Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/404

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imployed in the maske' and £15 more for 'players imployed in the barriers', about which barriers no more is known. This account, subscribed by Sir Thomas Chaloner, by no means exhausts the expense of the mask. Other financial documents (Devon, 131, 134, 136; cf. Reyher, 521) show payments of £40 each to Jonson and Inigo Jones, and £20 each to Ferrabosco, Jerome Herne, and Confess. These were from the Exchequer. An additional £16 to Inigo Jones 'devyser for the saide maske' fell upon Henry's privy purse, together with heavy

bills to mercers and other tradesmen, amounting to £1,076 6s. 10d. (Cunningham, viii, from Audit Office Declared Accts.). Correr had reported on 22 Nov. that neither of the masks of this winter was to 'be so costly as last year's, which to say sooth was excessively costly' (V. P. xii. 86). The anticipation can hardly have been fulfilled. I suppose that 'last year's' means the Tethys' Festival of June 1610, as no mask during the winter of 1609-10 is traceable.

Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly. 3 Feb. 1611

1616. A Masque of her Maiesties. Love freed from Ignorance and Folly. W. Stansby, sold by Richard Meighen. [Part of F_{1}.]

The maskers were eleven Daughters of the Morn, led by the Queen of the Orient; the antimaskers twelve Follies or She-Fools; the presenters Cupid and Ignorance, a Sphinx; the musicians twelve Priests of the Muses, who also danced a measure, and three Graces, with others.

The locality was probably the banqueting-hall. The scene is not described. There were two 'masque-dances', with 'measures and revels' between them. This was a Queen's mask, but the names of the maskers are not preserved.

John More wrote on 15 Dec. (Winwood, iii. 239), 'Yet doth the Prince make but one mask, and the Queen but two, which doth cost her majesty but £600.' Perhaps the writer was mistaken. Anne had not given more than one mask in any winter, nor is there any trace of a second in that of 1610-11. Correr, on 22 Nov., anticipates one only, not to be so costly as last year's. It was to precede the Prince's. It was, however, put off to Twelfth Night, and then again to Candlemas, 'either because the stage machinery is not in order, or because their Majesties thought it well to let the Marshal depart first'. This was Marshal de Laverdin, whose departure from France as ambassador extraordinary was delayed (cf. Mask of Oberon). He was present at the mask when it actually took place on 3 Feb., the day after Candlemas. Apparently the Venetian ambassador was also invited. (V. P. xii. 86, 101, 106, 110, 115.)

Several financial documents bearing on the mask exist (S. P. D. Jac. I, lvii, Nov.; Devon, 135; Reyher, 509, 521), and show that the contemplated £600 was in fact exceeded. An account signed by the Earls of Suffolk and Worcester, to whom the oversight of the charges was doubtless assigned as Household officers, shows that in addition to £600 14s. 3d. spent in defraying the bills of Inigo Jones and others and in rewards, there was a further expenditure of