ABSTRACT
On January 5, 1605, England’s Queen Anne and eleven other noblewomen played young nymphs of “the blackest nation of the world” before a courtly audience at Whitehall Palace, with paint covering their faces and arms, from fingertips to elbows (Jonson 1853, 660). Commissioned by the Queen, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness introduces the twelve “Nigritae” as women who had once been fair—pale and beautiful—before Africa’s intemperate climate scorched their skins (Iyengar 2004: 11, 47, 67). Since this calamity, they have spent their days cursing the sun and their nights cooling their burning limbs in a moonlit lake. This ritual is disrupted when, one night, these daughters of Niger spy a face in the lake’s waters, surrounded by a halo of light and inscribed with the following lines:
That they a land must forthwith seek,
Whose termination, of the Greek,
Sounds T A N I A where bright Sol, that heat
Their bloods, doth never rise or set,
But in his journey passeth by,
And leaves that climate of the sky,
To comfort of a greater light,
Who forms all beauty with his sight
(Jonson 1853: 662) The Nigritaes’ shared vision defies ordinary explanation. 1 Does each nymph merely see her own face reflected, or do all see that of another? If the face belongs to another, is it that of a corpse or an apparition? If a corpse, then is the waterproof writing a permanent ink or a trick of moonlight? The playwright rules out hallucination with their father’s authoritative statement: “Sure they saw’t, for Aethiops never dream,” leaving the audience in search of a credible etiology for this inked face (Jonson 1853: 661). The printed text reinforces the idea of Aethiops’ literal-mindedness with an appeal to the authority of the celebrated Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (Jonson 1853: 661n8). Appeals to authority aside, readers and viewers remain unaware of exactly what appears on the face in the water—if writing appears at all. After all, by prefacing the lines with the conjunction “that,” Jonson has provided an indirect quotation. It is unclear whether the face is covered with poetic lines or those couplets gloss a simpler insignia, the letters TANIA. 2 Then again, perhaps both the alphabetical marks and poetry are an exegesis of black skin, figured as an ink spread over the entire face. If so, then these twelve distinct women have been collapsed into one, paradigmatic black face, a hieroglyph that begs for expert deciphering.