SOURCE: “Dark Incontinents: The Discourses of Race and Gender in Three Renaissance Masques,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. 23, 1992, pp. 139-63.

[In the essay below, Siddiqi considers the treatment of gender and race in two court masques by Ben Jonson and a masque written for London merchants by Thomas Middleton.]

Colonial discourse is characterized by its capacity to harness a rhetoric of difference—construed in terms of race, culture, and morality—for a project of domination. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, Britain had but begun to colonize other territories. The rhetoric that underpinned its early colonizing ventures was not yet a fully developed discourse. However, even in its early moments, what one might call the protocolonial discourse of the period imaginatively constituted non-Europeans so as to legitimate British intervention and rule. This discursive expression of a will to dominate was variously shaped by the different relations of power that obtained in the imperial culture. The protocolonial discourse of the early seventeenth century—the period I examine in this essay—was markedly influenced by three factors: the accession of a male absolutist monarch, the continued ascendance of a mercantile class within England, and the expansion of commerce with various parts of the world. Thus ideologies of gender, absolutism, and mercantilism variously inflected protocolonial discourse of this period.

Protocolonial discourse also varied according to the location of its object: Britain was involved in Ireland, the New World, Africa, and India.¹ In this essay, I examine protocolonial rhetoric with particular attention to the expansion of the African slave trade and the increase in commerce between Britain and India. My focus is on three Renaissance masques. Of the three masques, two, The Masque of Blackness (1605) and The Masque of Beauty (1608), were composed by Ben Jonson and were performed for the court of James I. Both of these masques express the ideology of absolutism and glorify the absolute power of the monarch. The third masque, The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue (1622), by Thomas Middleton, was situated in an altogether different milieu, that of the rising bourgeoisie. It was performed in the streets of London, and it celebrated the principles of the ascendant mercantile class. In all three masques, gender is crucial to the elaboration of protocolonial discourse. Women of color, “black” women, are featured in the masques as at the same time objects of desire and subjects of transformation. However, the gendering of transactions between Englishmen and others in the masques is variously shaped by a number of factors: the constraints of the form; the ideals of the absolutist court and the principles of mercantilism; the contemporaneous terms of Orientalist and Africanist discourse; the gender of the monarch. A closer examination of the three masques in their specific contexts suggests certain differences between Africanist and Orientalist discourses, as well as points of divergence between aristocratic and mercantile discourses of gender and race.²

My purpose in examining the three masques is to show that the gendered non-European body is discursively negotiated in distinct ways to celebrate the different modalities of power of court and city. By examining the politics of verbal representation, I seek to illuminate the systems of value implicit in the masques. I discuss first the material setting of each type of performance—the court masque and the civic pageant—and then certain themes about which an array of ideologies is constellated: the body, sexuality, geography, science, virtue, and knowledge.

THE MASQUE OF BLACKNESS AND THE MASQUE OF BEAUTY

I have chosen to interpret the two court masques in conjunction with each other because The Masque of Beauty completes an ideological trajectory traced in The Masque of Blackness.³ The plots of both are straightforward. In The Masque of Blackness, twelve Ethiopian nymphs are brought to England by their father, Niger. They are sent away from the English court with the promise that they will be changed from black to white. In The Masque of Beauty, the “wandering” (though now white) nymphs are brought back to England and “fixed.” The two masques enact a transformation and containment of the feminized African body.

THE COURT MASQUE

As a dramatic form, the court masque was particularly suited to the celebration and propagation of absolutist power. It drew upon the force of spectacle and verbal representation to display royal puissance and, at the same time, to promote a sense of aristocratic community. The court masque was not merely a form of entertainment; it was a ritualized ceremony of communion.⁴ The audience of the court masques was not passive. The strategic positioning of the viewers was part of, and essential to, the mechanics of the masque. The court masques were an exercise in “interpellating” subjects—in initiating them to, and into, the intricacies of power relations within the absolutist court.⁵ The court masques must then be understood as attesting to the political power of “art.”

In his work, Stephen Orgel emphasizes the conjunction and interplay of aesthetics and politics in the court masque. Discussing the masque staged in The Tempest, he focuses on Prospero's ability to control and order his world through “art”: “Imagination here is real power: to rule, to control and order the world, to change or subdue other men, to create; and the source of the power is imagination, the ability to make images, to project the workings of the mind outward in a physical, active form, to actualize ideas, to conceive actions” (Illusion of Power 47). However, Orgel reads the transformation of the Ethiopian nymphs from black to white in The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty simply as a ritual of inclusion within the royal coterie (Jonsonian Masque 116-28). For Orgel, blackness in these masques is merely a symbol for the antithesis of court values—it is not a marker of racial and cultural alterity. While Orgel is correct in identifying the court masques as part of the apparatus of absolutist ideology, the treatment of racial difference in these masques is not merely an allegorical rendering of what is inimical to the court. The figuration of blackness has a specific historical context: the increasing contact of Renaissance England with Africa and Africans. The masques depict the response of the aristocracy to this encounter. They represent not only the workings of absolutist ideology within the court circle, but also its negotiation of racial alterity.

At the time Ben Jonson composed these masques, there was a visible presence of Africans in England. This increased presence was a direct consequence of the burgeoning trade in African slaves. The beginning of England's involvement in what came to be the triangular trade was marked by John Hawkins's famous expedition of 1562. English merchants had traded on the Guinea coast before this date; on an earlier voyage by John Lok in 1554, four Africans had been abducted and taken to England.⁶ However, it was John Hawkins who conceived the project of enslaving Africans (by purchase or by force) off the Guinea coast and transporting them to the New World for sale. From the New World, goods such as sugar were brought back for sale in Europe. This triangular trade—African slaves for English goods, New World cargoes for slaves, and the sale of these cargoes in Europe—yielded enormous profits. It was to grow rapidly over the next two hundred years and to constitute an important source of the capital that helped make the Industrial Revolution possible.

Though most African slaves were transported to the New World, captains of slaving ships were permitted to keep a few slaves for their own “use” in England. When the captains departed once again for Africa, these slaves were sometimes sold to rich families. In 1596, Queen Elizabeth responded with alarm to a growing black presence, urging that “those kinde of people should be sent forth of the land” (qtd. in Scobie 8); in 1601, she issued a proclamation to this effect. While African people were reviled in this period, they were, at the same time, exoticized and desired. The growing presence, and growing importance, of Africans within England is the historical backdrop against which Ben Jonson composed The Masque of Beauty and The Masque of Blackness.

THE BODY

Two corporeal discourses are intertwined in The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty, the discourse of the African body and the discourse of the gendered female body. The first masque dwells more on racial difference—on the issue of the blackness of the Ethiopian nymphs. The second masque articulates a problematic of the Renaissance conception of femininity—it is concerned with the “fixing” of “wandering” women. The discourses of gender and of race are not, however, separated; both masques evidence their inter-articulation.

At the beginning of The Masque of Blackness, the tritons “welcome … the orient flood”—Niger and his daughters—with the assertion that the nymphs, “though but black in face,” are “bright” and beautiful because of their “feature[s].”

Sound, sound aloud
The welcome of the orient flood
Into the west;
Fair Niger, son to great Oceanus,
Now honored thus,
With all his beauteous race,
Who, though but black in face,
Yet are they bright,
And full of life and light,
To prove that beauty best
Which not the color but the feature
Assures unto the creature.

(Blackness 76-87)

The opening song introduces two common and recurrent themes in writing about Africans. First, the incursion of the Orient into the West is depicted as a “flood.” The representation of the African body as fluid and uncontrolled is a trope which recurs in the masques. The second rhetorical operation in evidence is the effacement of blackness by a shift in focus from color to form. Because of their “feature[s],” the nymphs are characterized as “bright, / And full of life and light”—they are outwardly black but essentially white. The opposition of black to white is yoked to another set of opposed terms, inside (feature) and outside (color), to argue that the nymphs are inwardly white, despite an outward blackness. Jonson made use of the fact that the nymphs' features were indeed those of Europeans: their parts were played by English aristocrats. The trope is not, however, merely incidental. This rhetorical pattern—outwardly black but inwardly white—is a commonplace in Africanist discourse. As Christopher L. Miller writes, “In texts from the Ancients on, whether the speaker's attitude is positive or negative in regard to black people, blackness remains a powerful negative element. If black people are deemed blameless, it is usually in spite of their blackness. By actively forgiving and overlooking the color of their skin, one perceives an ‘inner whiteness’” (29). It is important to note that while the tritons deem the Ethiopians beautiful, it is the nymphs who, Niger claims, doubt their own beauty. The attribution to the native of a desire to be transformed by the West is yet another recurring trope in Africanist discourse (Miller 49-61).

Although the black Ethiopians have features that render them “light,” the actual mixing of black and white—miscegenation—is forestalled. Oceanus addresses the question of “mixing,” exclaiming upon Niger's having traveled so far west:

My ceaseless current now amazèd stands
To see thy labor through so many lands
Mix thy fresh billow with my brackish stream,
And in thy sweetness stretch thy diadem
To these far distant and unequalled skies,
This squarèd circle of celestial bodies.

(Blackness 94-99)

In what seems like a reversal of the privileging of European body over “other” body, Niger's “billow” is positively represented as “fresh,” and is opposed to Oceanus's “brackish” stream. The reversal is somewhat moderated by the fact that Albion, and in a more ambitiously imperialistic gesture of naming, Britannia, is represented as firm, ordered, and stable land.⁷ At the same time, if Oceanus's amazement suggests an anxiety about the mixing of bodily fluids, Niger allays this unease with a theory of corporeal separation:

Divine Oceanus, 'tis not strange at all
That, since the immortal souls of creatures mortal
Mix with their bodies, yet reserve forever
A power of separation, I should sever
My fresh streams from thy brackish, like things fixed,
Though with thy powerful saltness thus far mixed.

(Blackness 100-05)

Niger's claim that bodily fluids can separate from each other at will, just as immortal souls can separate from bodies, symbolically wards off the danger of bodily “streams” mixing inseparably. In the court milieu, the commingling of “other” body and “Western” body is viewed with anxiety.

The African body is repeatedly portrayed as uncontrollable and potentially overwhelming. In the tritons' song, Niger and his daughters are described as the “orient flood.” The slippage between Ethiopia and the Orient enacts an instability at the level of nomenclature: Niger and his daughters are not even fixed nominally.⁸ This lack of fixity is echoed in the discourse of the body. Oceanus is “amazed” not only by the possibility of bodily mingling, but also by the fact that Niger has “labor[ed] through so many lands.”⁹ As Kim Hall has pointed out, in many early Renaissance travel narratives, geography is given an anthropomorphic quality, and writers often conflate the propensity of African rivers to overflow with that of African peoples to resist control.¹⁰ Oceanus questions Niger's having not only “extended” his “labors” (108-09), but having “stretch[ed] [his] diadem / To these far distant and unequalled skies,” that is, extended his rule north of or above his legitimate sphere of influence. He expresses unease not merely about Niger's flowing beyond the East, but about his overreaching vertically, to “unequalled” skies. There is an implicit contrast between Niger's ambulatory excess and England's “calm and blessèd” shores (109). Niger's labor is a possible threat to Britannia's rule; at the same time, the productive capacity of the African body is a potential asset to Britain. The control of this labor is the ideological project of the masque. The final song signals the exercise of this control:

Now Dian with her burning face
                    Declines apace,
          By which our waters know
          To ebb, that late did flow.
Back seas, back nymphs, but with a forward grace
          Keep, still, your reverence to the place;
And shout with joy of favor you have won
          In sight of Albion, Neptune's son.

(Blackness 329-36)

The speaker in the song shifts from description to imperious command: “Back seas, back nymphs.” The Ethiopians' exit conforms to court etiquette—gentlemen and ladies-in-waiting could not turn their backs on the monarch, but had to back away from him. Court manners mesh with ideological form: the masquers retreat pledging their allegiance to England. Their overflowing bodies are subjected to the discipline of the monarch: the waters “know to ebb” rather than to “flow.” The control of “the waters,” the overflowing African body, is accompanied by the “refinement” of the African women. The Masque of Blackness closes with the anticipation that the Ethiopian women will return no longer black but “perfect,” that is, changed to a truly beautiful white. In this masque, Africans are depicted as potentially disruptive, but at the same time as desirable, meriting “refinement.”

SEXUALITY

In Renaissance travel accounts Africans are commonly represented as prodigiously sexed (Newman 148-49). Although both men and women are portrayed as licentious, the discourse of sexuality in these texts resonates strongly with the gender discourse of the time, which is increasingly concerned with the policing of women's sexuality. Kim Hall has argued that in travel narratives the primary sign of cultural anarchy is a perceived disorder in gender relations; hence there is room for slippage between preoccupations with racial alterity and the unruliness of women.¹¹ She observes that several travelers evaluate the cultures they encounter in terms of the degree to which women are sexually contained. The disorder the travelers perceive has as its discursive corollary the constitution of the African subject as one to be ordered, to be ruled, by Europeans. Hall's argument can be taken a step further: the successful ordering of African culture would entail a disciplining of the feminine within it. In The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty, the nymphs undergo a dual process of disciplining, both racial and sexual. The two masques are complementary: in the first, the black Ethiopian nymphs are promised that they will be washed white, that is, “refined.” In The Masque of Beauty, the now “blanched” nymphs are “fixed.” They are brought under the control of “agèd Thames” (251), who is an alternative patriarch to Nigher.

The cause of Niger's unruliness, his transgression of his boundaries, is attributed to his daughters. Their uncontrolled weeping has caused him to overflow:

They wept such ceaseless tears into my stream
That it hath thus far overflowed his shore
To seek them patience. …

(Blackness 145-47)

His failure lies specifically in his inability to stop his daughters' tears. The female body is viewed as open, leaking, and uncontrollable.¹² Niger is represented as unable to exercise the patriarchal authority necessary to “enclose” the female body, and himself takes on the characteristics of that body: he becomes an overflowing flood.

Niger's loss of control is figured as a loss of the power of the phallus—the power to control feminine desire. The nymphs have “wept such ceaseless tears” because a sense of lack has been introduced into their midst by the “envious” European poets. These poets have taken control of their desire:

Yet since the fabulous voices of some few
Poor brainsick men, styled poets here with you,
Have with such envy of their graces sung
The painted beauties other empires sprung,
Letting their loose and wingèd fictions fly
To infect all climates, yea, our purity;
As of one Phaëton, that fired the world,
And that before his heedless flames were hurled
About the globe, the Ethiops were as fair
As other dames, now black with black despair;
And in respect of their complexions changed,
Are eachwhere since for luckless creatures ranged.
Which when my daughters heard, as women are
Most jealous of their beauties, fear and care
Possessed them whole.

(Blackness 130-44)

According to Niger, certain “brainsick” poets instigate his family exodus to the Occident by representing other women so flatteringly that his daughters see their blackness unfavorably. In a self-referential moment, Jonson touts the power of poets to move people across continents. Niger acknowledges the poets' ability to control desire by means of verbal representation, but impugns this power by describing their literary excesses in the rhetoric of sexual indiscipline and disease. Their fictions are “loose,” that is, wanton, and “infect” the Ethiopians' “purity.” It is important to note, once again, that the nymphs are represented as seeking Western intervention. Niger does not dispute the veracity of this representation; rather, he faults their female vanity as the cause of his loss of patriarchal control. If, in contrast to the poets, the Ethiopian daughters are pure, they are, nevertheless, typical women, and “as women are / Most jealous of their beauties, fear and care / Possessed them whole” (142-44). Though the Ethiopian women live in a different and distant clime, Niger imputes an essentially feminine covetousness, and indeed narcissism, to them. Insofar as the logic of the masque allows the literal erasure of a racial marker, blackness, it does so because it is premised upon all women being essentially the same: obsessed with their physical appearance.

In The Masque of Beauty, femininity rather than blackness is the crucial difference to be discursively situated and negotiated. The masque begins with an explanation of the nymphs' tardiness in returning to England. Four of the Ethiopians' sisters have followed the transformed nymphs back to England, but have been beguiled by envious Night and lost on the way. In the ensuing search, both groups of nymphs are “tossed” and “wander” (70, 81) in the ocean. “Almost lost,” the smaller party arrives “on an island … / That floated in the main” (Beauty 71-73). Even the landmass they alight upon is unanchored, floating. The masque enacts a fixing of the errant feminine. The nymphs are found and brought to England:

By this time near thy coast they floating be;
For so their virtuous goddess, the chaste moon,
Told them the fate of th' island should, and soon
Would fix itself unto thy continent,
As being the place by destiny fore-meant
Where they should flow forth, dressed in her attires.

(Beauty 133-38)

The island fixes itself to the continent, enabling the nymphs to “flow forth.” They do not, however, meander like Niger, but are instead firmly placed in the charge of a venerable English river, the Thames, to whom Niger relinquishes his paternal role:

Rise, agèd Thames, and by the hand
Receive these nymphs within the land;
And in those curious squares and rounds
Wherewith thou flow'st betwixt the grounds
Of fruitful Kent and Essex fair,
That lend thee garlands for thy hair,
Instruct their silver feet to tread,
Whilst we again to sea are fled.

(Beauty 251-58)

Thames is given the task of disciplining the nymphs, that is, of instructing their feet to tread in England. The geography of England is celebrated as “fruitful” and “fair,” as lending itself to the measured dances, the “squares” and “rounds” of the stately Thames.

Though the English terrain is valorized in a pastoral moment, the nymphs are not taught to wander about the countryside, but are instead “seat[ed]” (319) at court. Stephen Orgel has pointed out that in the early years of the reign of James I, masques move from a pastoral setting to the court, which is asserted as “the ultimate ideal” (Illusion of Power 49-50).¹³ In the conventional courtly song of the machinations of love which follows, the nymphs' constancy is emphasized: “Their flames are pure, their eyes are fixed” (300). The nymphs themselves dance a “most elegant and curious dance, and not to be described again by any art but that of their own footing” (313-14). They physically play out the discipline that transforms their wandering steps, carefully “footing” the elaborate rounds and measures of English courtly ritual. The Masque of Beauty ends with an account of their physical incarceration, their final fixing:

Now use your seat—that seat which was before
Thought straying, uncertain, floating to each shore,
And to whose having, every clime laid claim;
Each land and nation urgèd as the aim
Of their ambition beauty's perfect throne,
Now made peculiar to this place alone.

(Beauty 319-24)

Once again, the feminine to be controlled is conflated with the land to be colonized, to be “laid claim” to. In a poetic construction which veils, if not inverts, their actual relation to power, the daughters are described as occupying beauty's perfect throne. They are, indeed, “seated,” but the attention of the speaker, Januarius, shifts to the monarch: “Long may his light adorn these happy rites” (329). The beauties' perfect throne is firmly subordinated to that of the monarch.

The final song, taking for its point of departure the metaphor of monarch as sun, extends it so that the other participants are enjoined to model themselves after the planets, in a well-ordered system:

Still turn, and imitate the heaven
                    In motion swift and even,
                    And as his planets go
                    Your brighter lights do so.

(Beauty 336-39)

The masquers are “hailed”¹⁴ as subordinate subjects revolving swiftly and evenly around the king. The subsequent lines, however, articulate a contrary imperative:

May youth and pleasure ever flow;
                    But let your state, the while,
                    Be fixèd as the isle.

(Beauty 340-42)

The nymphs are exhorted to be “fixèd as the isle,” even while youth and pleasure eternally “flow.” Although the currency of youth and pleasure is asserted in the rhetoric of fluid motion, the young and beautiful nymphs are held to a standard of stasis—a state exemplified by the isle of Britain itself. In “seating” the beautiful nymphs, the court both puts an end to their feminine straying and makes a territorial claim to their African bodies.

GEOGRAPHY

The Ethiopians are not, strictly speaking, colonized: their land is not occupied. In the masques of Blackness and Beauty, the Ethiopians travel to the Occident. Even though geographical bodies and human bodies are often conflated in the masques, it is African bodies and not African lands that are brought under the control of the English court. It is tempting to read this move as an allegorical allusion to the slave trade. The merits or demerits of such a reading aside, it is clear that a geographical schema of this type fits the ideology of the absolutist court. The court is the center of the absolutist cosmos, and thus it is only natural that the Ethiopians travel to Britain.

The masques of Blackness and Beauty invert the conventions of the discourse of discovery. Rather than presenting the pursuits of English explorers, they cast the Africans as voyagers who must pass through exotic lands—“Black Mauretania,” “Swarth Lusitania,” and “Rich Aquitania” (Blackness 173-75)—in order to reach Britain, the temperate “-tania” (172) of their vision. England, in contrast to the wild and intemperate land from which the itinerant nymphs have come, is depicted as the paradigm of beauty, bounty, and above all, order. The masque plays with the conventional discourse of discovery to applaud the courtly ideals of absolute power and stability.

SCIENCE

The emergence of the discourse of “science” and “reason” in the Renaissance has been well documented.¹⁵ The hegemonic power of this emergent discourse is invoked in yet another theme which privileges white European over black African in The Masque of Blackness: that of “science” versus “nature.” Gender once again enters the discursive field, but this time as a disruption, so that Niger is situated contradictorily as superior male but inferior African. The logical steps and sidesteps of the argument are worth retracing. Niger recounts how his daughters are gulled by the loose fictions of the poets into believing that the sun has scorched them and marred their beauty. He invokes the “strength of argument” to correct their “strange error”:

To frustrate which strange error oft I sought,
Though most in vain, against a settled thought
As women's are, till they confirmed at length
By miracle what I with so much strength
Of argument resisted; else they feigned.

(Blackness 152-56)

Niger characterizes women as essentially willful and irrational, and possibly deceitful. They are unduly influenced by the foreign or “strange.” Though prone to error by foreign influence, they are at the same time fixed in their folly. Their “settled thought[s]” cannot be moved by argument, but are confirmed only by “miracle.” Here, the plot takes an interesting twist: the moon Aethiopia appears to correct Niger. The daughters' vision of a guiding face in the lake is neither a miracle nor a fabrication because it can be explained by science. Male “argument” is privileged over female “settled thought[s]”; at the same time, Western science is judged superior to both Niger's “argument” as well as his daughters' mystic thoughts. In a final discursive twist which aligns science with the male, Britannia, feminine until now, becomes masculine through association with the king as sun.

Britannia, whose new name makes all tongues sing,
Might be a diamond worthy to enchase it,
Ruled by a sun that to this height doth grace it,
Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force
To blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse.
His light sciential is, and, past mere nature,
Can salve the rude defects of every creature.

(221-27)

Britannia's male, sciential light is “past” or superior to “mere nature”—a presumably female nature, since allegorically, Nature is female. Sciential light can remedy the ill effects of a scorching natural light. Moreover, this force demonstrates its power upon the bodies of women rather than men.

THE TRIUMPHS OF HONOUR AND VIRTUE

The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue was composed by Thomas Middleton for an audience of merchants, and was first performed in 1622. Above all, this masque celebrates and glorifies mercantilism. It articulates a mercantile discourse of “exchange,” “commerce,” “traffic,” and “adventure.” The masque features a black Indian queen, aptly named the “Queen of Merchandise,” who represents the continent of India. Three English merchants who have donned the guises of “commerce,” “adventure,” and “traffic” hold up the figure of “Knowledge,” represented as “a sun appearing above the trees in brightest splendour and glory” (358) to the queen. The iconography rather obviously conveys the message: the queen voluntarily “advanceth herself on a bed of spices” and in return for her riches is imparted “Knowledge” by the English merchants. The continent of India declares her indebtedness to English merchants for their intervention. The native female body is implicated in a discourse of “commerce.” As in The Masque of Blackness, Western knowledge is symbolized by light.

THE CITY MASQUE

In an introductory passage, The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue is described as “A Noble Solemnity, performed through the City, at the sole Cost and Charges of the Honorable Fraternity of Grocers, at the Confirmation and Establishment of their most worthy Brother, the Right Honorable Peter Proby, in the high Office of his Majesty's Lieutenant, Lord Mayor and Chancellor of the famous City of London.” These lines point to certain important differences between this civic masque and court masques such as The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty. The civic masque is situated in, and asserts the importance of, the City of London—the commercial heart of the metropolis. It valorizes the financial strength of the burgeoning merchant class: the introduction stresses that the cost of the masque is borne solely by the grocers' guild. The City functionaries are viewed as occupying “high Office.” The guild is described as an “Honorable Fraternity” and in a later passage, as a “noble fraternity” (362). Not only does the masque articulate a strong sense of guild community, it claims an aristocratic—“noble” and “Honorable”—status for this community. The civic masque mirrors the court masque in its function of promoting a sense of community among merchants as it celebrates their power. At the same time, it reveals a merchant class vying for power and magnificence of a type conventionally associated only with the aristocratic court.

A later passage traces the “worthy” ancestry of the guild, recounting the names of its more socially elevated members. These members have achieved their status by serving the City as mayors and magistrates. The figure of Antiquity points to the phenomenon of social mobility or “exchange”; class barriers have ostensibly weakened with the empowerment of the merchant class:

The court and city, two most noble friends,
Have made exchange alate: I read from hence,
There has gone some most worthy citizens
Up to the courts advance; in lieu of that,
You have a courtier now your magistrate. …

(Honour 361)

The City insists on its being a “noble friend” to the court. The merchant voice asserts its equality with the aristocracy. It projects a principle of market economy, “exchange,” onto society. The citizen and courtier are not qualitatively different; they may occupy the same positions. The merchant voice challenges the aristocracy's monopoly over power and status. The social hierarchy itself is, of course, not challenged; rather, the merchantry demands entry into a higher class, basing its claims upon its greatly increased wealth. In the masque, the success of the merchantry is attributed to its success in international trade. In fact, the merchantry was divided in its attitude toward foreign trade: some viewed it as a threat to the local economy. In its unreserved celebration of international commerce, the masque glosses over this split.

At the time this masque was performed, England's commercial hegemony was hardly as well established as the attitude taken by the figures in Honour and Virtue would suggest.¹⁶ Trade with India, a potentially rich source of revenues, had been controlled for a century by the Portuguese. Following the accounts of Father Thomas Stevens, the first Englishman in India, and of Ralph Fitch, who spent several years in India between 1583 and 1591, English merchants became increasingly interested in pursuing commercial possibilities in the East Indies. The East India Company was formed and on 31 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth granted it a charter with an exclusive right to trade in the East Indies. The first two voyages of the East India Company were to Sumatra and Java, where the English attempted to challenge the commercial hegemony of Spain and Portugal, with whom England was at war.¹⁷ In 1606-07, another expedition was launched under the command of William Hawkins, to establish trade links with India. Thereafter, the English engaged in a series of struggles with the Portuguese and the Dutch. They succeeded in setting up a factory (a group of factors, or merchants) at Surat in 1613 and at Masulipatam in 1611. Thus, in 1622, the East India Company had only begun to establish itself on the west coast of India. In fact, the silver bullion obtained by the British from the Spanish for African slaves was used to buy Indian goods. The depiction of an exchange of “Knowledge” for wealth can only be read as a staging of an English mercantile ideology and as a fantasy of wish fulfillment. All the same, the two types of exchange valorized in the masque, between the court and the city, and between the English merchants and India, are not unrelated, though they are somewhat prematurely articulated here. Merchants made enormous profits from foreign trade, and were able to challenge a declining aristocracy's power and status. Individual merchants were able to cross the barriers of class.

THE BODY

The court masques discussed earlier applaud the exercise of an absolutist and arbitrary authority by the monarch, who presides over the whitening and fixing of the nymphs. In contrast, The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue applauds a compact between English merchants and racial Others. In the civic masque, the Indian queen remains physically black, but she affirms the “enlighten[ing]” (359) effects of English commerce. She remains “beauteous in [her] blackness” because the “complexion of [her] mind” has been changed through intercourse with Englishmen (358). The masque preserves the Other for the sake of exchange with her, positing a symbiotic relationship between the merchants and the queen. The relationship is not, however, one between equal, self-constituting partners; the black queen is beautiful because of the epistemological intervention of the merchants:

You that have eyes of judgment, and discern
Things that the best of man and life concern,
Draw near: this black is but my native dye,
But view me with an intellectual eye,
As wise men shoot their beams forth, then you'll find
A change in the complexion of the mind:
I'm beauteous in my blackness. Oh ye sons
Of Fame and Honour! through my best part runs
A spring of living waters, clear and true,
Found first by Knowledge, which came first by you,
By you, and your examples, blest commerce,
That by exchange settles such happiness.

(Honour 358)

The queen asserts the transforming power of the “intellectual eye”: she is what she is seen to be by the wise men. She invites the merchants and the audience to “shoot their beams forth” and penetrate her with their gaze. This passage lends itself to a cinematic feminist interpretation: the queen hints at a scopic control exerted by the merchants and the audience. Two somewhat disparate readings may be made of what is clearly a sexualized relationship between the Indian queen/continent and the English merchants. The queen's claim that her “best parts” have been permeated by “a spring of living waters” from the merchants may be construed as a discourse of phallic penetration and insemination: the Indian queen has been injected with the seeds of Western knowledge. If so, the violence of this penetration is elided by an ideology of “exchange.”

Of gums and fragrant spices, I confess,
My climate heaven does with abundance bless,
And those you have from me; but what are they
Compar'd with odours whose scent ne'er decay?
And those I have from you, plants of your youth,
The savour of eternal life, sweet Truth,
Exceeding all the odoriferous scent,
That from the beds of spices ever went:
I that command (being prosp'rously possest)
The riches and the sweetness of the east,
To that fam'd mountain Taurus spreading forth
My balmy arm, whose height does kiss the north,
And in the Sea Eoum lave this hand,
Account my blessings not in those to stand,
Though they be large and fruitful, but confess
All wealth consists in Christian holiness.

(Honour 359)

India is metonymized as a woman's body which is to be impregnated by the merchants' “Knowledge”—“odours whose scent ne'er decay”—in return for which she is to offer her “natural” wealth. The yoking of the discourse of insemination to that of her fecundity has the bizarre rhetorical effect of attributing her fruitfulness to the discipline of the English merchants. She might enjoy an abundance of riches and sweetness, but these are incomplete without the “Truth” imparted by the merchants. We have here the rudiments of colonial economic ideology: the colonial body/land becomes productive under the control and discipline of the occupying power.

An alternative reading of the sexualized relationship between the Indian queen and the merchants is one that takes the rhetoric of “exchange” more literally. The “spring of living waters” might be interpreted as produced by a mingling of the merchants' bodily fluids with those of the queen. A sexualized “commerce” would “settle happiness” by “exchange.” This scenario differs markedly from that of the court masques, in which the fluid African/female body must be fixed. Here fluidity—denoted by “a spring of living waters”—is associated with commerce.

KNOWLEDGE

In The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue the queen declares herself fortunate to receive Western knowledge, and in particular, Christian knowledge. Within the schema of this masque things qualitatively different are subject to exchange, and here, Christianity acquires the status of currency. The emphasis on the exchange of knowledge is particularly interesting; as Foucault points out, power operates through the circulation of discourses and the deployment of knowledges. Moreover, in this masque, “Knowledge” is privileged over material wealth, in a discursive move similar to the one that enables the queen to efface her “blackness” and to locate her complexion in the mind.

While the discourse of “Knowledge” here in some ways parallels the discourse of “Science” in The Masque of Blackness, the deployment of the two is different. In the two masques “Science” and “Knowledge” are presented as antithetical to “strange error.” However, in The Masque of Blackness, “Science” is invoked to distinguish the powers of the court and the monarch (“his light sciential is”) from the erring and errant Ethiopians. Knowledge of science is not imparted to the Ethiopians; rather, the “sciential light” of England is mysteriously able to “blanch an Ethiop” (Blackness 225). As a discourse of power, it is exercised in an absolutist mode. The deployment of “Knowledge” in Honour and Virtue is, in contrast, couched in the rhetoric of exchange. The Indians are ostensibly “given” the knowledge that is instrumental in their hegemonic domination by the English. It is important to note that in this masque, it is the merchant class that is invested with the voice of knowledge.

“VIRTUE”

The second triumph to greet the newly confirmed Lord Mayor is the Throne of Virtue. The deity of Virtue asserts that “Great Power”—embodied in an individual such as the Lord Mayor—is raised by her; Power is raised by Virtue, not Virtue by Power. If sought, the deity of Virtue cannot but yield to Power, but that Power is properly tempered by her:

Still this remains, with eye upon me fix'd
As if he sought to have his splendours mixt
With these of mine, which makes authority meek,
And I'm so sick of love to those that seek
I cannot choose but yield; nor does it wrong
Great Power to come to Virtue to be strong,
Being but a woman, merciful and mild:
Therein is Heaven with greater glory stiled
That makes weak things, as Clemency and Right,
Sway Power, which would else rule all by Might.

(Honour 364)

An efficacious model for “Great Power” is laid before the audience here. “Might” is tempered by the virtues of “Clemency” and “Right,” thereby ensuring right rule. The relation between a feminine “Virtue” and, by implication, a masculine “Power” is sexualized: “Virtue” is “but a woman” who is “so sick of love to those that seek” that she “cannot choose but yield.” This episode is positioned between the speeches of the Continent of India and the machinations of the Globe of Honour, and must be read in the context of these. According to the logic of the masque, the correct stance for a merchant engaged in foreign ventures is one of “meek authority.” The masque instructs merchants to be firm yet temperate in their dealings.

GEOGRAPHY: THE GLOBE OF HONOUR

The relation between native body/land and English merchants is explored in the first two parts of Honour and Virtue. Upon leaving the feast at Guildhall, the Lord Mayor is intercepted by a third spectacle. This final spectacle, the Globe of Honour, presents to the audience a vision of a world literally “worlded” by merchants. The globe is comprised of eight distinct parts which fly apart into

eight bright personages most gloriously decked, representing (as it were) the inward man, the intentions of a virtuous and worthy breast by the graces of the mind and soul, such as Clear Conscience, Divine Speculation, Peace of Heart, Integrity, Watchfulness, Equality, Providence, Impartiality, each exprest by its proper illustration.

(Honour 365)

The qualities valorized are those appropriate to mercantilism. The good merchant literally becomes a metonym for the world.

In the final scene, the parts once again collapse into a globe. The description of the Globe of Honour in the last scene is revealing. We are told that it is covered by a starry canopy with four corners:

… by each of them [is] fixed a little streamer or banner, in which are displayed the arms of this honourable City, the Lord Mayors', the Grocers', and the Noble East India Company's. The outparts of the Globe, showing the world's type in countries, seas and shipping, whereon is depicted or drawn ships that have been fortunate to this kingdom by their happy and successful voyages; as also that prosperous plantation in the Colony of Virginia and the Bermudas, with all good wishes to the Governors, Traders, and Adventurers unto those Christianly reformed islands.

(Honour 366)

The entire machinery of exploration, trade, and colonial domination is acclaimed here. Again, the enterprise is justified by the principle of Christian reformation, of which merchants are the agents. In the final speech, the personage of Honour instructs the audience in the lessons of the Globe:

And as I (Honour) overtopping all,
Here fix my foot on this orbicular ball,
Over the world expressing my command;
As I in this contemptuous posture stand,
So every good and understanding spirit
Makes but use only of this life t' inherit
An everlasting living; making friends
Of Mammon's heaps, got by unrighteous ends;
Which happy thou stand'st free from, the more white
Sits Honour on thee. …

(Honour 367)

Honour is superior to all and commands all the world, yet Honour holds the world in no greater regard than as a means to a righteous life. Again, we have an exhortation to right conduct and an emphasis on trade as an honorable enterprise. The stance taken by Honour—foot on orbicular ball/world—indicates the global proportions of this vision of trade, and indeed, commercial domination.

CONCLUSION

Reading the past necessarily involves the dilemmas of translation, and these become magnified when one focuses on as unstable a category as “race.” One can only speculate as to what “blackness” signified to the seventeenth-century audiences of these masques. However, what these masques clearly suggest is that Europeans perceived intercourse with non-European peoples as hazardous, yet potentially rewarding. All three masques present imaginary relationships in which Englishmen make claims upon non-Europeans. These relationships are characterized by disciplinary interventions such as “refinement,” fixing, and re-education, interventions that render the non-Europeans safe as well as productive subjects in economies of power, labor, land, and goods.

In all three masques, gender plays a crucial role in the discursive elaboration of these economies. At the time they were performed, gender was the dominant code for registering relations of power: as a code it was relatively stable and familiar, and was employed extensively. In the masques, a discourse of gender serves to position non-Europeans as different, yet not so different as to defy conceptualization in terms of known paradigms. Further, recourse to the discourse of gender in the representation of non-Europeans renders them suitable subjects for various modes of domination by Englishmen. As I have argued, the discourses of gender and cultural difference in the masques are shaped by the circumstances in which these masques were produced. As a form, the masque was specifically concerned with staging the ideology of a particular milieu. The masques weave together protocolonial discourse and a discourse of gender to celebrate in a spectacular fashion the power of the court and emergent hegemony of the city.

Notes

1. In a recent essay, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Louis Montrose examines the discursive moments that underpin colonizing ventures in the New World during the reign of Elizabeth I. He focuses on visual representations of conquest, and on texts such as Walter Ralegh's The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautifull Empire of Guiana (1596). Crucial to the depiction of Guiana as a land readily and gainfully conquered is its representation as a virgin female body which may easily and pleasurably be raped. Montrose shows Ralegh's rhetoric to be shaped by the pressure of particular circumstances: his personal relation to Queen Elizabeth; his contradictory position as masculine subject of feminine monarch; his attempted differentiation of Englishmen from Spaniards; his position as a “gentleman” restraining his crew from thieving, while himself plotting the grandest theft of all. These circumstances produce a complex and unstable text in which discourses of gender, geography, ethnicity, nationality, and social position are woven together.

2. The treatment of race in the mercantile discourse of Honour and Virtue differs from that in the court discourse of Blackness and Beauty. This difference cannot, at least within the ambit of my study, be aligned with differences between Indian and Africanist discourse. Here, I have not considered a court piece about India or a city piece dealing with Africa; moreover, the number of texts analyzed here is too small to support generic claims about Indian and Africanist discourse. A more extensive study might indicate whether such generic distinctions can be made.

3. A further caveat: as a “political” reading of an “art” form, my discussion is doubly limited: whereas the masque was largely a visual event, I confine myself almost entirely to a close reading of the text, and do not discuss the politics of performance. Also, I do not consider the specific occasions on which and manner in which the masques were staged. The first two masques were performed at the behest of Queen Anne and featured aristocratic ladies as Ethiopian nymphs. To unravel fully the ideological strands of these court masques, one would have to “read” the nymphs not merely as African characters, but as black parts played by English aristocrats, and moreover, by particular English ladies. This I have not attempted to do. As for the third masque, The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue, little is known about it other than what is stated on the title page: that it was a civic masque performed in the streets of London at the cost of the Fraternity of Grocers when one of their members became Lord Mayor of London. It would be interesting to learn something about how the character “India” was played, and whether the set was indeed “replenished with all manner of spice-plants and trees bearing odour”—goods from the Orient—as claimed in the text (358).

4. Stephen Orgel engages in a discussion of the Renaissance masque in The Illusion of Power and The Jonsonian Masque.

5. I use Louis Althusser's sense of the term. “Hailing” or “interpellation” is the process by which ideology constitutes individuals as subjects.

6. Two of these men were taken back to the African coast in 1556 to act as interpreters for another trader, William Towerson. For accounts of the beginnings of the trade in African slaves, see Craton, Scobie, and Shyllon.

7. One might note in passing that James I, before whom this masque was performed, had plans to bring Scotland into a renamed realm.

8. Miller discusses this phenomenon in Africanist discourse at length.

9. For amaze, the OED lists these meanings as current during the early seventeenth century: “bewilder,” “perplex,” “fill with consternation” and “alarm” (all now obsolete). Amaze also had a meaning which is still current: “to astound, or greatly astonish.”

10. I am indebted to Kim Hall for making the first draft of her dissertation, “Acknowledging Things of Darkness,” an exploration of race and gender in Renaissance writing, available to me.

11. I refer again to an early draft of Kim Hall's dissertation.

12. Gail Kern Paster scrutinizes the discourse of “the weaker vessel as leaky vessel” in “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy.” Peter Stallybrass discusses constructions of patrician and plebeian bodies and how these are differentiated in gender terms in his “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.”

13. Orgel claims that this pattern is reversed after about 1616.

14. I use Althusser's term again (see n. 5 above).

15. I use the term reason interchangeably with science to refer to a philosophy associated with Francis Bacon.

16. For accounts of the early commercial activities of the British in India, see Rawlinson and Foster.

17. Spain owned Portugal at the time.

I would like to thank John Archer, Joe Cleary, Walter Cohen, Kim Hall, Margo Hendricks, Jean Howard, Ann Jones, David Kastan, Colleen Lye, Lisa Makman, Patricia Parker, Mary Beth Rose, and Sanjay Tikku for their helpful comments and advice.

Works Cited

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Craton, Michael. Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery. London: Temple Smith, 1974.

Foster, William, ed. Early Travels in India, 1583-1619. London: Oxford UP, 1921.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International, 1971.

Hall, Kim. “Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Race, Gender and Power in Early Modern England.” Diss. U of Pennsylvania, 1990.

Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969. 47-74.

Middleton, Thomas. The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue. The Works of Thomas Middleton. Ed. A. H. Bullen. Vol. 7. 351-67. 1886. 8 vols. New York: AMS, 1964.

Miller, Christopher L. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Montrose, Louis. “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery.” Representations 33 (1991): 1-41.

Newman, Karen. “‘And wash the Ethiop white’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello.” Shakespeare Reproduced. Ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor. New York: Routledge, 1988. 143-62.

Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.

—. The Jonsonian Masque. New York: Columbia UP, 1981.

Paster, Gail Kern. “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy.” Renaissance Drama ns 18 (1987): 43-66.

Rawlinson, H. G. British Beginnings in Western India, 1579-1657: An Account of the Early Days of the British Factory of Surat. Oxford: Clarendon, 1920.

Scobie, Edward. Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain. Chicago: Johnson, 1972.

Shyllon, F. O. Black Slaves in Britain. London: Oxford UP, 1974.

Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 123-42.