Performing Blackface Pregnancy at the Stuart Court: The Masque of Blackness and Love’s Mistress, or the Queen’s Masque

Abstract

n January 6, 1605, Queen Anna of Denmark—wife to King James I— danced in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness. Against contemporary ocourtly conventions, the queen used cosmetics to paint her skin in order to play a “Black-more.” The fact of Anna’s temporary blackness has been amply discussed: what has not been sufficiently considered is that Anna was also six months pregnant with Princess Mary, the first royal child born in England since 1537.This essay comparesQueenAnna’s pregnant performance inTheMasque of Blackness and Thomas Heywood’s 1634 Love’s Mistress. I argue Heywood’s Love’s Mistress—featuring a blackened and heavily pregnant Psyche—evokes Anna’s performance in The Masque of Blackness, wherein England’s first childbearing queen in two generations danced in blackface while visibly pregnant. In so doing, I explore how Anna wielded her reproductive body as a weapon in Stuart court politics, thereby recovering the queen’s influence on early modern dramaturgy and performances of pregnancy in early seventeenth-century England.