The Masque of Blackness
How do theatre and performance function as instruments of social conditioning?
Ben Jonson was an English poet, playwright, actor, and literary critic of the early 17th century. The Masque of Blackness was one of the many plays he had written. It was performed at The Court of Whitehall in 1605 in front of King James and his courtiers. He was eager to gain the patronage of the King, so his work praised the monarchy.
The principle characters of his play 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. They curse the African sun in Ethiopia that gave them life for making them too dark.
The moon goddess, Aethipoia, instructs them to seek a land ending in “-tania,” where the sun is strong enough to lighten their skin. After failed attempts in Mauritania, Lusitania (Portugal), and Aquitania (France), they discover the solution: Britannia.
The ‘Sun King’ (supposedly resembling King James), has the miraculous ability to turn black skin to white. Niger’s daughters therefore leave their native waters and come to the shores of England in search of the ‘Sun King’ and his skin transformations.
Ben Jonson decided not to use masks as disguises but paint the white actors black instead. “Genteel” English ladies painted Black caused quite the stir especially for one spectator, the gentleman Dudley Carleton. Carleton, an art collector and diplomat 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…”
The play was an example of English ladies using blackface to speak to, "the alleged hideousness of Black women." (Strings 2019)
This masque is a striking example of early 17th-century English perceptions of race, beauty, and power. It reflects a worldview in which whiteness was idealised, blackness was pathologised, and African bodies and identities were made subject to European fantasies. Beyond mere entertainment, The Masque of Blackness illuminates how theatre functioned as a stage for both aesthetic spectacle and cultural hierarchy—conveying implicit messages about desirability, authority, and racialised identity.