The History of England’s Masquerade Essays -- European History

The History of Englands Masquerade The masquerade party played a monumental sidetrack in the persuasions and themes of England during the eighteenth century. Its popularity spanned most of the century, bringing together multitude of all classes, from the highest nobleman to the lowest commoner. Masquerades were a firmly established part of city life in England by the 1720s. Most masquerades were held in buildings in particular designed for them, such as the Haymarket, the Soho, or the Pantheon. During the early part of the century, masquerades held at the Haymarket, the most popular location for these events, drew in up to a thousand masqueraders weekly. Later in the century, public masquerades in celebration of special(prenominal) events drew in thousands of people. The popularity of the masquerade is clearly apparent from the appearance of composition columns devoted to describing particularly elegant masquerades. Other masquerade literature that circulated by means of the cities included pamphlets denouncing the masquerade as scenes of promiscuity and impropriety (3). Such civilian and religious censure caused the popularity of the masquerade to fluctuate during the century, but the phenomenon did not decline until the l 780s. The origin of the masquerade in England is a subject that more scholars have speculated on. When masquerades first appeared, they were called signs ofdiabolical foreign influence, imported corruption (5) The idea for the masquerade may indeed have come from foreign parts. The eighteenth century was a time when many young people travelled abroad as part of their education. Undoubtedly, the excitement of masquerades held in Italy, Spain and France were something these traveling youths cute to recreate once they came home. Foreign ambassado... ...iction writers exploited the masquerades association with sexual license. Examples of this back tooth be found in Defoes Roxana and Fieldings Tom Jones. The masquerade became a tan trum in literature where the most outrageous things could happen, as often was the grammatical case in real life. Regardless of the origins, regardless of the propriety? the existence of the masquerade as a part of popular urban culture in the eighteenth century cannot be denied. The masquerade was a much infallible outlet for the people of this time who constantly had to keep their behavior in spite of appearance the strict confines of what was socially acceptable. By putting one bury on, the masqueraders were able to take a more fundamental mask off. reckon CitedCastle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization.The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996.