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It is needful to linger over these points here, for they account for much that we find in the subsequent development of theatrical ballets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Speaking of Beaujoyeux’s “Ballet Comique,” Castil Blaze, the scholarly historian of the Paris opera, remarks that it “became the model on which were composed a number of ballets, sung and danced, a kind of piece which held the place of Opera among the French and English for about a century.” That century was, roughly, from about 1500 to 1600. And he adds: “The English gave them the name of masque.”

In the few years after Henry VIII came to be crowned the young monarch spent considerable time and spared no expense in entertaining himself and his Queen with “disguisings,” “revels” and masqued balls.

On Twelfth Night, 1511, before the banquet in the Hall at Richmond, so records the contemporary chronicler, Edward Hall, there “was a pageant devised like a mountain, glistering by night as though it had been all of gold and set with stones; on the top of which mountain was a tree of gold, the branches and boughs frysed with gold, spreading on every side over the mountain with roses and pomegranates; the which mountain was with (de) vices brought up towards the King, and out of the same came a lady apparelled in cloth of gold, and the children of honour, called the henchmen, which were freshly disguised and danced a Morris before the King, and that done re-entered the mountain: and then was the wassail brought in and so brake up Christmas.”