Mastering Masques of Blackness: Jonson's Masque of Blackness, The Windsor text of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, and Brome's The English Moor

Abstract

This essay discusses the impact of blackface paint upon three early modern performances of racial change or racial masquerade: Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness (1605) and The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621) and Richard Brome's The English Moor (1637). Each production is shaped by the medium's often unruly materiality. When used as a device for disguise, blackface carries with it the possibility of aborted transformations, of misrecognition, of theatrical unpredictability—and, given early modern conceptions of the body, of worrisome physiological change. In The Masque of Blackness“the daughters of Niger” wish to change their skin color from black to white; the women remain black, however, at the masque's conclusion. This failure to show a racial transformation haunts Jonson's later and more successful masque, The Gypsies Metamorphosed. Richard Brome's The English Moor functions in effect as a comic revision of both of these earlier productions. Containing a failed “masque of Moors,” the play shows Brome adopting the very “parodic strategy” associated with his former master, Jonson: the subsumption of a rival playwright's use of theatrical convention—in this case, black face—for his own “exaltation.” (A.S.)