ABSTRACT
The Masque of Blackness was performed before the court of King James on Twelfth Night, 1605, the culmination of the Christmas festivities. It is difficult to gain a sense of the occasion simply from the sparse dialogue, stage directions and commentary that are all that now remain of this ephemeral entertainment. Characteristically, too, the chief masquers were drawn from the court itself, and, whilst they did not have speaking parts, they nonetheless constituted the focal point of the performance. The masque, then, was an ostentatious and self-regarding spectacle, in which the court basked in a refraction of its own magnificence and opulence. Dudley Carleton watched The Masque of Blackness and his accounts of it suggest something of the anxiety such performances were able to occasion. Carleton wrote that the costumes of the Qyeen and the other ladies were ‘rich, but too light and Curtizan-like for such great ones’.
