Across Western Europe, medieval drama represented the Devil in black-up. As Virginia Mason Vaughan notes, in English cycle plays, numerous episodes representing the Fall of Lucifer have him comment on his own transformation from white to black as divine punishment: he has become a “feende black” in the Chester cycle, “a devil ful derke” in the Coventry creation, and he has “waxen blacke as any coyll” in the Wakefield creation.¹ We know that those devils were performed in black-up from sources such as the records of professional guilds performing the Coventry cycle plays: for instance, referring to damned souls, the Drapers’ Company records from 1561 to 1579 list extra costs for “the blacckyng of the sowles’ facys.”² As Dympna Callaghan explains, actors may have used “charred cork mixed with a little oil” as minstrels would later do, some combination of soot and grease, or, more basically, charcoal.³ A costlier option, more rarely used, was to burn walnut shells, or—even better—ivory, which was reputed to produce the most beautiful black.⁴ The popularity of charcoal black-up in French religious theatre—explained in part by its cost-effectiveness compared to more lavish alternatives—is evident in a letter from Michel de L’Hospital to Cardinal du Bellay (ca. 1560), where he recalls attending a performance: “the most striking element was the character of Lucifer, with horns on his forehead, his face all smeared with charcoal, and his coiled tail.”⁵ Nondramatic literature suggests that the same technique was used in medieval Iberian performances, whose existence is attested to in the Siete partidas proclaimed by king Alfonso X of Castile in 1265. The same king, in Cantigas de Santa María, describes the devil as “a man black in color” (un omne negro de coor), “a tall man, thin, hairy, and black like pitch” (longo magro e veloso / e negro como pez).⁶

Medieval theatre practitioners have left no traces of black-up’s materiality, but we have images that can help us visualize stage devils. Indeed, the fourteenth-century French manuscript of the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages comes with miniatures often read as renderings of the plays’ performance.⁷ In these miniatures, devils are represented with hairy black skin (along the same lines as devils in king Alfonso’s Cantigas), wild hair, and pointed wings; they also have horns, and their goatish legs end with claws. The devils in the miniatures of the early fourteenth-century manuscript of the Mystère du jour du jugement (see Plate 1) can be described similarly, with one important variation: in this mystery play, the devils’ skin tone could be black, grayish, or reddish-brown. The miniatures suggest that the cosmetics used for black-up could be more or less charged in various pigments to create nuances. Other powdered substances, such as walnut wood, or the fruit stones mentioned by Nicholas Hilliard in The Arte of Limning, could be used with grease to create different shades of black-up.⁸

On stage, the blacked-up medieval devil had a double epistemology: he was both, in Robert Weimann’s words, a comedic folk figure providing “a subversive expression for class frustration and protest” and a theological figure that spectators truly believed in and feared most deeply.⁹ As a result, the audience’s disposition toward the Devil could fluctuate during performances, oscillating between sympathy, hilarity, and hostility. Constant through those oscillations, however, was the audience’s perception of stage devils as a disruptive force. “Operating supportively within the bounds of traditional religion,” writes John Cox, “stage Devils reveal communal values by default, illustrating (often satirically) what fifteenth century English society saw as most destructive of its sacral cohesion.… Where society was concerned, the devil’s opposition defined community by default, illustrating emblematically what community was not by opposing what it was.”¹⁰ Medieval stage devils threatened to tear apart the fabric of Christian societies: that legacy is key to understanding the ideological work performed by the diabolical script of blackness—a script of exclusion that hinged on the hermeneutic overlap between the Devil and other beings performed in black-up in the eyes of Renaissance spectators familiar with the episteme of religious drama. When that hermeneutic lens was successfully activated, characters in black-up were scopically associated with dark entities threatening to destroy Christian European societies from within. The diabolical script of blackness was cultivated by theatre makers who wielded poetic cues to reactivate the preexisting demonic associations of black-up at strategic junctures.

There were, of course, differences between medieval diabolical black-up and Renaissance Afro-diasporic black-up. The latter did away with the animal components of the Devil’s costume, added ethnically recognizable garments, and resorted to wigs in an attempt to render the texture of natural black hair: in England, performers used wigs made of stiff lambskin fur, while in Spain, a performance record from 1525 points toward the use of expensive wigs rendering the texture of African braids, twists, or locks.¹¹ The add-ons changed, but the basic technique of painting actors’ faces and either painting or covering their limbs with black cloth remained.¹² The diabolical script of blackness led spectators familiar with the older uses of black-up to ponder in performance the presence of Afro-diasporic people in Christian European societies. The early modern stage was indeed haunted by a question: could Afro-diasporic people be absorbed into societies that imagined themselves as bodies politic whose members were implicitly linked by intimate and organic forms of collectivity? The stage answered the question with its own language, in this case, with black-up and its historically accrued semiotic leverage. On the secular stage, I argue, the diabolical script of blackness would mark black characters as outcasts who, like the Devil, could not be woven into the fabric of early modern European societies.

This chapter moves gradually away from the diabolical script of blackness and from a theatrical culture that would hold on to that script throughout the early modern period, to one that would relinquish it very early on in favor of other scripts. In the first section of this chapter, focusing on England, I read the popularity of the diabolical script of blackness and its exclusionary discourse, epitomized in Titus Andronicus (1594), in light of the late Tudor and early Stuart contexts of xenophobia and racial aversion. I then cross the Channel to read the deployment of the same script of blackness in French theatre in light of the unspoken colonial fears and desires of early baroque France. From the first mercantile itchings in port cities on the Atlantic coast to Richelieu’s 1626 decision to form the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe, from Colbert’s foundation of the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales in 1664 to the promulgation of the Code noir dictating in 1685 conditions for slavery in the colonies, France continuously fashioned itself as a colonial slave-trading power in the seventeenth century, and that self-fashioning required the country to renegotiate its relation to sub-Saharan Africans, slavery, and the racial matrix. Performance culture and stagecraft, I argue, were crucial sites for such cultural negotiations to take place. During the early baroque period, in Rouen, the diabolical script of blackness was integrated into local conversations about French colonial expansion in plays such as Tragédie francoize d’un More cruel (1613), La merveille (ca. 1620), and Les Portugaiz infortunez (1608). Most often, that integration reckoned negatively with the Iberian colonial experience, suggesting that a similar expansion would involve Afro-diasporic subjects that could not safely be assimilated into a transoceanic and colonial French body politic. Moreover, that integration sometimes hinged on the trope of the Devil’s pact, which Christians have a duty to break by all means—legal obligations be damned. In such cases, the diabolical script of blackness construed Afro-diasporic people as fit to ensnare and cheat out of their labor with legal and moral impunity.

Returning to England, I argue that Othello (1604) reflects on the popularity of the diabolical script of blackness: by substituting a whitefaced woman for a blacked-up man as the iconic sign whose meaning is being indexically closed—by detaching the technique from blackness for a brief moment—the play renders the racializing technique visible; uncovers its uses, mechanics, and efficacy; and invites analysis. Othello exposes the demonizing rhetoric underlying the diabolical script of blackness as a tool wielded by the white male gaze against anyone it seeks to oppress. English theatre, unlike its Spanish and French counterparts, never relinquished the diabolical script of blackness in the early modern period; yet a play like Othello directed spectators’ attention early on to the devastating effects of the diabolizing rhetoric at play.

The chapter ultimately progresses from a scenario in which the diabolical script of blackness is critiqued to one where it is rejected wholesale. Indeed, in the final section of this chapter, I use the case of Iberian theatrical culture to support my overarching claim: that scrip...