Abstract
In 1605, a Danish woman, married to a Scotsman, appeared in public before him and an international gathering of his associates, wearing a flimsy, sexually suggestive costume and with black makeup on her arms, hands and face. She was impersonating one of twelve African nymphs, distressed by their ugly blackness, who were seeking the ruler of a country whose name ended with the syllables ‘tania’, in order to be whitened into beauty – and thereby to demonstrate, by means of the heliocentric symbolism of monarchy, the power of that country. The thematic inspiration for Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness apparently came from Queen Anne of Denmark herself; yet finally, it is her husband, James VI of Scotland and I of England and Wales, who becomes the centre of attention, as his regal light on the African nymphs transfigures them
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NOTES
Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness, in The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 11. 240–4.
Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 40–1.
I quote here from Margaret Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 116–7.
Quoted in Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1854 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 25.
Quoted by Montague Summers, A Memoir of Mrs. Behn’, in The Works of Aphra Behn, 6 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1915), I, xxix-xxx.
Quoted in Margaret J.M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 72.
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Chedgzoy, K. (1998). Blackness Yields to Beauty: Desirability and Difference in Early Modern Culture. In: McMullan, G. (eds) Renaissance Configurations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378667_5
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