Inventions of the Skin
Subtitle: The Painted Body in Early English Drama
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780748670499
Subjects: Theatrical makeup; English drama, history and criticism, to 1500; English drama, history and criticism, early modern and elizabethan, 1500-1600; English drama, history and criticism, 17th century
Description: "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."--Publisher's website.