ABSTRACT
Masque and masquerade were particularly prominent during two specific seasons of the year: Twelfth Night, especially in England, and Carnival, the period leading from the Christmas festivities to a culminating point on Shrove Tuesday, the eve of Lent, in all those countries which took a traditionally Roman Catholic view of the spiritual year and of Lenten fasting. If the donning of a mask or vizard provided a substitute for invisibility and allowed distinctions of rank, and the behaviour they entailed, to be forgotten in a search for wider, richer, less foreseeable experience, the cult of the masque as an art form in Jacobean and Caroline England, and the development of similar fashions in other European countries, indicated a compulsive longing for a wider aesthetic experience which would at one and the same time dazzle the eye, beguile the ear, entertain the mind and involve the body too.
