Abstract
The Masque of Blacknesse was a carnival—cavalcade of colour, — it was brash, bold and performed with swaggering pomposity in 1605. The Masque was written by Ben Jonson and staged by Inigo Jones. In it, the Queen of England, Anne of Denmark and her noble friends were painted Black and pretended to be the daughters of the River Niger (personified as a God King). This article unpicks the ethnographic themes in King Niger's speech where he extols the beauty of blacknesse. The author suggests that whilst early modern fiction may echo themes present in that society, it needs to be decoded and in some cases decolonised to decipher early modern ethnography.
Keywords
‘In the old age black was not counted fair’, William Shakespeare whimsically postulated in Sonnet 127. He was suggesting that ‘blacknesse’ was always abhorred and denigrated. But the quotation (above) offers another view. 1 It comes from The Masque of Blacknesse written by the English playwright Ben Jonson. The Masque was created for royal amusement and initiated as a result of a direct request from the Queen of England, Anne of Denmark, to Jonson. 2 The Masque was brash, lavish, and rumoured to have cost more than £3000 (£369,000). It was staged by Inigo Jones, the most renowned architect and designer of his age, and the music was composed by Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger, an English-born composer of Bolognese descent (now Italy). The Masque was garishly performed on 6 January 1605, at the Whitehall Palace in Kensington to an expectant audience which included King James I. 3
The Masque's narrative, structure and staging, reveal ideas about early modern colour aesthetics and their associations to ethnicity. 4 The principle characters are the Niger River, personified as an African God King, and his daughters. These daughters of Niger want to become white because they feel their blackness hides their ‘true’ beauty. 5 But Niger's words offer a contrary perspective. 6 He champions their colour and criticizes those Englishmen that ‘infect’ the remembrance of Africans’ beauty. 7 Niger's speech assails the ‘logic’ of any ‘alchemical’ attempt to ‘alter’ their ‘spotless’ complexions. 8 And Niger claims that historically ‘blacknesse’ was revered for its unchanging perfection, because ‘abhorred grey’ cannot transform it. 9 Furthermore, Niger claims ‘blacknesse’ is a ‘most faithful hue’ because it does not ‘alter’ and ‘Age will not wither’ those who ‘… pinch black’. 10 Finally, he argues that ‘blacknesse’ was considered the ‘perfect'st beauty’ until ‘some few … styled poets … [with] winged fiction’ ‘painted’ Black as less than ‘pur[e]’.
The sentiments behind Niger’s lines should not be dismissed, even though they would have been spoken by a white actor in black face. This is because Niger articulates ideas written and spoken by early-modern African and European scholars such as Abba Bahrey (1593) and Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1664–1665). 11 Niger’s words are reflective of early-modern philosophies that were capable of praising or reflecting on the beauty of ‘blacknesse’. 12
From a modern perspective this early part of the Masque may seem counterintuitive. These types of spectacles are not often seen as promoting the virtue of ‘blacknesse’. This is because ‘blacking up’ is often associated with a carnival cavalcade, mockery, minstrels, 13 mumming 14 or a ‘puppy show’. 15 Even the early-modern audiences that witnessed the Masque's first lavish iteration, before the King in 1605, would have found its final proceedings ironic – the central intention of the Masque failed. This is because the whitening of Niger's daughters was not achieved. The tincture used to ‘paint’ the noble actresses was of such an opulent constancy 16 it was not possible to ‘wash’ the performers for the later scenes. 17 The nobility who played the daughters of Niger remained ‘Coal-black … better than another hue/ … scorn[ing] to bear another hue’. 18
Of course, the fact that genteel English ladies were ‘painted’ Black at all, caused apoplectic consternation for at least one spectator, the gentleman Dudley Carleton. Carleton was an art collector and diplomat. He stated that the female actresses ‘black faces and hands … were painted … bare up [to] the elbows, [it] was a very loathsome sight and I am sorry that strangers should see our court so strangely disguised’. 19 What intensified the Englishman's disgust was the fact that the actresses in question were drawn from the most influential and powerful English families. They included: Queen Anne of Denmark, Mary Wroth the poet daughter of the Earl of Leicester and cousin to Walter Raleigh, Penelope Rich, Countess of Devonshire and sister of the Earl of Essex, and Lucy Russell, the countess of Bedfordshire, who was a tutor and confidant to several monarchs both in England and elsewhere. 20 The failure of the performance to depict the ‘washing’, despite Ingio Jones’ staging, is why a second masque was created – it was called the Masque of Beautie. This Masque took almost three years to bring to the stage, on 10 January 1608, and similar characters appeared, but conveniently ‘washed’ white. 21
Of course, for modern readers, the fact that these ideas are being so dramatically depicted at all in this Masque may seem surprising. Nevertheless, it is pertinent that Niger's views remain unchallenged within the verbal trajectory of the Masque. The challenges to Niger's perspective are in the Masque's subsequent proceedings: Niger's daughters want to become white, and James I is supposed to have the power to grant that wish.
Jonson uses the Masque to fantasize about the complexion of Africans being ‘cured’ or ‘washed’, 22 and proposes that this ‘alchemical’ transformation, or to quote Francis Bacon ‘experiment solitary’, 23 can be achieved by James, when his power is coupled with England's climate. It is a conceit that through the divine right of kings no power can take precedence over the monarch. After all James himself stated, the ‘Estate of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth’. 24 Jonson was therefore creating a dramatic ode to a power which 25 can make possible the impossible, as it was widely believed in early modern thought that ‘you’ can ‘not [“actually”] wash the Ethiop white’. 26 English penmen such as the politician and philosopher Thomas More (1557), the traveller and polemic George Best (1579), 27 the influential politician Francis Bacon (1620), and the dexterous polymath Thomas Browne (1646) remarked how ‘blacknesse’ was ‘constant’ and ‘stubborn’. Best attributed negative reasons to explain this, others such as More, Bacon and Browne did not. 28
However, Jonson uses this topic to underline the omnipresence of James' otherworldly power. Johnson elevated James’ touch beyond the power of ‘Christ's blood’, as the ‘blood of Christ’ could only achieve a metaphorical washing of the soul. 29 ‘Christ's blood’ did not change the colour of a baptized person's skin. For example, in Thomas Calvert's ‘… a Blackamoor made White’ (1648) the ‘blessing’ of Christ was bestowed on a man of the Jewish faith from Morocco who converted in England that same year. This Converso 30 then described himself as ‘white’. Of course, his actual complexion had not changed, he was only metaphorically ‘washed’. 31
Musings on the Masque of Blacknesse are enlightening for their insights into early modern drama, Renaissance theatre, and so on. However, whether the analysis of Jonson's Masque helps us to exculpate the ‘blacknesse’ of Africans in early-modern Europe is another matter. Hitherto most of the modern historians that have written on this topic have tended to rely on an interpretation of the negative aspects of this and other Renaissance performances, and from this extrapolate that Africans, especially ‘dark-skinned’ or ‘Sub-Saharan’ 32 Africans would have been thought of, and would have thought of themselves, as inferior in early modern Europe. This automatic othering of Africans is often predicated on an indifference towards the history of Africans living in Europe. For more than a hundred years, scholars such as J.A. Rogers and John Archer have written about Africans living in early-modern Europe. 33 They have proved that, in England, African men, women and children and those of dual heritage with a white father or mother, were not only present, but were born, baptized, married and died. These Africans lived in rural villages, market and port towns, and cities. They were royalty, ambassadors, needle makers, traders, soldiers and servants. Africans lived in towns as far north as Lanarkshire in Scotland, as far south as Portsmouth, to the west in Plymouth and eastwards in Norwich. The lowly status we may automatically inscribe to them is often a matter of modern appropriation, imputation or sometimes a misreading of texts. The African peoples that lived in early-modern England were not divided from each other or white people using anthropology, pseudo-science or phrenology, 34 although of course prejudice did exist. 35
Nevertheless, many historians create a context that relies on a cursory reading of the Masque and other dramatic works, coupled with an ignorance of the history outlined above. The result is an inferior status that is automatically applied to Africans in early-modern societies; they become ‘others’. 36 Peter Fryer appears to do this, when he writes that Africans in England were either slaves, or a few ‘strolling players’, isolated, strange and transient. 37 Earlier historians such as Kenneth Little in Negroes in Britain stated that he doubted ‘if the Blackman whether of African or East Indian origin was a familiar figure [in England] until well on in that [sixteenth] century, except as a chance visitor or when imported from Portuguese and colonial territories [in Africa and the Caribbean]’. Well respected and prominent historians such as Kim Hall and James Walvin seem to repeat this theory when Hall says that Africans in Tudor England were ‘too accidental and too solitary to be given a historical statistic’, and Walvin that an African presence in early-modern England was not significant enough to be given any serious academic investigation. 38
These perspectives of early-modern English society hypothesize that Africans were inconsequential, and at the same time, in a rather contradictory way, suggest that they were the epitome of strangeness to people in that society. But early-modern England was not a society where ‘race laws’, conventions and customs were endemic. Africans were not routinely segregated from white English people, or anyone else – they got baptized, married and buried in the same churches. So, in short, the only way to understand Africans in early-modern England is to study them.
Therefore, the Masque of Blacknesse can tell us a lot about the lavish nature of early modern drama and offer ideas about the aesthetics of ‘blacknesse’ associated with Africans. Some of these notions are rarely discussed – such as Niger's speech defending the ‘perfect blackness’. However, the lives of actual Africans in early-modern England were far less melodramatic, alchemically driven or otherworldly. By returning to the study of parish records we can see Africans in early-modern England more clearly. Most Africans lived uneventful lives in English society that seem parodied by the kind of high (or low) spectacle staged in the Masque. The imaginary blackness of the Masque should not conceal the real Africans embedded in English and European history. The Masque should be seen as what it was, a drama of its time: however, the African population of early modern Europe was ‘quite another thing’. 39