Shakespeare, Caliban, and Jonson

Combining early modern historiography with critical race and performance studies, Masquing Blackness offers a historically-contextualized examination of the mechanics of blackness in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Combining early modern historiography with critical race and performance studies, Masquing Blackness offers a historically contextualized examination of the mechanics of blackness in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The book places Shakespeare’s representations of race into conversation both with Jacobean colonialism and with the widespread calls for racially conscious reform in American theatre that gained national attention in the summer of 2020.

In the period between 2021 and 2022, immediately following the Covid-19 lockdowns, there were 37 professional or academic productions of The Tempest in the United States, making it by far the most produced of Shakespeare’s plays. This volume proposes an intriguing tri-part relationship between The Tempest, Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605), and Othello (c. 1604). It reveals a shared understanding of race and blackness, one which also shaped Shakespeare's Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, likely written alongside The Tempest. Throughout, the book explores the presence of masquing in Shakespeare’s work, both textually and in production, ultimately arguing that The Tempest’s particular staging of race in both early modern and twenty-first-century American production owes a great debt to the coterie court performances of Jacobean masques.

Given Masquing Blackness’ dual focus on theatre history and contemporary performance, the book appeals to performance scholars and historians as well as theatrical practitioners and students of American critical race theory. It has a home in graduate and undergraduate courses as well as in the libraries of Shakespeare festival producers, artists, and audiences.