In his preface to Hymenaei (1607), Ben Jonson distinguished between the body and the soul of masques. The former, though rich and magnificent in pleasing the senses, was as short-lived as the occasions masques celebrated. The latter—the “invention” and the “more remov'd mysteries” that appeal to “understanding”—were, on the other hand, “impressing, and lasting.” Many theorists and critics of the early Stuart masque have followed Jonson's lead: they grant that masques are complex, collaborative works, but ultimately privilege one element over others. As the soul is to be preferred to the body, the understanding to the senses, and the lasting to the ephemeral, so too in studies of the masque the poetry or the venue or the iconography or the ballet or the politics is presented as the heart of the matter. Given the subtitle of The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music, one might think that Barbara Ravelhofer's book is part of that critical tradition. In fact, her study demonstrates brilliantly that “masques were multimedia spectacles” which “though struggling with adverse performance conditions … reached out to their audiences with music, movements, words, machinery, colours, and lights” (6).

Throughout this book, we are enlightened about the ways in which elements of court masques complemented one another. The rise and fall of Queen Anna's hemline, for instance, obviously affected the perception and significance of her footwear and footwork. Similarly, as designers Inigo Jones and John Webb “experimented with obliquely placed side-wings” (94) because of problems presented by a single vanishing point, choreographers developed “balletic styles” that “turned dancers into living architecture, when limbs moved so as to project depth” (267). And in the artificially lit halls where masques were performed, the “gold, silver, (counterfeit) tinsel, and shiny materials” selected by costume designers “produced a spectacular effect, particularly if highlighted by jewels or glass” (165)—and especially, of course, when in motion. A dancer's costume might become, in effect, a “lighting machine” (Plate 3). Regularly inviting us to reimagine masques in performance, The Early Stuart Masque makes clear and compelling that “stage and costume designer, writer, and dancing master(s) developed text, setting, and choreography in a continual process of mutual fine-tuning” (226).

Ravelhofer divides her work into ten chapters: four on dance, three on costumes, and three on case studies. Comprising the case studies are two Jacobean masques, Queens (1609) and Oberon (1611); one Caroline show, Coelum Britannicum (1634); and a projected wedding masque for the daughter of the English ambassador in Constantinople (1650) recorded in the diary of a secretary of the Levant Company. Dancing merits an additional chapter on methodology, because dancing is the least documented aspect of these shows; indeed, “all choreographies for the great court masques are lost” (16). Like earlier masque critics, Ravelhofer has to rely on information about dance from France, Spain, and Italy—from a “pan-European discourse of courtly dancing” (26)—and on the circumstantial evidence found in English iconography and eyewitness reports. But she also draws on sources previously unknown or largely ignored, such as Ercole Santucci's “Mastro da Ballo” (1614), Barthélemy de Montagut's “Louange de la danse” (c. 1620), and, most important, the projected masque at Constantinople, which includes the only extant “notations for English theatre dances before 1700” (230) and an “Antick” that is the “earliest known example of a detailed English pantomime-ballet instruction” (250). As she does with dance, Ravelhofer analyzes new sources of information for costumes as well, most notably the debenture books of Queen Henrietta Maria with their “unique evidence of the administrative processing of masque costumes” (10). As a result, this book provides the best account we have of the creation, storage, repair, circulation, and recycling of costumes. In this respect The Early Stuart Masque, like the work of William Streitberger, John Orrell, and John Astington, helps establish the material conditions and institutional practices of production—including the role of the City in the production of court and country spectacles—that necessarily shape performance.

While rich with new information and informed with knowledge derived from performance experiments, Ravelhofer's work is solidly grounded in the literature of court entertainments. Besides including apt illustrations (some in brilliant color) and a comprehensive bibliography, she demonstrates a sure grasp of current issues and trends in the interpretation of masques. Though never polemical, Ravelhofer convincingly illustrates the need to adjust, qualify, or complicate many received ideas. Concerning dance for example, she challenges the “post-Lacanian and post-Foucauldian … bias towards portraying early dance as a coercive, alienating activity” by exploring the “positive implications of bodily self-control and muscular bonding as a source of individual and collective strength” (118). She also calls into question the practicability of the passive female gaze of a woman actually dancing and, given a close analysis of sets and danced shapes, of the “monofocal perspective” (94) of the monarch. So too with costumes: the analysis of the financing of masques at court compared to contemporary manor house shows and other annual expenditures leads to the conclusion that, even though costumes were, it seems, rarely repaired or reused, “the management of spectacle expenditure challenges received notions of conspicuous consumption and early modern cost (in)efficiency” (155). Partly because so little has been written about the projected English masque in Constantinople, the discussion of this show, given “the cross-dressing woman-actor and the onstage birth” (252), is especially fascinating. Ravelhofer puts the Bargrave record of this masque into the contexts of English representations of Ottomans and of dance and theatre in early modern Constantinople. She discusses social, political, and economic conditions—including the destabilizing impact of the Civil War in England on international situations—that impinged on the entertainment. Again, in this case, the analysis requires that we refine our thinking, for “the English holiday in Mehmet Efendi's summer residence contradicts the traditional view that foreigners bonded in a hostile and inscrutable Ottoman environment. Far from huddling together in a ghetto, traders and diplomats sought allies among the Ottomans. In a fierce competition for goods and influence, Europeans often feared their fellow Christians more than the Turks” (260–1).

Always alert to how dependent we are on verbal records for our knowledge of non-verbal features of masques, Barbara Ravelhofer has made a substantial, often brilliant, thought-provoking contribution to our knowledge of early Stuart masques in performance.