The Triumph of Peace - 1975

History

Reception

Introductory Remarks

R. Stanton Avery
Chairman of the Board of Trustees

Lawrence R. Tollenaere
Chairman of the Board of Overseers

James Thorpe
Director


A Royal Entertainment
The Triumph of Peace
A Masque by James Shirley

Refreshments
from the Stuart Period

Wine for the Gods
Comfits and Suckets
Banbury Cake
A Made Dish of Curds

The Masque

The most distinguished form of entertainment for English royalty and nobility during the sixteeth and early seventeeth centuries was the masque. It combined music, dancing, and poetry, and it used brilliant costumes and elaborate scenery. The result was a festive delight for the senses.

Masques were private entertainments, lavishly produced, usually for the members of the royal circle at court. The audiences and the performers often mingled: the masquers were themselves sometimes courtiers, and the member of the audience joined them in the dances which punctuated or concluded the entertainment. The word “masque” is the same term that appears in “masquerade,” a gathering at which the participants were called “masquers,” or wearers of masks.

Masques usually had almost no story. They often began with a procession of brilliantly costumed masquers and their attendants. One or more anti-masques (comic, realistic sketches) might precede the masque, or come between scenes, with one person presenting them to the audience. The heart of the masque was a series of songs and accompanying dancing (with the words, music, and choreography especially prepared for the occasion) by a symbolic or mythological figure (suc as Irene, who stands for Peace, or Amphiluche, who represents the Forerunner of the Morning). After the songs, there was dancing and revelry by the masquers and the guests. The masque usually concluded with an especially spectacular scene and song. Refreshments followed.

Masques were for an exclusive audience, and they were inordinately expensive to produce. As examples of conspicuous luxury, they were no longer performed after the decline of the British monarchy in the middle of the seventeeth century.

“The Triumph of Peace” was presented before King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria in the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall Palace in London on February 3, 1634. There was also present “a great assembly of Lords and Ladies and other persons of quality, whose aspect, sitting on the degrees prepared for that purpose, gave a great grace to this spectacle, especially being all richly attired.” The four Inns of Court - the legal societies which had exclusive right to admit people to the bar - planned and produced the masque to show their loyalty to the King. They engaged James Shirley to write the text, Inigo Jones to plan the scenes and the costumes, and William Lawes to write the music. It was said that this masque “was, for the variety of the shows, and richness of the habits, the most magnificent that hath been brought to Court in our time.” The King and Queen were especially delights: she danced with several of the masquers and declared that “she never saw any Masque more Noble, nor better performed than this was”; the King knighted the spokeman for those who had put on the masque.

The performance this evening uses the original music and the original text, somewhat shortened. The spirit of the original masque has been maintained, in the hope that we can enjoy it as royal entertainment.

James Thorpe

The Triumph of Peace

A Masque by James Shirley
Music Composed by William Lawes
Designed by Inigo Jones

First Music

Two Sarabandes
Matthew Locke

Sonata for Two Violins
Julie Ryan and Jeffrey Sandersier
Matthew Locke

Masquing Tune
John Adson

The Anti-Masques

The Entertainment begins with a series of comic sketches called anti-masques; Fancy presides over this phase of the Entertainment. The majority of the sketches are drawn from common life.

Dialogue among Opinion, Confidence, Fancy, Novelty, and Admiration

Dances of the Projectors

Dance of the Birds in the Woods

The Masque

“Heavenly strains” herald the masque proper and the entrance of three allegorical figures who symbolize the benefits of the King’s rule: Peace, Law, and Justice. Irene (Peace) enters first, drives off the anti-masquers, salutes the monachs, and calls forth her sisters, Eunomia (Law) and Diche (Justice).

The entry of Irene
Simfony
Song and Chorus: “Hence, ye profane”
Song: “Wherefor do my sisters”
Simfony
Chorus: “See where she shines”

The entry of Eunomia (Law)
Simfony
Duet: “Think not”
Chorus: “Irene enters”

The entry of Diche (Justice)
Dance: Pavan

The three sisters’ joint tribute to the King and Queen concludes the central portion of the Entertainment. After a comic interlude, included in the original text but omitted here, Amphiluche, Forerunner of the Morning, enters and ends the revels of Night.

The entry of Ampiluche (Forerunner of the Morning)
Song: “In enny”
Song: “The lark”
Chorus: “To bed”

The Refreshments

Sugar and spice, as the old rhyme says, are very nice. To seventeenth-century cooks they were vital ingredients in most cakes, candies, and wine-based drinks. The Banbury Cake served tonight has “a good store of . . . sugar” and its share of cinnamon, cloves, mace, and nutmeg. So does the Dish of Curds, possibly an early form of cheesecake.

The Englishman’s sweet tooth was also long indulged by comfits and suckets, the curious and now largely obsolete names for many kinds of sugar-coated concoctions. Not much escaped the candying process. Tiny seeds, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and even roots and flowers were dipped or boiled in sugar and spices. Few cooks today would go to the painstaking effort required to coat, for example, anise, coriander, and cucumber seeds with a hard sugar surface; it could probably also be said that few tastes today would still be tempted by candied seeds - or even by such delicacies as sugared rose petals. Some commercial counterparts of comfits still exist.

Peanut M&Ms and Jordan Almonds are examples, and candied fruits and nuts and even sugar-coats pills still have their devotess.

Sugard and spiced wines have perhaps had a better survival rate - though hardly by the names that were used in Stuart England. Three hundred years ago there were frequent culinary - and literary - references to hippocras, bastards, caudles, wassail, possets, bishops, and syllabubs. They were all, in spite of other possible connotations, terms used to describe various forms of sugared or mulled wine. The drink being served tonight, an adaptation of “Wine for the Gods,” is a kind of hippocras. The word derives from the Hippocrates’s sleeve through which apothecaries were wont to strain their medicinal creations. The original recipe for “Wine for the Gods” from Giles Rose’s A Perfect School of Instructions for the Officers of the Mouth, 1682, (reproduced here) calls for such straining. This evening’s modern adaptation is made by more conventional twentieth-century methods.

Suzanne Hull