Edinburgh University Press Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture)

This title examines the painted body of the actor on the early modern stage. The significance of turning healthy players into bloodied bodies, white players into Africans, and living players into gods, ghosts, statues and corpses are the focus of this book. Inventions of the Skin combines archival and materialist work on the early modern history of stage paint with period and contemporary accounts of embodiment and the phenomenology of audience reception. As this study recovers the concrete technology behind this grammar, it demonstrates the shaping influence of cosmetic materiality upon the content and the practical execution of plays. Addressing current debates about the relationship between early- and pre-modern subjectivity and embodiment, this book furthermore challenges the persistent notion that the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was built predominantly around a new, 'modern'language of interiority. It illuminates a history of the stage technology of paint that extends backward to the 1460s York cycle and forward to the 1630s. It includes 4 chapters that examine goldface and divinity in York's Corpus Christi play, bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, racial masquerade within seventeenth-century court performances and popular plays, and whiteface, death and 'stoniness' across a range of plays, from sixteenth-century Protestant hagiographies to Jacobean tragedies to Shakespeare's late romances. It recovers a crucial grammar of theatrical representation and argues that the onstage embodiment of characters forms an important and overlooked aspect of stage representation. From the Back Cover Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series Editor: Lorna Hutson These original interpretations of Renaissance culture focus on literary texts in English and in a range of vernacular languages. They also deal with the reception and transformation of the Greco-Roman literary, political and intellectual heritage. 'For anyone interested in the early modern theatrical representation of the body, its multiple transformations and the way paint enabled acting companies and dramatists to effect these transformations, Stevens' book is essential reading.' Farah Karim-Cooper, Head of Courses and Research, Shakespeare's Globe, London 'Stevens's sensitivity to the pervasiveness of cosmetics as a theatrical technology and a source of theatrical consciousness allows her to expose unthought of layers in familiar and unfamiliar plays alike. This book offers readers new and profound ways of thinking about theatricality itself as a source of identity.' Jeremy Lopez, University of Toronto Examines the painted body of the actor on the early modern stage Inventions of the Skin illuminates a history of the stage technology of body paint from its use within medieval cycle drama to its deployment as a special effect in the popular plays and court masques of the late 1630s. Organised as a series of studies, the four chapters of this book examine goldface and divinity in York's Corpus Christi play, with special attention to the pageant representing The Transfiguration of Christ; bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including blood's unexpected role as a device for disguise in plays such as Look About You (Anon) and Shakespeare's Coriolanus; racial masquerade within seventeenth-century court performances and popular plays, from Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness to William Berkeley's The Lost Lady; and finally whiteface, death and 'stoniness' in Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Recovering a crucial grammar of theatrical representation, this book argues that the onstage embodiment of characters - not just the words written for them to speak - forms an important and overlooked aspect of stage representation. Andrea Stevens is Assistant Professor of English, Theatre, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig