Masques of Difference: A Conversation with Kristen McDermott part 2

**Philip Rowe** (0:09)
Welcome to the History Of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 220 Masques Of Difference A Conversation With Kristen McDermott, Part 2 Last time Kristen McDermott and I discussed the origins of the court masque, and how it developed into a refined entertainment under the patronship of James I, his wife Queen Anna, and his son Prince Henry. We now continue that conversation with a look at two masques and the later history of the art form.
Kristen McDermott is Professor of English at Central Michigan University and co-author with Ari Berk of William Shakespeare his life and times, and the collection Masques Of Difference, as well as numerous papers on Shakespeare and Renaissance theatre. I've put a link in the show notes to Kristen's website where you can find further details of her work. Kris is also a listener and supporter of the podcast, so I was particularly happy to welcome her as a contributor on the microphone as well.
I spoke to Kris over a Zoom call from her home in Michigan. And this part of the conversation picks up from where we left off last time, where we had just mentioned the death of Prince Henry and the effect that had on Queen Anna's influences at court as she largely withdrew from entertainments in which she had been very much involved previously.

**Kristen McDermott** (1:34)
Yes, that was the watershed moment, really.
And it's interesting to speculate what England would have been like if Henry had survived to become king. And to what extent Anna would have been able also to have much more influence on England religiously and culturally because she was Catholic.

**Philip Rowe** (1:58)
Yes.

**Kristen McDermott** (1:58)
It was a practicing Catholic which James tolerated. You know, James was Protestant and Henry was much more Calvinist in that Elizabethan vein.
And in fact, Henry very much venerated kind of the memory of Elizabeth. So we end up seeing in a lot of the plays of the time during James' reign, these kind of anti-Elizabethan stories and tropes and this suspicion of female power that you see in plays like Macbeth and King Lear and plays like that, where it's very much thought that Shakespeare was responding to James' idea that he kind of wanted to people to stop looking back at the good old days of Elizabeth's reign and look forward to this very masculine ideal that he represented. Henry was resisting that a little bit. So and he shows up in the Masques as well, which is the origin of the idea of Masques of Difference. The Masque form, which was originally very much a vehicle for royal propaganda, because of the innovations of actual textual storytelling that takes place in it, suddenly becomes a way for the dissident voices of the court, whether they are the queen and the prince, or whether they become other powerful courtiers, to express some ideas that are not the purely traditional classical ideals, to express the notion that England's identity is something that has to be worked at and contested, rather than just given from on high, I think.

**Philip Rowe** (3:44)
Right. The volume you edited is called Masques of Difference and features four masks.
Selected for that reason, then, presumably, because they say something a bit different from a standard mask, if there is such a thing.

**Kristen McDermott** (3:59)
Yes. That's the other chief feature of the masks that scholars are interested in, that what was often called the anti-mask became part of the pageant and the performance that had formerly focused most heavily entirely on creating a musical and poetic framework for formal dancing. What happened was skits began to be introduced in the same way that they were in the mumming celebrations in the royal households. You would have performers enact the parts of creatures or beings from folklore that were, in many ways, the antithesis of whatever symbolism was being presented in the main mask. And the idea was is that contrast would emphasize the fact that the mask itself represented a particular set of values, a particular set of ideals. And the figures of the anti-mask would be against those ideals, but they would be either banished by the figures in the mask, the formal figures, or they would be transformed into the formal figures of the mask. So in other words, the court would somehow or other absorb and change any energy that was antithetical to it into what it wanted to be. That there was this transformative alchemical power in the mask.
So these skits become more and more elaborate, because of course we have the members of the King's Men performing them, and they are brilliant artists, and they are being written scripts by brilliant playwrights like Ben Johnson and Michael Drayton and Thomas Decker, and all of the playwrights working at the time, competing with each other to be witty and clever, and what happens then, of course, is that the characters of the anti-mask become more vivid because they're being performed by professionals. And more memorable, and there's more and more demand for these plays. The other part of that is that James himself, even though he's the one sitting on that little mini stage and everyone's watching him watch the play, James didn't enjoy sitting through long performances. He had circulatory problems. His legs were constantly in pain. And, you know, so sitting for long periods of time was uncomfortable for him. He also drank quite a lot and was just bored by the pageantry. He liked watching the men dance.