Masques and masking

Abstract

In 1632 William Prynne published his infamous Histriomastrix — the Player’s Scourge, or, Actors Tragedie, an hysterical and vicious attack on the theatre in general and vilification of women on the stage in particular: ‘And dare then any Christian woman be so more then whorishly impudent, as to act, to speak publicly on a Stage (perchance in man’s apparel, and cut hair, here proved sinful and abominable) in the presence of sundry men and women?’ (Cotton, 1980, p. 39). The severity of Prynne’s punishment for this publication — he had his ears cut off — matches the contemporary extremity of his crime: his attack seemed to aim directly at the Queen herself.

Mrs Squeamish: And that demureness, coyness, and modesty that you see in our faces in the boxes at plays, is as much a sign of a kind of woman as a vizardmask in the pit.

Mrs Dainty Fidget: For, I assure you, women are least masked when they have the velvet vizard on.

(William Wycherly, The Country Wife, Act V, scene iv, 1674–75, my italics)

… she might do what she liked with her face. It was an elastic substance, an element of gutta-percha, like the flexibility of the gymnast, the lady who, at music hall, is shot from the mouth of a cannon. He coloured a little at this quickened view of the actress; he had always looked more poetically, somehow, at that priestess of art. But what was she, the priestess, when one came to think about it, but a female gymnast, a mountebank at higher wages? She didn’t literally hang by her heels from a trapeze, holding a fat man in her teeth, but she made the same use of her tongue, of her eyes, of the imitative trick, that her muscular sister made of her leg and jaw. (Henry James, The Tragic Muse, 1890)