Masque of Blackness

We've been discussing tensions between written and performed texts in terms of what different audiences experience, what we as contemporary readers envision, and how a play may call attention to the body in performance. The masque as a form magnifies the interplay between text and performance in that the written text relies on descriptions of the aesthetic quality of the ephemeral. Given this reliance, I’d like to attempt to account for what we cannot account for, what we as readers cannot see but must imagine: the visual aesthetic and physicality of The Masque of Blackness.

As the content of The Masque of Blackness questions patriarchal and English notions of beauty, Jonson's explanatory text obsesses over the ornate, beautiful qualities of the masque in performance. Indeed, we as readers get nearly as much attempt at visual reconstruction as textual representation of the masque. Of course, the form of this type of performance demanded such attention to style; as Ingram notes, “some spectators might have come to see [Inigo] Jones’s spectacle as much as to hear Jonson’s verse, a fact that printed texts can obscure” (184). Yet Jonson's text appears as an attempt to resist loss of the quality of the performance as spectacle, an effort to preserve what cannot be contained within the form of written text. In doing so, it seems he creates an excess of language, one which I will consider as related to the presence/absence (in MacKendrick's sense) of the original performance within the text and the excessive quality of the form of the masque itself. And to provide you with a masque in performance (however anachronistically), I present The Tutors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tCUp6-FfXM&feature=related&noredirect=1