• "The Hall must not be pestred": Embedded Masques, Space, and Dramatized Desire

    Author(s):
    John Robert Ziegler (see profile)
    Date:
    2013
    Group(s):
    CLCS Renaissance and Early Modern
    Subject(s):
    Drama, English literature
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    masque, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, voyeurism, John Cumber, Early modern studies
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6VG7C
    Abstract:
    Embedded masques or masques within plays exploited an audience desire to witness elite bodies, dress, and behavior in theatrical spaces. They commodified and sold a voyeuristic look at the masque and the masquing hall, access to which was normally restricted to the elite. This essay examines a selection of 17th-century plays that dramatize masquing space as desirable by placing the audience in the position of insiders and that represent this desirability by staging the struggle over access to the masquing hall. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (c. 1610) and John Cumber’s The Two Merry Milkmaids (1619), the central examples here, show doorkeepers preserving the court from unwanted onlookers, even as actual audience members are allowed to see ‘inside’ and thus breach traditional boundaries of privilege.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. Date:
    2013
    Journal:
    Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England
    Volume:
    26
    Page Range:
    97 - 119
    ISSN:
    0731-3403
    Status:
    Published
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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