The Coleorton Masque

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Frances Seymour, later Duchess of Somerset Frances Devereux, by Anthony van Dyck.jpg
Frances Seymour, later Duchess of Somerset

The Coleorton Masque is an English country house entertainment performed on 2 February 1618, sometimes known as The Fairies' Farewell: The Masque at Coleorton.

Contents

Context

Thomas Beaumont produced a masque entertainment at Coleorton Hall in Leicestershire on 2 February 1618, in honour of William Seymour, (later Duke of Somerset), and his wife Frances. [1] [2] The author may have been a local vicar Thomas Pestell, though John Fletcher and Arthur Wilson have also been suggested. [3] [4] [5]

Summary

The antimasque is a dialogue between Bob, the local spirit of the house's buttery, and the fairy Puck. There has been a perceived decline in standards of country house hospitality and housekeeping, and instead, new ostentation in clothing (estate woods are sold to buy farthingales and meadows for petticoats). Puck introduces "black fairies", "the dancing spirits of the pits", a reference to new mining industries and coal at Coleorton. [6]

The masque is a contest between male and female values. [7] Favonius, the West Wind, gives a speech praising masculine chivalric values and is surprised by six female masque performers led by Iris, "Mistress Rainbow", with Meekness, Simplicity, Truth-in-Love, Modesty, and Chastity, to show the "precedency of female virtue". Their song:

Brave Amazonian Dames
Made no count of Mankind but
for a fit to be at the Rut.
free fire gives the brightest flames;
Men's overawing tames,
And Pedantlike our active Spirits smother.
Learn, Virgins, to live free;
Alas, would it might be,
women could live & lie with one another! [8]

The "brave Amazonian dames" dance. Six male masque dancers appear and after a song recommending the mixture of cold and warm qualities, the twelve masquers dance together. [9] [10]

References

  1. ↑ Karen L. Middaugh, '"Virtues Sphear": Court vs. Country in the 1618 Masque at Coleorton", David Allen and Robert White, Subjects On The World's Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (University of Delaware, 1995), pp. 280–294.
  2. ↑ Rudolf Brotanek, Die englischen Maskenspiele (Vienna, 1902), pp. 328–337, edition of the text
  3. ↑ David Lindley, Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments (Oxford University Press, The World's Classics, 1995), pp. xvii, 126–135, 251–255: Philip J Finkelpearl, "The fairies farewell: The Masque at Coleorton", The Review of English Studies, 46: 183 (August 1995).
  4. ↑ Philip J Finkelpearl, "The authorship of the anonymous 'Coleorton Masque' of 1618", Notes and Queries, 40:2 (June 1993), p. 224.
  5. ↑ "BEAUMONT, Sir Thomas II (c.1582-1625), of Coleorton, Leics., The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1604–1629, ed. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris, 2010
  6. ↑ David Lindley, Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments (Oxford, 1995), pp. 126–128.
  7. ↑ Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 43–45.
  8. ↑ Douglas Bruster, "Female-Female Eroticism", Mary Beth Rose, Renaissance Drama, XXIV (Evanton, 1993), p. 5
  9. ↑ David Lindley, Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments (Oxford, 1995), pp. 129–135.
  10. ↑ Valerie Traub, "Setting the Stage Behind the Seen", Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla, The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater (New York University Press, 2002), pp. 81–83.
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