Janelle Monáe’s “Q.U.E.E.N.” as Contemporary Court Masque

The title of Janelle Monáe’s 2013 single “Q.U.E.E.N. ” is an acronym for Queer, Untouchables, Emigrants, Excommunicated, and Negroid. By claiming a royal title for people ostracized for who they are, Monáe subverts traditional racial, sexual, and class hierarchies, using the song and its music video, which she calls an “emotion picture,” to pose radical questions about equality and power.¹ The video casts Monáe and company as rebel time-travelers frozen in a museum and brought to life by music. It starts with a voiceover declaring, “It’s hard to stop rebels that time-travel, but we at the Time Council pride ourselves on doing just that” as the picture starts to reveal “The Living Museum,” which exhibits the bodies of the members of Wondaland (the real-life name of Monáe’s production company and arts community) and their leader Janelle Monáe. They exist in what the voiceover calls “suspended animation” until two young Black women smuggle in a record and put it on a skull-shaped turntable with a gold tooth as a needle, and the music sets all the bodies in motion.

This frame story makes even more explicit the interest of the lyrics in temporality. Within the world of the video, the song serves as part of a “musical weapons program” that dismantles the status quo, enabling the rebels to move through history and, as a result, create a new future in the present.² In this essay, I also seek to do a bit of time traveling by putting “Q.U.E.E.N. ” into dialogue with Ben Jonson’s 1609 The Masque of Queens, featuring the British queen and her ladies-in-waiting as twelve (whitened) historical queens in the formation of a pyramid. As unlikely as the juxtaposition of Jonson and Monáe might seem, her queer aesthetic has much in common with the visually elaborate genre of the court masque, an entertainment popularized in Britain during the reign of James I (1603–1625) and his queen, Anne of Denmark. If, as I argue, Jonson appropriates queenhood for white women, then Monáe reclaims it for Black, queer women. Her fusion of poetry and spectacle mobilizes Black women’s power in a way that rebukes white culture for stigmatizing Black women’s bodies at the same time as profiting off their creative labor. 

Just as the song and video for Q.U.E.E.N. is the joint creative vision of Monáe, her fellow vocalist Erykah Badu, director Alan Ferguson, and a large cast and crew,³ so too were court masques the product of collaboration. Jonson was a well-known poet and playwright who the queen commissioned to write a series of private theatricals that combined music, singing, and dancing. Professional actors took on the speaking parts while the queen and her ladies exhibited their beauty, clothing, and dancing skills to an aristocratic audience.⁴ As with previous court masques that Jonson wrote, The Masque of Queens featured elaborate sets and costumes designed by Inigo Jones, who served as a sort of architect to the seventeenth-century stars, and mixed Jonson’s poetry with music by Alfonso Ferrabosco⁵ and choreography by Hierome Herne and Thomas Giles.⁶ Though no recording of the performance was possible, we can reconstruct aspects using Jonson’s script, which has survived as an autographed manuscript copy in the British Library (figure 1), a stand-alone print edition from 1609 (figure 2), and a printed version that appeared in Jonson’s complete works in 1611 (figure 3). When I see the world of Monáe’s emotion picture for “Q.U.E.E.N.,” where the director fills the camera lens with a stark white background with Black women (and some men) in white, black, and red clothing dancing in a futuristic space, I see a piece of multi-media art-technology that uses symbolism to tell stories in analogous ways to the masque as a genre.

This essay’s idiosyncratic leap from the twenty-first century United States to seventeenth-century London admittedly reflects my own subject position as an early modernist and Monáe fangirl, and my willful anachronism clearly has as much to do with me as the material.⁷ Given the way that time-travel allegorizes liberation in Monáe’s art, however, I hope that she would approve of the way such a move unsettles the temporal boundaries between past, present, and future. Monáe, I suggest, offers a Black/queer/feminist theory that gives us something new to say about Jonson’s aesthetic participation in the long history of white colonialism. The logics of the particular form that racism took in the Atlantic world has roots in the imaginative racialism that Jonson celebrates and caters to in his masque. In turn, Jonson’s semiotics of Blackness, whiteness, and queenship attest to the historically entrenched nature of the racist tropes resisted by Monáe’s song and video.  

What’s striking about Monáe’s invocation of the acronym “Q.U.E.E.N.” is not just that the title writes in the identities of those who Monáe sees as unheard, but also that she appropriates the language of royalty to reconceptualize queenship as an equalizing force. Monáe evokes white queenship in her line, “They be like, ooh let them eat cake,” alluding to Marie Antoinette, who regardless of the veracity of that historical anecdote, stands in for the long line of powerful white women who have disregarded the needs of others. In contrast, there is not just one queen in “Q.U.E.E.N. “; the goal is not to become a Black Marie Antoinette but to disorder power dynamics. Monáe’s song rejects assimilation into white culture, instead insisting, “But we eat wings and throw them bones on the ground,” embracing a food culture often deployed stereotypically to denigrate Black communities.

The radical potential of pluralizing and race-ing queenship is apparent when Monáe is set in contrast to Jonson’s The Masque of Queens. The logic of European Christian monarchy renders the idea of multiple queens illogical. There can only be one. The participants and audience of Jonson’s masque would have been well aware that only one real queen was in the room, and that queen was Anne, playing an avatar of herself as Bel-Anna, the queen of queens. The recognition of national difference calls attention to the fact that other societies have had and continue to have other sovereigns, but by subsuming them under the umbrella of Bel-Anna, the masque weaves a fantasy of a united white world, ultimately controlled by a white queen.⁸ Jonson’s version of Monáe’s Living Museum is the House of Fame, a large structure designed by Jones as a moving machine on “top of which, were discovered twelve Masquers, sitting upon a Throne triumphal, erected in form of a Pyramid, and circled with all store of light” (figure 4).⁹ Separated by historical time and geographical location, Jonson’s queens remain separated by time and space, cut off from female community and frozen in a tableau every bit as restraining as the figures in Monáe’s futuristic museum. The image of a pyramid likewise plays a key role in her song’s concluding rap, where Monáe says, “I don’t think they understand what I’m trying to say,” so she makes it impossible to misunderstand her message: “My crown too heavy like the Queen Nefertiti / Gimme back my pyramid, I’m trying to free Kansas City. ”¹⁰  

As an early modernist, I can illuminate the historical force of the demand that Monáe’s pyramid be returned to her through an explanation of the way Jonson stigmatizes and erases Blackness using the performance of Queen Anne and her ladies in his repeated appropriation of the image of the pyramid. From the moment of James’s ascension to the English throne in 1603, Jonson’s celebrations of Stuart royal power routinely invoked the monumentalizing power of pyramids, which were already strongly associated with ancient Egypt. Among the decorations of the festivities were two seventy-foot tall pyramids,¹¹ symbolism that makes sense in light of Thomas Dekker’s poem praising the new monarchy as dynastically superseding all the greatest rulers in history: “Those Columnes, and those Pyramids, / That won wonder by heights: the Colosse of the sun: / Th’Aegyptian obelisks: are all forgotten. ” In contrast, London, “this royal city,” has arches in a “new state; so made, / That their fresh beauties n’ere shall fade”; Decker claims that “our English Triumphes rear’st the Fame, / Boue those of old. ”¹² Several years later in 1605, Jonson collaborated with Jones at the request of the queen to produce The Masque of Blackness in which Anna and her ladies appeared in blackface portraying the daughters of the river Niger. Jonson makes his masquers Ethiopian because it was perceived in seventeenth-century Britain as “the blackest nation of the world,” thus creating a strong contrast between Black African skin and white British skin.¹³ The plot, such as it is, has the twelve royal river nymphs become distraught after hearing European poetry praising fair women and, after a dream, they set out on a quest to achieve whiteness. Having reached Britannia, the moon goddess appears and promises that the cooler climate of the location will blanch their skin. That moon goddess was described as appearing on a silver throne “in the figure” of a pyramid.

Critical race scholars have done a great deal of work on The Masque of Blackness, where race-making is text and not just subtext,¹⁴ and Jonson’s The Masque of Queens, where British women’s whiteness does colonialist work through its erasure of Black skin, likewise calls attention to the process of race-making that yokes femininity, beauty, and class to the production of whiteness. It might seem that the representation of African and Asian women in Jonson’s slightly later masque is not about race, since skin color is not referenced, but that obscures the process through which Jonson and his masquers write out the power of Black and Brown women and recast history as an all-white space.¹⁵ Rather than having a narrative, The Masque of Queens relies instead on iconography. The character Heroick Vertue makes sure the audience recognizes the identities of the queens, identifying them as follows:

Penthesilea, the brave Amazon,
Swift-foot Camilla, Queen of Volscia,
Victorious Thomyris of Scythia,
Chaste Artemisia, the Carian Dame,
And fair-hair’d Beronice, Ægypt’s fame,
Hypsicratea, glory of Asia,
Candace, pride of Æthiopia,
The Britain honour, Voadicea,
The vertuous Palmyrene, Zenobia,
The wise, and warlike Goth, Amalasunta,
And bold Valasca, of Bohemia¹⁶

Jonson somewhat passive aggressively notes that the twelve queens subsequently descended in a somewhat haphazard manner – “disposed rather by Chance, than Election” – but he describes them chronologically, creating a global map of powerful women that relegates them to the past and domesticates their otherness to the British present.

Heroick Vertue verbally turns the queenly tableau into a map of women, one that spans the globe and most of ancient history. In the written versions of the masque, Jonson elucidates information about the queens that would not have been immediately available to the live audience, making his description largely literary rather than a snapshot of the live spectacle. What we know about their costumes comes from surviving drawings by Jones. Jonson claims that the costumes reflect each queen’s culture, but as David Linley points out, “to modern eyes at least, it is not at all clear from the surviving drawings…how they reflect the nationality or the historical period of the individual queens. ”¹⁷ What I would argue is that that lack of differentiation is precisely the point. Rather than embracing an orientalist gaze that was specific to the queens’ various ethnic origins, Jones and Jonson collaborate to create a mythical world of difference that belongs to the white imagination and erases the threat of racial difference. The space of the past in this masque is more like the “once upon a time” of fairy tale movies like Ever After than the past of Herodotus or Jonson’s other sources. It is not an accident that Jonson selects queens who place Africa, Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and ancient Britain under Jacobean dominion.

Of the queens, one in particular offers an excellent illustration of this logic at work, the Ethiopian queen Candace. Similar points could be made with Zenobia and Berenice, but Candace offers the most extreme example of whitewashing, and her association with scripture directly references associations between Blackness, dirtiness, and sin. The surviving drawing of Candace, played by Lady Anne Winter, has little to distinguish her from the other queens (figure 5). “Candace” was the Englishing of the name for the queens of the Kingdom of Kush, a royal title rather than a name, making her a composite figure. The Kushites lived in an area that is now northern Ethiopia and, as we have seen, Jonson’s earlier masque demonstrates an association of Blackness and Ethiopia that Jones’s drawing does not register. Candace likewise had a symbolic resonance in early modern Christianity that resulted from her mention in the New Testament. In Acts, Philip the Evangelist meets a eunuch from Candace’s court and converts him. Upon baptism, his skin supposedly turned white. The Bible itself describes very little of the event, only telling us that he traveled in a chariot, was reading the book of Isaiah, and that he was baptized. The cleansing that took place was spiritual, rather than physical, but in the early modern European imagination, that spiritual conversion manifested itself in a literalization of the semiotics of Black and white.¹⁸

In Jonson’s masque, the personation of Candace by Lady Anne Winter, the third daughter of the Earl of Worcester and wife of Sir Edward Winter, enacts a parallel whitening of the Ethiopian queen. Not much about Lady Winter emerges from historical documents, except for her family’s connections to the increased involvement of the British aristocracy in mercantile exploration, an historical shift that gave rise to the class anxiety that Kim F. Hall associates with a growing investment in British racial identities.¹⁹ Worcester was a big player in James’s court, and three other of his daughters danced in Jonson’s masque; Lady Winter’s husband Edward has ties to early British colonialism, having joined Sir Francis Drake’s expedition to the West Indies²⁰; and Edward’s father, Lady Winter’s father-in-law William, was a well-known naval figure who, historical records reveal, had a Black porter named Edward Swarthye.²¹ The woman embodying Candace would have known at least some Black people, and she was connected to the men who were driving British territorial expansion. In fact, in 1633, twenty-two years after she performed as a white Ethiopian queen, Lady Winter had two sons, Edward and Frederick, who accompanied Lord Baltimore on the voyage that would establish Maryland as a colony. With them was an indentured servant identified as “black John Price,” one step in the historical move toward American plantation slavery.²²

Jonson’s imagination of white queenship did not happen in a vacuum. It is precisely this kind of erasure that Monáe’s Afrofuturism seeks to counter. As defined by Daylanne K. English and Alvin Kim, Afrofuturism is the “African American cultural production and political theory that imagine[s] less constrained black subjectivity in the future and that produce a profound critique of current social, racial, and economic orders. ”²³ The goal, according to Cassandra L. Jones, is to “rethink the past in order to imagine blacks in the future and, in doing so, recreate a vision of the future, an African diasporic experience that is ‘rooted in the past, but not weighed down by it, contiguous, yet completely transformed.'”²⁴

Through her recognizable allusions to sci-fi and Afrofuturism, Monáe creates a usable Black history that recognizes the pain of the past, but insists on creating a space for joy, particularly for queer Black women, in the future.²⁵ I am aware that there is an irony to taking so seriously a song about people who want to be allowed to have a good time. At the same time, the fun in this song, the insistence on ignoring attempts to cut them up and just get down, understands that claims to that kind of joy are in and of themselves seriously subversive. Pleasure and entertainment, like Jonson’s masques, are too often the province of the economic elite. In one of the most intriguing lines of “Q.U.E.E.N.,” the lyrics insist on the right to be silly: “They call us dirty cause we break all your rules down / And we just came to act a fool, is that all right?” The backup vocals have a fullness creating a choral effect, and their answer is “Girl, that’s alright. ” The inclusive “we” throughout the song clearly brings together the voices of the contemporary American subaltern captured in the title, but the “you” of “your rules” is a bit more ambiguous. Whose rules? Contextually, those rules are both those of white capitalist patriarchy, which trades in women’s bodies while denying them access to the joy of their bodies themselves, and of Black respectability politics. The song is deeply aware that the audience includes Q.U.E.E.N.s as well as the white and Black authority figures who might or might not be reached by Monáe’s music, which is unapologetically Black and does not pander to white audiences or obscure the singer’s race or sexuality. Rhetorically, that is a power play, one that takes for granted that what Monáe says will be heard by white and homophobic audiences, moving her and the members of her “we” out of the subaltern. Or to quote Lia Bascomb, “In repositioning the roles of spectacle and spectator, Monáe honors the position of the ‘freak’ raising it to a level of royalty. ”²⁶

Moreover, Monáe does not say that they break the rules, but that they break the rules down; her rebellion enacts a larger social change that remakes social agreement. Fun – the freedom to act a fool – is a privilege that capitalists routinely withhold from the oppressed, recasting economic inequity as a moral issue, as if pleasure has to be earned, even when the system ensures that no amount of work will ever be enough because having fun and dancing for the sake of dancing is the privilege of the few whose access to free time is made possible by the exploitation of others’ labors. The concluding rap offers a trenchant and direct critique of capitalist exploitation:

Are we a lost generation of our people?
Add us to equations but they’ll never make us equal
She who writes the movie owns the script and the sequel
So why ain’t the stealing of my rights made illegal?
They keep us underground working hard for the greedy
But when it’s time pay they turn around and call us needy
My crown too heavy like the Queen Nefertiti
Gimme back my pyramid, I’m trying to free Kansas City

In an elegantly compact metaphor, Monáe captures the failures of apolitical gestures toward diversity that keep existing structures in place and attempt simply to “add” Q.U.E.E.N.S. to the equation, as if equality results from letting a few Black women climb over other Black women to become part of the dominant ruling class. Monáe calls attention to the way powerful men let Black women do creative work, such as writing movies and songs, but then conscript the profits. This is a Marxist critique that calls not just for ownership of the means of production, but also for the products as well.

As with America’s infrastructure, the pyramids were built by slaves, and so ancient Egypt serves as a simile rather than a metaphor, a way of understanding the singer’s sense of the burden of participating in a revolution, even as it maintains a distance from ancient Black queenship. To try to be a queen in Nefertiti’s sense results in a crown that is “too heavy. ” Up until this point, the song relies upon rhetorical questions, but here Monáe shifts into the imperative, demanding the return of her pyramid so that she can free Kansas City. Elsewhere in the song, the actions are largely communal. “We” dance around and get down; here the singer shifts to the first person and makes it clear that she has an individual role to play, specifically one informed by her desire to help the people of her home town, Kansas City. Monáe clearly has in mind the famous bust of Nefertiti, found in 1912, appropriated by a German archaeologist, and now residing in a Berlin museum. “Q.U.E.E.N. ” calls for a restoration of the Black past that is also a new beginning, using dance music to “challenge or collapse the post-Renaissance distinction between body and mind, opening up a space in which existing identity formations and power hierarchies can be negotiated and even challenged.”²⁷

In addition to challenging white supremacy and capitalist exploitation, the song asserts the right of queer Black women to be both queer and Black. Monáe speaks directly to any members of her Black community who would stigmatize queer sexualities. Using the language of religious discourse, she pointedly asks, “Hey brother can you save me from the devil? / Is it weird to like the way she wear her tights?” and then, “Hey sister will your God accept me in my black and white?” Although she did not publicly identify as queer until 2018, when she told Rolling Stone that she identified as pansexual, her lyrics suggest that she was trying to stop feeling “like a computer virus” that needed to be cleaned well before that. In fact, in that same interview she explained that the original title of “Q.U.E.E.N.” was Q.U.E.E.R.²⁸ I would argue that queerness makes Monáe’s work a powerful weapon against oppression because it makes her particularly resistant to appropriation. As Jonson’s masque makes clear, art can be used to defend and prop up the status quo, and there is a long history of revolutionary art being repurposed to serve the interests of the powerful. Her embrace of multiple personae is part of her time traveling, of willing her desire into reality: “Even if it makes others uncomfortable / I will love who I am. ” That vow of self-love is itself an act of resistance.

Works Cited

1. “Janelle Monáe Says ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’ Is for the ‘Ostracized and Marginalized,” Fuse TV,   https://www.fuse.tv/videos/2013/09/janelle-monae-queen-interview, accessed  January 19, 2021.
2. “Janelle Monáe: Q.U.E.E.N., Full Cast and Crew, IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5268766/fullcredits, accessed  January 28, 2021.
3. The King of Denmarkes welcome. London: Edward Allde, 1606.
4. “Wynter, Edward (c. 1560–1690),” The History of Parliament, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/wynter-edward-1560–1619.
5. Aasand, Hardin. “‘To blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse’: Queen Anne and The Masque of Blackness.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32.2 (1992): 271–85.
6. Andrea, Bernadette. “Black Skin, the Queen’s Masques: Africanist Ambivalence and Feminine Author(ity) in the Masques of Blackness and Beauty.” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 246–81.
7. Barthelemy, Antony Gerard. Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
8. Bascomb, Lia. “Freakifying History: Remixing Royalty. ” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 9.1 (2016): 63.
9. Boehrer, Bruce. “Great prince’s donatives: MTV video and the Jacobean court masque.” Studies in Popular Culture 11.2 (1988): 1–21.
10. Dekker, Thomas. “Ode.” In The arches of triumph erected in honor of the High and mighty prince James the first, sig. B4 v. London, 1604.
11. English Daylanne K. and Alvin Kim, “Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’s Neo-Afrofuturism.” American Studies 52.4 (2013): 217–30.
12. Erasmus, Desiderius. The First Tome of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the New Testament. London, 1548. Early English Books Online. STC 2854.5.
13. Forest-Hassler, Dan. “The Politics of World-Building in Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist Wondaland.” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 26 (2014): 283–301.
14. Gonzáles, Jana Baró. “The Archandroid: Cyborg Consciousness in Janelle Monáe’s Cindi Mayweather Saga.” Hélice 3.8 (2017): 6–14
15. Hagan, Molly. “Janelle Monáe.” Current Biography 74.5 (2013): 76–81.
16. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
17. Jones, Cassandra L. “‘Tryna Free Kansas City’: The Revolutions of Janelle Monáe as Digital Griot,” Frontiers 39.1 (2018): 47.
18. Jonson, Ben. B. Jon.: His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainment through his Honorable cittie of London. London, 1603.
19. Jonson, Ben. The Masque of Blackness, Luminarium Editions, http://www.luminarium.org/editions/maskblack.htm, accessed January 28,  2021.
20. Jonson, Ben. The Masque of Queens, The Holloway Pages, https://www.hollowaypages.com/jonson1692fame.htm, accessed January 28, 2021.
21. ___ “The Masque of Queens (1609).” In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online. Edited by Linley, David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. https://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/works/queens/facing/#.
22. Kauffman, Miranda. Black Tudors: The Untold Story. London: Oneworld, 2017.
23. Kimmel, Ross M. “Blacks before the Law in Colonial Maryland. ” Master’s thesis, University of Maryland, 1974. https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc5300/sc5348/html/title.html.
24. McManus, Clare. “Defacing the Carcass: Anne of Denmark and Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness,” in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon. Edited by Jill Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy, and Susan Wiseman, 93–113. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998.
25. Murchison, Gayle. “Let’s Flip It! Quare Emancipations: Black Queer Traditions, Afrofuturisms, Janelle Monáe to Labelle,” Women & Music 22: 79–90.
26. Orgel, Stephen. “Marginal Jonson.” In The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Edited by David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, 144-75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
27. Schwarz, Kathryn. “Amazon Reflections in the Jacobean Queen’s Masque.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 35.2 (1995): 293–319.
28. Spanos, Brittany. “Janelle Monáe Frees Herself.” Rolling Stone, April 26, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-fe.
29. van Balen, Hendrik and Bruegel the Younger’s The Baptism of the Chamberlain of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, c. 1625–30.
30. Van Veen, Tobias C. “Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afro-futurism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Monáe.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5.2 (2013): 7–41.
31. Wynne-Davies, Marion. “The Queen’s Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque.” In Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance. Edited by Susan P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, 79–104. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.

1. “Janelle Monáe Says ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’ Is for the ‘Ostracized and Marginalized,” Fuse TV,   https://www.fuse.tv/videos/2013/09/janelle-monae-queen-interview, accessed 19 January 2021. The video from 2014 is no longer available, but selected quotations still remain posted. [↩]
2. At one point in the video, we see a typewriter where the person is typing “I will create and destroy ten art movements in ten years” over and over, which signals the importance of constant recreation (remaking) using recreation (fun and art). [↩]
3. “Janelle Monáe: Q.U.E.E.N., Full Cast and Crew,” IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5268766/fullcredits, accessed 28 January 2021. [↩]
4. You might think of it as an elaborate version of the talent show in Dirty Dancing that culminated in the cast drawing the audience out of their seats to rock out to “Time of My Life,” except that the Jacobean court’s costumes and set cost thousands of pounds. [↩]
5. Alfonso Ferrabosco was known as “Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger” to distinguish him from his father Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder, also a composer. Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder was Italian, and Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger was English. [↩]
6. Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens, The Holloway Pages, https://www.hollowaypages.com/jonson1692fame.htm, accessed 28 January 2021. [↩]
7. I am not the first to make a connection between Queen Anna’s court and music video; see Bruce Boehrer, “Great prince’s donatives: MTV video and the Jacobean court masque,” Studies in Popular Culture 11.2 (1988): 1–21. [↩]
8. The extent to which that white queen challenges the authority of her husband has been a matter of debate. Marion Wynn-Davies interprets the queens, all of whom are warriors, as challenging gender norms and asserting Anna’s power within the British court. others point out that everything about the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, where Jonson’s masque was performed, was designed around the position where King James would sit. I would point out that the gender transgression immortalized in the House of Fame cannot be separated from the class and race privileges of the female bodies on that pyramid-shaped throne. See Wynne-Davies, “The Queen’s Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque,” in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. Susan P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 79–104. On female power, see also Kathryn Schwarz, “Amazon Reflections in the Jacobean Queen’s Masque,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 35.2 (1995): 293–319. For a counter argument about the centrality of James, see Stephen Orgel, “Marginal Jonson,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 174. [↩]
9. Jonson, Masque of Queens. [↩]
10. Monáe grew up in Kansas City. For biographical information, see Molly Hagan, “Janelle Monáe,” Current Biography 74.5 (2013): 76-81. [↩]
11. B. Jon.: His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainment through his Honorable cittie of London (London, 1603), sig. D4 r. Pyramids were also used in entertainments honoring Anna’s father, the king of Denmark, when he visited. The King of Denmarkes welcome (London, 1606). [↩]
12. Thomas Dekker, “Ode,” in The arches of triumph erected in honor of the High and mighty prince James the first (London, 1604), sig. B4 v. [↩]
13. Jonson, The Masque of Blackness, Luminarium Editions, http://www.luminarium.org/editions/maskblack.htm, accessed  January 28, 2021. [↩]
14. See Bernadette Andrea, “Black Skin, the Queen’s Masques: Africanist Ambivalence and Feminine Author(ity) in the Masques of Blackness and Beauty,” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 246–81; Hardin Aasand, “‘To blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse’: Queen Anne and The Masque of Blackness,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32.2 (1992): 271–85; Clare McManus, “Defacing the Carcass: Anne of Denmark and Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness,” in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon, ed. Jill Sanders, et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998): 93–113. [↩]
15. In Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), Antony Gerard Barthelemy reads the binary of darkness and lightness mapped on to the witches of the first half of the masque and the queens in the second part as part of Jonson’s larger racist semiotics of Blackness (30). [↩]
16. Jonson, The Masque of Queens. [↩]
17. David Linley, ed. The Masque of Queens (1609), in The Cambridge on of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (Cambridge, Cambridge University, 2014). [↩]
18. One of the most striking images from the visual tradition is Hendrik van Balen and Bruegel the Younger’s The Baptism of the Chamberlain of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, c. 1625–30. Not all written accounts claim that the eunuch’s conversion was racial as well as spiritual, but a prominent one was the paraphrases of Erasmus, where “an Ethiopian borne, black skinned” changed “his naturall complexion in the fonte of baptisme” and became “immaculate, as white as snowe.” See his The First Tome of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the New Testament (London, 1548), sig. 3E 3v, Early English Books Online, STC 2854.5. [↩]
19. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 148. [↩]
20. “Wynter, Edward (c. 1560–1690), The History of Parliament,https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/wynter-edward-1560-1619. [↩]
21. Miranda Kauffman, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (London: Oneworld, 2017). [↩]
22. Ross M. Kimmel, “Blacks before the Law in Colonial Maryland” (master’s thesis, University of Maryland, 1974) https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc5300/sc5348/html/title.html. [↩]
23. Daylanne K. English and Alvin Kim, “Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’s Neo-Afrofuturism,” American Studies52.4 (2013): 217–30. [↩]
24. Cassandra L. Jones, “‘Tryna Free Kansas City’: The Revolutions of Janelle Monáe as Digital Griot,” Frontiers 39.1 (2018): 47. [↩]
25. For more on her engagement with Afrofuturism, see Tobias C. Van Veen, “Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afro-futurism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Monáe,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5.2 (2013): 7–41; Dan Forest-Hassler, “The Politics of World-Building in Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist Wondaland,” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 26 (2014): 283–301; Jana Baró Gonzáles, “The Archandroid: Cyborg Consciousness in Janelle Monáe’s Cindi Mayweather Saga,” Hélice, 3.8 (2017): 6–14; Gayle Murchison, “Let’s Flip It! Quare Emancipations: Black Queer Traditions, Afrofuturisms, Janelle Monáe to Labelle,” Women & Music 22: 79–90. [↩]
26. Lia Bascomb, “Freakifying History: Remixing Royalty,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 9.1 (2016): 63. [↩]
27. Forest-Hassler, “The Politics of World-building,” 291. [↩]
28. Brittany Spanos, “Janelle Monáe Frees Herself,” Rolling Stone, April 26, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/janelle-monae-frees-herself-629204/. [↩]