Performing devotion in The Masque of Blacknesse.(Critical essay)

On Twelfth Night, 1605, Dudley Carleton attended a performance of Ben Jonson's Masque of Blacknesse, an entertainment that not only featured James I's queen, Anne of Denmark, but also originated in her conceit: "to haue [the masquers] Black-mores at first." (1) Jonson, collaborating for the first time with Inigo Jones, fulfilled the queen's wishes with a story of river gods, sun kings, and African nymphs (to be played by Anne and her ladies) in search of miraculous "blanching." Carleton did not admire the conceit, assuring Ralph Winwood that "you cannot imagine a more ugly Sight then [sic] a troop of lean-cheek'd Moors." Describing the masque's final dance to Winwood, Carleton notes that only the Spanish ambassador seemed unfazed by the ladies' painted skin and "Curtizen-like" costumes. On the contrary, the ambassador "footed it like a lusty old Gallant with his Country Woman. He took out the Queen, and forgot not to kiss her Hand, though there was Danger it would have left a Mark on his Lips." (2) Many recent critics of the masque, stressing the centrality of women to a genre more often read in terms of kingly authority, understand Carleton's disgust as a reaction to the masque's linked evocations of racial and sexual difference. (3) For Leeds Barroll, the audacious premise and elaborate staging of Blacknesse reaffirmed the autonomous political power of Anne's court. (4) For Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Kim F. Hall, and others, this particular masque offers a gesture of "opposition" and "subversion" by associating the oppression of black African slaves with cultural restrictions on women, even queens. (5) The queen's desire for blackness, in a variation of this reading, can be understood as a desire to express a powerful and forbidden sensuality; by displaying her black limbs, as well as her advanced pregnancy, Anne presented herself as a sexually potent woman temporarily freed from codes of European feminine decorum--much to the horror of male observers such as Carleton. (6)

But why should Carleton pay such attention to the Spanish ambassador? Why might this particular male observer, in Carleton's mind, have had no qualms about the "Mark" of an African nymph likened to his "Country Woman"? The detail might simply indicate, as Clare McManus suggests, the equally "liminal positions of the foreigner and the female" at the Stuart Court. (7) But Carleton's suggestion of affinity between Anne and the Spaniard also hints toward another approach to the masque, one that would acknowledge both kingly and queenly authority while privileging neither, and one that might account more fully for Jonson's own investment in the masque's thematics. In this essay, I will offer a reading of Blacknesse centered not on racial, sexual, or even national identity but on confessional identity and more particularly the linked problems of Catholic conversion and Protestant conformity. At the time of the masque's performance, the subject of religious change had become particularly pressing for James, Anne, and the numerous courtiers and foreign dignitaries whose presence formed the ostensible raison d'etre for masquing. The year before the performance of Blacknesse, James had reasserted his own Protestant orthodoxy at Hampton Court, denying that his attitude toward religious dissent, and particularly recusancy, would be more lenient than that of his predecessor on the English throne. (8) Anxious speculation continued, however, to surround the religious identity of James's queen, who was widely (and, it seems, correctly) rumored to have converted to Catholicism several years before arriving in England. By the time of the masque, then, many would have assumed Anne to be the coreligionist, if the not the "Country Woman," of the Spanish ambassador.

Anne's Catholic conversion took place at almost precisely the same time as that of Jonson. Queen and poet, as semisecret converts, shared not only a number of Catholic friends but also a first-hand knowledge of the fluidity of denominational affiliation and of the kinds of devotional performances that could foster or allay suspicion. This shared context, I will argue, influenced Jonson's key innovations in the masque form. In contrast to the static pageantry of Samuel Daniel's Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604), performed the prior year, Blacknesse centers on the possibility of miraculous, mysterious transformation; its games of semiconcealment render the masquers at once familiar and unutterably strange. Such a concern with metamorphic identity would eventually become a hallmark of the Jonsonian masque. I will suggest that at this originary moment, however, it served to advance Jonson's witty allegory of confessional volatility in early seventeenth-century England. This is not to suggest that either Jonson or Anne intended the masque as a secret defense of Catholic belief; Blacknesse is not, as Barbara N. De Luna has argued of Catiline, a "private joke between the dramatist and the initiate [Catholic] few." (9) Such a reading would, in addition to rehearsing contemporary Protestant allegations of the genre's crypto-Catholicism, ignore the essential polysemy of the masque, its uncanny capacity to signal both a celebration and a repudiation of its titular color. (10) It is this very polysemy that I want to stress, suggesting that Jonson uses it to comment on the comparably ambiguous devotional performances enacted and observed at the Stuart Court. This essay will survey some of these performances, particularly those featuring Anne and her ladies, before turning to their aestheticized rehearsal at Whitehall.

DENOMINATING THE QUEEN

In an early passage of Basilicon Doron (1603), James I advises his son on wife selection, flatly declaring "I would rathest haue you to Marie one that were fully of your owne Religion." Though he admits that this might be "strait and difficile" given the small number of Protestant royal houses in Europe, James asks Prince Henry to "consider vpon these doubts, how ye and your wife can bee of one flesh, and keepe vnitie betwixt you, being members of two opposite Churches: disagreement in Religion bringeth euer with it, disagreement in maners." (11) James spoke from experience--his own marriage had been marked from the beginning by such "disagreement in Religion." Before journeying to Copenhagen to collect his bride in 1589, James accepted a number of prenuptial conditions, including the requirement "that her grace may have the religion and divine worship of her choice, as may her servants; and, furthermore, she may keep her own preacher at the expense of his majesty of Scotland." (12) The marriage treaty was more specific: Anne and her attendants would have "free profession and exercise of their religion, in meetings and in the administration of the sacraments in the vernacular and according to the custom of Denmark. To this end Anne is to have a Danish or German preacher and if he dies or leaves Scotland she can choose another, at James's expense." (13) The members of the queen's court, in other words, would be permitted to worship as Lutherans in an officially Calvinist country. Such an allowance did not please the elders of the Scottish Kirk, who characterized the Danish strain of reformed devotion as "Canaanitish," but Anne's Lutheranism seemed undeniably preferable to the Catholicism of James's mother, Mary. (14) To underscore this difference, the new queen's Scottish coronation oath included a vow to "defend the true religioun and worshipe of God, and advance the samyn, and ... dispys [despise] all papisticall superstitiones." (15)

The treaty created a kind of denominational fault line within the Stuart Court, however, one that first felt the tremors of conversion when Anne's Danish minister, Johan Sering, "embraced Calvinism, having abandoned his Lutheranism" soon after arriving in Edinburgh. Anne, according to the same contemporary account, "did not wish to retain his services, and anxiously wondered what was to be done, since she abhorred Calvinism." (16) The author of this account, a Scottish Jesuit named Robert Abercrombie, describes how he hastened to provide Anne with the requisite spiritual guidance. "I was summoned to the queen," Abercrombie writes in a report to his superior, Claudio Acquaviva, and "remained for three days secretly hidden in a small room, to which she came each day for one hour for the sake of being catechized." Eventually, Abercrombie continues, "I departed from [Anne] after she had heard the mass and received the most blessed sacrament." (17) After Sering's turn from the Lutheranism of Denmark to the official reformed religion of Scotland, the queen had turned in precisely the opposite direction, to the Church of Rome.

Abercrombie represents Anne's Catholic conversion both as final and as entirely his doing. While Sering simply "embraced" (amplexus est) Calvinism, Anne was led to Rome by male instruction. Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, the Venetian secretary in England, concurs in a letter to the Doge and Senate written several years later: "The Queen, whose father was a Martinist [Lutheran] ... became a Catholic owing to three Scottish Jesuits." (18) Aber-crombie's account likens his own missionary efforts to the secret wooing of a noble lady; seeking permission to enter her private chamber and administer the sacrament, the priest becomes a version of the courtly lover. This analogy between the conversion of ...