ABSTRACT
This book began from an apparently simple observation: some characters in some medieval English mystery plays wore masks. Why should this have been, and what did it contribute to the plays and their performance? As we explored this question it became clear that it vibrated across a vast web of masking activities stretching across time and space. Huge numbers of people from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, in countries from Sweden to Sicily, were involved in masking: in Provence in the early sixth century, New-Year revellers ‘put on the heads of wild animals, celebrating and leaping about’; in thirteenth-century Paris the clergy wore monstrous masks to parody the Mass in the church itself; fourteenth-century London sees groups of men in false faces going around at night to challenge householders to games of dice, while the court was entertained with sophisticated shows of dancers wearing faces of women, silver masks of angels, or ‘heads of men with elephants’; in Rome in 1502 the Pope watched a parade of maskers ‘with great long noses like penises’, while fifty years later in Venice the ‘lustie yong Duke of Ferrandin’ was killed in a private argument as he and another masker both attempted to flirt, in their visors, with the same gentlewoman; the devils in the 1536 mystery play at Bourges wore masks spouting fire from the ears and nostrils, while God in the fifteenth-century English morality Wisdom put on a wig and half-mask with ‘a bearde of golde of sypres curlyed’, and the corrupted king of the 1570s morality play The Cradle of Security was tricked into the mask of a pig.1
