Читать книгу The Art of Ballet онлайн

90 страница из 98

Now made peculiar to this place alone;

And that by impulsion of your destinies,

And his attractive beams that lights these skies;

Who, though with ocean compassed, never wets

His hair therein, nor wears a beam that sets.

Long may his light adorn these happy rites,

As I renew them; and your gracious sights

Enjoy that happiness, even to envy, as when

Beauty, at large, brake forth and conquered men!

“At which they danced their last dance into their throne again.”

These quotations, though necessarily brief, illustrate the characteristic elements in the construction of the masque—dancing, music, song, spoken verse and elaborate scenic effect.

The reference to Thomas Giles, “who made the dances,” to the dances themselves, “galliards and corantos,” and that charming admission as to “a third most elegant and curious dance” not to be described again “by any art but that of their own footing”; the reference to the arbours in which “were placed the musicians, who represented the shades of the old poets, and were attired in a priest-like habit of crimson and purple, with laurel garlands”; the song of the “first tenor”—“Had those that dwelt ...” and January’s speech apostrophising women’s beauty; above all the loving descriptions of the scenery and mechanical effects, must all be of uncommon interest to those who know anything of the history of the French ballet, because it is so closely paralleled in the descriptions given some seventy years later by the Abbé Menestrier of the entertainments at the Court of Louis XIV. The English “masques” of the early seventeenth were, in effect, the French “ballets” of the early eighteenth century. To return, however, to the English Court of James I.