Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/74

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��POEMS WRITTEN AT HORTON

��ARCADES AND COMUS

��In order to understand the task which Milton set himself in the Arcades and in Comus, it will be necessary to glance for a moment at the history of the dramatic form which it represents. The English masque, though it received modifications from native sources, was in the main an Italian product. The southern love of spectacle, united with the Renaissance enthusiasm for classical learning, developed in Italy during the six- teenth century a peculiar species of enter- tainment, the nearest analogue to which in our own time and country is perhaps the annual Mardi-gras procession at New Or- leans. Sometimes the Italian pageants took this precise form of a procession of gorgeously decorated cars moving through the city streets, bearing groups of symbolic figures. Sometimes, on the temporary stage of a ducal ball-room, they took the form of a more coherent series of tableaux, a kind of masque-pageant enlivened by music and dumb-show. Sometimes a con- nected story was acted out, with elaborate stage devices, and choric and lyric inter- ludes. All these entertainments shared alike the qualities of spectacular gorgeous- ness and pseudo-classic symbolism. The mythology of Greece and Rome was ran- sacked for stories which could be suggested by picturesque groups of figures without much action ; and upon the devising and mounting of these groups were lavished all the devices of the poet, the sculptor, the engineer, and the costumer. Architects like Palladio did not disdain to design the stage-settings ; masters of color like Tin- toretto and Veronese painted the scenery ; mechanicians like Brunelleschi arranged the machinery j distinguished musicians

��and choreographs took charge of the dances and songs which enriched the meagre ac- tion. All this of course made the masque- pageant an expensive form of diversion, open only to rich municipalities, to great guilds or societies, and to courts.

It was as an adjunct to courtly merry- makings that the masque proper chiefly flourished. Just as the masque-pageant added to the decorative and mimetic ele- ments of the simple pageant the beguile- ment of music, instrumental and vocal, so the masque proper added to the masque- pageant an element of spoken poetry or recitative, and also gave to the lyric ingre- dient a greater importance. The services of poets thus came into requisition, and it was at court that the Italian poets were apt to be found. Another reason for the popularity of the masque at court lay in the opportunity which it gave for lords and ladies, who had been blessed with little histrionic genius but with abundant physi- cal beauty, to display themselves in deco- rative roles as gods and goddesses, or as abstract virtues and passions.

When the masque passed over into Eng- land in the sixteenth century, it found there some indigenous forms of entertain- ment with which it had affinities, such as the pageants of the London Trade Guilds, the Morality plays, and the " mummings " which still survive, if the testimony of Mr. Hardy's Return of the Native is to be taken, in parts of rural England. How far the foreign importation was affected by these native products is uncertain, but there is early noticeable some substantial differ- ences between the English masque and its Italian prototype, due to the peculiar lit- erary conditions of England at the time. Elizabethan drama was just beginning its

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