Ellen: On Adelman’s article: a highly eccentric reading, akin to Wilson’s “insane!” crypto-Catholic reading of Shakespeare; I like both of them for all their boldness
-Will Stockton’s work demonstrates the openness of queer theory as a kind of problematic; queer theory might be akin to performance studies, as both are bold moves that go beyond standard approaches to bourgeoisie theatre; but there have recently been critiques of Schechner and others in performance studies for their heteronormative language; there may be a friction between queer studies and performative studies at play here that needs more investigation
-Will as a helpful and pragmatic resource, willing to respond to queries about useful texts; keep an eye on him, he is always supportive of young scholars
Savannah’s Presentation on Jonson’s Masque of Blackness
Savannah: We see several new phenomena in the masque that we haven’t seen before, including the biological female body in performance and royalty on stage
-The masque’s formal qualities refuse to privilege the written word over the spectacle; Jonson’s text is certainly no more valuable than Jones’s set and costume design; and accordingly we need to look at the visual performance and physicality of the Masque of Blackness; the Masque, for instance, probably cost at least 3,000 £s (380,000 £s in today’s terms) for costume and set design; as opposed to around 40 £s for Jonson’s tex
-This focus on the visual allowed the court to bask in its own fabulousness
-Jonson’s text can be seen as trying to maintain certain aspects of the performance as spectacle; he uses an excessive language to try to capture what cannot be captured: the original performance itself. Thus Jonson tries to describe the movements in the play’s opening and its moving scenery even as Jonson admits that his text cannot capture the ephemeral. We might consider why Jonson tries to write the a text that cannot contain the performance.
-The text imagines blackness as something aesthetic, beautiful; Jonson showcases the ladies’ blackness and uses the glamour of the scene to emphasize their blackness. This focus on the aesthetic juxtaposes with Andrea’s argument that blackness is a political tool for the Queen
-Questions:
1. How do we compare the blackened female body in the masque with our past discussions of the female body, or more specifically the male body dressed as a woman on stage?
2. Can we use MacKendrick’s concepts of absence and presence in language and dance to think about the absence and presence of the performance in Jonson’s the printed text?
Tracey: I like your reading of blackness as glamour, and as an aesthetic device that exceeds the text
Savannah: I saw Andrea as helpful, but I don’t think she addresses the concept of blackness as an aesthetic
Tracey: I agree, Andrea doesn’t talk about why the queen would have wanted to be black in the first place
Ellen: Andrea is certainly useful because she puts history back into the spectacle and shows the spectacle as needing a historic/contextualized reading. Certain aspects of her argument are convincing, especially her backdrop of blackness as a performative indulgence, but the link to Roth (women as tainted as black) that actually comes later historically is a tricky move for Andrea to make. She is right to say women’s access to print is tenuous, but simply linking Queen as author to the masque is tenuous. There is also something like Aebischer here in Andrea’s desire to see the Queen as simultaneously proto-feminist and racist, for all the anachronism of those terms. Using these terms isn’t so problematic, maybe, but Andrea should be more aware/overt of the anachronism of her terminology.
-Really, what Andrea does help us realize is that a spectacle like the Masque is not easy to understand, or to teach. To try and reclaim the performance that is inevitably lost requires as many historical accounts of it as we can take hold of. Such records also importantly remind us that Jonson’s record is not complete or univocal.
-I love Jonson’s clear tension with Jones, who is crowding out his textual virtuosity with imagery and spectacle. McDermott helpfully reminds us, too, that certain of Jonson’s arcane textual details could not have been read intelligibly during the performance itself (e.g. the symbols on the women’s fans)
Mandy: the Queen is 6 months pregnant while the masque occurred; did you, Savannah, find anything about this?
Savannah: I considered it, for sure, but it’s a hard detail to reckon with.
John: In line with the clip from The Tudors, it seems like the dance may have taken much more of the time of the masque that any of Jonson’s text. The dance may also have been a time when more “stuff” happened, women and men touching, exchanging glances; more interesting contacts may have been made here than during the text of the masque.
Savannah: The dance is under-described by Jonson, and I think it’s important to consider what Jonson does and doesn’t present. The dance gets very minimal textual attention.
Natalie: I agree, especially given that Jonson sassily writes off the dance and music.
Ellen: The dance is made significant only because of the royalty of the people dancing. We should consider the possibility that there may have been some awful dancing. I agree that there is a tension between the deferential language of Jonson and the event itself. A masque is an event that makes possible transactions that would not normally be able to occur in the open. Notice the Russian-doll nature of the masque in The Tudors where Henry meets Anne Boleyn, which itself is reference in another masque [NB: this may be wrong, I got a little lost here]. The dance and the masque more broadly are loaded moments, overloaded with juicy historical insiderism. There would have been a lot going on beneath the ostensible play action. Masques operate along insider knowledge, and so to read masques alongside plays or poems is both a democratic but also a divisive, problematic move, as the insider knowledge is essential for understanding masques to a certain degree.
Natalie: Unlike Shakespeare’s works, is it true that the masque can be brought back to life more easily?
Ellen: The theatre is always based upon both a loss and nod to futurity. The masque is hard to recreate because it is so expensive. Plus after the masque the court folks would tear the sets apart to take home souvenirs, which is a kind of nihilistic kind of move in which you literally consume the event. This highlights the masque’s ephemerality. And yet songs, bits and pieces of the masque could come back in parlor theatre. Until the Victorian period, you had to parlor theatre the thing, and thus preservation was based on reenactment in often stripped down circumstance. Even house of moderate wealth would stage pageants during holiday seasons.
Natalie: How might that relate to how blackness is talked about as everlasting, outside of death in the masque? This repeatable, on-going blackness is counterpoised to the ephemerality of the performance itself, I think.
Ellen: Supposedly this play is in honor of James’s enlightening gaze, which is at an odd juxtaposition to the discussion of eternal blackness. What’s weird is that this feels a lot like how Elizabeth was described in masques, and so maybe effeminizes James in some way.
-We are constantly trying to read the masque through multiple different lenses: local court politics, national politics, gender/sex politics, the politics of the theatre world. For me, the masque is an opportunity to capitulate to a state of non-thinking: the moment of reception is one that cannot be cognitively full and loaded in the way we think a play might be. The narrative is so flimsy an excuse for what is going on visually that interpreting it is in some way not conducive to investigative scholarship. Precisely because there are so many multiple readings at play at the same time, it is not possible to shore up a single reading. Given the multiple things going on, the multiple identities at play, one single reading can’t explain everything. Attempting to do so is at best a headache, at worst somewhat absurd.
Tracey: Yes, Oceanus is blue, it’s a little ridiculous
Michael: We should remember that slaves from northern Africa were called “bluemen” by Vikings
Tracey: Of course; but how do we take race really seriously in this text when we have a character who is blue? In the same vein, the mer-women are supposedly white?
Ellen: Andrea notes that race and color/hue are not commensurate during James’s reign. Bovilsky pointed this out too. Racialized thinking is opearting through a humoral paradigm that doesn’t cohere to our contemporary understanding of race as bodily and as readable through skin color. Color and hue have a robust history in plays and elsewhere, but they don’t support the modern notions of race. For example, Tamora in Titus is super-white and is opposed to not just Aaron’s blackness but also to Lavinia’s “normal” whiteness. Color was mapped geographically on the earth at the time (the farther north, the whiter you were assumed to be). Brownness/blackness can also have pleasurable connotations: it’s fun to put on different makeup, to wear short dresses.
-I think we should embrace a kind of nonsense at play in the masque; the Masque of Blackness certainly defers a sense of normativity until next year. It ends on an inchoate note where black can remain as beauty, and so everything that the play seems to support as a sensible narrative reading is deliberately put off. Ultimately nothing coheres. As a result, teaching masques can make you look like an ass to a certain degree because they don’t cohere to sensible readings and are easily troubled. The playtext itself is flimsy, even stupid, and Jonson overtly embraces the whimsy of the play.
Michael: There is a weird metonymic quality to Jonson’s stage directions. He doesn’t give enough specificity, and this too gives the play a nonsense quality. His description of the moon appearing is a bit fantastical and purposefully non-disclosive.
Ellen: I agree; this isn’t the text for a play, his are not stage directions. Jonson is unwilling to fully describe it, and he doesn’t bring up all the other materials/ideas/responses that other texts bring up. For instance, the claim that one maid “lost her honesty” is totally opaque.
-Remember that this is an early masque in James’s reign and so it must allegorize all of his institutions and reinforce patriarchal norms. Yet James’s performance of regality always seem to fail a bit, on stage and off. James really supports the theatre during his reign, but the theatre’s relation to James is complex at best. Theatrical works repeatedly undo him (A Game of Chess, for instance), and the Masque interestingly pokes fun of the “numskully nature” of tying the significance of patriarchal authority to a flimsy performance
-Savannah is right to point us to MacKendrick and to highlight the masque’s operatic nature, as MacKendrick points us towards gaps in the masque’s understandability
Tracey: Yes, the scene in The Tudors seems childish at points and even somewhat silly with Sir Thomas More describing the play to the Spanish ambassador. It is weirdly sexual as well
Ellen: Varnado is useful for reminding us that we don’t see the sex that early moderns saw. The masque may have allowed for erotic connections that otherwise would have been impossible.
-Also, what could people have possibly actually heard of the speeches, whether during the masque or during city parades? You could see women in scanty attire, some fireworks, but the speeches were probably inaudible, and overall performances like the parade can be a kind of boring and a non-meaningful act. Perhaps, then, the pleasure of the masque is actually its detachment from narrative. We need not think through all the meanings and connections that plays demand if us. The masque is thus perhaps best seen as a purely pleasurable, bodily experience.
Steven: On page 101, there is an important moment of dialogue involving a relationship between the imprintable and the unimprintable/ephemeral. The women’s dance here is turning into writing, the black-faced ladies are dancing around like black inked words on a page, but they are constantly swirling and not cohering to a logic. Is there a tradition of this link between dance and logic?
Ellen: Not that I can think of, though print culture is certainly developing at this time, and in first editions there are often huge numbers of errata. Thus texts can come across as a source of confusion rather than stable meaning given the looseness of typesetting at this period. The public is encountering this phenomenon for the first time, and it might have been in the air. Certainly people like Jonson would have been aware of the danger of incoherence in printing, as Jonson heavily oversaw the printing of his texts.
-Savannah makes an interesting point that Jonson might have tried to capture the ephemeral nature of the performance; but Jonson may also have cherry-picked the parts of the performance he wanted to keep. He highlights, for instance, the decision to use black make-up as the Queen’s, and one wonders whether there might be other sly insinuations of Jonson’s own take on the performance itself in his recording of the text. Jonson is taking liberties that bring out the irretrievability of the performance, which MacKendrick definitely emphasizes.
Tracey: I wonder who would have played Niger and Oceanius? Would they have been professional actors, or might someone have bungled the poetry?
Ellen: Jonson probably printed the masque precisely because there were problems with the performance itself: lines may have been bungled or too quiet, and most importantly the audience’s attention was probably on the set, the scenery, and the action rather than the speakers’ words. McDermott reminds us, too, that the revels part of the performance would have kept the audience anxiously waiting for their cue; this too might have been a distracting anxiety, along with the fear that the black body paint might spoil your good outfit. This interaction between audience and players happens to some degree in the public playhouse (e.g. clowning traditions, actors communicating with audience), but its occurrence in the masques might have been more fraught: the audience would have been anxious as to when they were supposed to come into the play, and so would have been attendant to their own performances rather than the masque itself. Jonson’s text assumes an un-implicated spectator sitting apart from the masque, which was not the case. Ironically Jonson loves the form of drama but he does not love the medium given all its potential distractions, which is doubly interesting given that he is so closely affiliated with masques.
-One thing we don’t know is what the dance would have looked like, how conventional it would have been. There would probably have been anxiety about dancing properly, but dance can be a pleasurable point as well, and certainly a point of overlap between performance and the everyday life. Later masques become more driven by narrative and more constrained b decorum; but with this Masque things would have been loser, more risky, and the dance is for that reason both quite important and particularly hard to recover.
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