The morality drama might seem one of the most obvious places to look for masks in the theatre of late medieval and Tudor England. The characters and action of the moralities are allegorical; the plays consciously and insistently demonstrate moral ideas; and their theatrical techniques are freely and inventively non-realistic and non-representational.1 All this might suggest that masks – demonstratively unconcerned with naturalism – could form a natural part of the stage language of the moralities. The plays do, in fact, introduce masks relatively frequently and often in interesting and suggestive ways. But as far as evidence suggests, masking is probably not as widespread, not as ingrained in the plays’ methods as modern interests might lead us to expect. Moralities use masks freely to contribute particular moral and theatrical effects; but they do not appear to be plays in which allegorical characters are masked most or all of the time.
This may, of course, be simply because morality drama takes its non-naturalistic techniques for granted. Methods such as emblematic action, direct address to the audience, songs, dances – and masks – are used only as and when they seem helpful, freely intermingled with more realistic or representational modes. The boundaries between the allegorical (or non-representational) and non-allegorical (or realistic) are less fixed and signalled than is often the case in later theatre. So a play like Everyman, which combines highly allegorical characters such as Discretion or Goods with the relatively non-allegorical figure of Everyman himself, may not need to crystallise a distinction between them by the use of masks.
Masks and Moral Allegory
Masks, and strange, non-human, or deformed faces and heads, were certainly widely used as moral emblems right through the Middle Ages and beyond, as common attributes of figures representing virtues, vices, and moral states. Evidence is heterogeneous and widely separated. In the visual arts iconographic tradition from the early Middle Ages onwards assigned masks to certain moral personifications. In the fourteenth century, poets like Guillaume de DeGuileville in Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, imagining allegories of spiritual and psychological journeys, drew on masks and strange heads to personify less familiar concepts. But the most explicitly moralised masks are found in the emblem books which invented images to encapsulate moral ideas, expounding these images in verse. Beginning in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century and spreading with phenomenal rapidity, the emblem books drew on medieval traditions as well as the new learning and interests of the early-modern period. The allegorical masks and heads of the Middle Ages found a natural home in these Renaissance emblem books. Since the characters and action of the morality drama seem to belong to a similar tradition of visual allegory, all these non-dramatic moral masks ought to throw some light at least on the context of morality masking.2
Surprisingly perhaps, neither the mask as such nor the exotic or unusual head belongs exclusively to either virtues or vices. The mask is rather more likely to suggest moral corruption or ambivalence, the artifice and deception that hides the truth, in the discrepancy between the outer mask and the face behind. This belongs to a longstanding tradition. The figure of Treason in DeGuileville’s Pèlerinage (1330–1355), for example, carries a threatening knife behind her back while presenting a fair mask to those she meets. According to Lydgate’s fifteenth-century translation this is to:
Shew the outward, ay humble and mek,
Contrayre to that thow art with-Inne.3
These images of concealing masks multiply in the sixteenth century, perhaps shadowing the period’s explicit concern with role-play, self-presentation, uncertain and fractured states.4 Masks in the emblem books are linked to figures like Fraud, Deception, Pride, or the World. In Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603), Fraud carries a double heart in one hand, and in the other a mask signifying, che la Fraude sa apparire le cose altrimenti da quel che sono per compire i suoi desiderii (‘that Fraud knows how to make things appear otherwise than they are, in order to fulfill men’s desires’).5 The World in Jan David’s Jesuit moral manual Veridicus christianus (1601) wears a mask in order to tempt the soul, reinforcing the seductiveness of the fair false face by offering gifts in one hand while holding a bridle behind her back in the other.6
But although masks most often signify hypocrisy and deceit they could also demonstrate virtuous qualities. In J.J. Boissard’s Emblematum liber (1593) Prudence is pictured with a serpent in one hand (symbolic of cunning), and a mask in the other. The verse explains this rather Machiavellian virtue:
Quod gerit haec larvam, non est ut fallat: at illa
Aptat personam casibus atque locis.7
The reason why she wears this mask is not to deceive: but she
adapts the face to occasions and places.
Whether virtuous or vicious, however, non-dramatic allegorical masks tend to emphasise the difference, tension or conflict between the mask and the face it conceals.
The other type of emblem that may relate to morality masking does not involve such discrepancy. Moral qualities are often symbolised by strange and distorted heads: transferred to the stage these would be re-created as masks. Most commonly such emblems present simply ugly, deformed, or caricatured faces that symbolise moral corruption.8 Such deformity rests on the traditional assumption that appearance mirrors inner truth. As the Secreta secretorum claims, ‘the Sowle whyche is the fourme of the body, sueth the kynde and the complexcion and the propyrteys of the body’.9 This idea finds particularly imaginative expression in the common image of moral metamorphosis: since the condition of the soul affects the appearance, a change of feature can reveal the true inner state. So a fifteenth-century sermon tells of a bishop who had a vision of the faces of his congregation transfigured when they came to communion, some hideous and some beautiful according to their spiritual condition.10 A hideous old couple in Boissard’s late-sixteenth-century Mascarades vividly demonstrates the same process, in which:
Speciem pulchritudinis, quam confert virtus, adimunt peccata.
Hominemque in portentum turpitudinis convertunt.11
Sins take away the face of beauty which virtue gives,
and change man into a monster of deformity.
For the Middle Ages and sixteenth century the notion of moral metamorphosis was especially linked to the myth of Circe. Her transformation of Odysseus’ followers into animals was widely interpreted as a moral emblem, following Boethius’ influential fourth-century interpretation that qui probitate deserta homo esse desierit … vertatur in beluam (‘he who having left goodness aside has ceased to be a man [and] … turns into a beast’).12 This idea explicitly informs the disgustingly deformed faces of some of Boissard’s Mascarades, captioned:
Vertit saepe homines in bruta Venefica Circe:
Quos hodie philtris monstra libido facit.13
The enchantress Circe often changed into animals men
who today are made monsters by the philtres of lust.
This reading of the Circe myth is one manifestation of a relatively common type of symbolic face, where the human head is replaced by that of an animal. Circe’s metamorphoses link to a medieval association of sins with animals, the Seven Deadly Sins in particular often portrayed accompanied or represented by appropriate creatures.14 This ultimately derives back to Plato who envisages humans re-born as various animals, ‘the transformation depending on the loss or gain of understanding or folly’.15 Traditions of illustration and masking, however, seem more directly traceable to the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica which makes extended comparisons between the appearances of animals and men according to their character types, claiming that ‘when the character of the soul changes it also changes the form of the body’.16 This principle was picked up by later physiognomists, such as the sixteenth-century Baptista della Porta whose extensive illustrations of sheep-headed, bull-headed, and bird-headed men offer eloquent suggestions for moral emblems and mask-makers alike.17 The visual effect can be seen in Ripa’s figure for Terror, where a man’s body is topped with a lion’s head, perche par proprieta del Leone atterire chi lo risguarda (‘because it is the property of the lion to terrify those who look at him’).18 This animal tradition was common in political allegory, like the anti-Catholic mask performed before Elizabeth I at Cambridge in 1564, in which a procession of dignitaries of the Roman Catholic church were accompanied by satirically appropriate animals, probably represented by maskers.19 It extends into the moral caricatures of Jonson’s Volpone, and continues to flourish in political caricatures and as a rule of thumb for modern mask-makers like Donato Sartori.20
PLATE 25: Circe and the poison of Lust: men turned into animals. Robert Boissard Mascarades recuillies & mises en taille douce (Strassburg: 1597).
Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce B subt. 26 no. 9. © Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
One very specific motif that recurs frequently in both visual moral allegory and theatre masks is the visually striking double face or bifrons: heads with two faces, either front-and-back or side-to-side. These vividly express the concept of doubleness but, like the emblems of masks themselves, may have very different ethical significations. We have already encountered similar masks among the devils of the mysteries. In classical times the double face was the attribute of Janus, gateway of the year;21 it was also assigned to the figures of Time, of Fortune, and then of Venus, initially as a morally neutral sign of their double natures.22 Perhaps inevitably, the ambivalence acquired a moral weighting, the double face easily coming to represent shiftiness and deception. In moral personifications the bifrons, like the mask itself, became a common attribute of Fraud and Dissimulation, signifying duplicity and double-dealing. These ‘two-faced’ figures were represented either by a double-faced mask, or by a single mask perhaps slightly raised to reveal the face beneath.23 Yet double faces are not always deceptive: they may equally be linked with the personifications of Prudence or Time who, like Janus, look both to the past and the future before making decisions.24
Double-faced theatre-masks present problems both in construction and performance.25 We have already seen their popularity in spectacle, for example in the court disguising of 1552/3 which employed ‘xvi hedpeces … doble vizaged thone syde lyke a man and thother lyke deathe’.26 But once engaged in interaction rather than safely locked into a motionless system of symbols or the non-representational systems of dance, it may be harder for the antipathetic strangeness of the double face to signify anything but perversion or vice.27 Static images invite the viewer to perceive the entire double nature of the character simultaneously. Pictorial presentations of Janus, generally show a seated, liminal character, poised between Old Year and New, his two faces equally visible. He is genuinely emblematic, and morally neutral. But allegorical descriptions which imply movement are more ambivalent. Fortune’s two faces are often perceived in sequence, first the smiling, then the frowning, as she turns to and from her victim; or she may be masked, and then reveal her true self. As with Deceit or Fraud, the genuine face is beneath, and inevitably inimical. On stage this suggests theatrical action: the character unmasks, or turns round, revealing her true ugliness.
This seems to be borne out by some of the costume directions in the largely morality Rhetoricians’ plays of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the spelen van sinne (‘plays about qualities’). In the 1616 Christelijcken Ridder (‘Christian Knight’), the two sinneken Vice figures are the World, dressed as ‘half devil, half human’, and Beloved of the World, dressed ‘behind as a wolf and before as a man’; the 1551 Wellustige Mensch prescribes that the sinnekens Quaet Gelove (‘Bad Faith’) and Vleischelijcke Sin (‘Carnal Lust’) should be dressed ‘behind as a devil’ and ‘as a Death’ respectively.28 These two appear from the script to have their alternative faces attached to their arses, like mystery-play devils, revealing them only, conspiratorially, to each other.29
All these examples show how heavily most emblematic facial distinctions depend on context for their interpretation. Few established conventions linked moral qualities to uniquely specific identifying features. Perhaps for this reason, in iconographic tradition the commonest allegorical personifications – the Seven Deadly Sins, the Four Daughters of God, the Four Cardinal Virtues – are far more frequently identified by attributes than by facial appearance. In theatrical performance personifications of moral qualities could certainly be made visually identifiable: at the Royal Entry of Charles VII into Paris in 1437 the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Virtues rode in procession tous habilliés seloncq leurs propriétés (‘all clothed according to their characteristics’).30 Such identification could at times include the use of masks: as the entry in the Revels accounts for 1552 for a mask of ‘covetous men with long noses’ shows.31 But few moral qualities seem to have acquired facial traditions that are distinctive enough to provide fixed or transparent signs for the theatre.
Again illustrations of the Rhetoricians’ drama of the Low Countries support this. An invaluable set of engravings exists of the processional entries for the drama competition held at Haarlem in 1606, in which all the characters are labelled. Masks are worn only by distinctively diabolical characters: for example, the trio of the Devil, Hell, and Death in the Hazerswoude play [PLATES 26].32 Other allegorical figures are identified by costume or attributes: Maticheyt (‘Temperance’) traditionally watering a cup of wine; Nidicheyt (‘Poverty’) gnawing on a stone, Giericheyt (‘Avarice’) with moneybag, Hovoerdicheyt (‘Pride’) with a peacock-feather fan, and Gramschap (‘Wrath’) in armour with a blazing brand.
But if there is no clearly agreed system of facial identification for moral personifications, the emblem books, narratives, and other visual allegories suggest that a general motif of masking was widely associated with presenting moral ideas. A French emblem of 1539 claims:
Masques seront cy apres de requeste
Autant ou plus qu’elles furent jamais.
Quand l’on souloit fairent banquet ou feste L’on en usoit par forme d’entre metz …
… a present n’est homme qui n’en use.33
From now on masks will be as much, or more, in demand than they have ever been. When they used to hold banquets and feasts they would use them for the entertainments … nowadays there is no man who does not use them.
As an English version of the same emblem explains:
You shall finde but few in any place
That carrie not sometimes a double face.34
Although no theatrical connection is asserted, such assumptions might well lead us to expect that the moral, emblematic morality drama should share the preoccupation with masks, and make enthusiastically extensive use of them.
PLATE 26: The Devil, Hell, and Death: Entry into Haarlem (1606) by the Hazerswoude Chamber of Rhetoric. Const-thoonende Iuweel, By de loflijcke stadt Haarlem … (Zwolle: Zacharias Heyns, 1607).
London: British Library, G 18275, plate 5 after sig. Giii. © Reproduced by permission of the British Library.
Masks in Morality Plays
Morality drama was a more obviously fluid and evolving form than the community-based mystery cycles, and morality masking was concomitantly more varied, inventive, and experimental. During the period, the genre develops from the universal spiritual allegories of The Castle of Perseverance or Mankind, to more individualised and historicised actions, as sixteenth-century moralities engage with topical issues and alternative theatrical forms. While the morality drama borrowed many ideas and techniques from visual and literary moral allegory there are distinct differences of emphasis, probably relating primarily to its theatrical mode: designed for performance rather than reading, for an audience which may include but is not limited to those with a literary education. Morality plays, naturally enough, seem more practical and less consciously learned than the non-dramatic literature of moral emblem.
The moralities are undeniably a visually emblematic drama. They tend to present ideas in emblematic action, whether in the simple revelation of seven devils under the cloak of the soul in Wisdom (c.1475), the elaborately arranged processional entry of the sins in John Bale’s Kynge Johan (1538–60), or the comic bridling of the recalcitrant Lust in the late play The Trial of Treasure (1567).35 The costumes and props are consistently emblematic rather than straightforwardly representational. But although the plays occasionally draw on the allegorical traditions of the emblem books there is little to suggest any pervasive use of moral masks. Definitive judgements are difficult because of the lack of clear evidence about the staging of the moralities. Unlike the mystery plays and court entertainments which were both organised and financed by centralised record-keeping authorities, most moralities were flexible and ephemeral, performed in households or by small professional or semi-professional groups with easily transportable productions.36 Consequently there is almost no record evidence for staging except for the occasional allusion in Revels or household accounts, or in inventories of academic institutions. Evidence for morality staging lies almost exclusively in the texts; but as with all early drama stage directions are scanty and inconsistent, and recreation of the action necessarily partial.
Direct evidence for masking is confined almost solely to a few stage directions specifying particular effects, making it hard to form a general impression. While there is very little to suggest that visors were habitually worn, there is one intriguing payment recorded in the Edinburgh city accounts for 1554, assumed to be for a production of David Lindsay’s political morality Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, for ‘paynting … the playaris facis’.37 Nothing in the play’s text suggests distinctive facial characteristics; but unlike the majority of morality performances this was both a large-scale and an outdoor production. The practice may have been wider spread; but such illustration as exists for morality plays – the carefully drawn pictures in Thomas Chaundler’s academic morality the Liber apologeticus of c.1460, or the woodcuts that sometimes embellish the title pages of the early printed editions – gives no sign of mask, paint, or facial disguise at all.38 Medieval and Tudor play-illustration, however, is rarely related to performance: woodcuts, for example, were frequently drawn randomly from the printer’s stock. With evidence so scanty, uncertain, and hard to assess, all we can really say is that there is nothing definite to suggest that the wearing of masks was in any way habitual.
Some of the practicalities of morality production might be thought to favour their use. The practice of doubling parts appears extremely common, probably due to the exigencies of professional performance. Even the early plays clearly allow for such casting, with Mercy and Titivullus very easily doubled in Mankind (c.1475), the World and Folly in The World and the Child (1522). Later sixteenth-century printed texts specify how the increasingly large casts may be divided between small numbers of actors, each apparently taking three, four, or even five parts.39 Modern focus on individual performers might suggest that masks would help the audience to avoid being confused by such doubling. So for example in Mankind the devil Titivullus is masked whereas Mercy is not, and the visored Herod was possibly doubled with Pilate in the Chester Trial and Flagellation.40 Contemporary evidence from the Low Countries may confirm this: in 1508 Badius describes actors who varias personas accipiunt, ut unus actor seu lusor varios posset presentare (‘put on different masks: so that each actor or player can present different parts’).41
But despite this testimony, medieval and sixteenth-century acting styles appear not to encourage the merging of the actor with his part which such masking might facilitate. A character is identified by costume, attributes, and manner, rather than primarily by the actor. As Edward Burns suggests, ‘the convention of playing assumes that each character when established is taken as a separate entity, however many of them a particular player may have to present’.42 Pre-modern theatre in general recognises a separation between actor and character, a fact confirmed by the occasional use of two performers to play one part. This suggests a relatively formalised acting language, in which doubling would not cause the kind of confusion which needed masks.43
In presenting moral ideas the moralities seem only to specify the use of masks where they contribute to particular stage-effects. This is neatly demonstrated in Thomas Lupton’s All for Money (1578).44 The costume directions are unusually detailed. All are emblematic: Theology wears ‘a long ancient garment, like a Prophet’ (98), Art (or Craft) has ‘certeyne tooles about him of divers occupations’ (152), Money ‘hauing the one halfe of his gowne yellowe, and the other white, hauing the coyne of siluer and golde painted vpon it’ (202). But only the appearance of the final vice, Damnation, specifies ‘a terrible vysard on his face, [and] his garme[n]t shalbe painted with flames of fire’ (378). Play is made with this mask during Damnation’s excruciating ‘birth’, his father Sin commenting on his son’s vast and ugly head. The stage directions only call for a mask when it is wanted for a particular effect.
Comparison between narrative and dramatic allegories supports the impression that morality playwrights have their eyes firmly on performance. Narrative allegory has a freedom to create elaborate visual effects that would be either unworkable or simply grotesque as stage masks. In DeGuileville’s Le Pèlerinage, for example, we meet in succession a woman with a broom in her mouth instead of a tongue (Penance); a woman with her eyes in the back of her head (Memory); and a serpent-woman with two spears in her eyes, on her back a woman with a mask and another holding a sword full of ears, with one hand held in her mouth (Envy, Treason, and Detraction).45 The illustrators of these episodes clearly enjoy portraying these weird abnormalities, but it is hard to see how even a skilled mask-maker could make them practicable for the stage. Emblem illustrators, equally, rarely show very feasible versions of the distorted heads they present: the ‘double face’ of Ripa’s Fraud is actually two separate heads on separate necks. Emblems of masks look more like solid ‘false faces’, perhaps derived from classical statuary, than wearable, usable visors.46
An early-sixteenth-century example may confirm the difference in priorities between narrative and dramatic allegory. Skelton’s dream poem The Bowge of Court introduces various personifications, many of whom reappear in his political play Magnyfycence (c. 1515).47 One of these is Dissimuler whom the dreamer describes:
Than, in his hode, I sawe there faces tweyne:
That one was lene and lyke a pyned goost,
That other loked as he wolde me have slayne.48
In Magnyfycence Dissimuler’s role is taken by the equally deceptive Cloked Collusion who claims:
Two faces in a hood covertly I bear,
Water in one hand and fire in the other.49
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Cloked Collusion is speaking literally: as we know, two-faced masks certainly existed. But the complex speed of the action and passing brevity of the allusion suggests that what is literal in the narrative has slipped back into metaphor for the stage, an easy process in this instance since Skelton’s poem simply reifies the proverbial image for falseness, ‘two faces in a hood’.50 Unless a dramatic point is to be built on it, to encumber an actor with a two-faced mask (let alone water and fire) is liable to be more distracting than expressive. While emblems can focus exclusively on the idea, the plays must keep firmly in touch with the realities of masking.
Although the evidence is not conclusive it suggests some development in the use of masks during the history of the morality drama from the early fifteenth to the late sixteenth centuries. In earlier plays like The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, or even Redford’s Wit and Science (c.1530), the boundaries between allegory and representational realism are extremely fluid, if not non-existent. Symbolic and naturalistic action flow into each other, personified characters move from heightened formality to colloquial realism, and the shifts between emblem, explanation, and impersonation are almost if not wholly unnoticeable. Edward Burns’ analysis of early rhetorical traditions seems to apply: ‘where the modern reader would tend to separate off “allegorical” from “real”, the rhetorical tradition would make no such distinction’.51 Where these early plays use masks they seem to do so flexibly, unselfconsciously, and for a variety of different characters. In the late-fifteenth-century Wisdom, a strikingly visual play very aware of its formal allegory, we find a pervasive use of masks: they are worn by divine figures, by a personification of the human soul, Anima, and in a quite different theatrical mode by the dancers in a vivid series of disguisings. The Castle of Perseverance, on the other hand, although its allegory is equally formal and traditional, shows no sign of using masks at all except for the almost obligatory figures of Death and the Devil. In Wit and Science the young hero, Wit, is given an emblematic ‘mask’52 at one crucial moment, although his relaxed colloquial characterisation brings him closer to modern ideas of naturalism than any other figure in the play. All these plays appear to consider masks as simply one available tool of the theatrical language, of the same status as any other representational technique.
As the sixteenth century progresses dramatists appear to become more self-conscious about generic modes, about the theatrical representation of human individuals, and about broader questions of performance and subjectivity.53 In the morality plays one symptom is a separation that begins to develop between ‘realistic’ and ‘allegorical’ characters and speech. As this happens masks come steadily to be associated with assertively allegorical figures and episodes which are increasingly formalised and consciously emblematic. The difference can be seen very clearly in All for Money, whose episodic structure juxtaposes lively but unconnected scenes focusing either on symbolic characters like Money, Sin, and the Devil, or on such socially realistic type-figures as corrupt judges, scholars, and beggars. The play’s effective use of masks confines them strictly to the allegorical scenes where they are associated with deliberate emblem.
This development is neither simple nor linear, and allegory and realism, the metaphorical and the literal, remain difficult to separate throughout the morality drama. This can cause problems in deciding whether masks are literal or figurative. In the early Wisdom verbal metaphor and actuality clearly coincide. A theme runs through the play of the soul as the corruptible image of God. Lucifer sums up:
Of Gode man ys the fygure,
Hys symylytude, hys pyctowre
Wyche I wyll dysvygure.54
Stage directions show that this metaphor is vividly actualised: the soul, Anima, first appears with her face fair and ‘lyke to WYSDOM’; corrupted by sin she then re-enters ‘in the most horrybull wyse’. The verbal images of figuring and disfiguring are in this case realised in stage masks. Lewis Wager’s mid-sixteenth-century Protestant morality Marie Magdalene is less clear.55 The Vice, Infidelity, opens the play with a speech dwelling specifically on masking:
Like as I haue a visour of vertue
So my impes, whiche vnto my person do leave,
The visour of honestie doth endue.56
Text and action, however, suggest that this is purely metaphorical. Masks are not mentioned again, and Infidelity’s frequent shifts between his vicious and falsely virtuous personae would involve some pretty complicated mask-juggling if his visors were real. Such uncertainty makes it hard to be wholly clear about stage masking, particularly in the later moralities.
Morality Masks: Characters and Crisis Points
Masks are regularly worn by certain specific groups of morality figures. Death is one obvious example, devils another, both with well-established visual traditions in dramatic and non-dramatic art. Apart from these groups, masks seem to be most frequently called on to contribute to significant moments, often turning points, of theatrical and moral action. They are often assumed, or removed, at crucial moments of corruption, redemption, or crisis.
Death
The figure of Death was well-established by iconographic and theatrical tradition, its stage-mask an integral part of a complete costume. The dominant medieval icon is the skeleton, often cloaked, who may or may not carry an hourglass, a spear, or a scythe.57 This image carried over into theatrical costume, probably impelled by the famous 1424 Dance of Death frescoes in the cloister of the Holy Innocents in Paris, which inspired many imitations, such as the (?) 1430 version in the cloister of St Paul’s Cathedral in London,58 and even dramatic performances.59 ‘Deathes cote’ and ‘deathes face’ turn up in various sixteenth-century Cambridge college inventories of players’ costumes, and the same tradition is presumably evident in Edward VI’s intriguing ‘maske of medyoxs half man half death’.60 Death appears as a character in the mystery cycles in the N. Town Death of Herod, where he is clearly dressed as a cadaver: ‘I be nakyd and pore of array / and wurmys knawe me al a-bowte’.61 In European spectacles we find a Death ‘whose head was a hideous skull without nose or eyes’, and those with ‘masks painted behind and before like skulls, including the throat, most realistic but a horrid and terrible sight’.62 A particularly famous version of the Dance of Death, painted at Bern (1516–1519) by Niklaus Manuel,63 was dramatised in 1637 and 1638: the canvas costumes and masks survive and are on display in the City Museum [PLATE 27].64 Skeletal bones are painted on the all-in-one canvas body-suits with feet and close-fitting hoods attached.
When Death appears in several of the early morality plays the assumption, whether or not there is direct reference to it in the texts, must be that he is dressed in these skeletal ‘dethes cootes / hoose dobled & hedd all in one’.65 He probably appeared so in the earliest morality, the fragmentary Pride of Life (c. 1420), although the manuscript breaks off before his promised entrance, and also in the large-scale pageantry of The Castle of Perseverance (c.1425).66 Although he formally identifies himself to the audience, ‘I hatte drery Dethe’,67 the implication of his speech, and of Mankind’s instant and terrified recognition, is that he takes his familiar horrifying form, not as a human being representing Death but as the skeletal embodiment of death itself. These dramatic skeletons offered the audience a vision of their future selves, ideally provoking reflection on mortality along with pleasurable theatrical terror.
PLATE 27: Death costumes for a dramatic presentation in 1637 of Niklaus Manuel’s wall painting of the Dance of Death. Bern: Historisches Museum, no. 743.
© Reproduced by permission of the Bernisches Historisches Museum.
Everyman, the most familiar example, makes fascinating play with this convention. The text gives no guidance about Death’s appearance, alluding only to his spear; but the woodcut prefacing the printed editions shows a wholly traditional skeletal Death, suggesting that this was how he was envisaged by readers, and most probably also audiences of the play.68 If so then the skull-mask of Death is used in Everyman with a chilling subtlety quite in keeping with the sensitivity of the play as a whole. Everyman does not greet Death with the horrified recognition of Mankind in The Castle of Perseverance, the obvious response to the walking skeleton. He seems neither to recognise Death, nor to notice his appearance, saying simply, ‘I knowe the not. What messenger arte thou?’69 The unconsciousness of the unmasked human character intensifies the audience’s response to the mask’s awesome power, as with the gold face of Little God in the cycle play of Christ before the Doctors. Unlike other dramatic manifestations, Death is surprisingly unaggressive in his encounter with Everyman. He adopts a gentle, almost compassionate tone which contrasts with the grim inexorability of his message and appearance:
Dethe: |
Eueryman, and thou be ones there, What, wenest thou thy lyfe is gyuen the, |
Everyman: |
I had wende so veryle. |
Dethe: |
Nay, nay, it was but lende the.70 |
The spectacle of the confused and human Everyman addressed with such stern but gentle intimacy by a horrifically costumed Death’s head adds an extra poignancy to an already powerful encounter. Paradoxically, the mask gains in power from Everyman’s oblivion, as the audience read the sign he cannot see.
Devils
The Devil, like Death, has a well-established iconography and an even more pervasive and lively stage life, as outlined in the previous chapter; it is scarcely surprising that in the moralities he appears in the traditional costume with mask or full head, provoking the same balance between laughter and fear, ridicule and threat. The Devil is a familiar character in the early moralities, receding during the sixteenth century as the drama’s preoccupations shift. Devils appear in all three of the fifteenth-century Macro plays, The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, and Mankind, apparently in the usual guise. The Castle’s Belyal is black and spouts fire. In Wisdom Lucifer actually removes his ‘dewyllys aray’ to reveal the close-fitting costume of a ‘goodly galont’ for his seduction of humanity, an interesting practical reversal of the ‘fair mask’ of temptation. Neither play specifies the devilish visor, but it seems a natural part of the costume, as in the Cambridge ‘blak cote hose & cappe all of on for the devel’, marking him off from the figures of humanity and allegorical vices among whom he moves.71
In Mankind the Devil’s mask is used for special play, not with the victim but with the audience. The three Vices build up the first entrance of the play’s devil, Titivullus, collecting money from the spectators for the privilege of seeing the ‘man wyth a hede that ys of grett omnipotens’.72 The stage business of collecting the money, and the way the spectators are implicated in the devilish spectacle they pay for, serve to magnify the effect of Titivullus’ entry, particularly spotlighting the promised ‘hede’. Titivullus then, from behind ‘a net of invisibility’, distracts Mankind from his virtuous labour by various stage tricks: putting boards in his field, spoiling his seed, and stealing his spade. Since Mankind is oblivious of the devil-mask its relationship with the spectators is accentuated. Titivullus establishes a conspiracy with the onlookers like that of a pantomime villain, drawing them in as silent accomplices in his plots and his joke against Mankind as he tells them:
I am here ageyn to make this felow yrke.
Qwyst! pesse! I xall go to hys ere and tytyll therin …
Ande euer ye dyde, for me kepe now yowr sylence.73
The audience is tricked into complicity, not with the human Mankind who represents themselves, but with the hideously devil-headed tempter, the alien being who is manipulating humanity.
In the later moralities it is more often the ludicrous aspect of the Devil’s grotesque appearance that is emphasised: the horned, masked, and tailed figure of the Middle Ages was by the later sixteenth century beginning to seem somewhat superstitiously old-fashioned.74 By 1620 when John Melton comments scathingly on the ‘shagge-haired Deuills’ of Dr Faustus who ‘runne roaring over the stage with Squibs in their mouthes’, the traditional devil figure had almost disappeared.75 He had become a theatrical sensation, remembered affectionately by those like Jonson’s Timothy Tattle who longed nostalgically for ‘the devil for my money’,76 The Devil of the late moralities which Tattle recalls was apparently still dressed in costume and mask like his predecessors but is often treated with derision, rather than fear, by the Vices of the plays.
The mask itself may have contributed to this scenario: an elaborately masked actor with restricted eye-lines will inevitably lumber about in comparison with an unmasked Vice. The Vice Ill-Report in Thomas Garter’s Susanna (c.1560) mocks and bullies Satan, although the hideously visored devil in this play still finally triumphs over his quick-witted tormentor.77 In Like will to Like (1568), the scornful comments of other characters suggest that Lucifer’s mask has lost its power to terrify. He is called ‘some dancing beare’ (suggesting his shagginess) and mocked for his ‘bottle nose’ and ‘that ill face’.78 Fear is by no means necessarily absent: but it is likely to be provoked more by the careless arrogance of the Vices’ mockery than by the devil-mask itself. All for Money (1578) shows a very similar situation when Satan, ‘deformedly dressed’, enters with Gluttony and Pride ‘dressed in devils apparel’ to consult with Sin.79 Sin’s remarks about the ugly face and bottle-nose again single out the mask; yet Satan’s role in the ensuing argument is helpless and humiliated, as Sin contradicts, attacks and comically bullies him. The role of complicity with the audience, the edge of threat apparent in the earlier plays, has shifted to the Vices, leaving the Devil’s mask as the traditional child’s terror, something to be mocked rather than feared.80
FIG. 12: Diabolical long-nosed priapic mask, Innsbruck
This appears to be confirmed by the strategies of later dramatists. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus embodies the serious strength of the devil in Mephostophilis’ disguise as a friar,81 calm, cool, sinister in manner rather than appearance, his ‘devilish’ aspect deliberately put aside. The ‘shows’ of traditional masked devils and fireworks are largely distractions, designedly childish. The alternative, taken much later by Ben Jonson in The Devil is an Ass, is to play up the ludicrous, undignified aspect of the traditional devil figure, emphasising that for a culture questioning the power and role of images the grotesque face has become, as it supposedly remains, merely comic.
A small group of late morality figures take over elements of the Devil’s hideously masked appearance. All are associated with damnation, and suggest a slightly changed conception both of the nature of evil and of the expressive capacity of masks. In All for Money, Damnation has ‘a terrible vysard on his face, and his garment shalbe painted with flames of fire’.82 He and Satan stand as horrifyingly non-human figures, distinguished by their terrible masks from the apparently unmasked characters around them. But their faces are reflected in two other characters: Judas enters from Hell, accompanied by Dives, ‘like a damned soule, in blacke painted with flames of fire, and with a fearful vizard’.83 They address the spectators directly on the consequences of inordinate love of money, the terrible masks projecting the fearful fate of the audience rather than the actuality of the devil. In Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (1569) a similar costume and role is given to God’s Judgement who passes sentence of damnation on the old, foolish, and unrepentant protagonist, Moros.84 He enters ‘with a terrible visure’,85 and strikes the unseeing Moros with the sword of vengeance. Confusion then enters from Hell ‘with an ill-favored visure and all things beside ill-favored’86 and seals Moros’ damnation by carrying him off on his back to Hell. These masks seem to represent an evil located in a spiritual state, in the situation of damnation, rather than in the devil himself.
In George Wapull’s The Tide tarrieth No Man (1576)87 a similar mask is given to Despair, who attacks the protagonist Wastefulness, luring him towards suicide. A stage-direction specifies that Despair, later called a ‘monster’, should ‘enter in some ugly shape’,88 suggesting a shape-changing costume including a mask or head. Instead of encountering Wastefulness directly, Despair ‘stands behind him’ to speak, Wastefulness apparently hearing him as an inner voice rather than responding to him as a visible character.89 Consequently the hideous head seems almost to function as a projection of Wastefulness’ psychological state, dangerously close to damnation, rather than as an autonomous agent of temptation like the vices of the play. The mask begins to embody an imaginative projection of the individual psyche.
Giants
One subsidiary group of characters shares the full-head mask construction associated with Deaths and Devils. Three linked sixteenth-century plays present a humanist educational allegory in which the young hero, Wit, seeks marriage with the lady Science (Knowledge).90 One of the obstacles in Wit’s quest is a battle with the monster Tediousness, who wears a full-head mask contributing to his giant stature. All three versions of the play stage the same episode. The first, John Redford’s Wit and Science (c.1530), directs ‘Tedyousnes cumth in with a vyser over his hed’; when towards the end of the play Wit kills him offstage he ‘bryngth in the hed upon his sworde’.91 This visor appears to be a complete detachable head-piece, as it clearly was in many devils’ costumes. This is specifically confirmed in the latest version of the play, Francis Merbury’s The Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom (1570s), where the giant is called Irksomeness. The stage direction carefully explains:
Here thay fight a while and Ircksomnis must run in a dores and Wit shall followe taking his visor of his hed and shall bring it in vpon his sworde.92
There is little to indicate what the mask looked like, though it may well have been worn on top of the head, making the giant even taller. Given the context of battle it is even possible that it involves a helmet. The motif is suspiciously like the pictures of David returning in triumph from the slaughter of Goliath in some Books of Hours. But clearly this visor is not intended to be separable from a face beneath. Like the Devil’s mask it simply is the head of the wearer. This sort of mask belongs to the freedom of technique which allows the playwright to personify a concept like boredom as a physically threatening giant.93
Vices
Although the vices and personifications of evil in the moralities are all theologically offshoots of the Devil, they are very differently conceived, and belong to a very different theatrical world. As dramatic characters they have a complex presence: they represent neither human nor non-human beings, but crystallisations of moral forces. These forces are universal, with independent agency, and yet also represent forces at work in the individual psyches of the human protagonists. The balance between these poles is a shifting one, both across the history of morality drama, and within individual plays. The active roles the vices take are similarly complex and diverse. Allegorically they function primarily as tempters of the human soul; but they are also sowers of discord, instigators and manipulators of the action, part of and yet separate from Mankind, controlling him yet subject to his will. Theatrically they are often the main focus of energy in the plays, a source of laughter and fear, standing in a peculiarly intimate relationship with the audience and often sharing in a distinctive stage persona identified by familiar theatrical routines.94
This all suggests that the vices might be particularly fruitful maskers. Personifying some very specific and suggestive moral qualities, from Covetousness to Counterfeit Countenance, Haphazard to Hypocrisy, they might well have a use for masks embodying these states. Alternatively, masks might enhance their role as tempters. The vices almost invariably conceal their real natures and present the protagonist with a seductively fair-seeming persona: this is a strategy which neatly allegorises the self-deception of the individual’s first steps into sin, while overtly demonstrating the duplicity of evil. But in fact there is little if any evidence that the vices adopted masks for these purposes. Ideas associated with masking often pervade their language, in imagery of visors, false faces, painted looks; disguise is often central to the vices’ roles in the plots, and even to their stage routines. Ideas of masking are associated with them outside the plays as well as in. Thomas Tusser comments on an ‘envious neighbour’ in the Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573), with ‘His face made of brasse, like a vice in a game’.95 But the image of the ‘brass face’ had already, like the proverbial ‘two faces in a hood’, entered the language as a common metaphor for impudence. Although the vices make sophisticated play with masking metaphors of disguise and concealment it is not clear that they were ever actualised in wearable masks. The texts suggest that the vices’ disguising tends to focus on two other areas: a change of clothes and/or a change of names.
The change of clothes for a vice who wishes to seduce rather than terrify or repulse humanity goes back at least as far as Wisdom where Lucifer himself appears ‘in a dewyllys aray wythowt and wythin as a prowde galonte’.96 This change of clothes becomes an increasing feature: in Respublica (1553) the Vice Avarice explains to his companions:
agaynste I youe call
ye muste haue other garmentes, and soo must ye all
ye muste for the season counterfaite gravitee.97
His own costume change consists of turning his gown inside-out, to hide his money bags. In John Bale’s Kynge Johan (1538–60) the vices assume both the clothes and identities of particular historical characters; while in David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis they play a comic routine as they change into religious habits.98 This costume change is accepted as impenetrably concealing. When Malicious Judgment in Wager’s Marie Magdalene (1566) tells the disguised Infidelity ‘I had not knowen thee but by the voyce’,99 Infidelity puts this down solely to a change of clothes:
For euery day I haue a garment to weare,
According to my worke and operation.100
Infidelity is even reminded later in the play, ‘As nere as thou canst, let him not behold thy face’,101 implying that the face itself remains unmasked.
The other form of disguise for the Vice is a change of names, a linguistic shift that appropriately emphasises that the alteration is not of the Vice’s quality but of human perception. The verbal play could even be seen as a reflection of the increasing scepticism in sixteenth-century theories of language about any divinely determined relationship between signifier and signified, and as such it may even be enhanced by a deliberate absence of facial disguise to match the new name.102 In the Thrie Estaitis and Respublica the change of name is built up into elaborate routines of mock baptism; but by the time of New Custom (1573) it is so established that Perverse Doctrine and Ignorance can simply remark, ‘It were expedient that both our names were amended’ without further explanation.103 Name change becomes such a familiar convention that it can be introduced almost casually and generates many comic routines around the vices’ remembering and forgetting of their assumed names.104 This light-hearted play itself contributes to a wider morality interest in questions of identity, but has no certain association with the wearing of masks.
The Virtues and God
There is even less evidence that dramatic personifications of virtue were commonly masked. There seems no iconographic tradition to link virtues with masks beyond the obvious one of giving them beautiful faces, especially when, as often, they were personified as women. So Chastity in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis ‘hes the fairest forme of face’ and apparently, along with Verity, a flowing wig of blonde hair.105 In The Three Ladies of London (1584) Love, Conscience, and Lucre have ‘a dainty face’, ‘a lovely face’, ‘a face angelical’. This suggests that the moralities more or less followed the normal convention without making anything particular of it.106
God appears in only a few of the earlier moralities, and there seems no reason to doubt that the tradition of a gold face for divinity established in the mystery cycles was at that point considered perfectly appropriate.107 Indeed in Wisdom the stage directions specify that Wisdom, who is Christ, shall wear ‘a cheueler wyth browys, a berde of gold of sypres curlyed’ which sounds like at least a half-mask; and the tradition seems to have extended to the pagan deities of Latin and Greek academic plays in the sixteenth century: St John’s College costume inventory records ‘A golden face & crowne for Iuppiter’ in 1548.108 But it is not clear whether figures associated with God, or personifications of divine attributes, were also gold-faced. It might be the case in Wisdom since Anima, constantly referred to as made in the image of God, is said to wear ‘a cheueler lyke to WYSDOM’, which could imply a similar half-mask.109 But there is nothing to suggest that this was a common tradition. No reference is made to golden or shining faces on Divine Correction in the Thrie Estaitis or Nemesis, the instrument of divinity in Respublica, although there are allusions to various other items of their costumes and properties – wings, a wheel, a sword, a crown. Equally, though, absence of evidence does not prove that they were not gilded. Light of the Gospel in the Puritan New Custom (1573) is briefly described as:
A good personable fellow, and in countenance so bright,
That I could not behold him in the visage aright110
which could suggest a gold face of the kind seen in the mysteries. But this reaction is not developed in the play, and the cast list identifies Light of the Gospel’s costume as being simply that of a ‘minister’.
By the end of the sixteenth century we find a widespread sensitivity to the concept of masking and disguise, seen specifically in the language and discourse of the vices and more broadly in the increasingly self-conscious preoccupation with questions of identity. This suggests one possible reason for the apparently bare-faced virtues. It is explicitly stated by the personification of Virtue herself in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1599): when told by Fortune that she should acquire a gold face in order to make herself more attractive she proclaims, ‘Virtue abhors to wear a borrowed face’.111 The concept of the mask is alien to the supposedly pure and unmediated nature of virtue; this concept, it seems, now carries more weight in performance than the mask itself. But such scruples were less common before the Reformation, when morality virtues seem equally bare-faced. Moralities, as far as we can tell, had no accepted tradition of using masks to present intrinsic moral qualities, whether good or bad.
Figures of Mankind
Almost all morality plays centre around a ‘mankind’ figure: a representative of general humanity or a particular type of human being, who is the focus of attention for the personifications of good and evil. Although the part these figures play in the action may be slight, or passive, they are the centre of both the plot and the network of moral ideas the plays dramatise. It is not surprising, then, that the most interesting and inventive use of masks in the moralities concerns these figures of humankind. Masks are introduced for the human protagonists usually at moments of crisis, to mark moral change. In effect they always relate to moments of corruption and degeneracy, although this may itself be determined by the underlying shape of the morality protagonist’s experience. The pattern that tends to structure all the plays, however much it is varied, adapted, or modified, is a movement which runs from innocence to corruption and usually, especially in the earlier plays, on through to redemption. This pattern is obviously determined by Christian perceptions of the human condition. Mankind is born innocent, capable of good and evil. Being mortal he is necessarily corruptible, although within the Christian vision also redeemable. Consequently, for any generic figure of humanity the fall into sin and usually also the return to grace are inevitable parts of human experience. Masks, where used, tend to be introduced at the turning point where innocence is corrupted, and removed again at the upturn where sin is redeemed. They belong to the middle phase of the pattern.
The pattern of experience outlined here is seen particularly clearly in the one surviving eye-witness account of the performance of a morality play. Ralph Willis describes watching the lost play The Cradle of Security as a young child, probably in the 1570s. The protagonist, ‘a king or some great prince’, was lured from his graver counsellors and habits by the pleasures offered by three ladies, Pride, Covetousness and Luxury (Lechery):
… that in the end they got him to lye downe in a cradle upon the stage, where these three ladies joyning in a sweet song rocked him asleepe, that he snorted againe, and in the meane time closely conveyed under the cloaths where withall he was covered, a vizard like a swines snout upon his face, with three wire chains fastned thereunto, the other three end whereof being holden severally by those ladies, who fall to singing againe, and then discovered his face, that the spectators might see how they had transformed him, going on with their singing. Whilst all this was acting, there came forth of another doore at the farthest end of the stage two old men … and then the foremost old man with his mace stroke a fearful blow upon the cradle, whereat all the courtiers, with the three ladies and the vizard, all vanished; and the desolate prince starting up bare-faced, and finding himselfe thus sent for to judgement, made a lamentable complaint of his miserable case.112
This might easily serve as a paradigm for the kind of morality action which uses masks most expressively. The visor is put on the king’s face at the moment of corruption, the moment when his soul accepts Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury. Yet it is smuggled onto him secretly, while asleep, emphasising his ignorance of his own sin and unconsciousness of its effects. It is taken from him at the moment of revelation, which in this play is provoked by the End of the World (as Willis identifies the Old Man); this moment opens man’s eyes to himself, and he is left ‘bare-faced’, alone with his own self-knowledge.
The management of the action points up the parallel with the myth of Circe, as the mask reveals externally the moral deformity and spiritual degeneracy that the acceptance of sin involves. According to Boethius’ influential moralisation of the Circe myth, ‘a man wallowing in foul and impure lusts is occupied by the filthy pleasures of a sow’.113 The subsequent shocking removal of the mask reflects an image seen in the frontispiece of one of the emblem books, Jacob de Gheyn’s Masks, where Death pulls the masks from two women [PLATE 28].114 The accompanying verse by Hugo Grotius stresses the women’s deliberate assumption of the masks, and the need to bare one’s face to Christ:
Detrahe personam simulator, detege vultum,
Dum nondum Mortis cogeris imperio.
Detrahe personam, dum vivis detege vultum,
Sic tibi, sic Christi vultus amicus erit.
Take off your mask, pretender, uncover your face, while you have not yet been forced by the power of Death. Take off your mask, uncover your face while you still live, for so the face of Christ will be your friend.
Although the spiritual implications are slightly different, the visual link between unmasking and self-realisation in both texts is powerfully confirmed. The king’s mask in The Cradle of Security therefore pulls in two directions: on the one hand it represents the true spiritual corruption of which he is unaware; on the other, it acts as a concealment of his self which must ultimately be removed to enable self-awareness in the face of the absolute. Although the action in The Cradle of Security is theatrically simple, the mask in context is richly expressive, demonstrating some complex and subtle moral ideas with vivid theatrical clarity. It becomes an integral part of the drama, a necessary stage of the action rather than just an illuminating adjunct to it.
Although The Cradle of Security is now lost, several extant plays make very similar use of masks. Even more follow the same visual pattern, in which Mankind in his central phase of corruption is physically deformed – by ludicrously over-fashionable clothes in Mankind, by the rags seen in Magnyfycence and Respublica, or even by false emblematic attributes: the trusty weapons of Christianity in The Tide Tarrieth No Man (1576) are changed into a sword of ‘policy’ and a shield of ‘riches’. Visual realisation of this moral structure is also clearly implied in the title of a lost political morality played at Cambridge in 1553, ‘cawled Anglia deformata and Anglia Restituta’.115 Most of the moralities that introduce masks for their human protagonists use them to contribute to a similar visual pattern of deformity.
PLATE 28: Death removes the masks from fair women. Jacob de Gheyn II The Masks [1595–96] title page.
London: Theatre Museum, Henry R. Beard Collection F. 156–22. © V&A Picture Library.
Most simply, masks become physical indicators of moral corruption, without any further development. Physical deformity is a common image for spiritual corruption in medieval literature: the hideous leprosy that strikes Cresseid in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid is an obvious and striking example.116 The motif is exploited at various times right through the morality tradition and in at least two plays, the fifteenth-century Wisdom and John Bale’s Three Laws (1538), the corruption of the protagonist is expressed in simple facial disfigurement.
In Wisdom the soul, Anima, is endowed with three personified faculties, Mind, Will, and Understanding. They are costumed ‘all thre in wyght cloth of golde, cheveleryde and crestyde in sute’, clearly reflecting Anima’s own ‘cheveler lyke to WYSDOM’ and ‘wyght clothe of golde gysely purfyled wyth menever’. In the course of the play the three faculties, led astray by Lucifer, have their clothes changed, apparently for the fashionable dress of gallants. At the climax of the action Anima, who has been offstage during this period of corruption, is summoned by Wisdom to confront her three faculties: ‘Here ANIMA apperythe in the most horrybull wyse, fowlere than a fende’.117 The reference to the devilish ‘horrybull wyse’ and the play’s constant emphasis on the soul as the ‘image’ of God suggest that this disfigurement includes a mask or facial deformity of some obvious kind. Confronted with this fearful figure, the three faculties are quickly brought to understanding and repentance, and Anima is led out singing ‘in the most lamentabull wyse’ to undertake penance. She then returns with Mind, Will, and Understanding, ‘all in here fyrst clothynge, her chapplettys and crestys, and all hauyng on crownys’.118 Anima appears as a largely passive figure in this action, the tabula rasa on which identity is written by others. She recognises and sorrowfully suffers the deformity brought upon her by the corruption of her three faculties, but is offstage during the scenes of downfall and redemption, when the hideous masked costume is put on and taken from her. Consequently she appears as the victim rather than the agent of corruption; her disfigurement and restoration act as striking visual signs, demonstrating the moral effect on the individual soul of the sins we have observed.
John Bale’s Three Laws presents a similar action although with non-human protagonists; God’s three dispensations, the Law of Nature, the Law of Moses, and the Law of Christ, are successively corrupted by Infidelity aided by various vices.119 The text implies that masking played a part in at least one of these episodes of corruption. When the Law of Nature is attacked by Sodomy and Idolatry, Sodomy claims, ‘I wyll corrupt Gods Image / With most unlawfull usage’.120 The Law is taken offstage and returns lamenting:
I thynke ye marvele to see soch alteracyon
At thys tyme in me, whom God left here so pure …
By hym [man] have I gote thys fowle dysease of bodye,
And as ye se here, am now throwne in a leprye.121
The words of the Law of Nature suggest a mask or paint demonstrating facial deformity. Such a mask was certainly used in the Cornish saint’s play Meriasek (1504): when the Emperor Constantine is punished with leprosy for his sinful persecution of the Christians, a stage direction indicates, ‘a vysour aredy apon Constantyn ys face’.122 Leprosy offers a forceful visual image epitomising, as in Henryson’s Cresseid, the medieval association of ideas of deformity, disease, and sin.123 After the downfall of the Law of Nature, the Law of Moses is crippled and veiled to signify blindness, while the Law of Christ is dressed in filthy clothes. The Laws are finally led before God who restores their unblemished state: ‘Thu, Lawe of Nature, we first begynne with the, / Restorynge the agayne to thy first puryte’.124 Obviously some fairly rapid cure of the leprous deformity is envisaged, easily performed by the removal of a mask. Like Anima in Wisdom, the Law of Nature knows and repents his deformity but is powerless to prevent or remedy it.
Both plays show the most straightforward way in which an ugly stage mask can be used as an emblem of moral ugliness. Offstage, out of sight of the audience, the mask is placed on the passive recipient. The theatrical effect is largely one of shock: the horrified surprise when a previously normal or beautiful face suddenly re-appears deformed or hideous. But the processes of moral corruption, like the masking itself, can be far more complex. Different dimensions are added in plays where the mask-wearers are not seen just as victims, but as agents in their own corruption and deformity. This tends to focus theatrical attention on an onstage acquisition of the mask, which becomes a more dynamic and multivalent stage sign, paralleling the more complex analysis of spiritual development and moral progression. Interestingly the human protagonists never seem to assume masks of their own accord: as in The Cradle of Security the masks are slipped onto their faces without their conscious knowledge. While making for some interesting stage effects, this also graphically demonstrates Mankind’s lack of real awareness of the nature and effect of moral corruption. Although bringing it on himself, he is not fully conscious of what he is doing. Consequently these mask episodes tend to address not just sin but questions of self-awareness and self-knowledge. The mask is involved not just with moral states, but with the issues of awareness of identity involved in what we now term subjectivity.
Such questions are already emerging in Wisdom even though Anima does not play an active stage part in her own deformity. The relationship between the Soul and her three faculties is peculiarly intimate: in a sense they are the soul even though they also represent separate powers. The play articulates a parallel between Anima and God, the three faculties and the Trinity. As God is the fusion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Anima is the fusion of Mind, Understanding, and Will. Although it is the faculties and not Anima that we see sinning, their corruption is hers, as her deformity is theirs. As Wisdom forcefully exhorts the three powers when he introduces the horrifyingly disfigured Anima:
Se howe ye haue dysvyguryde yowr soule!
Beholde yowrselff; loke veryly in mynde!125
She is the mirror that both reflects their truth and offers a moral warning. To draw a more recent parallel, Anima and her mask function like the portrait of Dorian Gray, showing the faculties their true selves and bringing them self-knowledge.
In most moralities, however, the protagonist is undivided, and the sinner and mask-wearer are one and the same. This emphasises the internal nature of spiritual corruption, dependent on personal actions and consent to sin: the mask externalises this inner truth. Although the protagonist may not fully realise what he is doing, there is usually a clear moment when the soul ceases to resist or even to recognise temptation, losing discrimination between right and wrong. In The Cradle of Security this moment arrives when the King falls asleep: accepting Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury, he loses consciousness of their nature. The secret putting-on of the mask during this sleep emphasises that the King, although willingly accepting sin, does not realise what it makes of him and does not recognise his own bestial nature: he does not know he is wearing the mask. Like a dream, the sleep-induced mask objectifies an unconscious truth of the psyche. Such scenes help us to re-create the resonance of the ass’s head that Shakespeare puts on an equally unconscious Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom’s mixture of self-ignorance and self-knowledge is richer and more complex, less strictly ethical, than that of the morality figures. But the theatrical capacity of the mask not to deceive but to express unconscious inner truth, that Shakespeare exploits so densely in the ass’s head, is first discovered and established in these morality plays.
The onstage masking of characters without their knowledge obviously offers opportunities for imaginative theatrical action. Willis describes a scene dependent on sleight of hand and surprise; a similar episode in R. Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1584) devises an almost opposite method. In this play Lucre, one of the three Ladies, keeps company with Usury, Dissimulation, and Fraud; the other two, Love and Conscience, attempt to preserve their virtue while sinking ever deeper into poverty and distress. But when Conscience is humiliatingly reduced to selling brooms (the emblematic attributes of her own cleansing property),126 she finally gives way to Lucre’s blandishments, consenting to compromise her purity in accepting her sister’s pleasures. During their exchange Lucre quietly sends for a pretty little ‘box of abhomination’. When ‘a painted box of ink’ is brought:
Here let LUCRE open the box, and dip her finger in it, and spot Conscience’ face, saying as followeth …127
With her inky finger the friendly Lucre affectionately admires Conscience’s beauty, gently stroking her face feature by feature. By the time the alliance is sealed with a final kiss Conscience’s face is stained ‘with all abhomination’,128 although she apparently remains unaware of her appearance until the end of the play. Unlike the magician’s trick of The Cradle of Security, the theatrical power of this episode rests on Conscience’s willingly unconscious co-operation in a seductive, almost erotic process of disfigurement of which the audience are witnesses.
This slow, comic, but sinister facial disfigurement emphasises both the amorous seduction of temptation and Conscience’s dangerous lack of awareness of both her sin and her self. In her trial and imprisonment at the end of the play she finally recognises her own corruption, lamenting her hideous face and repenting for her acquiescence in sin. But it is unclear both how this self-knowledge has developed, and whether the disfigurement is redeemable. It is not until Conscience removes her veil at the beginning of the play’s sequel, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, that she and the audience discover that the disfigurement is gone, presumably as a result of her penance in imprisonment. Wilson’s interest in the loss of self-knowledge that accompanies sin and corruption is apparently not extended to the re-awakening of self-awareness.
Masks and Mirrors
Those moralities that use this masking motif most expressively of all are those concerned with both loss and reawakening of self-awareness, raising questions about the effect of self-knowledge on identity itself. The consequent explorations of subjectivity testify to a continuing interest of the morality tradition.129 In the widely spread handful of plays that use visors for this purpose there is a fascinating association of masks with mirrors that makes for particularly forceful theatre. Both objects have wide emblematic associations; in performance, both belong to a specialised language of objects, being means of presenting other or parallel realities, which makes them almost uneasily powerful in the theatre. Both can be expressive dramatic metaphors for ideas connected with self-knowledge and true identity. Mirrors offer a physical means by which individuals can see themselves from outside, as others see them, and arguably as they really are. Yet the unreality of a mirror’s reflection makes it also suspect, and open to the perceptual distortions of pride and fantasy. Masks can demonstrate concealment of the truth, the false face that covers real identity. Yet conversely the masks worn by morality protagonists may reveal the true state of the soul; they offer the spectator a reflection of inner truth that may not be apparent to the wearer. The combination of the two objects, mirror and mask, each with its different relationship to identity and individual truth, can be strikingly compelling.
Medieval and early-modern thinking on mirrors as instruments of spiritual and moral perception was highly developed.130 Alain de Lille in the eleventh century distinguished multiple levels of mirror, true and distorting, in quo te debes videre (‘in which you should see yourself): the triple mirrors scripturae, naturae, creaturae (‘of scripture, nature, creation’), reflected the self within the wider truth of God’s creation, as in the ‘mirour that highte Middelerthe’ that Fortune shows the dreamer in Piers Plowman.131 Yet the inner triple mirror of individual perception was also speculum rationis, sensualitatis, camis (‘the mirror of reason, of the senses, of the flesh’), each offering a different view of human actuality whose reflections might work against rather than with each other in developing human understanding. The mirror was seen as offering not only a reflection of what is, but an example of what ought, or ought not to be.132 So Christ in the York Baptism urges men to follow him, ‘For men schall me ther myrroure make’, while Henryson’s Cresseid warns readers to beware of her fate and ‘in your mynd ane mirrour mak of me’.133 The mirror has a far more active role than simply the passive reflection of reality.
Like masks, mirrors also carried diverse and sometimes contradictory emblematic significances during the Middle Ages and early-modern period. They are used by figures of vanity, pride, and lechery, to demonstrate sins of self-obsession. But they also symbolise the virtues of wise self-knowledge, held by personifications of Prudence, Wisdom, and Truth, or the man in an emblem by Joannes Sambucus whose motto is Conscius ipse sibi.134 Even in non-dramatic emblems there are occasional connections made between mirrors and masks, or strange and deformed heads. In one representation Pride is painted wearing a false face and looking in a mirror: self-obsession resulting not in self-knowledge, but in knowledge only of a false self.135 On the other hand, the early-sixteenth-century Prudence carved on the tomb by Michel Colombe in Nantes Cathedral, who carries a mirror by which she knows herself, also has a double face to signify that she looks to both past and future.136 While the sculpture does not present this as a mask, that is how it would be realised in performance; and indeed an undated document in the Revels accounts (probably for the time of Edward VI) records just such a stage figure. In the largely allegorical cast for an unknown ‘Enterlued’, Wisdom is characterised as ‘A woman with to faces and in eache hand a glas’.137 The double-faced mask that reveals Wisdom’s capacity to see past and future contemplates itself in the mirrors in order to achieve self-understanding.
As the moralities associate masks with moments of moral crisis for the protagonist, mirrors may similarly indicate points at which a character undergoes spiritual change. The conversion of Wager’s Marie Magdalene from sin to repentance is initiated by her encounter with the mirror of the Law. This mirror offers more than a simple reflection, as Law explains:
In me as in a glasse doth plainly appere,
What God of his people doth require.138
Mary confirms this when she looks in the mirror:
O frend Prudence, doe you see yonder glasse?
I will tell what therin I do see …
All men for synne by God’s sentence damned be.139
The reflection reveals the universal spiritual truth of the human condition. But the glass is nonetheless associated with self-knowledge: the Law says that in it, ‘The weakenesse and sinne of him selfe he may se’, and Mary’s contemplation of the reflection triggers the arrival of the character ‘Knowledge of Sin’. The mirror creates a turning point, the first step in her re-evaluation of her self and spiritual regeneration.
Since both mirrors and masks can play such important dramatic roles at moments of crisis and change in the plays it is not surprising that they should function so powerfully when linked.140 The conjunction can be exploited even in non-dramatic literature. Masks and mirrors, for example, interact at one of the climactic points of Dante’s Paradiso. When Beatrice urges Dante to drink from the river of divine light, he tells us:
come fec’io, per far migliori spegli
ancor delli occhi, clinandomi all’onda …
Poi come gente stata sotto larve
che pare altro che prima, se si sveste
la sembianza non sua in che disparve
cosi mi si cambiaro in maggior feste
li fiori e le faville, si ch’io vide
ambo le corti del ciel manifeste.141
As I to make still better mirrors of my eyes bent down to the water … then like people who have been masked, and seem other than before if they put off the semblance not their own in which they were hid, the flowers and the sparks changed for me into a greater festival, so that I saw both the courts of heaven made plain.
Through the ‘mirrors’ of his eyes, the image of contemplation and understanding, the false mask of appearance is discarded, so that Dante sees the landscape for what it truly is: the bliss of the courts of heaven. This intense poetic moment is persuasively analogous to the more concrete dramatic examples of the morality plays.
The first play to link masks and mirrors in the process of self-recognition is an early academic morality written in Latin prose, Thomas Chaundler’s Liber apologeticus (c.1460). This may never have been intended for performance: the sole manuscript is clearly a reading rather than an acting text, ornamental and beautifully illustrated. However, it shows a firm grasp of what could be effective in performance in its action, if not in its rather leisurely language and execution.
In the opening scene Man is created innocent by God and Reason gives him a ‘mirror of contemplation so that he may understand the nature of his being’. This is initially, then, a glass of self-knowledge; but as Reason explains, such knowledge must lead beyond the self to include knowledge both of God and of creation. The mirror reveals existing truth, but can also teach Man what is right and show him when he is in danger of losing his true identity as the image of God. Reason tells Man to use the mirror:
… si … distortus aliquando aut deformis exigencia demeritorum, imaginem Dei amiseris … quia cuiusmodi es talem effigiem ac similitudinem tibi… presentabit.142
… if … at any time, distorted and deformed by the constraint of your demerits, you should have lost the image of God … for whatever sort of person you are, it will present your image and likeness.
Reason warns Man not to attribute any apparent deformity to a fault in the glass, but to consult it whenever he is in doubt to help understand himself and what he should do. The particular nature of the mirror’s potential in the action is therefore delimited, although it never loses its traditionally mysterious quality.
Man is given two companions, Reason and Sensuality, and in spite of his good intentions is soon persuaded by Sensuality to reject Reason and eat the forbidden apple. Immediately, struck with panic and uncertainty, he senses a change he does not understand and decides to look into Reason’s mirror even though he is already losing his trust in it:
Cogito; estne sanum speculum? Temptabo speculari. Heu, horrenda mihi nimis, imago mortis apparebo.143
I wonder whether the mirror is sound? I shall try to look. Alas! beyond measure horrible to me, I appear the image of death.
At the moment he looks into the glass he is appalled by the sight of his true self which has become an ‘image of death’. Chaundler does not make clear how he envisaged this being staged (if he did at all). But the implications of the text are clear: at some point during his acquiescence in sin, his acceptance of the apple from Sensuality, Man’s face has been deformed. Theatrical practicality suggests that, like Willis’ King, a mask of death has been slipped onto his face without his knowledge. Now the mask of sin and death contemplates itself in the mirror of self-knowledge.
Whether or not he was writing for performance, Chaundler shows no interest in the mechanics of stage business. But his play does show, often with quite poignant force, the spiritual and philosophical disturbance engendered. As the horrified Man observes his reflection his fevered speech reveals the disturbing tensions between face, mask, and mirror:
Infrangam speculum, memet mihi condem(p)nans, quod … mortis nunc mihi imaginem et idolum confusionis declarat. Heu me miserum! Estne mutatus oculus aut speculum distortum? Videbo me iterum. He nephandum facinus! Deformis mihi videor sed et difformis et, quot sunt rupture, tot singularum partium et fraccionum singule deformitates … Heu me! Quo fugit decor meus, imago Dei in utriosque hominis uultu relucens?144
I shall break the mirror which condemns me to myself, which … now reveals to me the image of death and the picture of confusion. [Breaks mirror.] Alas, wretched me! Is my eye changed, or is the mirror distorted? I shall look at myself again. Alas, heinous sin! I seem to myself both deformed and misformed. There are as many particular deformities of particular parts and segments as there are broken pieces … Ah me! Whither has fled my beauty, the image of God shining out of the face of every human being?
The mirror shows him a self he cannot recognise or accept: the reflection exposes an antipathy between the mask and what Man believes to be his true face, which results in panic and dislocation. He cannot believe the mask is his true self, preferring to mistrust either his eye, his perception, or the mirror, his reason. His response, the smashing of the glass, provokes the apparently intuitive horror that still lingers around breaking mirrors. This horror is rationalised by the context: Reason’s mirror has been strongly identified with Man’s rational self, the image of God, so in breaking it he is attacking his own identity. But the mirror, though broken, continues to reflect his true image, the fragments simply representing his own psychological disintegration. Man is left with the sense of permanent entrapment in the mask: it is now himself whether he accepts it or not, and in spite of his longing for his lost identity.145
The overall shaping of this episode clearly throws light on Shakespeare’s compelling use of the same motif in Richard II. Richard similarly calls for a mirror in order to contemplate himself, similarly breaks it in revulsion against the discrepancy he feels between his real and his imagined self. Richard’s confrontation with the mirror is only one moment in that play’s much wider exploration of the questioning and performance of the self, and the implications are left largely unspoken, allowing the emblem to speak hauntingly for itself. Chaundler’s morality, more transparently allegorical and didactic, spells out not unskilfully though certainly rather less dramatically the tensions that underlie the intensity of the stage image.146
It is of course quite possible that Chaundler’s sequence was imagined without a mask at all, the death’s head appearing only in the mirror as it does in a sixteenth-century portrait of the aged Hans Burgkmair and his wife.147 In an earlier parallel episode in DeGuileville’s Le Pèlerinage the dreamer, looking in the mirror of conscience, sees himself ugly and throws it away.148 Although he is told that the mirror shows his true image it is not clear that his physical face is intended to show the same distortion as the mirror. But in medieval theatre it is unusual for visual effects to remain imaginary. It is rare for a character to see something that the audience can not: Macbeth’s dagger belongs to a later kind of theatrical expression. So if the Liber apologeticus was conceived in any way as a dramatic work it seems probable that masks would have been involved; and even if the play was not directly intended for performance, it still demonstrates forcefully the expressive potential of the stage action, as Chaundler articulates the complex and disturbing ideas that mask and mirror would dramatise.
Man suggests that sin finally consists not in sensuality itself but in the betrayal of identity:
Deposui picturam Dei cuius imaginem habui et indui me, pro nefas, picturam meretricis Sensualitatis … Non agnosco uultum quem ipse mihi formauit summus et rerum omnium optimus Creator Deus.149
I have cast away the likeness of God, whose image I had, and I have taken on myself, O monstrous deed, the likeness of the harlot Sensuality … I do not recognise the face which He, the highest and most excellent Creator of all things, God, fashioned for me.
He has betrayed both his Maker and his self. Moving to a play which is more certainly designed for performance, this question of identity remains central.
In John Redford’s Wit and Science (c. 1530), the motif of mask and mirror definitely reaches the stage.150 The manuscript of the play, because of a lacuna, opens in the middle of a scene between the young hero, Wit, and his prospective father-in-law, Reason. Supporting Wit’s suit to his daughter Science (Knowledge), but realising the difficulty of his quest, Reason provides:
A glas of Reson, wherein beholde yee
Youre-sealfe to youre-selfe.151
This mirror of self-knowledge will help Wit ensure that he is fit for Science. Clearly associated with Alain de Lille’s triple mirror of perception, it is closely related to reason itself:
Thys glas of Reason shall show ye all:
Whyle ye have that, ye haue me, and shall.152
This play explores a primarily secular process of education; but since the faculty of Reason is that which most closely reflects the divine Logos, the glass of Reason can reflect Wit as the image of God.
After a disastrous first encounter with the monster Tediousness, Wit is helped to recover by the charming lady Honest Recreation; but having removed his ‘garmentes of Science’ to dance with her he falls into the lap of the even more seductive Idleness, who lulls him asleep after his exertion. As he sleeps, Idleness dresses him in the fool’s coat and cap belonging to her son Ignorance, and then paints his face ‘as black as the devyll’.153 Idleness’ speech implies a grimly caressing affection as she applies the blacking, like that of Lucre in The Three Ladies of London:
But yet to take my leve of my deere, lo,
Wyth a skyp or twayne, heere, lo, and heer, lo.
And heere agayne.154
Like the King in The Cradle of Security, Wit is unconscious when his face is disfigured: having succumbed to Idleness he is no longer aware of himself. Idleness emphasises that the ugly face symbolises not just Wit’s sin but, more importantly, his lack of self-knowledge. She tells her son:
Ye shall see wone here browght in such takynge
That he shall soone scantlye knowe hym sealfe.155
When Wit awakes, unaware of his transformation, he immediately approaches Lady Science and her mother Experience, boldly confident of his welcome. Faced with their reserve, lack of recognition, and finally their outright information that he is ‘fowle, dyspleasant and uglye’,156 he responds with angry incredulity. Once alone he triumphantly pulls out his mirror in order to vindicate his own idea of himself. As in the Liber apologeticus this precipitates a crisis of confusion and self-recognition which forms the turning point of the play.
Redford has not only chosen an allegory of education more limited than Chaundler’s profound spiritual archetype, but unlike his predecessor has designed his play directly for performance by schoolchildren, keeping a firm eye on stage practice.157 The result is a very much livelier, more entertaining and theatrically viable play, but one in which the ideas are handled far more lightly, and less explicitly developed. Nonetheless, many of the serious questions of self-recognition and identity raised in the Liber apologeticus also inform the mask-mirror episode in Wit and Science. Like Chaundler’s Man, Wit engages in a long soliloquy with his mirror, moving through a series of emotions and responses to his predicament, from resentful incredulity, through realisation, to humiliated and penitent self-acceptance.158 Throughout, there is a lively interplay between Wit’s idea of his self, the mask, and the mirror’s reflection. A further dimension to this confrontation of images is introduced earlier in the scene where Wit, unaware of his altered appearance, compares himself with a portrait that he had previously sent to Science, demanding, ‘What dyference betwene this and this can ye fynd?’159 Picture and ‘mask’ face each other, actualising the discrepancy between Wit as he sees himself (and once was) and as the mirror reveals he truly is.
When Wit looks in the mirror it is not, like Chaundler’s Man, because of uncertainty but in order to confirm his complacently fixed conception of himself. In his initial horror he rejects the reflection as something alien to himself, ascribing the altered image to a fault in the glass:
Hah! Goges sowle! What have we here? A dyvyll?
This glas, I se well, hath bene kept evyll.
Goges sowle, a foole! A foole, by the mas!
What a very vengeance aylth this glas?160
He sees not himself deformed, but something not himself, blaming a weakness in his reason for the ‘shamefully blotted’ reflection. But in a striking piece of stage action he soon comes to realise that it is not the mirror that is at fault:
How looke ther facis heere rownd abowte?
All fayre and cleere they, evry-chone,
And I, by the mas, a foole alone.161
Wit here turns his glass towards the audience, creating a comically uneasy theatrical effect by briefly forcing the spectators into the self-consciousness that comes from accidentally catching sight of one’s public face.162 The audience fleetingly share the mirror’s unsettling displacement of identity. This marks a step forward in Wit’s self-discovery; as medieval mirror theory suggested, he measures his view of himself against his reasoned perception of the outside world. As he steps from his self-enclosed fantasy to this contextualised view he begins to recognise and accept his true self, no longer resisting the truth revealed in the mask.
Wit’s new self-assessment projects him into a profound remorse and self-disgust which is only resolved by the entrance of Shame, who beats him until called off by Reason: physical penance seems the only way in which Wit’s psychological turmoil can be calmed. As in Everyman the processes of self-acknowledgement and penitence bring renewal. Wit’s disfigured face and clothes are not removed on stage (a more difficult procedure with face-paint than with a visor), but Reason instructs three virtuous companions to ‘Take him and trym hym in new apparell’.163 When he returns, clearly restored in both face and garments, Wit makes short work of defeating Tediousness and offering himself again to his lady. Although the whole episode is lightly handled and full of lively stage comedy, it also enacts a serious development in the hero’s understanding of himself and his nature. Mask and mirror not only reveal identity, but also enforce Wit’s awareness of it; that awareness allows him to re-shape and re-appropriate the image of his true self.
The performance of self-realisation through mask and mirror remains effective even in relatively undistinguished plays: a very late example, Barnabe Barnes’ revenge tragedy The Devil’s Charter (1607) demonstrates its continuing theatrical viability even outside the morality tradition.164 In this play the seductively evil Lucretia Borgia is sent a poisonous cosmetic lotion by one of her lovers. As she applies it in front of a mirror, she sees and feels the corrosive ointment eat into and disfigure her face. Like a morality figure, she recognises in her hideously altered face a reflection of her true moral nature:
Who painted my faire face with these foule spots,
You see them in my soule deformed blots.165
The glass of vanity shifts under our eyes into a glass of self-knowledge. Dying in agony Lucretia compares herself with Cresseid, the archetype of sinful deformity who was similarly started on a painful road to self-recognition by observing her suddenly leprous face in a mirror.166 Even in this fairly pedestrian play the conjunction of deforming mask and revealing mirror retains its theatrical and moral power.
Emblems and Drama
The masks discussed so far have belonged to a tradition that seems distinctive to the theatrical priorities of the morality drama. There are a small number of moralities, however, that introduce more learned, more self-conscious, and often more elaborate versions of visors which derive more obviously from non-dramatic emblematic traditions. These masks tend to stand somewhat separate from the dramatic action and the plays in which they appear usually indicate access to courtly, educated, or aristocratic patronage and resources.
The first morality to exploit such emblematic masks is the fifteenth-century Wisdom in which the three corrupted faculties of the Soul introduce elaborate disguisings.167 The masked dances, although wholly detachable from the rest of the play, vividly express its themes with the elaborate masks flamboyantly presenting moral ideas. The moral status of the unmasked faculties, Mind (now Maintenance), Will (Perjury), and Understanding (Fornication) is conveyed in the emblematic exactitude of the red-bearded, two-faced, and ‘wondyrfull’ visors and costumes of the dancers. Both these masks and the costly magnificence of the disguising form seem wholly appropriate for Wisdom, which as an openly learned and philosophic play, relying heavily on costly and spectacular visual effects, must have had access to the resources of a wealthy and relatively well-educated audience.168
Court records of morality performances indicate the same value for costly, spectacular, and non-naturalistic costumes. The play performed for the coronation of Mary Tudor in 1553 dressed Mankind in seven yards of purple ‘breges’ satin; even characters like Scarcity had seven yards of russet satin, and:
Sicknes, feblenes, deformitie, thre longe Gownes, one of Tawny satten, the other ashe colored satten, the other blacke satten for every of them viii yardes.169
Costuming is clearly magnificently emblematic, rather than straightforwardly representational. This apparently accompanies a readiness to recreate literary allegory and moral emblems, seen in references to roles such as Loyalty, ‘A woman with a payre of ballance’, or Labour, ‘a woman with many handes’.170 This makes the use of symbolic masks more likely, confirmed by the description of Wisdom as ‘A woman with to faces and in eache hand a glas’.171 Unfortunately the scarcity of scripts for courtly moralities makes it hard to assess the part such masks played. In the one surviving text that appears to fit the category, the late-printed Liberality and Prodigality, the evidence is inconclusive.172 Although all the characters are allegorically named some, like Prodigality and Tenacity, are effectively treated as social types. The more conventionally emblematic figures like Vanity, Fortune, and Virtue are obvious candidates for masks, being given stately and demonstrative roles with highly symbolic costumes. Vanity is dressed ‘all in feathers’, while Fortune enters ‘in her chariot drawn with Kings’ in ‘vestures wrought with gold so gorgeously’.173 There is, however, no explicit indication of masking, apart from Virtue’s ambiguous comment on Fortune’s ‘double face, disguised, false and fickle’. These emblematic, pageant-like characters make masking a distinct theatrical possibility; but that is as far as the evidence reaches.
Emblem masks were certainly used late in the period in some of Thomas Dekker’s plays performed at court. A simple but forceful paradigm of the mask of moral corruption is found in The Whore of Babylon (1607) which opposes figures of Truth and Falsehood, distinguishing them solely by their faces: the directions for the dumbshow specify ‘Falshood (attir’d as Truth is) her face spotted’.174 Masking is more fully developed in Old Fortunatus (1599) in which Dekker frames the popular tale of Fortunatus within a contest between allegorical figures of Vice and Virtue. The action introduces masks that echo those of the moralities: characters who eat apples of Vice acquire ugly faces and horns; these are removed by eating the apples of Virtue, whose motto sibi sapit emphasises the importance of self-knowledge. Virtue and Vice themselves, appearing in largely separate framing scenes, demonstrate an emblematic use of masks that reflects not so much the earlier morality tradition as the pre-occupation with role-play and ambivalent appearance of the late sixteenth century. As in metaphoric discourse, it is Vice who wears a visor, a gold face demonstrating the false allure of sin. Virtue, who ‘abhors to wear a borrowed face’ is conversely unmasked, but a fool’s coxcomb demonstrates the scorn in which she is held. These elaborate visors and costumes, and the careful explanations of their paradoxes, show the differences as well as the similarities between this more emblematic masking of the early-modern period, and the traditional techniques of the moralities.
A play written for performance in the public playhouses, but clearly influenced by civic pageantry and courtly shows, gives us another distinctively emblematic mask. We have seen how R. Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1584) introduces the morality mask at the moment of moral corruption, painting Conscience’s face from the ‘box of all abhomination’. Another of the Ladies of London, Love, is similarly deformed by a mask. Married off to Dissimulation, Love re-enters ‘with a vizard behind’. It becomes clear that she has been given a mask on the back of her head, a different version of the double-face signifying the duplicity of her marriage. As Love laments her monstrously swelling head Lucre investigates:
Is your head then swollen, good Mistress Love? I pray you let me see.
Of troth it is, behold a face that seems to smile on me:
It is fair and well-favoured with a countenance smooth and good;
Wonder is the worst, to see two faces in a hood.175
Love is then obscurely described as ‘a deformed creature much like Bifrons the base daughter of Juno’.176 These ready allusions to metaphor and classical emblem suggest a more literary understanding than one might expect from its intended popular audience. The Three Ladies of London succeeds, if not at a very high level, in incorporating the sophisticated conceptual power of the emblem mask into the performance vitality of morality action.
Conclusion
Although the moralities are not a fully masked drama, masks make an expressive contribution to their theatrical strategy. The plays draw easily on other contemporary masking traditions: they incorporate the gold-faced Gods and hideous devils of the mysteries, the conceptual conventions of emblem literature, the possibilities of disguisings. But in their most characteristic use of masks for the human protagonists the moralities establish a masking tradition of their own. These masks present not falseness or concealment but an intrinsic truth about the moral being of the wearer. Unlike the mystery visors, however, the morality mask retains a separation from the character: the truth it displays is a transient moral quality rather than a complete and essential nature. Both audience and, ultimately, mask-wearer must recognise the mask as a reflection of inner reality: yet it remains always potentially under the control of the character who wears it. This emphasises a particular conception of selfhood: by their own will and actions these characters can change the aspect of the self the mask represents; by recognising the truth of the mask they can find the power to put off its entrapment. Consequently a tension is set up between face and mask, for although the mask represents a truth about the self that cannot be denied, it is possible by changing the self to cancel the mask.
In the mystery plays it seems that mask and face were considered as one, the mask’s wearer effectively abolished. The later disguisings, conversely, depend on a deliberate tension between the wearer and the mask, a flirtation with concealed identity and a tacit invitation to penetrate the disguise. Morality masks seem different from either: a tension does exist, but between character and mask rather than performer and mask. It is a tension that depends on the very intimacy of the mask with the face, the complexity of identity. Audiences are encouraged to focus neither on the mask, nor on the face behind it, but on the relationship between the two.
Notes
1 See for example Robert Potter The English Morality Play (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); Sumiko Miyajima The Theatre of Man (Clevedon: Clevedon Printing Co, 1977); Pamela M. King ‘Morality Plays’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre edited Richard Beadle (Cambridge University Press, 1994) 240–64.
2 See Rosemary Freeman English Emblem Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948); Samuel Chew The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); The English Emblem Tradition edited Peter M. Daly and others (University of Toronto Press, 1988).
3 The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, Englisht by John Lydgate, A.D. 1426, from the French of Guillaume de DeGuileville, A.D. 1330, 1355 edited F.J. Furnivall and K.B. Locock EETS ES 77, 83, 92 (1899–1904) line 15100. See also The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode edited Avril Henry EETS 288 (1985) lines 4509–12.
4 See for example Dollimore Radical Tragedy 153–81, 249–71; Richard Hillman Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (London: Macmillan, 1997) 1–30.
5 Cesare Ripa Iconologia introduction by E. Manowsky (Hildesheim; New York: Georg Olms, 1970; facsimile reprint of edition Rome: L. Facii, 1603) 174.
6 Jan David Veridicus christianus (Antwerp: Jan Moretus, 1601) no. 38, ‘The World, the Flesh, and the Devil assault the Soul’, reproduced in Chew The Pilgrimage of Life figure 70.
7 J.J. Boissard Emblematum liber (Frankfurt: de Bry, 1593) no. xxi; reproduced in Eckhard Leuschner Persona, Larva, Maske: ikonologische Studien zum 16. bis frühen 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt and New York: P. Lang, 1997) 317–33 and figure 142.
8 See e.g. Philip Galle’s series of engravings of the Seven Deadly Sins (c.1600), where Envy, in particular, is distortedly ancient and hideous: Philip Galle VII peccatorum capitalium imagines elegantissime a Philip. Gallaeo depictae et aeri incisae (s.d. [c. 1600]), reproduced Chew The Pilgrimage of Life figure 83.
9 The Governaunce of Prynces or Pryvete of Pryveteis translated James Yonge (1422) in Three Prose Versions of the Secreta Secretorum edited Robert Steele EETS ES 74 (1898) 218. This might seem to contradict the previous assumption, but the two traditions happily coexist.
10 John Mirk Festial edited Theodor Erbe EETS ES 96 (1905) 132 line 14; Homily 30, De Festo Pasche.
11 Robert Boissard Mascarades recuillies & mises en taille douce (Strassburg, 1597) no 18.
12 Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy edited and translated S.J. Tester (Loeb; London: Heinemann, 1973) Book 4 prose 3, line 67.
13 Boissard Mascarades no. 9.
14 See Morton W. Bloomfield The Seven Deadly Sins (Michigan State College Press, 1952) especially Appendix 1.
15 Plato Timaeus translated H.D.P. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) Section 10, p.58.
16 Physiognomonica in Scriptores physiognomonici edited R. Förster, 2 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1893) 1: 1–91; chapter 4. See Elizabeth C Evans ‘Physiognomics in the Ancient World’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society NS 59: 5 (1969).
17 Giovanni Baptista della Porta De humana physiognomonia libri iiii (Vico Equense: J. Cacchius, 1586).
18 Ripa Iconologia 485.
19 See Marion Colthorpe ‘Anti-Catholic Masques Performed before Queen Elizabeth I’ Notes and Queries NS 33 (1986) 316–18; REED: Cambridge 242–3, 1217.
20 Donato Sartori and Bruno Lanata Maschera e maschere (Centro maschere e strutture gestuali; Florence: La Casa Usher, 1984) 31–8.
21 Sometimes claimed by opponents as the sponsor of New Year masking: see chapter 2 on ‘Early Masking’ 29, and note 61.
22 See Leuschner Persona, Larva, Maske figure 98; Chew The Pilgrimage of Life figures 29, 31, 54; Howard R. Patch The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927) 42–9.
23 Leuschner Persona, Larva, Maske figures 57, 58, 62.
24 Chew The Pilgrimage of Life 135–6, figure 29.
25 See above in chapter 9 on ‘Mystery Plays’ 206–7.
26 The ‘medioxes’: Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 134.
27 The ‘half-man half-death’ mask has however been effectively used as a (non-evidenced) mask for Reward in Apius and Virginia (see lines 912–1020). Reward is ambivalent, like Fortune: careful stage positioning allows Reward to show the appropriate profile to the character and/or the audience, to striking effect. ‘R.B.’ Apius and Virginia in Tudor Interludes edited Peter Happé (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) 271–317.
28 W.M.H. Hummelen De Sinnekens in het Rederijkersdrama (Groningen: Wolters, 1958) 47–8.
29 Jan van den Berghe De Wellustige Mensch (1551) in Dichten en spelen edited C. Kruyskamp (Uitgave van de Vereeniging der Antwerpsche Bibliophielen 2: 4; ’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1950). For a translation, see Peter King ‘The Voluptuous Man’ Dutch Crossing 28 (1986) 53–107; for the ‘revelation scene’ see 70–1.
30 Monstrelet Chronique 5: 302.
31 Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 116.
32 Const-thoonende Iuweel, By de loflijcke stadt Haarlem … (Zwolle: Zacharias Heyns, 1607); reproduced and discussed in B.A.M. Ramakers ‘De Const getoond: De beeldtaal van de Haarlemse rederijkerswedstrijd van 1606’ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 49 (1998) 129–83. Other ‘diabolical’ characters than the Devil himself include tSerpent (‘the Serpent’), Loon na quade Wercken (‘Reward for Evil Deeds’), and Eewige Hart (‘Eternal Pain’).
33 Guillaume de la Perrière La Theatre des bons engins (Paris: Denis Janot, 1539) no. 6.
34 Thomas Combe The Theatre of Fine Devices (London: R. Field, 1614) no. 6.
35 Wisdom line 912; John Bale Kynge Johan in Complete Plays edited Happé, 1: 49, lines 785–803; The Trial of Treasure in Robert Dodsley A Select Collection of Old Plays edited W.C. Hazlitt, 15 vols (London: 1874–76; reprinted in 7 vols New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964) 3: 277–80 (Blom 2: 277–80). For emblematic action and costuming in the moralities see Craik Tudor Interlude, passim.
36 See David Bevington From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962) 8–25; Westfall Patrons and Performance 152–7; see also the episode of the travelling players in Anthony Munday and others Sir Thomas More edited Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester University Press, 1990) Act 3 Scene 2.
37 Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh 1528–1557 edited J.D. Marwick (Edinburgh: Scottish Burgh Records Association, 1871) 198; quoted in The Works of Sir David Lindsay edited Douglas Hamer, 4 vols (Scottish Text Society; Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1931–36) 4: 142.
38 Thomas Chaundler Liber apologeticus de omni statu humanae naturae edited D. Enright-Clark Shoukri (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1974); for title-page illustrations see e.g. Everyman edited A.C. Cawley (Manchester University Press, 1961) frontispiece and 39–40; The Interlude of Youth edited Ian Lancashire in Two Tudor Interludes (Manchester University Press, 1980) frontispiece and 1–2.
39 Bevington From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe 86–113.
40 See chapter 9 on ‘Mystery Plays’ 219–20.
41 P. Terentii aphri comicorum elegantissimi comedie edited Joachim Badius Ascensius (Paris: Nicolaus Depratis, 1508) Avir. See chapter 11 on ‘Ideas and Theories’ 294–5.
42 Edward Burns Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (London: Macmillan, 1990) 53.
43 On morality characterisation see Carpenter ‘Morality Play Characters’ 18–28; for character splitting see Craik Tudor Interlude 41–2.
44 Thomas Lupton All for Money edited Ernst Vogel Shakespeare Jahrbuch 40 (1904).
45 See DeGuileville Pèlerinage translated Lydgate, lines 4006; 8733; 14763. For illustrations see for example V.A. Kolve Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (London: Edward Arnold, 1984) figs 23, 29, 30. Such effects were not wholly unknown in performance, an elaborate example is quoted in Muir ‘Playing God’ 45; but this is confined to static pageant.
46 See for example J.J. Boissard Emblematum liber nos xxi and xxxv.
47 John Skelton ‘The Bowge of Court’ in The Complete English Poems edited John Scattergood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) 46; Magnificence edited Paula Neuss (Manchester University Press, 1980).
48 ‘The Bowge of Court’ lines 426–8.
49 ‘The Bowge of Court’ lines 709–10.
50 See Whiting Proverbs, Sentences and Proverbial Phrases 170: F13.
51 Burns Character: Acting and Being 43.
52 Actually a blackened face: see 272–4.
53 Stephen J. Greenblatt Renaissance Self-Fashioning 1–9; Dollimore Radical Tragedy 153–81; Belsey Subject of Tragedy 13–54.
54 Wisdom lines 351–3.
55 Lewis Wager The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene edited F.J. Carpenter (The Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, 1902) line 47.
56 Marie Magdalene lines 44–7.
57 Phoebe S. Spinrad The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, [1987]) 1–26; Chew The Pilgrimage of Life 233–5.
58 The Dance of Death edited Florence Warren with introduction and notes by Beatrice White EETS OS 181.
59 These have been rather over-enthusiastically antedated in an attempt to prove that the frescoes represented a real dance. The ghastly apparition at the 1285 wedding feast of Alexander III of Scotland, described in the sixteenth century by Hector Boece as ‘ane ymage of ane dede man, nakitt of flesche & lyre, with bair banys’, has been taken as the earliest record of a theatrical Dance of Death: The Chronicles of Scotland compiled by Hector Boece and translated into Scots by John Bellenden (1531) edited Edith C. Batho and H. Winifred Husbands (Scottish Text Society 3rd Series 15; Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1941) 2: 244. However, a 1440s account records it as a genuine spectre portending the king’s imminent untimely death, not as an entertainment: Walter Bower Scotichronicon general editor D.E.R. Watt, 9 vols (Aberdeen University Press, 1987-) Volume 5 edited Simon Taylor, D.E.R. Watt, and Brian Scott (1990) 418–19.
60 REED: Cambridge 146–7, 161, 197, 220; Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 133,135.
61 N-Town Play 197; Play 20 line 272.
62 Stern Medieval Theater in Castile 99: this, at the coronation festivities of the King of Aragon in 1414, antedates the Dance of Death, and belonged to a different type of scenario; Lives of the Painters translated Hinds 2: 178, see chapter 3 on ‘Carnival’ 59–60.
63 Paul Zinsli Manuels Totentanz (Bern: Haupt, 1979).
64 H. Kasser ‘Notizen über dramatische Aufführungen und militãrischen Jugenunterricht im alten Bern’ Anzeiger für Schweizerische Altertumskunde herausgegeben vom Schweizerischen Landesmuseum NS 5:1 (1903) 175–86; Peter Schibler ‘Vom Kultspiel zum Kleintheater’ Berner Jahrbuch (1983) 5–10.
65 REED: Cambridge 161.
66 The Pride of Life in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments edited Norman Davis EETS SS 1 (1970); The Castle of Perseverance in The Macro Plays edited Mark Eccles EETS 262 (1969).
67 Castle of Perseverance line 2790.
68 Everyman edited Cawley, frontispiece. For further discussion see Spinrad The Summons of Death 70–73.
69 Everyman line 114.
70 Everyman lines 150–52, 161–4.
71 Castle of Perseverance line 199; Wisdom lines 324, 380; REED: Cambridge 127.
72 Mankind line 461.
73 Mankind lines 555–6 and 589.
74 See Peter Happé ‘The Devil in the Interludes, 1550–1577’ Medieval English Theatre 11 (1992) 42–56.
75 John Melton Astrologaster (London: B. Alsop, 1620) 31.
76 Ben Jonson The Staple of News edited Devra Rowland Kifer (London: Edward Arnold, 1976) Act I, Intermean, line 33.
77 Thomas Garter The Comedy of Virtuous and Godly Susanna edited B. Ifor Evans and W.W. Greg (London: Malone Society, 1937).
78 Ulpian Fulwell Like will to Like in Tudor Interludes edited Happé, 319–64, at 324–5: lines 72, 89, and 96.
79 All for Money lines 445, 484.
80 See chapter 13 on ‘Terminology’ s.v. larva 336–44, especially 338, 342.
81 An image adapted from the traditional Temptation in the Wilderness scenes, reinforced by post-Reformation anti-Catholic cartoons.
82 All for Money line 378.
83 All for Money line 1439.
84 William Wager The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art edited R. Mark Benbow (London: Edward Arnold, 1968).
85 The Longer Thou Livest line 1759.
86 The Longer Thou Livest line 1807.
87 George Wapull The Tide Tarrieth No Man edited Ernst Rühl Shakespeare Jahrbuch 43 (1907).
88 The Tide Tarrieth No Man lines 1582, 1609.
89 Compare Conscience in Apius and Virginia Scene 4, line 565.
90 Redford Wit and Science in Tudor Interludes edited Happé; The Marriage of Wit and Science edited Arthur Brown (Malone Society Reprints; Oxford University Press, 1961); Merbury Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom.
91 Wit and Science lines 140, 964.
92 Wit and Wisdom stage direction at line 905.
93 This type of giant, which needs to engage in some strenuous stage action, does not really have much to do with the giants of popular processions, which are often built upon wooden frames carried (at some physical cost) by bearers, and are only capable of a stately promenade.
94 See Bernard Spivack Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958) passim; Peter Happé ‘The Vice: a Checklist and an Annotated Bibliography’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 22 (1979) 17–35 and ‘“The Vice” and the Popular Theatre, 1547–80’ in Poetry and Drama 1570–1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks edited Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond (London: Methuen, 1981) 13–31.
95 Thomas Tusser Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry edited W. Payne and S.J. Herrtage (London: English Dialect Society, 1878) no. 64 line 19.
96 Wisdom stage directions at lines 324, 380. The same technique appears in the spelen van sinne: see Hummelen Sinnekens 48–50.
97 Respublica edited W.W. Greg EETS 226 (1952) lines 414–16.
98 Bale Kynge Johan lines 940–1085; David Lindsay Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis edited Roderick Lyall (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1989) lines 716–805.
99 Marie Magdalene line 915.
100 Marie Magdalene lines 919–20.
101 Marie Magdalene line 1530.
102 Hillman Self-Speaking 24–30.
103 New Custom in Dodsley Old Plays 3: 1–52 (Blom 2: 1–52).
104 See e.g. Thrie Estaitis line 729–31.
105 Thrie Estaitis line 1314. Verity is mocked for her ‘yealow locks’ (line 1160); records of costumes for the play include ‘twa angell hair’: Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh 198–9, quoted Hamer Works 4: 142.
106 R. Wilson The Three Lords and Ladies of London in Dodsley Old Plays 6: 431 (Blom 3:431).
107 See chapter 9 on ‘Mystery Plays’ 220–25: see also 194–6.
108 REED: Cambridge 162.
109 Wisdom stage directions at lines 1 and 16.
110 New Custom lines 31–2.
111 Thomas Dekker Old Fortunatus in Dramatic Works edited Fredson Bowers, 4 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1953–61) 1: Act 1 Scene 3, line 74.
112 Ralph Willis Mount Tabor (London: R. B., 1639) 110–14; quoted F.P. Wilson The English Drama 1485–1585 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) 76–7.
113 Boethius Consolation of Philosophy 334–5: Book 4 prose 3. See above 238, and PLATE 25.
114 Jacob de Gheyn II (1565–1629) The Masks (set of engravings: Leiden: J. de Gheyn II, [1595–96]) frontispiece. These were copied by Robert Boissard for his Mascarades (see 235).
115 REED: Cambridge 187.
116 Robert Henryson The Testament of Cresseid in Poems edited Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) lines 344–57.
117 Wisdom line 902.
118 Wisdom stage direction at line 1064.
119 John Bale A Comedy concemynge thre lawes of nature, Moses and Christ in The Complete Plays of John Bale edited Peter Happé (Cambridge: Brewer, 1986) 2.
120 Thre Lawes lines 683–4.
121 Thre Lawes lines 752–3, 757–8.
122 Beunans Meriasek edited Whitley Stokes (London: Trubner, 1872) line 1347.
123 It is possible that Conscience in Apius and Virginia wears a diseased mask: ‘I spotted am by wilfull will / By lawles love and luste’ (lines 462–3): but this may again be purely a verbal metaphor.
124 Thre Lawes lines 1884–5.
125 Wisdom lines 900–1.
126 See Langland Piers Plowman B-Text Passus 9 line 9.
127 Three Ladies of London 338.
128 Three Ladies of London 339.
129 Hillman Self-Speaking 41–73.
130 See especially Herbert Grabes The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance translated Gordon Collier (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
131 Alain de Lille Ars praedicandi PL 210: 118; translated G. Evans The Art of Preaching (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981) 29; Langland Piers Plowman B-Text Passus 11 line 9.
132 Grabes The Mutable Glass 48–61; Hillman Self-Speaking 43–8, 69–73.
133 York Plays 184: Play 21 line 93; Henryson Testament of Cresseid line 457. In both these instances mirrors are also connected with remembrance.
134 Joannes Sambucus Emblemata (Antwerp: C. Plantin, 1566) no. 196. See also Chew The Pilgrimage of Life sv mirror.
135 See Chew The Pilgrimage of Life 82.
136 See Émile Mâle L’Art religieux de la fin du Moyen Age en France (Paris: Armand Colin, fifth revised edition 1949) 324–5; also Chew The Pilgrimage of Life 136.
137 Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 245.
138 Marie Magdalene lines 1017–18.
139 Marie Magdalene lines 1055–8.
140 For the following discussion see Sarah Carpenter ‘Masks and Mirrors: Questions of Identity in Medieval Morality Drama’ Medieval English Theatre 13 (1991) 7–17.
141 Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy: Paradiso translated Charles Singleton (Bollingen Series 80; Princeton University Press, 1975) Canto 30: 85–91. We are grateful to Nick Havely for this reference.
142 Liber apologeticus 70.
143 Liber apologeticus 80.
144 Liber apologeticus 82.
145 The image of the shattered mirror was familiar in the Middle Ages as an analogy for transubstantiation: each of the mirror’s fragments continues to reflect a whole image, as each fragment of the Eucharist contains in itself the true body of Christ (see for example Alan de Lille De fide catholica contra haereticos Lib. 1 Cap. 58, PL 210: 362; Lydgate Pilgrimage of the Life of Man lines 6006–12). While this analogy is not explicitly evoked here, the sense of the broken mirror as a resonant image for complex questions of spiritual identity informs the scene.
146 See Peter Ure ‘The Looking-glass of Richard II’ Philological Quarterly 34 (1955); Grabes The Mutable Glass 214–16.
147 Lukas Furtenagel, portrait of Hans Burgkmair and his wife, Vienna; reproduced in Charles Cutler Northern Painting from Pucelle to Breughel (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968) figure 541.
148 DeGuileville Le Pèlerinage translated Lydgate, lines 22484–518.
149 Liber apologeticus 100.
150 In the two following Wit and Science plays the same action is used, but increasingly less is made of the mask-mirror episode. The scene remains, but with a gradually decreasing hold on the subtleties both of the staging and of the ideas involved.
151 Wit and Science lines 1–2.
152 Wit and Science lines 6–7.
153 Wit and Science line 819.
154 Wit and Science lines 587–9.
155 Wit and Science lines 568–9.
156 Wit and Science line 778.
157 Westfall Patrons and Performance 104.
158 For a discussion of the episode see Hillman Self-Speaking 70–3.
159 Wit and Science line 776.
160 Wit and Science lines 802–5.
161 Wit and Science lines 810–12.
162 The technique is similar to the dramatic disturbance created by Virginia Woolf at the end of Between the Acts.
163 Wit and Science line 879.
164 Barnabe Barnes The Devil’s Charter edited Jim C. Pogue (New York: Garland, 1980).
165 Devil’s Charter lines 2281–2.
166 See Annette Drew-Bear ‘Face-Painting in Renaissance Tragedy’ Renaissance Drama NS 12 (1981) 71–93.
167 For discussion of these disguisings see chapter 6 on ‘Disguisings’ 143–4.
168 For the auspices of the play see for example Westfall Patrons and Performance 52–4.
169 Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 289.
170 Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 245.
171 See above 238–9.
172 The Contention Between Liberality and Prodigality edited W.W. Greg (Malone Society Reprints; Oxford University Press, 1913) B3v–B4r: text 1600, performed 1570s.
173 Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 342.
174 Thomas Dekker The Whore of Babylon in Dramatic Works edited Fredson Bowers, 4 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1955) 2: Act 4 Scene 1 line 1.
175 Three Ladies of London 359.
176 Three Ladies of London 363.
