These shows were given in great halls, brilliantly lighted. The stage was splendidly decorated. Gods and goddesses floated among the clouds, and elaborate machines and scenes were devised. In one masque, a few years before the 'Tempest,' "an artificial sea was seen to shoot forth over the stage as it flowed to land, [this was the main machine--a great stage four feet high on trestles] on which was a great concave shell like mother of pearl" containing the masquers and conveyed by many sea-monsters hidden by the torch-bearers. The costumes of the masquers were in brilliant colors and heavily jeweled. These were often bizarre; but Inigo Jones knew the monuments of classical antiquity and the artistic achievements of Renaissance Italy as well as Jonson knew classical and humanistic literature. The living pictures were often in richness and color no unworthy rivals of the frescoes with which Rubens had decorated the ceiling of the Masquing Hall. Such expensive spectacles were beyond the reach of the professional theaters, but contemporary dramatists frequently found something that could be adapted or imitated for the public stage. So the antick dance of satyrs in a 'Winter's Tale' (three of whom are announced as having already appeared before the King) seems borrowed from an anti-masque in Ben Jonson's 'Masque of Oberon.' In two plays of nearly the same date there is a well defined effort to combine the masque and the regular drama into a distinctive and novel dramatic entertainment, in the 'Four Plays in One' of Beaumont and Fletcher and the 'Tempest' of Shakspere. The 'Tempest' has always been a spectacular play on the stage, and so it must have appeared to him--and as a spectacle having many of the features of the court masque. There is music and song. Ariel, Prospero, and even Caliban are proper figures for a court show. The "masque proper" is used to celebrate the betrothal in the fourth act. This is a simplified form of such a masque as would be given at court. There is evidently some machinery--it is the insubstantial pageant that calls forth Prospero's famous lines. Ariel, Iris, Ceres, and Juno appear, Juno descending from the heavens. There is music and a song, and Ferdinand cries: This is a most majestic vision, and Harmonious charmingly. May I be bold To think these spirits? And when Prospero says they are spirits summoned by his art, Ferdinand exclaims Let me live here ever; So rare a wond'red father and a wise Makes this place Paradise. It is not Miranda now, but the machine and costumes used in court-spectacles that turn the platform into a land of romance.