Join the Shakespeare Centre London for our first London Shakespeare Seminar of the year. Hosted online, this event will be Chaired by Dr Hanh Bui and will feature two exciting new papers by Dr Murat Öğütcü and Dr Andrea Stevens.

About the speakers

Dr Murat Öğütcü

Jonson’s Masque of Blackness: Materializing Environmental Injustice

Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605) as a product of court culture has been traditionally analysed as a literary artefact that reflects Stuart absolutism, the expansion of intercontinental trade and the early signs of imperialism. Reducing the play as a pro- or anti-colonialist work, however, fails to produce a holistic analysis of the shallow ecology the masque seems to propose. James I occupied the Chair of State and was the central figure/audience in the performance of the masque, which foregrounds him as a dematerialized anthropocentric figure who subjugates others who are different from his gender, age, race, and species. In the masque, James I’s ability to cure “the rude defects of every creature” is shown to be achieved through the affirmative acts of staged consent and lack of resistance. Thus, the masque posits a problematic stance towards environmental justice as a whole. The intra-action of discourse and matter in the multi-visual staging of the masque in the court space is materialized through early modern assumptions about climate effects, the use of imported (in)organic goods for costumes and props, and the personifications of water resources for the benefit and glorification of the human race. Therefore, this paper analyses Jonson’s Masque of Blackness as a materialization of environmental injustice in Early Modern England.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Murat Öğütcü is currently working at Adıyaman University, Türkiye. He is the General Editor of the “Turkish Shakespeares” Project which aims to introduce Turkish Shakespeare texts, productions and research to an international audience. He is a researcher at the AHRC-funded “Medieval and Early Modern Orients” Project that concentrates on encounters between England and the Islamic Worlds. He is a regional editor of the Global Shakespeares Project and the World Shakespeare Bibliography. He co-edited Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama (Bloomsbury, 2023). He has written book chapters and articles on early modern studies, Shakespeare, and cultural studies.

Dr Andrea Stevens

‘They need not a foyle to set them off’: Racial Masquerade and the ‘Retconning’ of The Spanish Match in Walter Montagu’s The Sheperd’s Paradise (1633)

Offering a revised history of the early English actress, this talk explores the centrality of racial masquerade to the personal mythology of Queen Henrietta Maria, queen consort to England’s King Charles I. I am speaking of the theatrical device of the ‘Maid-as-Moor’, or the white woman who temporarily disguises herself as an African only to be revealed as white in the course of the masque or play; by the 1630s, it was more common to see ‘blackness’ performed as a disguise rather than as a static identity (as for example in earlier plays such as Othello). This fact of theater history has not been sufficiently explored or indeed tied to the conservative feminocentric politics of Queen Henrietta Maria. One key example: the first play written for and performed by English actresses is Walter Montagu’s 1633 pastoral romance The Shepherd’s Paradise, commissioned by the queen herself and centrally featuring a black-face disguise plot. Here, the device of the ‘Maid-as-Moor’ is used as part of a complex plot intended, among other interventions, to mythologise the marriage of Henrietta Maria to Charles by rewriting the history of Charles’s earlier courtship of the Spanish Infanta. My talk thus reveals the intersection of the history of the early English actress with the history of black-face performance on English stages.

Andrea Stevens is Associate Professor of English, Theatre, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches and publishes in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She is the author of Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama (2013) and her edition of William Heminge's 1639 tragedy The Fatal Contract -- the first modernized edition of this play-text -- can be found in the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020). Her performance-as-research includes dramaturgy and the adaptation of Shakespeare and early modern drama for contemporary performance, most recently Titus Andronicus (fall 2019). Her current research includes a monograph titled Racial Masquerade and the Early English Actress 1600 – 1800 and a further book-length study of the intersection of performance and poetics titled The Unearned Authority of Rhyme.

This event is online. Please reserve a ticket on the event page to receive a link.