Summary
Aethiopia addresses the daughters directly, saying that only their father will return to the lake.
They, instead, will remain in the ocean.
There, they will bathe in the "brine" and light of this British sun once a month for a year.
After the year is up, their skin will have changed from black to white, and they can appear at the court before the king.
Delighted, the daughters return to their giant shell in the ocean.
They sing a celebratory song praising Diana, the sea, the nymphs, and their transformation to come.
The masque ends with this song and the image of the dark-skinned daughters retreating into the sea.
Analysis
The conclusion of the masque finally promises a resolution to the "problem" of the daughters' tainted beauty: they, with the help of the British climate and the magnificence of King James I, will be transformed into the fair-skinned beauties whom the Western poets praise.
This conclusion may seem anticlimactic to contemporary readers, as the transformation never actually occurs within the masque. However, for early modern audiences, the play ends on a "to be continued" note: Jonson wrote a sequel to The Masque of Blackness called The Masque of Beauty, performed three years later to inaugurate the refurbished banquet hall of the royal palace. Though less frequently studied, The Masque of Beauty is where the daughters' transformation actually occurs, and the two plays are frequently considered two parts of one text. Of course, the respective titles of these masques reflect their subject matter, with the first play focusing on the conflict – the daughters' beauty has been ruined by the sun – and the latter focusing on the solution – the restoration of beauty with the help of the king.
The Masque of Blackness is not one of Jonson's most studied plays, likely for a number of reasons: it is short and largely unconventional considering the rest of Jonson's work like his successful and satirical city comedies.
First and foremost, of course, the masque is a racist text that denigrates blackness as a perversion of beauty. Many have noted, however, that the conclusion of the play features a mild and benign solution to the daughters' problem – all they must do is bathe in sea water beneath the British sun and eventually their skin will lighten in hew. Some early modern political scholars have argued that these instructions are actually a reflection of King James I's policies toward Africa, or that they are at the very least an allusion to James's desire to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland (at the time, Scottish people were considered of a different "race" than English people, as race was defined primarily by blood rather than skin color).
Thus, some maintain that despite its outward racism and insensitivity, The Masque of Blackness is an important literary text for understanding Jacobean notions of difference, nationality, and geographic expansion.
