Masked & Bared

The Eloquence of Masques! What need of prose

Or verse, or Sense t'express Immortal you!

You are the Spectacles of State!

Thus Poet Ben Jonson, with as much irony as admiration, honored the costly pageants known as masques and performed at the courts of Britain's James I and Charles I. The happenings of their day, masques were part allegorical or pastoral drama, and part dance; the participants were actors, mimes, musicians, lords and ladies of the court, and some times even the reigning monarch himself. Jonson wrote some two dozen such verse spectacles, but his sprightly dialogues and ballads were all too often lost amid the splendor of costumes, sets and elaborate stage effects dreamed up by the Florenz Ziegfeld of the Stuart court, Inigo Jones.

Banished Burly. In 1631, in the granddaddy of all showbiz altercations, Jones and Jonson split (the argument, naturally, concerned who should get top billing). But so popular was Jones with Connoisseur King Charles that Jonson was forced to retire from court. Jones continued to rule as the arbiter of taste--until, with the Puritan revolution, he probably landed in prison and eventually an obscure grave. Plentiful evidence of his flamboyant wit and stagecraft can be seen in an exhibit of 119 drawings of stage sets, props and costumes from the Duke of Devon shire's collection at Chatsworth, currently on display at Washington's National Gallery.

The exhibit includes small models of sets, assembled under the direction of Chatsworth's keeper, Thomas S. Wragg, but the drawings more nearly illustrate why a contemporary observed that Jones, "in designing with his pen, was not to be equalled by whatsoever great masters in his time for boldness, softness, sweetness and sureness of touch." The son of a Smithfield clothworker, Inigo Jones was trained as a painter, studied in Italy, and was largely responsible for putting England back into the mainstream of Renaissance cul ture, from which it had been isolated by the Reformation. Appointed the Crown's surveyor-general in 1615, Jones turned into an architect of note, designing the portico to St. Paul's Cathedral and the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall with the serene neoclassicism of Italy's Palladio, thus banishing forever burly Tudor beams and gables.

Ougly Hell. As master of the court revels from 1605 onwards, Jones revolutionized English stage techniques, importing the Italian proscenium arch and exiling the simple "wooden O" of Shakespeare's stage for three centuries. From Florence, he adapted stage sets that consisted of serried ranks of flats painted in perspective, with a distant vista on the backdrop, "the whole worke shooting downewards," as Jonson said, "which caught the eye afarre off with a wandring beauty."

Jones delighted in intricate stage machinery, created supernatural effects ranging from the mouth of an "ougly Hell" that shot flames to a "heaven opening," full of deities and a celestial chorus. He specially enjoyed sketching extravagant costumes for the court ladies, most of which he designed so that the ladies were prettily, if ingenuously, exposed, wearing at most diaphanous veils across the bosom. Seventeenth century ladies, however, were an imperious lot, and had no compunctions about altering their dress to suit themselves. History does not record how many of them actually chose to turn up bare-breasted at the festivities.

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