Watching the Maskers: Masquerade Dances in the London Theatres

Commercial masked balls seem to have begun in London during the reign of Queen Anne, with 'Mr Thurmond's Masquerade' leading the way in 1711. They became all the rage among the very rich when very expensive and exclusive balls, frequently attended by royalty, were put on at the Opera House in the Haymarket from 1717. Before long theatre audiences could see masquerade dances as entr'actes, performed by the leading dancers of London's two main theatre companies, and masked ball scenes in new plays. Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing and Romeo and Juliet both have masked balls that are essential to the plot, and these scenes were expanded to show off the company's dancers and the elaborate costumes of the characters watching the dancing. Even Cymbeline, in David Garrick's adaptation, acquired a masked dance inserted into Shakespeare's serenade scene, famous for its song 'Hark, hark the lark'. This paper will look at masquerades on the London stage and the dancers who performed them. 

About the authors

Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson have written extensively on 17th- and 18th-century singers and theatre performers for musical periodicals and for New Grove. They were Research Associates for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for which they wrote over 60 articles, and have edited facsimile editions of the complete songs of Richard Leveridge (1997) and of The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music, 1702-1711 (2007). Recent articles and papers include 'Nancy Dawson, her hornpipe and her posthumous reputation' (RECTR, 2015), 'Dancing the Hornpipe in The Beggar's Opera' (Oxford, April 2018), 'New light on the Baroness' (Theatre Notebook, 2019), 'Reading the Accounts: Dancers at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in the season of 1726-7' (Oxford, April 2019) and 'Getting and Spending in London and Yorkshire: a young musician's account book for 1799-1800' (Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle (2020).