SOURCE: “‘Those Beautiful Characters of Sense’: Classical Deities and Court Masque,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 166-79.

In the following essay, Dundas analyzes the use of figures of classical myth in masques, arguing that they added an aspect of beauty and enrichment to the performances.

The flight into the imagination which was implicit in the whole production of court masques took courage from two sources, classical allusion and moral significance. However fantastic the thinly spun plots or however marvellous the stage machinery and costuming, these received some sort of anchoring to reality through recognizable myths and morally sound principles. The didactic no less than the political function of these myths has been stressed in recent criticism; in the words of Stephen Orgel, the masque fictions served to create “heroic roles for the leaders of society.”¹ Such an interpretation tends to emphasize the political and ethical goals...