The masked theatre of the ancient world died with the pagan culture which fostered it. Medieval theatre was a new genre. Liturgical drama and the mystery plays were born out of a different ceremonial and a different mythology; morality plays from the essentially Christian literary form of psychological allegory. The golden mask of God which represents divine radiance, or the double face of Deceit or Prudence, belong to a language of symbolism and emblem based imaginatively in literature before it was embodied in art or theatre. The only possible remnants of the ancient world may have been filtered through Kalends masking, as the hairy animal-headed creatures and blackened faces of folk games are appropriated and reinterpreted as devils – or so it appears.
What happened to the professionals of the Roman theatre, and their tradition of masked acting? In Masks, Mimes and Miracles, Allardyce Nicoll sets out to demonstrate that there was ‘a regular line of “theatrical” continuity’ from the Roman mimus (low comedian) to the medieval joculator (‘entertainer’, in French jongleur). One of his main arguments is that both used masks.1 There is thus, he contends, possibly a direct line of descent between the Roman comic stage and the late-sixteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte, some of whose stock character-masks uncannily echo surviving images of actors in the Atellan farces.2
There is no way of proving or disproving this, but any line of continuity would surely flow through a traditional repertoire of entertainments and improvisations rather than formal comic drama. The mimi themselves were not always masked: in his famous epitaph, the (ninth-century?) mimus Vitalis is celebrated for his range of facial expressions.3 On the other hand medieval professional entertainers appear occasionally to have worn masks. A much-quoted late-thirteenth-century classification of the three types of histriones (by this stage, a term usually translated as ‘minstrels’), says that the first:
… transformant et transfigurant corpora sua per turpes saltus et per turpes gestus, vel denudando se turpiter, vel induendo horribiles larvas …4
… deform and contort their bodies with obscene acrobatics, and obscene actions, or by obscenely stripping themselves naked, or putting on terrifying fright-masks …
This clearly describes contortionists, whose horribiles larvae are a performance prop rather than direct descendants of the character masks of the Roman comedy. In thirteenth-century France, Etienne de Bourbon compares painted old women to ioculator[es] qui ferunt facies depictas quae dicuntur artificia gallice, cum quibus ludunt (‘entertainers who wear painted faces which are called artifices in French, with which they play’).’5 But neither comment suggests that the joculatores or histriones presented a serious secular alternative, the legacy of classical theatre masking, to the mysteries and moralities.
It is not even clear that medieval professional entertainers performed plays, in which they might have used masks, although vernacular texts like the Interludium de clerico et puella and Dame Sirith are sometimes cited as possible English examples.6 The later English interlude tradition is not masked. On the other hand, the early-sixteenth-century editor of Terence, Joachim Badius, speaks of professional players in the Low Countries who wore masks when they performed ‘the histories of kings and princes’ in halls.7 But we do not know who these players were, or what precisely the plays were, and the question of their acting heritage must remain unresolved.
Few mask illustrations from our period show theatrical performance. However, the gesticulating mime figures in two late-fourteenth-century imaginative reconstructions of the Roman theatre of Terence are wearing masks.8 They are not classical comedy masks, but some of them have a strong resemblance to those of the Italian commedia, and they may illustrate the type of mask a joculator might wear. They are ‘painted in various colours’, like the tenth-century Byzantine entertainers referred to by Liudprand of Cremona.9 But these pictures seem just as likely to be an attempt at visualising a scholarly text, as real life reportage. As for the shapes, their resemblance to the Atellan masks on the one hand and the commedia on the other could be purely fortuitous. All caricature mask-making starts from our most prominent facial feature, and in practice, there are only so many ways of exaggerating a nose.
Notes
1 Allardyce Nicoll Masks, Mimes and Miracles (London: Harrap, 1931) 152–3.
2 See also Pierre-Louis Duchartre The Italian Comedy translated Randolph T. Weaver (New York: Dover, 1966 reprint of London: Harrap, 1929) 28–9, 208.
3 Minor Latin Poets edited J. W. and A. M. Duff (Loeb; London: Heinemann, 1934) 636–9.
4 Salisbury Penitential attributed to Thomas of Chobham. Quoted Chambers Medieval Stage 2: 262.
5 étienne de Bourbon Anecdotes historiques edited A. le Coy de la Marche (Paris: Renouard, 1877) 231.
6 Richard Axton European Drama of the Early Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1974) 19–24.
7 See chapter 11 on ‘Ideas and Theories’ 294–5.
8 See chapter 11 on ‘Ideas and Theories’ 291–4 and PLATE 29.
9 Liudprand of Cremona Opera edited Joseph Becker (Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum 41; Hanover and Leipzig: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1915) 90. The reference comes from an anecdote where the new father-in-law of the Emperor complains that though he has been given the proper shoes for his status, he has not been given the appropriate diadem, and therefore looks just like one of those motley actors who ut ad risum facile turbas illiciant, variis sese depingunt coloribus (‘in order to make the crowd laugh, paint themselves in various colours’).