The Stuart Mask

If anything like justice is to be done within the limits of a single essay to a dramatic genre that is as often maligned as it is neglected by historians and critics, it is important to define the sort of treatment that is to be accorded to it here. One approach would be to take the actual dates which circumscribe the period—from Samuel Daniel’s Vision of Twelve Goddesses performed in the year of James I’s Coronation, to Sir William D’Avenant’s Salmacida Spolia which gave the Court of Charles I its most expensive, glittering and mocking entertainment before Civil War disestablished the Mask as a genre—and follow its development chronologically, very much as Allardyce Nicoll has done at much greater length in Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage (1938). Another possibility would be to narrow our focus to a single Mask and, taking that as an example, make a microscopic inspection of the text and settings, as D. J. Gordon has done with Ben Jonson’s and Inigo Jones’ Hue and Cry After Cupid or Hymenaei, relating all its iconography to source in other literature and art of the period. ¹ Yet a third approach is to try to distil the essence, as it were, of Masks of the Jacobean and Caroline period relating the blossom itself to the roots from which it sprang and to the seed which it left against the future. It is the last of these three possible approaches which I have chosen to follow here, largely because, so far as I am aware, it has not been attempted in any concise manner before. ¹