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The Queen and Ladies of her Court once again took part in the entertainment of His Majesty as representatives of the various types of Beauty introduced in the course of the masque, and yet again were they found in the noble “Masque of Queens,” celebrated from the House of Fame, by the Queen of Great Britain with her Ladies, at Whitehall, February 2nd, 1609, which was dedicated to the young Prince Henry, as to the origin of which Ben gives the following interesting note: “It increasing,” he says, “to the third time of my being used in these services to Her Majesty’s personal presentations, with the ladies whom she pleaseth to honour; it was my first and special regard, to see to the dignity of their persons. For which reason I chose the argument to be A celebration of honourable and true Fame bred out of Virtue.”

All of which in a sense foreshadowed the various symbolic ballets later at the Court of France, such as La Verité, ennemie des apparences, which we shall come to consider in due course. The thing to realise now is that these masques of Ben Jonson and of other men of his period were the finest flowering of a form of entertainment which had been struggling for definite shape throughout the previous century, indeed from the days of di Botta’s fête in 1489, and had received its most recent and most effective stimulus from France in the production of Beaujoyeux’s wondrous symbolic and mythologic “ballet” some twenty odd years before Ben Jonson’s first “masque” was produced. The English masque—partly dramatic “interlude” with song, music and dance introduced, was in effect a ballet, and was a direct influence in the formation of the “opera-ballets” which were subsequently to be the delight of the French Court for a century or more.