Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama

Examines the painted body of the actor on the early modern stage
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.

Author: Andrea Stevens
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 06/11/2013
Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture
Pages: 192
Weight: 1.1lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780748670499