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COPYRIGHT 2006 Adam Mickiewicz University
ABSTRACT
Composed of signs taken from various art disciplines, the seventeenth-century masque involved a considerable amount of interaction between its constituents. Among these, word and image seem to have been particularly interdependent. One of the key aspects of the relationship between the two media in question was that the masque's frequently obscure visual element conditioned the explicative character of the verbal component. This paper attempts to classify the elucidative passages to be found in masques: it shows that these referred both to the signalled fiction and to the material structure of the scenic arrangement. Moreover, the study proves that these comments, essentially devised to clarify pictorial signs, fulfilled a variety of other functions: for instance, they served as ostensive markers, invested the scenic composition with temporal qualities, and emphasised the close connection between the stage set and the figure.
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It was a common practice in Renaissance portraiture to supply sitters with symbols of the arts as their attributes. In some sense, the performative genre referred to as the Stuart masque functioned as such a tribute, expressed by means of all the creative disciplines that were at its makers' disposal. This type of seventeenth-century entertainment served to illustrate the glory of the monarch, who was to be perceived, as stated in Ben Jonson's Oberon, the fairy prince (1611), as "the wonder ... of tongues, of ears, of eyes" (Spencer--Wells 1967: 59). (1) A multimedia structure meant to express that overwhelming praise, the masque soon became an arena for the complex dialogue between a variety of artistic structures. This is to say that disciplines as diverse as architecture, painting, music, dance or poetry began to influence and complement one another, generating a variety of new messages, which would not be transmitted if any of these constituents were removed from the entertainment.
Long recognised as one of the constitutive aspects of the genre, this hybrid quality has nonetheless received surprisingly little in-depth analysis; consequently, the scope of its impact on the shape and informative potential of individual signs used in the masque remains largely unexplored. One of the possible reasons behind this omission is that, for all the comments likening the Stuart entertainment to an ideal Gesamtkunstwerk, the most common way to approach it has always been to disentangle its multimedia structure and then to deal with just one of its numerous components at a time, removing language, stage design, music or dance from their poly-systemic context. What is thus overlooked is the extent to which each of the elements listed above was actually shaped by and adjusted to the remaining ones. The present study, in its turn, will focus on one of such interdependencies, which, although it surely does not exhaust the subject of cross-disciplinary combinations used in the masque, is nevertheless highly representative of the genre discussed, emerging as it did between its two most intricately connected components, namely word and image. A crucial aspect of this complex interaction was that the linguistic medium supplemented and, not infrequently, also counterbalanced visual splendour, an inherent feature of the masque. This was effected by means of certain highly conventionalised linguistic structures, which this analysis will attempt to classify.
In his speech on the splendid scenic construction of the Throne of Beauty, Vulturnus, in Jonson's The masque of beauty (1608), asks: "But why do I describe what all must see?" (Orgel 1969: 66). Rhetorical as it is, this question deserves to be answered, for it could be posed with regard to almost every masque staged for the court of James and Charles I. Even a brief survey of the masques' printed accounts, customarily composed after the actual performance, will indicate that the Stuart productions abounded in speeches and songs explicating the visual element. This peculiar feature of the genre's linguistic material was conditioned by the nature of the images that were specially devised for this type of entertainment. The maximum aesthetic appeal of its visual portion, which manifested itself in all kinds of pictorial opulence, including a profusion of colours, textures and types of lighting, had to be accompanied by a comparable intellectual input in order to obtain the high degree of sophistication appropriate for the occasion. That is why each court production contained a large number of references to a variety of representative codes. Drawn from classical sources, contemporary emblem books, various iconographic manuals, native artistic traditions and those of Italy and France, the masque's visual element must have been the quintessence of eclecticism. Unsurprisingly, the surviving costume and setting designs may strike the modern reader as mysterious and undecipherable; one has to study the accounts included in the printed versions to understand their content. In fact there exists considerable evidence suggesting that their actual scenic realisations proved equally unclear for the contemporary audience. (2)
The requirement of intellectual sophistication could have destroyed the form, as any performance exclusively based on such intricate visual symbolism would cease to convey meaning. It would hence fail to become a work of art, for each artistic structure should, at least to some extent, be self-explanatory. The solution adopted by the masque to avoid this obscurity was rather simple: its erudite images could be comprehended in the presence of other systems, which would clarify their meanings. As language is the basic clarifying agent of human communication, it was a natural choice for the genre. Consequently, numerous verbally elucidated meanings were introduced into the actual performance. One method of doing this was to include such information in the figures' conversations that the spectators could simply "overhear"; another was to enlighten the audience directly by having gods and personified abstractions address them. Such condescension towards those members of the audience whose knowledge of the contemporary cultural codes was insufficient formed something of a theatrical counterpart to the learned glosses that Jonson placed in his printed masques, where he laboriously annotated his sources and explained the allegories used.
Its presence imposed by the masque's visual content, verbal explication became an essential element of each court performance. Obviously, this requirement had a bearing on the style of speech used in the entertainment: the linguistic portion of the masque proper (3) had to be so modelled as to fulfil its clarifying function most effectively. This type of speech was not a system focused on dynamism, irregularity or true dialogue; rather, it was one centred on stasis, harmony and monologue, or at most on a dialogue with an already preordained ending. Consequently, the verbal portion of the genre was mostly declarative in character, composed of long and detailed descriptions of images, usually narrative and essentially neutral in relation to the action. This type of language was used not to create fiction but to reflect whatever fiction had already been signalled visually. The verbal component of the Stuart masque, at least within the masque proper, was hence essentially dominated by ekphrasis. (4)
By now we should be able to answer Vulturnus's question: he describes what all must see because the entertainment itself requires this of him. The redundancy involved in rephrasing verbally what has already been suggested pictorially, which worries him so, is fully justifiable if one regards the introduction of such repetitive, not to say tautological, linguistic passages into the performance as a means of clarifying its message and intensifying its aesthetic appeal. Moreover, the phenomenon discussed has a solid historical grounding, for it was as much the inner requirements of the form as the general taste of the epoch that made verbal explanation essential. As a...
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