Masques

Although masques originated in Italy, they reached the height of their form in England, especially during the early years of the reign of James VI. His remarkable queen, Anne of Denmark (1574-1619), was patroness of the masques commissioned for their court. As the daughter of Frederick II, king of Denmark (1534-88), she gave Scotland permanent claim to the Orkney and Shetland Islands with her

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Marriage to James in 1589. Ignored in her efforts to become involved in politics, Anne enthusiastically participated in court festivities, wearing in turn the jewels and some 6,000 dresses she inherited from Queen Elizabeth. Well loved for making the court so gay, Anne herself acted in the masques, playing everything from a nymph to a black woman, the latter in Ben Jonson’s (1572-1637) Masque of Blackness (1605), written at her request. Masques were able to have amateur performers because they consisted mostly of disguise, poetry, dance, and music. There was very little plot, except perhaps a simple pastoral story. Jonson introduced an “antimasque,” often with grotesque or savage characters, supposedly as a negative foil to the positive society depicted in the masque proper. His actual purpose, however, may have been to enliven an increasingly stilted performance. Because it required more dramatic skill, the antimasque usually included professional performers. Unlike the parsimonious court of Elizabeth, the Jacobean court spared no expense on these scintillating spectacles. The architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652) designed many of their ingenious stage settings.