Note 1458 — Chapter XVII · MASKS AND MISRULE

‘Maske’ first appears in 1514 (Collier, i. 79 ‘iocorum larvatorum, vocat. Maskes, Revelles, and Disguysings’); ‘masque’ is not English until the seventeenth century (Evans, xiii). Skeat derives through the French masque, masquer, masquerer, and the Spanish mascara, mascarada (Ital. mascherata) from the Arabic maskharat, a buffoon or droll (root sakhira, ‘he ridiculed’). The original sense would thus be ‘entertainment’ and that of ‘face-mask’ (larva, ‘vizard,’ ‘viser’) only derivative. But late Latin has already masca, talamasca in this sense; e.g. Burchardus of Worms, Coll. Decretorum (before 1024), bk. ii. c. 161 ‘nec larvas daemonum quas vulgo Talamascas dicunt, ibi ante se ferri consentiat’; cf. Ducange, s.v. Talamasca; Pfannenschmidt, 617, with some incorrect etymology. And the French masque is always the face-mask and never the performance; while se masquier, masquillier, maschurer, are twelfth-to thirteenth-century words for ‘blacken,’ ‘dirty.’ I therefore prefer the derivation of Brotanek, 120, from a Germanic root represented by the M. E. maskel ‘stain’; and this has the further advantage of explaining ‘maskeler,’ ‘maskeling,’ which appear, variously spelt, in documents of †1519-26. Both terms signify the performance, and ‘maskeler’ the performer also (Brotanek, 122). Face-masks were de rigueur in the Mask to a late date. In 1618 John Chamberlain writes ‘the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn came to court with their show, for I cannot call it a masque, seeing they were not disguised, nor had vizards’ (Nichols, James I, iii. 468).