The Masque of Blackness was an early Jacobean era masque

Masque

The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...

, first performed at the Stuart

House of Stuart

The House of Stuart is a European royal house. Founded by Robert II of Scotland, the Stewarts first became monarchs of the Kingdom of Scotland during the late 14th century, and subsequently held the position of the Kings of Great Britain and Ireland...

 Court in the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall Palace on Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night (holiday)

Twelfth Night is a festival in some branches of Christianity marking the coming of the Epiphany and concluding the Twelve Days of Christmas.It is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as "the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the...

, January 6, 1605. The masque

Masque

The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...

 was written by Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson

Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...

 at the request of Anne of Denmark

Anne of Denmark

Anne of Denmark was queen consort of Scotland, England, and Ireland as the wife of King James VI and I.The second daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark, Anne married James in 1589 at the age of fourteen and bore him three children who survived infancy, including the future Charles I...

, the queen consort of King James I

James I of England

James VI and I was King of Scots as James VI from 24 July 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the English and Scottish crowns on 24 March 1603...

, who wished the masquers to be disguised as Africans. Anne was one of the performers in the masque along with her court ladies, and appeared in blackface makeup. The plot of the masque follows the ladies arriving at the English Court to be "cleansed" of their blackness by King James; a stage direction that was impossible to fulfill on stage. As a result, The Masque of Beauty

The Masque of Beauty

The Masque of Beauty was a courtly masque composed by Ben Jonson, and performed to inaugurate the refurbished banqueting hall of Whitehall Palace on January 10, 1608. It was a sequel to the preceding Masque of Blackness, which had been performed three years earlier, on January 6, 1605...

 was written as a sequel to The Masque of Blackness. (The Masque of Beauty, originally intended for the following holiday season, was displaced by Hymenaei

Hymenaei

Hymenaei, or The Masgue of Hymen, was a masque written by Ben Jonson for the marriage of Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, and Lady Frances Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, and performed on their wedding day, January 5, 1606...

, the masque for the wedding of the Earl of Essex

Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex

Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex was an English Parliamentarian and soldier during the first half of the seventeenth century. With the start of the English Civil War in 1642 he became the first Captain-General and Chief Commander of the Parliamentarian army, also known as the Roundheads...

 and Frances Howard

Frances Carr, Countess of Somerset

Frances Carr, Countess of Somerset was an English noblewoman who was the central figure in a famous scandal and murder during the reign of King James I...

. Beauty was finally performed in 1608.)

The sets, costumes, and stage effects were designed by Inigo Jones

Inigo Jones

Inigo Jones is the first significant British architect of the modern period, and the first to bring Italianate Renaissance architecture to England...

; Blackness was the first of many masques for the Stuart Court on which Jonson and Jones would collaborate. The music for Blackness was composed by Alfonso Ferrabosco

Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger

Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger was an English composer and viol player of Italian descent. He straddles the line between the Renaissance and Baroque eras.-Biography:...

.

Jones designed a raised and mobile stage for the masque, forty feet square and four feet off the floor; this was employed for many subsequent masques. The stage contained inner space for the machines that produced stage effects and the technicians who operated them. Blackness introduced effects that Jones would repeat with variation throughout his career as a stage designer: it opened with a tempestuous seascape, simulated by flowing and billowing cloths.

The opening stormy sea was populated with six blue-haired merman

Merman

Mermen are mythical male equivalents of mermaids – legendary creatures who have the form of a human from the waist up and are fish-like from the waist down.-Mythology:...

-like tritons

Triton (mythology)

Triton is a mythological Greek god, the messenger of the big sea. He is the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, and Amphitrite, goddess of the sea, whose herald he is...

. The gods Oceanus

Oceanus

Oceanus ; , Ōkeanós) was a pseudo-geographical feature in classical antiquity, believed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to be the world-ocean, an enormous river encircling the world....

 ("blue") and Niger (black) entered, mounted upon giant seahorses

Seahorse

Seahorses compose the fish genus Hippocampus within the family Syngnathidae, in order Syngnathiformes. Syngnathidae also includes the pipefishes. "Hippocampus" comes from the Ancient Greek hippos meaning "horse" and kampos meaning “sea monster”.There are nearly 50 species of seahorse...

. The twelve daughters of Niger, played by the Queen and her ladies in waiting, entered in the company of a dozen nymphs of Oceanus as torchbearers; the ladies of the Court were dressed in silver and azure, with pearls and feathers in their hair, while the torchbearers, in green doublets with gold puffed sleeves, had their faces, hands, and hair dyed blue. The ladies rode in a great hollow seashell, which seemed to float upon and move with the waves, and was accompanied by six large sea monsters carrying more torchbearers. (With Blackness as with many subsequent masques designed by Jones, one of the aspects of the show most commented upon by witnesses was the dazzling intensity of light involved...which inevitably says something about the normal conditions of life in the Jacobean era.)
The principal cast of the masque:

• Queen Anne................Euphoris
• Countess of Bedford........Aglaia
• Lady Herbert...............Diaphane
• Countess of Derby.....Eucampse
• Lady Rich........................Ocyte
• Countess of Suffolk
  Catherine Howard, Countess of Suffolk
  Catherine Knyvet was born in Charlton, Wiltshire.She was the daughter of Sir Henry Knyvet of Charlton and Elizabeth Stumpe. Her half-brother was Sir Thomas Knyvet who foiled the gunpowder plot....
  
  .......Kathare

• Lady Bevill.........................Notis
• Lady Effingham...........Psychrote
• Lady Elizabeth Howard....Glycyte
• Lady Susan Vere.............Malacia
• Lady Mary Wroth
  Lady Mary Wroth
  Lady Mary Wroth was an English poet of the Renaissance. A member of a distinguished literary English family, Wroth was among the first female British writers to have achieved an enduring reputation...
  
  ...............Baryte
• Lady Walsingham.........Periphere

The masque was controversial in its day, in part for the production's use of body paint instead of masks to simulate dark skin. One observer, Sir Dudley Carleton

Dudley Carleton, 1st Viscount Dorchester

Dudley Carleton, 1st Viscount Dorchester was an English art collector, diplomat and Secretary of State.-Early life:He was the second son of Antony Carleton of Brightwell Baldwin, Oxfordshire, and of Jocosa, daughter of John Goodwin of Winchendon, Buckinghamshire...

, expressed a view tinged with the prevailing social biases of the era:

...instead of Vizzards, their Faces and Arms up to the Elbows,

were painted black, which was a Disguise sufficient, for they were

hard to be known...and you cannot imagine a more ugly sight....

The masque was expensive, costing £3000, and caused consternation amongst some English observers due to the perceived impropriety of the performance.

The texts of The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty were published together in quarto

Book size

The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from "folio" , to "quarto" and "octavo"...

 form in 1608, by the bookseller Thomas Thorpe

Thomas Thorpe

Thomas Thorpe was an English publisher, most famous for publishing Shakespeare's sonnets and several works by Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. His publication of the sonnets has long been controversial...

; they were reprinted in the first folio collection of Jonson's works in 1616

Ben Jonson folios

The folio collections of Ben Jonson's works published in the seventeenth century were crucial developments in the publication of English literature and English Renaissance drama. The first folio collection, issued in 1616, treated stage plays as serious works of literature instead of popular...

.

External links

• The Masque of Blackness.