SOURCE: "Literary Transformations: The Masquerade in English Fiction," in Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction, Stanford University Press, 1986, pp. 110-29.

In this excerpt from a study of the carnivalesque, Castle examines the relationship between the masquerade and English fiction in the eighteenth century.

The literary history of the masquerade in England could be said to begin, not with a novelist at all, but with John Dryden. The following dialogue from Marriage a la Mode (1673) celebrates the birth of a topos:

PALAMEDE. We shall have noble sport tonight, Rhodophil; this masquerading is a most glorious invention.

RHODOPHIL. I believe it was invented first by some jealous lover to discover the haunts of his jilting mistress, or perhaps by some distressed servant to gain an opportunity with a jealous man's wife.

PALAMEDE. No, it must be the invention of a woman: it has so much...