Renaissance Masque and The Tempest
Andrea Hargrove

According to the Revels Accounts, which logged court festivities, King James saw The Tempest on Hollowmas Nyght (November 1) of 1611. This is the first recorded performance, and one of two performances scholars are aware of which happened in the lifetime of its author, William Shakespeare. The other, also at court, celebrated the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of Bohemia (“Performance”). In England in Jacobean times, the intermezzo masque was an elaborate form of entertainment for aristocrats, enjoyable largely because it was audience-interactive (Demaray 47). The nobles themselves had a silent part as dancers, while professionals played music, sang, and/or acted. Commoners, meanwhile, had carnival-style masquerades. These noisy, colorful events featured men and women in bizarre disguises. Under this anonymity, the people freely parodied politics, society, and conventions (Bristol 70). Nothing was sacred. Many of Shakespeare’s plays, therefore, incorporate elements of the masque, as something that the whole audience would be familiar with, regardless of class.

In The Tempest, specifically, the betrothal of Miranda and Ferdinand features as high sort of masque where goddesses perform. Then strange Shapes perform an “antimasque,” or a show of disorder much like a carnival, while serving a banquet to the King and his company (Schelling 93). In both cases, the masques mark Prospero’s celebrations. The first prepares for his only child’s wedding, and the second preempts his return to civilization and power.
Besides this, Prospero conducts the whole play as a masque, or a series of mini-masques. He employs many spirits as his actors – often disguised as creatures such as hounds – and Ariel is his star. Prospero uses these masques to get the attention of his audience in order to teach them a lesson in karma (Holland 311). Ariel (at Prospero’s instruction) reports the moral very bluntly to the wicked Antonio and his confederates. “You are three men of sin, whom Destiny… the never-surfeited sea hath caused to belch up you, and on this island where man doth not inhabit” (Shakespeare III.iii.53-57). In other words, Antonio sinned against the natural order by overthrowing his brother, and “destiny” is punishing him. Like Prospero, Shakespeare delivers similar, straightforward speeches in many of his plays, not just The Tempest. Also like Prospero, he uses noise, color, and wit to bring us in and springs a moral on us. The spectacle grabs the audience’s attention to make the message more palatable.

Both Shakespeare and Prospero avail themselves of special effects that would have been advanced for the time. Besides causing the great titular tempest, Prospero has Ariel distract the castaways by pretending to be fire, mimicking their voices, turning into a Harpy, and invisibly playing music. He does all of this dramatically, playing with the audience’s emotions. For example, Ariel vanishes in thunder and the strange Shapes appear immediately after, dancing to soft music in a vivid contrast (III.iii.82-83). Shakespeare, meanwhile, used these same devices for his own purposes. Of course, had more to work with on his home stage than at court. On the court stage, which he may not have used for his court performances, the most he could do would be to change scenery. The Globe, on the other hand, had trap doors to ascend and descend through. Shakespearean scholar C. Walter Hodges even suggests that the Bard may have even had flying machines to assist the winged Ariel (Orgel 1).

Everything about the play and masques was so weird and wonderful that one book was even called “Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness.” Its author, John Demaray, highlights many notable aspects of the masque as incorporated into The Tempest, especially the artifice of it all. Other authors that I’ve encountered briefly note how in a masque a person’s disguise equals his identity (Bristol 70). Demaray takes a more in-depth approach to how Shakespeare “influenced by masques – dramatized the sudden, fifth-act unmasking of characters and their final movement from realms of artifice, illusion, or dream into the “actual” society of the theatrical world” (46). (This prepares the audience for their return to the real world.) Disguised noblemen, especially, were stock characters in Elizabethan intermezzo masques, as were sorcerers (though the two were not necessarily combined). The sorcerers appeared due to a public interest in magic. King James even purported to be an expert on this subject, so it made sense that popular playwrights like Shakespeare and his rival, Ben Jonson, both took advantage of this, composing several plays including an element of witchcraft (30).

The Tempest does not just have masque characters, though, it even has a classic masque plot structure to give it a scholarly aspect. It goes: prologue, protasis, epitasis, catastrophe. These terms date back to the Latin plays but were arcs of action used by Shakespeare and others to put intellectual playgoers at ease. The term “prologue” is still used today, but not the others. They respectively indicate the introduction of characters and plot, the main storyline, and the conclusion, which can be either funny or dramatic (36). In The Tempest, the very first scene is the prologue, which contains the shipwreck. This has nothing to do with the actual plot, but it sets the stage. The rest of Act I and Act II introduce main characters and their various predicaments on the island. The next two acts have characters traipsing about the island under Prospero’s influence, and the final act sees Prospero bring everything to its happy resolution. Ariel is free, the castaways are saved, Miranda and Ferdinand are engaged, and Prospero himself gets his dukedom back.

Other kinds of intellectuals, political aficionados, also get their red meat from Shakespeare’s masque. Much like today’s movies contain references to popular culture and current events, Shakespeare’s Tempest includes references to real-world happenings. The play was, as previously mentioned, written around the time of a celebrity’s marriage. This made weddings like the one in the play chic. Besides this, some scholars believe that Prospero, with all of his strengths and flaws, represents King James as a monarch (Bevington and Holbrook 221). The play even references the ongoing debates between Catholics and Protestants, as one of the major themes is the forgiveness of wrongs (238). The lines that end the play are:
“Now I want sprits to enforce, art to enchant, and my ending is despair, unless I be relieved in prayer, which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.” (Shakespeare V.v.13-20) That word “indulgence” both begs the audience’s approval for the play and references the Catholic term for the forgiveness a church member gets from his priest after confessing his sins. Additionally, Prospero’s colonization of the island and conquering of the exotic native, Caliban, reminds the Englishman of the colonization of the New World, especially the members of the Virginia Company who were part of his audience (Sturgess 74). All of them would be familiar with the recent shipwreck of members of that same company, so the opening shipwreck would strike a familiar chord. Clearly, Shakespeare’s multidimensional view of the world shows through in every scene, and he seems to revel in the complexity of masquing.

Unfortunately, the masques within his Tempest do not have time to develop much of themes or a story arc. The one accompanying the King’s banquet, especially, could only convey an invitation to eat. The goddesses at least tell a story. These masques – the dancing and storytelling – represent the pieces of courtly masques which contain performances. Moreover they contain magical characters, in keeping with the fantastic theme.

This element of fantasy, by the way, is not only a part of English intermezzi. This part of the masque was shared by the continentals in their tradition of balet de cour (the ballets of court). Predominantly used by the French and known for its variety in songs, dances, scenes, and apparitions, Shakespeare incorporates several continental elements into his masque (Demaray 49). This way, even foreign dignitaries could enjoy familiarity when watching his play at court. What might have been most obvious to these visitors would have been the subplot involving Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano. A common plot device in balet de cour falsely elevates somewhat malicious characters to a godlike status (54). In this case, Caliban worshiped the other two (especially Trinculo) for their wine and their relative kindness in comparison to Prospero. They willingly embrace this charade. Prospero puts an end to it and unmasks the frauds, leaving Caliban to feel ashamed of himself. The poor servant laments: “I’ll be wise hereafter, and seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass was I, to take this drunkard for a god, and worship this dull fool” (Shakespeare V.i.298-231). Prospero takes this whining in stride and returns the play to its predominantly intermezzo status.

By combining tradition and novelty, and incorporating elements of the masque into The Tempest, Shakespeare was doing what he did best: pleasing the masses. One of the reasons Shakespeare is such a well-known author today is because he was tremendously popular in his own time. He catered to Englishmen and foreigners, noble and common, academic and uneducated – a commercial audience. He could write humorous, romantic, dramatic, and tragic elements all into the same play. In other words, he really knew how to sell out a show.


Works Cited
Bevington, David and Peter Holbrook, ed. The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Bristol, Michael D. Carnival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen, Inc, 1985.

Demaray, John G. Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1998.

Holland, Norman N. The Shakespearean Imagination. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964.

Orgel, Stephen. Introduction. The Tempest. By William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

“Performance History.” Exploring Shakespeare. Royal Shakespeare Company. 12 October 2009. <http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/tempest/2339_2346.htm>

Schelling, Felix E. Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642. New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co, 1908. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc, 1994.

Sturgess, Keith. Jacobean Private Theatre.