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"e; 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.