Roger is playing Jack Cade, the leader of a popular revolt in 1450, during Henry V’s reign. The revolt came about due to local grievances against the king’s regime. Cade, based in Kent led an army of as many as 5,000 to London. After much looting in London the rebels were defeated in a battle not far from where the Globe now stands, at London Bridge. Cade was eventually killed in a small skirmish on 12 July 1450.

Over to Roger.

“So the first week of rehearsals is over and no one has been stabbed, hit or fallen over. Its a good start, considering how many fights and battles there are in these plays.

Everybody seems to be getting on really well, so far! We’re all excited about the fact that 14 actors will be telling these epic stories. The cut versions that Nick [Bagnall, director] has done read brilliantly and feel like they motor along at a real pace.

So far rehearsals have been gentle but intense. Two rooms running side by side- one music, one text. We’ve been doing a lot of drumming and I have to say it sounds amazing. As Gareth Pierce [Reignier, Duke of Anjou / George, Duke of Clarence] said “ It gets you right in the ********.”

Alex Baranowski [composer] has written a great rebel song for the Jack Cade section of part 2, so there’s been a lot of singing; or shouting depending on who you talk to.

We even had a session with trumpets just to see who in the cast could make a noise with them. Turns out Andy Sheridan [Earl of Warwick / Lord Talbot]  is a veritable Miles Davis and has probably missed his vocation. I, on the other hand, after telling everyone I used to play bit of cornet and trombone when I was in school, couldn’t get a single note out of it! Which prompted the comment from Nigel Hastings [Duke of Bedford/Duke of Burgundy/Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March/Dick the Butcher] , “still got the old magic.” The swords are out, literally and metaphorically.

Combat Kate aka Kate Waters [Fight director]  has been in a bit and we will be definitely seeing a lot more of her. It’s also brilliant to have my old movement teacher from drama school, Wendy Allnut, in the room. She is amazing and still scares me as much now as she did then. And I mean scare in the best sense of the word.

It’s starting to feel like there’s a real gang in the rehearsal room, which is fantastic for these plays. It’s all very exciting, and made even more special by the fact that we’ll be doing them on the very battlefields that The Wars of The Roses were fought on.

There is a huge responsibility. We all feel we want to honour the people who died in those fields. I am sure it will be an incredible, unique experience for everyone involved.

There’s an old saying that “ If you can’t see who the **** (insert your own derogatory word) in the room is, it’s probably you.” At the moment I think it might be me. But things may change and I will let you know, as and when, they do!”

Word of the Week: ‘Pother’ (n.) – fuss, uproar, commotion

‘Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch
That hast within thee undivulgèd crimes
Unwhipped of justice; hide thee, thou bloody hand,
Thou perjured and thou similar of virtue
That art incestuous; caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Has practised on man’s life; close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinned against than sinning.’
[Lear]
King Lear III.ii

Voiced by Joseph Marcell

Behind The Voice:
Joseph is currently playing the title role in Shakespeare’s Globe’s touring production of King Lear, having previously graced our stage in Much Ado About Nothing, Coriolanus and Under the Black Flag.

King Lear is at Shakespeare’s Globe from 13 – 18 May, before it continues its tour around the UK, Europe and beyond.

Joseph’s favourite Shakespeare plays are King Lear and Julius Caesar.

I have been at the Globe since 1999 and while in those early days I had some job titles – one was Master of the Words – now my position is that I’m the Globe Associate in charge of text. What that means is that I am responsible for helping to make the delivery of the text as clear and expressive, and as naturally spontaneous as possible. So I work with the actors and try to explain to them why Shakespeare writes in the way he does, and when needed to, I try and help unravel the meaning behind some of his knottier passages.

Which is your favourite Shakespeare play and why?

If you had asked me this twenty years ago I’ve had said The Winter’s Tale. Back then I was mainly a theatre director and I’d always wanted to direct this play, because it is so mysterious and such a entrancing mix of the tragic and the comic, of loss and rediscovery. I still have not had a chance to direct it, but now because my role is to undertake the text work on so many of his plays, I think I begin to like best whatever play I’m currently working on. I sometimes say I have twenty favourite Shakespeares these days.

What do you do in a typical day?

It depends on the time of year. During the spring and summer my typical day could be in rehearsals taking part in ‘table work’ – that is when the actors and director first begin to investigate the text of their play, working out what it all means and why the characters say what they say. Or later I sit in and listen to how rehearsals are progressing. I’m frequently moving from one play to another as sometimes as many as four productions are rehearsing at the same time. If I am not in rehearsals I’ll be working ‘one to one’ with individual actors, listening to them and suggesting ways that they might make what they have to say, more exciting for them, more fun, truer. Later on a typical day I might be in the theatre watching a performance. But no two days are ever exactly alike. I also have an assistant working with me, which is a help, especially because it’s good to have someone you can discuss the day’s work with.
During the autumn and winter the Globe Theatre is closed for professional productions, and at that time of year my typical day might be spent working for Globe Education and giving classes to drama students who are attending courses at the theatre. But at that time of year I might only come into the theatre about three days a week. From 2014 the Globe is opening its indoor theatre – The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – and then professional theatrical production will happen throughout the year.

What is the strangest task you’ve ever undertaken in the name of your role?

I can’t think of anything.

How did you end up where you are today?

By the time I heard about Sam Wanamaker’s project to build the Globe – I suppose in the late 80’s / early 90’s – I was already very interested in Shakespeare and how his plays would have been first performed. By that time I had been working in the theatre, first as an actor, then as a director for about twenty five years. So I went to meet Sam and talked to him about things that interested me – one of which was where the staircase would have been situated that allowed the actors to move from the upper level down to the main stage – something which we have never really solved – and I also staged a fund raising concert for Sam to aid the ongoing appeal to make the Globe a reality. But it was not until I met Mark Rylance in 1998 that he became interested in the way I had begun to feel that actors might best approach Shakespeare’s texts, that in 1999, he invited me to join the company. To begin with I combined my ‘text work’ with directing for him – though under Mark we were not called Directors, but ‘Masters of Play’. But after a few years the text work took over from the occasional directing.

What are the most challenging aspects of your role?

Knowing when to say what to actors.

Any (Globe specific) career highlights so far?

Receiving the Sam Wanamaker Award in 2011.

If someone wanted a role like yours, what advice would you give them?

I have had a very lucky life. I feel I have always followed what I wanted to do and have in some ways achieved that. Though I never thought that I would end up doing what I’m now doing – though I feel that I am now doing, probably, what I do best. I had great fun being an actor for several years; then I became somewhat unsatisfied with acting and wanted to direct as well. I gradually achieved that and then the acting faded away. Then I became intrigued by Shakespeare’s texts, and the way they are written, and by his development as a writer, but especially I became intrigued by how actors approached and delivered his texts, and whether Shakespeare’s own actors might have delivered them somewhat differently. So I realise that what has happened to me is that the role I play now is a role that I have created for myself – and it has come about simply because it became my main fascination. I’ve met many young directors (some of these become my assistants) who are interested in what I do, and in some of the things I say, but I think all of them want to be simply directors, so I’ve never met anyone who wants to do what I do exactly. But my general advice would be to pursue your dreams, but be prepared to change them as you change, because you can’t ever know where you might end up.

What is your book about?

My book is about Shakespeare, and in particular how can actors get the most out of playing all these many wonderfully varied parts that his plays are filled with.

You can purchase Giles’ book from our Shop.

Word of the Week: ‘Bluster’ (n.) – storm, tempest, rough blast

‘We have landed in ill time. The skies look grimly
And threaten present blusters. In my conscience,
The heavens with that we have in hand are angry,
And frown upon’s.’
[Mariner to Antigonus]
The Winter’s Tale III.iii

Voiced by Matthew Raymond

Behind The Voice:
Matthew is currently playing the role of Boatswain/Adrian in Shakespeare’s most blustery play, The Tempest.

It is perhaps apt to tour King Lear  to this location given how influential two women in particular, were in the shaping of this domain frequented by kings. Redevelopment and restoration of the Estate that became known as Hodsock Priory was largely undertaken by Anne Chambers and Mrs Margaret Mellis, between 1805 and 1930.

From the mid-twelfth century the Cressey family owned Hodsock. Over 200 years they held sufficient positions of power and entertained Henry II, John and Edward I. In the early fifteenth century the estate passed to the Clifton family, who owned Hodsock for fourteen generations until 1765. During this time, in 1541, Henry VIII visited.

You can read more about the history of Hodsock here.

A country setting

Hodsock Priory is an historic country house set in 800 acres of countryside on the border of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed changing styles of gardening. The splendours of the Hodsock gardens were well known thanks to the Head Gardener, Mr Arthur Ford and his team of five. Mr Ford was more than a gardener. He wrote articles for gardening journals, recorded the weather every day on equipment he kept in the Gatehouse and is reputed to have been ‘head hunted’ by Kew Gardens.

Every year Hodsock boasts a carpet of bluebells. With your King Lear ticket you can walk through the bluebell woods for free.

You can follow the activities of at Hodsock  on Twitter at @HodsockPriory and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/HodsockPriory.

During Shakespeare’s lifetime, England became conscious of holiday custom as it had not been before, in the very period when in many areas the keeping of holidays was on the decline. Festivals which worked within the rhythm of an agricultural calendar, in village or market town, did not fit the way of living of the urban groups whose energies were beginning to find expression through [...] the Puritan ethic.[4]

There was, however, some opposition to these neopagan rites: the Puritan Phillip Stubbes wrote in his 1583 Anatomie of Abuses that on May Day, after dancing round the ‘stinking idol’ that was the Maypole,

all the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills, and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes [...] And no marvel, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendent and Lord over their pastimes and sports, namely, Satan, prince of hell.[5]

The pagan calendar

As of October 1582, the Gregorian calendar was introduced after a bull by Pope Gregory XIII to change the Julian calendar. In effect, this meant that the calendar was moved ten days forward, though a greater change was that new year celebrations were moved from March 25^th – ‘Lady’s Day’ – to the January 1^st, though many English people still celebrated the March date. The Gregorian calendar was also intended to track Easter, a moveable feast, with greater accuracy. Easter and Passover were moveable because they were related to the lunar calendar, being the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Underneath the surface of most Christian feasts of Elizabethan England, lurked the pagan past.[6] As François Laroque points out, this was partly pragmatic – while ‘the Church fathers express horror at the persistence of pagan festivals and beliefs […] it would appear that, circumstances permitting, it strove to integrate pagan celebrations into its own calendar, in the hope of unobtrusively changing their immediate meaning’.[7] This indeed happened – we still celebrate Christmas and Easter on winter and spring equinoxes – however, a certain level of pagan beliefs remained within English folklore, so that, Laroque suggests, a collective memory of a pagan past was triggered at festive times: ‘magical beliefs that had lain dormant for most of the year were suddenly reawakened and came back to life for the duration of the festival’.[8]

Calendar for the month of June from the Codex Gigas, early 13th century. The feast of St. John the Baptist is marked by numerals VIII, the 24th day of the month (Img 1)

The pagan calendar largely derived from Celtic and Teutonic traditions, but this had become infused with Graeco-Roman traditions, and eventually associated with Christian traditions. This variety of different cultures’ rituals leading into the pagan calendar meant that there were general important times, relating to the equinox.  The main cluster of festivals were: in spring, May Eve (April 30^th) or Roodmas, which lasting into May 1st derived from the Celtic feast of Beltane and the Roman festival of Bona Dea, and in summer, the Celtic feasts of Lugnasadh, celebrated on August 1st. In autumn came Samhain or Allhallow Eve on 31^st October, which converged with the ancient Greek festival of Thesmophoria, though a parallel tradition marked November 11^th, St Martin’s Day, which was celebrated as a Christian festival of the dead, the beginning of winter, and indeed the entire year. (In Catholic countries today, this is still celebrated as a harvest festival – with roasted chestnuts or the blessing of the new wine). In winter, a number of festivals such as the Roman celebration of the January Calends, the Celtic ‘Yule’ festival and the Christian festivals of Christmas and the New Year, converged around December 25^th and January 1^st. In February, the Celtic festival Dimelc and the Greek festival of Anthesteria were celebrated on the 1^st February, followed by the Christian feast of the purification of the Virgin, or Candlemas, celebrated the following day.

Fire-festivals

Fire-festivals were one of the most obvious links back to a pagan past in early modern Britain. Despite ‘attempts made by Christian synods in the eighth century to put them down as heathenish rites’,[9] the ‘superstitious beliefs’ of the country people saw a gathering at significant points of the agricultural calendar.[10] James George Frazer writes of the survival of the festival of the Beltane fires in the Highlands on the first of May as ‘a curious and interesting picture of ancient heathendom surviving in our own country’.[11] He argues that ‘from the standpoint of primitive man nothing might seem more appropriate than to kindle fires on earth at the two moments [the summer and winter solstices] when the fire and heat of the great luminary in heaven begin to wane or wax’.[12] Some have argued that the survival of the fire-festivals is to do with purifying the community, ‘being designed to burn up and destroy all harmful influences’,[13] especially in a period when witchcraft was a hot topic.[14] Others have argued that such ‘magical ceremonies’ as take place in neopagan rites work on ‘the principle of imitative magic, to ensure a needful supply of sunshine’.[15]

Equinox and solstice

The O.E.D. gives the definition of ‘equinox’ as ‘equality between day and night’, and first cites its usage in Chaucer’s Treatise on an Astrolabe (c.1391). An equinox is the moment when the length of daylight hours and night-time hours are the same: the vernal equinox (Aries) falls around the 20^th March, and the autumnal equinox (Libra) falls around the 22^nd September. Chaucer writes that ‘whan the sonne is in the hevedes of Aries and Libra, than ben the dayes and the nightes ylike of lengthe in all the world. And therefore ben these 2 signes called the equinoxiis’.[16] The word ‘equinox’ appears only once in Shakespeare, in Othello, when Iago says of Cassio that ‘his vice, / ’Tis to his virtue, a just equinox, / The one as long as th’other’, implying his good and bad sides are in equal balance.[17] The equinox has its root in the pagan understanding of the calendar, as did many festivals in early modern Christendom: ‘the year was spangled with festivals. [...] Everywhere the two great festivals were those of Christmas and May Day, the Mid-winter and Summer festivals of the Celtic year’.[18] The Christian festival of Easter derives from ‘a spring equinox celebration in honour of Eostre, the Teutonic dawn goddess’.[19] It has been suggested that The Winter’s Tale, with its themes of renewal and faith, may have been written for the vernal equinox of 1611.[20] Equinoxes retained a pagan mysticism for the early modern Christians: the rains of the autumnal equinox were thought to have healing qualities.[21]

Islamic planispheric astrolabe from Andalusia, 1067 (Img 2)

The summer solstice – Midsummer, around June 21^st-24th – occurs when the sun reaches its highest point in relation to the equator. The solstice was also the site of a pagan festival overlaid with Christian meaning for the early moderns: Anca Vlasopolos writes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that ‘the play, like the ritual which informs its structure, maintains a dual frame of reference, Christian and pagan’.[22] The Feast of St John the Baptist was celebrated on the summer solstice,[23] as in the Gospel of Luke it is implied that John the Baptist was born six months before Jesus.

St. John the Baptist, Jacopo del Casentino, c.1330 (Img 3)

Barber writes that the ‘three great features of the midsummer celebration were the bonfires [where originally bones were burnt, hence ‘bonefire’ and, later, ‘bonfire’], the processions with torches round the fields, and the customs of rolling a wheel’.[24] Midsummer was associated with magic and carnivalesque celebration: ‘characterized by exorcisms of evil spirits, and by reconciliations and atonement, the feast of Saint John the Baptist follows the license and misrule of the eve and night preceding June 24’.[25] Midsummer Eve is one of the oldest festivals to celebrate the summer solstice, and was seen as ‘turning point in the year’. [26] In addition, it was ‘particularly a time when spirits were abroad, when particular plants must be gathered and when one might see one’s future true love in the fires or through other magic’.[27] Fertility rites were often enacted on Midsummer Eve, and Spenser links Midsummer festivities with new marriages in his 1595 Epithalamion.[28]

May Day

That Shakespeare was at least aware of the Maying customs is hinted at in the allusion he  makes to it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Hermia thus addresses Helena:

“And are you grown so high in his esteem,

Because I am so dwarfish, and so low?

How low am I, thou painted Maypole?” [III.ii.1342 - 1344]

The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania Sir Joseph Noel Paton, 1847 (Img 4)

Cesar Barber argues that the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is based on the structure of a typical early modern Mayday, commenting that the action, like the occasion, “moves ‘from the town to the grove’ and back again, bringing in summer to the bridal.”^[29] The conclusion of the play also ends like a typical May Day, asserts Barber, with Oberon and Titania bringing blessings of fertility to the newlyweds.^[30]

What happened on May Day?

The earlier hours of the previous day are occupied by the children in a perambulation of the parish, calling upon the farm folk and other residents for gifts
of flowers and finery with which to decorate their maypoles.^[31]

In the evening the maypole is hoisted on the village green, or in some paddock or orchard lent for the purpose, and the election of the May Queen takes place.^[32]

On the morrow the queen and her attendants, as richly bedizened as flowers, ground ivy, May blossoms, and patchwork can make them, again parade the boundary of the parish, singing their May songs round a portable maypole; finally returning to their ground or play-mead, where the songs are sung over again in the following words, to a generally recognised home-made tune:

‘Tis always on the twelfth of May,

We meet and dress so gaily;

For tonite will merry be,

For tonite will merry be,

For tonite will merry be,

We’ll sing and dance so gaily.^[33]

After the songs are sung and the daily portion of the festival is over, dancing begins.^[34]

A Flemish etching of a May Day ceremony from the 15th century (Img 5)

Stubbes describes May day in the most detail of any contemporary commentator:

“The chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-pole, which they bring home with great veneration, as thus. They have twentie or fortie yoke of Oxen, every Oxe having a sweete nose-gay of flowers placed on the tip of his hornes; and these oxen drawe home this May-pole which is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round with strings from the top to the bottome, and sometimes painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women and children, following it with great devotion. And thus being reaped up with handkercheefs and flags hovering on the top, they straw the ground rounde about, bind greene boughs about it”^[35]

Stubbes also describes the young men and women on May Day in a negative way, implying that May day at the time was a day of licentiousness and moral abdandon. They are depicted as “running gadding overnight into the woods… where they spend the whole night in pleasant pastimes.” He goes on to describe the vexations of falling in and out of love, and of lovers’ quarrels: “And no marvel, for there is a great Lord present among them, as superintendent and Lord over their pastimes and sports, namely, Satan, prince of hell”^[i]

When Theseus and Hippolyta find the lovers sleeping, Theseus jumps to the conclusion that:

“No doubt they rose up early to observe

The rite of May; and, hearing our intent,

Came here in grace of our solemnity.” [IV.i.31-3]

May Day and Paganism

Cesar Barber remarks that “In making Oberon, prince of fairies, into the May king, Shakespeare urbanely plays with the notion of a supernatural power at work in holiday”^[1]: indeed, the occasion had supernatural and Pagan connotations which made it unpopular under the Puritan regime. The Puritans were not mistaken in tracing the May games from heathen times, and certainly the church had never christianized May Day^[2], and sure enough the rise of Protestantism in the 16th century led to increasing disapproval of maypoles and other May Day practices those who viewed them as idolatry.^[3] The Long Parliament‘s ordinance of 1644 described maypoles as “a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness.”^[4] May day celebrations were revived in 1660.

The story the Isango Ensemble have taken on is a challenge because Venus’ increasing desperation of Venus is potentially very sad and harrowing. Mark explains that they still managed to find fun and humour in it however by choosing to use seven actresses to portray the same role so that the tale only becomes darker and more tragic towards the end.

“We wanted to avoid the idea that Adonis simply does not fancy one particular woman. And practically it was a major part of the fun: seeing how different actresses try to wheedle their way into Adonis’ affections.”
Mark also explains how the various changes in language throughout the piece reflected the new change in Venus who in turn suited that particular section.

In terms of the South-African context from which this piece comes, many of the issues seem particularly prevalent. As Mark says: “Across all cultures, South Africa has a deeply sexist outlook, and it was quite liberating for the women to work on a character who decides what she wants and goes all-out to get it.”

In order to prevent the piece from becoming too static – or, as Mark puts it “falling in love with the poetry; forgetting that you are meant to be creating a piece of exciting active theatre” – the Isango Ensemble use the seven Venuses, puppetry and various forms of dance.

(c) Ellie Kurttz

 Venus & Adonis will be back on the Globe stage on 29 April, and Mark says it will certainly have developed since we last saw it. He describes it as a “constant process (…) we’ll often take a scene apart and
rebuild it in a completely different way.”

He also spoke about what a fantastic time he and the Isango Ensemble had performing at the Globe this time last year.
“It was an ideal space for us. The great thing about Isango’s performers is that they genuinely enjoy playing for an audience – there’s a lift in energy.”

“We can set about creating magic in that space. At one point Venus goes out into the audience when looking for Adonis, the groundlings become the trees. Wonderful.”

Tell us what you think of Venus & Adonis by tweeting us @The_Globe, including the hashtag #G2G. Or you can join in the conversation on Facebook.

Venus & Adonis @the_globe is spelling binding. Love it. #intervaltweet

— Matthew. (@matthew_iliffe) April 29, 2013

Word of the Week: ‘Candle’ (n.) – a taper, a light

‘That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams-
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.’
[Portia to Nerissa]
The Merchant of Venice V.i

Voiced by Amy Cody

Behind The Voice:
Amy is the Major Gifts Co-ordinator at Shakespeare’s Globe and has recently been working very hard to raise money for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Amy’s favourite Shakespeare play is Hamlet.

This week we announced the inaugural season of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, an indoor theatre that will bring you Jacobean joy by candlelight. For more information on the 2014 theatre season, click here.

To donate towards the building of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, click here.

Masques were a major innovation in royal entertainment in the Jacobean period, possibly introduced by Anne of Denmark (the queen). They featured allegorical figures, some very heavy obsequiousness, music, verse and elaborate staging and costumes.

Shakespeare’s company, being closely involved with royal entertainments, increasingly introduced masques and masque elements to their plays. 

What was a masque?

Masques of the form presented in The Tempest were introduced to the English court by Anne of Denmark, James I’s queen,[i] developed from a type already popular in Italy. Throughout his reign, James I spent vast amounts of money on producing masques.[ii]

The first masque performed under Anne’s patronage, Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’s Masque of Blackness (1605) established what would remain the masque’s principal purpose and characteristics:

‘A fable that was a piece of high fantasy and royal compliment, and an action that revealed something of the mysterious power of kingship. Set on a single stage with music, song and dance to amplify the action, with costume of unprecedented extravagance, with scenery and illusionistic effects, and novelty in lighting, The Masque of Blackness was a composite art form.’[iii]

Masques were performed by a mixture of professional actors and costumed aristocrats. The characters represented were a mixture of grotesques and allegorical, classically-derived gods, goddesses, mythical figures and personified virtues.

A particularly innovative aspect of the masque was the use of highly-engineered stage sets, often incorporating a ‘machina versitalis or “turning machine” … [and also] … sophisticated series of flats slid in on shutters or dropped from flying galleries’.[iv]

The above descriptions may seem rather dry, but an extract from the stage directions of Samuel Daniel’s Tethys Festival gives some flavour of the masque’s florid ambition and technical sophistication:

‘The scene itself was a port or haven … within this port were many ships, small and great, seeming to lie at anchor, some nearer, and some further off, according to perspective. Beyond all appeared the horizon or termination of the sea, which seemed to move with a gentle gale … from this scene entered Zephyrus with eight naiads…’[v] (my italics)

As the masque form developed, the idealised figures of the court were grotesquely mirrored in ‘antimasques’ performed by professional actors. These antimasques often included comic elements, setting up a disruptive force to be dispelled by the entrance of the principal (courtly) masquers. In Jonson’s Masque of Queens, a group of hideous ‘hags’ cavort and perform comically ineffectual conjurations until

… on the sudden, was heard a sound of loud music … with which not only the hags themselves but the hell into which they ran quite vanished … but in the place of it appeared a glorious and magnificent building … in the top of which were discovered the twelve masquers…’[vi]

‘A Star’ - Inigo Jones costume design

'Queen Atlanta' - Inigo Jones costume design

Inigo Jones’s costume designs for his masques reveal the central influence of classical sources and the elaborate richness of the materials. Pictured here, ‘A Star’ and ‘Queen Atalanta’.

In recent criticism, masques have often been considered little more than ‘an elaborate frame for nothing more nor less than an aristocratic knees-up’,[vii] containing only unquestioning sycophancy toward the royal household and noble patrons. Ben Jonson, however, argued that a masque was not mere flattery, but ‘presenting an ideal to which [the sovereign or nobleman] should aspire’.[viii]

Indeed, close examination of the political conditions in place at the moment of specific masques’ performance can reveal subtle criticism of royal policy, even of attitudes toward class and – on one occasion – the failure of patrons to pay poets for writing masques.

Shakespeare, masques, and The Tempest

The professional actors performing in many of these masques, as hags, gods and – in Jonson’s Neptune’s Triumph – a turkey and other kitchen ingredients, would often have been the King’s Men: Shakespeare and his colleagues.[ix]

Andrew Gurr states that masques within plays ‘became a conspicuous feature of King’s Men plays after 1610’[x]  although ‘there is no record of [Shakespeare] having composed an independent masque’.[xi] The ‘satyrs dance’ in The Winter’s Tale is thought by many to be drawn from or at least reference the masque Oberon.[xii]

Inigo Jones’s designs for satyr costumes, perhaps identical to those used in The Winter’s Tale.

There is a tradition that The Tempest contains, or was itself, a court masque.[xiii]  Even if this isn’t the case, David Daniell states that ‘it is probable that the first performance of The Tempest was spectacular and masque-like’.[xiv] Daniell also notes that the scene wherein Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano are chased by “divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds” (IV.i.253) could be thought of as a variation of the antimasque.[xv]

The earliest comment we have on The Tempest must be the king’s command performance at court, to take place in the Banqueting House at Whitehall on 1^st November 1611, Hallowmass or All Saints Day – thus opening the    winter season of court entertainments.

The Tempest had probably played at the Blackfriars before that[xvi], but at the Banqueting House it would go well in the hall so fitted up for court masques, with machinery for transformation scenes, flying chariots, clouds, and performers’ flying entrances.

It has also been suggested that The Tempest’s masque draws many elements from Jonson’s Hymenaei (1606), including several of the same mythical characters.[xvii] Prospero’s masque, however, ‘continues Jonson’s hymenal theme but with several important differences’[xviii] in terms of the thematic emphases.

Prospero’s masque: style and themes

Trevor R. Griffiths provides a useful analysis of the ways in which Shakespeare uses verse, form and language to stylistically isolate the masque from the ‘real’ world of The Tempest:

‘The language of the masque itself is clearly marked off from the rest of the play by use of couplets, the choice of vocabulary and the formal, rather convoluted used of language, where the build-up of epithets creates a rather Latinate, almost Miltonic, atmosphere.  Reversed word-orders create a stiff and hieratic tone that is perhaps appropriate to the theme of chastity.’[xix]

The Arden third series edition of The Tempest includes a detailed thematic analysis of the masque, outlined as follows:

The masque is shaped by Prospero’s insistence on abstinence: “Do not give dalliance/Too much the rein… Be more abstemious” (4.1.51-3). His concern for his daughter’s chastity is linked to his hopes for her fruitful marriage and the legitimacy of his dynasty.

The threat to chastity from love is represented mythologically by Ceres’ inquiry about the whereabouts of Venus, the goddess of sensual love, and her Cupid, purveyor of passion:

Since they did plot

The means that dusky Dis my daughter got,

Her and her blind boy’s scandaled company

I have foresworn. (4.1.88-91)

The songs of Ceres and Juno celebrate chaste love, a temperate union that eschews extremes of passion.

Ceres’ wish for the lovers is an eternal spring that arrives just as the harvest ends. The dance of temperate nymphs and reapers signals the conflation of the seasons of planting and reaping. Through the union of Miranda and Ferdinand, Prospero hopes to see his dynasty continue in peace and prosperity, with his grandchildren as heirs to both Milan and Naples.

The mythological figures chosen for Prospero’s masque resonated richly for an audience steeped in classical lore:

Roman gods, including Juno and Iris, as depicted by Wenceslas Hollar.

Iris, signified by the rainbow, was messenger to the gods (particularly Juno) and sister to the harpies. Her airy qualities and relation to the harpies associate her with Ariel.

Juno, Jove’s sister and wife, was the goddess of light and childbirth; she represented the maternal side of marriage. Juno represents fecundity, the iconographic theme of the magician’s masque.

Ceres represented the fecundity of the cultivated earth. Wheat and barley were sacred to her. She presided over the labours of ploughing, tilling, planting and harvesting, and was known as a maternal fertility goddess.

Ceres, goddess of the harvest, as depicted by Wenceslas Hollar

In a parody of the formal masque in which actors assume the roles of goddesses, Stephano and Trinculo in Act Four seize the magus’s clothing, prance about in borrowed robes and adopt an identity not their own. This parodic vision instantly disappears when spirits in the guise of dogs chase the conspirators from the stage.[xx]

The Research Team 

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