Masque

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 367, 5 July 1946, Page 10

Masque

HE Court Masque, latest treated in the English Theatre, BBC series, was a highly refined and specialised form of entertainment, aimed at providing diversion for the nobility and gentry.

The BBC treatment rightly stressed the Masque’s main claim to fame, that it coincided with the great age of English music between the Armada and the Civil War and gave that music a vehicle. For the rest, the programme made much of the ingenuity and beauty of the spectacles and stage devices involved (bringing one listener, it must be confessed uneasy thoughts of the Messrs. Goldwyn and Ziegfield); and continued in the determinedly proletarian strain of their earlier numbers. "It's -all very well, yer know,’ said the 17th Century stagemanager, "but the people want something more real. It’s all very lovelylike a dream--but dreams don’t last." This is true enough, in the sense that after Elizabeth the English theatre tended to become an aristocratic hothouse; but I question whether this is the sole criterion. Granted that this art was exclusive and sophisticated, it was still in its particular line the best of its day (why, I wonder, were Milton’s Comus and Shakespeare’s Tempest not mentioned?); and it must often enough have happened that an art-form or idiom of refinement grew among the nobility and thence descended to the people. An example, recounted by James Agate, is that of the literary gent who asked the navvy if he was going on all night breaking up the pavement with his pneumatic drill. The navvy said "Definitely!" Seriously though, growth among the people and participation in their life is not art’s only criterion.