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  • The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music
  • Lauren Shohet (bio)
The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. By Barbara Ravelhofer . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Illus. Pp. xvi + 318. $99.00 cloth.

This book offers a scrupulously researched addition to early modern theater history. For students of the masque, this book offers a valuable supplement to literary analyses. Ravelhofer's discussions of costume, lighting, and dance in the masque will also prove useful to broader studies of early modern performance practice. Particularly commendable is her commitment to situating English masque within European contexts (extending east to the Ottoman Empire). The international character of the royal families who commissioned masques, the diplomatic corps who attended them, and the professional musicians and dance masters who staged them is well known, but Ravelhofer's broad-based study makes us realize how incompletely this acknowledged cosmopolitanism has inflected most studies of the genre. Ravelhofer's sources—letters, philosophical treatises, production notes, and financial records from all over Europe—are impressively varied, and her suggestions about a "pan-European discourse" (26) in which masque dance, iconography, costume, and music participate are compelling.

The first two sections of the book treat dance and costume; a third undertakes case studies of four seventeenth-century English masques. Exploring dance and costume, Ravelhofer is faced with two problems: the impermanence of evidence and, often, the durability of sometimes hasty inferences drawn by previous scholars. Where performance practice is irrecoverable, Ravelhofer does not hesitate to speculate. But her guesses are based on a much wider range of information than the [End Page 553] positions she critiques, and her speculation is always flagged as such, with cautious inferences across time, national boundaries, and performance circumstances.

The book's section on dance includes methodological reflection, as well as scrupulous investigation of theatrical and nontheatrical sources for English masque practice. Ravelhofer details available evidence for a range of questions about the relationships between country dances and their adaptations for the masque, the differences among national styles, the precise nature of specific dance steps, and the size of the dancing space for particular masques. Revealing the kind of detail that is available to the industrious researcher, this study should improve the state of the field; even if her encyclopedic descriptions sometimes favor description too heavily over analysis, her undogmatic approach allows Ravelhofer to sketch out multiple hypotheses from her data.

The section on costume surveys early modern systems for producing, storing, recirculating, and interpreting masque costumes. Aristocratic masque costumes enjoyed afterlives in portraits and perhaps, under certain circumstances, they were retailored for court wear ("translat[ing] theatrical into stately costume" [149]). Ravelhofer's investigation of costume production confirms earlier suggestions that costume design was an arena in which patrons exercised substantial initiative. Ravelhofer adds insights about material theater history, discussing preproduction timetables (rushed, as ever), transportation and communication between the City and Whitehall, and complex accounting for masque expenses among royal bursaries. This investigation also positions Ravelhofer to offer shrewd local readings: for instance, how the possible reuse of courtly costumes by the Egerton brothers in Milton's provincial Ludlow masque could visually blur the text's distinctions between the sober brothers and Comus's courtly band, while the garments' mock-Tudor design visually reinforced Milton's Spenserian echoes (147). Chapter 6, on the fascinating topic of "The Costume in Motion," considers costumes as "Colours and Lights"; Ravelhofer's wealth of information, which outlines intriguingly complex overlays of cultural, gender, and semiotic systems, merits further consideration.

In the book's final section, Ravelhofer's case studies treat Jonson's Jacobean Masque of Queenes (1609) and Oberon (1611), Carew's Caroline Coelum Britannicum, and—in a gloriously unusual move—an English masque intended to be produced in Constantinople in 1650. In discussing the three court masques, her analysis of color and movement always adds to our understanding of the masques' operations and often includes insights uniquely enabled by her approach. For example, Ravelhofer's emphasis on visual structure allows her to contextualize animal imagery in Oberon—a masque Jonson wrote for Prince Henry—within the spectacles that marked Henry's public life. The Carew chapter augments available evidence on how we...

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