THE QUEEN’S REQUIREMENTS 119 
expense during the annual period of relaxation of the Christmas 
Revels. But these masques within thé play at Blackfriars were 
a wholly new feature in the evolution of the drama,’ and cannot 
have been but strikingly attractive and popular with the aristo- 
cratic patrons. The dance was made up of nymphs, or sylphs, 
or other airy, mythological, or fanciful shapes. The effect was 
heightened by special costumes calculated to lead the eye through 
the maze of masque into pleasing bewilderment. 
In Cynthia’s Revels the masque is danced by four nymphs and 
four fairy brethren. All are dressed to the taste of the Royal 
~Court of Fancy. The nymphs in citron, green, vari-colored, and 
white, match their sylvan partners in green and blue, purple em- 
paled with gold, blush-color, and watchet-tinsel. The whole sit- 
uation is phantastic. The evolutions are executed under the magic 
of Cupid and Mercury in the presence of the throned Cynthia. 
Doubtless the masque was danced to the level of Jonson’s con- 
ception of the mingling of colors, movement, and music into har- 
monious charm. 
Sir Giles Goosecap closes with a dance of lords and ladies, fol- 
lowed by a song. This is on the order of a Court-masque, and is 
danced in honor of Hymen. Doubtless it was executed with 
elaboration, giving the light play its chief attraction. Merely its 
place of occurrence, at the end of the play, is mentioned in the 
printed drama as it has reached us. 
Poetaster may be mentioned in this connection, although it con- 
tains no stage directions for dancing. But it has in act IV “a 
pretty fiction” of “a heavenly banquet” represented as played at 
the Court. It is “a pageant” or masque of the Bacchanalian 
revels of the gods in the full habit of deities, with the effects of - 
too much nectar riotously dominant in the ichor of their deity- 
ships. The revel closes with irregular singing and loud music, 
and might appropriately have had the reeling accompaniment of 
the Bacchanalian dance ending with the usual joyous whoop in 
swinging the fair goddess clean from the floor at the great final 
leap of “the swaggering upspring.’”? 
The “pretty show” in The Gentleman Usher is a masque pre- 
* See infra, 119-21, 122-23. in Europe. But to see this manner 
*This is a custom still familiar and finish of a dance in its native 
233 
