Inventions of the SkinThe Painted Body in Early English Drama

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

• Recovers a crucial grammar of theatrical representation and argues that the onstage embodiment of characters forms an important and overlooked aspect of stage representation
• The 4 chapters examine goldface and divinity in York’s Corpus Christi play, bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, racial masquerade within seventeenth-century court performances and popular plays, and whiteface, death and ‘stoniness’ across a range of plays, from sixteenth-century Protestant hagiographies to Jacobean tragedies to Shakespeare’s late romances

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.