Machiavel: A character type deriving his name from Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), the Florentine statesman and political philosophe. Machiavelli became famous for Il Principe (written in 1513), a treatise on statecraft which justifies the use of various expediencies (including cruelty, lies and treachery) in the ruling of a state. Il Principe was often alluded to in Elizabethan drama and during the Elizabethan period the name of Machiavelli became associated (at any rate in the popular imagination) with treachery, murder, atheism and every kind of double-dyed villainy and viviousness. The sinister, resourceful and unscrupulous villain -usually an Italian and often the embodiment of evil - in revenge tragedy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods came to be regarded as a Machiavel.

    A masque was a fairly elaborate form of courtly entertainment which was particularly popular in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, as it was in Italy (where the masque first acquired a distinctive form), and in France. In fact, Circe (1581), first produced in Paris, had a considerable influence on English masque.

    The masque combined poetic drama, song, dance and music. The costumes were often sumptuous. The structure was usually simple. A Prologue introduced a group of actors known to the audience. They entered in disguise or perhaps in some kind of decorated vehicle. Plot and action were slight. Usually the plot consisted of mythological and allegorical elements. Sometimes there might be a sort of 'debate'. At the end there was a dance of masked figures in which the audience joined. In short, it was a kind of elegant, private pageant.

    In the Tudor period masques accompanied many festive occasions. Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign the poetic element, thanks to the influence of Gascoigne and Daniel, began to predominate. In the reign of James I Ben Jonson perfected the genre with the help of Iñigo Jones who (like Brunelleschi in Italy) created lavish sets and costumes and performed many ingenious and spectacular feats with stage machinery. By this time masques had become so elaborated that they could almost be described as forerunners of the musical. They were extremely expensive. For example, Jonson's Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611) cost a little under £1,000, and his Oberon (1611) cost over £2,000 - huge sums of money for those days.

    As time went on they became more and more spectacular, and operatically splendid; to such an extent that even Jonson was disillusioned and felt that they were merely obscuring truth. As he put it in An Expostulation with Iñigo Jones (1631):

Oh, to make boards to speak! There is a task!
Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque!
Pack with you peddling poetry to the stage!
This is the money-get, mechanic age.

    In the development of the theatre the masque was particularly important because it was Iñigo Jones who was responsible for the technique of proscenium staging. Moreover, the masque had considerable influence on contemporary drama, as we can see from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1593), Dekker's Old Fortunatus (1600), John Ford's The Sun's Darling (1624) and Nabbes's Microcosmus (1637). The most famous instance was the masque of Juno and Ceres within the fourth act of The Tempest (c. 1611), rivalled only by Milton's Comus presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634.

    Further development was prevented by the outbreak of civil war and the closing of the theatres by the Puritans. Almost the last masque of any note before the ban was Davenant's Salmacida Spolia (1640). However, when the theatres re-opened all that had been learned of staging techniques was applied to the production of plays. And Davenant's was by no means the last masque. Shirley's Cupid and Death was presented in 1653, Cockayne's The Masque at Bretby in 1658, Crowne's Calisto in 1675, Davison's The Masque of Proteus and the Adamantine Rock in 1688, and Congreve's The Judgment of Paris in 1701.

    masque: A lavish form of dramatic entertainment relying heavily on song, dance, costumes, extravagant spectacle and special effects. The genre flourished in the first part of the seventeenth century, having been imported from Italy. Ben Jonson is sometimes seen as the greatest of masque writers. Comus (1634) by John Milton is a particularly famous masque.

masque: also spelled MASK, festival or entertainment in which disguised participants offer gifts to their host and then join together for a ceremonial dance. A typical masque consisted of a band of costumed and masked persons of the same sex who, accompanied by torchbearers, arrived at a social gathering to dance and converse with the guests. The masque could be simply a procession of such persons introduced by a presenter, or it could be an elaborately staged show in which a brief lyrical drama heralded the appearance of masquers, who, having descended from their pageant to perform figured dances, reveled with the guests until summoned back into their pageant by farewell speeches and song. The theme of the drama presented during a masque was usually mythological, allegorical, or symbolic and was designed to be complimentary to the noble or royal host of the social gathering.

Most likely originating in primitive religious rites and folk ceremonies known as disguising, or mummery, masques evolved into elaborate court spectacles that, under various names, entertained royalty throughout Europe. In Renaissance Italy, under the patronage of Lorenzo de Medici, the intermezzo became known for its emphasis on song, dance, scenery, and stage machinery. No matter how literary, the intermezzi invariably included a dance or masked ball where the guests mingled with the actors. A nondramatic form, the trionfo, or triumph, evolved from these Italian court masques and, arriving in France, gave rise to the ballet de cour and the more spectacular masquerade.

During the 16th century the European continental masque traveled to Tudor England, where it became a court entertainment played before the king. Gorgeous costumes, spectacular scenery with elaborate machinery to move it on- and offstage, and rich allegorical verse marked the English masque. During the reign of Elizabeth I the masque provided a vehicle for compliments paid to the queen at her palace and during her summer tours through England.

Under the Stuarts the masque reached its zenith when Ben Jonson became court poet. He endowed the form with great literary as well as social force. In 1605 Jonson and the scene designer Inigo Jones produced the first of many excellent masques, which they continued to collaborate on until 1634. Jonson invented the antimasque--also known as the antemasque, the false masque, and the antic masque--and produced the first in 1609. It took place before the main masque and concentrated on grotesque elements, and provided a direct contrast to the elegance of the masque that followed. In later years the masque developed into opera, and the antimasque became primarily a farce or pantomime. After Jonson's retirement, masques lost their literary value and became mainly vehicles for spectacle.

Masque entertainments in England ceased with the beginning of the English Civil Wars, and later revivals never equaled the originals.

The Mermaid Tavern has intrigued scholars interested in Shakespeare's personality and in those of other great men of Elizabethan and Jacobean letters, mainly because of a passage in a poem, "Letter of Ben Jonson" (1640), by the playwright Francis Beaumont (also a member of the club):

What things we have seen

Done at the Mermaid! heard words thathave been

So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,

As if that every one (from whencethey came)

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,

And had resolved to live a fool the rest

Of his dull life.

    A figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another. The basic figure in poetry. A comparison is usually implicit; whereas in simile it is explicit.

    The marks of 17th century metaphysical poetry were arresting and original images and conceits (showing a preoccupation with analogies between macrocosm and microcosm), wit, ingenuity, dexterous use of colloquial speech, considerable flexibility of rhythm and meter, complex themes (both sacred and profane), a liking for paradox and dialectical argument, a direct manner, a caustic humour, a keenly felt awareness of mortality, and a distinguished capacity for elliptical thought and tersely compact expression. But for all their intellectual robustness the metaphysical poets were also capable of refined delicacy, gracefulness and deep feeling; passion as well as wit. The foollowing example is Marvell's The Definition of Love:

The Definition of Love

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed ;
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close ;
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed
(Though Love's whole world on us doth wheel),
Not by themselves to be embraced,

Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear,
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.

As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet ;
But ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.

[Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678]

    The Metaphysicals have had a profound influence on the course of English poetry in recent years, thanks, in great measure, to the critical appreciations of Herbert Grierson, T.S. Eliot, J.B. Leishman, H.C. White, Rosemond Tuve, Cleanth Brooks, Louis Martz, George Williamson and Helen Gardner. [See Conceit.]

    metaphysical: metaphysical is an adjective used to describe the poetry of a group of seventeenth-century poets (for example, Donne, Marvell, Herbert) whose language, imagery and verse forms were original.

   Mystery Play: The Mystery Plays of the Middle Ages were based on the Bible and were particularly concerned with the stories of man's Creation, Fall and Redemption. They antedate Miracle Plays.

    These plays marked the high point of medieval drama, reaching a peak in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The plays were essentially dramatisations of episodes and scenes from the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. They were presented from a series of wagons, complete with complex stage effects, so that a whole 'cycle' of plays could be seen performed in one spot before each individual wagon moved on. The most famous English cycles were York, Coventry, Wakefielf, and Chester. They became so complex and demanding of time and resources that they were taken over by the immensely powerful medieval trade guilds (a cross between a modern trade union and a professional association). As these guilds tended to refer to their trades as 'mysteries' the plays came to be called mystery plays. Miracle plays could deal with miraculous events and legends, whereas the Mystery plays dealt solely with biblical episodes.

miracle play: also called SAINT'S PLAY, one of three principal kinds of vernacular drama of the European Middle Ages (along with the mystery play and the morality play). A miracle play presents a real or fictitious account of the life, miracles, or martyrdom of a saint. The genre evolved from liturgical offices developed during the 10th and 11th centuries to enhance calendar festivals. By the 13th century they had become vernacularized and filled with unecclesiastical elements. They had been divorced from church services and were performed at public festivals. Almost all surviving miracle plays concern either the Virgin Mary or St. Nicholas, the 4th-century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor. Both Mary and Nicholas had active cults during the Middle Ages, and belief in the healing powers of saintly relics was widespread. In this climate, miracle plays flourished.

The Mary plays consistently involve her in the role of deus ex machina, coming to the aid of all who invoke her, be they worthy or wanton. She saves, for example, a priest who has sold his soul to the devil, a woman falsely accused of murdering her own child, and a pregnant abbess. Typical of these is a play called St. John the Hairy. At the outset the title character seduces and murders a princess. Upon capture, he is proclaimed a saint by an infant. He confesses his crime, whereupon God and Mary appear and aid John in reviving the princess, which done, the murderer saint is made a bishop.

The Nicholas plays are similar, an example being Jean Bodel's Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas (c. 1200), which details the deliverance of a crusader and the conversion of a Saracen king. Few English miracle plays are extant, because they were banned by Henry VIII in the mid-16th century and most were subsequently destroyed or lost.

MYSTERY PLAY: one of three principal kinds of vernacular drama of the European Middle Ages (along with the miracle play and the morality play). The mystery plays, usually representing biblical subjects, developed from plays presented in Latin by churchmen on church premises and depicted such subjects as the Creation, Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, and the Last Judgment. During the 13th century, various guilds began producing the plays in the vernacular at sites removed from the churches. Under these conditions, the strictly religious nature of the plays declined, and they became filled with irrelevancies and apocryphal elements. Furthermore, satirical elements were introduced to mock physicians, soldiers, judges, and even monks and priests.

In England, over the course of decades, groups of 25 to 50 plays were organized into lengthy cycles, such as the Chester plays and the Wakefield plays. In France a single play, The Acts of the Apostles by Arnoul and Simon Gréban, contained 494 speaking parts and 61,908 lines of rhymed verse; it took 40 days to perform.

The form in which the mystery plays developed contributed to their demise at the end of the 16th century. The church no longer supported them because of their dubious religious value, Renaissance scholars found little of interest in their great rambling texts, and the general public preferred professional traveling companies that were beginning to arrive from Italy. In England the mystery cycles and miracle plays were suspected of Roman Catholic tendencies and were gradually suppressed.

At their height, the mystery plays were quite elaborate in their production. In England they were generally performed on pageant wagons, which provided both scaffold stage and dressing room and could be moved about readily. In France and Italy, however, a production might take place on a stage 100 feet (30 m) wide, with paradise represented at one end of the stage, hell at the other, and earthly scenes between the two. The plays did not attempt to achieve unity of time, place, and action, and therefore they could represent any number of different geographic locations and climates in juxtaposition. Mechanical devices, trapdoors, and other artifices were employed to portray flying angels, fire-spouting monsters, miraculous transformations, and graphic martyrdoms.

Scotland had an official similar to the Lord of Misrule, known as the Abbot of Unreason (suppressed in 1555), and both are thought by scholars to be descended from the "king" or "bishop" who presided over the earlier Feast of Fools. Another related functionary was the Boy Bishop, the leader of children's Christmas festivities in the choir schools. After the death of Edward VI in 1553, the English court ceased to appoint a Lord of Misrule. See also Master of the Revels.

    A poem of mourning presented by one person.

    Basically, a Morality Play is an allegory in dramatic form. Its dramatic origins are to be found in the Mystery and Miracle Plays of the late Middle Ages; its allegorical origins in the sermon literature, homilies, exempla, romaces and works of spiritual edification. In essence a Morality Play was a dramatization of the battle between the forces of good and evil in the human soul; thus, an exteriorization of the inward spiritual struggle: man's need for salvation and the temptations which beset him on his pilgrimage through life to death. The main characters in Everyman (c. 1500) are God, a Messenger, Death, Everyman, Fellowship, Good Deeds, Goods, Knowledge, Beauty and Strength. Everyman is summoned by Death and he finds that no one will go with him except Good Deeds.

    In other plays we find the forces of evil (the World, the Flesh and the Devil, the Seven Deadly Sins and various demons) deployed against Man, whose champions are the forces of good (God and his angels, and the four moral and the three theological virtues). Nearly all the Moralities are didactic illustrations of and commentaries on a preoccupation which dominated Christian thought throughout much of the Middle Ages: namely, the war between God and the Devil.

morality play: also called MORALITY, an allegorical drama popular in Europe especially during the 15th and 16th centuries, in which the characters personify moral qualities (such as charity or vice) or abstractions (as death or youth) and in which moral lessons are taught.

Together with the mystery play and the miracle play, the morality play is one of the three main types of vernacular drama produced during the Middle Ages. The action of the morality play centres on a hero, such as Mankind, whose inherent weaknesses are assaulted by such personified diabolic forces as the Seven Deadly Sins but who may choose redemption and enlist the aid of such figures as the Four Daughters of God (Mercy, Justice, Temperance, and Truth).

Morality plays were an intermediate step in the transition from liturgical to professional secular drama, and combine elements of each. They were performed by quasi-professional groups of actors who relied on public support; thus the plays were usually short, their serious themes tempered by elements of farce. In the Dutch play Het esbatement den appelboom ("The Miraculous Apple Tree"), for example, a pious couple, Staunch Goodfellow and Steadfast Faith, are rewarded when God creates for them an everbearing apple tree with the property that whoever touches it without permission becomes stuck fast. This leads to predictable and humorous consequences.

The most famous of the French morality plays is Nicolas de la Chesnaye's Condemnation des banquets (1507), which argues for moderation by showing the bad end that awaits a company of unrepentant revelers, including Gluttony and Watering Mouth. Among the oldest of morality plays surviving in English is The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1425), about the battle for the soul of Humanum Genus. A plan for the staging of one performance has survived that depicts an outdoor theatre-in-the-round with the castle of the title at the centre. Of all morality plays, the one that is considered the greatest, and that is still performed, is Everyman.

    It was the tradition for a poet (especially an epic poet) to invoke the aid of a particular muse to help him with his work.

    Originally, one of the nine Greek goddesses who presided over the arts. Poets used to invoke the aid of the Muses to inspire them, as in Shakespeare's appeal 'for a Muse of fire' in Henry V.

    Classical writers had a 'ready-made' mythology. Others have not been so fortunate and some have felt a great need to invent or somehow contrive a mythology which shall be the vehicle of their beliefs.

    Myth is an anonymous story which tells of mysterious and strange events far back in history. Mythology is a collection of such stories. Myths often deal with elemental situations such as the cretation of the world or the action of gods, and are associated with primitive societies. These stories are often basic to the nature of human existence, and as such exert lasting appeal. Many authors have either used myths in their work, or attempted to create myths of their own. The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) uses the myths of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, whilst J.R. Tolkein's (1892-1973) The Lord of the Rings (1955) uses a personal mythology that borrows heavily from a wide range of other mythologies.