You're student might be interested in examining Rodomandro's - the King of Tartaria's - masque from Urania Part II (46-49, in Roberts). Wroth performed in the Masque of Blackness and is, I believe, revisiting Jonson here, playing with the idea of blackface in her description of the torchbearers - "visards they had non, the most of them having faces grimm and hard enough to be counted visards" (46). "The maskers," by contrast, "had a pretty kinde of visards or slight coverings of their faces" and they are all dressed "after the Tartarian fashion." The King of Tartaria might himself be interesting, with "hands soe white as wowld have become a great Lady" but a face which "plainely shewed the sunn had either liked itt to much, and so had too hard kissed itt, ore in fury of his delicasy, had made his beames to strongly to burne him" (42). And something of a Spenserian's pun in "plainely," I think.
But of course, that this occurs in a theatrical staging within a prose romance is also interesting.
Best,
Colleen Rosenfeld
Graduate Student,
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
--- On Thu, 9/4/08, Joseph Black <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Joseph Black <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: 'Blackface' disguise in romance?
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008, 6:16 PM
> Thank you all for the responses so far. Theatrical examples
> are indeed
> plentiful: scores of plays from the period feature
> characters in 'blackface' of
> one sort or another, and in many of those plays other
> characters (non-Moor,
> non-Turk, etc.) adopt at some point 'blackface' for
> purposes of disguise.
>
> But while common on stage, cross-racial disguise still
> appears to be relatively
> (if not entirely?) absent from prose romance, a genre in
> which disguises of all
> other sorts abound. Disguise calls attention to the
> barrier that the disguise
> crosses, and at times even suggests a measure of
> permeability. Renaissance
> theater repeatedly deploys disguise and other modes of
> self-transformation
> (e.g., conversion) to explore issues of racial and cultural
> identity, fluidity,
> and hybridization; prose romance -- a genre in some ways
> about identity
> formation -- doesn't. At least, I'm beginning to
> think it doesn't. Or at
> least it's starting to seem a topic a graduate student
> might usefully explore?
>
> Joseph Black
> Department of English
> University of Massachusetts Amherst
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