Popular masking games were so widespread in the Middle Ages that it is no surprise to find them also flourishing at court. At the centres of wealth and power, in the households of the monarch, the noble, and the wealthy, masks played a significant role in the activities by which people entertained themselves. In England, between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, the gradually increasing wealth of surviving evidence may suggest a more straightforward development than was in fact the case. Nevertheless, English courtly masking games, following the example of continental Europe and especially of Burgundy, seem to become increasingly elaborate and self-conscious, culminating in the early sixteenth century in the lavish personal enthusiasm of Henry VIII for masking in all kinds of new and traditional forms that knit into and displayed the complex personal and power functions of the court. Developments in courtly masking play reflect not only continental practices, but wider shifts in cultural perception.1
There is no hard and fast separation of courtly from popular activities: the nobility sometimes picked up and transformed popular forms such as mumming; sometimes simply joined in the wider carnival practices around them. But although the activities themselves may appear unchanged, the distinctive social and political situation of the court must alter their significance. Noble maskings inevitably express the court’s exercise of power. Princes and nobles wandering the streets and throwing eggs in masked disguise carry a very different weight within their communities from private citizens doing the same things. A mumming dressed in silk, velvet, and cloth of gold carries a different social charge, means something different to both spectators and participants, from one created from sooted faces and inside-out coats. Equally the significance of the hidden identity of a masker carries a different weight in the close hierarchical structure of the court and on the street. Courtly activities both blur into and at the same moment separate from popular customs.2
It is equally hard to separate and categorise different kinds of maskings. While the variety of masking activities attracted a variety of often elastic terms – disguising, maskelyn, mummery, mask, to name but a few – their participants seem to have had little interest in differentiating between them. It is not always possible to distinguish a disguising from a mummery, or a mask from either. Sydney Anglo has pointed out ‘the fluidity of all forms of entertainment in the period under discussion, the way in which combats, dances, and disguisings could appear upon almost any social occasion’: these many different forms combined and overlapped as the court experimented with a variety of pleasurable spectacles.3 Equally, it is not only the boundaries of genre, but those between game and performance that are blurred: masks are worn in a whole spectrum of activities, from tournaments to pageants to dances, in which the demarcation between ‘performer’ and ‘spectator’ becomes thoroughly elusive and sometimes non-existent. At court we often find a seamless continuum between the participatory play of dancing in masks, and the dramatised débat or spectacular pageant car that might also be part of the evening’s entertainment. As with carnival masking, there is rarely a distinct body of ‘spectators’ watching a distinct body of ‘performers’.4
In discussing courtly masking activities, we will have to break down this fluid pattern of revelling; but we must remember that the categories we use are largely ours and not theirs. As William Streitberger points out, ‘the conception of genre was flexible and inclusive, not definitive and exclusive as ours is’.5 Equally, the terminology used in records and chronicles may well make distinctions that are not ours, and which we may not recognise. Our discussion explores the various masking activities of the English courts, attempting to understand what they meant to those who engaged in them. Predictably, two lines of interest tend to emerge most strongly. Since the courts and noble households are centres of wealth and authority, courtly entertainments are inevitably, if usually indirectly, linked to and expressive of the power these centres exercised. In masking activities, where faces were hidden, questions of power combine and often interact with questions of identity and its role in courtly communities. While courtly masking raises all kinds of issues, these two recur as central.
Notes
1 For general views of late medieval courtly entertainment see Juliet Vale Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context 1270–1350 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1982); Gordon Kipling The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1977); Sydney Anglo Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Suzanne R. Westfall Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); William Streitberger Court Revels: 1485–155 9 (University of Toronto Press, 1994).
2 See e.g. Gurevich Medieval Popular Culture 176–210; Nijsten ‘Feasts and Public Spectacle’; Ruiz ‘Elite and Popular Culture’.
3 Sydney Anglo ‘The Evolution of the Early Tudor Disguising, Pageant and Mask’ Renaissance Drama NS 1 (1968) 7; see also Streitberger Court Revels 6.
4 Sarah Carpenter ‘The Sixteenth-century Court Audience: Performers and Spectators’ Medieval English Theatre 19 (1999 for 1997) 3–14.
5 Streitberger Court Revels 4.