Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 1).pdf/239

 and danse upon the stage'. Shakespeare has a mask in Love's Labour's Lost, and another in Romeo and Juliet, to which the episode is handed down from the ultimate source in Italian narrative. Another early example is in 1 Richard II (iv. 2). Munday has a mask in his Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598; ii. 2), Dekker (ii. 204) in his Whore of Babylon (c. 1607) and his Satiromastix (1601; l. 2302), and Tourneur, if it was Tourneur, in his Revenger's Tragedy (c. 1607; v. 3). These are examples from the public theatres. When the boys' companies came into existence at the end of the century, dance and song proved well within their means; and their principal writers, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, Field, Jonson, all make use of the mask. So do Beaumont and Fletcher, both in plays for boys and in plays for men. But the enumeration of earlier names is of itself enough to dispose of the theory that to Beaumont and Fletcher is due, in some special way, the transference of the court mask to the popular stage, and in particular the introduction of Shakespeare to the supposed new idea. Doubtless the mask in A Maid's Tragedy is set out with somewhat greater elaboration of presentment than was usual in earlier plays, and doubtless the antimask of Beaumont's contribution to the Princess Elizabeth's wedding was furbished up again for the delight of a popular audience in ''The Two Noble Kinsmen''. But it hardly follows that Shakespeare, after using the mask in Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet, had anything to learn from his younger rivals before he used it in The Tempest, and a writer who can assert that Ben Jonson 'did not mix his masques and plays' must have simply forgotten Cynthia's Revels. The mask in this play is of*