Birthing a Nation: Jonson’s Black Shakespearean Masque
Arts West Bld - North Wing (Building 148A), Melbourne
When
Where
Arts West Bld - North Wing (Building 148A), Melbourne
About
Recent criticism of Ben Jonson’s A Masque of Blackness (1605) has generally focused on a racial blackness in early seventeenth-century Britain, but this presentation argues that these readings, while compelling, under-appreciate not only the aesthetics and humanistic politics of Jonson’s white-nation-making but how he interpolates Shakespeare to be a part of it. Join Professor Arthur L. Little, Jr, from University of California at Los Angeles and co-editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, as he re-appreciates these complexities for the 2026 Ian Donaldson Memorial Lecture.
Source: whatson.melbourne.vic.gov.au