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
The variety seems bewildering: these masks are worn, or watched, by people from very different areas of society, in very different kinds of public and private encounter. Should these activities be seen as part of a single masking phenomenon, or as the parallel development of many quite separate traditions? It quickly became clear that the masked characters of the English mystery cycles could not be considered in isolation. They are only one aspect of a multi-faceted cultural phenomenon in which masks and masking contribute to play of all kinds – popular and courtly, spiritual and worldly, sporting and theatrical.
Given this variety it is important to define, if also to question, some boundaries for this study. We are looking primarily at masking in England, through the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century. This necessitates an awareness both of temporal change and of geographical and national difference. Although masking traditions appear remarkably durable and widespread, they and their functions will change with changing societies. While it is significant and revealing that European customs involving masks are associated with the New Year for at least a thousand years, that does not mean that a fifth-century Spanish Kalends masker and a fifteenth-century English mummer both visiting households with covered faces at the beginning of January were necessarily doing and meaning the same thing. On the other hand cultural traditions of this period were not strictly respectful of national boundaries, and England shared many masking practices with the Continent. Certainly, by the early sixteenth century, trade, travel, and the marriages that linked the royal courts of Europe meant that countries knew of and sometimes imitated each other’s fashions in festivity and drama. English masking needs both to be seen within, and to be distinguished from, the wider European tradition.
If the diversity of masking activities is dazzling, modern perceptions are also diffracted by the slippery and shifting terms used to refer to them. Like the activities themselves, the vocabulary of medieval masking is both elusive and elastic. The multitude of words for face-covering objects frequently blurs together variously related senses. Visor shifts between a particular term for a helmet-piece and a general word for any face-cover; head and face are used interchangeably for real and artificial forms. Latin words cover even wider semantic fields: persona, the term for a theatre mask inherited from the classical period, also signified ‘individual’ or ‘personality’; larva, the common late-medieval term for a mask, also meant ‘malignant ghost’. References need to be unpicked with care in such a fluid semantic field. Equally, although words for masking activities are spread widely across Europe, the same word dos not always refer to the same practice. A mumming did not mean the same to a fifteenth-century English tradesman as a mommerij did to his courtly German contemporary. This consonance of terms sometimes suggests a seductive homogeneity to medieval masking which turns out to be at least partly illusory. Readers with an interest in these issues might well wish to read the chapter on ‘Terminology’ before rather than after the rest of the book.
This book consciously perpetuates one such ambiguity. The term mask did not acquire our primary sense of ‘an object used to cover the face’ until the later sixteenth century. Earlier in the century mask much more commonly designated a particular kind of court entertainment, the forerunner of what later became known as the Stuart masque. This later spelling variation usefully separates the object from the performance; but we have resisted using masque for the earlier disguisings, since its current association with a very specific Stuart genre imports misleading assumptions into the discussion of earlier masked performances. Yet throughout this study we also use mask a-historically for the object. Our choice mirrors the rich but confusing overlap in the vocabulary associated with masking throughout the medieval and Tudor periods.
Masks have fascinated virtually all human societies, including our own, and activities which involve the deliberate covering of the face remain compelling and paradoxically revealing of the cultures of their participants.2 Our aim is not, however, to address directly any one of the cultural, psychological, philosophical, and anthropological questions raised by the various forms of medieval masking. Instead this study seeks to historicise and contextualise the moments and patterns of mask-wearing in the Middle Ages. By unravelling more fully the contexts of particular activities we are better placed to draw out the meanings, both traditional and topical, they appeared to carry within their own communities.
An activity as suggestive, as openly symbolic, and indeed as unsettling as masking inevitably demands theoretical interpretation. Yet for masking behaviour as multifarious and complex as we find in medieval and Tudor England, to adopt any single theoretical approach is to run the risk of imposing rather than elucidating meaning. Its very diversity warns us that no one explanation or theory can account for all its different manifestations. This is not to say that both recent and earlier theoretical models for medieval customs are not enlightening: but often their value is primarily in alerting us to possibility rather than in defining purpose or effect. So E.K. Chambers’ inclusive study of folk custom, closely related to J.G. Frazer’s early-twentieth-century anthropological theories of ritual, influentially encouraged recognition of the undoubted cultural significance and the enduring structures of apparently trivial popular games. But his tendency to draw scattered fragments of evidence into a single, a-historic, overarching pattern of residual pre-Christian worship can seriously distort the local and immediate meanings and functions of particular masking customs. More recently, Bakhtin’s influential notion of medieval carnival as a conflict between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ cultural expression prompts us to recognise the profound importance of the social relationships between those involved in any medieval masking practice. Yet the very complexity of those social relations at different moments and places quickly undermines any simple model of social repression or of a straightforward opposition between popular and élite. Recent trends in medieval studies are recognising the need for flexibility, variety, and difference in understanding the complexity especially of popular cultural forms.3 With masking, all theoretical models need to be tested against the complex particularity of the evidence.
Of course neither evidence nor contexts are transparent. Records of medieval masking are partial and often uncertain, distorted not only by chance and time but by the biases and preconceptions of the recorders as well as by our own assumptions and cultural attitudes. All interpretations of these records need to be questioned and tested in the light of whatever can be recovered of their linguistic, cultural, religious, and political contexts. Our interrogation of both evidence and context begins from the question of what those involved at the time appear to have thought they were doing. Although the participants’ beliefs will never provide a complete explanation, they are one crucial root of the meaning of any cultural activity.4
This approach involves questioning the sometimes conflicting views of mask-wearers, of those who watched or interacted with maskers, and of those who discussed them, both at the time and later. Of these it is most difficult to rebuild the views of the maskers, whose personal responses are rarely recorded. We are almost always reliant on indirect evidence for any access to the opinions of those who went mumming, played the devil on stage, or courted young women in masks. The occasional glimpses of apparently personal experience themselves suggest differences, between both individual maskers and activities. Podalirius, an eighteen-year-old German carnival masker of the end of the fifteenth century, argues that masking is a valuable outlet for the playful and fiery energies of his age group, asserting his own delight in change and transformation; the young men in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, more pragmatically, see masking as a socially accepted opportunity to survey the looks and enjoy the company of young women. Similar differences of emphasis or opinion are apparent among those who observe masking activities. Podalirius’ friend Cato sees in the maskers’ riotous release of energy only ‘dizzy madness’ and lasciviousness; but more sympathetic observers of masking practices can offer us keys to unlock contemporary meanings that may be invisible to us. Edward Hall’s lovingly detailed accounts of the lavish spectacle of the Tudor court’s masked disguisings reveal not just naive propaganda or impressionability, but a recognition of the subtle operations of power through courtly display and through Henry VIII’s play with royal identity in his masking games. Theoretical commentators on masking activities may have different views again: critics of popular masking games might perceive a spiritually dangerous submission to irresponsibility, or rejection of the image of God in oneself, views that were presumably not shared by the maskers themselves.
Understanding of a masking event was therefore unlikely to be simple or consensual even in its own time: contemporary meaning must be seen as the sum and interaction of many, often conflicting, interpretations. The famous episode of the Bal des Ardents in 1392, in which four members of a masking team led by King Charles VI of France were horribly burned to death, demonstrates the variety of interpretations which might, even at the time, feed into a single event.5 This disguising was initially understood as devised to give pleasure – to the King as performer, to the ladies as spectators, and to the court celebrating a wedding – a pleasure especially ascribed to youth. When tragedy fell, it was first blamed on culpable carelessness, and then interpreted more generally as a warning from God, though this itself affirmed the first interpretation since the warning was seen as directed at ‘yonge ydell wantonnesse’, improper for a king. Yet very quickly other observers were reading different meanings: the Roman Pope understood the disaster as divine dissuasion from the King’s support for the Pope of Avignon, the English as an assassination attempt by the King’s brother. Although this last seems literally unlikely, it drew on an apparently common recognition of masked disguising as a moment partly out of normal control which might offer an opportunity for confusion and violence.6 As the vivid anecdote was passed down, sixteenth-century analysts came to record it more broadly as an example of God’s implacable hostility to masking itself.7 The tragedy became a locus for conflicting contemporary understandings of masking, all of which must contribute to our understanding of the event in its own context.
While our study begins from the attempt to recover contemporary meanings, the aim is also to try to recreate for readers today some degree of imaginative understanding of these events. Apart from the intrinsic fascination, such engagement helps to give an insight into the experience of medieval maskers, and enhances our awareness of cultural and historical difference. Such heightened imaginative awareness may rest in simple and practical recognitions. The fact, for example, that courtly disguisings all took place by torchlight throws a particular kind of emphasis on the extensive use of cloth of gold, reflective materials, and spangling. Shadows, inevitable in pre-modern indoor performance, may not be simply inhibiting but can modify and enhance the expressiveness of masks. Readers today with no direct experience of masking may fail to realise how completely mask-plus-costume can conceal identity, and consequently fail to understand the impact of many popular and courtly disguising games. Such physical observations affect our interpretations; but imaginative reconstruction may also involve recognition of more complex cultural beliefs. We need, for example, to consider what ordinary people were likely to have thought and believed about devils and their operation in the human world, if we are to realise properly the effect of the hideously masked devil of a mystery or morality play. Hidden social assumptions may need to be made explicit. The community relationships between maskers, or between those who masked and those they encountered, may powerfully affect the experience of a masking event. A mumming encounter between friends may be very different from one between strangers, or the relative social positions of householder and mummer may modify the meaning of the custom. An imaginative recreation of the physical, temporal, and social context in which masking took place is needed to help us realise the possibilities and purposes of the experiences of masking.
Evidence and its interpretation are central to this study. Yet the sources of evidence on which we depend, though rich, are partial, ambivalent, and sometimes contradictory, each presenting its own issues of interpretation. Accounts and inventories of stage property may appear relatively factual and objective but they are in fact highly self-selecting depending upon the needs of the account-keepers. Such accounts are inevitably biased toward institutional masking activities, but spontaneous popular games have left traces of a different kind in regulations, laws, and resulting court records which can record vivid instances of informal masking. Yet since regulations are only drawn up, court cases only brought, if a problem has been perceived, the focus is inevitably on restraint or repression, distorting our impression of contemporary attitudes. The fact that a masking activity was forbidden does not necessarily mean it ceased; indeed, a ban or prosecution is more likely to reveal the continuance than the death of a custom, testifying to popular support as well as official disapproval. Frequently, moralising objection is our prime source of evidence about masking practices. Although revealing, such comment is almost always by non-participants and by its nature unlikely to empathise with the intentions and experiences of the maskers, to describe their actions clearly, or even to understand what is going on. Encyclopaedists traditionally rely on repeating earlier writers rather than first-hand observation; travel-writers tend to focus on customs they consider exotic and unfamiliar which they may well therefore misinterpret; diarists are influenced by their personal preoccupations; historians, then as now, have their own principles of historiography, which will shape their selection and presentation of material. Visual images, which provide one of the most vivid and informative sources of evidence for medieval masking, often capturing the flavour and mood of masking activities more sharply and fully than any written account, are unfortunately very rarely from England: the standard picture-researchers’ illustrations tend to come from the Low Countries or Italy. With all these materials, we are left having to balance the revelations and limitations of different kinds of evidence against each other in our attempt to recreate as fully and sensitively as possible the experience and the context of the masking activities they record.
Putting on a mask can mean many different things. This study focuses on performance masking, whether in drama or in other kinds of game. But in pre-modern times, as now, there could be many other reasons for publicly covering the face. Masks might be worn by thieves, velvet masks were used to protect women’s complexions, the closed visor of a battle helmet effectively masked the armoured knight. We are today equally used to a range of non-performance masking. Surgeons, motorcyclists, polar explorers, and even cricketers all cover or paint their faces for what are initially protective reasons. We have learned to read this diversity of face-coverings through context. The motorcyclist, required by both law and safety to cover his face, is asked to remove his masking helmet when entering a bank, where the same face-cover may be read as threatening. The same contextual sensitivity applies to early masking. The ‘paynted faces visours and other disgisynges’ outlawed by a 1485 decree against rabbit poachers8 are apparently the same as the ‘peyntid visers, disfourmyd or colourid visages’ sported by Christmas mummers, while the protective helmet on the battlefield turns into the self-advertising heraldic helm in a courtly joust. The same mask can mean different things in different contexts.
This also holds true within performance traditions. A horrifying devil’s mask worn in a domestic carnival game may provoke different reactions from the same mask in a spectacularly serious Doomsday play; a serene mask may signify universal beauty in a danced disguising, but the sinister hypocrisy of the temptations of vice in a moral interlude or emblem. While remaining alert to the overlap and seepage between traditions we must be careful how we transfer attitudes between contexts. Societies quickly become sophisticated at reading the subtle signals given by mask-and-context: television audiences today readily distinguish the heavy shades that signify the mafioso from those that indicate ‘a celebrity keeping the press at bay’, or simply a sun-bather. There is no reason to assume that medieval communities were not equally adept at understanding masking signals.
However, almost all public covering of the face involves some push towards performance. This relates to the crucial role of the face in the public presentation of identity. In social interaction it is primarily by the face that individuals are recognised, and the face that is held as the centre of communication of the self. It seems unsurprising that it was the classical Latin term for a character’s face as embodied in the actor’s mask, persona, that gradually came to signify not only the role but the very identity of the character represented. Assuming a mask, for whatever reason, consequently involves the wearer in a public statement about identity which is hard to separate from performance. The different traditions of medieval masking all seem to share this common central core. The gold-faced God on a pageant waggon, the soot-faced mummer on the street, the fashionably pale velvet-masked woman, and the rabbit-stealer with painted visor are all to varying degrees involved in the relation of performance to public identity. In the performance traditions we explore, questions of identity are almost always active.
Although this study focuses primarily on the particularity and difference of medieval masking traditions, some common issues of this kind seem to be raised by the activity of masking itself. Equally, some physical effects tend to hold good for most masks, and clearly influence the way they are used. In a mask the face, the central focus of human expression, cannot change. This becomes a key feature of several different medieval masking activities: in the mystery cycles the mutability of the human face is replaced by the homoeostasis of God; in a tournament helm the vulnerable opponent becomes the impervious fighting machine. Both exploit the impassivity of the mask to inspire awe.
With changing facial expression unavailable as a source of communication, masking activities often prioritise other sources of bodily expression. Courtly masking almost always centres on dance; dicing, the central game of English popular mumming, offers a focused physical activity concentrating on the hands. As gesture carries a greater weight of communication, simple acts almost inevitably carry symbolic weight when performed by a masked actor. Many morality plays exploit the resonances of the masked performer looking in a mirror, lying on a bed, even simply walking onto the stage.
Mask-wearing often affects the voice: it may be muffled or amplified, its source may be uncannily diffused. In dramatic speech this can be exploited to contribute to the otherness of non-human beings: divine, diabolic, or even allegorical figures are lent an extra dimension by the altered voice. Masking games, on the other hand, often make a feature of silence, or of caricatured or nonsense languages like the ‘mom, mom’ of the mummer.
Necessarily larger than the head beneath, masks may alter the balance between head and body. To recover the proportion, they are often given enlarging costumes: tournament armour, extravagantly cut disguising clothes, the stilts and lifts sometimes worn by stage giants and death figures. The mismatch may be used creatively, as with the Spanish fiesta ‘dwarf’, an ordinary dancer in fancy dress until he puts on his papier-maché ‘big head’, and the instant change of proportion also gives the illusion of a change of scale.9
Eye contact, both with other performers and the spectators is modified by the mask.10 Sometimes the role of the eyes can be enhanced: glinting behind the metallic immobility of the helmet visor, the bestiality of the devil’s face, or the fantasy of a young man’s flirting visor, the masker’s eyes may be exploited as the one source of energy that turns the mask to a living thing. On stage however a mask tends to slow the actor down by restricting his sight-lines,11 so that movement becomes more deliberate, the face needing to turn more emphatically. Where the masked actor performs with unmasked colleagues, the consequent contrasts in movement allow for striking effects, both serious and comic. A gold-masked God is easily lent a degree of dignity or ritual. Conversely several later morality plays feature scenes in which a slow-witted Devil is tormented by witty, fast-moving Vices. The devil’s enveloping costume and full-head mask inevitably hampers the actor’s speed and responsiveness among the apparently unmasked Vices: the pointed comparison with the lumbering dancing bear is not confined to the hairy costume.12
Concealing the face reduces an actor’s sense of personal exposure. Along with the mask’s physical effects this tends to encourage an acting style in which the performer consciously ‘represents’ rather than ‘becomes’ a character. Although masked performance can be highly emotionally charged for both actor and spectator, the mask discourages a focus on the person and personality of the performer, foregrounding instead the role he presents. This aspect of masked performance confirms what we can conjecture more generally about medieval acting styles.13 We find a less direct relationship between performer and role: in processional mystery cycles a number of different actors would share a single role as it continued through a series of separate pageants; in moralities, conversely, a single actor often took several roles within the same play. This did not apparently inhibit the intensity of the emotional response often provoked by the plays.14 But it does suggest that acting was not primarily understood as an identification between performer and role, which accounts for the twentieth-century recognition that Brecht may offer more useful tools than Stanislavsky for modern understanding of medieval performance techniques.15 Masks are by nature well adapted to such demonstrative notions of dramatic performance.
Both mystery and morality texts also suggest some measure of stylisation of action and of rhetoric. Such stylisation is, however, deliberately heterogeneous, ranging tonally without awkwardness between high formality and colloquial intimacy. Dramatic masking traditions are adapted to this mode. Medieval theatrical performances are rarely fully masked, but allow masked and unmasked characters to share the same stage. The nature of medieval performance suggests that this caused no unease. Masking was simply one extension of the mixed economy of medieval acting.
The practical effects of mask-wearing contribute rather differently to masking games. Unlike the drama, medieval masking play is rarely concerned with sustained impersonation of characters. Although spectacle is usually important, anonymity is very often the key feature of games involving masks, whether popular or courtly, domestic or public. Many games centre on the fact that the masker is not known as himself. Sometimes this turns masking play into a guessing game for the spectators: there is delight both in concealment and in discovery, in the moment that the king unmasks at the end of a disguising or that the mummer successfully hoodwinks a family. Play like this focuses on the identity of the masker as a prize to be won, withheld, or given to the spectators.
Equally, if not more important are the effects for the masker of concealing his, or less often her, face. In renouncing his own identity he also appears to renounce the expectations and responsibilities that normally attach to him. This is probably what connects so many pre-modern masking games to the notion of licence, of the freedom to act in ways that are usually forbidden. Wearing a mask a tradesman may throw eggs or oranges at passers by, a cardinal may ride with a courtesan, a young man may have unimpeded flirtatious private conversation with a young woman; without the mask these things are forbidden. Assuming a mask therefore operates as a public signal: first that the masker is entering a play world in which normal expectations are suspended; then that the masker cannot be held to account for what he does since, at least in pretence, he is not himself. Even though the implicit laws and customs of many masking games, from carnival street celebrations to domestic mummings and amorous courtly masking, are highly structured and even rule-bound, the implication is that wearing a mask releases the masker from personal responsibility.
It is tempting to see this as a key to the extraordinary popularity and persistence of masking games at all levels of society throughout the Middle Ages and, like Bakhtin and others, to link it with a more hierarchical society in which social role was more fixed, release more crucial. But it is clear that no easy political interpretation will hold: people throughout society seemed to enjoy masking, sometimes across and sometimes within class communities. Their activities sometimes challenge and sometimes support social norms, are sometimes highly structured and sometimes very free. The relative demise of popular masking games in England after the Reformation seems more connected to Protestant suspicion of anything associated with Roman Catholic festive practice than to any obvious loosening of social structures.16
The meaning of masking activities can be significantly affected by the particular mask-form adopted. An enormous range of possibility is exploited in different medieval and Tudor traditions. The very simplest is that exemplified in the modern drama-workshop exercise of a paper-bag over the head: the face is covered with an easily available, featureless, and non-representational material. Various popular masking practices, both medieval and modern, rely on cloth, straw, paper, or similar substances to obliterate the face without replacing it by any obvious alternative. The blank moon-faces among Breughel’s carnival guisers and the soot and flour make-up or sheets favoured by English mummers survive in folk customs still active or revived today: the Marshfield Paper Boys shrouded in torn newsprint or the Queensferry Burry Man totally enveloped in burrs.17 Such masks offer not alternative faces but non-faces, seeming to signify absence rather than presence of identity. The masker apparently aims not to assume a new persona, but simply to be ‘not myself’.
This persistent desire to escape identity is counterbalanced by an apparently equally persistent instinct, among onlookers if not maskers, to impose it. A need to classify or interpret such featureless face-coverings has clearly always been powerful. Yet the fact that these interpretations are so varied and changeable suggests that the impulse to conceal outweighs any genuine representational intent. The blackened face, which seems in the earliest times to have been read as ‘a ghost’, by the sixteenth century was understood as a devil, or even as a character in its own right, like the Zwart Piet who accompanies St Nicholas in the Low Countries.18 The modern racial sensitivity which now militates against ‘blacking-up’ also reads the blackened face as representational: but there is no evidence that the soot-faced maskers of the Middle Ages were intending to impersonate any of these conflicting figures. Similarly, Hallowe’en guisers draped in sheets today are assumed by themselves and others to be representing ghosts; yet guisers dressed in the same sheets in the sixteenth century were simply taken as ‘going a-mumming’.19 In popular anthropology, the widespread ‘folk’ disguises made of scraps of rag, paper, or skins have come to be read, under the influence of E.K. Chambers, as relics of the pelts of sacrificial animals, while those using plant materials – leaves, burrs, or straw – are seen as fertility personifications.20 But we should remain alert both to the easy accessibility of such natural materials and to the apparent primacy of the desire to obliterate personal identity rather than to impersonate. Masking of this kind seems to represent a meeting ground on which the impulse to renounce identity meets the impulse to impose it: but the primary intention seems to have been to draw attention to absence and inscrutability.
One step up from the blank face-covering is the modern ‘neutral’ mask: a human face, but not characterised by any obvious expression or individuality.21 These were sometimes used in disguisings, and also appear in emblems which focus on the adoption of a false face, or on the ‘fair face’ which conceals evil. The avoidance of such identifying features as sexual characteristics or mood leads these masks toward an epicene serenity of expression that is associated with beauty. Like the more radically blank face-cover, the neutral mask signifies the absence of the person beneath: but what it obliterates is individuality rather than humanity. The particular identity the neutral mask may convey is determined solely by the context of its appearance, its accompanying costume and actions. The masker remains a human being but without, in theory, a history or personality, one who exists solely in the moment of appearance.
Most medieval masking traditions, however, move away from the simplest human features. Probably most common are non-human, grotesque or fantastic masks, which present fewer problems of accuracy or construction and mark more overtly the otherness of the assumed face. In masking games monsters, masks of animals or fantastic beings, exotic or spectacular face-coverings were popular, replacing the wearer’s face with an identity that is strange, heightened, or non-human. The element of fantasy signals a different world, a game world defined by different expectations. In drama fantastic masks easily become supernatural beings, like the Gods and devils ubiquitous in medieval theatre who also act outside the boundaries of normal human behaviour.
Another development is the character mask we now associate with the theatre of Ancient Greece. These generally work to present recognisable but heightened human features and to invite normal but intensified human responses from audiences. Both masks and responses remain extensions of the known world rather than escape into something other. Such masks are only occasionally found in medieval traditions: the satirical masks sometimes worn in carnival games or court disguisings, mocking types such as ‘covetous men with long noses’, or the personal caricature of the helmet-visor mask given to Henry VIII by Maximilian I are comic examples. The characterised disguising costumes of Turks, huntresses, or aged men show that more serious character masks were also available if required. But overall this is not a period when either masking games or dramatic forms make extensive use of masks to represent human individuals.
This brings us to a final and crucial observation about the masking traditions flourishing at this time: almost all depend on the interaction of masked and unmasked participants. Late medieval theatre forms seem always to use masks for particular effects, mingling and contrasting with unmasked performers. Most masking games also depend upon the presence or participation of unmasked players, often focusing precisely on the boundaries between them. Although the more specialised performance tradition of the disguising could involve fully masked companies, the thrust of these shows towards involving unmasked onlookers, whether as dancers or as admiring witnesses of the masks’ removal, mean that this form also came to foreground the relationship between masked and unmasked. This adds yet another level to the variety and complexity of medieval masking. For any study of the masking traditions of the medieval and Tudor periods must concentrate not only on the maskers but on the unmasked. The central interest of the masks themselves often lies in the dynamic and unsettling relationship between the two.
Notes
1 All the instances given in this chapter will be discussed at more length in the rest of the work, so we do not reference them here.
2 See, for example, the influential study by Claude Lévi-Strauss La Voie des masques (Paris: Plon, 1979; augmented version of 2-volume Geneva edition by Skira, 1975), translated by Sylvia Modelski as The Way of the Masks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).
3 See for example Chris Humphrey ‘The World Upside-Down in Theory and as Practice: A New Approach to the Study of Medieval Misrule’ Medieval English Theatre 21 (1999) 5–20, and The Politics of Carnival (Manchester University Press, 2001); Tom Pettitt ‘Protesting Inversions: Charivary as Folk Pageantry and Folk-law’ Medieval English Theatre 21 (1999) 21–51; Meg Twycross ‘Some Approaches to Dramatic Festivity, especially Processions’ in Festive Drama edited Meg Twycross (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996) 1–33.
4 Peter Marsh ‘Identity: an Ethogenic Perspective’ in Persons in Groups: Social Behaviour as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe edited Richard Trexler (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 36; Binghamton NY: SUNY Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1985) 22–9.
5 See chapter 6 on ‘Disguisings’ 144–8 for a detailed discussion.
6 Sarah P. Sutherland Masques in Jacobean Tragedy (New York: AMS Press, 1983) 6–7, 112–16; Inga-Stina Ewbank ‘“These Pretty Devices”: A Study of Masques in Plays’ in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll 405–48, at 437–47.
7 See Nicolaus Calenus In detestationem, originem et ritum bacchanaliorum oratio (Marburg: Paul Egenolph, 1591) 27; Claude Noirot L’Origine des masques (1609) in Collection des meilleures dissertations, notices et traités particuliers relatifs à l’histoire de France edited Constant Leber, 20 vols (Paris: J.-G. Dentu, 1826) 9: 115.
8 The Statutes of the Realm, from original records and authentic manuscripts (1101–1713), printed by command of His Majesty King George the Third edited A. Luders and others, 12 vols (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall for the Records Commission, 1810–28; reprinted 1963) 2: 505 (1 Hen. VII. c. 7: 1485) 3: 755–6 (32. Hen. VIII. c. 11: 1540/41). We are grateful to Olga Horner for these references.
9 See Margaret McGowan The Court Ballet of Louis XIII: A Collection of Working Designs for Costumes, 1615–33 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1987) no. 182 for an early-seventeenth-century example.
10 See David Wiles The Masks of Menander (Cambridge University Press, 1991) 104–12; Quintilian Institutio oratoria edited H.E. Butler, 4 vols (Loeb; London: Heinemann, 1922) 4: 282–7, Book 11: 3, 72–9.
11 The four corner pillars of the Japanese Noh stage are there partly to orientate the masked actors, who move along prescribed paths (information from Professor Takeo Fujii).
12 See chapter 10 on ‘Morality Plays’ 252.
13 See Meg Twycross ‘The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre edited Richard Beadle (Cambridge University Press, 1994) 37–84, at 43–4 and 54–5.
14 See for example J.W. Robinson ‘The Late Medieval Cult of Jesus and the Mystery Plays’ PMLA 80 (1965) 508–15; Meg Twycross ‘Books for the Unlearned’ in Drama and Religion edited James Redmond (Themes in Drama 5; Cambridge University Press, 1983) 65–110.
15 See for example the group of articles in Medieval English Theatre 5:1 (1983): David Mills ‘Characterisation in the English Mystery Cycles’ 5–17; Sarah Carpenter ‘Morality-Play Characters’ 18–28; Bill Tydeman ‘Stanislavski in the Garden of Gethsemane’ 53–7.
16 Popular masking practice never died out completely, and was revived in different forms after the Commonwealth: see for example Ronald Hutton The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford University Press, 1996) chapters 2, 8, and 37.
17 For the Marshfield Paper Boys, see Alex Helm The English Mummers’ Play (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981). We would like to thank Alan Reid, the Burry Man of Queensferry, for allowing us to watch as he was prepared for his arduous outing in 1987.
18 In the later Mummers’ Plays the black-faced character can become a chimney sweep (E.K. Chambers Mediaeval Stage 1: 214–15), or the Black Prince of Parradine. The Bacup Nutters are thought of as ‘Moorish’.
19 Ghosts did not assume white floating shapes until the development of theatrical light technologies and of spiritualism in the second half of the nineteenth century.
20 E.K. Chambers The Mediaeval Stage 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903) 1: 185. The Jack in the Green, although an urban eighteenth-century creation of the chimney sweeps, is now popularly related to the Green Man of the roof bosses: see Roy Judge The Jack-in-the-Green: a May Day custom (Cambridge: Brewer, 1979).
21 The neutral mask was brought to prominence in the last century by the work of practitioners like Jacques Lecoq: see Lecoq ‘Le masque neutre’ in Le Corps poetique: un enseignement de la création théâtrale (Paris: Actes Sud-Papiers, 1997) 47–56. ‘Neutral’ is, of course, a relative and culturally determined term: the neutral masks of the 1970s now seem dated to a particular aesthetic and physical style, just as the neutral masks of Tudor disguisings are recognisable as belonging to their own traditions. See chapter 6 on ‘Disguisings’ 140.