Masques and The Tempest

A common masque of the seventeenth century included elaborate and ornate productions, often very over the top, that required little intellectual attention or introspection on the part of the audience; viewers simply had to passively sit back and visually observe the production in hopes of being entertained by an embellishment of costumes and movement. Shakespeare observed that the theater was becoming masque like and comments on this in his romance play, The Tempest. We are visually fooled in the Tempest; what appears to be the most natural scene of the play is actually the most artificial-Prospero's (and Shakespeare's) creation. Shakespeare shifted from the genre of tragedy to romance, a genre driven by tragedy that ends in comedy in a rather superficial (or artificial) fashion. Shakespeare stopped emphasizing the importance of individual personality among characters and casted them as "types," or cliches. The Tempest embodies the masque-like artificiality that was transpiring in the theater, and served as Shakespeare's final attempts to fool his audience into believing they understood what they were observing, when in fact they were the butt of the joke in their lack of understanding and inability to observe a play with more than their eyes. (In Coriolanus we observed a play where little was seen, and much was heard, unlike the Tempest which reveals how audiences became too visually dependent and stopped listening to the narrative.)

Stephanie Ingraham
Section 1B Ian Hoch