nsive spectacles were beyond the reach of the professional
theaters, but contemporary dramatists frequently found something that
could be adapted or imitated for the public stage. So the antick dance
of satyrs in a 'Winter's Tale' (three of whom are announced as having
already appeared before the King) seems borrowed from an anti-masque in
Ben Jonson's 'Masque of Oberon.' In two plays of nearly the same date
there is a well defined effort to combine the masque and the regular
drama into a distinctive and novel dramatic entertainment, in the 'Four
Plays in One' of Beaumont and Fletcher and the 'Tempest' of Shakspere.
The 'Tempest' has always been a spectacular play on the stage, and so it
must have appeared to him--and as a spectacle having many of the
features of the court masque.

There is music and song. Ariel, Prospero, and even Caliban are proper
figures for a court show. The "masque proper" is used to celebrate the
betrothal in the fourth act. This is a simplified form of such a masque
as would be given at court. There is evidently some machinery--it is the
insubstantial pageant that calls forth Prospero's famous lines. Ariel,
Iris, Ceres, and Juno appear, Juno descending from the heavens. There is
music and a song, and Ferdinand cries:

This is a most majestic vision, and
Harmonious charmingly. May I be bold
To think these spirits?

And when Prospero says they are spirits summoned by his art, Ferdinand
exclaims

Let me live here ever;
So rare a wond'red father and a wise
Makes this place Paradise.

It is not Miranda now, but the machine and costumes used in
court-spectacles that turn the platform into a land of romance.

Then enter Nymphs, "Naiads of the winding brooks with sedg'd crowns,"
and Sun burnt Reapers, "with rye-straw hats." These are the main
masquers and join in a graceful dance, until upon Prospero's sudden
start--"to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish."
More ingenious is Shakspere's use of the anti-masques--i.e. dances by
professional performers drest in fantastic costumes as animals, satyrs,
statues, witches, etc. Such are the several strange shapes of III.3, who
first bring in the banquet and again enter "and dance with mocks and
mows and carrying out the table"; and in IV.1, the divers spirits who
"in shape of dogs and hounds" hunt about the drunken conspirators while
Prospero and Ariel set them on.

For a stage, then, that had long been us