“The devil looks ten times worse with a white face”:

colours in Richard Brome’s The English Moor

Cristina Paravano

University of Milan

cristina.paravano@unimi.it

About the author

Cristina Paravano wrote her PhD on Richard Brome at the University of Milan where she

obtained a post-doctoral research fellowship. Her areas of interest include Elizabethan, Jacobean

and Caroline drama, source studies, Biblical studies and modern-contemporary theatre studies.

Abstract: The paper purposes to investigate the multiple meanings of the black and white

opposition which lies at the basis of the plot of Richard Brome’s The English Moor. This binary

can be seen as a contrast between Englishness and otherness as the oxymoronic title may suggest.

In the play, the usurer Quicksands dresses up his own wife Millicent and other women as

Moorish servants using black-face make-up. The way in which Brome uses black face as a

theatrical device to vehicle a cultural ideology about otherness is new in terms of sexual politics,

gender, cosmetics and race.

The dualism which emerges in the plot is reflected in the use of space that I perceive as an

opposition between the space of ‘white Englishness’ and the one of ‘black otherness’: one of the

locations chosen as a setting by Brome, the famous tavern of the Devil and St. Dunstan,

contributes to reinforce the dichotomy that constitutes the play owing to its double reference to

the devil, often associated with black, and to a saint. Moreover, the only scene set in the Devil

Tavern occupies a strategic position in the middle of the play as a sort of watershed which divides

white from black (after this scene Millicent and the other women wear black make-up) and

recalls many issues developed in the previous scene such as Millicent’s transformation into a

black moor, the idea of otherness and a secret hidden in Quicksands’s past.

What complicates the issue is that actually Brome does not stage real otherness but uses the

theatrical device of the disguise and of the black-white opposition to reproduce the prejudices of

his contemporaries related to otherness.

Key words: Brome, The English Moor, black, white, otherness, symbolism

Résumé: Le but de cet article est d’étudier les multiples significations de l’opposition du noir et

du blanc, qui est à la base de l’intrigue de The English Moor de Richard Brome. Cette opposition

binaire peut être considérée comme un contraste entre anglicité et altérité, ainsi que le suggère le

titre en forme d’oxymore. Dans cette pièce l’usurier Quicksands déguise son épouse Millicent et

d’autres dames en servantes maures en leur appliquant un maquillage noir sur le visage. La façon

dont Brome utilise le noir comme procédé théâtral pour véhiculer une idéologie culturelle

concernant l’altérité constitue une nouveauté en termes de politique sexuelle, de genre, de

cosmétique et de race.

Le dualisme qui émerge de l’intrigue est représenté par l’utilisation de l’espace qui, à mon avis,

est une opposition entre l’espace de la « blanche anglicité » et de la « noire altérité » : l’un des

lieux choisis comme décor par Brome, la célèbre taverne du Diable et de St. Dunstan, contribue à

renforcer la dichotomie qui caractérise l’œuvre, en raison de sa double référence au diable,

souvent associé au noir, et à un saint. De plus, l’unique scène qui se déroule dans la Taverne du

Diable occupe une position stratégique dans l’œuvre. Elle est positionnée au milieu de la pièce

comme une sorte de tournant qui divise le blanc du noir (après cette scène, Millicent et les autres

dames sont maquillées en noir) et elle reprend plusieurs thèmes développés dans la scène

précédente, comme la transformation de Millicent en femme maure ainsi que l’idée d’altérité et

de secret, cela à propos du passé de Quicksands.

Ce qui complique la question, c’est que Brome ne met pas en scène une réelle altérité, mais qu’il

utilise le procédé théâtral du déguisement ainsi que l’opposition du noir et du blanc pour

représenter les préjugés de ses contemporains à propos de la diversité raciale et culturelle.

Mots-clés:Brome, The English Moor, noir, blanc, altérité, symbolisme

One of the most recurrent characters in early modern drama is the Moor: ‘real’ Moors like Aaron

in Titus Andronicus (1594), Othello, the Moor of Venice (1604) and little Jacques, in Webster’s

The White Devil (1612); or white European characters impersonating black Moors, like

Clarindor’s wife Beaupre, disguised as a black servant in Massinger’s The Parliament of Love

(1624), and Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605) in which, as requested by

Queen Anne, she and her ladies could pretend to be black Moors on stage. Yet, despite the

popularity of the character, The English Moor (1638) by Richard Brome is unexpectedly the only

play of Renaissance drama featuring a Moor in the title1. The identity of the English Moor is not

revealed till the very end of the comedy, leading the audience to interrogate themselves about the

real meaning of this oxymoronic title, which echoes the idea of the “white devil” in Webster’s

eponymous play. Brome’s title, moreover, puts the emphasis on the binary black and white (black

Moor opposed to white Englishness), which is used to vehicle a cultural ideology about

otherness, but also to negotiate multiple and conflicting meanings in terms of morality, sexual

politics, gender, cosmetics, beauty and race.

The English Moor has been mainly investigated in relation to Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and

as a work featuring blackface characters in early modern drama (Mason Vaughan 2005,

Barthelemy 1987); other lines of investigation have taken into consideration the recourse to place

realism (Steggle 2004), with an emphasis on racial and gender issues (Hall 1995), or on the

play’s meta-theatrical qualities and the theatrical representations of black beauty through

cosmetics (Efsthatiou-Lavabre 2003, Karim-Cooper 2007). Even though all these scholars have

noticed and discussed some aspects of this binary, they have concentrated on the scene of

Millicent’s transformation into a black Moor and other scenes with supposedly black characters

on stage, without analysing more systematically how this opposition actually pervades the whole

play. Yet, this dichotomy is extremely significant since it is at the origin of the way human

beings experience colours: black and white stand as archetypal symbols owing to the primitive

white-light association as opposed to black-darkness and, consequently, with good and evil,

which preceded the awareness of symbolic meanings related to the use of verbal language

(D’Aloe 49). Moreover, their symbolism has stratified thanks to the copious, and even

1 Mason Vaughan (50) mentions The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy, a collaborative work by Dekker, Haughton and Day,

which was known as Lust’s Dominion, or The Lascivous Queen. In his edition of The English Moor Steggle draws a

connection between Mr. Moore’s Revels, an amateur entertainment performed at Oxford in 1636, two years before

The English Moor. In this amateur entertainment in honour of a student called Moore, Oxford students impersonated

black moors.

contrasting meanings, provided by different cultures throughout the centuries so that, despite the

apparent dichotomous relation, black and white have striking similarities: “both are achromatic

and extremes of brightness, and in these respects are interchangeable as symbols, as if what has

to be symbolized is an extreme state” (Schapiro 47) like death, which can be represented by the

black of mourning and the white of paleness. My paper purposes to discuss the complex and

multiple meanings of this dualism in early modern England and how it is reflected also in the use

of space in which, nonetheless, white and black do not refer only to racial connotations but

acquire a wider significance.

1. Blackness on stage: “Never came so deep in blackness yet” (4.4.717)

A brief summary of the play is needed owing to its complexity and the multiple levels of plot.

Before the beginning, the gentlemen Meanwell and Rashley quarrel and disappear, leading the

audience to surmise that they may have killed each other. This leads to a feud between the

children of the two families, respectively, Dionysia and Arthur Meanwell, and Lucy and

Theophilus Rashley. Theophilus is in love (and is loved in return) by Millicent, who has been

obliged to marry the old usurer Quicksands. He has several enemies, among whom the

womanizer Nathaniel and his friends, who want to take revenge on the evil usurer: they predict

that he will be made a cuckold on his wedding night. In order to avoid it, Quicksands pretends

that Millicent has died and that he wants to remarry a black servant, who is actually the young

woman in disguise. After a month, Quicksands invites the gentleman to see a masque at his

house, during which Nathaniel sleeps with a black woman whom the usurer supposes to be his

wife, so that he immediately demands a divorce from her. Yet, when Nathaniel proposes to the

black Moor, the woman turns out to be Phillis disguised as a black servant, a gentlewoman who

had been seduced and then abandoned by the young man earlier in the play. All the conflicts are

solved with the return of Meanwell and Rashley and the marriage between Arthur and Lucy,

Millicent and Theophilus, and Nathaniel and Phillis.

The first association between a colour and a character occurs at the beginning of the play, when

Dionysia describes her brother Arthur’s mood. Here, she refers to the theory of humours, which

associates colours with four humours related to four main temperaments — yellow for choleric,

red for sanguine, white for phlegmatic, and black for melancholic like Arthur:

I may not, brother.

What! suffer you to pine, and peak away

In your unnatural melancholy fits;

Which have already turned your purer blood

Into a toad-pool dye?

(1.1.4)2

Interestingly, humours were also believed to affect skin colour (Loomba 53), so that, in

metaphorical terms, not only is his blood turning black, but his skin also becomes black due to a

“toad-pool”, “a mass of corrupt poisonous matter” (OED toad n, 7b) that may be the cause of his

melancholy. His mood probably has an impact on the whole household, made “dark with

sighing” (1.1.14) and, even without his actually meeting her, on his lover Lucy, who shows a

similar melancholic attitude: “How long has this disease affected you? This melancholy,

mistress?” Phillis asks her, “not ever since/ You lost your father, I hope” (2.1.215). Black is “the

colour that is without colour, without light, the colour of grief, of loss, of humility, of guilt, of

shame” (Harvey 10) and, for Arthur and Lucy, it represents the grief for the loss of a father and

for the impossibility to love each other openly. Furthermore, it also stands for guilt and shame as

far as he is concerned, because he can neither comply with his sister’s plans to revenge the

wiping out his enemy’s family nor reveal his love for Lucy. This black “toad-pool” actually

stands for the secret interior conflict in Arthur’s soul between love and familial duty that is

poisoning his life.

Yet, the character most often associated with black in the play is the usurer Quicksands. When

Nathaniel is informed there is some news about the usurer, he asks:“Is he then hoisted into the

Star Chamber / For his notorious practices? /Or into the High Commission for his blacker arts?”

(1.1.56). Quicksands’s actions are compared to black magic, obscure arts that he employs as if he

were a kind of devil. Interestingly enough, his first name is Mandeville, which may reflect his

Mephistophelian nature and his close bonds with the devil as a “man-devil”, as Steggle reminds

us (The English Moor n. 2327). His surname is thus appropriate for a character who is defined as

a “bottomless devourer of young gentlemen” (1.1.25), as deceptive and treacherous as quicksands

2 All quotations from the play are from The English Moor, Modern Text, edited by Matthew Steggle, Richard Brome

Online (http://www.hrionline. ac.uk/brome, 17 January 2010). In this edition, against all odds, the text is not divided

into lines but into speeches.

which one only notices by being sucked down under; it also evokes the idea of a painful death, a

slow fall into a dark hell. Moreover, Mandeville recalls Sir John Mandeville, whose book of

Travels, translated into English in 1499, provides a clear idea of the culturally relativistic vision

of Africa in early modern Europe. Therefore, not surprisingly, it is the devilish Quicksands who

decides to disguise the “fair mistress Millicent” (1.1.20) as a black Moor using black make-up. In

this scene, Brome not only exploits a popular and successful plot device, but he is also using

black as a symbol. Unlike Mason Vaughan who claims that “the application of black make-up is

not nearly as important as the moment of its removal” (109), I find this episode more fascinating

than its counterpart and much more complex, too, since it takes place in front of the audience

(Millicent’s face is painted on stage3) and raises a number of questions about race, otherness,

beauty and morality. Quicksands uses black paint to conceal Millicent’s identity, to make her

dead to the world as well as invisible by degrading her to the rank of servant and to the status of

foreigner in order to obscure her beauty, to make her seemingly undesirable so as to protect her

honour and chastity (as if the black make-up were a wall) and, metaphorically, to make her

experience his spiritual darkness, his moral obscurity.

Millicent’s transformation into a black Moor articulates different perspectives on beauty on

moral, religious and aesthetic levels:

[QUICKSANDS shows MILLICENT] a box of black painting.

Millicent: Bless me! you fright me, sir. Can jealousy

Creep into such a shape? Would you blot out

Heaven’s workmanship?

Quicksands: Why, thinkst thou, fearful beauty,

Has heaven no part in Egypt? Pray thee tell me,

Is not an Ethiop’s face his workmanship

As well as the fair’st lady’s? nay, more too

Than hers, that daubs and makes adulterate beauty?

Some can be pleased to lie in oils and paste

At sin’s appointment, which is thrice more wicked.

This, which is sacred, is for sin’s prevention.

[...]

3 For a discussion of the performance of this scene see Richard Brome Online edition, n. 2575

Be fearless, love; this alters not thy beauty,

Though, for a time, obscures it from our eyes.

(3.1. 434-5, 7)

On the one hand, Millicent’s words reflect an early modern anti-cosmetic argument that

“expressed disdain for the appropriation of divine materials. Re-creating the body was

blasphemous” (Karim-Cooper 3) and associates the idea of make-up, in this case even black, with

sin and damnation. Yet, Quicksands, defending his position, tries to convince Millicent that this

device is a kind of sacred rite to prevent sin and which will not affect her beauty permanently. It

is ironic to consider that, in terms of the actual make-up, white powder was far more dangerous

than the black one: while white make-up was mainly based on a rather toxic blend of white lead

and vinegar, “the materials likely used to paint faces black were not poisonous. They were

literally harmless” (Karim-Cooper 146).

The argument supporting Ethiopian beauty is fairly cynical if we consider Quicksands’s

association with Mandeville’s Travels which describe a series of African countries and cultures.

As in the case of Ethiopia, they are presented as a negative inversion of European civilization in

terms of geography, physical appearance, social and sexual behaviour, as well as values and laws.

As Hall claims, “the descriptions found in Mandeville are a very early constellation of the

increasingly complex links between the fear of the alien cultures and the destructive powers of

sexuality associated with blackness” (27-28). The usurer’s main aim is to conceal Millicent’s

beauty as well as her identity in order to cool down the lust of young gallants like Nathaniel,

eager to sleep with her and cuckold him: “After this tincture’s laid upon thy face,” he tells

Millicent, “’Twill cool their kidneys and allay their heats” (3.1.432). Quicksands’s assumption is

that a black woman is far from being desirable, that “de fine white Zentilmanna /Cannot-a love-a

the black-a thing-a” (4.4.726). When introducing Millicent, disguised as the black Moor Catalina,

to the young gentlemen, he says:

Stay, Catalina. Nay, she may be seen. / For know, sirs, I am mortified to beauty/ Since

my wife’s death. I will not keep a face / Better than this under my roof, I ha’ sworn.

(4.4.710)

Yet, he does not take into account the fact that black women were associated with lechery and

promiscuity. An exception to the rule is the womanizer Nathaniel whose lust is aroused by

blackness, so much so that, in front of the black Catalina, he exclaims: “This devil’s bird, /This

moor runs more and more still in my mind” (4.4.742). Earlier in the play, he had expressed his

own view on beauty boasting his varied sexual experience with women by claiming: “briefly, all

sorts and sizes I have tasted” (3.3.571), regardless of age, stature, condition and complexion:

I think I have had my share,

And have loved every one best of living women;

A dead one I ne’er coveted, that’s my comfort;

But of all ages that are pressable

From sixteen unto sixty, and of all complexions

From the white flaxen to the tawny-moor;

And of all statures between dwarf and giantess;

Of all conditions, from the doxy to the dowsabel;

Of all opinions, I will not say religions

(For what make they with any?); and of all

Features and shapes, from the huckle-backed bum-creeper,

To the straight spiny shop�maid in St. Martin’s.

(3.3.571)

Catalina would be a new prey that he may add to his rich palmarès: interestingly, as Loomba

reminds us, “complexion was originally another word for temperament, and its shift to a

primarily somatic meaning can be related to the sharpening of colour-consciousness” (53).

Therefore, the term ironically acquires a psychological connotation that Nathaniel had not taken

into account when describing his numerous female partners. His attraction to the black Moor

seems to be irresistible:

Nathaniel:[Aside] It is the handsomest rogue

I have e’er seen yet, of a deed of darkness;

Tawnyand russet faces I have dealt with,

But never came so deep in blackness yet.

Quicksands: Come hither, Catalina. You shall see, sir,

What a brave wench she shall be made anon:

And when she dances, how you shall admire her!

Arthur Will you have dancing here tonight?

Quicksands: Yes! I have borrowed other moors of merchants

That trade in Barbary, whence I had mine own here,

And you shall see their way and skill in dancing.

Nathaniel: [Aside] He keeps this rye loaf or his own white tooth

With confidence none will cheat him of a bit.

I’ll have a sliver, though I lose my whittle.

(4.4.717-721)

Different uses of black are present here. First, the expression “deed of darkness” is a reference to

a possible sexual intercourse with Catalina, an immoral act with an unmarried black servant, “a

negative version of the white positive that embodies hidden desire and fantasies” (Mason

Vaughan 77). Secondly, Nathaniel compares Catalina to a “rye loaf”, a loaf of black bread, thus

marking her inferiority and exploitability. This foodstuff image may recall Titus Andronicus,

when Demetrius explicitly compares Lavinia to a slice of bread (2.1.87), a metaphor

underscoring his sexual appetite. Finally, despite the experience he had boasted of before, he had

never slept with a woman with a coal-black complexion (“But never came so deep in blackness

yet”) and he had never reached such a level of sinfulness, as Steggle suggests, making an

equation between blackness and sin (The English Moor n. 3831).

Another scene in which the polarity black and white is extremely important is the masque in act

4, scene 5, which is Brome’s answer to the Masque of Blackness, often evoked throughout the

play. The objective of the masque organized by Quicksands is taking revenge on the young

gallants who had put on stage a masque suggesting his imminent cuckoldry on his wedding night:

The Queen of Ethiop dreamt upon a night

Her black womb should bring forth a virgin white

Edmund: Black womb!

[...]

Inductor: Till this white dream filled their black heads with fears,

For ’tis no better than a prodigy

To have white children in a black country.

So ’twas decreed that if the child proved white,

It should be made away. ‘O cruel spite!’

The queen cried out, and was delivered

Of child black as you see: yet wizards said

That if this damsel lived married to be

To a white man, she should be white as he.

Vincent: The moral is, if Quicksands marry her,

Her face shall be white as his conscience.

(4.5.783-4, 90-1)

Brome turns upside down the dynamics of black and white but, despite the change in the

dominant colour, the possibility of combination is still forbidden since a white child was not

allowed within the black community where marriages can only occur between people of the same

skin colour. This masque has to explain and justify his fictitious interracial marriage with the

black Moor. The inductor of the masque reveals that while Quicksands was not paying attention,

Nathaniel slept with the black servant (actually Phillis in disguise), thereby committing a “deed

of darkness”:

Inductor: Marry, sir, a naughty business. This gentleman has

committed a deed of darkness with your moor, sir; we all saw it.

Testy: What deed of darkness? Speak it plainly.

Inductor: Darkness or lightness; call it which you will. They

have lain together; made this same a bawdy house; how will you have it?

Quicksands: Undone, most wretched. O, I am confounded.

I see no art can keep a woman honest.

Nathaniel: I love her, and will justify my act.

(4.5.885-9)

The expression “darkness or lightness” obviously hides a pun: “a ‘light’ woman”, as Steggle (The

English Moor n6765) reminds us, “is one who is sexually promiscuous”, but it may also imply

the fact that the woman is actually the white Phillis. Barthelemy emphasizes the paradoxical

situation in which Phillis finds herself: “to gain a husband for herself and to regain her honour,

Phillis, while she remains blackened, must again commit that sin that darkens her name”

(143).While Nathaniel, showing an unexpected moral preoccupation, is now ready to marry her,

the usurer, thinking that the gallant had slept with Millicent, pleads for divorce.

2. Whiteness on stage: Merry England, the fairest nation

In the scene in which Millicent is dressed up by her devilish husband as a Moorish servant with

black make-up, she is associated with other colours besides black:

Now red and white, those two united houses

Whence beauty takes her fair name and descent,

Like peaceful sisters under one roof dwelling,

For a small time farewell Oh let me kiss ye

Before I part with you— now, jewels, up

Into your ebon casket.

(3.1.439; my emphasis)

This passage refers to white and red, the third colour introduced after white and black as a

symbol of blood and life; when associated with white, like in this context, it symbolizes beauty

and health, but originally it was opposed to white (the chessboard had white and red squares) and

sometimes its opposition was even stronger than the one with black (Castoldi 6). Three colours

thus coexist on stage while Quicksands is painting Millicent’s face: white, red and black (the

ebon casket). It is worth noticing here that the association of these shades was already highly

popular in the Middle Ages, and that it reappears in a number of tales such as the Grimm

Brothers’ story of Snow White who was indeed “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black

as ebony wood” (1). This may give to the scene a fairy-tale flavour depicting Millicent as a

princess imprisoned by the villain Quicksands, a sort of jealous Bluebeard.

White is a colour more frequently associated with Millicent. It represents her virtue, chastity and

truth, which may explain her horror in front of the black make-up, a disguise concealing both her

identity and her respectable condition: “This is the face / On which the hell of jealousy abused/

The hand of heaven, to fright the world withal” (4.4.763). These words reinforce the opposition

between the devilish Quicksands and the pure Millicent, often associated with heaven: “Heaven

was married/ To my first love” (5.2.969), says Theophilus thinking of Millicent’s supposed

death”; or “See, see, the heaven that I am justly fallen from!” (5.3.1065) Quicksands complains

when he sees his wife reappearing without the black make-up. When Arthur meets Millicent for

the first time after she has removed her disguise, he exclaims:

A goodly creature!

The room’s illumined with her; yet her look

Sad, and cheek pale, as if a sorrow sucked it.

How came she in? What is she? I am fear�struck.

’Tis some unresting shadow. Or, if not,

What makes a thing so glorious in this house,

The master being an enemy to beauty?

She modestly makes tome.

(4.4.758)

Later on, when he leads her to her beloved Theophilus, he defines her a “white gift” (5.2.968)

since she is probably dressed in white but also to mark her purity and chastity.

A careful reading of the play undermines our certainties about the complete positivity of white as

a symbol, showing that, like the blend for white make-up, it can be much more dangerous than

black. As Batchelor reminds us, “whiteness is woven in the fabric of culture: since the classical

age white is associated to female beauty, to divinity, to goodness, purity and chastity but also to

ghosts and to skeletons, carrying “an uncanny sense of coldness, inertia and death” (19). White is

mentioned seventeen times in the whole play, with eleven occurrences in act 4 only. Now, let’s

take into consideration the extract analysed earlier but focusing on the significance of white:

The Queen of Ethiop dreamt upon a night

Her black womb should bring forth a virgin white”

Edmund: Black womb!

[…]

Inductor: Till this white dream filled their black heads with Fears,

For ‘tis no better than a prodigy

To have white children in a black country.

So ’twas decreed that if the child proved white,

It should be made away. ‘O cruel spite!’

The queen cried out, and was delivered

Of child black as you see: yet wizards said

That if this damsel lived married to be

To a white man, she should be white as he.

Vincent: The moral is, if Quicksands marry her,

Her face shall be white as his conscience.

Inductor: The careful queen, conclusion for to try,

Sent her to merry England charily,

The fairest nation man yet ever saw,

To take a husband.

(4.5.783-4, 90-2; my emphasis)

The passage reveals a predominance of white, even though it describes the dream of a black-

skinned Ethiopian Queen, which may suggest a preponderance of dark colours. Turning white

has a racial connotation but mainly a moral one: not only a transformation as “a metamorphosis

to expunge the darkened alien” (Mason Vaughan 109) but also one to enhance the whiteness of

the soul and insist on the supposed moral virtues. The reference to Quicksands’s conscience is

satirical: if his wife’s face is supposed to be the same colour as his conscience, it definitely has to

be black, not white, so that a dark-skinned wife seems very appropriate for him. Even though

white is associated with virtue and black with vice, the vicious and dishonest characters are

white-skinned: the perfidious usurer Quicksands, the unscrupulous womanizer Nathaniel and

Phillis who has used various disguised to hide her identity and deceive Nathaniel; moreover,

unlike Millicent, who has always been morally ‘white’ despite the disguise, Phillis has given

herself to Nathaniel and she acquires again her socially honourable position only when he accepts

to marry her: “[…] her new reappearance marks her transition from the blackened character of

the fallen woman to the whitened status of the gentle wife” (Mason Vaughan 120). Only her

status is white, not her soul or her intentions. When Nathaniel realizes who she really is, he

exclaims: “The devil looks ten times worse with a white face. Give me it black again” (5.3.1047).

The traditional association between blackness and the devil seems to fade and to be replaced by a

more threatening concept: evil is not to be found only in the ‘dark other’ or in a culture perceived

as inferior but it can be hidden everywhere in early modern England, “the fairest nation”

(4.5.792) and in Europe, and in any person, even those whose moral conduct is apparently

immaculate.

White is part of a wider discourse about fairness, which variously recurs in the play as a noun or

adjective: Millicent is the usurer’s “fair wife” (467), her honour is “fair” (1.2.112) in

Theophilus’s words, she pleads for “fair justice” (2.2.320) when imploring her uncle Testy not to

oblige her to marry the usurer. According to the OED, the adjective “fair” covers a wide range of

meanings both related to physical and moral features: “Beautiful to the eye; of attractive

appearance; good-looking” (A1); “Of a person’s character, conduct, reputation, etc., free from

moral imperfections; exemplary, unblemished” (12); “Of a person: characterized by equitable or

lawful conduct; honest, just; reasonable” (14b), “Of hair or complexion: light as opposed to dark

in colour. Of a person: having such colouring” (17). Actually, “fair” is also connected to justice,

represented on stage by Testy, a justice of the peace. Efstathiou-Lavabre (229) sees the end of the

play as the triumph of fairness in all its shades which deletes the blackness, both physical and

ethical, so that “Justice and Law lights every one his way” (4.5.909), as Testy exclaims. The

black Moors are washed white and justice is actually done since all the characters get what they

deserve, either a prize or a punishment, but it is also the triumph of the white devil Phillis that

casts a shadow over the moral and cultural significance of being white as well as on female

morality.

3. Geographies of black and white

The concept of blackness runs in a wide geographical space: from England to Africa through

Venice. The idea of black painting indeed comes from Venice (“it was the quaint device/ Of a

Venetian merchant, which I learnt/ In my young factorship”(3.1.431), one of the major trading

ports between Western Europe and the Levant, a place full of theatrical resonances (Othello, The

Merchant of Venice) and economic and social implications. Quicksand's idea of blackness is

loaded with all the negative racial connotations and is evoked in relation to the slave trade: when

the usurer says “I have borrowed other moors of merchants / that trade in Barbary, whence I had

my own here ” (4.5.720-21), he recalls his mercantile activities with Barbary, that is, North

Africa and suggests the presence of other Moors as servants in his house. As Habib records,

merchants were then not only the main agents in bringing black people to Britain, but they also

feature significantly in the records of those who had black servants in their households (88-

93).This play seems to reflect the beginning of the gradual integration of black people in the

English lower classes since Africa is represented as an inferior country, exploitable economically

and sexually and with one distinctive feature—blackness.

This dichotomy between black and white with many of its implications is reflected in the use of

space, in particular in the two tavern scenes. The first takes place in a famous eating

establishment staged in act 3, scene 2: the tavern of the Devil and St. Dunstan at no. 2, Fleet

Street, was one of the leading and oldest of Temple Bar. It is named after the legend of the 10th

-

century Saint Dunstan: while he was working at his forge, the devil tried to tempt him in the

disguise of a beautiful woman. Dunstan pulled the devil by the nose with pincers so that he

regained his original shape. As Burn reminds, devils used often to appear to the monks in the

shape of Ethiopian men or boys; which was why, in all probability, painters began making the

Devil black (103-05).Interestingly, while painting Millicent, Quicksands speaks of the beauty of

an “Ethiopian face” compared to a white one.

As Steggle has pointed out, the location works as a literary homage to Jonson, a regular of the

place who had passed away in 1637, when the play was being written. Firstly, there is a

remarkable profusion of references to his works such as the Masque of Blackness (1605), as for

the blackface make-up used to disguise Millicent, Epicoene (1609), The Devil is an Ass (1616)

and The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621). Therefore the history of the Devil Tavern is intertwined

with the fame of Jonson, one of its most renowned and assiduous patrons.

Despite being used as a setting only in one scene, the location is highly significant in the

dynamics of the play for multiple reasons. First of all, the Devil Tavern is evoked metaphorically

by the numerous references to the devil: beside Mandeville, the name of the usurer, the noun and

its adjective recur eighteen times throughout the play and become a leitmotif: the name of the

devil is evoked in numerous proverbial phrases such as “what devil’s this ,raised?” (1.2.97), “the

devil take the hindmost” (1.1.184), “This devil’s bird” (4.2.742) and in curses like “that unworthy

Quicksands, devil take him” (1.2.112). Most of the allusions are, in fact, connected to the usurer

Mandeville. When the servant Buzzard hints at the disappearance of Millicent, he describes

Quicksands’s house as full of devils, as if it were their natural habitat: “I shall ne’er forget it, that

riotous wedding night: when Hell broke loose, and all the devils danced at our house, which

made my master mad, whose raving made my mistress run away, whose running away was the

cause of my turning away” (3.3.500). Interestingly, these lines recall what Ferdinand is reported

to have said in the middle of the shipwreck in The Tempest, i.e.“Hell is empty,/ and all the devils

are here” (1.2.214-15). As has been noted by many scholars (Steggle 2010: n 2535, Maison

Vaughan 117), the phrase “quaint device” used by Quicksands to define the practice of black

make-up as in Venice also recurs in the stage direction of The Tempest (3.3.53) to describe the

vanishing of Ariel’s banquet. This is no coincidence since the play is also deeply concerned with

alterity by virtue of the presence of the savage Caliban, called by his master a “thing of darkness”

(5.1.278).

Moreover, the scene set in the Devil Tavern has a strategic position in the unfolding of the action:

it is placed right in the middle of play as a sort of ‘watershed’ which divides white from black

(after this scene Millicent and Phillis have black make-up) and recalls many issues developed in

the previous scene, such as Millicent’s transformation into a black Moor, the idea of otherness

related to a secret in Quicksands’s past, namely the existence of a disabled son hidden in Norfolk.

At the beginning of the scene, we immediately realize that we are inside the Devil Tavern looking

at the sign of the tavern, which represents the devil reassuming his true shape (he changes from a

beautiful woman to a black monster), hanging over the stage. “Some sixteenth-century Court

plays appear to have used both title and locality boards” (Gurr180) often in the form of inn signs,

to establish the location. In this case, it also reminds the audience of Millicent’s and Phillis’s

transformation into black Moors, which is the main point of the plot. The womanizer Nathaniel

with his friends Vincent and Edmund meet Quicksands’s ex-servant Buzzard at the Devil Tavern,

where they try to figure out about what happened to Millicent, the usurer’s wife. Even if they do

not succeed in obtaining any information about Millicent, they are unexpectedly told that

Quicksands is the father of Timsy, a 27-year-old mentally disabled illegitimate child who has

been hidden “in the further side of Norfolk” (3.2.529). This dark secret reveals such weakness in

the usurer that the gallants decide to be revenged against him by working out a plan that will

prove no less devilish than his. Therefore, otherness, in its double form of Africa and Norfolk, is

deeply connected to the idea of blackness and all its implications. The darkness of Africa with its

black-skinned inhabitants and the darkness of Norfolk, at the outskirts of the “fairest nation”

(4.5.792), both remain somehow neglected and unknown.

If the relevance of this scene actually lies in the strong iconographic and symbolic value of the

Devil Tavern, the value is its being set in an anonymous tavern. In act 5, scene 1, Brome takes

stock of the situation both for the characters on stage and the audience, giving details of previous

events and introducing characters unknown to the public. Actually, within the familiar place of

the inn run by a reliable old friend, Meanwell, Rashley and Winloss (Phillis’s father) reappear

after a long absence in order to confide in the host by telling him what they had been doing for the

past years:

Now, my good host, since you have been our friend and only counsel-keeper

in our absence, to you, before we visit our own houses, we’ll render a

relation of our journey and what the motive was that drew us forth. ’Tis true,

we did pretend a deadly quarrel at a great bowling match upon Blackheath;

went off; took horse; and several ways, forecast to meet at Dover, where we

met good friends, and in one bark passed over into France: here, ’twas

supposed, to fight, like fashion-followers that thither fly, as if no sand but

theirs could dry up English blood.

(5.1.916)

These words reproduce the basic binary black and white of the play: the place where they agreed

to meet is Dover, famous for its white cliffs, whereas the name of Blackheath, where they

pretended to have killed each other, recalls blackness. On the other hand, there is also a hint at the

Englishness-otherness contrast through the reference to English blood and France, to Dover

which faces France (later on, there is a reference to Dunkirk, in the north of France) and

Blackheath, which is the place where Henry V was welcomed after the battle of Agincourt in

1415 during the Hundred Years’ War.

The two tavern scenes are so relevant in symbolic terms because they mirror the dichotomy that

characterizes the play. On the one hand, the renowned Devil Tavern which hints at Millicent’s

transformation into a black Moor and is ‘haunted’ by the immortal spirit of the recently deceased

Ben Jonson; on the other, an ‘obscure’ inn, without a name, not frequented by famous clients but

which puts on stage some characters believed to be dead, yet still alive. Nevertheless it is in this

anonymous inn that Brome starts the denouement of the play which will lead to the final

punishment of the devilish usurer Quicksands and the reappearance of the white Millicent.

5. Conclusion: a masque of whiteness

The way in which Brome uses a black face as a theatrical device to vehicle a cultural ideology

about otherness is new in terms of sexual politics, gender, art and race. What makes the issue

more complex is that, actually, Brome does not stage real otherness but uses the theatrical device

of the disguise and of the play-within-the-play to satirize his audience’s prejudices in the area of

ethnic difference by highlighting the pervasive phobia of blacks at the time. He also wishes to

subvert common clichés about the conventional meanings of black and white: the former being

related to lasciviousness, evil, cultural and social inferiority, lack of moral values, while the latter

was regarded as the epitome of virtue and moral superiority. Brome’s stage is full of English

Moors, to be metaphorically comprehended by the reader / spectator as morally unsound, white

English characters, like the usurer Quicksands whose jealousy recalls not only that of Othello and

Nathaniel, but also that of Dionysia, the revengeful virago, and that of Phillis, the English Moor of the

title. This may suggest an integration of the two communities through the revelation of a

symbolic co-existence of black and white in the same characters. Yet, the English Moor is a

(mere) figment since none of the Moors are real black people. This integration movement is

brought to a halt at the end of The English Moor, when the characters put off their masks. They

are all Londoners who have performed their own play on otherness, their ‘Masque of Blackness’,

within the boundaries of the city of London.

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