Inventions of the skin : the painted body in early English drama, 1400-1642 / [electronic resource]
Stevens, Andrea Ria,author.
Inventions of the Skin illuminates a history of the stage technology of paint that extends backward to the 1460s York cycle and forward to the 1630s. Organized 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, specifically 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 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.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).
Light : staging divinity in the York cycle -- Blood : enter Martius, painted -- Black : mastering masques of blackness -- Stone : lost ladies.
Inventions of the Skin illuminates a history of the stage technology of paint that extends backward to the 1460s York cycle and forward to the 1630s. Organized 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, specifically 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 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.
English drama
English drama
English drama