To Blanch an Ethiop: Motifs of Blackness in The Tempest and Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness

Abstract

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. The play was by far the most produced of Shakespeare’s works in this timespan, and those 37 productions represent a 280% increase compared to 2019, in which there were 13 such productions. Considering The Tempest’s hyper-popularity within the context of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the birth of We See You White American Theatre’s calls for reform in 2020, this paper seeks to understand anew the way in which Shakespeare constructs blackness in the play. Indeed for all of its beauty and magic, The Tempest stages a violent anti-blackness in its treatment of Caliban. In particular, I argue an unexplored connection between The Tempest and Ben Jonson’s 1605 court masque, The Masque of Blackness, itself an exploration of the construction of race for a particular early modern audience. My exploration here began as a partial answer to a question posed by Robin Alfriend Kello: “how do you balance [an] attraction to the richness of Shakespearian verse against these layered histories of racial violence and exclusion?” A deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s version of blackness may grant insights into areas of intervention for those theaters reaching for The Tempest amidst national calls for anti-racist theatrical work.

1. Introduction

In the spring and summer of 2020, amidst the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States underwent a period of racial reckoning in response to the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Although Taylor and Floyd’s murders were part of a pervasive pattern of police violence against Black bodies in the United States, public protests over policing techniques and calls for reform grew exponentially following Taylor’s murder on 13 March and again after Floyd’s murder on 25 May, leading to a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. BLM rapidly grew into the non-profit Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF), whose mission is “to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes” (About 2013). Simultaneously, in the “We See You White American Theatre” manifesto (WSYWAT, later re-named “Principles for Re-Building American Theatre Systems”), American theater artists aired grievances against both systemic and overt racism in American professional theatrical practices. As a result, in the months both during and after the pause in live theater caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many professional and academic theaters—including those for whom the plays of Shakespeare were regular offerings—examined or reexamined their relationships to both hegemonic whiteness and the theatrical canon.

At the same time that these statements of equity and access proliferated on company websites and marketing materials, many of these theaters and academic theater departments chose to produce plays by Shakespeare to welcome production teams and audiences back into shared performance spaces after lockdowns had ended. While the choice to produce Shakespeare in general is not surprising, given both the economic advantage of producing plays in the public domain and the perceived “universality” of Shakespeare’s plays and themes, what stands out is the unusually high number of American theaters that chose to perform The Tempest during this dynamic period. In 2021 and 2022, a total of 37 professional or university runs of The Tempest occurred in the United States, including prominent versions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the American Shakespeare Center.1 This number indicates an increase of 280% over the 13 professional or academic productions of The Tempest in 2019. The comparably large number of 2021/22 productions—particularly given the text’s demand for high spectacle at a time in which theater budgets were recovering from the shutdown period—suggests that American theater companies found something particularly salient in The Tempest that justified staging it for audiences in the immediate period post-lockdown.2 This unique attraction to The Tempest positioned it as more than a play; the text became emblematic of how many American theater makers understand the importance of art post-2020.

Considering the hyper-presence of The Tempest in the American post-lockdown context, this paper takes a deeper look at the anti-blackness that pervades the play’s text, which seems at odds with the post-lockdown emphasis on equity and representation. While many early modern English plays are grounded in notions of white supremacy, The Tempest’s Caliban occupies a particular place in the early modern canon as a Black-coded character who voices direct questions about his identity, demanding continual reconsideration of his relationships to Prospero, Miranda, and the other Europeans. His behavior and attitudes in turn facilitate audience reflections on power, status, and race. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden Vaughan argue that “Caliban fascinates because he violates the order of things. … His very opposition to Prospero’s hegemony helps to define the appropriator’s assumptions and values” (Vaughan and Vaughan 1991, p. xv). In brief, Caliban’s position in The Tempest is relational. We understand Prospero by his treatment of Caliban, just as we understand Caliban in contrast to the freedom and dignity afforded to the play’s other characters. As this paper will argue, through Caliban Shakespeare both actively shapes and responds to burgeoning notions of early modern blackness. Further, I find a direct connection between Caliban and the characters of Ben Jonson’s 1605 court masque The Masque of Blackness, which I argue to be an important and heretofore unacknowledged source text for The Tempest. I argue that grounding Caliban’s blackness in the discourse and material production conditions of court masquing and performance may grant insights into areas of intervention for those theaters reaching for The Tempest amidst national calls for anti-racist theatrical work.

2. Early Modern Contexts of The Tempest

Shakespeare wrote The Tempest near the beginning of England’s prolonged period of colonial expansion, which is generally agreed to have begun around 1600 with the establishment of the first East India Company trading posts in India. Thus, Shakespeare witnessed—and was positioned to comment on—the burgeoning process of English identity formation in the face of continual encounters with new cultures. By the time The Tempest was staged in 1611, this notion of English identity had begun to solidify, bringing with it a sense of ascendancy on the world stage. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin characterize this period as one of contradiction, arguing that as early moderns expanded their colonial reach, “they became culturally more open, and yet in many ways more insular. … They became increasingly aware of the power, wealth, and learning of other peoples, of the precise histories and geographies of worlds beyond Europe, and yet this awareness often only intensified expressions of European and Christian superiority” (Loomba and Orkin 1998, p. 4). In other words, when confronted with difference, the English colonial response was to cultivate and protect nationalistic identity.

As England’s colonial project began later than those of continental European countries, it is easier to see the direct effects of English imperial efforts on the country’s developing conceptions of race. Kim F. Hall argues that “England’s movement from geographical isolation into military and mercantile contest with other countries sets the stage for the longer processes by which preexisting literary tropes of blackness profoundly interacted with the fast-changing economic relations of white Europeans and their darker ‘others’ during the Renaissance” (Hall 1995, p. 4). The process of defining “Englishness”, for the early moderns, then, became an inverse process of determining what did not count as English. As Dorothy Kim and Kimberly Ann Coles observe, early modern whiteness “is constructed against other people who inhabit the world they want to claim for themselves” (Kim and Coles 2023, p. 12). The practice of “claiming” spaces and territories in Africa, for instance, necessitates a construction of the indigenous inhabitants of that place as othered. Further, the status of “other” always indicates an inferiority as compared to the culture that perceives itself as dominant.

Adam Miyashiro argues that this reliance on othering to build identity necessitates a framing of non-dominant cultures as “primitive, aboriginal, and barbarous” (Miyashiro 2023, p. 35). This framing justifies colonial takeover as an act of “civilizing”, or of rescuing a colonized culture from their indigenous practices in favor of, in this case, English practices and norms. Imtiaz Habib similarly describes a common tendency to frame colonized peoples as less than human “wild men”, who are thus in dire need of such interventions. He characterizes the “wild man” trope as consisting of such features as “dirt and darkness, barbaric religious practices, multifarious bestialities including chiefly cannibalism, and an uncontrolled sexuality manifested more often than not in a casual, socially pervasive nakedness” (Habib 2000, p. 214). Most of these descriptors fit Shakespeare’s Caliban—as the subject both of Prospero’s colonial control and of his attempts at education. One possible interpretation of Caliban is indeed as the idealized colonial subject: one whose alleged attempts at sexual assault, stubborn adherence to an African system of religion allied with witchcraft, affinity for alcohol, and resistance to European education illustrate the urgent need for him to be tamed and brought in line with European (or English) social and behavioral norms. While Shakespeare may be presenting these colonial systems of subjugation in an effort to undermine them, he does position Caliban as what Habib terms the “dark alterity” of English whiteness (Habib 2000, p. 17)—i.e., as an embodiment of all that is not idealized English identity.

Like most other early modern explorations of racial difference, The Tempest was also likely influenced by the large number of travel narratives circulating in the late medieval and early modern periods. Particularly popular in this genre is the 1589 compendium The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, whose compiler, Richard Hakluyt, Habib characterizes as “the chief propagandist of early modern English colonialism. He … is the architect of the success of sixteenth and seventeenth century colonial education chiefly through his careful projection of colonial action as a logical endeavor for the colonized native’s own good” (Habib 2000, pp. 219–20). Like most works in the genre, Hakluyt’s features numerous descriptions of native populations using language that casts such peoples as fundamentally exotic and often as less than human. Also following generic conventions, Hakluyt eschews specificity in these descriptions of indigenous populations, favoring writings that positioned Africans and Native Americans as servile, simple savages while also promoting the strength of English naval powers.

Back in England, anxieties persisted about the effect of contact with the populations described in travel writings, especially when Africans in particular began to be brought back to England. These anxieties eventually played a crucial role in England’s participation in the chattel slave trades. In 1601, Elizabeth I drafted a warrant calling for the deportation of certain “Negros and Blackamoores” from England, as many (presumably white) English people thought Black people were robbing English subjects of necessary resources (Elizabeth 1601, vol. xi, p. 569). Emily Weissbourd has argued that this Elizabethan warrant—and two earlier warrants from 1596 on the same subject—functioned less as proclamations barring Black Africans from England and more as documents legitimizing the ownership and transfer of Black bodies as commodities. Weissbourd maintains that these warrants reflect an early modern linkage of blackness to slavery and demonstrate an “emergent discourse in English culture that naturalized the enslavement of black [sic] Africans” (Weissbourd 2018, p. 13). Further, Vaughan and Mason Vaughan note that many “English assessments, especially of Africans with dark skin, were decidedly pejorative and some were vituperative”, suggesting that early moderns would not only link Black bodies to slavery but would also understand them to be inherently inferior to white bodies (Vaughan and Vaughan 1999, p. 50). Patricia Akhimie argues that this prejudice was systemic for the early moderns, arising at least in part from a proverbial understanding of the futility of ‘washing [the blackness from] an Ethiope’; she writes “the indelibility of blackness … may be understood as an incapacity for engaging in self-improvement. The impossibility of ‘improving’ black skin by making it lighter is linked to the idea that black people cannot be improved and cannot improve themselves” (Akhimie 2018, pp. 4–5).

The Tempest was written at the height of these discourses. The play answers increased public hunger for tales of travel to exotic locales populated by racially and culturally diverse Others and enters into discourse around the superiority of white Europeans in contrast to these newly discovered populations as well as the possibility for those populations to be “improved” by contact with Europeans. As Eric Mallin and Loomba note, “by 1600, eighteen to twenty thousand visits were made each week to London playhouses. The bulk of these visitors got their images of foreign people from the stage, rather than from books or from real-life interactions” (Mallin and Loomba 2004, p. 8). By 1611, then, early modern audiences would likely have actively sought these representations of exotic locales—and populations—when they visited the public theaters. Although the only recorded performances of The Tempest are two which James commissioned for court entertainments, it is difficult to believe that the King’s Men would have missed the opportunity to profit from public showings of a play so steeped in the imagery and rhetoric of travel, adventure, and encounters with new and fascinating creatures.

3. Blackness in The Tempest

It is of course beyond the scope of this article—or of any academic work—to attempt to decipher what Shakespeare intended in his portrayal of Caliban. It is indeed more productive to follow Vaughan and Mason Vaughan in examining “what [Caliban] represents to the observer, not … what Shakespeare may have had in mind” (Vaughan and Vaughan 1991, p. 146). Particularly given the relative newness of racial discourses in the early modern period, it is impossible to know if Shakespeare envisioned a Black islander when he wrote Caliban. Even Othello, so steadfast in his own understanding of his blackness, is not exempt from scholarly debates over whether Shakespeare intended him to be Black or if his Moorish identity implies Middle Eastern heritage. My intention is to examine what Shakespeare did write about Caliban and to explore the early modern resonances of those descriptors with an eye always toward how the character—as Shakespeare presents him—functions in the context of live performance. To that end, this section is a close reading of the textual evidence for Caliban’s blackness and the numerous descriptions of the character with which any production of the play must reckon.

Scholars have long found numerous linguistic references to blackness in The Tempest. As early as 1895, for example, Albert Kluyver drew a comparison between Caliban’s name and the Romani “Cauliban (or kaliban) [which] meant ‘black’ or things associated with blackness” (qtd. in Vaughan and Vaughan 1991, pp. 33–34). Joanna Udall notes that, for the early moderns, the devil was Black, and Prospero insists that Caliban was “got by the devil himself/Upon [his] wicked dam” (1.2.320-1) (Udall 1991, p. 50). Sycorax’s name itself connotes blackness, drawn as it likely is from the Greek Korax, meaning raven—an animal associated in the early modern imagination with both blackness and evil (Deroux 2010, p. 96). The devil’s union with Caliban’s mother Sycorax, an African witch (from “Algiers”, the early modern term for the Northern African country of Algeria), would thus almost undoubtedly have resulted in a Black child. Although Prospero’s descriptions of Caliban are colored by his own feelings for the character and likely do not represent the objective truth of Caliban’s existence, they stand as the most pervasive descriptions of Caliban throughout the play and likely resonated with early modern audiences’ developing notions of racial difference. Vaughan argues, for instance, that “fear of the devil overlapped with fear of the black African other on the stage” (Vaughan 2005, p. 8). Caliban is thus doubly and relatedly damned as a spawn of the devil and a markedly Black character.

Prospero’s descriptions, the most famous and often cited of which is his reference to Caliban as “this thing of darkness” (Shakespeare 1999, 5.2.275), link blackness to wickedness.3 The number of textual references to Caliban’s ugliness and evil nature indicate that the play’s European characters imagine his subjugation—and his unsuccessful resistance to that subjugation—as a particular trait of his blackness. In addition to the seven times that Caliban is referred to as a “slave”, a term that was, as Loomba argues above, becoming increasingly identified with Black Africans, Miranda calls him “a thing I do not love to look on” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.311). Prospero refers to him as “thou earth” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.314), which could be a comment on his dirtiness but is also likely a reference to his skin color. In this same vein, he is a “freckled welp-hag born” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.283). Cristina Malcolmson and Sujata Iyengar note that for early moderns, freckles—imperfections on the whiteness of idealized skin—”shore up pre-existing and emergent hierarchies of dark and light skin” (Malcolmson and Iyengar 2018, p. 136). Caliban’s freckled skin becomes yet another marker of his inferiority. As Akhimie argues, Prospero also contributes to this marking of Caliban’s skin, further darkening it in response to Caliban’s supposed bad behavior: “while Caliban was a ‘freckled whelp’ perhaps from birth, Prospero hopes to make him ‘spotted’ with each mark as a reminder of the punishments that Caliban’s misbehavior has incurred” (Akhimie 2018, p. 173). In this way, Caliban’s blackness is both an innate trait that—for Prospero—indicates his evilness and a punishment for that behavior.

Further, Prospero couples his characterization of Caliban as a “thing of darkness” with a reference to him as a “bastard one” (Shakespeare 1999, 5.1.273), likely referring both to his illegitimate parentage as well as to what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as a seventeenth-century notion of a bastard as a “mongrel”, or “an animal of mixed or inferior breed” (Bastard 2019). This inferiority is visible in the play particularly when Caliban is compared to Ferdinand. Both characters are expected to fetch wood for Prospero—Caliban as a condition of his servitude, and Ferdinand as a trial of his devotion to Miranda. As Akhimie argues, “the selfsame agricultural labor—log bearing—that disinherits Caliban, transforming him from a would-be king to a servant, cultivates Ferdinand as a desirable son-in-law, future ruler, and heir” (Akhimie 2018, p. 159). Log bearing for Ferdinand could be read symbolically as preparation for his time to come as a husband, father, and ruler—i.e., the “bearer” of his subjects. For Caliban, however, there is no nobleness to the act. Unlike Ferdinand, who welcomes the log bearing as proof of his constancy, Caliban chafes at the task, exclaiming “I’ll bear [Prospero] no more sticks” (Shakespeare 1999, 2.2.169) when he believes he has recruited Stephano to overthrow Prospero.

Hall argues that these kinds of Black/white contrasts were common as discoveries of Black Africans helped to define white English identity. She writes “the search for foreign treasure is haunted by a search for the self, for a whiteness that is simultaneously priceless and valuable and that can become the defining, stable marker in a binarism that encodes difference” (Hall 1995, p. 53). Caliban’s blackness and the evilness associated with it thus seems a deliberate contrast to the whiteness—and resultant goodness—of the play’s European characters. Early in the play, Prospero makes this binary clear by explicitly couching his distinction between Caliban’s “vileness” and Miranda’s “goodness” in racial terms: “thy vile race … had that in’t which good natures/Could not abide to be with” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.360-1). While “race” for early modern audiences did not carry the social or legal connotations the word would later gain, Vaughan and Mason Vaughan gloss the term as “creatures of [Caliban’s] kind who share [his] diabolical nature”, framing the early modern notion of “race” here as one of heredity, rather than skin color (Vaughan and Vaughan 1999, p. 175). As they note, the line is of course “predictive of modern racism” (Vaughan and Vaughan 1999, p. 175).

Indeed, it is impossible for a twenty-first-century audience to divorce a verbal reference to Caliban’s “race” from their understanding of his skin color and thus from the later myth that differences in race—particularly in terms of blackness and whiteness—carry with them differences in intellect or ability. Thus, even though Shakespeare’s original line may not have been a reference to the color of Caliban’s skin, directors who retain the line in performance, particularly post-lockdown, necessarily invoke audiences’ experiences with or understandings of systemic racism and anti-blackness.4 As Loomba and Orkin argue, “Caliban’s ‘vile race’ is an amalgam of location, religion, culture, language, sexuality, and physique, all of which were part of the discourse of ‘race’ which was to remain volatile and variable in years to come” (Loomba and Orkin 1998, p. 35).

4. The Tempest and The Masque of Blackness

I propose a deep textual connection between the blackness Shakespeare imagines for Caliban and the version of racial difference Ben Jonson created in his 1605 The Masque of Blackness—his first for the Jacobean court. Indeed, it is possible that the published version of Blackness may have been one of Shakespeare’s sources, given the masque’s explorations of the mechanics of stage blackness and othering, its particular interrupted structure, and its exploration of the colonial backdrop and priorities of James’ kingship. In the sections to follow, I analyze the masque as both a unique artifact of developing early modern racial theory and as a potential companion piece to The Tempest. The plot of Blackness revolves around twelve Ethiopian river nymphs—daughters of Niger, the spirit of the Nile river. Although Niger describes his daughters as the “first formed dames of earth” (Jonson 2007, 128),5 and thus the models for all of human beauty, he notes that they have been convinced by “poor brainsick” Western poets to desire white skin (Jonson 2007, 146). He brings them to “Albion”, where there reigns a king so great that he has the power “to blanch an Ethiop” (Jonson 2007, 241). The twelve nymphs, played by court figures including a pregnant Queen Anna, wore black makeup on their faces and bodies, marking the first usage of what we now call blackface makeup in a court masque. Previously, black skin on non-Black actors would have been represented with black leather or velvet masks and gloves.

At first, the masque seems to present blackness as an impermanent state, able to be remedied if Niger’s daughters visit England and its all-powerful ruler, as the character Ethiopia describes: “Their beauties shall be scorch’d no more: /This sun is temperate, and refines/All things on which his radiance shines” (Jonson 2007, 249–50). Jonson frames James’ “light sciential” (Jonson 2007, 242) as powerful enough to “blanch an Ethiope” and thus to alleviate the daughters of Niger from the blackness that they see as burdensome. Therefore, audiences likely expected an on-stage resolution, but the material condition of Anna’s stage blackness made it impossible for this transition to happen within the performance of the masque itself. Unlike most previous early modern instances of stage blackness, which utilized black velvet costume pieces to signify black skin on non-Black actors, Anna insisted on painting herself with black paint. Further, her costume was specifically designed to show off her pregnant belly, meaning that a significant potion of Anna’s body would have been covered in the paint. It would have thus taken a prohibitively long amount of time—likely close to the run time of the brief masque itself—to remove the paint in order to “whiten” Anna, let alone the eleven other women on stage with her. Consequently, the whitening of the daughters was not complete until the performance of the companion masque, The Masque of Beauty, three years later on 10 January 1608. No evidence exists to suggest that Blackness broke the convention of court masques as single-performance events, meaning that it was extremely unlikely that it was revived in 1608 to create narrative unity with Beauty. Thus, the unresolved conflict of Blackness—Anna remains Black at the conclusion of the piece—reinforces the notion of a double consciousness of blackness as both temporary and indelible—as both an identity and a state of being. Even James is not powerful enough to “blanche an Ethiope” in the moment.

Simultaneously, Jonson’s representation of blackness reflected emerging models of English whiteness. For all of its innovation within the emerging form of the Jacobean court masque and its potential undermining of James’ authority, Blackness ultimately positions whiteness as triumphant, privileging the spectacle of blackface performance over any textual notion of inherent African beauty. Niger’s reference to the “poor brain-sick men” who have “with such envy of their graces, sung/The painted beauties other empires sprung” (Jonson 2007, 146–48) thus refers not only to himself and other early modern writers—including Shakespeare—who connect their characters’ beauty to their fairness, but also to Anna and her court. Anna and her ladies are in fact doubly “painted”, both in terms of their habitual cosmetics in daily life, to which Niger’s line likely refers, as well as in their use of blackface makeup in the masque itself. Within the masque, the beauty of the daughters’ blackness is thus tempered both by their desire to transform and by the physical presence of white skin under blackface makeup. The dominance of Anna’s white body, in a story authored by the white Jonson and performed for the white Jacobean court, negates narratives of beautiful blackness within the masque even as Jonson seems to give those narratives voice.

There is of course no evidence that Shakespeare was present for the single production of Blackness on 5 January 1605. Attendance at court masques was restricted to what Kristen McDermott describes as “an invitation-only group consisting of James, his most important courtiers, and visiting foreign dignitaries” (McDermott 2007, p. 134). Shakespeare, as a member of none of those categories—and as Jonson’s perceived artistic rival—would not have received an invitation. Still, there are enough textual and thematic resonances between Blackness and The Tempest (as well as the plays that followed The Tempest) to argue that Shakespeare read a version of it.

This possibility is made all the more likely because, unlike earlier authors of court entertainments, Jonson insisted on the publication of his masques. Blackness appeared in quarto in 1608, alongside the text of The Masque of Beauty. McDermott indeed argues that it was publication, rather than the ephemeral nature of performance, that was Jonson’s chief aim: “Jonson called the printed texts of his masques ‘poems’ and made it clear that they were aimed more at readers than at spectators” (McDermott 2007, p. 17). David Lindley argues that this focus on publication was exclusive to Jonson, noting that other masque authors were not as particular about the textual preservation of their work. Lindley cites Samuel Daniel’s masque Tethy’s Festival, commissioned in 1610 for Prince Henry’s investiture, as an example. In the introduction to the published masque, Daniel “pointedly distanced himself from Jonson’s parade of learning, claiming that he did not print the work ‘out of a desire to be seen on pamphlets, or of forwardness to show my inventions therein; for I thank God, I labour not with that disease of ostentation’” (Lindley 2009, p. 42). Jonson himself seems not to have viewed publication as “ostentation”, but rather as evidence of the intellectual—as opposed to visual—nature of his texts. The extensive nature of the authorial notes that accompanied the 1608 quarto of Blackness, for example, suggest Jonson’s efforts “to transform a one-time-only performed event into an enduring document of classical scholarship” (Lindley 2009, p. 7). His preface both outlines his hope that publishing the masques will “redeem them as well from ignorance as from envy” (Jonson 2007, 17–18), as well as identifies “Pliny, Solinus, Ptolemy, and of late Leo the African” (Jonson 2007, 20) as Jonson’s sources for information about the Nile and Ethiopia.

Of course, the existence of the carefully prepared 1608 Blackness quarto does not guarantee that Shakespeare read it. The speculation that he did, however, is bolstered by Shakespeare’s contact with Jonson’s other works. There is record of Shakespeare appearing in two of Jonson’s plays: Every Man in His Humor in 1598 and Sejanus His Fall in 1604, the year before Jonson wrote The Masque of Blackness. Additionally, Vaughan and Mason Vaughan note that “Jonson listed the King’s Company as performers in the 1612 masque Love Restored, and actors from Shakespeare’s company were probably also involved in Jonson’s earlier efforts” (Vaughan and Vaughan 1999, pp. 67–68). Thus, while there is no evidence of Shakespeare’s company members in Blackness itself, the troop would have been familiar enough with the form and with Jonson’s work for both the public and court performance that its resident playwright’s contact with the quarto is more than feasible.

The strongest piece of evidence for Shakespeare’s familiarity with Jonson’s published masques is his inclusion of a court masque in The Tempest, written within two years of the publication of Jonson’s quarto. Martin Butler characterizes The Tempest and its masque as “one part of an ongoing critical conversation between Shakespeare and Jonson over the court masque, and over the nature and significance of art in general” (Butler 2019, p. 152). Butler notes that, particularly for Jonson, this “conversation” between the two playwrights is visible in their published texts. In the induction to Bartholomew Fair, for example, Jonson rails against violations of verisimilitude in his contemporaries’ work, including in particular a mention of a “servant-monster” (Jonson 1995, 113) that is clearly a reference to Caliban.6 Beyond this, there are numerous structural and textual resonances between the two pieces.

Unlike later court masques, Blackness does not contain an antimasque. There is no physical counterbalance to the blackness of Niger’s daughters. There is only the hope and expectation that their blackness would eventually be cured by their visit to Albion and its king. Thus, although whitened versions of the daughters may have served as their own foils, as discussed earlier, Anna’s request for blackface makeup prevented that transition from happening during the performance itself. Although it is possible to read the later Masque of Beauty as the formal masque and Blackness itself as an antimasque without a resolutory main masque, the delay of years between the performances of the two masques—and the lack of evidence that Blackness was revived in 1608, meaning that different audiences saw both pieces—would likely have separated them too far for James and his court to have made meaningful connections between them. It is thus possible to read Blackness as unfinished both in terms of its narrative and its theatrical structure. Although the daughters’ blackness may have functioned in the tradition of the antimasque as “a distorting mirror, negatively defining the values of the court by displaying and mocking those who embody all the court is not” (McDermott 2007, p. 41), the lack of any miraculous onstage transition to whiteness casts the daughters as masquers, not antimasquers. The masque ends as the daughters reach Albion and their father and Ethiopia leave them, presumably in the care of James, to their hoped-for whitening.

Similarly, Prospero’s masque does not contain a formal antimasque. Prospero abruptly ends the masque—seemingly in the middle of a dance of reapers and nymphs ordered by Iris—with his recollections of Caliban’s planned treachery. The ending feels startling and unresolved, causing Ferdinand to remark that “this is strange: your father’s in some passion/That works him strongly” (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.143-4) and for Miranda to comment on the strange intensity of her father’s anger. By the time Shakespeare was writing The Tempest, numerous examples of the masque/antimasque dyad had been published for him to use as models. His choice, then, to write a masque without an antimasque seems to have been deliberate, and one that further suggests his use of Blackness as a model.7 As in Blackness, nothing is actually accomplished in Prospero’s masque. Niger’s daughters remain black, Ferdinand and Miranda remain unmarried, and the threats against Miranda’s virginity—arguably the subject of the masque itself—linger. The abruptness of both pieces’ endings calls attention to what each masque is missing. In both, resolution happens outside the action of the masque. Anna and her courtiers presumably remove their makeup in private, and Ferdinand and Miranda likely marry (and end anxiety about her virginity) once the European characters have left the island.

Hardin Aasand argues that Blackness, both in its use of white bodies in Black roles and in its ultimate preference for whiteness, “is a document of marginalization, and it records analogically, historically, and ethnically, the intersection of socially excluded forces” (Aasand 1992, p. 273). The Tempest similarly emphasizes the marginalization of its non-white characters, often in ways that recall Blackness directly. In the marriage masque, Prospero’s Ceres notes her trepidation of contact with Venus and Cupid, as a result of their aid in “dusky Dis’” (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.98) plans to hold her daughter captive (and presumably to violate her sexually). Ceres’ specific identification of the lord of the underworld as “dusky” may allude to a moral blackness—if not a physical one—that might strike Prospero as reminiscent of Caliban, i.e., another, more sinister threat to Miranda’s virginity that Ferdinand’s.

This connection, as well as the masque’s repetition of motifs from Blackness, might then help to explain Prospero’s abrupt end to the masque. One of its final images is a group of nymphs dancing with a group of reapers. As she calls forth both groups, Iris is very specific about their identifications. The nymphs are “naiads of the wandring brooks” (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.144), further suggesting a connection to Niger’s daughters, themselves embodiments of flowing water. The reapers are “sunburnt sicklemen”, who approach the performance space from their “furrow”. (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.134-5). Their specific description as “sunburned” indicates a tie to Niger’s daughters specifically, as well as to early modern notions of race in general. Niger suggests that it is the African sun that has blackened his daughters, having “in their firm hues drawn/Signs of his ferventest love” (Jonson 2007, 132–33). While to Niger, this sun-blackening is a blessing, contributing to his daughters’ “perfectest beauty” (Jonson 2007, 134), the daughters seek its reversal from James, whose sun “is temperate” and can “refine” their blackness (Jonson 2007, 250), working as discussed above against the course of the natural sun. As Hall argues, the process of sunburning—of the sun altering the color of skin—was a particular source of anxiety for the early moderns, particularly as they encountered non-white races through colonial expansion and exploration: “sunburn allows movement between the strict dichotomies of black and white and so too between the racial absolutes mandated therein” (Hall 1995, p. 97). Thus, white skin could become darkened—to its detriment—by too much time in the sun. As Hall argues, in previous decades to those of James’ rule, Elizabeth’s “rage for fairness and whiteness” spurred her court to avoid the sun “at all costs” (Hall 1995, p. 94). In Blackness, of course, James’ court directly faced questions of the blackening of white skin, provoking an anxiety exemplified by diplomat and parliamentarian Dudley Carleton. He famously wrote of his disgust for Anna’s black painted skin, noting that “you cannot imagine a more ugly Sight, then a Troop of lean-cheek’d Moors” (qtd. in Aasand 1992, p. 279). Further, Carlton worried about the potential spread of blackness through contact with Anna and her ladies, noting anxiously that the Spanish Ambassador danced with Anna “and forgot not to kiss her hand, though there was danger that it would have left a mark on his lips” (qtd. in McDermott 2007, p. 37).

The particular timing of the nymphs’ and reapers’ appearance and dismissal in Prospero’s masque, coming as it does particularly after Ceres’ reference to a “dusky” figure who threatens her own daughter suggests a similar anxiety about mixing sunburned skin with white. Prospero allows the intermixed groups to begin their dance, but interrupts them to end the masque. As discussed above, the cause for this interruption is his memory of Caliban: “I had forgot the foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban and his confederates/Against my life” (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.155-7). Prospero has previously voiced an anxiety about Caliban’s alleged sexual assault of Miranda, which may have resulted in the conception of mixed offspring, a possibility which delights Caliban: “would’t had been done!/Thou didst prevent me. I had peopled else/This isle with Calibans” (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.419–21). Prospero’s reference to Caliban as a “beast” after witnessing the intermingling of sunburned reapers and nymphs with “ever-harmless looks” (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.145) very likely recalls his early anxiety about mixed—or “beastly”—grandchildren.

Strikingly, Jonson’s masque also contains an interrupted dance, this time between the blackened daughters of Niger and the (white) men of Jonson’s court. As Jonson’s stage directions note, the daughters finish a dance of their own, but “as they were about to make choice of their men, one from the sea was heard to call ‘em” (Jonson 2007, 279–80). A voice from the sea attempts to tempt the daughters away from the dance and back to their native water. Although the daughters reject the voice’s enticements and continue on to dance “several measures and corantos” (Jonson 2007, 289) with their chosen partners, the voice provides a moment—however brief—in which the audience could consider the implications and potential results of such mixing, not the least of which might have included the transfer of the daughters’ black makeup to the white courtiers, as Carleton feared. Shakespeare may have found in the brief interruption an inspiration for the disruption of his own masque and the prevention of the kind of racialized mixing that Blackness staged.

Shakespeare is indeed very specific about the bodies of color he stages in The Tempest. In addition to removing the “sunburned sicklemen” quickly after their entrance, he also does not allow Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, to appear on stage at all. Although she is very present in the memories of both Ariel and Caliban, the only descriptors we encounter of her come from Prospero, who seemingly knows her only by reputation. Prospero’s references to Sycorax as “a foul witch”, “the damned witch”, and “hag”, (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.258; 263; 283) as well as his notion that Caliban is the result of a coupling between an African witch and “the devil himself” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.320) create a racialized image of the absent Black mother, constructed by a white playwright and voiced by a white actor playing a white character. Prospero’s version of Sycorax is one-dimensional, existing only to provide evidence of her son’s wickedness and unworthiness in comparison to the white European characters. As Joyce MacDonald argues, “black people, and black women in general, are necessary to the productions of white value and virtue” (MacDonald 2020, p. 2). Sycorax serves as the absent foil to the white Miranda—the only human female character allowed on stage—whom Ferdinand describes as “perfect and peerless” (Shakespeare 1999, 3.1.47). Sycorax’ off-stage blackness thus becomes a tool of racial definition and oppression, further isolating Caliban from the other inhabitants of his own island.

MacDonald notes the multitudes of Black women who are absent from Shakespeare’s text, including not only Sycorax but also Desdemona’s maid in Othello, the Black maid whom Lancelot Gobbo impregnates in The Merchant of Venice, and the multitude of “Ethiopes” to whom white women’s beauty is compared throughout the canon. MacDonald argues that “the spectral quality of black women in our Shakespearian archive—physically absent, but socially present, and called on to do various kinds of work in establishing social, sexual, and racial hierarchies—develops within the history of colonial abjection” (MacDonald 2020, p. 3). Shakespeare was of course not alone in his exploitation of absent Black female bodies. Indeed, this trope is yet another point of contact between The Tempest and Blackness, in which the absence of actual Black women highlights the distances—geographical, ideological, economic, and colonial—between Africa and James’ court. Although, as MacDonald points out, the trope of the absent Black woman was common enough throughout early modern dramatic literature that Shakespeare would have had (and indeed created) numerous models, I argue that the specificity of missing Black bodies in the masque cannot be overlooked as a source for the absent Sycorax. Anna’s insistence to Jonson that she appear in black makeup may very well have been an attempt to gain artistic agency, but her act was staged on the backs of more absent Black women, namely Niger’s daughters. Their blackness—like that of Sycorax—is a construction determined by whiteness. Even Niger’s descriptions of his daughters’ beauty and status as the “first-form’d dames of earth” is tempered by the promise of their whitening and thus their participation in and service to white theatrical and court conventions.

Referencing a fifteenth-century English proverb, “black best sets forth white”, Mason Vaughan argues that “blackfaced characters in early modern dramas are often used in just this way, to make whiteness visible so that it can be ‘read’ and in the process to make it seem fairer by contrast” (Vaughan 2005, p. 6). Like the blackness of the absent African daughters, both Sycorax’ invisible blackness and Caliban’s hyper-present racial identity (painted on as Anna’s would have been in the masque) highlight the whiteness of the rest of the characters in The Tempest. Strikingly, one of the other notably absent women in The Tempest is Ferdinand’s sister Claribel, whose marriage in Tunis occasions the sea voyage that shipwrecks Ferdinand and the other Italian nobles on the island. It is perhaps her ties to blackness—that is, her marriage to an African—that disqualifies her from stage time in the play, Indeed, the character who discusses her the most is Sebastian, who bemoans her “loss” to Africa and reminds her father, Alonso, of Claribel’s “fairness” as well as of the fact that Alonso was “kneeled to and importuned” to cancel the marriage” (Shakespeare 1999, 2.1.133-6). Thus, in addition to Prospero’s repeated derogatory references to Caliban’s blackness, the play stages a subtler preference for whiteness throughout.

Ferdinand, in particular, seems oddly fixated on the dynamics of color. He speaks a majority of the lines that reference whiteness or fairness and often appears to be doing so in an effort to please Prospero. In his promise to keep Miranda’s virginity intact, for example, he voices a hope for “fair issue”, promising, among other things, that “the murkiest den” (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.25) would not be enough to tempt him to lust and assuring Prospero that “the white cold virgin snow upon my heart/Abates the ardour of my liver” (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.55-6). His description of his future children as “fair” may well assuage Prospero’s fears of Black or mixed offspring that would have resulted from Miranda’s sexual contact with Caliban. Similarly, Ferdinand’s specific mention of a murky den—a dark place, probably very like the one in which Caliban resides—ties the notion of such specifically dark—or black—places to lustful, sinful behavior. Although Ferdinand has had no stage contact with Caliban at this point in The Tempest, Miranda likely told him of her father’s struggles with Caliban, presumably to provide Ferdinand more ways to ingratiate himself with Prospero. Thus, Ferdinand refers to the “snow” that abates his lust not only as virginal but as specifically white. Indeed, it is “white”, rather than the more obvious “cold”, that Ferdinand chooses as the first word to describe the snow and which appears as a stressed syllable in the regular iambic pentameter of the line. While Ferdinand may (correctly) imagine that any direct reference to Caliban might enrage Prospero rather than win him over, Ferdinand is savvy enough to subtly highlight his racial difference from Caliban in his promises to respect Miranda’s purity. As suggested above, for Prospero, this purity is likely racial as well as sexual.

5. The Tempest, the Masque, and Colonialism

As does The Tempest, Blackness opens on what will become one of the most enduring symbols of British colonialism and investment in the slave trade—“a vast sea” (Jonson 2007, 78). Mary Floyd-Wilson indeed argues that the “stage action corresponding to the real point” of Blackness is not the whitening of Niger’s daughters’ skin, but “the flowing movement of water” (Floyd-Wilson 1998, p. 202). For Floyd-Wilson, Jonson’s depiction of the River Niger meeting Oceanus, “king of floods” (Jonson 2007, 107), is a meditation on purity, as Niger insists that he will be able to maintain the integrity of his waters as they flow into the sea. His confidence in the distinguishability of his waters from those of the western coast anticipates his insistence on the superiority of blackness which “no cares, no age can change” (Jonson 2007, 137). Oceanus seems unconvinced by this argument and comments on the strangeness of Niger’s presence so far removed from his native Africa: “how comes it, lovely son, /That thou … /Art seen to fall into the extremist west/Of me … /And in mine empire’s heart” (Jonson 2007, 104–8)? Oceanus’ naming of his territory, and, in particular, the part of his territory that borders Albion—the land Niger and his daughters so eagerly seek—frames the masque as a whole in the language of colonial conquest.

Crucially, rather than stage a British encroachment into African territory, this moment depicts Niger entering willingly into the space of the colonizer—which Oceanus explicitly names an empire—to seek aid, thereby placing Niger immediately into a subservient position regardless of his conviction that he will be able to hold onto his unique African identity in Albion. Bernadette Andrea argues that the masque as a whole reveals the court’s “complicity with an emerging institutional racism as England’s increasing investment in the trans-Atlantic slave trade underwrote its imperialist expansion into the Americas” (Andrea 1999, p. 247). Niger’s appearance on England’s shores exemplifies Andrea’s notion of emerging institutional racism. By journeying to England, Niger risks his sense of selfhood and undermines his belief in the beauty of his daughters’ blackness. Not only have Niger’s daughters been convinced by white poets of the superiority of whiteness, they are eager to position themselves as supplicants to what the courtly audience knew to be the white ruler of England.

Guided by a vision of the goddess Ethiopia, Niger’s daughters have urged him to take them to a land ruled by a “bright Sol …[who], 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 2007, 180–84). While the lines do refer to the physical sun—whose power here is to cleanse rather than to blacken, as it is in the daughters’ native Africa—they also position James, the “greater light”, as the sun king. Russell West argues that Jonson’s repeated solar imagery casts the king as the “prime motor and cause” of both the spectacle of the masque and the court in which it was staged (West 2015, p. 66). West argues that James himself curated a symbolic understanding of his power—a force he understood to be so potent as to influence the weather. On his journey from Scotland to ascend the English throne, for example, he explained a surprise rainstorm as “a good omen, the sun before the rain represented his happy departure, the downpour the grief of Scotland, and the succeeding fair weather the joy of England at his approach” (West 2015, p. 66). Similarly, Jonson’s Ethiopia solidifies the sun/James connection, assuring Niger that England is “ruled by a sun, that to this height doth grace it: /Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force/To blanch an Ethiope” (Jonson 2007, 239–41). Additionally, Ethiopia’s earlier lines contain one of the first references to the notion that “the sun never sets (or here, never rises or sets) on the British Empire”. In both lines, she positions James as triumphant over nature itself—ruler of a land so vast that it defies the setting sun and powerful enough to reverse the effects of that sun should he so choose. As Hardin Aasand notes, James’ “beams perform a whitening action, removing the scorching intemperateness of its other persona” (Aasand 1992, p. 282).

Further, the appearance of Anna and her courtiers as the Black daughters of Niger enacts performative colonialism. The courtiers’ white bodies have colonized the blackness of their characters. As Andrea argues, even as Anna’s agency in creating the masque might momentarily subvert court patriarchy, this “subversion finally depends on an appropriation, since it is white (European) women in blackface, not black (African) women as such, who are celebrated in the masque. This contradiction fundamentally … plac[es] her resistance within the confines of incipient British imperialism and the emerging model of racial slavery to which it is inextricably connected” (Andrea 1999, p. 248). These are white women applying Black makeup solely to perform a desire to be whitened. This version of blackness—one constructed, contained, and performed by whiteness—is a blackness that is easy to control and mold. Niger’s description of the beauty of his Black daughters is thus always and already undermined by the audience’s knowledge that this is a blackness created by and for whiteness. Similarly, the Africa of the masque is a space created by white artists specifically as subservient and in need of the healing intervention of the white English court.

Shakespeare repeats this racialized colonial dynamic in The Tempest, as Caliban seems both to desire the “improvements” the encroaching European force can offer him, as do Niger’s daughters, and to resent his resultant feelings of inferiority, as does Niger himself. As Roland Greene argues, The Tempest is “a play of encounters” (Greene 2000, p. 138). Read through a colonial lens, these encounters privilege Prospero as the gatekeeper of knowledge he himself deems essential. If we are to believe Miranda’s claim that before her father’s tutelage Caliban could only “gabble” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.357), it is presumably Prospero who has taught Caliban English (or Italian). Caliban himself acknowledges that Prospero was the one who “taught [him] language” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.364). He describes his initial years with Prospero as a time of learning:

When thou camest first,

Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me

Water with berries in’t, and teach me how

To name the bigger light, and how the less,

That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee

(Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.333-7).

Caliban implies that his love for Prospero was tied both to physical affection and to the knowledge that Prospero imparted. Given that Caliban has enough lived experience of the environment to show Prospero “all the qualities o’ the isle” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.338), however, his need for English language is a need both created and weaponized by Prospero. As colonizers, Prospero and Miranda devalue Caliban’s lived experience of the island in favor of their own western epistemology, constructing pre-language Caliban as “a thing most brutish” (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.358). This dynamic is directly reminiscent of Niger’s description of his daughters, who—as the “first form’d dames of earth”—did not think of their blackness as inferior until they were taught to do so by the “lovesick” poets of the west. They are then conditioned to desire and welcome the cleansing light of the colonizing James, just as Prospero expects Caliban to do.

Further, Caliban’s description of his early lessons suggests a connection between Prospero and Jonson’s version of James as colonizers. Just as James is the “greater light” whom Niger’s daughters seek, Prospero teaches Caliban to name “the bigger light”. This lesson about the English names of the sun and moon is indeed the only aspect of his childhood work with Prospero that he specifically names, hinting that Shakespeare may have been making a purposeful connection to James’ identification with the sun. Even more strikingly, a scene after the masque that Prospero creates for Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero claims that through his magic he has “bedimm’d the noontide sun” (Shakespeare 1999, 5.1.41-2). Although the line comes as Prospero prepares to abjure his magic, he is here claiming a control over the sun that seems to echo James’ power in Blackness to reverse the sun’s blackening effects and to “blanch an Ethiope”. Both Jonson and Shakespeare ascribe their respective rulers the power to triumph over nature and specifically to control the brightness of the sun or the material effects of that brightness.

Both Blackness and The Tempest stage moments of colonial encounter in which race plays a crucial role in defining power relations and narrative structure. The connection between developing notions of racial difference and of colonial identity were indeed related, although not one and the same, for the early moderns. As Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin argue, “ideologies of colour were made more rigid as well as more powerful by colonialism, but there were pre-histories in place here too. Prejudice against blacks certainly predated colonial contact, although the specific forms and effects of that prejudice were transformed by colonial relations” (Loomba and Orkin 1998, p. 14). The Tempest and Blackness provide similar glimpses into these transformations and the resulting further subjugation of Black bodies in early modern England.

6. Conclusions

Although we can never be certain of Shakespeare’s engagement with The Masque of Blackness, the complex nature of blackness in the masque finds a near direct echo in Shakespeare’s later play. The conflicted nature of Niger’s and Caliban’s celebrations of their blackness in the face of white colonizing forces—seen and unseen, staged and unstaged—suggests a conversation about racial difference and power flowing under the surface of the two works. Butler suggests that even though Jonson and Shakespeare wrote with starkly different values and levels of participation in court culture, early modern stages benefited from “a cross-pollination, an ongoing dialogue about the nature and function of festivity and of dramatic art in general, in which both writers were engaged” (Butler 2019, p. 151). Both The Tempest and The Masque of Blackness contribute, with varying degrees of influence, to early modern conversations about identity and difference. Both pieces allow their audiences space to ruminate on the expanding British empire and the questions raised by contact with non-white populations. The complex and nuanced questions the plays raise, mediated in both instances by the magic and opulent spectacle of court masques, open space in later centuries for examinations of privilege, of representation, and of artistic responsibility.

Twenty-first century audiences do not have access to productions of The Masque of Blackness for numerous thematic and material reasons. I argue, however, that The Tempest engages with the same tropes and structural inequities that the masque did, calling into question its continued place on professional or academic stages, particularly post-2020. Many theaters that chose to produce the play seemed to do so with an eye toward the play’s representations of forgiveness and renewal. In a director’s note for his 2021 production of The Tempest at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for example, director Nicholas C. Avila wrote “we have endured a Tempestuous time and, in our separation, we have missed each other and the stories that bring people into the same room that would otherwise not be. Now that the sun has begun to peek through the clouds of the storm, it is time to take the stories off of the shelf and make them plays again as they were meant to be” (Avila 2022). While these themes—as well as examinations of loneliness, isolation, and exile—may have seemed familiar to audiences and creatives post-lockdown, the narrative of Caliban’s subjugation feels antiquated in a post-lockdown society, particularly one actively shaped by BLM and WSYWAT. After all, as outspoken as Caliban might be about his agency and humanity, in the end, he admits defeat and affirms his subservience to Prospero. As written, the text promotes a blindness to racial inequity which echoes the rhetoric of many on the American political right. The early modern racial dynamics of the play, perhaps grounded in the power structures and politics of court masquing, are insufficient to contain the discourses of race in 2020 and beyond.

Although it is outside the scope of this paper to examine post-2020 productions in detail, there were a small number that worked to overturn the inherent anti-blackness of the play.8 Director Cameron Knight’s 2022 Utah Shakespeare Festival production, for example, was a complete and celebratory reversal of its racial dynamics. In Knight’s production, Prospero was a powerful Black woman played by Jasmine Bracy. Her relationships with Miranda (also Black, played by Amara Webb) and Ariel (played by Sophia K. Metcalf) were loving ones and her powers seemed to spring largely from the island, which itself was replete with African imagery. There were also strong visual ties between Bracey and projected images of a clearly Black Sycorax, suggesting a current of Black femininity that undergirded the magic of the play. Similarly, in his 2021 Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival Tempest, director Ryan Quinn also featured a mostly BIPOC cast. Quinn described the production in his director’s note as staging “the fight to account for the stories of the past that determine the future each character believes they are owed” (Quinn 2022), and linked his work on the play to his hopes for his own daughter’s future. By framing The Tempest as a space for the hope that comes from naming and redressing oppression, Quinn worked to subvert the harm inherent in the original text. These productions offer examples of reparative work done both to and by The Tempest, just as they stand as reminders of the harm inherent in Shakespeare’s original text. Following Knight and Quinn, perhaps by examining the roots of the blackness of The Tempest, we can find ways to subvert, challenge, and upend it.