The first study to consider masques from the point of view of reception as well as production, Reading Masques illuminates intersections of elite and public culture in seventeenth-century England. Court masques, the rhetorically slight but visually and aurally spectacular dramas that framed hours of festive dancing at the English courts of James I and Charles I, were major social occasions for the aristocratic audiences who participated in them, and they have been central to historical and literary considerations of the era's elite culture. However, masques were also undertaken in a far wider...