All this, despite the dangers and expense of artificial lighting by which to read. Of his eighteenth-century childhood in Yorkshire, Thomas Wright recalled poring over the Bible in bed by candlelight. “On this I used to read till twelve, one, or two o’clock in the morning, till I fell asleep, a dangerous practice.” Some youths had to fend for themselves, scavenging rushlights, pine knots, or small nubs of tallow. Although born to an aristocratic family, even François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, was forced as a student to steal candle-ends from chapel to read the sermons of Jean Baptiste Massillon, the renowned Bishop of Clermont. More fortunate was the sixteenth-century German student Friederich Behaim. Residing in the town of Altdorf, he received supplies of large candles from his mother in Nuremberg. “Buy yourself a few small candles,” she instructed in 1578, “and use them when you are not reading and writing so that the large candles may be saved for studying.”47 Whatever its source, the poor quality of artificial light proved difficult for readers. Pepys grew plagued by “sore eyes” and discontinued writing his diary at the age of thirty-six, fearing that he might go blind. Late hours spent working in his office were the principal cause, though books were an aggravation. “My eyes, with overworking them, are sore as soon as candlelight comes to them,” he lamented in 1666. A Lancashire physician complained of failing sight due to “reading and writing so much by candle light,” notwithstanding his efforts to use a “thick candle” and “to keep a steady light.”48
For small numbers of people, writing filled late hours. “It smells of the candle” was a saying reserved for midnight compositions. Not surprisingly, these hours were coveted by the author of Night Thoughts, poet Edward Young. At Oxford, to stimulate his creativity at midday, Young even drew his curtains and lit a lamp. John Milton, completely blind later in life (due, he believed, to a childhood penchant for reading at bedtime), composed verse at night in his head, which he dictated each morning to a scribe. Journals provided an increasingly popular outlet for self-reflection. Rarely were they intended for one’s family, much less the educated public—some diarists, like Pepys, wrote entries in cipher. Apart from reading books and keeping a diary, Beck poured his emotions at night into writing poetry. As a widower, he spent hours composing elegies to his deceased wife, Roeltje. “At night, until 1:00, I wrote the 2nd elegy upon the death of my dear departed wife,” he scribbled on January 2, 1624. Letters, too, addressed to intimate acquaintances, afforded a vehicle for personal thoughts. This was one of the joys of Laura Cereta, the young wife of an Italian merchant in the late fifteenth century. Responsible for helping to maintain her parents’ household as well as her own, she found rare freedom at night, especially from males in her family, to cultivate her many talents. Hours were lavished both on books (“my sweet night vigils of reading”) and needlework. The artistry involved in embroidering an intricate silk shawl, adorned with images of savage beasts, gave her special pleasure. To a close friend, she confided, “My firm rule, of saving the night for forbidden work, has allowed me to design a canvas that contains a harmonious composition of colors. The work has taken three months of sleepless nights.” Above all, Cereta composed long, highly introspective epistles, filled with classical allusions. As she described in one letter:
I have no leisure time for my own writing and studies unless I use the nights as productively as I can. I sleep very little. Time is a terribly scarce commodity for those of us who spend our skills and labor equally on our families and our own work. But by staying up all night, I become a thief of time, sequestering a space from the rest of the day.49
Such were the principal diversions of preindustrial folk when nights were free. Rather than retire with the sun, most people instead chose to prolong their evenings with like-minded souls of good cheer, whether families, friends, or lovers. Notwithstanding a small literate minority, intensely devoted like Laura Cereta to solitary study, large numbers delighted in hours of idle play and conviviality. Nights inside cramped dwellings and alehouses were as vibrant as they were ill lit. “Easier flows a song at night,” went a saying, “than a song by morning light.” Moderation, proclaimed a Polish song, “is for the day, eve and night to be gay.” That said, darkness brought the greatest freedom of all, not to the middle-class likes of David Beck and Samuel Pepys, but to men and women at opposite ends of the social spectrum. If night, the common benefactress, was a time of autonomy and license for most, it bore heightened significance for patricians and plebeians. It was the mean and the mighty, paradoxically, for whom darkness had the most profound bearing. Declared a sixteenth-century ballad, “Welcome the nights, / That double delights as well as [for] the poore as the peere.”50
CHAPTER EIGHT
KNIGHTWALKERS:
PRINCES AND PEERS
I
. . . Come,
Let’s have one other gaudy night. Call to me
All my sad captains. Fill our bowls once more.
Let’s mock the midnight bell.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1606–16071
DURING THE LATE Middle Ages, princes and knights laid claim to night’s domain. Across the darkened countryside, distant fortresses stood as lonely outposts of light, their turrets and parapets aglow with blazing torches. Nocturnal displays of princely power were grand spectacles of self-indulgence, festive evenings when nobles reveled within the great halls of their castles. Amid open fires, candles, and flambeaux, enormous banquets, larded with game, testified to feudal extravagance. So it was that Charles VI of France (1368–1422) and his entourage, over four days in 1389, celebrated the Feast of Saint-Denis. Days of jousting ended each night with dance and drink. On the fourth evening, reported a chronicler, “The lords, making night into day, indulging in all the excesses of the table, were led by drunkenness into such disorders that, with no respect for the presence of the king, several of them profaned the holiness of the religious edifice and gave themselves up to libertinage and adultery.”2
In due course, with the appearance of court aristocracies by the sixteenth century, more refined entertainments arose within noble households. As military competition among lords diminished amid the emergence of strong nation-states, aristocratic life revolved around civil amusements at court, coupled with intellectual and artistic pursuits. At the same time, the growth of cities afforded less isolated settings for nocturnal merriment. Just as the upper classes proclaimed their power and wealth at night through public illuminations, so they appropriated evenings for private amusements, “lengthening out” their “pleasures,” to paraphrase a commentator. And whereas, initially, daytime, too, proved a popular venue for court diversions, night increasingly appealed to royal sensibilities. Noted a German writer, “They stay awake in order to indulge in their entertainments, though other people sleep.” Diversions distinguished elites from social subordinates, consigned by necessity to their beds. “Instead of roaring, / We waste the night / In love and snoaring,” a commoner jests in The Two Queens of Brentford (1721). By contrast, wrote an observer in the mid-1600s, “Courtiers of both sexes turn night to day, and day to night.”3
Across Europe, from London to Vienna, noble courts staged lavish entertainments against the blackness of night. At a Florentine opera in 1661 entitled The Horse Dance, performed in a garden behind the palace of the Grand Duke, more than one thousand torches lined the arena as a “troope of horse” paraded to the music of over two hundred violas and violins. “Beyond all expression,” an English visitor marveled. Spectacular fireworks displays enjoyed immense popularity, as did theatrical performances utilizing new techniques of stage lighting. No paean more passionately proclaimed the aristocratic affinity for night than Isaac de Benserade’s Le Ballet de la Nuit (1653). Staged in honor of Louis XIV, it was the most lavish of Benserade’s early ballets. The young king himself appeared in several roles during the baroque spectacle, which featured lush costumes and opulent sets. Appropriately, the king in the final act donned a plumed headdress in t
he image of the rising sun. Although populated by beggars and thieves, Le Ballet de la Nuit offered a transcendent vision of nocturnal life, one replete with deities against the ornate backdrop of the heavens. Performed on several occasions, the ballet was a great favorite at court.4
Wolfgang Heimbach, Nocturnal Banquet, 1640.
Balls, concerts, and opera were among the principal nocturnal diversions of urban patricians, escorted in the comfort of coaches by armed servants with links. “Show, equipage, pomp, feasts,” and “balls,” described a writer. Toward the late seventeenth century, promenades of carriages along public walks captured aristocratic fancies. Renowned sites included the Prado in Madrid and St. James’s Park in London. Of the Voorhout in The Hague, a visitor remarked in 1697, “Everyone endeavoured to be the most admired for richnesse of liverie and number of footmen.”5 In the early eighteenth century, elegant amusements only proliferated, including illuminated pleasure gardens like Ranelagh and Vauxhall in London. “Ranelagh,” exclaims a wide-eyed admirer in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, “looks like the inchanted palace of a genie, adorned with the most exquisite performances of painting, carving, and gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps.” Elegance was paramount. Invited to an evening party in Palermo known as a conversazione, the Englishman William Beckford and a companion found themselves bereft of a coach. Alarmed by the public disgrace of arriving on foot, their Sicilian guide Philip went to heroic lengths en route, leading the pair without flambeaux through a maze of back lanes “only known to himself” in order to conceal their shame. Meanwhile, assemblies, or parties, among persons of quality acquired immense popularity from London to Moscow. In Paris, a traveler in 1717 found assemblies “every night,” as did a visitor to Prague. A London writer declared, “Masquerades, ridottos, operas, balls, assemblies, plays, the gardens, and every other big-swoln child of luxury, in the height of excess, becomes the proof of a taste for the elegancies of life.”6
Indeed, even nocturnal funerals, favored by some aristocratic families during the seventeenth century for their solemnity, became for others ostentatious exhibitions of wealth and privilege—“as much pomp as the vanity of man could wish,” derided a London resident in 1730. Upon the death of Cardinal Richelieu in 1642, more than two thousand candles and torches illuminated his cortège. Among Lutheran elites in Germany, the Beisetzung, or nocturnal burial, became a coveted honor for members of court society. In 1686, the Saxon Consistory complained to Elector John George III (1647–1691) that the “increasingly common nocturnal internments . . . are transforming Christian burial into a base carnal display.”7
II
Now is the wisht for time to crowne delight
Turne night to day and day into the night,
Prepare for stirring, masque, midnight revells,
All rare varietie to provoke desire.
NATHANIEL RICHARDS, 16408
The preeminent entertainment during much of the early modern era was the masquerade. Long popular in European capitals, it provided a source of genteel amusement in England from the reign of Henry VIII (1491–1547). The Elizabethan poet Thomas Campion wrote of “youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights.” Confined to courts and estates of the nobility, early masquerades were dramatic spectacles in which guests danced and performed in costume. Soon enough, dancing and conversation became their principal attractions, always, however, in some manner of disguise. For central to a masque’s mystique was anonymity, achieved by a vizard covering one’s face. In the same spirit, introductions were suspended between revelers, in sharp contrast to the requirements of formal etiquette.9
To understand a masquerade’s broad appeal, it is important to note the constraints of aristocratic life. Gentility and good manners defined the existence of courtiers, with elaborate canons to guide their words, gestures, and deeds. Success at court rested upon reserve and self-control, especially in the presence of superiors. No realm of personal behavior went unregulated, not even coughing and spitting. Ceremonious conduct, however feigned, was critical to preferment. Among the precepts in an early seventeenth-century conduct book, “A courtier must be serviceable to ladies & women of honour, dutiful to high officers, gracefull amongst councellers, pleasant among equalls, affable to inferiors, and curteous to all.” Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, contrasted aristocratic manners with the “natural behavior” of the lower classes: “Whereas the countrey peasants meet with such kind hearts and unconcerned freedom as they unite in friendly jollity, and depart with neighbourly love, the greater sort of persons meet with constrain’d ceremony, converse with formality, and for the most part depart with enmity.” In short, preferment and status rested upon theatrical “self-fashioning,” with courtiers playing contrived roles.10
Masquerades, by contrast, afforded a hiatus from the repressive milieu of early modern courts. Baroque spectacles, they featured lavish costumes of silk and satin bathed in the brilliance of beeswax candles. But on several levels, masquerades represented dramatic departures from courtly etiquette. By stripping persons of their identity, they undermined distinctions between social ranks, with all revelers recreated equal. Within the privileged universe of aristocrats, this ramification was significant enough, but time would bring yet more sweeping changes. By the early eighteenth century, London was hosting midnight masques open, by ticket, to the general public so long as one arrived masked and unarmed. During one gathering, the ballroom was lit by five hundred candles, with women adorned in a “vast variety of dresses (many of them very rich).” Clearly, these remained grand entertainments, but with unprecedented opportunities for leveling. “A country of liberty,” pronounced a contemporary of the typical masque. Indeed, subscription masquerades arose in other cities, too. A writer in a Manchester newspaper predicted in 1755 the direst consequences:
Giuseppe Grisoni, Masquerade at King’s Opera House, 1724.
The masquerade houses may, with propriety enough, be called shops, where opportunities for immorality, prophaneness, obscenity, and almost every kind of vice, are retailed to any one who will become a customer; and at the low rate of seven and twenty shillings, the most abandon’d courtezan, the most profligate rake or common sharper, purchases the privilege of mingling with the first peers and peeresses of the realm.11
Most important of all was the freedom conferred by a masque’s anonymity. Candor and spontaneity replaced artifice and inhibition, exposing the inner self while concealing one’s public identity. To “masque the face” was to “unmasque the mind,” Henry Fielding wrote in “The Masquerade” (1728). Conversations were bolder and more impulsive. “Absolute freedom of speech” was the protocol, according to Mist’s Weekly Journal. Flirtations became more daring and jests less subtle. Polite manners, stiffened by courtly etiquette, yielded to gestures of physical intimacy. Rued a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine, “Whatever lewdness may be concerted; whatever luxury, immodesty, or extravagance may be committed in word or deed, no one’s reputation is at stake.” Critics of masquerades complained loudly of the liberties taken by men and women, though the latter received the greatest blame for their defiance of traditional stereotypes—shedding, as a person put it, one’s “daily mask of innocence and modesty.” More than that, alcoves and gardens permitted sexual liaisons, often, one presumes, with vizards still intact. “Immodesty and leudness propagate, and with promiscuous congress in disguise, practise obscene and flagrant villanies,” condemned a poet.12
And then there were the costumes. These, often worn in place of a black silk gown, or “domino,” added to one’s sense of liberation. No doubt some disguises were donned in a spirit of derision, yet a further annoyance to critics, particularly when government and religious authorities were targets. But often, guests chose instead to indulge personal fantasies, and to some degree wearers were transformed by the experience of such close identification. For a single night, one could become a pauper or a prince, or, for that mat
ter, a demon or a god. For Joseph Addison, commenting in the Spectator, masquerades permitted persons to dress as they “had a mind to be.” In addition to impersonating such historical figures as Henry VIII or Mary Queen of Scots, guests appeared in abstract guises, attired, for instance, as Day or Night. Common were costumes modeled after proletarian clothing. Dairymaids, shepherds, prostitutes, and soldiers were all popular characters. Cross-dressing was prevalent. Henry III of France (1551–1589) usually appeared in a low-cut gown that “showed his throat hung with pearls.” Horace Walpole arrived one evening dressed as an elderly woman. A writer railed in 1722, “Women, lewd women, dress in mens habits, that they may vent their obscenity more freely, and that to their own sex; and where men dress in the female habit, to give and receive a flood of unclean, and, to them, luscious conversation.”13
Masquerades, then, occasioned evenings of striking license. Still, genteel entertainments represented, at most, momentary reprieves from reality—passing fancies staged sporadically over the course of a year. Nor in their lavish displays of pomp and privilege, their sumptuous buffets and beeswax candles, did masquerades embody a genuine spirit of egalitarianism. Despite critics’ fears, any commitment to social leveling was at best ephemeral. Lords and ladies invariably departed from masquerades as they arrived, in coaches squired by squads of footmen. A Danish writer remarked, “A servant is as good as his master,” but only, he noted, “for as long as the masquerade lasts.”14
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