Inventions of the Skin

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.