Chief among these are Colax,
'a corrupted traveller,' and Techne, a subtle wench of Corinth,
who, by their nefarious schemes, delude the shepherd Amyntas
into the belief that Cloris, whom he wooes in vain, is a wanton.
In despair, he tries to take his own life, but, in an episode imitated
1 Cf. ante, p. 298.
For a brief sketch of the progress of the pastoral drama in England see the fol.
lowing chapter (XIII).
## p. 318 (#336) ############################################
318
University Plays
from Aminta, is rescued by Cloris, whose heart has, at last, been
touched by love. The arch evildoers, after plotting not only
against the hero and heroine but against other Arcadian lovers,
are banished for ever. Subordinate, but more amusing, mischief-
makers are Lincus, a pettifogging lawyer, and Alcon, a quack
doctor, into whose mouth is put a description of tobacco as
a certaine herbe wrapt up in rowles
From th’ Island of Nicosia where it growes:
And this he said a wondrous vertue had,
To purge the head, and cure the great catarre.
This, of course, was intended to tickle the ears of the author of
A Counterblaste to Tobacco. But the permanent attraction of
Daniel's play lies not in its topical references or even in its
plot and characterisation, but in the lyrical sweetness of its
verse and the limpid grace of its diction and imagery. Its pro-
duction at Christ Church is amongst the most memorable records
of the Oxford stage. Probably, however, none of the Christ Church
plays gratified the king so much as a more informal open-air inter-
lude which took place in front of St John's college on the day of his
entry into Oxford. Three young scholars, dressed as nymphs,
suddenly appeared in his path. They announced that they were
the sibyls who had formerly foretold to Banquo the rule of his
descendants, and that they had come again to prophesy all hap-
piness to James, and the perpetuity of Banquo's stock upon the
British throne. They then saluted the king in turn with a triple
salve, and greeted similarly the queen and prince Henry. James
'did very much applaude' the conceipt,' which was devised by
Matthew Gwinne, and it is possible that some account of it reached
the ears of Shakespeare and suggested the writing of Macbeth in
the following year.
The stimulus of the royal visit to theatrical activity at Oxford,
especially at St John's college, seems to have lasted for some time
afterwards. To this, we have remarkable testimony in a unique
memorial of the academic stage preserved in the St John's library.
It is a manuscript written by Griffin Higgs, a member of the college,
who successively became fellow of Merton and chaplain to Eliza-
beth of Bohemia, and entitled A true and faithfull relation of
the risinge and fall of Thomas Tucker, Prince of Alba Fortunata,
Lord St Johns &c. , with all the occurrents which happened through-
out his whole domination. No extant document, not even Gager's
6
## p. 319 (#337) ############################################
Plays at St John's, Oxford, 160748 319
letter to Rainolds, lets us so completely behind the scenes of the
collegiate theatre, or brings home to us so intimately the hopes
and fears, the labours and difficulties, connected with the per-
formances. The manuscript is an account of a series of festivities
which lasted from All Saints' eve (31 October) 1607 till the first
Sunday in the following Lent? On All Saints' eve, Thomas
Tucker, a bachelor of arts (later, a fellow of the college and
canon of Bristol) was elected 'Christmas Lord or Prince of the
Revells. . . to appoint & moderate all such games and pastimes
as should come. ' Two bills' were, therefore, sent out to the
masters craving allegiance to his authority and 'money & main-
tenance. Among those who contributed were Laud and Juxon,
each assessed at ten shillings. But, in order to raise an adequate
sum, Tucker (like a true Stewart ruler) had to levy a further
requisition on ex-fellows and commoners and on college tenants.
Sufficient provision thus made, he was publicly installed on
St Andrew's day by means of a Latin "devise,' Ara Fortunae.
In this, the prince, with his leading councillors, visits the temple
of Fortune and is assured by her priestess of the favour of the
goddess. He accordingly announces that he no longer reigns by
popular favour but by divine right, and that he is preparing ‘pomps
and triumphs' for the entertainment of his faithful subjects.
On Christmas day, the prince sat at high table in the vice-
president's place, and a boar's head was carried in as 'the first
messe' by the 'tallest and lustiest' of his guards, to the accom-
paniment of a brisk carol. In the evening, a short Latin interlude,
Saturnalia, was performed, introducing a Dominus and a Servus
in the inverted relation peculiar to the Roman festival, and after-
wards Hercules, who, by interpreting aright an equivocal Delphic
oracle, shows that waxen lights and not human sacrifices are the
offerings enjoined at this anniversary. As the season of the
Saturnalia coincided approximately with Christmastide, these
waxen lights, it is hinted, are the source of Christmas candles;
and, in a prose epilogue, an ingenious parallel and contrast are
drawn between the pagan and the Christian festival.
The same sense of classical and Biblical analogies dictated the
choice of a play for Innocents' day. A Senecan tragedy on the story
of Philomela was written for the occasion, as it was thought that the
1 The narrative part of the manuscript and one play The Seven Dayes of the
Weeke were printed in 1816, with the title The Christmas Prince. The present writer
has been given facilities for consulting the manuscript, and the account of the other
plays is here printed for the first time.
## p. 320 (#338) ############################################
320
University Plays
subject 'well fitted the day, by reason of the murder of Innocent
Itis. ' But the performance had to be postponed for a day because
the carpenters were 'no way ready wth the stage. ' Then a further
mishap occurred. “The Prince himself who was to play Tereus had
gott such an exceeding cold that it was impossible for him to
speake, or speaking to be heard. ' However, with the unnamed
author of the tragedy in reserve as an understudy should he be
'constrained to leave,' the resourceful Tucker got through his
part with credit. The whole play was wel acted and wel liked,
a more favourable verdict than had been pronounced on Calf-
hill's tragedy on the same story acted before Elizabeth at Christ
Church in 1566.
It is characteristic of the academic taste of the time, that
Philomela was much more appreciated than an English play
Time's Complaint, acted on New Year's day as part of the
princes triumphs. ' The failure of this piece, which received only
'two or three cold plaudites,' was partly due to the blunders of
amateur actors, of which Higgs gives amusing details, and to the
overcrowding on the stage. But, doubtless, the fault also lay
largely in the plot, which combines awkwardly a semi-allegorical
tale of Time's attempt to recover his daughter Veritas, kept in
thraldom by Opinion and Error, and a farcical series of mistakes
and entanglements arising out of the theft of goodwife Spigott's
goods by a drunken cobbler, Swallow. Yet, Time's Complaint is
far from being without interest. It contains genre pictures of
characteristic Elizabethan types, such as the dispossessed country-
man, the cashiered soldier and the professional beggar. It intro-
duces, also, in Studioso, the poor and embittered scholar, and in
Philonices, the grasping, pompous lawyer and justice, two figures
akin to those in the Parnassus plays.
The spirits of the St John's actors, which had been grievously
depressed by the cold reception of Time's Complaint, were revived
by the success of an amusing show, The Seven Dayes of the Weeke,
acted at the president's lodging on Sunday, 10 January, and re-
peated by special request before the vice-chancellor and other
dignitaries a week later. Equally successful was a Latin comedy
Philomathes, mingling abstractions with Plautine characters.
After its performance 'the stage & scaffold were pul'd downe
wch had stood from Cristmas'; but they were set up again on
Shrove Tuesday for the prince's resignation. This, like his public
installation, was solemnised in the form of a play, Ira seu Tumulus
Fortunae. The goddess has now grown angry with the prince
## p. 321 (#339) ############################################
Riots at Performances
321
because he has not paid her sufficiently constant homage. His
ministers resign their symbols of office and desert him. In vain
he visits again the altar of Fortune, and seeks to placate her
wrath. He, therefore, strips himself of the emblems of sove-
reignty, and lays them in a sepulchre in her temple, dedicating
himself henceforth to the service of Minerva.
Thus ended the memorable reign of Thomas Tucker; but, as the
stage and scaffolds had been re-erected, and, as an English tragedy
on the story of Periander, tyrant of Corinth, had been prepared,
it was decided to perform this on the following Saturday. It at-
tracted such a concourse that hundreds could not find room in the
hall. They ‘made such an hideous noice, and raised such a tumult
with breaking of windows all about the colledge, throwinge of stones
into the hall, and such like ryott' that the officers of the college
had to rush forth, 'wth about a dozen whiflers well armed and
swords drawne. ' The rioters then ran away, but some of the
ringleaders were arrested, and imprisoned in the porter's lodge
till the play was over.
Curiously enough, about a week later, on 20 February, there
was a similar riot at Cambridge, when there was 'foul & great
disorder committed at the time of a comedy in King's College,'
probably a lost play by Phineas Fletcher. In the same month,
four years later, there was a yet more serious disturbance at Cam-
bridge, when the St John's men, angry at being excluded from a
comedy acted at Trinity college, began an affray outside the Great
Gate, which led to proceedings in the vice-chancellor's court. In
sharp contrast to these tumultuous proceedings was the scene in
the hall of Trinity on 2 March 1613, when prince Charles and
Frederick, the elector palatine, saw Samuel Brooke's comedy
called Adelphe, and when the elector slept during the greater part
of the performance, which lasted from seven in the evening till
one. On the following evening, the princes were again provided
with solid entertainment by the performance of Scyros, a Latin
version by Brooke of Bonarelli's pastoral drama, Filli di Sciro.
On 7 March 1615, James himself, with prince Charles, came to
Cambridge, and stayed at Trinity for four nights. As the sovereign
had not visited the university since Elizabeth's 'progress' in 1564,
elaborate preparations were made to celebrate the event. The
days were devoted to learned disputations and the evenings to
plays. The first piece, Aemilia, a Latin comedy written by Ed-
ward Cecil of St John's, was not very successful; but ample
amends were made on the following evening when, in the hall
21
E. L. VI.
CH, XII.
## p. 322 (#340) ############################################
322
University Plays
of Trinity, Ignoramus was launched on its triumphant career.
Its author was George Ruggle, fellow of Clare hall, who had
formerly been a scholar of Trinity, and the actors were chosen
from various colleges, difficulty being found in filling suitably the
female parts. On one side, Ignoramus is linked with the group of
Latin adaptations of Italian comedies mentioned above, for it is
founded on G. della Porta's Trappolaria. But Ruggle transformed
his original by extensive additions, and by a fundamental change in
the central character, converting him out of a soldier into the
lawyer who gives his name to the play. Thus metamorphosed,
the typically southern comedy became the climax of Aristophanic
attacks by gownsmen upon the town and its officials. The title
part is a merciless caricature of the detested recorder, Brackyn,
who had already been ridiculed in The Returne from Pernassus,
Part II. The animus against him as a common lawyer had
been intensified by public events. The law dictionary The Inter-
preter, published in 1607 by John Cowell, regius professor of
civil law, had been suppressed on the demand of the House of
Commons, because its tendency was to exalt the royal prerogative
at the expense of common law. The civilians of the university
and the king himself were, therefore, delighted when Ruggle
brought upon the stage a burlesque figure talking a barbarous
jargon of bastard Latin and the technical terms of common law.
It is the novelty of this conception and the gusto with which it is
developed that give the play its unique character. In the course
of its intricate plot, Ignoramus goes through a variety of humiliating
and painful experiences. On a visit to Bordeaux, he falls in love
with the heroine, Rosabella, and engages to pay 600 pieces of gold
for her hand. But, through the stratagems of Antonius, the
favoured suitor of the girl, Ignoramus obtains possession instead
of the heavy-handed virago, Polla, who belabours him soundly,
Amazed at his incomprehensible outcries, she thinks he is be
witched and goes to fetch her husband and a monk, who, in a
scene of richly farcical humour, exorcise the evil spirits out of
him and carry him off, shrieking, to a monastery for his final cure.
Rosabella, of course, is finally united to Antonius, and a mystery
attaching to her birth is cleared up.
Ignoramus, with its mixture of learning and horseplay, was
exactly suited for captivating James. The play presented on the
following night, Albumazar, though adapted by Tomkis, author
of Lingua, from another comedy of della Porta, L'Astrologo,
was less successful. But it contains two amusing characters in
## p. 323 (#341) ############################################
6
James I at Cambridge, 1615 323
Albumazar, the rascally astronomer, and Trincalo, the rustic whom
Albumazar 'transforms' into his absent master, Antonio, with lu-
dicrous consequences when the latter unexpectedly returns home. .
In its printed form, the play was fortunate enough to attract both
Dryden and Garrick, both of whom revived it on the London stage.
But, on its production, it seems, from a contemporary account,
to have been less appreciated not only than its predecessor,
Ignoramus, but than its successor on the following evening, Me-
lanthe, a Latin pastoral drama from the pen of Samuel Brooke,
whose Adelphe and Scyros have been mentioned above. The king
could not stay to see the last play prepared for his entertainment,
Sicelides, by Phineas Fletcher ; but it was acted a few days later.
He thus missed seeing the first English 'piscatory' on the stage,
as he had already seen at Oxford, in 1605, the first English pastoral
drama. The main plot of Sicelides, dealing with the romantic
love stories of Perindus and Glaucilla and Thalander and Olinda,
is, apparently, original, though episodes and motives are derived
from classical and Italian sources. One underplot centres round
Cosma, the typical 'light nymph' of 'Messena,' and the other
round Cancrone and Scrocca, low-comedy fishermen whose talk is
largely a farrago of 'malapropisms' and topical allusions. The
machinery of the play is unduly intricate and perplexing, and the
characterisation is not vivid. But the work has real charm in its
delicate delineation of emotions, in the graceful imagery of its
descriptive passages and in the lyric sweetness of its choruses.
James was so delighted with Ignoramus that he revisited Cam-
bridge in May to see it a second time. Its triumph marks the
close of the most vital period of the university drama. Hence-
forward, no new type was evolved, and the distinctively academic
element dwindles. Allegorical plays became increasingly popular
with college dramatists, though Lingua remained unrivalled for
wit and verve. Thus, in February 1618, Technogamia or The
Marriage of the Arts, by Barten Holiday, was acted at Christ
Church ‘with no great applause'; but it was repeated before the
king at Woodstock in August 1621. Though James seems to have
found the piece very dull, it is not without merit. The action
shows how some of the arts and sciences endeavour to enter into
unnatural unions. Thus, Poeta seeks to win the hand of Astronomia,
but is finally allied to Historia and promises that his love shall
follow her ‘more inseparably than the Hexameter the Pentameter. '
Closely related to Lingua, to which it contains direct references, is
Pathomachia or The Battell of Affections, published by 'a Friend
of the deceassed Author,' in 1630, and 'written some years since. '
6
21-2
## p. 324 (#342) ############################################
324
University Plays
6
It deals with the revolt of the Affections against Love and Hatred,
‘whom heretofore they counted their King and Queene' Love
and Hatred are aided by the Virtues, headed by Justice, while the
rebels have the support of the Vices disguised as Affections or
Virtues, and commanded by Pride. Justice, however, unmasks
them, and sends them to confinement, whereupon the Affections
tender their submission and are pardoned. The work is in prose
throughout, and contains interesting passages and many allusions
to recent events, but lacks dramatic movement and vivacity.
Religious satire is another predominant element in the later
university playsa foretaste of the dread conflict that was fast
approaching. Loiola, by John Hacket, acted at Trinity before
the university on 28 February' and before James on a third visit
to Cambridge on 12 March 1623, is an entertaining Latin comedy,
which attacks impartially Roman Catholics and Calvinists, the
former in the person of Loiola, 'an unscrupulous Jesuit,' the latter
in that of Martinus, a canting elder of Amsterdam, where the scene
is laid. To the same year belongs the semi-allegorical Fucus
Histriomastix, wherein the title role, that of a hypocritical puritan
minister, was played by Robert Ward of Queens' college, who was
probably the author of the piece. Fucus, who hates all plays and
amusements, seeks to prevent the marriage of Philomathes and
Comoedia, otherwise, the production of an academic comedy. The
arguments he uses are the same as those of Rainolds in his con-
troversy with Gager, and seem derived from his book. But his
intrigues are foiled, and he also comes off badly in a feud with the
merry-making countryman, Villanus, who is in love with Ballada,
an illegitimate sister of Comoedia'.
Another actor in Fucus was Peter Hausted, afterwards fellow
of Queens', who, when Charles and Henrietta Maria visited
Cambridge in March 1632, wrote in their honour the singular play
The Rival Friends. This is linked to the comedies satirising
religious hypocrisy by its caustic portraiture of the wooers of the
deformed and foolish Mistress Ursely, whose hand carries with it
an 'impropriate parsonage. ' More realistically humorous person-
ages are Stipes, the shepherd of the simoniacal patron, and his wife
and daughter, all genuinely rustic figures without the customary
pastoral veneer. From Hausted's preface to the play when it
was published, it is evident that his low-life portraiture had been
adversely criticised as unbefitting the royal presence. But to
1 See Fucus Histriomastix, edited by Smith, G. C. Moore (1909), introduction and
notes, pp. 98—9. The editor suggests that the play may have been partly inspired by
an attempt, recorded by Chamberlain, to suppress the performance of Loiola.
## p. 325 (#343) ############################################
Hausted.
Randolph
325
modern taste this appeals much more strongly than does the
pseudo-romantic main plot. The two friends, Lucius and Neander,
rivals for the love of Pandora, vie in their readiness to abdicate
in each other's favour, and carry their altruism so far that the lady
gives her affections, at first in pretence, afterwards in reality, to a
third wooer. The popularity, however, of such fantastic themes
was evidenced by the successful production at Trinity, during
the same royal visit, of Thomas Randolph's The Jealous Lovers.
Randolph, a distinguished alumnus of Westminster and Trinity,
had already written two short academic 'shows,' Aristippus or
The Joviall Philosopher and The Conceited Pedler. The Jealous
Lovers was his first complete play, and the rapturous welcome
accorded to it does little credit to either the university or the
court. Randolph's inventiveness and rhetorical fluency cannot
redeem the essential falsity of the main plot. Tyndarus is insanely
suspicious of the faithfulness of his beloved Evadne, and Techmessa
similarly mistrusts her devoted Pamphilus. The two jealous
lovers' go through a mock funeral (which gives occasion for an
imitation of the gravedigger's scene in Hamlet) as a final test of
the constancy of the seemingly bereft pair. But, after this ordeal
has proved their loyalty unswerving, Hymen forbids the proposed
unions, and it transpires that Tyndarus is the brother of Evadne, and
Techmessa the sister of Pamphilus. Interwoven with these pseudo-
romantic episodes is an underplot of gross humour.
The royal pair, accompanied by their nephews, the palatine
princes, paid a second visit to Oxford in August 1636, when
the last important series of academic plays was produced in
their honour. William Strode, public orator, welcomed the
king to Christ Church with a speech, and with an allegorical
drama, The Floating Island, which was staged with great elabora-
tion, and furnished with music by Henry Lawes. The title and
general conception of the work, in which the island represents the
human mind afloat on the sea of the passions, was, doubtless, sug-
gested by Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island or The Isle of
Man, published at Cambridge in 1633. But Strode develops the
theme on lines of his own, and with the added spice of political
and religious satire. A conspiracy is formed by Audax, Irato and
others against the rule of king Prudentius and his counsellor,
Intellectus Agens. Prudentius resigns his crown, and Fancy is
proclaimed queen, her only law being 'that each man use his
proper humour, be it vice or virtue. ' Discord and tumult are the
result, and Prudentius is finally implored to resume the crown, after
each of the plotters has declined it in turn. The implied lesson
## p. 326 (#344) ############################################
326
University Plays
on the evil results of rebellion, and the castigation of Prynne,
in the person of Melancholico, a play-hating puritan, helped
to recommend the play to the royal favour. Equally successful
were the two dramas produced on the following day. One of these,
Love's Hospitall, by George Wilde, fellow of St John's, was per-
formed in the afternoon at that college at the expense of Laud,
who, as chancellor of the university, was present to welcome the
king and queen. The piece is an entertaining comedy of humours,
in almost farcical vein, and is in no way characteristically academic.
This is also true of William Cartwright's The Royall Slave', acted
in the evening at Christ Church. An Ephesian captive, Cratander,
in accordance with an old custom among the Persians, is granted
for three days before his execution the full insignia and privileges
of kingship. During this period, he displays such nobility of soul
that heaven intervenes in his favour, and he is spared to become
the wearer of a real crown. This theme is handled by Cart-
wright with genuine rhetorical effectiveness, and his drama was
furnished with special scenic effects by Inigo Jones and incidental
music by Lawes. So delighted was the queen with the perform-
ance that she afterwards borrowed the costumes and scenery for
a repetition of the play by her own company at Hampton court.
The academic stage was to number yet one more illustrious recruit
in Cowley, whose Naufragium Joculare, based on classical sources,
was acted at Trinity college, Cambridge, in 1638, and was followed
in 1642 by his satirical comedy The Guardian, remodelled after
the Restoration into Cutter of Coleman Street. But the royal
visit to Oxford in 1636 marks the close of these elaborate univer-
sity displays, which had begun with Elizabeth's coming to Cam-
bridge in 1564. Even in the traditionally loyal community on the
banks of the Isis, there were ominous symptoms of the rapidly
growing resentment against the autocratic rule of Charles and Laud.
As the king and queen rode away from Christ Church, the streets,
according to custom, were lined with 'Scholers of all degrees,' but
'neither they nor the citizens made any expression of joy, nor
uttered, as the manner is, Vivat Rex. ' When Oxford, some seven
years later, again opened its gates to Charles, it was not to enter-
tain him with ‘masques and triumphs,' but to afford him shelter
in his stern conflict with his parliamentary foes.
The civil war and the commonwealth mark a period of deep
cleavage in English stage history. With the Restoration, came
new men and new methods, and a forgetfulness of all but
the greatest dramatists of the former age. It was virtually
· See, as to Cartwright's plays, ante, chap. ix.
6
## p. 327 (#345) ############################################
Concluding Survey
327
the work of the nineteenth century to rediscover the lesser
Elizabethan writers for the popular stage. The university drama,
bilingual in utterance, and with its memorials not easy of
access, has had to wait for yet tardier recognition. It had, of
course, patent faults. It produced much that was artificial,
amateurish and unduly imitative, and its moral standard was
as unexacting as that of the London theatre of the day. But it
had behind it truly formative influences, in the renascence ardour
for classical lore and delight in pageantry, in the gownsmen's
haughty resentment of the buffets of fortune to which they were
exposed, and in the traditional hostility between scholars and
townsmen by Isis and by Cam. Hence sprang that special type of
Aristophanic comedy, unique in this period of the drama, repre-
sented by Pedantius and Ignoramus, Club Law and the Parnassus
trilogy. And, in addition to these distinctively topical university
plays, we owe to the academic stage a number of dramas moulded
and coloured by the peculiar conditions of their origin. Such are
the semi-Senecan plays on religious, historical and mythological
subjects, like Archipropheta, Richardus Tertius and Ulysses
Redux; comedies like Laelia and Hymenaeus; allegorical pieces
like Lingua, Fucus and The Floating Island; pastorals like The
Queenes Arcadia and Sicelides. In these and kindred productions,
noted in this chapter or merely recorded as 'comedy' or 'tragedy’
in college account-books, the university humanists preserved ele-
ments of classic and neo-classic culture which would otherwise
have been almost entirely lost to the stage. From Oxford and
Cambridge, these influences permeated to the capital. For, sharp
as in general was the division, social and intellectual, between
academic and professional playwrights, the latter and larger class
was constantly being recruited from graduates who had gained
their earliest dramatic experience as spectators, actors, or, in some
cases, authors, of college 'shows. The royal visits to the uni-
versities helped further to extend the range of influence of the
amateur stage.
And they did something more.
Under the per-
sonal rule of the Tudors and Stewarts, the centre of national life
was not fixed in Westminster, as at present; it moved with the
movements of the sovereign. And thus, the university plays, as
the principal magnet which drew Elizabeth, James and Charles
with their courts to Oxford and Cambridge, performed a more
important function than has been usually recognised. They helped
materially for nearly a hundred years to keep the two seats of
learning in contact with the throne, from which radiated, for good
and for ill, the dominating forces of the age.
>
## p. 328 (#346) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
MASQUE AND PASTORAL
THE Elizabethan drama, being without scenery and elaborate
stage apparatus, made its appeal to the mind rather than to the
eye, and used language as the main instrument by which the
imagination of its audience was aroused and satisfied. This
familiar fact goes far to explain the essentially intellectual
character of the Elizabethan drama, and the wonderful literary
power of the great dramatists. But we should misinterpret the
facts very seriously if we allowed ourselves to suppose that the
Elizabethan age was indifferent to the appeal of the eye, or to
imagine that, because the Elizabethan playgoer was without the
elaborate scenery and staging of the modern theatre, he was dis-
dainful of spectacle, and unwilling to spend time and money on
gorgeous shows in which the master art of pageantry combined
music, singing, painting, dancing and architecture in united effort
to charm and delight his senses.
The Elizabethan, for all his intellectual energy, was intensely
sensuous. In this respect, he represents the end of the Middle
Ages rather than the beginning of modern times. We cannot here
consider the meaning of that reaction against pageantry which was
an important part of puritanism, but we may note that the modern
student does not see the Elizabethan age as it saw itself; for
he overlooks as childish those things which it most cared for.
The drama meant, broadly, the introduction into popular enter-
tainment of a new intellectual element, which gradually dis-
credited pageantry, so that it ceased to be the art of the
educated and refined. But, all through the Elizabethan age and
until the closing of the theatres in 1642, masque and pageantry
held their place in the public eye, and in the public interest, as
the most important and honourable and magnificent of the arts.
The masque at court and among the nobility, and the pageant
among the citizens, were practised with an energy that, for the
1
1
1
## p. 329 (#347) ############################################
The Essence of Masque
329
time being, made them the most obvious, if not the most charac-
teristic, of the national activities, the means by which corporate
and national feeling most readily expressed itself. This old world
splendour of masque and pageant has, for the most part, perished.
Neither antiquarian researches nor modern adaptations can make
it live again, but, before it died, the intellectual power of the new
dramatic art came to the rescue and infused into the Elizabethan
masque a literary element, which has been a preservative against
decay. The leading dramatists were pressed into the service of
masque and pageant, and contributed an element to the spectacle
which, in many cases, has survived. The words supplied to pageants
and masques by Munday and Middleton, by Campion, Chapman,
Beaumont and Brown and, above all, by Jonson, form a small, but
very interesting, appendix to the many volumes of the drama.
The extant masques have considerable literary merits, and they ! 1
lead on to Milton's Comus, in which masque expands into pastoral: ;
with pastoral, generally, they have an important connection. But,
in studying masques as a literary form, we have to bear in mind
that we are not dealing with essential masque. Even Ben Jonson's
words are not much more than the stick of the rocket after the
firework has flamed and faded. Essential masque was the appeal
of the moment to the eye and the ear, the blaze of colour and
light, the mist of perfume, the succession of rapidly changing
scenes and tableaux, crowded with wonderful and beautiful figures.
All the gods of Olympus, all the monsters of Tartarus, all the
heroes of history, all the ladies of romance, the fauns, the satyrs,
the fairies, the witches—all these were presented to the eye, while
every kind of musical instrument charmed the ear, and eye and
ear together were delighted by an elaboration of dance and
measured motion which has never been known since. We have
put away these childish things : but our maturity has elaborated
no art equally joyous and whole-hearted. The actual remains
of the masque with the careful description of the scenes, written,
afterwards, in cold blood by the deviser, even though that deviser
were Jonson himself, are but broken meats of a banquet that
is over.
The curious modern reaches a direct and adequate conception
of the vanished splendour and joy, and is enabled to comprehend
clearly the medieval instinct, only when the medieval passion for
masque and pageant receives imaginative expression in the work
of a great descriptive poet. Such a poet there was, but he was
not a dramatist. Spenser came before the drama. The masque
## p. 330 (#348) ############################################
330
Masque and Pastoral
was not drama; in many respects, it was the antithesis of drama.
Dramatists who wrote while the masque was still alive often,
in some metaphor or description, thrill us with a touch of its
glamour. Shakespeare, for instance, regards the masque as a
pol of the evanescent. This world and all its inhabitants
shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
The words express negatively the delight of the spectator in the
show by exhibiting his dismay that it must stop—'Our revels now
are ended. ' But we require a positive description, in which the
masque is not what it must be to the dramatist, unreal and un-
satisfying ; rather, on the contrary, the expression of life's wonder
and joy. This positive description is given us with extraordinary
power and fulness in Spenser's Faerie Queene, especially in the
first three books, which were published in 1590, before English
drama had developed its strength.
But, before we touch upon the relation of Spenser's art to the
masque, we must attempt to summarise the history of masque and
pageant before his time. The masque, like the drama, runs back
into remote antiquity, and we must make an effort to conceive
of masque as it was practised in England during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, if we are to understand clearly what a masque
was, and what modifications it underwent while, in Ben Jonson's
hands, it was the main amusement of the English court and
nobility. Out of numerous accounts of masques that have come
down to us, we may take two as typical of the kind of enter-
tainments which, by their combination, finally produced the true
masque. For the first, we will go back to the fourteenth century.
Edward III died on 2 January 1377. On the second of February
following, being Candlemas day, the Commons of London made
great sporte and solemnity' in honour of his successor, prince
Richard, who was lodged with his mother and the leading nobles
of the realm at the palace in the royal manor of Kennington,
which had been a favourite residence of the Black prince. “At
night and in the night,' a cavalcade of 130 men, 'disguizedly
aparailed and well mounted on horsebacke to goe on mumming,
rode ‘from Newgate through Cheape over London Bridge to
Kennington. They went ‘with great noyse of minstralsye, trumpets,
cornets and shawmes, and great plenty of waxe torches lighted. '
First came 48 esquires, two and two, “in cotes and clokes of red
say or sendall, and their faces covered with vizards well and
6
1
## p. 331 (#349) ############################################
6
Mummings and Disguisings 331
handsomely made'; next followed 48 knights, 'well arayed after
the same maner'; then a single figure, 'as he had bene an
emperor'; then another single figure, 'as a pope'; after him,
24 'arayed like Cardinals'; and, last, 8 or 10 with black vizardes
like devils, nothing amiable, seeming like legates. ' On reaching
the palace, all alighted and entered the hall, into which presently
came the prince, his mother and the leading nobles, whom the
said mummers saluted'; the mummers then proceeded to play
with a pair of prepared dice with the prince and other gentry for
valuable gifts. When the gifts had all been won, the prince and
the lordes danced on the one side and the mummers on the other
a great while,' and then they drank and took their leave and
departed to London.
In this account, we have what is probably the oldest and
simplest form of what is afterwards the masque! It is called
'a mumming,' and the performers are ‘mummers. ' The word
means that the disguised performers say nothing that would
betray their identity. They dice in silence, using only dumb show
where they wish to signify their meaning. But they are all
disguised with vizards, the old word for mask; they are accom-
panied by musicians ; they dance together among themselves when
their ‘mumming' business is over and torchbearers conduct them
on their way. Simple as their scheme was, the entry of masked
mummers with blare of trumpets and blaze of torches into the
great banqueting hall must have been highly picturesque. The
impressiveness of the moment is splendidly given by the drama-
tist :
Night, like a masque, is entered heaven's great hall,
With thousand torches ushering the way2!
а
>
In this particular ‘mumming,' the vizarded procession repre-
sented the emperor and pope as coming with attendant knights
and cardinals to greet the uncrowned king. When a 'mumming'
was regarded from the point of view of the dress assumed by the
'mummers,' it was called a 'disguising'; and, by the sixteenth
century, this name quite superseded the other, as, in the seven-
teenth century, it was itself superseded by 'masque’; so that Ben
Jonson, in 1622, makes Notch aver, ‘Disguise was the old English
word for a masque, Sir'; to which the groom of the revels answers,
"There is no such word in the office now, I assure you, Sir;
6
6
1 We shall use this spelling for the spectacle, and mask' for a vizard.
? The Insatiate Countesse, at end.
## p. 332 (#350) ############################################
332
Masque and Pastoral
I have served here, man and boy, a prenticeship or twain, and
I should know1. '
'Mumming' came to be applied particularly to the custom,
practised usually at Christmas time, of going round in masking
habit from house to house and gaming with dice; the game itself
was called 'mumchance. There are many allusions to it in the
Elizabethan dramatists. Finally, we may notice in this example of
a disguising, the '8 or 10 with black vizardes, like devils, nothing
amiable’; these are the germ of the Jonsonian antimasque.
For our second typical instance, let us go to the reign of
Henry VII in the year 1501. The marriage of prince Arthur to
Katharine of Arragon was celebrated in London with great magni-
ficence. The walls of Westminster hall were 'richly banged with
pleasant clothes of arras,' and, in the upper end, had ‘a Royall
and great Cupboard’ erected, upon which was displayed a 'goodly
and rich treasure of plate. ' The king and queen took their
seats 'under their Clothes of Estate,' and all the nobility 'were
ordered in their Roomes. ' To this great assembly entered a
'most goodly and pleasant disguising, convayed and shewed in
pageantes proper and subtile': of which the first was a Castle
right cunningly devised sett uppon certaine wheeles and drawne
into the said great hall of fower great beastes with chaines of
gold. ' The beasts were two lions, a hart and an ibex, personated,
each one of them, by two men. In the castle were 'disguised
VIII goodly and fresh ladyes looking out of the windowes of
the same,' and, in the turrets, 'fowre children singing most
sweetly and harmoniously. The castle was drawn into the
hall and up to the king's state? , and then set on one side to allow
of the entry of a second car, this time 'a shippe,' having 'her
mastes toppes sayles her tackling and all other apperteynances
necessary unto a seemely vessel as though it had been sayling. '
The ship cast anchor in front of the king, next the castle. On
board the ship was a lady, in apparel like to the princess of Spain.
Hope and Desire go from the ship to the castle as ambassadors
from the knights of the mount of Love; but the ladies in the
castle will have nothing to say to the knights. 'Incontinent came
in the third Pageant,' a mountain, with eight knights upon it, to
whom the ambassadors recounted their ill-success with the ladies.
Thereupon, the knights make a great show of assaulting the castle,
and the ladies surrender. The cars are wheeled back, and the
knights and ladies daunced together divers and many goodly
· The Masque of Augures.
2 The royal seat.
## p. 333 (#351) ############################################
Masque under Henry VII and VIII 333
dances. ' The cars then came back for the masquers and took
them away; after which, prince Arthur and his bride and other
distinguished people in the audience danced, including young
prince Henry and his sister Margaret. This 'disguising' was
succeeded on the following evenings by three others, nearly as
elaborate as the first. The whole display makes it quite clear
that the early sixteenth century had not much to learn from the
early seventeenth. The splendour of these shows reached a high
water mark in the reign of Henry VIII, and then, again, in the
reign of James I, when the mechanical and artistic genius of Inigo
Jones introduced new contrivances and a more elaborate arrange-
ment of scenery, suppressing almost entirely the processional
character of the masque and the early car.
Our second example of a masque has added to the first the
important item of the pageant or car. This, of course, suggests
a connection between the 'disguising' and the medieval miracle-
plays, which were performed on the movable waggon called a
pageant. It is easy to see how the grandeur of the cavalcade
would be increased if the emperor and pope were put in cars.
In the British Museum, there is a design by Albert Dürer, dated
1522, of a triumphal car for Maximilian, which may serve as an
illustration of the way in which a car would become a 'pageant'-
an elaborate structure to hold masquers. This pageant, as the
above example shows, is capable of very varied developments.
But, as the car becomes more elaborate, it cannot easily form
part of a long procession; to draw it the length of the hall taxes
the ingenuity of the carpenters; and, finally, it becomes stationary,
suggesting something approximating to the modern stage at one
end of the hall. The car, moreover, when it is a ship or a
lanthorn or a 'herbour,' requires some explanation; and an
exposition of the device of the car is added to the original
dance of the masquers. This is the masque in its simplest
outline
certain men or women disguised, who arrive in some
setting which corresponds to their dress, and which has to be
explained before they dance their measures ; they retire as they
came.
The disguisings had an extraordinary vogue under Henry VIII,
and they found a historian whose prose descriptions have hardly
received the attention which their great merit deserves. Edward
Hall was a lawyer and a politician. His parents were in sympathy
with advanced reformers. He affords, therefore, a remarkable
instance of the passion for pageant displaying itself in a hard-
1
## p. 334 (#352) ############################################
334
Masque and Pastoral
headed political trimmer, bred up in a sober and serious middle-
class family. Pageant was Hall's one passion. His English style
takes on a new distinction when he begins to describe the splendid
succession of festivities which distinguished the reign of Henry VIII.
His masterpiece is, perhaps, his account of the Field of the Cloth
of Gold; but, everywhere, thanks to his enthusiasm, his accounts
of masques and entertainments are gorgeously coloured and won-
derfully full of movement.
He is the writer who notes the coming of the word 'masque. '
On the evening of Epiphany, 1512,
the kyng with a XI other wer disguised, after the maner of Italie, called a
maske, a thyng not seen afore in Englande; thei were appareled in garmentes
long and brode, wrought all with gold, with visers and cappes of gold, and
after the banket doen, these Maskers came in, with sixe gentlemen disguised
in silke, bearing staffe torches, and desired the ladies to daunce, some were
content, and some that knewe the fashion of it refused, because it was not a
thyng commonly seen. And after thei daunced, and commoned together as
the fashion of the Maske 1 is, thei toke their leave and departed, and so did
the Quene and all the ladies2.
This passage raises problems which are still under discussion.
What was the 'thyng not seen afore in Englande? ' What was
the 'thyng not commonly seen,' which made some of the ladies
refuse to dance? In short, what was the difference between the
disguising,' familiar in England for centuries, and this innovation
after the maner of Italie, called a maske'? The probable answer
is that there was a difference in dress which was connected with
a difference in procedure. The masquers not only danced with
one another, but, after their own dance, they chose partners
among the spectators. This introduced into the masque a new
element of courtship and intrigue. For this device to maintain its
proper piquancy, the disguise of the masquer must be complete ;
his costume must, like a domino, conceal any peculiarities of
mien and shape which might betray him if he wore a more
closely-fitting disguise. Whether this sufficiently explains Hall's
language must be considered a question still under discussion ;
but two points are clear. There is a common conviction, both in
France and England, that, in some of its characteristic aspects, the
masque was Italian. Ronsard says that 'masquerade' came from
the Italians, and mentions 'ses vestemens, ses moeurs et ses façons,'
as the things which were copied. Reyher, after quoting Ronsard,
6
1 The edition of 1550 reads · Masques. '
Hall (1548), f. 16rº. For the views that have been expressed on the passage,
consult Reyher's first appendix, in Les Masques Anglais.
## p. 335 (#353) ############################################
Masque in Spenser
335
suggests that this borrowing from Italy took place au moment
des expéditions françaises de la fin du XV. et du début du XVI.
siècle. In our own literature, Marlowe's 'I'll have Italian maskes
by night? ' is familiar. But, secondly, the motive of intrigue,
whatever its derivation, was a most important addition to the
masque's attractiveness. Clearly, it was much appreciated by
Henry VIII. It is a breath of natural drama introduced into
what is essentially undramatic. Because it is natural drama, it
is often the means by which the masque gets a place in dramatic
literature. The masque in Love's Labour's Lost? is delightfully
dramatic, and it is an excellent comment, so far as it applies, on
the passage in Hall. It is in a masque that Romeo loses his heart
to Juliets; and, more interesting still, Henry VIII conceives his
passion for Anne Boleyn, in the same way, in the masque of the
first act of the play. Many other instances* occur in the
dramatists, where this dramatic moment in the masque is utilised.
But, in the masque itself, this item remains an episode upon which
the deviser of the masque never lays his hands ; in Henry VIII's
reign, the undramatic character of the masque shows no sign of
changing.
When we reach the reign of Elizabeth, Spenser's poetry, even
more adequately than Hall's prose, reflects and revives the glory
of the medieval masque and pageant. His genius, in some of
its most characteristic aspects, was exactly fitted to describe and
appreciate the world just beyond the real world with which the
masque dealt. The masque of the Seven Deadly Sins5 and the
masque of Cupido are magnificent examples of the processional
masque. The former shows that the antimasque is implicit in the
masque from the beginning. The house of Temperance and the
attack upon it? recall the knights' onslaught on the castle of
the ladies described above. Such famous descriptions as the cave
of Mammon8 and the bower of Bliss are like the set pieces which
Inigo Jones tried to make real to the eye when the masque
became a fixture at the end of the great hall. There are cantos
in The Faerie Queene in which we seem in spirit to follow the
procession until it reaches the hall, where the full device is
displayed before us in all its intricacy. Spenser's abstractions,
Coelia, Fidelia, Speranza, Charissa, the porter Humiltá of the
i Edward II, act i, sc. 1. ? Act v, 8c. 2. 8 Act I, 80. 5.
• Reyher gives a list of plays with masques inserted ; Les Masques Anglais, p. 497.
5 Bk. I, canto iv. 6 Bk, III, canto xii. 7 Bk. II, cantos ix and xi.
8 Bk. II, canto vii. • Bk. II, canto xii.
9
## p. 336 (#354) ############################################
336
Masque and Pastoral
house of Holiness and scores of others, are just such as meet us
in masques; but a line of description like 'bitter Penaunce with
an yron whip,' calls up the figure before us more effectually
than Jonson's most exact prose ; and Spenser's poem abounds in
similar vivid lines and stanzas. The poem, again, like almost every
masque, is an elaborate compliment. Its relation to Elizabeth is
precisely that of Jonson’s masques to James or Charles. Spenser's
poem, it should be remembered, greatly influenced Ben Jonson
and other writers of masque-Ben Jonson in especial.
Elizabeth's frugality prevented the masque from developing
in her reign. It was in frequent use, but the queen had not the
special taste for it which made it prominent as an amusement of
the aristocracy in the courts of Henry VIII and James I. But
'entertainments,' during the queen's numerous progresses, were
plentifully produced. The entertainment was the masque out-of-
doors, and consisted of some kind of welcoming device or function
arranged for greeting the queen on her arrival, or discovered B
afterwards, as she was conducted round gardens and park. The
entertainment had more dramatic possibilities in it than the
masque, because it depended less upon scenery, but the English
climate kept it always short and slight. One, by Sir Philip Sidney,
of considerable merit, has survived—The May Lady', presented
in May 1578, when the queen visited his uncle, the earl of
Leicester, at Wanstead. Jonson's reverence for Sidney makes it
likely that he did not overlook Sidney's work when he composed
the entertainments which were the beginning of his masque
work. But it seems more probable that The May Lady guided
Jonson's views on pastoral than that it influenced his con-
ception of masque, and it remains by itself as a short out-of-doors
scene of pastoral comedy, not without influence upon Shakespeare's
early comedy. The schoolmaster, master Rombus, is, obviously,
an ancestor of Holofernes, and the play's likeness to masque lies
in its complimentary character. Some of Lyly's plays, also, have
affinities with the masque. They are elaborate compliments; their
ideas are not concerned with the real world of men and women;
their characters are mythological. But perhaps their most im-
portant connection with the masque is their influence upon Jonson's
Cynthia's Revels. This play magnifies at all points Lyly's limited
strength to such a degree that the reader may easily fail to notice
a
its debt to Lyly. But its connection with Jonson’s masques is
1 Bk. 1, canto x.
Called, also, The Lady of the May.
• See vol. V, chap. VI.
4 Cf. ante, chap. v, p. 18.
## p. 337 (#355) ############################################
Daniel's First Masque
337
obvious. In Cynthia's Revels, a great realist, the author of
Bartholomew Fayre, succeeds in making us understand how he
came to write masques. We see his mind becoming absorbed
in the particular art and method of which the masque was an
expression.
But, before we pass to Jonson's masques, one Elizabethan play
must be mentioned which was neither a masque, nor a pastoral, nor
a drama, but partook of the character of all three. It is, perhaps,
the most elaborate and beautiful entertainment extant, and the
brilliance of its total effect makes us regret that such a delightful
type of renascence art did not receive fuller development. Peele's
Araygnement of Paris comes before the development of the
ma que, as Milton's Comus comes after it, to suggest to us that
in the method of the out-of-door entertainment or pastoral there
is inherent a truer breath of poetry than is to be found in that of
the indoor masque, in which scenery and carpentry and music and
,
dance were always tending to smother and suppress the poetical
soull.
The first court masque after king James's accession was pro-
duced on 8 January 1604 at Hampton court, because plague was
prevalent in London. It was The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses,
in which the masquers were queen Anne herself and eleven of
her ladies. By the recommendation of Lucy countess of Bedford,
Daniel was chosen to design and write the masque.
acting thereof they brought in five or six men almost naked which
were much disliked by the Queen and Ladies. ' It needed the
entreaties of the chancellors of both universities to prevent the
king leaving before half the comedy had been ended. ' On the
following night, James saw Ajax Flagellifer. James would have
done well to imitate his predecessor in countermanding', as he
'was very weary before he came thither, but much more wearied
by it, and spoke many words of dislike. ' Nor did matters fare
.
much better on the third evening, when Vertumnus sive Annus
Recurrens, by Matthew Gwinne of St John's, was performed on
the Christ Church stage. Though it was well acted by a company
consisting chiefly of St John's men, the king fell asleep in the
middle. But the play produced on the following evening ‘made
amends for all. ' It was The Queenes Arcadia of Samuel Daniel,
'
memorable as the first English pastoral drama written for the
academic stage? Guarini's Il Pastor Fido had been acted a short
time previously at King's college, Cambridge, in a Latin version,
Pastor Fidus. Parthenia, a similar version of Luigi Groto's Pen-
timento Amoroso, preserved in manuscript at Emmanuel college,
Cambridge, is of uncertain date. Daniel, as was natural, followed
the general lines of Italian pastoral drama; but the statement of
a contemporary Cambridge visitor to Oxford, that it was drawn
out of Pastor Fidus,' is misleading. So far as Daniel's play owes
a direct debt to a foreign original, it is to Tasso's Aminta rather
than to Guarini's work, while the conception of the plot, though
not of a number of episodes, must be put down to the English
poet's own credit. It deals with the entanglements and evils
produced in Arcadia by the machinations of sophisticated re-
presentatives of the outer world. Chief among these are Colax,
'a corrupted traveller,' and Techne, a subtle wench of Corinth,
who, by their nefarious schemes, delude the shepherd Amyntas
into the belief that Cloris, whom he wooes in vain, is a wanton.
In despair, he tries to take his own life, but, in an episode imitated
1 Cf. ante, p. 298.
For a brief sketch of the progress of the pastoral drama in England see the fol.
lowing chapter (XIII).
## p. 318 (#336) ############################################
318
University Plays
from Aminta, is rescued by Cloris, whose heart has, at last, been
touched by love. The arch evildoers, after plotting not only
against the hero and heroine but against other Arcadian lovers,
are banished for ever. Subordinate, but more amusing, mischief-
makers are Lincus, a pettifogging lawyer, and Alcon, a quack
doctor, into whose mouth is put a description of tobacco as
a certaine herbe wrapt up in rowles
From th’ Island of Nicosia where it growes:
And this he said a wondrous vertue had,
To purge the head, and cure the great catarre.
This, of course, was intended to tickle the ears of the author of
A Counterblaste to Tobacco. But the permanent attraction of
Daniel's play lies not in its topical references or even in its
plot and characterisation, but in the lyrical sweetness of its
verse and the limpid grace of its diction and imagery. Its pro-
duction at Christ Church is amongst the most memorable records
of the Oxford stage. Probably, however, none of the Christ Church
plays gratified the king so much as a more informal open-air inter-
lude which took place in front of St John's college on the day of his
entry into Oxford. Three young scholars, dressed as nymphs,
suddenly appeared in his path. They announced that they were
the sibyls who had formerly foretold to Banquo the rule of his
descendants, and that they had come again to prophesy all hap-
piness to James, and the perpetuity of Banquo's stock upon the
British throne. They then saluted the king in turn with a triple
salve, and greeted similarly the queen and prince Henry. James
'did very much applaude' the conceipt,' which was devised by
Matthew Gwinne, and it is possible that some account of it reached
the ears of Shakespeare and suggested the writing of Macbeth in
the following year.
The stimulus of the royal visit to theatrical activity at Oxford,
especially at St John's college, seems to have lasted for some time
afterwards. To this, we have remarkable testimony in a unique
memorial of the academic stage preserved in the St John's library.
It is a manuscript written by Griffin Higgs, a member of the college,
who successively became fellow of Merton and chaplain to Eliza-
beth of Bohemia, and entitled A true and faithfull relation of
the risinge and fall of Thomas Tucker, Prince of Alba Fortunata,
Lord St Johns &c. , with all the occurrents which happened through-
out his whole domination. No extant document, not even Gager's
6
## p. 319 (#337) ############################################
Plays at St John's, Oxford, 160748 319
letter to Rainolds, lets us so completely behind the scenes of the
collegiate theatre, or brings home to us so intimately the hopes
and fears, the labours and difficulties, connected with the per-
formances. The manuscript is an account of a series of festivities
which lasted from All Saints' eve (31 October) 1607 till the first
Sunday in the following Lent? On All Saints' eve, Thomas
Tucker, a bachelor of arts (later, a fellow of the college and
canon of Bristol) was elected 'Christmas Lord or Prince of the
Revells. . . to appoint & moderate all such games and pastimes
as should come. ' Two bills' were, therefore, sent out to the
masters craving allegiance to his authority and 'money & main-
tenance. Among those who contributed were Laud and Juxon,
each assessed at ten shillings. But, in order to raise an adequate
sum, Tucker (like a true Stewart ruler) had to levy a further
requisition on ex-fellows and commoners and on college tenants.
Sufficient provision thus made, he was publicly installed on
St Andrew's day by means of a Latin "devise,' Ara Fortunae.
In this, the prince, with his leading councillors, visits the temple
of Fortune and is assured by her priestess of the favour of the
goddess. He accordingly announces that he no longer reigns by
popular favour but by divine right, and that he is preparing ‘pomps
and triumphs' for the entertainment of his faithful subjects.
On Christmas day, the prince sat at high table in the vice-
president's place, and a boar's head was carried in as 'the first
messe' by the 'tallest and lustiest' of his guards, to the accom-
paniment of a brisk carol. In the evening, a short Latin interlude,
Saturnalia, was performed, introducing a Dominus and a Servus
in the inverted relation peculiar to the Roman festival, and after-
wards Hercules, who, by interpreting aright an equivocal Delphic
oracle, shows that waxen lights and not human sacrifices are the
offerings enjoined at this anniversary. As the season of the
Saturnalia coincided approximately with Christmastide, these
waxen lights, it is hinted, are the source of Christmas candles;
and, in a prose epilogue, an ingenious parallel and contrast are
drawn between the pagan and the Christian festival.
The same sense of classical and Biblical analogies dictated the
choice of a play for Innocents' day. A Senecan tragedy on the story
of Philomela was written for the occasion, as it was thought that the
1 The narrative part of the manuscript and one play The Seven Dayes of the
Weeke were printed in 1816, with the title The Christmas Prince. The present writer
has been given facilities for consulting the manuscript, and the account of the other
plays is here printed for the first time.
## p. 320 (#338) ############################################
320
University Plays
subject 'well fitted the day, by reason of the murder of Innocent
Itis. ' But the performance had to be postponed for a day because
the carpenters were 'no way ready wth the stage. ' Then a further
mishap occurred. “The Prince himself who was to play Tereus had
gott such an exceeding cold that it was impossible for him to
speake, or speaking to be heard. ' However, with the unnamed
author of the tragedy in reserve as an understudy should he be
'constrained to leave,' the resourceful Tucker got through his
part with credit. The whole play was wel acted and wel liked,
a more favourable verdict than had been pronounced on Calf-
hill's tragedy on the same story acted before Elizabeth at Christ
Church in 1566.
It is characteristic of the academic taste of the time, that
Philomela was much more appreciated than an English play
Time's Complaint, acted on New Year's day as part of the
princes triumphs. ' The failure of this piece, which received only
'two or three cold plaudites,' was partly due to the blunders of
amateur actors, of which Higgs gives amusing details, and to the
overcrowding on the stage. But, doubtless, the fault also lay
largely in the plot, which combines awkwardly a semi-allegorical
tale of Time's attempt to recover his daughter Veritas, kept in
thraldom by Opinion and Error, and a farcical series of mistakes
and entanglements arising out of the theft of goodwife Spigott's
goods by a drunken cobbler, Swallow. Yet, Time's Complaint is
far from being without interest. It contains genre pictures of
characteristic Elizabethan types, such as the dispossessed country-
man, the cashiered soldier and the professional beggar. It intro-
duces, also, in Studioso, the poor and embittered scholar, and in
Philonices, the grasping, pompous lawyer and justice, two figures
akin to those in the Parnassus plays.
The spirits of the St John's actors, which had been grievously
depressed by the cold reception of Time's Complaint, were revived
by the success of an amusing show, The Seven Dayes of the Weeke,
acted at the president's lodging on Sunday, 10 January, and re-
peated by special request before the vice-chancellor and other
dignitaries a week later. Equally successful was a Latin comedy
Philomathes, mingling abstractions with Plautine characters.
After its performance 'the stage & scaffold were pul'd downe
wch had stood from Cristmas'; but they were set up again on
Shrove Tuesday for the prince's resignation. This, like his public
installation, was solemnised in the form of a play, Ira seu Tumulus
Fortunae. The goddess has now grown angry with the prince
## p. 321 (#339) ############################################
Riots at Performances
321
because he has not paid her sufficiently constant homage. His
ministers resign their symbols of office and desert him. In vain
he visits again the altar of Fortune, and seeks to placate her
wrath. He, therefore, strips himself of the emblems of sove-
reignty, and lays them in a sepulchre in her temple, dedicating
himself henceforth to the service of Minerva.
Thus ended the memorable reign of Thomas Tucker; but, as the
stage and scaffolds had been re-erected, and, as an English tragedy
on the story of Periander, tyrant of Corinth, had been prepared,
it was decided to perform this on the following Saturday. It at-
tracted such a concourse that hundreds could not find room in the
hall. They ‘made such an hideous noice, and raised such a tumult
with breaking of windows all about the colledge, throwinge of stones
into the hall, and such like ryott' that the officers of the college
had to rush forth, 'wth about a dozen whiflers well armed and
swords drawne. ' The rioters then ran away, but some of the
ringleaders were arrested, and imprisoned in the porter's lodge
till the play was over.
Curiously enough, about a week later, on 20 February, there
was a similar riot at Cambridge, when there was 'foul & great
disorder committed at the time of a comedy in King's College,'
probably a lost play by Phineas Fletcher. In the same month,
four years later, there was a yet more serious disturbance at Cam-
bridge, when the St John's men, angry at being excluded from a
comedy acted at Trinity college, began an affray outside the Great
Gate, which led to proceedings in the vice-chancellor's court. In
sharp contrast to these tumultuous proceedings was the scene in
the hall of Trinity on 2 March 1613, when prince Charles and
Frederick, the elector palatine, saw Samuel Brooke's comedy
called Adelphe, and when the elector slept during the greater part
of the performance, which lasted from seven in the evening till
one. On the following evening, the princes were again provided
with solid entertainment by the performance of Scyros, a Latin
version by Brooke of Bonarelli's pastoral drama, Filli di Sciro.
On 7 March 1615, James himself, with prince Charles, came to
Cambridge, and stayed at Trinity for four nights. As the sovereign
had not visited the university since Elizabeth's 'progress' in 1564,
elaborate preparations were made to celebrate the event. The
days were devoted to learned disputations and the evenings to
plays. The first piece, Aemilia, a Latin comedy written by Ed-
ward Cecil of St John's, was not very successful; but ample
amends were made on the following evening when, in the hall
21
E. L. VI.
CH, XII.
## p. 322 (#340) ############################################
322
University Plays
of Trinity, Ignoramus was launched on its triumphant career.
Its author was George Ruggle, fellow of Clare hall, who had
formerly been a scholar of Trinity, and the actors were chosen
from various colleges, difficulty being found in filling suitably the
female parts. On one side, Ignoramus is linked with the group of
Latin adaptations of Italian comedies mentioned above, for it is
founded on G. della Porta's Trappolaria. But Ruggle transformed
his original by extensive additions, and by a fundamental change in
the central character, converting him out of a soldier into the
lawyer who gives his name to the play. Thus metamorphosed,
the typically southern comedy became the climax of Aristophanic
attacks by gownsmen upon the town and its officials. The title
part is a merciless caricature of the detested recorder, Brackyn,
who had already been ridiculed in The Returne from Pernassus,
Part II. The animus against him as a common lawyer had
been intensified by public events. The law dictionary The Inter-
preter, published in 1607 by John Cowell, regius professor of
civil law, had been suppressed on the demand of the House of
Commons, because its tendency was to exalt the royal prerogative
at the expense of common law. The civilians of the university
and the king himself were, therefore, delighted when Ruggle
brought upon the stage a burlesque figure talking a barbarous
jargon of bastard Latin and the technical terms of common law.
It is the novelty of this conception and the gusto with which it is
developed that give the play its unique character. In the course
of its intricate plot, Ignoramus goes through a variety of humiliating
and painful experiences. On a visit to Bordeaux, he falls in love
with the heroine, Rosabella, and engages to pay 600 pieces of gold
for her hand. But, through the stratagems of Antonius, the
favoured suitor of the girl, Ignoramus obtains possession instead
of the heavy-handed virago, Polla, who belabours him soundly,
Amazed at his incomprehensible outcries, she thinks he is be
witched and goes to fetch her husband and a monk, who, in a
scene of richly farcical humour, exorcise the evil spirits out of
him and carry him off, shrieking, to a monastery for his final cure.
Rosabella, of course, is finally united to Antonius, and a mystery
attaching to her birth is cleared up.
Ignoramus, with its mixture of learning and horseplay, was
exactly suited for captivating James. The play presented on the
following night, Albumazar, though adapted by Tomkis, author
of Lingua, from another comedy of della Porta, L'Astrologo,
was less successful. But it contains two amusing characters in
## p. 323 (#341) ############################################
6
James I at Cambridge, 1615 323
Albumazar, the rascally astronomer, and Trincalo, the rustic whom
Albumazar 'transforms' into his absent master, Antonio, with lu-
dicrous consequences when the latter unexpectedly returns home. .
In its printed form, the play was fortunate enough to attract both
Dryden and Garrick, both of whom revived it on the London stage.
But, on its production, it seems, from a contemporary account,
to have been less appreciated not only than its predecessor,
Ignoramus, but than its successor on the following evening, Me-
lanthe, a Latin pastoral drama from the pen of Samuel Brooke,
whose Adelphe and Scyros have been mentioned above. The king
could not stay to see the last play prepared for his entertainment,
Sicelides, by Phineas Fletcher ; but it was acted a few days later.
He thus missed seeing the first English 'piscatory' on the stage,
as he had already seen at Oxford, in 1605, the first English pastoral
drama. The main plot of Sicelides, dealing with the romantic
love stories of Perindus and Glaucilla and Thalander and Olinda,
is, apparently, original, though episodes and motives are derived
from classical and Italian sources. One underplot centres round
Cosma, the typical 'light nymph' of 'Messena,' and the other
round Cancrone and Scrocca, low-comedy fishermen whose talk is
largely a farrago of 'malapropisms' and topical allusions. The
machinery of the play is unduly intricate and perplexing, and the
characterisation is not vivid. But the work has real charm in its
delicate delineation of emotions, in the graceful imagery of its
descriptive passages and in the lyric sweetness of its choruses.
James was so delighted with Ignoramus that he revisited Cam-
bridge in May to see it a second time. Its triumph marks the
close of the most vital period of the university drama. Hence-
forward, no new type was evolved, and the distinctively academic
element dwindles. Allegorical plays became increasingly popular
with college dramatists, though Lingua remained unrivalled for
wit and verve. Thus, in February 1618, Technogamia or The
Marriage of the Arts, by Barten Holiday, was acted at Christ
Church ‘with no great applause'; but it was repeated before the
king at Woodstock in August 1621. Though James seems to have
found the piece very dull, it is not without merit. The action
shows how some of the arts and sciences endeavour to enter into
unnatural unions. Thus, Poeta seeks to win the hand of Astronomia,
but is finally allied to Historia and promises that his love shall
follow her ‘more inseparably than the Hexameter the Pentameter. '
Closely related to Lingua, to which it contains direct references, is
Pathomachia or The Battell of Affections, published by 'a Friend
of the deceassed Author,' in 1630, and 'written some years since. '
6
21-2
## p. 324 (#342) ############################################
324
University Plays
6
It deals with the revolt of the Affections against Love and Hatred,
‘whom heretofore they counted their King and Queene' Love
and Hatred are aided by the Virtues, headed by Justice, while the
rebels have the support of the Vices disguised as Affections or
Virtues, and commanded by Pride. Justice, however, unmasks
them, and sends them to confinement, whereupon the Affections
tender their submission and are pardoned. The work is in prose
throughout, and contains interesting passages and many allusions
to recent events, but lacks dramatic movement and vivacity.
Religious satire is another predominant element in the later
university playsa foretaste of the dread conflict that was fast
approaching. Loiola, by John Hacket, acted at Trinity before
the university on 28 February' and before James on a third visit
to Cambridge on 12 March 1623, is an entertaining Latin comedy,
which attacks impartially Roman Catholics and Calvinists, the
former in the person of Loiola, 'an unscrupulous Jesuit,' the latter
in that of Martinus, a canting elder of Amsterdam, where the scene
is laid. To the same year belongs the semi-allegorical Fucus
Histriomastix, wherein the title role, that of a hypocritical puritan
minister, was played by Robert Ward of Queens' college, who was
probably the author of the piece. Fucus, who hates all plays and
amusements, seeks to prevent the marriage of Philomathes and
Comoedia, otherwise, the production of an academic comedy. The
arguments he uses are the same as those of Rainolds in his con-
troversy with Gager, and seem derived from his book. But his
intrigues are foiled, and he also comes off badly in a feud with the
merry-making countryman, Villanus, who is in love with Ballada,
an illegitimate sister of Comoedia'.
Another actor in Fucus was Peter Hausted, afterwards fellow
of Queens', who, when Charles and Henrietta Maria visited
Cambridge in March 1632, wrote in their honour the singular play
The Rival Friends. This is linked to the comedies satirising
religious hypocrisy by its caustic portraiture of the wooers of the
deformed and foolish Mistress Ursely, whose hand carries with it
an 'impropriate parsonage. ' More realistically humorous person-
ages are Stipes, the shepherd of the simoniacal patron, and his wife
and daughter, all genuinely rustic figures without the customary
pastoral veneer. From Hausted's preface to the play when it
was published, it is evident that his low-life portraiture had been
adversely criticised as unbefitting the royal presence. But to
1 See Fucus Histriomastix, edited by Smith, G. C. Moore (1909), introduction and
notes, pp. 98—9. The editor suggests that the play may have been partly inspired by
an attempt, recorded by Chamberlain, to suppress the performance of Loiola.
## p. 325 (#343) ############################################
Hausted.
Randolph
325
modern taste this appeals much more strongly than does the
pseudo-romantic main plot. The two friends, Lucius and Neander,
rivals for the love of Pandora, vie in their readiness to abdicate
in each other's favour, and carry their altruism so far that the lady
gives her affections, at first in pretence, afterwards in reality, to a
third wooer. The popularity, however, of such fantastic themes
was evidenced by the successful production at Trinity, during
the same royal visit, of Thomas Randolph's The Jealous Lovers.
Randolph, a distinguished alumnus of Westminster and Trinity,
had already written two short academic 'shows,' Aristippus or
The Joviall Philosopher and The Conceited Pedler. The Jealous
Lovers was his first complete play, and the rapturous welcome
accorded to it does little credit to either the university or the
court. Randolph's inventiveness and rhetorical fluency cannot
redeem the essential falsity of the main plot. Tyndarus is insanely
suspicious of the faithfulness of his beloved Evadne, and Techmessa
similarly mistrusts her devoted Pamphilus. The two jealous
lovers' go through a mock funeral (which gives occasion for an
imitation of the gravedigger's scene in Hamlet) as a final test of
the constancy of the seemingly bereft pair. But, after this ordeal
has proved their loyalty unswerving, Hymen forbids the proposed
unions, and it transpires that Tyndarus is the brother of Evadne, and
Techmessa the sister of Pamphilus. Interwoven with these pseudo-
romantic episodes is an underplot of gross humour.
The royal pair, accompanied by their nephews, the palatine
princes, paid a second visit to Oxford in August 1636, when
the last important series of academic plays was produced in
their honour. William Strode, public orator, welcomed the
king to Christ Church with a speech, and with an allegorical
drama, The Floating Island, which was staged with great elabora-
tion, and furnished with music by Henry Lawes. The title and
general conception of the work, in which the island represents the
human mind afloat on the sea of the passions, was, doubtless, sug-
gested by Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island or The Isle of
Man, published at Cambridge in 1633. But Strode develops the
theme on lines of his own, and with the added spice of political
and religious satire. A conspiracy is formed by Audax, Irato and
others against the rule of king Prudentius and his counsellor,
Intellectus Agens. Prudentius resigns his crown, and Fancy is
proclaimed queen, her only law being 'that each man use his
proper humour, be it vice or virtue. ' Discord and tumult are the
result, and Prudentius is finally implored to resume the crown, after
each of the plotters has declined it in turn. The implied lesson
## p. 326 (#344) ############################################
326
University Plays
on the evil results of rebellion, and the castigation of Prynne,
in the person of Melancholico, a play-hating puritan, helped
to recommend the play to the royal favour. Equally successful
were the two dramas produced on the following day. One of these,
Love's Hospitall, by George Wilde, fellow of St John's, was per-
formed in the afternoon at that college at the expense of Laud,
who, as chancellor of the university, was present to welcome the
king and queen. The piece is an entertaining comedy of humours,
in almost farcical vein, and is in no way characteristically academic.
This is also true of William Cartwright's The Royall Slave', acted
in the evening at Christ Church. An Ephesian captive, Cratander,
in accordance with an old custom among the Persians, is granted
for three days before his execution the full insignia and privileges
of kingship. During this period, he displays such nobility of soul
that heaven intervenes in his favour, and he is spared to become
the wearer of a real crown. This theme is handled by Cart-
wright with genuine rhetorical effectiveness, and his drama was
furnished with special scenic effects by Inigo Jones and incidental
music by Lawes. So delighted was the queen with the perform-
ance that she afterwards borrowed the costumes and scenery for
a repetition of the play by her own company at Hampton court.
The academic stage was to number yet one more illustrious recruit
in Cowley, whose Naufragium Joculare, based on classical sources,
was acted at Trinity college, Cambridge, in 1638, and was followed
in 1642 by his satirical comedy The Guardian, remodelled after
the Restoration into Cutter of Coleman Street. But the royal
visit to Oxford in 1636 marks the close of these elaborate univer-
sity displays, which had begun with Elizabeth's coming to Cam-
bridge in 1564. Even in the traditionally loyal community on the
banks of the Isis, there were ominous symptoms of the rapidly
growing resentment against the autocratic rule of Charles and Laud.
As the king and queen rode away from Christ Church, the streets,
according to custom, were lined with 'Scholers of all degrees,' but
'neither they nor the citizens made any expression of joy, nor
uttered, as the manner is, Vivat Rex. ' When Oxford, some seven
years later, again opened its gates to Charles, it was not to enter-
tain him with ‘masques and triumphs,' but to afford him shelter
in his stern conflict with his parliamentary foes.
The civil war and the commonwealth mark a period of deep
cleavage in English stage history. With the Restoration, came
new men and new methods, and a forgetfulness of all but
the greatest dramatists of the former age. It was virtually
· See, as to Cartwright's plays, ante, chap. ix.
6
## p. 327 (#345) ############################################
Concluding Survey
327
the work of the nineteenth century to rediscover the lesser
Elizabethan writers for the popular stage. The university drama,
bilingual in utterance, and with its memorials not easy of
access, has had to wait for yet tardier recognition. It had, of
course, patent faults. It produced much that was artificial,
amateurish and unduly imitative, and its moral standard was
as unexacting as that of the London theatre of the day. But it
had behind it truly formative influences, in the renascence ardour
for classical lore and delight in pageantry, in the gownsmen's
haughty resentment of the buffets of fortune to which they were
exposed, and in the traditional hostility between scholars and
townsmen by Isis and by Cam. Hence sprang that special type of
Aristophanic comedy, unique in this period of the drama, repre-
sented by Pedantius and Ignoramus, Club Law and the Parnassus
trilogy. And, in addition to these distinctively topical university
plays, we owe to the academic stage a number of dramas moulded
and coloured by the peculiar conditions of their origin. Such are
the semi-Senecan plays on religious, historical and mythological
subjects, like Archipropheta, Richardus Tertius and Ulysses
Redux; comedies like Laelia and Hymenaeus; allegorical pieces
like Lingua, Fucus and The Floating Island; pastorals like The
Queenes Arcadia and Sicelides. In these and kindred productions,
noted in this chapter or merely recorded as 'comedy' or 'tragedy’
in college account-books, the university humanists preserved ele-
ments of classic and neo-classic culture which would otherwise
have been almost entirely lost to the stage. From Oxford and
Cambridge, these influences permeated to the capital. For, sharp
as in general was the division, social and intellectual, between
academic and professional playwrights, the latter and larger class
was constantly being recruited from graduates who had gained
their earliest dramatic experience as spectators, actors, or, in some
cases, authors, of college 'shows. The royal visits to the uni-
versities helped further to extend the range of influence of the
amateur stage.
And they did something more.
Under the per-
sonal rule of the Tudors and Stewarts, the centre of national life
was not fixed in Westminster, as at present; it moved with the
movements of the sovereign. And thus, the university plays, as
the principal magnet which drew Elizabeth, James and Charles
with their courts to Oxford and Cambridge, performed a more
important function than has been usually recognised. They helped
materially for nearly a hundred years to keep the two seats of
learning in contact with the throne, from which radiated, for good
and for ill, the dominating forces of the age.
>
## p. 328 (#346) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
MASQUE AND PASTORAL
THE Elizabethan drama, being without scenery and elaborate
stage apparatus, made its appeal to the mind rather than to the
eye, and used language as the main instrument by which the
imagination of its audience was aroused and satisfied. This
familiar fact goes far to explain the essentially intellectual
character of the Elizabethan drama, and the wonderful literary
power of the great dramatists. But we should misinterpret the
facts very seriously if we allowed ourselves to suppose that the
Elizabethan age was indifferent to the appeal of the eye, or to
imagine that, because the Elizabethan playgoer was without the
elaborate scenery and staging of the modern theatre, he was dis-
dainful of spectacle, and unwilling to spend time and money on
gorgeous shows in which the master art of pageantry combined
music, singing, painting, dancing and architecture in united effort
to charm and delight his senses.
The Elizabethan, for all his intellectual energy, was intensely
sensuous. In this respect, he represents the end of the Middle
Ages rather than the beginning of modern times. We cannot here
consider the meaning of that reaction against pageantry which was
an important part of puritanism, but we may note that the modern
student does not see the Elizabethan age as it saw itself; for
he overlooks as childish those things which it most cared for.
The drama meant, broadly, the introduction into popular enter-
tainment of a new intellectual element, which gradually dis-
credited pageantry, so that it ceased to be the art of the
educated and refined. But, all through the Elizabethan age and
until the closing of the theatres in 1642, masque and pageantry
held their place in the public eye, and in the public interest, as
the most important and honourable and magnificent of the arts.
The masque at court and among the nobility, and the pageant
among the citizens, were practised with an energy that, for the
1
1
1
## p. 329 (#347) ############################################
The Essence of Masque
329
time being, made them the most obvious, if not the most charac-
teristic, of the national activities, the means by which corporate
and national feeling most readily expressed itself. This old world
splendour of masque and pageant has, for the most part, perished.
Neither antiquarian researches nor modern adaptations can make
it live again, but, before it died, the intellectual power of the new
dramatic art came to the rescue and infused into the Elizabethan
masque a literary element, which has been a preservative against
decay. The leading dramatists were pressed into the service of
masque and pageant, and contributed an element to the spectacle
which, in many cases, has survived. The words supplied to pageants
and masques by Munday and Middleton, by Campion, Chapman,
Beaumont and Brown and, above all, by Jonson, form a small, but
very interesting, appendix to the many volumes of the drama.
The extant masques have considerable literary merits, and they ! 1
lead on to Milton's Comus, in which masque expands into pastoral: ;
with pastoral, generally, they have an important connection. But,
in studying masques as a literary form, we have to bear in mind
that we are not dealing with essential masque. Even Ben Jonson's
words are not much more than the stick of the rocket after the
firework has flamed and faded. Essential masque was the appeal
of the moment to the eye and the ear, the blaze of colour and
light, the mist of perfume, the succession of rapidly changing
scenes and tableaux, crowded with wonderful and beautiful figures.
All the gods of Olympus, all the monsters of Tartarus, all the
heroes of history, all the ladies of romance, the fauns, the satyrs,
the fairies, the witches—all these were presented to the eye, while
every kind of musical instrument charmed the ear, and eye and
ear together were delighted by an elaboration of dance and
measured motion which has never been known since. We have
put away these childish things : but our maturity has elaborated
no art equally joyous and whole-hearted. The actual remains
of the masque with the careful description of the scenes, written,
afterwards, in cold blood by the deviser, even though that deviser
were Jonson himself, are but broken meats of a banquet that
is over.
The curious modern reaches a direct and adequate conception
of the vanished splendour and joy, and is enabled to comprehend
clearly the medieval instinct, only when the medieval passion for
masque and pageant receives imaginative expression in the work
of a great descriptive poet. Such a poet there was, but he was
not a dramatist. Spenser came before the drama. The masque
## p. 330 (#348) ############################################
330
Masque and Pastoral
was not drama; in many respects, it was the antithesis of drama.
Dramatists who wrote while the masque was still alive often,
in some metaphor or description, thrill us with a touch of its
glamour. Shakespeare, for instance, regards the masque as a
pol of the evanescent. This world and all its inhabitants
shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
The words express negatively the delight of the spectator in the
show by exhibiting his dismay that it must stop—'Our revels now
are ended. ' But we require a positive description, in which the
masque is not what it must be to the dramatist, unreal and un-
satisfying ; rather, on the contrary, the expression of life's wonder
and joy. This positive description is given us with extraordinary
power and fulness in Spenser's Faerie Queene, especially in the
first three books, which were published in 1590, before English
drama had developed its strength.
But, before we touch upon the relation of Spenser's art to the
masque, we must attempt to summarise the history of masque and
pageant before his time. The masque, like the drama, runs back
into remote antiquity, and we must make an effort to conceive
of masque as it was practised in England during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, if we are to understand clearly what a masque
was, and what modifications it underwent while, in Ben Jonson's
hands, it was the main amusement of the English court and
nobility. Out of numerous accounts of masques that have come
down to us, we may take two as typical of the kind of enter-
tainments which, by their combination, finally produced the true
masque. For the first, we will go back to the fourteenth century.
Edward III died on 2 January 1377. On the second of February
following, being Candlemas day, the Commons of London made
great sporte and solemnity' in honour of his successor, prince
Richard, who was lodged with his mother and the leading nobles
of the realm at the palace in the royal manor of Kennington,
which had been a favourite residence of the Black prince. “At
night and in the night,' a cavalcade of 130 men, 'disguizedly
aparailed and well mounted on horsebacke to goe on mumming,
rode ‘from Newgate through Cheape over London Bridge to
Kennington. They went ‘with great noyse of minstralsye, trumpets,
cornets and shawmes, and great plenty of waxe torches lighted. '
First came 48 esquires, two and two, “in cotes and clokes of red
say or sendall, and their faces covered with vizards well and
6
1
## p. 331 (#349) ############################################
6
Mummings and Disguisings 331
handsomely made'; next followed 48 knights, 'well arayed after
the same maner'; then a single figure, 'as he had bene an
emperor'; then another single figure, 'as a pope'; after him,
24 'arayed like Cardinals'; and, last, 8 or 10 with black vizardes
like devils, nothing amiable, seeming like legates. ' On reaching
the palace, all alighted and entered the hall, into which presently
came the prince, his mother and the leading nobles, whom the
said mummers saluted'; the mummers then proceeded to play
with a pair of prepared dice with the prince and other gentry for
valuable gifts. When the gifts had all been won, the prince and
the lordes danced on the one side and the mummers on the other
a great while,' and then they drank and took their leave and
departed to London.
In this account, we have what is probably the oldest and
simplest form of what is afterwards the masque! It is called
'a mumming,' and the performers are ‘mummers. ' The word
means that the disguised performers say nothing that would
betray their identity. They dice in silence, using only dumb show
where they wish to signify their meaning. But they are all
disguised with vizards, the old word for mask; they are accom-
panied by musicians ; they dance together among themselves when
their ‘mumming' business is over and torchbearers conduct them
on their way. Simple as their scheme was, the entry of masked
mummers with blare of trumpets and blaze of torches into the
great banqueting hall must have been highly picturesque. The
impressiveness of the moment is splendidly given by the drama-
tist :
Night, like a masque, is entered heaven's great hall,
With thousand torches ushering the way2!
а
>
In this particular ‘mumming,' the vizarded procession repre-
sented the emperor and pope as coming with attendant knights
and cardinals to greet the uncrowned king. When a 'mumming'
was regarded from the point of view of the dress assumed by the
'mummers,' it was called a 'disguising'; and, by the sixteenth
century, this name quite superseded the other, as, in the seven-
teenth century, it was itself superseded by 'masque’; so that Ben
Jonson, in 1622, makes Notch aver, ‘Disguise was the old English
word for a masque, Sir'; to which the groom of the revels answers,
"There is no such word in the office now, I assure you, Sir;
6
6
1 We shall use this spelling for the spectacle, and mask' for a vizard.
? The Insatiate Countesse, at end.
## p. 332 (#350) ############################################
332
Masque and Pastoral
I have served here, man and boy, a prenticeship or twain, and
I should know1. '
'Mumming' came to be applied particularly to the custom,
practised usually at Christmas time, of going round in masking
habit from house to house and gaming with dice; the game itself
was called 'mumchance. There are many allusions to it in the
Elizabethan dramatists. Finally, we may notice in this example of
a disguising, the '8 or 10 with black vizardes, like devils, nothing
amiable’; these are the germ of the Jonsonian antimasque.
For our second typical instance, let us go to the reign of
Henry VII in the year 1501. The marriage of prince Arthur to
Katharine of Arragon was celebrated in London with great magni-
ficence. The walls of Westminster hall were 'richly banged with
pleasant clothes of arras,' and, in the upper end, had ‘a Royall
and great Cupboard’ erected, upon which was displayed a 'goodly
and rich treasure of plate. ' The king and queen took their
seats 'under their Clothes of Estate,' and all the nobility 'were
ordered in their Roomes. ' To this great assembly entered a
'most goodly and pleasant disguising, convayed and shewed in
pageantes proper and subtile': of which the first was a Castle
right cunningly devised sett uppon certaine wheeles and drawne
into the said great hall of fower great beastes with chaines of
gold. ' The beasts were two lions, a hart and an ibex, personated,
each one of them, by two men. In the castle were 'disguised
VIII goodly and fresh ladyes looking out of the windowes of
the same,' and, in the turrets, 'fowre children singing most
sweetly and harmoniously. The castle was drawn into the
hall and up to the king's state? , and then set on one side to allow
of the entry of a second car, this time 'a shippe,' having 'her
mastes toppes sayles her tackling and all other apperteynances
necessary unto a seemely vessel as though it had been sayling. '
The ship cast anchor in front of the king, next the castle. On
board the ship was a lady, in apparel like to the princess of Spain.
Hope and Desire go from the ship to the castle as ambassadors
from the knights of the mount of Love; but the ladies in the
castle will have nothing to say to the knights. 'Incontinent came
in the third Pageant,' a mountain, with eight knights upon it, to
whom the ambassadors recounted their ill-success with the ladies.
Thereupon, the knights make a great show of assaulting the castle,
and the ladies surrender. The cars are wheeled back, and the
knights and ladies daunced together divers and many goodly
· The Masque of Augures.
2 The royal seat.
## p. 333 (#351) ############################################
Masque under Henry VII and VIII 333
dances. ' The cars then came back for the masquers and took
them away; after which, prince Arthur and his bride and other
distinguished people in the audience danced, including young
prince Henry and his sister Margaret. This 'disguising' was
succeeded on the following evenings by three others, nearly as
elaborate as the first. The whole display makes it quite clear
that the early sixteenth century had not much to learn from the
early seventeenth. The splendour of these shows reached a high
water mark in the reign of Henry VIII, and then, again, in the
reign of James I, when the mechanical and artistic genius of Inigo
Jones introduced new contrivances and a more elaborate arrange-
ment of scenery, suppressing almost entirely the processional
character of the masque and the early car.
Our second example of a masque has added to the first the
important item of the pageant or car. This, of course, suggests
a connection between the 'disguising' and the medieval miracle-
plays, which were performed on the movable waggon called a
pageant. It is easy to see how the grandeur of the cavalcade
would be increased if the emperor and pope were put in cars.
In the British Museum, there is a design by Albert Dürer, dated
1522, of a triumphal car for Maximilian, which may serve as an
illustration of the way in which a car would become a 'pageant'-
an elaborate structure to hold masquers. This pageant, as the
above example shows, is capable of very varied developments.
But, as the car becomes more elaborate, it cannot easily form
part of a long procession; to draw it the length of the hall taxes
the ingenuity of the carpenters; and, finally, it becomes stationary,
suggesting something approximating to the modern stage at one
end of the hall. The car, moreover, when it is a ship or a
lanthorn or a 'herbour,' requires some explanation; and an
exposition of the device of the car is added to the original
dance of the masquers. This is the masque in its simplest
outline
certain men or women disguised, who arrive in some
setting which corresponds to their dress, and which has to be
explained before they dance their measures ; they retire as they
came.
The disguisings had an extraordinary vogue under Henry VIII,
and they found a historian whose prose descriptions have hardly
received the attention which their great merit deserves. Edward
Hall was a lawyer and a politician. His parents were in sympathy
with advanced reformers. He affords, therefore, a remarkable
instance of the passion for pageant displaying itself in a hard-
1
## p. 334 (#352) ############################################
334
Masque and Pastoral
headed political trimmer, bred up in a sober and serious middle-
class family. Pageant was Hall's one passion. His English style
takes on a new distinction when he begins to describe the splendid
succession of festivities which distinguished the reign of Henry VIII.
His masterpiece is, perhaps, his account of the Field of the Cloth
of Gold; but, everywhere, thanks to his enthusiasm, his accounts
of masques and entertainments are gorgeously coloured and won-
derfully full of movement.
He is the writer who notes the coming of the word 'masque. '
On the evening of Epiphany, 1512,
the kyng with a XI other wer disguised, after the maner of Italie, called a
maske, a thyng not seen afore in Englande; thei were appareled in garmentes
long and brode, wrought all with gold, with visers and cappes of gold, and
after the banket doen, these Maskers came in, with sixe gentlemen disguised
in silke, bearing staffe torches, and desired the ladies to daunce, some were
content, and some that knewe the fashion of it refused, because it was not a
thyng commonly seen. And after thei daunced, and commoned together as
the fashion of the Maske 1 is, thei toke their leave and departed, and so did
the Quene and all the ladies2.
This passage raises problems which are still under discussion.
What was the 'thyng not seen afore in Englande? ' What was
the 'thyng not commonly seen,' which made some of the ladies
refuse to dance? In short, what was the difference between the
disguising,' familiar in England for centuries, and this innovation
after the maner of Italie, called a maske'? The probable answer
is that there was a difference in dress which was connected with
a difference in procedure. The masquers not only danced with
one another, but, after their own dance, they chose partners
among the spectators. This introduced into the masque a new
element of courtship and intrigue. For this device to maintain its
proper piquancy, the disguise of the masquer must be complete ;
his costume must, like a domino, conceal any peculiarities of
mien and shape which might betray him if he wore a more
closely-fitting disguise. Whether this sufficiently explains Hall's
language must be considered a question still under discussion ;
but two points are clear. There is a common conviction, both in
France and England, that, in some of its characteristic aspects, the
masque was Italian. Ronsard says that 'masquerade' came from
the Italians, and mentions 'ses vestemens, ses moeurs et ses façons,'
as the things which were copied. Reyher, after quoting Ronsard,
6
1 The edition of 1550 reads · Masques. '
Hall (1548), f. 16rº. For the views that have been expressed on the passage,
consult Reyher's first appendix, in Les Masques Anglais.
## p. 335 (#353) ############################################
Masque in Spenser
335
suggests that this borrowing from Italy took place au moment
des expéditions françaises de la fin du XV. et du début du XVI.
siècle. In our own literature, Marlowe's 'I'll have Italian maskes
by night? ' is familiar. But, secondly, the motive of intrigue,
whatever its derivation, was a most important addition to the
masque's attractiveness. Clearly, it was much appreciated by
Henry VIII. It is a breath of natural drama introduced into
what is essentially undramatic. Because it is natural drama, it
is often the means by which the masque gets a place in dramatic
literature. The masque in Love's Labour's Lost? is delightfully
dramatic, and it is an excellent comment, so far as it applies, on
the passage in Hall. It is in a masque that Romeo loses his heart
to Juliets; and, more interesting still, Henry VIII conceives his
passion for Anne Boleyn, in the same way, in the masque of the
first act of the play. Many other instances* occur in the
dramatists, where this dramatic moment in the masque is utilised.
But, in the masque itself, this item remains an episode upon which
the deviser of the masque never lays his hands ; in Henry VIII's
reign, the undramatic character of the masque shows no sign of
changing.
When we reach the reign of Elizabeth, Spenser's poetry, even
more adequately than Hall's prose, reflects and revives the glory
of the medieval masque and pageant. His genius, in some of
its most characteristic aspects, was exactly fitted to describe and
appreciate the world just beyond the real world with which the
masque dealt. The masque of the Seven Deadly Sins5 and the
masque of Cupido are magnificent examples of the processional
masque. The former shows that the antimasque is implicit in the
masque from the beginning. The house of Temperance and the
attack upon it? recall the knights' onslaught on the castle of
the ladies described above. Such famous descriptions as the cave
of Mammon8 and the bower of Bliss are like the set pieces which
Inigo Jones tried to make real to the eye when the masque
became a fixture at the end of the great hall. There are cantos
in The Faerie Queene in which we seem in spirit to follow the
procession until it reaches the hall, where the full device is
displayed before us in all its intricacy. Spenser's abstractions,
Coelia, Fidelia, Speranza, Charissa, the porter Humiltá of the
i Edward II, act i, sc. 1. ? Act v, 8c. 2. 8 Act I, 80. 5.
• Reyher gives a list of plays with masques inserted ; Les Masques Anglais, p. 497.
5 Bk. I, canto iv. 6 Bk, III, canto xii. 7 Bk. II, cantos ix and xi.
8 Bk. II, canto vii. • Bk. II, canto xii.
9
## p. 336 (#354) ############################################
336
Masque and Pastoral
house of Holiness and scores of others, are just such as meet us
in masques; but a line of description like 'bitter Penaunce with
an yron whip,' calls up the figure before us more effectually
than Jonson's most exact prose ; and Spenser's poem abounds in
similar vivid lines and stanzas. The poem, again, like almost every
masque, is an elaborate compliment. Its relation to Elizabeth is
precisely that of Jonson’s masques to James or Charles. Spenser's
poem, it should be remembered, greatly influenced Ben Jonson
and other writers of masque-Ben Jonson in especial.
Elizabeth's frugality prevented the masque from developing
in her reign. It was in frequent use, but the queen had not the
special taste for it which made it prominent as an amusement of
the aristocracy in the courts of Henry VIII and James I. But
'entertainments,' during the queen's numerous progresses, were
plentifully produced. The entertainment was the masque out-of-
doors, and consisted of some kind of welcoming device or function
arranged for greeting the queen on her arrival, or discovered B
afterwards, as she was conducted round gardens and park. The
entertainment had more dramatic possibilities in it than the
masque, because it depended less upon scenery, but the English
climate kept it always short and slight. One, by Sir Philip Sidney,
of considerable merit, has survived—The May Lady', presented
in May 1578, when the queen visited his uncle, the earl of
Leicester, at Wanstead. Jonson's reverence for Sidney makes it
likely that he did not overlook Sidney's work when he composed
the entertainments which were the beginning of his masque
work. But it seems more probable that The May Lady guided
Jonson's views on pastoral than that it influenced his con-
ception of masque, and it remains by itself as a short out-of-doors
scene of pastoral comedy, not without influence upon Shakespeare's
early comedy. The schoolmaster, master Rombus, is, obviously,
an ancestor of Holofernes, and the play's likeness to masque lies
in its complimentary character. Some of Lyly's plays, also, have
affinities with the masque. They are elaborate compliments; their
ideas are not concerned with the real world of men and women;
their characters are mythological. But perhaps their most im-
portant connection with the masque is their influence upon Jonson's
Cynthia's Revels. This play magnifies at all points Lyly's limited
strength to such a degree that the reader may easily fail to notice
a
its debt to Lyly. But its connection with Jonson’s masques is
1 Bk. 1, canto x.
Called, also, The Lady of the May.
• See vol. V, chap. VI.
4 Cf. ante, chap. v, p. 18.
## p. 337 (#355) ############################################
Daniel's First Masque
337
obvious. In Cynthia's Revels, a great realist, the author of
Bartholomew Fayre, succeeds in making us understand how he
came to write masques. We see his mind becoming absorbed
in the particular art and method of which the masque was an
expression.
But, before we pass to Jonson's masques, one Elizabethan play
must be mentioned which was neither a masque, nor a pastoral, nor
a drama, but partook of the character of all three. It is, perhaps,
the most elaborate and beautiful entertainment extant, and the
brilliance of its total effect makes us regret that such a delightful
type of renascence art did not receive fuller development. Peele's
Araygnement of Paris comes before the development of the
ma que, as Milton's Comus comes after it, to suggest to us that
in the method of the out-of-door entertainment or pastoral there
is inherent a truer breath of poetry than is to be found in that of
the indoor masque, in which scenery and carpentry and music and
,
dance were always tending to smother and suppress the poetical
soull.
The first court masque after king James's accession was pro-
duced on 8 January 1604 at Hampton court, because plague was
prevalent in London. It was The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses,
in which the masquers were queen Anne herself and eleven of
her ladies. By the recommendation of Lucy countess of Bedford,
Daniel was chosen to design and write the masque.
