Masque
Quick answer: A masque is a lavish courtly entertainment blending poetry, music, dance and spectacle. Learn how masques worked, from Ben Jonson to Milton's Comus.
A masque is a form of courtly entertainment, at its height in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that combined poetry, music, dance, elaborate costumes and stage machinery into a single spectacular performance. Written largely in verse, masques were staged at royal courts and great houses, often with the nobles themselves, sometimes the king or queen, dancing in the final scenes.
For poets, the masque mattered because it paid, and because it stretched verse in unusual directions. The words had to share the stage with scenery and song, so masque poetry specialises in ceremony, praise, invocation and transformation. Reading one today is like finding the libretto of a lost art form, and its techniques still show up wherever a poem wants pageantry.
How It Works
A typical masque is built around an allegorical occasion: Virtue triumphs over Vice, Night gives way to Dawn, a royal wedding is blessed by descending gods. Speeches in verse alternate with songs and dances, and the whole event usually culminates in the revels, when masked performers invite the audience to dance. Ben Jonson added the antimasque, a grotesque or comic opening scene of witches or drunkards whose disorder is banished by the arrival of splendour.
The verse itself runs to invocation and ceremony. An invented example of masque register: Draw back the night on its silver hinges; / let the four winds kneel at the bride's white door. Ornate, imperative and built to be declaimed.
Where You Will See It
Ben Jonson, working with the designer Inigo Jones, perfected the Stuart court masque in works like The Masque of Blackness and Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, until the two men famously quarrelled over whether words or scenery mattered more. John Milton's Comus, presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, turned the form into serious moral poetry about chastity tested in a dark wood. Shakespeare embedded masques inside plays, most famously the betrothal masque of goddesses in The Tempest, which dissolves in the middle when Prospero remembers a plot against his life.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Nobody expects you to hire dancers, but the masque's tools travel well. Try writing a poem as ceremony: personify two forces, let one banish the other, and end in celebration. Borrow the antimasque idea by opening with deliberate chaos that the poem then transforms. Occasion poems, for weddings, graduations and new years, are the masque's modern descendants, and they succeed for the same reason masques did, because ceremony gives feeling a shape.
What poets can take from this
- Structure a masque-style poem around a transformation, disorder giving way to order.
- Personify abstractions boldly; the form was built for Virtue, Night and Rumour walking on stage.
- Open with an antimasque, a burst of comic or grotesque chaos for the ending to redeem.
- Write for the ear and the eye at once, with verbs of movement, light and unveiling.
- Keep speeches short; masque verse was always sharing time with music and dance.
Try it yourself
Write a short masque in verse for an ordinary occasion, such as the first day of spring on your street. Include one antimasque stanza of comic disorder, one speech by a personified force, and a closing invitation for everyone present to join the dance.
Questions
What is the difference between a masque and a play?
A play tells a story through characters in conflict, and anyone might watch it. A masque is an occasion-piece built on allegory, music, dance and spectacle, performed at court for and often by aristocrats, with praise of the host or monarch near its heart.
What is an antimasque?
An antimasque is a grotesque or comic prelude, invented by Ben Jonson, in which figures of disorder such as witches or satyrs perform before being swept away by the masque's arrival of beauty and order. The contrast makes the transformation feel earned.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.