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 dance, or a far-fetched and costly device, as occasion and economy may demand. As far as I can see, the whole evolution of the form, as we find it in the seventeenth century, was already complete under Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn, in 1532, led the first recorded mask in which women took lords out to dance. Even the fixed scene had made its appearance, as an alternative to the movable pageant, before the end of the reign.

The mask retained its vogue under Edward VI and Mary, and Elizabeth, with her special love of dancing, was not likely to neglect it. The annals of her court, indeed, have left us few such detailed descriptions of masks as Halle affords for that of Henry VIII and the mask-writers themselves for that of James I. This may be an accident, or it may be that either economy or taste led Elizabeth to a preference for the mask simple over the mask spectacular, which most invites description. The story of the Elizabethan mask has to be pieced together from the account-books of the Revels Office, or, where these fail, from scattered sources. But though we would gladly have more detail, especially on the literary and dramatic side, the result of such a survey is sufficient to show that this particular type of mimesis contributed at least as much to the Christmas entertainment of Gloriana as to that of either her father or her successor.

The first mask of the reign was on Twelfth Night, 1559. Some of its details recall, across a space of two centuries, those of the Kennington 'mumming' of 1377. In both cases the performers represented ecclesiastical personages, and in both there was the somewhat exceptional feature of a parade in the streets. Naturally the Elizabethan show, with its crows, asses, and wolves dressed as cardinals, bishops, and abbots, made a characteristic sixteenth-century appeal to the sympathies of a reviving Protestantism. But even in 1377