0 a type of theatre entertainment including poetry, singing, and dancing, performed in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially at a royal court (= the official home of a king or queen) --
Masque scholarship is currendy in a state of turmoil, and only a very rash outsider would undertake to pronounce on the content and meaning of masques with anything like assurance.
The image of halcyon peace was never free from other representations and evocations of war, and the authors of masques acknowledged their anxieties about such evocations.
Hume defines the turn-of-the-century masque as ' celebratory/mythological, short and musical'.
They reveal that the play and the masque share much in terms of imperial iconography, though the masque is eminently more explicit in the manner in which it does this.
The masque was a kind of staging or realization of fantasy, its fabulous metamorphoses conjoining real and ideal.
Given the continental analogues and masque background, we should certainly expect that many late seventeendi-century operas would be both political and inclined to allegory.
There is a rich literature on the politics of festival, and masques have recently attracted the serious attention they deserve.
To complicate the issue, the degree and nature of political content in these operas, masques and plays is far from a settled matter.
