Inventions of the skin : the painted body in early English drama, 1400-1642 / Andrea Ria Stevens.

Inventions of the skin : the painted body in early English drama, 1400-1642 / Andrea Ria Stevens.

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

xi, 176 p. ; 25 cm

Edinburgh critical studies in Renaissance culture

"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."--Publisher's website.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [155]-167) and index.

Light: Staging divinity in the york cycle
Blood: Enter martius, painted
Black: Mastering masques of blackness
Stone: Lost ladies.

Edinburgh critical studies in Renaissance culture.

Great Britain -- Scotland.

PR646 .S74 2013