Staging the volatile gender politics of the Henrician era in his last play, The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight (1612/13), William Shakespeare, with his collaborator John Fletcher, abridges a century of “masques of blackness” for a Jacobean court weighing its investments in transatlantic expansionism.2 During this transitional period—variously described as “para-colonial” and “proto-orientalist”—the English oscillated between anxieties about their status as “sluggish” imperialists, which term Richard Hakluyt coined at the end of the sixteenth century (1582: sig.*2), and as supplicants to the more powerful empires of “the Greater Western World,” including the Ottomans.3 This tension imbues the play from its opening scene, which focuses on the Field of Cloth of Gold (Le Camp du Drap d’Or).4 This political spectacle, staged in 1520, celebrated the détente between Henry VIII and the French king, Francis I, who would go on to forge an alliance with the Ottomans in the mid-1530s (as Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, would do 50 years later).5 The Field of Cloth of Gold was nevertheless a diplomatic failure, yielding little more than monarchical display.6
As I shall argue here, the French imperial display in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, having “[m]ade Britain India” (1.1.21), casts the English as a potential colonizing power and as a potential colonial “other.”7 Britain could join in the race for imperial spoils or it could become the spoils. Hence, it constantly threatens to appear foreign to itself. Reinforcing this overdetermined spectacle, the play continues with a masque showcasing “[a] noble troop of strangers” (1.4.54), coded as Turks and Moors by analogy with similar entertainments in which the historical Henry VIII appeared (Streitberger 1994: 67–9).8 These masques of blackness are charged with multivalent and troubling representations of three queens—Katherine of Aragon (former), Anne Boleyn (current), and Elizabeth (future)—all of whom are represented as blackened by their fall from patriarchal dynastic imperatives.9 These queens, that is, figure “internalized outsideness” through the discourses of blackness the play persistently associates with femininity.10 Whether native born (Elizabeth and Anne, despite her French manners) or immigrant (Katherine), these female characters become the primary vehicles for the foreignness that inheres in the oscillation between center and margin that drives the play. By focusing on these queens, this chapter thus links the estrangement of the “marginal English” from the global imperial projects of the sixteenth century to the instantiation of this strangeness in the inevitably “fallen” women surrounding Henry VIII (Floyd-Wilson 2003: 1–19).
As J. J. Scarisbrick details in his authoritative biography of Henry VIII, Western European politics in this period involved shifting and often duplicitous alliances between the two great powers of France, led by Francis I, and Spain, with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the helm. Although England could not match these colossi, it sought “to act as a third party who would be prepared to upset that balance” of power (1968: 81).11 The Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificent also figured into this diplomatic calculus, with France actively seeking an alliance with Christendom’s purported Islamic “other.” Ostensibly, the Field of Cloth of Gold was meant to advance a universal peace within Western Christendom to make way for a new crusade against the Turks, who having recently conquered Syria, the Hijaz, and Egypt were turning their forces toward Central Europe (Scarisbrick 1968: 67–96). Yet, even an ardent advocate of a unified Christian front such as Erasmus realized “this talk of peace was but a façade” (Anglo 1997: 137). Henry VIII’s surreptitious conference with Charles V in Dover while on his way to meet Francis I at Calais reinforced this hypocrisy. As Joycelyne G. Russell concludes her meticulous history of The Field of Cloth of Gold, “It would probably be fair to suggest that the intention of this ‘memorable meeting’ was to deceive. It was to embody and set forth, in most sumptuous and dramatic guise, an Anglo-French understanding which hardly existed” (1969: 182). Six weeks of masques, banquets, tournaments, and other chivalric displays accordingly ended in a stalemate.
In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, we hear about this spectacle—which a contemporary described as “superior to ‘les miracles des piramides egiptiennes et les amphiteatres romains’” (the miracles of the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman amphitheaters)—rather than see it (Anglo 1997: 139; Archer 2001: 23–62). The Duke of Norfolk’s report in the play, which critics have compared to Enobarbus’s paean to Cleopatra’s progress on the River Cydnus (2.2.196–245) in Shakespeare’s earlier production, Antony and Cleopatra (1606/7), makes similar proto-orientalist and imperialist references (Richmond 1969: 339; 1979: 13). As Norfolk effuses, “Today the French, / All clinquant all in gold, like heathen gods / Shone down the English; and tomorrow they / Made Britain India” (1.1.18–21). A number of critics have discussed this passage in terms of the politics of spectacle; however, no one has dwelt on the overdetermined discourses of empire that inform it.12 These discourses, to reiterate, estrange Britain as potential colonizer and as potentially colonized, making it foreign to itself. Establishing the historical context for English imperialist aspirations up to the late sixteenth century, David Loades in his biography of Elizabeth I states that the queen
did not share John Dee’s vision of a British empire, but she was impressed by it. … Good relations with the [Ottoman] sultan, and with the tsar of all the Russias, to say nothing of Drake’s circumnavigation of the world, spelled out a global ambition which the queen herself had neither the time nor the resources to realize. (2003: 311)13
In other words, sixteenth-century England was not a global imperialist power, even though Henry VIII and Elizabeth I sought to promote the realm as a counterweight to Spanish, French, and even Ottoman designs. Rather, it was “the reign of James that saw the effective beginnings of the British Empire” (Andrews 1984: 13), reminding us that Shakespeare is recasting this “para-colonial” and “proto-orientalist” history for a newly expansionist, albeit still tentative imperial era.14
In Shakespeare’s depiction of the Field of Cloth of Gold, then, Henry VIII and his courtiers participate in displays that anachronistically align them with the global imperialist project to which the English remained belated throughout the sixteenth century. Typical glosses of Norfolk’s lines include, from The Norton Shakespeare, “the English made Britain look as (fabulously) rich as India or the West Indies” (Greenblatt 1997: 3122n8).15 Yet, an equally valid reading suggests that the English are threatened by the “heathen” French who sought to turn Britain into fiefdom-cum-colony through dynastic imperialism.16 This threat becomes more pronounced when we consider most western Europeans deemed the French “heathens” for their alliance with the Ottoman Turks.17 According to Sydney Anglo in his landmark study of Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy, “[Cardinal] Wolsey summed up the official position when he remarked that the real Turk was he with whom they were occupied, that is the King of France, and that he knew no other Turk” (1997: 185).18 The historical Catherine of Aragon likewise remarked, “[t]he King of France is the greatest Turk” (Fraser 1994: 97).19 Shakespeare’s play underscores this analogy when detailing the effect of French cultural imperialism on English courtiers: “Their clothes are after such a pagan cut to’t / That sure they’ve worn out Christendom” (1.3.14–15).20 “India,” overdetermined in early modern discourses of empire as “East” and “West,” thus links England to the promise of imperial spoils even as it suggests its potential spoiling as the empire (be)comes home. On the one hand, the play’s Tudoresque aristocrats’ critique of the excesses that made and marred the Field of Cloth of Gold points toward the mercantile empire James I was attempting to establish at the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, it raises the haunting memory of England’s potential absorption by the imperial powers of Europe, including the Ottomans, during the sixteenth century. As we shall see, the play projects this threat onto the queens associated with Henry VIII’s reign, including his eventual heir, Elizabeth, by blackening them as inevitably “fallen” women. They are thus estranged from the patriarchal succession upon which Henry VIII’s epochal declaration— “England is an empire”—depended (Bray 2004: 78; Scarisbrick 1968: 267–8).21
The historical Henry VIII’s reign was inaugurated with a 1510 entertainment in which the king and the Earl of Essex appeared dressed “after Turkey fashion,” their male attendants with faces blackened “like Moreskoes” and the court ladies with “their heades rouled in pleasauntes and typpers like the Egipcians, enbroudered with gold. Their faces, neckes, armes and handes, covered with fyne plesaunce blacke … so that the same ladies semed to be nigrost or blacke Mores” (Hall 1904: 15, 17).22 This disguising arguably constitutes the first “masque of blackness” for the English court, though similar masques were staged in Scotland during the same period.23 It presents an array of proto-orientalist and imperialist signifiers with its “Turkish” clothing, its “Egyptian” headgear, and its participants’ blackened faces. Once again, these signifiers could cut two ways, as expressed in the papal nuncio Francesco Chieregato’s assessment: “In short, the wealth and civilization of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such” (Anglo 1997: 177). The English of Henry VIII’s era, that is, had to prove they were not barbarians or constitutive outsiders (Smith 2009: 16–18; Floyd-Wilson 2003: 49–60). Yet, even though Anglo maintains early Tudor representation of Turks and Moors in masques and entertainments were “without malice” (1997: 177), subsequent critics have stressed the connection of these Henrician displays to the more explicit imbrication of race, gender, and empire in Jacobean plays and masques.
Tracing the genealogy of “the discourses of religious and racial difference in the Renaissance empires” from the Ottomans through the Spanish to the English, Margaret Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan observe,
[b]lack skin, despite the symbolic linkage of black with death and evil, carried few generalized negative connotations for a medieval Europe with little contact with blacks [i.e., sub-Saharan Africans]. As the representation of one of the Magi as black and the legend of Prester John demonstrate, blackness was exotic and could be coded positively. (2007: 247–69)24
Still, as Kim F. Hall underscores in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, discourses of blackness in England from the sixteenth through the early seventeenth century became “increasingly infused with concerns over skin color, economics, and gender politics” (1995: 2). As Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton conclude, these “contradictory elements … do not indicate that race is ‘not yet formed’ … but that it is always an amalgam of contradictory, unstable, and evolving ideas” (2007: 10). This amalgam of ideas and issues attached to “blackness” is rehearsed in Shakespeare’s play through the falls of the courtiers Buckingham and Wolsey and, more surprisingly, through the trials of the saintly Queen Katherine.25 Only subsequently does it become explicit with the overtly sexualized Anne Boleyn, Katherine’s erstwhile replacement. Perhaps just as surprisingly, it persists in the description of the newborn Elizabeth, who will become England’s celebrated Virgin Queen.
From the first scene of the play, this increasingly racialized discourse characterizes the fallen courtier, the Duke of Buckingham, who declares when arrested at Wolsey’s behest, “It will help me nothing / To plead mine innocence, for that dye is on me / Which makes my whit’st part black” (1.1.207–9). Although “blackness” in these lines primarily stands as a metonym for moral decay, it points toward the accumulating racialized connotations in the play, which are vehiculated through phallocentric representations of female sexuality. When Henry VIII comments on the Duke of Buckingham’s case, he builds on these connotations:
Yet see,
When these so noble benefits shall prove
Not well disposed, the mind growing once corrupt,
They turn to vicious forms ten times more ugly
Than ever they were fair. This man so complete,
Who was enrolled ’mongst wonders—and when we
Almost with ravished list’ning could not find
His hour of speech a minute—he, my lady,
Hath into monstrous habits put the graces
That once were his, and is become as black
As if besmeared in hell. (1.2.115–25)
Blackness, then, is linked to ugliness, monstrosity, and damnation, with “fair” whiteness set as the positive foil (Andrea 1999: 261).
Yet, Henry’s ruminations are also significant in that they link blackness with femininity, both proper and improper, an imbrication central to the play’s representation of all its queens. Arguing against the traditional interpretation of Shakespeare’s Katherine as the iconic “good woman,” modern feminists have stressed that, even though Henry himself approves of Katherine as chaste and obedient, she is by no means silent (Thorne 2010: 105–24).26 She therefore becomes a new type of icon boldly asserting her regal female agency. Nonetheless, as we saw in the passage above, Henry rebukes her for defending the Duke of Buckingham’s honor against Wolsey’s aspersions, just as she had previously ranked herself against Wolsey’s economic exploitation of the common people.27 As the play continues, her outspoken interventions into those political and legal spheres reserved for men reveal how even a “good woman” could be threatened with a “blackened” reputation.
During her trial at Blackfriars, for instance, Katherine expresses this contradiction by pleading that she is “a poor woman, and a stranger” (2.4.13–14; cf. 2.3.17) and asserting that she is daughter of the “King of Spain” (2.4.46).28 Similarly, when after the trial Wolsey accosts her in her chamber using Latin, she positions herself as “a housewife” to dissociate herself from this “strange tongue,” which has been labeled the “‘father’ tongue” of Renaissance humanism (3.1.24, 44). However, it is clear she understands it.29 These contradictions culminate in Katherine’s last-ditch defense of her “honor,” which in the early modern period depended on a woman’s reputation for chastity. As the scene in her chamber continues, Katherine finds herself interpellated or hailed into the subject position of a “blackened” woman despite her protestations. Wolsey, her antagonist, insinuates as much when he says, “We come not by the way of accusation, / To taint that honour every good tongue blesses, / Nor to betray you any way to sorrow” (3.1.53–5).30 To his suggestion that she may be “tainted,” she retorts that she was “[n]ever yet branded with suspicion” (3.1.127). Yet, her self-defense buttresses Wolsey’s design to “blacken” her reputation by reinforcing his phallocentric terms for their confrontation.31
Ironically, this conflation of femininity and blackness also marks the moment when Wolsey falls from the king’s favor, which reinforces the broad reach of this cultural logic. Henry’s envoy, the Earl of Surrey, presages his indictment with the taunt, “I’ll startle you / Worse than the sacring-bell when the brown wench / Lay kissing in your arms, lord Cardinal” (3.2.295–7). The Norton Shakespeare, like most other editions, glosses “brown” primarily in terms of class; however, it also stresses the misogyny encoded in the slur: “Surrey imagines Wolsey surprised with a country girl (‘brown’ because tanned or dirty from working, or perhaps ugly or promiscuous) when he should have been at mass” (1997: 3166n5).32 R. A. Foakes in his edition likewise highlights this conflation when he glosses “brown wench” as “probably implying a slut, or an ill-favored girl” (1964: 116). But he also cites a passage that supports Kim Hall’s analysis of “economies of race and gender in early modern England” (1995), despite the lack of critical attention to this facet: “(Lydia) so mote I thee thou art not faire, / A plaine brownetta when thou art at best” (Foakes 1964: 116). A “brownetta,” or brunette, as the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, could signify a “woman with a dark complexion,” which in this citation is positioned as not “faire” in the multivalent sense of physical beauty, feminine propriety, moral rectitude, and whiteness.33
Katherine’s concern with her honor in Shakespeare’s play persists until the moment of her death, when she is ambivalently described as simultaneously “pale” (4.2.98) and “of an earthy colour” (4.2.99).34 The possibility that her corpse, like her reputation, will be blackened accordingly impels her to deliver detailed instructions about her burial:
When I am dead, good wench,
Let me be used with honour. Strew me over
With maiden flowers, that all the world may know
I was a chaste wife to my grave. (4.2.168–71)35
The historical Catherine of Aragon was not so honored, with Henry VIII ignoring her final bequests (Fraser 1994: 230–31).36 Rather, Shakespeare’s Katherine, contra those critics who elaborate her as either a traditional or a feminist icon, exemplifies how “blackness” as an overdetermined signifier colors all the females in the play. Even though she is an “immigrant,” then, she becomes the prototype for the foreignness that marks the native-born queens, Anne and Elizabeth.
In critical discussions of the queens in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn has long taken center stage, despite Katherine’s significance as the female character who speaks the most lines and Elizabeth’s importance as the prophesied queen who will consolidate England as a prospective empire. Anne’s role in Shakespeare’s play, by contrast to the historical record, remains primarily spectacular.37 While she speaks far less than Katherine, she is showcased in most of the banquets, masques, and processions that characterized the Renaissance theatricalization of politics. Anne first appears as one of the ladies embellishing Cardinal Wolsey’s much-touted banquet. Versus the indictment of the Cardinal’s conspicuous consumption, registered most prominently by the Duke of Buckingham and Queen Katherine at the beginning of the play, the Lord Chamberlain enthuses, “This night he makes a supper, and a great one, / To many lords and ladies. There will be / The beauty of this kingdom, I’ll assure you” (1.3.52–4). Portentously, the ladies are grouped with the other consumables at the banquet, just as their beauty, or “fairness,” will be linked to discourses of “blackness” in a nexus suggesting their estrangement as memorialized in the mnemonic “divorced, beheaded, survived.”38
The historical Cardinal Wolsey was known for his lavish banquets, one of which was described by the Venetian ambassador, Sebastian Giustinian, as surpassing those “either by Cleopatra or Caligula; the whole banqueting hall being so decorated with huge vases of gold and silver, that I fancied myself in the tower of Chosroes, where that monarch caused divine honours to be paid him” (Anglo 1997: 130). Although this banquet predates Anne Boleyn’s rise to the throne by eight years, it epitomizes the excess observers associated with the cardinal’s household, which was frequently described in orientalist terms. Evoking this association, the banquet Shakespeare stages segues into a masque of exotic strangers, which Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter equate with the entertainments commencing Henry VIII’s reign (2002: 166–7). In Shakespeare’s play, dual anachronisms situating Anne within the nexus of blackness and femininity I have proposed implicates all of the play’s queens (former, current, and future), including the seemingly saintly Katherine and the apparently innocent Elizabeth. Anne’s “Frenchness,” associated with the Turks, reinforces this feminization of the foreign within.
The banquet scene is framed by the sexual double entendres of the randy Lord Sands, who boasts, “had the Cardinal / But half my lay thoughts in him, some of these / Should find a running banquet, ere they rested” (1.4.10–12). “A running banquet,” as the Norton editors expand, shifts from “light refreshments” to “furtive, stolen pleasures.” I add that “lay thoughts” exceeds the gloss, “secular,” to encompass illicit sexual connotations (Greenblatt 1997: 3135). This sexualized bantering between men continues until the ladies are invited to sit, with Lord Sands sandwiched between Anne and another lady. As this seating arrangement deliberately interrupts the ladies’ solidarity, the now isolated Anne is increasingly interpellated into the patriarchal dichotomy “virgin/whore.” This is a designation Lord Sands seals with a kiss (Greenblatt 1997: 3136), which presages Henry VIII’s subsequent embrace of Anne.
Interestingly, this sexually charged scene contains the most frequent use of the term “fair,” which oscillated with “black” as an index of “the appearance or moral states of women” (Hall 1995: 9). As becomes clear from the sheer excess of this term in relation to the increasingly sexualized ladies, the dichotomy between “fair” and “black” cannot but implode. These “fair ones” (1.4.14) find themselves anatomized into the “fair cheeks” (1.4.45) and other parts that constitute the Petrarchan blazon. As such, their “fairness” becomes an incitement for illicit sexual couplings, culminating in Henry’s seduction of Anne. Anne, whom Henry declares has “[t]he fairest hand I ever touched” (1.4.76), confirms the collapse of the dichotomy “fair/black” when she matches Lord Sands’s smutty comments with her own knowing reference to his phallus as a titillating absent presence (1.4.48). Lord Sands’s reference to the color rising in the ladies’ cheeks—“[t]he red wine first must rise / In their fair cheeks, my lord, then we shall have ’em / Talk us to silence” (1.4.44–6)—thus sets up Anne as the antithesis to the patriarchal mores that defined the proper woman as “chaste, silent and obedient” (Hull 1982). Yet, it also shows how “fair” was cast in an ambivalent, and not simply an opposing, relationship to “blackness.”
The masque of “[a] noble troop of strangers” (1.4.54) following this repartée reinforces the “blackening” of Anne. The stage directions for the masque specify King Henry and his men entering “as masquers habited like shepherds” (Greenblatt 1997: 3137). Their audience additionally learns that “they speak no English” (1.4.66), a provincial language in the period (Mattingly 1955: 186; Smith 2009: 92–9). Rather, they converse in French, an international language. As Twycross and Carpenter suggest, such courtly masquers strive for an “exotic familiarity,” with the historical precedent for Shakespeare’s masque—the aforementioned entertainment that inaugurated Henry VIII’s reign in 1510—featuring the king and the Earl of Essex, “appareled after Turkey fasshion, in long robes of Bawdkin, powdered with gold, hattes on their heddes of Crimosyn Velvet, with great rolles of Gold, girded with two swordes, called Cimiteries, hanging by greate bawderikes of gold” (2002: 15; Hall 1904: 15).39 The rest of Henry’s entourage consisted of ladies and gentlemen parading as blackamoors. While the masque in Shakespeare’s play does not literally replicate this historical performance, as the setting for Anne’s first encounter with the king it resonates with the racialized and sexualized discourses of blackness that inform her subsequent conversation with the Old Lady and her coronation procession.
This masque also resonates with the masque of strangers who appear “[l]ike Muscovites or Russians” (5.2.122) in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594/95). Kim Hall explicates the rhetoric of blackness and beauty in the earlier play, arguing that “[t]he ‘painted’ woman is threatening because her cosmetics reveal the ‘artifice’ of the politics of color and thereby explode the contest of contraries set up by male discourse.” As for the “‘blackamoors with music’ (5.2)” who accompany these masquers, Hall emphasizes “their blackness was integral to their performance” (1995: 91, 13). John Michael Archer adds that the early modern English deemed Russians slaves and associated them with blackness. Situating Love’s Labour’s Lost within the broader performance tradition encompassing masques, Archer also adduces “the ‘Ne-gro-Tartars’ of the Gray’s Inn Revels of Christmas 1594–95” and “a device of 1510 in which two lords appeared at Henry VIII’s court in Muscovite costume along with two other lords and six ladies dressed as ‘Nigers, or blacke Mores.’” The play accordingly represents its heroine “Rosaline’s black beauty” as “not so much black as a mixture of shades: ‘Of all complexions the cull’d sovereignty / Do meet, as at a fair, in her fair cheek’ (4.3.231–2).” In Archer’s words, “Rosaline is ‘fair’ in that like a fair she unites contrasting principles for common profit” (2001: 122–4, 128–9). Shakespeare’s Tudoresque spectacles in Henry VIII similarly pun on the term “fair” to highlight the feminized consumer promoted by early English ideologies of empire. This connection comes to the fore during Anne’s coronation procession when a gentleman remarks, “Our King has all the Indies in his arms, / And more, and richer, when he strains that lady” (4.1.45–6).40
In the coronation scene (4.1), Anne remains completely silent and she does not appear again. However, in the last scene in which she speaks (2.3), she engages in an off-color conversation with an “Old Lady,” who is a unique addition to the play (Loughnane 2012: 120–21; Round 1997: 101–9). In this tête-à-tête, which critics have likened to the exchange between Desdemona and Emilia in act 4, scene 3, of The Tragedy of Othello (1603/4), Anne expresses her sympathy for the discarded Katherine (Merriam 2001: 235). This de casibus set piece culminates with her declaration, “By my troth and maidenhead, / I would not be a queen” (2.3.23–4). In a play alternatively titled, All Is True, such assertions of “troth” are immediately ironized (Wegemer 2002: 73–90), as with Henry VIII’s tendentious reflections on conscience (2.2.142–3). Furthermore, as the double entendres structuring the banquet scene suggest, Anne’s maidenhead remains an uncertain commodity. Hence, whereas Desdemona’s words with the worldly Emilia serves to highlight her virtue, Anne’s tête-à-tête with the Old Lady results in her condemnation as a hypocrite (2.3.24–6).
The continuing parallel with Desdemona and Emilia’s exchange is striking:
Old Lady |
Yes, troth and troth. You would not be a queen? |
Anne |
No, not for all the riches under heaven. |
Old Lady |
‘Tis strange. A threepence bowed would hire me, Old as I am, to queen it. (2.3.34–7) |
In a footnote, the Norton editors paraphrase these lines: “A bent (‘bowed’) and hence worthless coin would convince me to be a Queen. Sexual puns (‘queen’–‘quean,’ or whore; ‘bowed’–bawd) continue through the scene” (Greenblatt 1997: 3147n3; Fizer 1998: 281–95). “Yet,” as Walter Cohen observes, “Anne does become queen, without an explanation of her supposed change of heart but with a suggestive pun on ‘quean’ (whore) characteristic of the entire sexualized exchange and of Anne’s earlier banter” (1.4.46–9). He concludes, “The scene with the Old Lady, apparently invented by Shakespeare, thus sullies Anne before she becomes a purely ceremonial figure reduced to bearing royal children” (1997: 3116). Such a denigration of Anne—in the dual sense of “to blacken” and “to defame” (OED)— continues as the Old Lady slings one double entendre after another at her.
As Anne is named Marchioness of Pembroke by the Lord Chamberlain, an honor that signaled Henry’s official embrace, the Old Lady launches into a parable that clinches her assessment of Anne’s complicity in the “blackening” of her reputation: “There was a lady once—’tis an old story— / That would not be a queen, that she would not, / For all the mud in Egypt” (2.3.91–3).41 Despite Anne’s protests to the contrary, it is precisely this racialized and sexualized “mud” that sticks to her as she marries Henry, bears Elizabeth, and prepares for her execution on charges of incest, adultery, and treason. That she is likened to the riches of “the Indies” (4.1.45) during her coronation only strengthens this sense of her spoil(ing). Moreover, it is as a scandalously “[g]reat-bellied” woman that the visibly pregnant Anne becomes anointed queen of England, though this well-known historical fact is displaced in Shakespeare’s play onto the raucous common women who greet her procession (4.1.78). These “common” women, while they certainly connote fertility as critics have argued, primarily symbolize the chaotic female sexuality that confounds patriarchal control: “No man living / Could say ‘This is my wife’ there, all were woven / So strangely in one piece” (4.1.81–3).42 Ominously, Anne’s coronation feast is held at the fallen Wolsey’s former palace, renamed Whitehall (4.1.99). This was also the banqueting hall where The Masque of Blackness (1604/5), Anna of Denmark, James I’s queen’s first masque with Ben Jonson premiered (Barroll 2001: 36–116).43 As we shall see, even as Jacobean imperialistic terms become increasingly salient by the end of the play, this overdetermined locale underwrites not only Anne’s interpellation as a “blackened” woman but also her daughter Elizabeth’s.
Shakespeare’s “late play” draws to a close by juxtaposing Henry VIII’s assertion of his absolute power as he promises to defend Cranmer, the reformist Archbishop of Canterbury, against his council (5.1.88–158) with the Old Lady’s announcement of Anne’s safe delivery of Henry’s unlikely heir, Elizabeth (5.1.159–77) (Richmond 2004: 45–68). Despite the Protestant triumphalism of this ending, the same Old Lady who confirmed the “blackening” of Elizabeth’s mother’s reputation reemerges to announce Elizabeth’s birth. Using the double-edged language associated with the play’s fallen courtiers, the Old Lady responds to the king’s hope that the child is the promised boy with a “yes” that means “no”: “Ay, ay, my liege, / And of a lovely boy. The God of heaven / Both now and ever bless her! ’Tis a girl / Promises boys hereafter” (5.1.164–7). In the play, Henry does not voice his displeasure with this announcement; still, the Old Lady complains that his gratuity of “[a]n hundred marks” hardly sufficed for the occasion (5.1.172).44 When the king next appears, after first confirming his hold over his council, he remembers that he has “a fair young maid that yet wants baptism” (5.3.195) and reiterates, “I long / To have this young one made a Christian” (5.3.211–12). In this liminal space between birth and christening, then, Elizabeth remains little better than a “Turk” or a “Moor.” This potential “blackening” of the newborn Elizabeth is reinforced in the next scene, which does not feature the christening itself but focuses on the raucous commoners awaiting it. This scene further underscores the connection between masquing and the gendered discourse of blackness we have unpacked, as when the head porter instructs his men:
What should you do, but knock ’em down by th’ dozens? Is this Moorfields to muster in? Or have we some strange Indian with the great tool come to court, the women so besiege us? Bless me, what a fry of fornication is at door! On my Christian conscience, this one christening will beget a thousand. Here will be father, godfather, and all together. (5.3.30–36)45
The taint of incest that followed Elizabeth throughout her life is thus conflated with imperialist spoils and lower-class license.
Moreover, although Shakespeare’s play concludes by providentially elevating Elizabeth as England’s ideal sovereign, she is linked in the meanwhile with the (Black) Queen of Sheba or “Saba” (5.4.23).46 The allegorical figure of Sheba, as William Tate stresses, stood as the counterpart to James I’s preferred representation of himself as Solomon (1996: 561–85).47 Tate situates this Jacobean coupling in imperialistic terms by quoting Linda Levy Peck, who “has … summarized the Jacobean ideal of empire as combining union of the kingdoms at home with a developing English colonial enterprise. ‘In the Jacobean era,’ she says, ‘new attitudes toward empire were spelled out which shaped the colonization of Ireland and laid the basis for English expansion across the Atlantic.’” As Tate concludes, “James’s desire for a union of the British Isles and his desire for American gold express the same attitude, and as a matter of convenience I will refer to these complementary notions collectively as ‘imperial’” (1996: 564–5). The relationship of the imperialist Solomon to the supplicant Sheba formed the conceit of a masque presented before James and his brother-in-law, Christian IV of Denmark, in 1606. This masque featured a very drunken “lady” as the Queen of Sheba, who fell at the feet of a very drunken guest of honor.48 Following the pattern of other early Jacobean masques, the finale was a confused and messy affair, with “His Majesty [King Christian] … carried to an inner chamber and laid on a bed of state; which was not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen which had been bestowed on his garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other good matters” (Tate 1996: 565). This description echoes the porter’s speech in Henry VIII, with its grossly racialized and sexualized references, as much as it does the decorous Archbishop Cranmer’s celebration of Elizabeth as “Saba” (5.4.23). Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, after all, was a play staged with the Jacobean sovereign in mind, if not in sight (Rankin 2011: 357–62; Kurland 1987: 208–18).
The conclusion of Cranmer’s prophecy about Elizabeth thus points fittingly toward Jacobean ecumenism, with its imperialist thrust (Patterson 1997: 31–74; Bliss 1975: 1–25):
Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That were the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and, like a vine, grow to him.
Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations. (5.4.47–52)
Importantly, this passage does not simply elaborate Genesis 17: 4, “A father of many nations have I made thee”; it “also compliments James on the ‘new nation’ he has established in America, appropriately named Virginia after the ‘virgin’ Queen Elizabeth” (Greenblatt 1997: 3191n4). Nevertheless, rather than heralding a new era, it extends the racialized and gendered discourses of blackness that marked Henry VIII’s proto-imperialist court and its estranged queens. As James struggled with his own recalcitrant queen, who appeared with her ladies as “the daughters of Niger” in Jonson’s first production for the Jacobean court, he, too, would have to account for the internalized outsideness that shaped his reign’s masques of blackness.49
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1 This essay grew out of my contribution to the 2010 Shakespeare Association of America seminar on “Shakespeare: Immigrants and Aliens,” led by Ruben Espinosa and David Ruiter. I thank both for their gracious invitation to contribute to the SAA seminar, with my paper responding to questions about the alien or “stranger,” and to this collection, with its multifaceted approach to the topic of Shakespeare and immigration.
2 Unless otherwise indicated, I refer to the play in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (1997: 3120–93). This play, conventionally considered Shakespeare’s last, “was initially published in the First Folio of 1623 … under the title The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eight and today is generally know as Henry VIII”; however, “comments on early performances suggest that it was originally called All Is True” (ibid.: 3118). In the balance of this essay, I refer to this play as “Shakespeare’s” for concision rather than to weigh in on the authorship debate, which is not germane to my argument. For a recent assessment, see Brian Vickers (2002: 333–402).
3 On “para-colonial studies,” see John Michael Archer (2001: 17). On “proto-orientalism,” see Richmond Barbour (2003: 17). For the concept of “the Greater Western World,” see Daniel Goffman (2002: 8).
4 For historical details, see Joycelyne G. Russell (1969); for a cultural analysis, see Sydney Anglo (1997: 124–69).
5 On the sixteenth-century Franco-Ottoman alliance, see Garrett Mattingly (1955: 150–55) and Roger Bigelow Merriman (1944: 126–44). For Elizabeth I’s alliance with the Ottomans, see Bernadette Andrea (2007: 22–9).
6 In Mattingly’s classic formulation, “The meeting at the Field of Cloth of Gold of Henry VIII and Francis I was personal diplomacy at its most pompous and spectacular. The two interviews between Henry VIII and Charles V which bracketed and nullified the Anglo-French encounter were personal diplomacy at, perhaps, its most effective” (1955: 148).
7 Ian Smith makes a parallel argument for “Elizabethan classicism,” with “England as the colonized object” and incipient colonizer (2009: 117). See also Barbara Fuchs (2003: 76, 86). For a caution about projecting “teleological readings” of British colonialism back into more tentative eras, see Andrew Hadfield (1995/96: 1–22). Following Hadfield, Edmund Valentine Campos shows how Spanish imperial ambitions threatened England throughout the sixteenth century (2007: 250–52).
8 Studies that touch on masque elements in Shakespeare’s play include David Lindley (2009: 39–40); Kwang Soon Cho (1997: 197–216); Mary E. Hazard (1987: 95–103); Ralph I. Berry (1985: 128–41); John D. Cox (1978: 390–409); and John P. Cutts (1963: 184–95).
9 On the reduction of the queens in the play, including the infant Elizabeth, to vehicles for ensuring patriarchal succession, see Jo Eldridge Carney (1995: 189–202). For more, see Mary K. Nelson (2009), Susan Frye (2003: 427–44), Kim H. Noling (1988: 291–306), and Linda McJ. Micheli (1987: 452–66).
10 I thank the initial anonymous outside reader of this essay for offering the term “internalized outsideness.” While this reader was interested in how “foreign” queens, such as Catherine of Aragon and Anna of Denmark, might have culturally changed “the internal make-up of England,” my paper focuses on the range of queens Shakespeare represents in Henry VIII for a Jacobean audience. These include the proudly English Elizabeth and her mother, Anne Boleyn; even if Anne served as a maid of honor in the courts of Margaret of Austria and the French queen Claude, she was not considered “foreign” in the same sense as Catherine and Anna. Nevertheless, as I argue, all these queens instantiate “outsideness” through the discourses of blackness that the play persistently links to femininity. On Anne Boleyn’s education in continental European courts, see Ives (2004: 18–36). For Elizabeth’s assertion of her Englishness, see Loades (2003: 313).
11 For a recent elaboration of this point, see Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton (2000: 57–62).
12 For studies that touch on colonialism in the play, see Karen Britland (2009: 79), Willy Maley (1999: 152), and Walter Cohen (1997: 3114).
13 For Henry VIII’s general disinterest in overseas exploration, see J. J. Scarisbrick (1968: 123–5).
14 Kenneth R. Andrews specifies these beginnings as “the establishment of colonies in North America, the development of direct trade with the East, and even the first annexation of territory in a recognized Spanish sphere of influence—the West Indies”; he continues with the proviso, “James during most of his reign deferred to Spain’s pre-emptive claims in the Caribbean, but supported trade and settlement in areas Spain claimed and manifestly did not possess: North America and the East Indies” (1984: 13). Even so, as late as 1613 “a second Spanish Armada” loomed as a threat to English autonomy; for this threat in relation to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, see Camille Wells Slights (1991: 59), Susan E. Krantz (1993: 142), William M. Baillie (1979: 249–50), and Tom McBride (1977: 36).
15 For almost verbatim glosses, see Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (2007: 10) and David Bevington (1997: 898n20, n21). R. A. Foakes’s influential edition completely elides the colonial implications of this passage by glossing “heathen gods” as “possibly a biblical allusion” and “India” as “commonly represented a source of fabulous wealth” (1964: 8–9). Editions that follow Foakes include Gordon McMullen (2000: 214), Jay L. Halio (1999: 76), and John Margeson (1990: 66). Editors have overwhelmingly assigned “the English” as the referent for “they” in line 26; however, it could equally refer to “the French” in line 23. Cf. the ambiguous pronoun in Henry VIII’s concluding lines to act 2, scene 2—“O, my lord, / Would it not grieve an able man to leave / So sweet a bedfellow? But conscience, conscience– / O, ’tis a tender place, and I must leave her” (2.2.140–43)—with “her” referring to his repudiated wife or to his conscience.
16 As Retha M. Warnicke documents, fear of “a French annexation of England” formed a prominent part of Henry VIII and his countrymen’s focus on the lack of a male heir (1989: 48).
17 For instance, John Aylmer, Elizabeth I’s defender against John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, wrote, “God is English” and “[t]he French Turke” (Andrea 2007: 15).
18 On Wolsey’s role in crafting the anti-Ottoman Treaty of London, see Mattingly (1955: 144–7).
19 While Shakespeare spells the queen’s name, “Katherine,” I adopt Mattingly’s spelling, “Catherine,” when referring to the historical queen (1941). For an actresses’s perspective on Shakespeare’s Katherine, see Jane Lapotaire (1998: 132–51).
20 On English anxieties about French cultural imperialism, see Andrew Hadfield (2001: 46–52, 64–80). On the critique of Henrician courtiers who appeared “all French,” see Scarisbrick (1968: 117).
21 G. R. Elton explains that “the civilian concept of imperium … [existed] in any polity whose ruler did not recognise a superior on earth [such as the Pope]” (1958: 234). Nicholas Canny adds that “[t]he word ‘empire’, which was particularly favoured by Henry VIII after his breach with Rome, … called to mind the relative isolation of England through the centuries rather than its domination over foreign territories” (1998: 1).
22 According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “pleasauntes” is “[a] fine gauzelike fabric” (s.v. pleasance). A “typper” is “[a] long narrow slip of cloth or hanging part of dress, formerly worn, either attached to and forming part of the hood, head-dress, or sleeve, or loose, as a scarf or the like” (s.v. tippet). On related Tudor productions, see Skiles Howard (1994: 16–39) and Marie Axton (1977: 24–47).
23 On late medieval and early modern Scottish “masques of blackness,” see Andrea (1999: 256–63) and Louise Olga Fradenburg (1991: 244–64).
24 Walter Mignolo further explains that during the sixteenth century “[t]heology served as the conceptual framework to argue ‘racial differences’ in two directions simultaneously: First, Spain, and later England and France, distinguished themselves from the Muslims (in the north of Africa) and the ‘Turks’ in the East (the Ottoman Empire). Second … England distinguished itself from the Spaniards, who, the English said, had Moorish blood and acted as barbarians in the New World” (2007: 312–13).
25 Krantz’s discussion of “‘Black’ Wolsey” (1993: 137) is misleading, as the play does not attach these stereotypical terms to the cardinal, even though he is frequently referred to as a devil (cf. 1.1.52–3, 69–72).
26 Samuel Johnson famously pronounced that “[t]he meek sorrows and virtuous distress of Catherine have furnished some scenes which may be justly numbered among the greatest efforts of tragedy” (1968: 657). Robin Bowers traces and challenges this traditional view (1988: 29–51). This view still informs Matthew C. Hansen’s argument that “Shakespeare and Fletcher present Catherine as a Griselda-like figure and paragon of English feminine virtue” (2003: 91).
27 Krantz states, “Queen Katherine’s championing the cause of the citizenry is a complete invention by Shakespeare” (1993: 134). Lynne Magnusson describes it as “bold speech action” (1992: 401). See also Joseph Candido (1980: 491–8).
28 For important background, see Eric J. Griffin (2009: 30–37). Although Griffin does not discuss Shakespeare’s play, he offers a cultural analysis of Catherine of Aragon.
29 On Latin as a “‘father’ tongue,” see Harry Berger, Jr. (2006: 124). On the historical Catherine of Aragon’s humanist education, see Mattingly (1941: 8–11).
30 I agree with Bowers’s argument that Wolsey taunts Katherine in this scene (1998: 38, 47n10). This contrasts with Edward I. Berry’s reading (1979: 229–46).
31 Buckingham is caught in a similar subversion-containment double bind when he defends himself against “black envy” (2.1.86). For an application of this New Historicist model, see Zenón Luis-Martínez (2001: 205–43).
32 For a related emphasis on class, see Mowat and Werstine (2007: 146, 241), McMullen (2000: 350), and Margeson (1990: 140).
33 OED (s.v. brunette, which is cross-listed under the heading brownetta). See also I. A. Shapiro (1992: 445–6).
34 The textual variant for the latter quotation is “earthy cold” (Greenblatt 1997: 3193).
35 The Norton Shakespeare glosses “used” in this passage as “signifying chastity” (Greenblatt 1997: 3177).
36 Antonia Fraser indicates that the autopsy of Catherine “did reveal a large round black growth on her heart which itself was ‘completely black and hideous’” (1994: 229, quoting the resident ambassador Eustache Chapuys’s report to Charles V). This “blackness” was interpreted as the sign of a broken heart rather than of sin, corruption, or infidelity.
37 On Shakespeare’s Anne Bolyen, see William Leahy (2003: 132–44) and K. Hilberdink-Sakamoto (1998: 21–44).
38 I adjust the traditional adage, featured in Karen Lindsey (1995), to refer to Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and, as a variant, Elizabeth. The latter, even though she was a daughter and not a wife of Henry VIII, survived her father’s obsession for a male heir; however, she remained estranged from the patriarchal succession as a perpetual virgin.
39 “Bawdkin” is “[a] rich embroidered stuff, originally made with warp of gold thread and woof of silk” (OED, s.v. baudekin). “Cimiteries” means “scimitars,” or “[a] short, curved, single-edged sword, used among Orientals, esp. Turks and Persians” (OED, s.v. scimitar). A “bawderike” is “[a] belt or girdle, usually of leather and richly ornamented, worn pendent from one shoulder across the breast and under the opposite arm, and used to support the wearer’s sword, bugle, etc.” (OED, s.v. baldric).
40 The Norton Shakespeare glosses “strains” as “embraces” (Greenblatt 1997: 3171). The OED, citing this line, more precisely defines the term as “[t]o clasp tightly in one’s arms” (s.v. “strain, v.1”). It also has a bawdy connotation.
41 Scarisbrick points out that Anne’s actual title was “marquis of Pembroke (not marchioness, because she held the title in her own right)” (1968: 306).
42 Cf. the vulgar pun on “common” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1.2.74).
43 For more on Anna of Denmark in relation to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, see Frye (2004: 182–93) and Roper (2003: 45–59).
44 According to Warnicke, the historical Henry VIII was devastated by the news of Elizabeth’s birth (1989: 168–9). Fraser concurs with this assessment (1994: 99). However, Ives counters that “[t]here is … no evidence of the crushing psychological blow that some have supposed” (2004: 184).
45 The Norton Shakespeare glosses “tool” as “genitalia” (Greenblatt 1997: 3188n5). Critics have described the porter scene in terms of “amoral energy” (Cespedes 1980: 435), Roman saturnalia (Hiscock 1997: 59), and Bakhtinian carnivalesque (McMullen 1998: 223–4).
46 On Sheba as a racialized image in early modern England, see Kim F. Hall (2000: 359–66; 1995: 108–9). Anston Bosman explicates the Sheba reference in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII alongside Holbein’s Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (1999: 474–6). See also Ruth Vanita (2000: 329–30).
47 Howard Felperin notes that the image of James culminated the “Tudor myth of British history” (1972: 193). For more on James as the New Solomon destined to encompass Great Britain under his beneficent imperial rule, see Graham Parry (1981: 29–32).
48 As Martin Butler points out, a male actor may have played this “lady” (2008: 125–7).
49 For Jonson’s published text for The Masque of Blackness, along with the costume sketches, see the online Luminarium Edition (2010), ed. Anniina Jokinen.