The Pilgrim's Progress, the plays of Shakespeare, Milton's Paradise Lost: the turn of the twentieth century in Britain inherited previous generations’ love and admiration for these, but it added enthusiasms of its own for other work from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Comedies and tragedies by certain contemporaries of Shakespeare were reprinted in Havelock Ellis's ‘Mermaid’ series and every now and then staged. Lyrics were recovered from obscure Jacobethan playbooks and music-books, eagerly anthologised and occasionally sung, sometimes in their original settings, sometimes in new ones. And then there were the masques of the Stuart court. These were anthologised too—even put on stage on occasion, which is pretty remarkable when one considers that such masques in performance during the reign of the Stuart King James VI and I had been singular things. Singular indeed in two senses: first in the opulence of their décor, poetry, music and dance, in their sophisticated play of illusion and allusion, and in their counterpointing of venerable myth and immediate politics; but singular too in that, unless the monarch was minded to command a repeat performance, each masque was given once only. As Ben Jonson wrote in 1606, a masque was a ‘transitory device’, of such richness and rarity that, once over, there was only regret that ‘it lasted not still’, since it could not be ‘recovered to a part of that spirit it had in the gliding by’.