“A beauty not so whitely”: Anne Boleyn and the Optics of Race

On 20 October 2020, Variety magazine announced a forthcoming psychological drama about Anne Boleyn’s downfall, featuring the star of “Queen & Slim,” Jodie Turner-Smith.¹ The announcement caused a stir online, primarily because Turner-Smith, a Black actress, was cast as Anne Boleyn. What followed was an onslaught of tweets, ranging from enthusiasm and skepticism to explicit racism. Most of the objections to this casting called for a more “accurate” representation of Anne Boleyn. Yet, historical accounts suggest Anne’s coloring was problematic in terms of its whiteness and her contemporaries used signifiers of “otherness” to describe her. While early modern scholars, when they have noticed it at all, have read this “color” rhetoric in sixteenth-century sources in terms of Anne’s foreignness, rather than her skin color, they have largely ignored the role that and colorism played in provoking suspicious, hostile, and sexualized depictions of her. This essay explores the role Anne Boleyn plays in Tudor race-making, then and now, and in the case of Jodie-Turner Smith, the politics of color-conscious casting and racial provocation. My goal is to show how Anne’s contemporaries marked her as distinct from an English whiteness and how colorism shapes an ongoing fascination with the Tudors, informing both popular representation and academic scholarship.

Anne Boleyn, the woman for whom King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and whom he eventually executed, has become the most famous of Henry’s six wives. Here I want to emphasize the path that led her to Henry’s court because her upbringing played a large role in the way Anne was differentiated from women in the Tudor court. The daughter of an English diplomat, Anne was educated in the Netherlands, but she left the Habsburg court in 1514 to become a lady-in-waiting to Mary Tudor, the Queen Consort of France and Henry’s sister. By 1521, she had returned to England, where she eventually caught Henry’s eye. When Henry began courting Anne he was still married to Catherine of Aragon. Gossip about Anne quickly spread within the Tudor court and beyond, painting her as an exotic woman whose dark features were non-English.² While Anne dazzled the Tudor court with her intelligence, wit, and personality, those traits were also associated with France. One of Anne’s contemporaries, Lancelot de Carles, claimed that “no one would ever have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman.”³ This emphasis on foreignness persists in representations of Anne across various media.⁴ Anne’s French upbringing and manners continue to be the primary way of differentiating her from other English-born women at the Tudor court.

While her associations with France were indeed important to how Anne was described and distinguished from other women at the Tudor court, conversations about her skin color were used to distance her from English whiteness. According to George Wyatt’s Life of Queen Anne Boleigne,⁵ Anne was “taken at that time to have a beauty not so whitely as clear and fresh above all we may esteem, which appeared much more excellent by her favour passing sweet and cheerful.”⁶ Wyatt’s claim that Anne was beautiful even though she was “not so whitely,” tells us that her coloring was darker than was typically considered attractive and yokes aesthetic value to whiteness. Even though George Wyatt did not personally see or meet Anne, he was privy to personal details about Anne because he was the grandson of Thomas Wyatt, which is why any commentary he offers about Anne seems particularly important. Although Anne did not meet the standards of a quintessential English rose, Wyatt insists that her cheerful personality enhanced her appeal, as though her skin color is an impediment that can be easily overlooked in favor of her French upbringing and mannerisms.

However, that does not mean that Anne’s contemporaries completely ignored her skin color, as is evidenced by how they frequently remarked upon it. Venetian diplomat Francesco Sanuto wrote that Anne was “not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, a bosom not much raised and eyes which are black and beautiful.” ((Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 40–1.)) According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to be swarthy is to be of a dark hue; Black or Blackish; dusky.⁷ This term was regularly used to describe non-European Others, including Julia from Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, who is referred to as a “swarthy Ethiope.”⁸ Sanuto’s description of Anne is similar to Wyatt’s in that they both note the darkness of her skin in order to demonstrate that she was not a great beauty. Unlike Wyatt’s flowery description of Anne’s overall appearance and personality, Sanuto’s description is an assessment of specific physical attributes. Anne was also called “sallow,” which refers to an unhealthy coloring, and Simon Grynée described her complexion as “rather dark.” From these accounts it seems almost certain that Anne did not have the alabaster skin often associated with early modern conventions of beauty.⁹

Yet Anne is most recognizable to us today in the famous Holbein painting, where her skin is very white.¹⁰ This portrait of Anne is controversial because it is most likely based on a contemporary portrait which no longer survives, which means her skin color in the painting is a projection of how later generations thought Anne might have looked or demonstrates the tradition of using cosmetics to achieve whiteness.¹¹ According to the National Portrait Gallery, Anne Boleyn is associated with twenty-six portraits, all of which were created in the late sixteenth century or later.¹² Ireland’s National Portrait Gallery has a portrait of Anne where her skin is even whiter than the portrait of Anne in the Gallery in London. Perhaps posthumous portraits whitened Anne to make her seem ghostly dead; we can also consider whether Anne’s skin color in these paintings has been influenced by depictions of Elizabeth I, whose skin also appears extremely white, whether intentionally or due to paint fading over time. While the visual record of Anne (largely from after her death) appears to emphasize her whiteness, eyewitnesses contemporary to her consistently mention the darkness of her skin. Despite the fact that several of these reliable accounts of Anne’s dark skin survive, that evidence has not been thoroughly interrogated.¹³

Anne’s perceived somatic darkness does not mean she was a woman of color, but I would maintain that her “not so whitely” skin and dark features are a part of a system of race-making in sixteenth-century England. After considering all the evidence about Anne’s appearance, historian Eric Ives concludes that “all reports agree that Anne was dark.”¹⁴ Thomas Wyatt referred to her as the “brunet,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a person having a dark complexion.”¹⁵ Several people in the Tudor court also commented on her “magnificent dark hair” and “eyes which were black and beautiful.”¹⁴ Even though the emphasis on Anne’s hair and eye color might not necessarily align with a modern emphasis on skin color as determinative of racial identity, as Kim F. Hall demonstrates in her germinal book Things of Darkness, the overlap of tropes of dark and light, with categories of undesirable and desirable, English and foreign, helped to reinforce an emerging racialized standard of beauty in the early modern period. In particular, Hall challenges a critical tradition that separates eye and skin color from race or ethnicity. As she argues, “to insist on blackness solely as hair color … ignores the fact that modern Western notions of race were developing at the very moment of the first contact between ‘white’ European and his dark others.”¹⁶ Hall’s reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets is “based on the premise that ‘dark ladies’ of the sonnets are at least in part the literary cousins of the foreign women encountered in travel narratives and that they have the same subject position.”¹⁷ Similarly to the dark lady in the sonnets, Anne is praised for her unfashionable dark beauty, and her darkness links her to non-Englishness.¹⁸ Although some of Anne’s admirers seem to have appreciated her darker features, a number of Anne’s contemporaries, particularly detractors such as Thomas Wolsey, articulated clearly that, for them, darkness and beauty were incompatible.

Marking and remarking upon Anne’s appearance, then and now, contributes to a racializing of her. As Patricia Akhimie points out, “the language of ‘marking’ –  observing, interpreting, remarking, labeling – succeeds in branding, permanently marking its objects.”¹⁹ Descriptions of Anne Boleyn as “swarthy” and “the night crow,” as Wolsey referred to her, are racialized markers that distinguish Anne from the white, English beauties at court. Jealous of her increasing wealth and position and fearful of shifting political alliances caused by her growing intimacy with Henry, Anne’s contemporaries went to great lengths to criticize Anne by critiquing her physical appearance. When it comes to Anne’s skin color, however, as I have just shown, both her friends and allies seemed to agree she was not-quite white or English enough.²⁰ Physical descriptions of Anne are especially important when we think about the juxtaposition between Anne and Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. While Catherine, who was born in Spain and spoke heavily accented English, was a foreigner, she also had the light skin and hair that were favored at the time.²¹ Anne, on the other hand, even though she was born in England, was what Francesca Royster refers to as the “stranger or foreigner from within” even though she was born in England.²² Royster posits that the “attention to the variations of whiteness…has the power to take us from the black/white dichotomies into white/white relations and a host of contexts that arise within them.”²³ Anne provides an interesting example of “the variations of whiteness” that existed in the Tudor court, particularly because we see both the Black/white dichotomies and the white/white relations in the ways she is depicted by her contemporaries.

Given the criticism Anne received because of the color of her skin, it should be no surprise that her daughter, Elizabeth I, went to great lengths to symbolize herself through whiteness.²⁴ Lancelot de Carles notes that when Elizabeth was born “it was remarked how fair she was, taking after her father rather than her mother.²⁵ By the time Elizabeth was twenty-three years old, however, her pallor had changed. Giacomo Soranzo, the Ventian ambassador to France, wrote that Elizabeth was “a young woman, whose mind is considered no less excellent (bello) than her person, although her face is comely (gratiosa) rather than handsome, but she is tall and well formed, with a good skin, although swarthy (ancorchè olivastra).”²⁶ Soranzo’s description of Elizabeth sounds similar to the way her mother was described, especially when it comes to her swarthy skin. It seems that Elizabeth’s reasons for aligning herself with her father’s image were not only gendered but raced.

The development of Anne’s posthumous racialization in popular representations was a long process, beginning in 1613 with William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s King Henry VIII (All is True).²⁷ In fact, Anne becomes the center of attention during one of the most spectacular coronation scenes ever to grace the stage.²⁸ As she passes the crowd an onlooker, referred to as “Second Gentleman,” says:

Thou hast the sweetest face I have ever look’d on.
Sir, as I have a soul, she is an angel;
Our king has all the Indies in his arms,
And more and richer, when he strains that lady:
I cannot blame his conscience. (4.1.43-47)

These comments about Anne quickly escalate from admiration to desire, as the gentleman first praises Anne’s angelic beauty and then imagines her in the throes of passion with the king. The Second Gentleman’s eroticization of Anne racializes her as well by referring to her as a commodity from the “Indies,” to be counted amongst the king’s riches. Kim F. Hall reminds us that “in a culture and class in which women are literally connected to wealth through the exchange of dowry and portion, it is not surprising that the ultimately desirable sonnet mistress is directly associated with worlds of wealth, having ruby lips, pearly teeth, and eyes like diamonds.”²⁹ Hall refers here to the sonnet mistress praised in so many blazons as an assemblage of objects, and that Shakespeare parodies in his famous anti-blazon, sonnet 130. Anne is reminiscent of this ideal because of her association with riches and dreams of resource extraction, already linked with the Indies from a British perspective. Yet, like the sonnet mistress, she is also a paradox, praised both for her association with the Indies and for her fairness, a standard of beauty associated explicitly with whiteness. During their first meeting, Henry chooses Anne as his dancing partner and exclaims, “The fairest hand I ever touch’d! O beauty / Till now I never knew thee? ”³⁰ Hall reminds us that the connection between whiteness and beauty is important in dynastic culture. So it makes sense that Anne’s fairness is most notably mentioned when she meets Henry for the first time, and again later during her coronation: moments when she is on display.³¹ Shakespeare and Fletcher set up a template for later popular representations of Anne where she will be white-washed.

Whereas Anne’s contemporaries remarked on her darker skin color and often underscore her foreignness, writers after her death, and particularly those writing at the time her daughter was on the throne, made efforts to disarticulate her foreignness from color.³² All of that changed in October 2020, when Variety announced that actress Jodie Turner-Smith would play the role of Anne Boleyn in a forthcoming psychological thriller by Fable Pictures. The prospect of a dark-skinned Black woman playing Anne Boleyn upset a lot of people. Some of the criticism against casting Black actors in Tudor historical dramas is rooted in an inaccurate and racist belief that people of color and Black people, specifically, did not exist in Tudor England. Scholars of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS), a term created by Margo Hendricks, regularly lament how, often, critics will use accusations of anachronism³³ to discredit conversations about the premodern period and race.³⁴ There were Black people and people of color in the early modern period and we see their portraits, find traces of them in the archive, and know about them because of work by scholars such as Imtiaz Habib, Kim F. Hall, Margo Hendricks, and Onyeka Nubia (to name a few).³⁵ Academics (and scholars of color, in particular) have been writing and producing scholarship about people of color in the early modern period for decades, but that research doesn’t always make its way to broader publics. The general public might not be as familiar with academic scholarship, but they might have heard of Olivette Otele’s African Europeans or Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors, two critically acclaimed trade books that challenge the centrality of whiteness in the Tudor period. Diversifying the picture of Tudor England makes good archival sense. It gives us a more complete picture of what life was like in the Tudor period, as well as the various cross-cultural encounters that influenced life at court.

Another way of diversifying our understanding of the past is to cast people of color in period dramas. Until recently, Tudor period dramas rarely included any actors of color, giving audiences the impression that people of color simply did not exist in the period or if they did exist, they would not have had prominent positions at court or would not have been at court at all.³⁶ The creative teams behind recent period dramas have begun to cast more actors of color by using more inclusive casting practices, like color-conscious casting.³⁷ This is different from what used to be (and still sometimes is) called color-blind casting.³⁸ Color-conscious casting “acknowledges the impact casting decisions have on individual characters, their relationships, and the play as a whole. This casting practice recognizes that theatre audiences are not only aware of race onstage, but that their experience of both the production and institution can and will be affected by it.”³⁹ Color-conscious casting provides opportunities for actors of color to participate in a wider variety of stories and in the case of Tudor period dramas, it invites us to imagine the complexities of race and racial difference in the past. The decision to cast Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn challenges our assumptions about “historical authenticity” and the role that visual culture has played in shaping those assumptions.

However, many people think they know about Anne Boleyn because of the visual representations they have seen and they balk at seeing those representations change. In an interview for The Independent, Turner-Smith responded to backlash and talked about how “Hamilton is a really great example of how amazing it is when you just open up the space to tell a story with non-white actors. It makes that story that much more relatable, because it just becomes a human story and a story for all of us. Not just a story for white people.”⁴⁰ She went on to say that she hoped people would watch the show “with an open heart and an open mind. When they do [that], they’ll see that when we put characters of colour in stories where we’ve typically only seen white people, it is not in some effort to erase white people, which is not possible.”⁴¹ Despite Turner-Smith’s hopes, several people continued to criticize the casting in the comments on her interview online.⁴² The majority of criticism about Turner-Smith’s casting was predicated on claims about historical accuracy and a desire to preserve Anne Boleyn’s whiteness. One commenter insisted that Anne Boleyn “deserves the respect of being portrayed accurately, starting with the fact that she was white” and another said “I feel this is one special role, that she could have left alone. Queen Anne Boleyn was white, there I said it-end of. Historic fact. A constructive historic observation and nothing at all to do with racism.”⁴¹ While the commentators’ focus on Anne Boleyn makes sense since she is the main character of the miniseries, they did not mention disapproval towards any of the other actors of color who were also playing white historical figures. The cast includes several actors of color, yet Turner-Smith, the darkest actress on the show, was the primary target of racist attacks online.⁴³ These attacks could be considered an example of misogynoir – a term created by Moya Bailey to refer to the misogyny directed towards Black women in visual and popular culture – and they are becoming increasingly common within fandoms when Black actors are cast in traditionally white roles.⁴⁴ The Anne Boleyn enthusiasts who reacted most negatively to the casting news seem to have a vested interest in protecting and preserving the idea of white womanhood. But as Turner-Smith aptly noted, no amount of color-conscious casting can actually erase whiteness and, more importantly, erasure is not the point of color-conscious casting. We can appreciate British history and heritage while also imagining what it would have been like if the Tudor court was more diverse and Henry VIII had a queen by his side.

This was not the first time that a woman of color played Anne Boleyn. In response to tweets calling for more accurate representation, Owen Emmerson noted that Merle Oberon was the first BAME⁴⁵ actress to play Anne in 1933.⁴⁶ In the years since Oberon’s portrayal, Anne has been played by white actresses, some of whom did not fit the physical descriptions of Anne in historical records. Natalie Dormer is still celebrated for her performance as Anne in Showtime’s The Tudors (2007-2010), despite having blue eyes instead of the brown eyes Anne was so famous for. The charge of anachronism so often used as an excuse to deny the existence of people of color in the Tudor period isn’t lodged against Dormer, notably; as long as the skin color is “right,” other attributes (brown eyes, black hair, full lips etc.) are not remarked on. Claims of inaccuracy and anachronism have to ignore archival evidence in the service of an investment in an all-white past, which is itself an inaccuracy. The language of beauty is always tinged with colorism and Turner-Smith’s casting foregrounds that fact when we consider the descriptions of Anne by her contemporaries.⁴⁷ There is value in casting a Black actor as Anne Boleyn, not because the historical Anne was Black, but because challenging her depiction as an emblem of whiteness enables us to see part of the archival record we have suppressed and allows us to imagine the colorism attached to Anne Boleyn’s historical body.⁴⁸

In our desire to know more about Anne Boleyn, we too have made her the subject of the white gaze, intentionally or otherwise. When asked about their forthcoming miniseries, the creative directors of Fable Pictures, Faye Ward and Hannah Farrell, said, “We feel that history has side-lined the voice of this ambitious queen in favour of the men who brought her down, and that Lynsey Miller’s beautiful, intimate vision will put Anne’s gaze at the heart of the piece.”⁴⁹ Whether or not this filmed historical drama lives up to its promises will be determined by the film’s audience, but one thing is for certain: a narrative that centers Anne by emphasizing her voice and placing her gaze at the heart of the show is too tempting to ignore, particularly when what the audience sees is an Anne performed by a Black actress. The historical advisor of the series, Dan Jones, acknowledged public response to Turner-Smith’s casting as Anne Boleyn by saying that he knew “from social media that a few people have found it difficult to process. But it is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Everyone knows the real Anne Boleyn was white. But we’re making a drama, and historical drama is about reinventing old stories to ask questions about the modern world.”⁵⁰ Yes, Anne Boleyn was deemed white, but as I have argued throughout this essay, her whiteness was constantly under scrutiny. Jones’s assertion about what “everyone knows” is more indebted to a history of popular representation than to archival evidence.

Anne Boleyn offers a new and important depiction of queenship and seeing a dark-skinned Black woman as Henry VIII’s wife does a lot of the work in revising the public imaginary by challenging beauty standards and highlighting sexual politics at court. Aware of the visual power of a Black queen onscreen, Turner-Smith wanted her Anne Boleyn to have Afro-textured hair and to wear a bonnet when she slept. When asked about those creative choices she replied, “I just felt like, when we have the opportunity to tell a story and we’re gonna do identity-conscious casting and cast somebody who’s not white, then why don’t we add the nuances of a person who’s not white? That means not European hair, having kinkier hair and styling that and seeing that life.”⁵¹ Resisting European beauty standards to provide a more accurate portrayal of a Black woman is an important choice and Turner-Smith insisted on embodying and performing Anne as non-white. While Turner-Smith emphasizes her embodiment of Anne as racialized in interviews, the show itself does not explicitly discuss the queen’s race or racial politics at court and instead focuses on sexual politics. For example, we see the physical realities of miscarrying a pregnancy and the toll it takes on Anne’s physical body when she wakes up to find her breasts lactating and is reminded once more of her painful loss.⁵² While Anne is convalescing, she realizes that Jane Seymour is supplanting her in Henry’s affections, so she forces herself into a corset so that she can show Henry she is recovered and sexually available. Anne risks her health to put herself back into sexual competition with Jane before she is fully healed. After ignoring both her lady Madge and her brother George’s concerns about her health, Anne falters as she walks out of her chambers and the camera slowly pans down to the floor, where spots of blood lie in her wake. Turner-Smith’s powerful portrayal of motherhood and loss is a good example of the ways the show tells the story from Anne’s perspective, as the directors had hope to do. However, the connection between Turner-Smith’s Blackness and the focus on her body is a missed opportunity to consider both the sexual and racial politics at court. Acknowledging Anne’s Blackness would highlight important aspects of the historical Anne’s story, like how she was viewed as an outsider despite being English-born and the challenges of navigating life at court while her husband openly courted Jane Seymour, a woman historically known for having much whiter skin than Anne.

Although Anne Boleyn offers a new depiction of Black queenship, it also reveals the limitations of color-conscious casting. The show does not explicitly acknowledge or discuss race at all, relying on visual representation, and especially Turner-Smith’s skin color, to do all the work. Olivette Otele also notes this missed opportunity and how she was “riveted by the lack of reference to slavery and the refusal to attempt to explain why the queen was not the expected English rose.”⁵³ Turner-Smith’s portrayal has implications for our thinking about a racialized Anne; however the lack of reference to race or slavery throughout the series puts into question whether audiences are supposed to view the performance as that of a Black queen, or merely a Black woman playing the part of a white queen.⁵⁴ The overall lack of diversity in period dramas makes any form of diversity seem groundbreaking and in some ways, it is, which is the problem. While commenting on color-conscious casting in historical drama and how television and film are slowly catching up to casting in theatre, Jones emphasizes that, “In our show Anne Boleyn is played by Jodie and the whole cast is racially diverse. The thinking is simple: you cast the actor who connects most with the spirit and essence of the character.”⁵⁵ On the one hand, it is great to see more representation in performances of historical dramas and color-conscious casting makes that possible. On the other hand, casting a Black woman as Anne Boleyn, a queen who was falsely accused of adultery, incest, and subsequently beheaded, is not as radical as Jones, or even those who oppose this casting, might think. It would have been more politically efficacious of a move if the show didn’t also sexualize Anne, which ends up playing into a troubled history of degrading Black women by overly sexualizing them.

In my work, I discuss the ways that Anne has been hypersexualized and the Anne Boleyn miniseries continues and further problematizes that trend.⁵⁶ While engaging in pillow talk about Thomas Cromwell, Henry tells Anne that Cromwell is “not the only one whose bite is to be feared.”⁵⁷ As Anne is straddling Henry she replies, “And yet you remain such a gentle master. One would think you enjoy being bitten” and grips his hair, yanks his head back, and then bites him on the chin. When Henry responds by panting with excitement before they start kissing, it is evident that Anne’s assertiveness arouses him. Anne appears to be the initiator of sexual encounters with Henry, including visiting his bedchamber while she is heavily pregnant and rousing him from sleep by choking him before he eventually performs oral sex on her. When portrayed in a television series by a Black woman, the character of Anne Boleyn remains hypersexualized and this hypersexualization reads differently because she is Black. The spectacle of a Black-appearing, hypersexualized queen plays into harmful tropes without fully reckoning with how it might be interpreted by audiences.⁵⁸

In the hundreds of years since Anne Boleyn’s death, she continues to be a subject of interest and intrigue. But perhaps we can shift the conversation, rather than recycling the most familiar and damagingly racist and sexist tropes. My hope is that this article, and the television show that inspired it, will encourage us to reconsider how we talk about Anne and the ways in which she is represented in popular culture today. Reassessing the archival evidence of Anne’s racialization creates new opportunities for reimagining Anne (and the Tudors) in popular culture and opens the door for more nuanced depictions of race and representation in Tudor period dramas. By making room for these new interpretations, we can diversify the field: an expansive act that can contribute to a richer understanding of the way we think about historical figures, like Anne Boleyn, and the world she lived in.

Author’s note: This essay would not be possible without the scholars who have been at the forefront of Premodern Critical Race Studies, including Kim F. Hall, Margo Hendricks, Arthur J. Little Jr, Joyce Green MacDonald, Ayanna Thompson, and Peter Erickson. They have not only paved the way in the field but have also created spaces for scholars of color to learn, thrive, and grow. The RaceB4Race and #ShakeRace communities have been a constant source of support and inspiration and I feel lucky to be a part of such a brilliant and vibrant group of scholars. I am grateful for the support of Professor Frances Dolan, who shepherded this work into the essay you are reading today and is an incredibly supportive mentor. I would also like to thank Margo Hendricks, Ambereen Dadhaboy, Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Jessica Hamlet, Breanne Weber, Samuel Pizelo, and the Race-ing Queens seminar participants at Shakespeare Association of America 2020 for reading drafts of this essay and helping me think through my ideas. Lastly, I would like to thank the editors of this special collection for including my work, the peer reviewers who offered me such generous feedback, and the copy editors for their hard work.

Works Cited

“Anne Boleyn.” National Portrait Gallery. http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp00109/anne-boleyn.

Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.

Allen-Flanagan, Tara. “The Face of an Empire: Cosmetics and Whiteness in Imperial Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I.” Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal, vol. 3, no. 1 (2020).

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York: New York University Press, 2021.

Calendar of State Papers, Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice. Vol. 6, 1555-1558. May 1557, 11–15.

Chapman, Matthieu. Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other.” Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.

Dolan, Frances E. “Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England. PMLA, vol. 108, no. 2, 1993 224.

Emerson, Owen (@MowenEmmerson). “To everyone freaking out about the prospect of a black actor playing Anne Boleyn, just a gentle reminder that first BAME woman to play Anne was back in 1933 – by Merle Oberon who was of Indian/ Polynesian descent – and like Jodie Turner-Smith undoubtedly will, she totally rocked.” Twitter, 30 October 2020, 7:43a.m. https://twitter.com/mowenemmerson/status/1322187453776744453?lang=en

Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso, 2022.

Frost, Emma and Matthew Graham. The Spanish Princess. Created by Emma Frost, and Matthew Graham, Starz, 2019.

Gregory, Philippa. The Boleyn Inheritance. Miami: Atria, 2019.

_____. The Other Boleyn Girl. New York: Harper Collins, 2018.      

Habib, Imtiaz H. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1676: Imprints of the Invisible. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008.

Hachimi, Yasmine. “‘I have perused her well’: Popular Culture’s Appropriation and Hypersexualization of Anne Boleyn.” Shakespeare: Between Performance and Appropriation. Edited by Louise Geddes, Kathryn Santos, and Geoffrey Way. Forthcoming.

Hall, Kim F. “Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 4, 1996: 461.

_____. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Hendricks, Margo. “Margo Hendricks ⁠⁠– Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race.” RaceB4Race: Race and Periodization Symposium, September 2019. Folger Shakespeare Library, July 8, 2020. www.folger.edu/institute/scholarly-programs/race-periodization/margo-hendricks.

Hirst, Michael. The Tudors. Showtime, 2007.

Howard, Jean E. “An English Lass Amid the Moors: Gender, race, sexuality, and national identity in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West.” In Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, 101–17 (London, Routledge, 1994).

Hussein, Waris, director. Henry VIII and His Six Wives. Anglo-EMI (UK), Levitt-Pickman (US), 1972.

Ives, E.W. The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: ‘the Most Happy.’ Hoboken: Blackwell Pub., 2009.

Jones, Dan. “Anne Boleyn: The New Drama Modernising History.” The Big Issue, May 30, 2021, www.bigissue.com/culture/film-tv-radio/anne-boleyn-the-new-drama-modernising-history/.

Kafantaris, Mira. “Protestant Purity and the Anxieties of Cultural Mixing in William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII” in The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare Queens. Edited by Kavita Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Karim-Cooper, Farah, host. “How Whiteness dominates the study of Shakespeare.”#SuchStuff, Season 6, Episode 2, The Globe Theatre Podcast, Season 6, Episode 2, 20 August, 2020, https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-and-features/2020/08/20/suchstuff-s6-e2-how-whiteness-dominates-the-study-of-shakespeare/

_____. Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Kaufmann, Miranda. Black Tudors: An Untold Story. London: Oneworld Publications, 2018.

Lathrop, Emily. “For Everybody: Casting, Race, and Audience Engagement in The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit.” In Shakespeare’s Audiences. Edited by Matteo A. Pangallo and Peter Kirwan, 212–213. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021.

Legardye, Quinci. “Jodie Turner-Smith on Becoming Anne Boleyn.” Harper’s Bazaar, December 19, 2021. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a38474875/jodie-turner-smith-anne-boleyn-interview/.

 Longshore, Katherine. Gilt. New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

_____. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Mantel, Hilary. Bring up the Bodies: A Novel: Book Two of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy (Wolf Hall Trilogy, 2). New York and London: Picador, 2013.

_____. Wolf Hall: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010. 

Norton, Elizabeth. The Anne Boleyn Papers. Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2013.

Nubia, Onyeka. Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, Their Presence, Status and Origins. Narrative Eye, 2014.

O’Connor, Roisoin. “Jodie Turner-Smith Responds to Anne Boleyn Casting Backlash.” The Independent, April 29, 2021. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/jodie-turner-smith-black-anne-boleyn-b1839822.html.

Otele, Olivette. African Europeans: An Untold History. New York: Basic Books/Hachette Book Group, Inc., 2021.

_____. “Rise of a Black Queen: Jodie Turner-Smith’s ‘Anne Boleyn’ forces us to rethink our expectations.” The Independent, May 31, 2021. https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/long-reads/anne-boleyn-jodie-turner-smith-b1852709.html.

Prescott, Amanda-Rae. Amanda’s Period Drama & Anglophile Discourse, https://amandaraeprescott.com/.

Ramachandran, Naman. “‘Queen & Slim’ Actor Jodie Turner-Smith to Play Queen Anne Boleyn in Channel 5 Series.” Variety, October 20, 2020. https://www.yahoo.com/video/queen-slim-actor-jodie-turner-100211346.html.

Raman, Shankar. Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Royster, Francesca T. “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 4, 2000: 432–55.

Shahani, Gitanjali. Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020.

Shakespeare, William, and William C. Carroll. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015.

Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher. King Henry VIII:(All is True). London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015.

Stitch. Stitch’s Media Mix, https://stitchmediamix.com/.

Thompson, Ayanna. Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

1. This three-part TV miniseries was produced by Fable Pictures for UK broadcaster Channel 5 and aired on AMC in the United States. [↩]
2. Catherine’s name is spelled differently in different places. I have chosen to use “Catherine” when referring to the historical Catherine of Aragon and “Katherine” when discussing the character in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s King Henry VIII (All is True). [↩]
3. E.W Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: ‘the Most Happy,’ (Hoboken: Blackwell Pub., 2009),9. [↩]
4. Anne’s Frenchness is highlighted in subsequent appropriations, from historical fiction by Philippa Gregory and Hilary Mantel, to historical dramas like Showtime’s The Tudors. Katherine Longshore’s Gilt is one of the few historical novels to discuss the way Anne was treated by Tudor courtiers because of her darker skin color. [↩]
5. Wyatt wrote the Life of Queen Anne Boleigne in response to Nicholas Sander’s attack on Anne Boleyn in 1585. The text is incomplete and was last printed in 1825. [↩]
6. Norton, The Anne Boleyn Papers, 21. [↩]
7. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “swarthy (adj.),” Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com. January 11, 2021. [↩]
8. William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, (2.6.26). I use the Arden Shakespeare throughout this essay, unless otherwise noted. [↩]
9. For more on early modern conventions of beauty, see the work of Frances Dolan, Kim F. Hall, and Farah Karim-Cooper. [↩]
10. “Anne Boleyn.” National Portrait Gallery, www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp00109/anne-boleyn. [↩]
11. There is scant scholarship on Anne’s skin color in portraits. [↩]
12. Although Anne was believed to be the subject of these portraits, several of them have been renamed to “Unknown woman formerly known as Anne Boleyn.” [↩]
13. Eric Ives, Amy Licence, and Susan Bordo briefly mention Anne’s dark skin in their historical and cultural biographies of her. [↩]
14. Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 40. [↩] [↩]
15. Oxford English Dictionary Online, “brunet (n. and adj.)” Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com. January 11, 2021. [↩]
16. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998),71. [↩]
17. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, 64. [↩]
18. We see more depictions of Anne as an exotic, foreign woman in seventeenth-century drama. [↩]
19. Patricia Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020),49. [↩]
20. It is important to note that although many of Anne’s contemporaries resided in the Tudor court, many were foreign dignitaries and/or had ties to other courts and countries and therefore had political reasons for discrediting Anne. [↩]
21. For more on Katherine of Aragon in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s King Henry VIII (All is True), see Mira Kafantaris, “Protestant Purity and the Anxieties of Cultural Mixing in William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII” in The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare Queens, eds. Kavita Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). [↩]
22. Francesca T. Royster, “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 4, 2000: 434. [↩]
23. Royster, “White-Limed Walls,” 434. [↩]
24. For more on Elizabeth’s whiteness, see Tara Allen-Flanagan’s “The Face of an Empire: Cosmetics and Whiteness in Imperial Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I”; Jean Howard’s “An English Lass Amid the Moors: Gender, race, sexuality, and national identity in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West“; and Peter Erickson’s Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England. [↩]
25. Lancelot De Carles, ‘De la royne d’Angleterre’, in Ascoli, L’Opinion. [↩]
26. Calendar of State Papers, Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice. Vol. 6, 1555-1558. May 1557, 11–15. [↩]
27. William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII (All is True)(London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015),9. [↩]
28. The Arden Shakespeare cites this scene as one of the only onstage reenactments of a royal coronation. [↩]
29. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, 80. For more on the Indies in the Early Modern period, see Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness, as well as the work of Shankar Raman, Gitanjali Shahani, and Ania Loomba. [↩]
30. William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII (All is True)(London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015),263. [↩]
31. During their first meeting, Henry chooses Anne as his dancing partner and exclaims, “The fairest hand I ever touch’d! O beauty / Till now I never knew thee?” (Shakespeare Henry VIII 1.4.75-76). The Third Gentleman recalls how Anne “cast her fair eyes to Heaven and pray’d devoutly” during her coronation (Shakespeare, Henry VIII, 4.1.84). [↩]
32. We see more depictions of Anne as an exotic, foreign woman in seventeenth-century drama, like Elizabeth Cary’s the Tragedy of Mariam and John Banks’s Virtue Betray’d. [↩]
33. Matthieu Chapman argues that “The impulse to avoid retrofitting contemporary notions of race onto Early Modern England, while correct in its intentions, has caused two important critical slippages in the field of Early Modern English race studies. The first is that it has led to a vast and often contradictory network of ‘identity-as-race’ arguments that often conflate two seemingly different groups into one category of Otherness. The second slippage is that to assume that contemporary notions of race cannot be retrofitted into Early Modern England assumes that contemporary notions of race are stable and universal.” Matthieu Chapman, Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other” (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). [↩]
34. According to Hendricks, “PCRS resists the study of race as a single, somatic event (skin color, in most cases) and insists that race be seen in terms of a socioeconomic process (colonialism)… PCRS is an intellectual, political, and public interrogation of capitalism’s capacious erasure of the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, whether in the Americas, the Pacific islands, Asia, or the African continent…”’PCRS also recognizes and acknowledges its genealogies. It celebrates that lineage – citation – and it uses it ‘to dismantle the master’s house’ since the master’s tools are ineffective.” Margo Hendricks, “Margo Hendricks ⁠⁠– Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race.” RaceB4Race: Race and Periodization Symposium, September 2019, Folger Shakespeare Library, July 8, 2020. www.folger.edu/institute/scholarly-programs/race-periodization/margo-hendricks. [↩]
35. Scholars of color have been writing about people of color in the early modern period for decades. [↩]
36. This is also the case with many period dramas. Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton has changed the landscape of period dramas by using color-conscious casting and has paved the way for more inclusive representations of the past. [↩]
37. An increasing number of actors and directors are now calling this identity-conscious casting. It is emerging as a term because it includes race, sexuality, and gender. [↩]
38. There has been a shift away from the use of “color-blind casting” not only because it is ableist but also because it implies the invisibility of color or race. For more on color-blind casting, see Ayanna Thompson, Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. [↩]
39. Emily Lathrop, “For Everybody: Casting, Race, and Audience Engagement in The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit,” In Shakespeare’s Audiences, edited by Matteo A. Pangallo, and Peter Kirwan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 212–3. [↩]
40. Roisoin O’Connor, “Jodie Turner-Smith Responds to Anne Boleyn Casting Backlash” The Independent, April 29, 2021. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/jodie-turner-smith-black-anne-boleyn-b1839822.html. [↩]
41. O’Connor, “Jodie Turner-Smith Responds to Anne Boleyn Casting Backlash.” [↩] [↩]
42. Amanda Rae-Prescott has a forthcoming blog about Twitter backlash to Turner-Smith’s casting. [↩]
43. For more on racism in fandoms and backlash against casting Black actors in traditionally white roles, see the work of Stitch, https://stitchmediamix.com/. [↩]
44. For more on misogynoir, see Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York: New York University Press, 2021). [↩]
45. BAME is an acronym that refers to Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic and is typically used in the United Kingdom. [↩]
46. @MowenEmmerson (Owen Emmerson). “To everyone freaking out about the prospect of a black actor playing Anne Boleyn, just a gentle reminder that first BAME woman to play Anne was back in 1933 – by Merle Oberon who was of Indian/ Polynesian descent – and like Jodie Turner-Smith undoubtedly will, she totally rocked.” Twitter, October 30, 2020, 7:43 a.m. https://twitter.com/MOwenEmmerson/status/1322187453776744453. [↩]
47. It is important to note that colorism is what drives racism and racecraft. For more on racecraft, see Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields. [↩]
48. In the 1972 production of Henry VII and His Six Wives, Anne Boleyn (played by Charlotte Rampling) appears onscreen in blackface. [↩]
49. Naman Ramachandran, “‘Queen & Slim’ Actor Jodie Turner-Smith to Play Queen Anne Boleyn in Channel 5 Series,” Variety, October 20, 2020, https://www.yahoo.com/video/queen-slim-actor-jodie-turner-100211346.html. [↩]
50. Dan Jones, “Anne Boleyn: The New Drama Modernising History,” The Big Issue, May 30, 2021, www.bigissue.com/culture/film-tv-radio/anne-boleyn-the-new-drama-modernising-history/. [↩]
51. Quinci Legardye, “Jodie Turner-Smith on Becoming Anne Boleyn,” Harpers Bazaar, December 19, 2021. [↩]
52. Anne Boleyn, “Episode #1.2.” [↩]
53. Otele Olivette, “Rise of a Black Queen: Jodie Turner-Smith’s ‘Anne Boleyn’ forces us to rethink our expectations.,” The Independent, May 31, 2021. https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/long-reads/anne-boleyn-jodie-turner-smith-b1852709.html. [↩]
54. This is an important distinction and one that I am exploring further in my work on color-conscious casting in period dramas. [↩]
55. Dan Jones, “Anne Boleyn: The New Drama Modernising History,” The Big Issue, 30 May 2021. [↩]
56. For more on the hypersexualization of Anne Boleyn in popular representations, see my chapter, “‘I have perused her well’: Popular Culture’s Appropriation and Hypersexualization of Anne Boleyn,” Shakespeare: Between Performance and Appropriation, edited by Louise Geddes, Kathryn Santos, and Geoffrey Way. Forthcoming. [↩]
57. Anne Boleyn, “Episode #1.1” [↩]
58. The jezebel stereotype classifies Black women as being seductive, promiscuous, and sexually insatiable. [↩]