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.
| ISBN: | 9780748670499 |
| Publication date: | 10th June 2013 |
| Author: | Andrea Ria Stevens |
| Publisher: | Edinburgh University Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 192 pages |
| Series: | Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: general Literary studies: plays and playwrights |