Introduction

Of course, the printed direction “Enter Blackamoors with music,” dating from 1597 at the latest, was not available to Shakespeare’s audience any more than the expectation that, even if impersonated ad vivum by virtue of mimetic and cosmetic proficiency, these musicians might be real Africans. Although English monarchs employed black musicians from the reign of Henry VIII-Henry had a “blacke trumpet” while Elizabeth I is depicted with a group of black minstrels and dancers in a painting dated c. 1577 and attributed to Gheeraerts the Elder, and James I later had a troupe of black minstrels-there is no record of black performers being borrowed from royal or aristocratic households to play roles onstage (Fryer 1984:4, 9; Walvin 1973:9). There is, however, a wealth of evidence about how early

modern performers achieved racial impersonation by means of theatrical integument. The stage direction, then, signals not that the players borrowed royal musicians but that they are dramatizing the richness and exoticism of court culture (Vaughan and Vaughan 1997).