Dublin Core
Creator
Andrea Stevens
Title
Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400-1642
Description
Description
Inventions of the Skin considers a crucial aspect of the visual field of the early modern stage: the painted body of the actor. 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, including 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 The 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. (Reviewed Shakespeare Bulletin, 32.4 Winter 2014, 765-770)
Inventions of the Skin considers a crucial aspect of the visual field of the early modern stage: the painted body of the actor. 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, including 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 The 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. (Reviewed Shakespeare Bulletin, 32.4 Winter 2014, 765-770)
Date
2013