Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

The Stuart period is marked by decadence and debauchery.

Experience the Stuart Court in all its nuanced splendour in this series compiled from our archive.

In this talk, historian Dr. Anne Day explores an elaborate form of entertainment at the Stuart Court, the mask.

Combining dance, theatre and a fancy dress ball, masks were staged regularly at the banqueting

house at Whitehall Palace.

So, it's a delight to be asked to teach, to talk on this subject, in this very special building.

It is actually the only surviving dance theatre from the 17th century in Europe,

and many people don't really quite understand how on earth this empty space could ever have been a dance theatre.

So that's what I'm going to focus on.

I'm going to do basically four main things.

The first is to talk about this banqueting house and what it was and what it was

and what it was then to give you a little bit of an insight into what a mask was,

which is the dance theatre that took place in this space,

and then to explain how this room was turned into a dance theatre

and how it operated.

And then I'm going to finish off by looking at just a few masks briefly

to show you how one or two of them worked.

So that's the little thing.

...