The Renaissance humanists’ quest for the perfect Latin style formed the central element in their views of literature and history and contributed fundamentally to the genesis of their cultural values. In order to establish the ideal Latin, the humanists searched the treasures of Antiquity and formed the critical standards necessary to judge and use ancient writers. As a consequence Renaissance Latin prose was dynamic, although within definite limits. It changed according to the increased knowledge and sophistication of both its practitioners and their audience. This essay will describe the changes that Latin prose (Latin poetry will be discussed only in passing) experienced in Italy in the last decades of the Quattrocento and first years of the Cinquecento. It will review the major schools of Latin prose composition—the eclectic, the strict imitative, and the “archaizing“— and concentrate on the last of these in an attempt to explain why some Italian humanists followed certain ancient but uncommon Latin models in their writing and, thereby, rejected, at least implicitly, a number of basic elements in the view of the Latin language and its history that was accepted during the Quattrocento.

When, in the fifth act of Hamlet, Shakespeare's protagonist accepts the challenge to “play” with Laertes, newly returned from France, in a match contrived by the King, both the challenge and the resulting contest embody strains of significance largely inaccessible to a twentieth-century audience. Shakespeare's patrons at the Globe, however, would surely have distinguished in minute detail the differences between foreign and domestic codes of swordsmanship, might well have traced the actors’ skills to the pedagogical efforts of one or another master of defense then plying his talents in London, and, yeomen and aristocrats alike, would undoubtedly have felt themselves expert critics of an athletic ritual rich in historical association and accumulated lore. Today, however, the cultural context within which they reacted is difficult indeed to recover, for the history of the arts of defense remains a neglected area in Renaissance studies.

The existence of an Oxford dramatic piece of 1636 variously called Moore's Mask or The Moor's Mask has been known to scholars since 1891, when F. G. Fleay included it in a list of “University plays in English.” Fleay gave no source for his information, however, and the location of the manuscript has hitherto been unknown. G. E. Bentley wrote in 1956 that “I find no other record of this masque. Presumably Fleay's information was derived from the manuscript, but I do not know where it is.” Harbage and Schoenbaum's Annals of English Drama (1964) simply repeats Fleay's entry with the comment “Extant?” Fleay called the work Moore's Mask; Bentley The Moor's Mask; Harbage and Schoenbaum give both titles