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L'allegro, and Other Poems; Paradise Lost, Books I-Iii. With a Biographical Sketch, Introds., and Notes
L'allegro and Other Poems Paradise Lost Books IIii With a Biographical Sketch Introds and Notes Author:John Milton General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1896 Original Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry Poetry / General Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When yo... more »u buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: COMUS: A MASK. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. What is a mask? To find the best illustration we must go to the great period of the English drama. While Shakespeare's plays were being given with very little scenery and with nothing of that gorgeousness of apparatus which now makes a great spectacle, when for instance Henry Irving puts Henry the Eighth on the stage, Ben Jonson was producing masks which brought into requisition the genius of a great architect like Inigo Jones, who built splendid palaces and arches of pasteboard for the representation of these pageants. Moreover, though plays were given sometimes at court, they were then as now popular entertainments to which one could go on paying the price of admission; whereas masks were more in the nature of private theatricals; they were entertainments of a social nature, produced with much elaborateness of scenery, dress, music, and dancing, in honor of some high event as a marriage, a birthday, or the visit of a royal personage. The mask was in its composition more akin to the opera than to the play, and perhaps still more like the modern spectacle than either. It was less a representation of life on a small scale than an allegorical picture. In Bacon's Essays there is one entitled Of Masques and Triumphs, which lets one into something of the secret of the attraction which these pageants had for men of learning and imagination. When one considers what a great poem Edmund Spenser built on an allegorical basis in the Faerie Qu...« less