Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama 9780748670505

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Inventions of the Skin

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series Editor: Lorna Hutson Titles available in the series: Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability James Kuzner 978 0 7486 4253 3 Hbk The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in SeventeenthCentury French Literature John D. Lyons 978 0 7486 4515 2 Hbk Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain Dale Shuger 978 0 7486 4463 6 Hbk Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion William P. Weaver 978 0 7486 4465 0 Hbk The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence Jennifer Higginbotham 978 0 7486 5590 8 Hbk Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640–1705 Penelope Anderson 978 0 7486 5582 3 Hbk Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400–1642 Andrea Ria Stevens 978 0 7486 7049 9 Hbk Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600–1642 Bradley D. Ryner 978 0 7486 8465 6 Hbk Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture website at www.euppublishing.com/series/ecsrc

Inventions of the Skin The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400–1642

Andrea Ria Stevens

© Andrea Ria Stevens, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 7049 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7050 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7051 2 (epub) The right of Andrea Ria Stevens to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgments vi Bibliographical Note

viii

Series Editor’s Preface

ix

Introduction 1 1 Light: Staging Divinity in the York Cycle

21

2 Blood: Enter Martius, Painted

49

3 Black: Mastering Masques of Blackness

87

4 Stone: Lost Ladies

121

Epilogue 153 Bibliography 155 Index 168

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the many people who helped guide this study from its inception to its conclusion, from Christie Luckyj at Dalhousie University, to Katharine Maus, Bruce Holsinger, and Elizabeth Fowler at the University of Virginia, to my outstanding colleagues in early modern drama here at the University of Illinois: Curtis Perry, Rob Barrett, Catharine Gray, Bob Markley, Carol Thomas Neely, and Lori Newcomb. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the UIUC Campus Research Board, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities have supported my research with fellowships, teaching releases and travel grants. Jenny Daly at Edinburgh University Press has been unflaggingly helpful; I thank her, the series editor Lorna Hutson, and my two anonymous readers at the press for their incisive criticism. So too do I wish to thank Alan Dessen, Farah Karim-­Cooper, Jeremy Lopez, and Tiffany Stern, each of whom either shared their own research with me or generously responded to various parts of this manuscript. Thank you to six years of inspiring students at the U of I, especially to the very patient Shakespeare classes of Fall 2012. Portions of Chapter 3 first appeared in English Literary Renaissance in an article on ‘Mastering Masques of Blackness’ (2009); my thanks to the editors for their permission to reprint. I must also thank again Farah and Tiffany (along with A&C Black Bloomsbury Academic) for permission to reprint portions of my chapter on ‘Cosmetic Transformations’ from their collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Theatre and the Effects of Performance (2013). ‘Without others, we cannot perfectly know ourselves’: the list grows. For their years of friendship and good counsel, I thank Justin Gifford, Samara Landers, Ellen Malenas Ledoux, Michael Lewis, Michael Lundblad, and Eric Song; Thadd McQuade; Matt Hart, Summer Jellison Hart, and Justine Murison; Colin Fitzsimons; and Dave McGimpsey. I am delighted to count my theatre department colleagues Robert

Acknowledgments     vii

Anderson, Lisa Gaye Dixon, Robert Quinlan, and Robert Ramirez among my friends and collaborators in various endeavours both professional and personal. Paul Menzer has been an invaluable resource for a very long time indeed. I have, moreover, learned more than I can say about performance from my time spent in the presence of the gifted actors and scholars I have come to know primarily through the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, including but not limited to Ralph Alan Cohen, Alice Dailey, John Harrell, Peter Kanelos, James Keegan, Matt Kozusko, Genevieve Love, and Rene Thornton. For your endless kindness, thank you Sarah Hagelin. Thank you to my supportive family in Ottawa, Toronto, and Norwich, including the newest girl from Norfolk, Abigail Ria, and here at home on the plains: thank you Gabriel, Ellen, Bella, and Coleman. In loving memory of Marvin Miller, Ollie Stevens, and above all of Fraser Harris, who very wisely supplied a six-­year-old girl with as many P. G. Wodehouse novels as she could wish. Finally, I was born under a lucky star when it comes to teachers. Thank you Neil Brooks, Corinne Davies, and Elizabeth Revell, all of Huron University College. This book is dedicated to the teacher who first taught me Shakespeare at Huron, and who taught me best: Peter Hyland.

Bibliographical Note

I have used recent modernised editions of plays when available. In the case of the less canonical plays not available in modern edition, I have tried to identify quotations as best as possible (in most cases, by through lines or by page signature numbers). All references to Shakespeare, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the Norton Shakespeare. For the dates of first performance, I have followed Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson in A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. For the sake of clarity, I have silently modernised early modern spelling from ‘u’ to ‘v’, ‘i’ to ‘j’ when necessary.

Series Editor’s Preface

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identification of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’? The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defines its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing ‘the advent of a once-­and-­for-­all modernity’ which is the deictic ‘here and now’ from which we look back.1 The phrase ‘early modern’, that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to ‘us’. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture aims rather to shift the emphasis from a story of progress – early modern to modern – to series of critical encounters and conversations with the past, which may reveal to us some surprising alternatives buried within texts familiarly construed as episodes on the way to certain identifying features of our endlessly fascinating modernity. In keeping with one aspect of the etymology of ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Rinascimento’ as ‘rebirth’, moreover, this series features books that explore and interpret

­x    Inventions of the Skin anew elements of the critical encounter between writers of the period 1500–1700 and texts of Greco-­Roman literature, rhetoric, politics, law, oeconomics, eros and friendship. The term ‘culture’, then, indicates a license to study and scrutinise objects other than literary ones, and to be more inclusive about both the forms and the material and political stakes of making meaning both in the past and in the present. ‘Culture’ permits a realisation of the benefits to be reaped after two decades of interdisciplinary enrichment in the arts. No longer are historians naïve about textual criticism, about rhetoric, literary theory or about readerships; likewise, literary critics trained in close reading now also turn easily to court archives, to legal texts, and to the historians’ debates about the languages of political and religious thought. Social historians look at printed pamphlets with an eye for narrative structure; literary critics look at court records with awareness of the problems of authority, mediation and institutional procedure. Within these developments, modes of research that became unfashionable and discredited in the 1980s – for example, studies in classical or vernacular ‘source texts’, or studies of literary ‘influence’ across linguistic, confessional and geographical boundaries – have acquired a new critical edge and relevance as the convergence of the disciplines enables the unfolding of new cultural histories (that is to say, what was once studied merely as ‘literary influence’ may now be studied as a fraught cultural encounter). The term ‘Renaissance’ thus retains the relevance of the idea of consciousness and critique within these textual engagements of past and present, and, while it foregrounds the Western European experience, is intended to provoke comparativist study of wider global perspectives rather than to promote the ‘universality’ of a local, if far-­reaching, historical phenomenon. Finally, as traditional pedagogic boundaries between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ are being called into question by cross disciplinary work emphasising the ‘reformation’ of social and cultural forms, so this series, while foregrounding the encounter with the classical past, is self-­conscious about the ways in which that past is assimilated to the projects of Reformation and Counter-­ Reformation, spiritual, political and domestic, that finally transformed Christendom into Europe. Individual books in this series vary in methodology and approach, sometimes blending the sensitivity of close literary analysis with incisive, informed and urgent theoretical argument, at other times offering critiques of grand narratives of the period by their work in manuscript transmission, or in the archives of legal, social and architectural history, or by social histories of gender and childhood. What all these books have in common, however, is the capacity to offer compelling, well-­

Series Editor’s Preface     xi

documented and lucidly written critical accounts of how writers and thinkers in the period 1500–1700 reshaped, transformed and critiqued the texts and practices of their world, prompting new perspectives on what we think we have learned from them. Lorna Hutson

Note 1. Terence Cave, ‘Locating the Early Modern’, Paragraph, 29:1 (2006) 12–26, 14.

‘our soul expands, we are not monochromatic’

Michel Serres

Introduction

Bare Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both.1

When a troupe of travelling actors arrives at Elsinore, Hamlet asks to hear a speech about the slaughter of princes. It begins, so Hamlet reminds them, with Pyrrhus: The rugged Pyrrhus – he whose sable arms, Black as his purpose, did the night resemble When he lay couched in the ominous horse, Hath now his black and grim complexion smeared With heraldry more dismal, head to foot. Now is he total guise, horridly tricked With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, Baked and imparched in coagulate gore, Rifted in earth and fire.

(7.340–50)2

The power of this speech resides in the picture it creates of a transfigured body. After a false start with a less visually precise simile (‘Pyrrhus, like th’Hyrcanian beast’), Hamlet delivers what sounds like a stage direction: red, black, and grim as night, Pyrrhus stalks the streets of Troy covered head to foot in the blood of his enemies. The implication is clear. To become a successful revenger is not merely to act – a vexed question

­2    Inventions of the Skin throughout the play – but also to look the part, in Pyrrhus’s case to appear to Priam, like the murderers in Macbeth, ‘steep’d in the colours of [his] trade’ (Macbeth, 2. 3. 113). The passage cited above comes from the 1603 Q1 Hamlet. In the 1623 printing of the play, Pyrrhus, no less striking, is described as ‘roasted in wrath and fire’, ‘o’ersized with coagulate gore, / with eyes like carbuncles’ (2. 2. 458–60). In this version, the heraldic term for ‘red’, ‘gules’, replaces the more theatrical ‘guise’ or costume, the lexical shift (whatever its origins) transforming blood into the formal heraldry of armour. Larger than life, Pyrrhus achieves the symbolic ‘thick skin’ that the critic Klaus Theweleit associates with the fascist fantasy of the male body become ‘steel-­hard’ and impregnable.3 Pyrrhus does not, of course, actually appear on stage in Hamlet, although we might register the passage’s ‘Marlovian ring’ and ask whether this moment invokes Shakespeare’s own memory as a spectator or as an actor of a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, since the titular hero’s personal iconography relies heavily on red, black, and white color symbolism (‘white’ emerges later in the speech, in the arresting sight of ­reverend Priam’s ‘milky head’).4 Hamlet’s description does, however, have a metadramatic dimension in that it invites us to imagine bodily effluvia and otherwise ‘natural’ materials (blood, sweat, dirt) as a theatrical ‘guise’ that actually transforms the body beneath, if we consider this blood and blackness as ‘baked’ in the fires of warfare on to Pyrrhus’s body like a second skin. And if Pyrrhus had indeed appeared on stage coloured as black and red as the text suggests, he would have done so via a process of cosmetic transformation – in other words, he would have been a ‘painted tyrant’ in truth (Hamlet, 1623 text, 2. 2. 476). That process is the subject of this book, which takes up one of the early modern stage’s more ubiquitous prosthetics: stage paint. Throughout the late medieval and early modern periods and in an array of dramatic circumstances, theatrical paint was used to materialise a range of bodily states not always thought of as similarly constituted: divinity against human vulnerability, blackness against whiteness, beauty against deformity, life against death, to say nothing of femininity against masculinity within the all-­male theatre. Indeed, early modern defenders and detractors of the stage alike imagined paint as embodying the essence of theatricality. In his Apology for Actors (1612), Thomas Heywood suggests the word ‘tragedy’ derives from the Greek for ‘a kinde of painting’, implicating the roots of theatre in such cosmetic transformations, and John Webster describes the close association between paint and player as axiomatic: ‘[a player] is much affected to painting, and tis a question whether that makes him an excellent Plaier, or his playing an

Introduction     3

exquisite painter’.5 If, as it has been suggested, this ‘character sketch’ refers to Richard Burbage, chief actor of Shakespeare’s company and also a painter of portraits, the slippage between cosmetics and the fine arts might be deliberate. For the anti-­theatricalist Phillip Stubbes, paint helped players forge the protean identities he found so alarming: ‘beware, therefore, you masking players, you painted sepulchres, you doble-­dealing ambodexters’.6 Throughout this book I use ‘paint’ as an umbrella term for the theatrical materials applied directly to the player’s body, sharing a similar physical constitution, and behaving similarly in performance. Related key terms in the early modern lexicon include ‘fucus’, ‘­ tincture’, ‘enamel’, ‘vermilion’, ‘gild’, and ‘cosmetics’, to list but a few; as a verb, to paint is also to ‘represent’, ‘limn’, ‘decorate’, ‘prick’, ‘touch’, ‘daub’, ‘adorn’, ‘beautify’, ‘disfigure’, ‘transfigure’, and ‘adulterate’. This definition encompasses cosmetics as well as more ‘industrial’ paints; significantly, in the early modern theatre, the same materials used to paint canvases, scenery, and props were also applied to bodies – and thus we should not think of early modern theatrical paint as producing a ‘naturalistic’ effect or as effacing its own artificiality. I say ‘behaving similarly in performance’, but the OED’s primary definition of paint also captures the potential unpredictability of a substance that manages to occupy different states of matter: a liquid which when spread over a surface dries to leave a thin layer of colour or protective coating; the dried film itself. Also: solid matter that may be spread in this way, usually when combined with a liquid vehicle (as water or oil).

Whether liquid or solid, paint is colour. For Steven Connor, colour ‘harbours the idea of something that both touches the skin, and is also itself, by a curious logic of contagious replication, a kind of second skin, a layer, film, or veil’.7 When applied to the human body, paint can be seen to protect the skin by adding a false layer over a true, or indeed to achieve a more radical transformation by creating an altogether new entity from the artificial merged with the organic: ‘Now is he total guise’.

I. In the wake of recent calls to devote serious study to the ‘seemingly vain objects’ of Renaissance culture, we are now seeing a more nuanced history of the visual field of the early modern stage emerge.8 Any lack of attention especially to the more ephemeral elements of staging is partly

­4    Inventions of the Skin due to the relatively scarce archival evidence for those objects that do not show up on surviving property lists; I also attribute this oversight to the persistence of rigid distinctions between late medieval and early modern staging practices that, in turn, both reflect and reinforce distinctions between a Catholic past invested in the image and a ‘reformed’ Protestant present invested in the word. As the story goes, when the ‘medieval’ stage became ‘early modern’ it jettisoned its more ‘primitive’ or ‘infantile’ trappings and became ‘bare’, all the better to showcase early modern drama’s greater linguistic sophistication: thus Shakespeare gets the theatre he deserves.9 Like those who wrongly imagine classical antiquity as a field of uniformly white, rather than brilliantly painted, marble, we should be wary of this impulse to ‘decoloration’. As a moral and aesthetic judgment, ‘bare’ can obscure what was certainly a sensually vibrant theatrical environment.10 True, there was no painted scenery to be found in the public playhouses of the early seventeenth century. To see such ‘sets’ one would have to go to court to attend one of the lavish masques designed, from 1605 onwards, by the master craftsman Inigo Jones. That does not mean, however, that the theatres clustered on the South Bank of the Thames across the water from the city of London were bereft of visual stimuli.11 On the contrary, as the antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson complained, in the setting forth of plays ‘nothing was forgot that might ravish the beholders with varietie of pleasure’.12 Flags bearing emblematic images flew from the playhouse rooftops: swans, roses, phoenixes, and gods shouldering the burden of the world.13 Once inside the theatre, spectators encountered such stage hangings as tapestries or painted cloths (‘arrases’); wooden pillars ‘painted in such excellent imitation of marble that it is able to deceive even the most cunning’; and of course the ‘ceiling’ overhanging the thrust stage that at the Globe, at least, was painted with celestial symbols to resemble the heavens: ‘The benediction of these covering heavens / Fall on their heads like dew, for they are worthy / To inlay heaven with stars’ (Cymbeline 5. 5. 351–3).14 Although his subject is the atomist theory of light and vision and his example far removed in time and place from early modern London, Lucretius’ description of objects that appear to emit rays of pigmented light beautifully captures the ambient sprawl of colour within an open-­ air amphitheatre: For verily we see many things cast off and give out bodies in abundance, not only from deep beneath, as we said before, but often too from the surface, such as their own colour. And commonly this is done by awnings yellow and red and purple, when stretched over great theatres they flap and flutter, spread everywhere on masts and beams. For there they tinge the assembly in

Introduction     5 the tiers beneath, and all the bravery of the stage and the gay-­clad company of the elders, and constrain them to flutter in their colours . . . all the scene within [does] laugh, bathed in brightness as the light of day is straitened.15

This penchant for colour was not confined to the theatre, as Frederick Kiefer points out: To walk into an Elizabethan interior was to experience what Eric Mercer has called an ‘uproar’ of color: ‘Throughout the greater part of the period the only reason for leaving anything unpainted seems to have been the physical impossibility of reaching it with a brush.’16

From textiles to wood to stone to plaster, paint adorned the surface of things. Early modern bodies were equally fair game for similar aesthetic transformation – by similar substances – from Queen Elizabeth, who in matters of religion preferred ‘words over pictures’, who once issued an edict likening the use of makeup to ‘witchcraft’, and who each day greeted her public with an elaborately painted face; to the countless women who, even if emulating their Queen, were criticised for the facepaints that made them morally suspect and socially unknowable; to the archetypal male courtier John Donne satirically describes as ‘so glistering, and so painted in many colours that he is hardly discerned from one of the pictures in the Arras hanging’.17 In the Induction to Cynthia’s Revels (1600), a Children of the Chapel play performed at the indoor Blackfriars playhouse, Ben Jonson scripts a gentleman who refuses to sit upon one of the ‘gallants’ stools’ on the stage lest he be mistaken, like Donne’s courtier, for part of the scenery: ‘What, wouldst thou make an implement of me? . . . Sir crack, I am none of your fresh pictures that use to beautify the decayed dead arras in a public theatre’ (139–43). If, in their paintedness, live bodies resembled the figures that decorated arrases, they also resembled other painted simulacra of bodies such as effigies and memorial tomb sculptures painted in bright oil colors. Sir Henry Wotton in his Elements of English Architecture (1624) derides this custom as ‘the Fashion of colouring, even Regall Statues, which I must take leave to call an English Barbarisme’.18 In early modern England, it was the unpainted statue that was the exception, not the norm. In his Survay of London (1618), John Stow reports that, during the refurbishment of the ‘Aldgate’ of the City of London, the civic statues of ‘Charity’ and ‘Love’ remained veiled from the public until they were painted.19 Accordingly, in Jonson’s Epicoene, the gallant Truewit sarcastically defends the length of time some women devote to painting their faces to the time spent renovating these statues: ‘How long did the canvas hang before Aldgate? Were the people suffered to see the city’s

­6    Inventions of the Skin Love and Charity while they were rude stone, before they were painted and burnished’? (1. 1. 119–22). Images of crudely painted human figures decorated commercial signboards advertising alehouses, for instance; in Titus Andronicus, the blackfaced Aaron mocks Demetrius and Chiron for their white and red complexions by comparing them to ‘whitelimed walls, alehouse painted signs’ (4. 2. 97). And let us not forget what, for post-­Reformation audiences, were the most fraught painted bodies of all: the speciously gilded and painted ‘idols’ of the old religion, up to and including that great ‘strumpet of all strumpets, the Mother of Whoredome’, the Catholic Church herself (2678–9).20 Bodies that appeared painted on the stage or within other types of public performance could invoke any of these contexts. Painted actors could variously portray statues or people feigning stoniness, corpses or people playing dead, good women or whores pretending to virtue, ‘moors’ or Europeans posing as Africans. To be sure, it is paint’s very polysemousness that constitutes its dramaturgical value in the early modern theatre: in the absence of heavily designed sets, stage characters are necessarily ‘defined by what they walk about in’, and the definitions that paint invites range broadly indeed.21 For David Batchelor, ‘with makeup we not only make our bodies more visible and vivid, we also make them more expressive and articulate’; for Simon Shepherd, ‘theatre is, and always has been, a place which exhibits what a human body is, what it does, what it is capable of’.22 Both of these statements apply especially well to the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Recovering this ground zero of early modern theatrical illusion – the body of the actor – my study examines goldface and divinity in York’s Corpus Christi play, bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama (especially blood’s unexpected use as a device for disguise), racial masquerade within seventeenth-­century court performances and popular plays, and finally whiteface, death, resurrection, and ‘stoniness’ in two closely affiliated plays of 1610–1611, Thomas Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Not only did dramatists turn to paint to sustain a variety of theatrical illusions, they also strategically manipulated the multiple significations of this technology to create stage characters with complex effects of depth; allude to past and to contemporary performances; and thrill audiences by showcasing actors’ virtuoso transformations.

Introduction     7

II. ‘To paint’ was among the many actions that a man might play on stage. For a variety of reasons, characters paint themselves or each other in full view of the audience, or indeed insistently comment upon their own paintedness. This is an especially significant act of body modification at a historical moment when, as Katharine Maus has shown, ‘the sense of discrepancy between “inward disposition” and “outward appearance” was unusually urgent and consequential for a very large number of people’.23 For Maus, in the English Renaissance the ‘problem of other minds presents itself to thinkers and writers not so much as a question of whether those minds exist as a question of how to know what they are thinking’.24 What I find striking about this epistemological crisis that Maus attributes to the ‘social and religious upheavals wrought by the Reformation’ is that a general conviction of the fundamental unknowability of the human interior does not bring about an increased sense of privacy: if only God can see into the hearts of men, people still remained remarkably anxious about how the ordinary and fallible observer might view them, as the popularity of treatises that elaborated techniques for self-­concealment and for the scrutiny of others indicates.25 Altogether disrupting social intercourse, the painted face dramatises the ‘problem of other minds’ as having as much to do with what we wish to hide from others, as what we fear others might be hiding from us. This is not to suggest, however, that ‘paint’ has only to do with acts of disguise: consider the emblematically reddened and blackened Pyrrhus, whose external appearance matches an inner ‘body-­scape . . . roasted in wrath and fire’.26 A presentational device that flaunts its own artifice, paint is not an aspect of early modern theatrical production meant to go unremarked. Rather, in specific situations, its presence or absence allows us to discern the various subject positions and ethical orientations selves might take up toward others, and it is partly for this reason that I call it a strategy for creating ‘character’. In early modern drama, stage persons who metadramatically call attention to their paintedness generally do so either to deny the grounds of their shared humanity or to seize control of their bodies’ expressive surfaces. The first position is aggressive, as in an assault; the second defensive, as in a retreat. And while neither fantasy is mutually exclusive, both tend to fall more or less along gender lines. Typically, playwrights depict male characters who attempt to deny their similarity to others by using paint to emphasise their biological difference. In turn, women are depicted as attaining bodily privacy by donning ‘masks’ of paint that hide their tell-­tale

­8    Inventions of the Skin shifts of colour from view. Such feminine assertions of agency do not, however, always have successful outcomes. Especially in the Caroline period, playwrights devise situations in which women masquerade in paint guises solely to emphasise the coup de théâtre moment when the paint is removed and the woman’s true face is exposed – as ‘true’ as that feminine face can be in an all-­male theatre. Not all acts of bodypainting, moreover, are acts of self-­fashioning: when male characters paint women’s faces they do so to discipline their wives or lovers – as if by painting the body’s surface, they exert their dominion over whatever unruly passion might, within, be passing show. In terms theorised by Valerie Traub, paint therefore provides men with a ‘strategy of containment’ for making a ‘still, cold, and closed’ monument out of a ‘mobile, hot, and open’ body.27 From the actions characters take with paint, we thus can discern their attitudes to themselves and to others. We begin to intuit what they wish to become or to avoid becoming, what they wish to deny or to keep at bay or, finally, and perhaps only fleetingly, what they come to accept. My study also considers how these fantasies, which often involve moments of direct address to the audience, enlist early modern viewers as co-­collaborators in the production of dramatic subjectivity.28 As we shall see, Coriolanus commands his soldiers – and by extension, the audience – to see him as ‘painted’ rather than as bloodied. Characters in blackface routinely reflect upon the fixed constancy of their black skin. When Govianus paints the corpse of the ‘Lady’ in Middleton’s tragedy, we are told how the paint looks, how it smells, how it feels. In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina warns Leontes not to touch the ‘newly performed’ statue of Hermione – because the paint is wet, it might stain his lips. These instances ask us to consider the ‘nuts and bolts’ of stage processes in their own right and to imagine the impact of these processes upon players’ bodies. Intimating that something is being withheld from us, the painted face grips us with the expectation that there is some thing, some essence, capable of being withheld. Of course, any number of dramaturgical elements similarly invite audiences ‘to project their imaginations . . . toward an unseen behind or within’, to cite Bruce Smith’s analysis of the role of the curtain that hung in front of the discovery space at the back of the early modern stage: The term ‘hangings’ is too inert . . . For actors on the stage, the curtain could be implicated in all sorts of activities: hiding, discovering, sexual pleasuring, sleeping, dying, reading, writing, dreaming, eating, moving from one place to another. For spectators in the house, they were sites of expectation, enticements for looking, invitations to the play of fantasy, preparations for the focused seeing and listening that define dramatic scenes.29

Introduction     9

Watching a character don a disguise, watching a bed ‘thrust forth’, watching a tomb pried open – at these moments illusions are conjured, of subjectivity, of depth, of spaces ‘further within’. The metatheatricality of these moments – the way they make the work of theatre visible – in no way diminishes the efficacy of the illusion.30 Unlike other prosthetics or identity tokens, however, paint directly involves, implicates, and showcases the ‘real’ body of the actor. Once discarded, a mask reverts to its prior state of ‘inert materiality’; we cannot say the same for a false face of paint.31 As a stage action, ‘to paint’ is therefore analogous to the ‘performative’ speech acts Andrew Sofer has analysed with respect to Doctor Faustus: if to blaspheme onstage is really to blaspheme, and perhaps to conjure is really to conjure, to paint the skin is really to alter the body, and I do not simply mean that the act of painting is executed rather than mimed: rather, the actor’s physiology is a ‘potentiality’ within the play that is activated when players are painted or stripped of paint in view of the audience, or when players metadramatically comment upon what it feels like to inhabit their painted bodies.32 To borrow a phrase from Bert O. States, at these moments ‘something indisputably real leaks out of the illusion’, or more correctly, something real leaks into the illusion.33 Gail Kern Paster has persuasively outlined how, for the early moderns, ‘psychology and physiology are one’. The playhouse fact of the painted actor is, by necessity, also a physiological reality, and by strategically incorporating this physiological reality into the dramatic fiction, early modern plays create a language of interiority that makes sense in early modern ‘psychophysiological’ terms rather than in terms of a new, ‘modern’ language of interiority. Paint’s milieu is the skin, the very blushing, quivering, and melting exterior where early modern subjects visibly experienced their somatic precariousness. In The Book of Skin, Steven Connor usefully summarises the many ways in which the skin has functioned historically: ‘first of all a pure and inviolable covering, and then an expressive screen, the skin began through the medieval period to be thought of more and more as an organ of interchange, or permeable membrane, traversable in two directions’.34 The ideal of the disciplined, privatised, and closed self that Norbert Elias designated ‘homo clausus’ was therefore emergent rather than dominant in the early seventeenth century, and it has been shown that early moderns tended to think of the skin less as a barrier than as a ‘transpirable and transfluxible’ membrane subject to the influence, good or ill, of its surrounding environment.35 For Paster, it is not surprising, then, that the humoral body should be characterised not only by its physical openness but also by its emotional instability and

­10    Inventions of the Skin v­ olatility, by an internal climate knowable, like climates in the outer world, more for changeability than for stasis.36

Early modern subjects developed various ‘therapies of self-­regulation’ in response to this bodily volatility, from diet, to exercise, to carefully monitored acts of ingestion and excretion.37 Although not typically included within these regimens, body painting provides a concretely literal method for ‘demarcating the porous cusp between self and other and between matter and world’.38 At the risk of oversimplifying what, within the plays, are complex representations of affective experience, I find that stage characters narrate their psychophysiological experience of paintedness in suggestively contradictory ways. For some, the integument of paint provides something like fortifying body armour that regulates the ‘mutual permeation’ of self and world. For others, paint is felt instead to hasten the body’s degeneration or, indeed, even to weaponise the body as a source of spreading toxicity to others. Thus on the one hand paint protects, civilises, and monumentalises bodies become invulnerable. On the other, paint corrodes, contaminates, and adulterates bodies shown to be frighteningly susceptible to invasive outside forces. This tension helps explain the dramatic motifs I discuss throughout the book – figurations of the painted body as a statue to be worshipped and as a poisonous trap, of the skin-­container as a shield and as a prison-­house. These motifs all draw upon paint’s material properties. Given the literally poisonous ingredients such as lead and mercury sublimate that paint sometimes contained, moralising tracts warned that the habitual use of cosmetics could result in ‘black teeth . . . an offensive breath’, with a ‘face half scorched’.39 With admittedly less frequency, some voices did, however, defend the reparative use of cosmetics as justifiable under the right circumstances, for example if ‘honestly endeavoured by a Physitian’.40 Thomas Jeamson accordingly lauds the capacity for paint to remedy the frailty of the skin by providing an ‘artificial Enamel, which might be a fixation to Natures inconstancy’ (Jeamson’s argument harmonises with the OED definition of paint as a ‘protective coating’).41 What remains ostensibly forbidden, as Frances Dolan has demonstrated, is for women to take up the ‘pen’, so to speak, in their own hands.42 Of course, it wasn’t simply women who painted, but men as well, and if the habitual use of cosmetics did indeed permanently injure the skin, it is tempting to wonder whether actors were marked by their trade in the way that tanners bore the visual evidence of their profession even unto death, according to the Clown in Hamlet: ‘Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade, that he will keep out water a great while; and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body’ (5. 1. 157–9). It

Introduction     11

is not, however, the task of this book to speculate about the long-­term physiological consequences of acting per se (as fascinating as that might be), but instead to give life to the various affective transformations the experience of paintedness can sustain – and in so doing, to note the vocabulary of inwardness, distant from our own, that makes this inner experience tangible: stage persons blush and blanch, melt and crack, chill and burn as they negotiate their way in a relentlessly social world. Throughout the book, I consider the ‘intermateriality’ or indeed the ‘intramateriality’ of seemingly dissimilar effects in plays and pageants by canonical and non-­canonical writers. The theatre’s most powerful illusions of gender, death, and race are created from essentially the same materials; considering these effects in relation to each other and, importantly, to those conventions the public stage inherits from late medieval drama discloses provocative new possibilities for understanding early modern performance. Together with a host of props including masks, paint was widely used in English cycle drama to create images of divinity and violence and to realise such abstract states as salvation and doom. At Chester the ‘little God’ had his face painted gold, at York Jesus wore a leather suit painted with the marks of his wounds, and everywhere throughout the Records of Early English Drama volumes (hereafter REED) we find evidence for the labour of painters. Even more evidence survives from continental Europe. Consider, for example, the following contract for labour from Modane in 1580. The father and son mentioned in the contract – Thomas Mellurin Sr. and Thomas Mellurin Jr., painters by trade – are paid for their expertise in providing the majority of the special effects required to stage Modane’s communal performance of ‘The Mystery of the great Judgment of God’, a play similar in subject and purpose to the mystery plays performed around the feasts of Corpus Christi and Pentecost in York and Chester. The brief extract that follows should indicate the kind of work these men were expected to do, and how (‘God willing’!) they were expected to do it: Firstly they shall undertake to paint Hell and the sea on cloth or heavy fabric of such size as they are instructed. To paint the sky with stars, the sun, and the moon with such skill that the said sun shall appear black to those watching and the moon red when they are acting at the appropriate times . . . and to make the stars with such skill that they can fall to the ground when necessary. . . . they will make several limbs that look like the limbs of people killed in the battle with the semblance of blood on those thus killed and wounded. . . . They shall paint five or six souls, and they shall find some means by the skill and cunning to put out the eyes of the catholic with pointed skewers, and to this end they shall make the necessary eyes and false faces or some alternative as skillfully as they can.

­12    Inventions of the Skin . . . Then they shall make a dagger with which someone can be struck in the breast and die from the blow. And they will make blood issue forth in the accustomed way. . . . Then shall be made two dummy bodies to rip up or saw through the middle, from which shall come out entrails and blood and which will look as much as possible like the two Jesuits. And the officials will supply the flesh of the said bodies and the pig skins and shall take back the said flesh afterwards . . .43

Its startling images breaking through the bounds of its legalese, the contract reminds us that behind theatre’s most spectacular illusions lies the world of work: networks of labour relations, money, and raw materials, even ‘flesh’ itself. The sheer scope of this contract’s proposed special effects calls to mind the theatrical ‘urban legends’ Jody Enders chronicles so vividly: tales of ‘real’ devils appearing onstage, beautiful peasant girls (and boys) performing so winningly that they land husbands and benefactors.44 Whatever the special effect, the contract makes clear that the men are to employ their ‘skill’ and ‘industry’ to represent things as ‘convincingly’ as they can. Although the Reformation is too often defined in terms of its hostility toward the visual, the sensual, and the theatrical, these material technologies survive the Reformation and accrue different significations from the 1460s to the 1630s: simply put, there can be no ­wholesale overturning of the religious theatre when the same technologies remained in place to remind of a ‘proscribed former language’.45 When Shakespeare’s Coriolanus calls his blood a ‘mask of paint’, the taint of female cosmetic practices complicates the spectacle of his heroic bloodshed – even as the sight of his bloody body recalls in complex ways the Jesus of cycle drama. When Paulina warns Leontes not to touch the statue of Hermione, she echoes the resurrected Jesus’ command to Mary Magdalene to ‘touch him not’. These connections and associations are all but invisible if we consider theatrical effects in isolation from past iterations of their use, and each chapter shows how the ‘ghosted’ traces of multiple cultural and dramatic practices haunt the spectacle of the painted body on the early modern stage. If paint adorns stage subjects, it is itself an object, albeit an unusually unruly or unpredictable one. Stubbes’s charge that the actor is a ‘sepulchre’ is especially suggestive not only for its moralistic hostility to acting, but also for its evocation of a body buried within layers of adhesive paint. Neither discrete nor movable in the way of other stage additions, paint sits too close to the skin, is too much like the skin, to be easily detachable. The technology is messy, hazardous to expensive costumes, and hard to manage. When paint is used as a device for disguise,

Introduction     13

as is the case in several of the plays I discuss, entrances and exits must be carefully timed to accommodate these changes of face and body; indeed, managing these quick transformations allows the actor to display his own virtuosity. Early modern dramatists and performers embraced the medium, and not just because they recognised that manipulating it allowed them to offer metatheatrical commentaries upon a range of cultural and dramatic practices: they recognised paint’s commercial appeal as a special effect. In his Art of Love, Ovid cautioned women to conceal their own cosmetic rituals from prying eyes lest the sight of their artifice ruin the illusion of their beauty:46 Beware lest that by chance your boxes lye Upon the table, and your Loves passe by: Throw them aside, art spreads her safest net When she is with most cunning counterfet. . . . Shut fast the forge where beauties joyned are. For many things there be men should not know, The greatest part of them, if you should show, They should offend them much: spare not to shroud The doing, though the thing done be allowed. (Book III 315–18; 340–4)

Scenes in which bodies are painted in full view of the audience offer spectators a privileged, and perhaps also titillating, glimpse of theatrical processes typically conducted backstage in the tiring house. These processes can, of course, go wrong, and I suggest that dramatists in fact valued the very risks the technology introduces of theatrical unpredictability and also of worrisome physiological change; it is precisely the uncertainty surrounding the ‘real’ complications that accompany staged scenarios of bodypainting that often give this grammar of representation its signifying power. A forceful example of the belief that paint, a technology of the surface, can in fact work permanent changes comes in John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis (1650); there, Bulwer provides a cosmetic origin for skin colour difference, speculating that the Moors’ ancestors had an ‘affectation of painting’ that led to the race becoming permanently black by a process of ‘artificial denigration’.47 I hope that we can read Bulwer’s account without diminishing its anecdotal power or dismissing the insight it provides into early modern conceptions of biology, and I am particularly interested in identifying moments such as this that imagine the skin as a milieu traversable in multiple directions and as a place of passage.48

­14    Inventions of the Skin

III. This study adds to the growing body of scholarship upon what people saw when they went to the theatre, and, more important still, why what they saw mattered, from Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda’s collection Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (2002), to Andrew Sofer’s The Stage Life of Props (2003), to Tiffany Stern’s Making Shakespeare from Page to Stage (2004). It complements recent accounts of early modern ‘materialities’ in studies by Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones on early modern clothing; by Will Fisher, on the identity tokens that materialise gender; and certainly by Farah Karim-­ Cooper, Tanya Pollard, Dympna Callaghan, Frances Dolan, and others on early modern cosmetics.49 Karim-­ Cooper in particular has written authoritatively about the ‘culture of cosmetics’ attached to discourses of feminine beauty in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and drama. With chapters on divinity, race, and violence, my study builds upon Karim-­Cooper’s work on the role of cosmetics as ‘crucial to the art and design of early modern theatrical production’, but differs in its range of coverage (from late medieval through to Caroline drama) and its focus on the psychophysiology of the painted body in performance.50 I am indebted to the archival data collated not just in the REED volumes, but also in such invaluable works of theatre history as Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter’s Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England and Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby’s The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages.51 As I consider throughout the book this evidence for past performance, I take for granted the value of a methodology that joins ‘suspicion and inductive empathy’ to the careful consideration of those period accounts of early English performance that survive, all the while remaining alive to Rita Felski’s reminder that ‘we cannot close our eyes to the historicity of artworks, and yet we sorely need alternatives to seeing them as transcendentally timeless on the one hand, and imprisoned in their moment of origin on the other’.52 Chapter 1 examines the staging of divinity in the York cycle drama. Theatre historians traditionally have identified ‘goldface’ as the primary sign for representing divinity on the medieval stage. Staged by the Curriers’ guild, the York pageant of The Transfiguration of Christ – which represents ‘the person of Jesus taking on the persona of Christ’ in front of three core disciples – offers the theological explanation for the convention. By attaching gold to this specific event (narrated in Matthew 17 1: 9), this pageant highlights the convention as a material process

Introduction     15

that is itself the explicit subject of the dramatic action; thus the pageant invites us to consider how the materials used to signify divinity necessarily shape the doctrinal message that the cycle imparts. Demonstrating the overlooked importance of this pageant to the York cycle as a whole, this chapter argues that The Transfiguration establishes a signifying idiom of divinity that recurs across those pageants that also take up the mystery of Christ’s dual nature, including especially the resurrection stories and the pageant dramatising the Last Judgment. This analysis yields an original interpretation of Christ’s body that differs from readings focused solely on the suffering Christ of the passion sequence. I return to the eschatological significance of this event in my final chapter on souls and bodies in Middleton and Shakespeare. Using Coriolanus (1608) as its focus, Chapter 2, ‘Blood: Enter Martius, Painted’ takes up what the Mellurins père et fils were instructed to make ‘in the accustomed manner’: stage blood. Arguing that when players’ bodies are required to be bloodied, paint rather than animal blood or red vinegar was used, I survey a representative range of stage directions to establish what is conventional, and what is innovative or noteworthy, about the execution of blood effects in early modern drama. Accustomed to thinking about stage blood as a vehicle for realism, we overlook the embrace of blood as a mode for theatrical disguise, as in the anonymous comedy Look About You (1599) or James Shirley’s tragedy The Politician (1639). If in Chapter 1 I argue that a simultaneously gilded and bloodied Jesus of the York cycle forces us to reassess the view that the mystery plays (like late medieval devotional art) consistently emphasised Jesus’ powerless suffering, Shakespeare’s last tragedy offers a similar opportunity to reconsider blood’s affective pull. Returning wounded from the battle at Corioles, Caius Martius repeatedly demands that his blood be viewed as ‘paint’. Instead of a depleting leakage, this blood-­as-­paint becomes for Martius a hardening armour that makes him impregnable; moreover, his telling claim that his ‘mask’ of paint conceals his ‘blushes’ from view suggests that his blood grants him precisely the refuge from the gaze that the ritual of the gown demands he surrender. This chapter locates in Martius’ metadramatic narration of his body a language of self-­display vitally different from the poetry of soliloquy and introspection more commonly associated Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. The use of blackface paint to signify ‘Moorishness’ is perhaps the most recognisable (and the most controversial) example of the type of effects I discuss. Less familiar might be the use of blackface as a disguise device for white characters – a supple and mobile blackness designed to be cast off or, given the unruliness of live theatre, to fail to be cast off.

­16    Inventions of the Skin Chapter 3 on ‘Mastering Masques of Blackness’ demonstrates how two of Ben Jonson’s masques for the court of King James deploy the trope of temporary blackface disguise, a convention that becomes especially popular in the 1630s. Thus The Masque of Blackness (1605) and The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621) establish an iconography that later elite and public performances revisit, most notably Walter Montagu’s court entertainment The Shepherds’ Paradise (1633) and William Berkeley’s tragicomedy The Lost Lady (1637). These plays and masques envision this blackness in multiple and contradictory ways: in the public theatre, as a way to manage the female body; at court, as a liberating self-­fashioning strategy; and in both venues, as paradoxically a distorting mask and a ‘true’ manifestation of interior states. Crucially, The Masque of Blackness and The Shepherds’ Paradise were performed by all-­female casts of aristocratic amateurs, whereas in every other performance discussed throughout this book, the painted body is male. Developing the feminist implications of my attention to theatrical materiality, this chapter argues that blackface disguise is a potent fantasy for elite women because it allows them to perform as spectacular, but not as revelatory, subjects. I conclude by investigating Berkeley’s use of the blackface disguise to criticise the positive self-­assertion of elite female performance. Radiance, blood, and blackness: so too are the passages between flesh and stone, life and death, signified within drama by the application and removal of cosmetics. Returning to the topics of death, resurrection, and transfiguration with which I begin, my final chapter titled ‘Stone: Lost Ladies’ explores the shared materiality of stage corpses, ghosts, and statues in relation to two plays about jealous tyrants and the women they love: Shakespeare’s tragicomedy The Winter’s Tale (c.1610–1611) and Thomas Middleton’s revenge tragedy, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (c. 1610–1611). Both of these plays exploit the fact of paint’s potential to collapse ‘difference’ by making women indistinguishable from one another, a threat that the preacher Barnabe Rich explains as follows (1615): They are so paynted so be periwigd, so be poudered, so be perfumed, so bee starched, so be laced . . . that I cannot tell what mental virtues they may have that they do keepe inwardly to themselves, but I am sure, to the outward show, it is a hard matter in the church it selfe to distinguish between a good woman, and a bad.53

It is only within the context of social relationships, then, that ‘difference’ can be established, especially when it comes to the difference between a good woman and a bad, a corpse and an idol; in other words, the

Introduction     17

painted face demands to be acknowledged, a principle dramatised most forcefully in the statue scene that concludes The Winter’s Tale.

Notes  1. Batchelor, Chromophobia, p. 22.   2. I am quoting here and immediately below from Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Thompson and Taylor.  3. Theweleit, ‘Male Bodies’, pp. 306, 313. See also Male Fantasies, vol. 1, p. 362.  4. See Bradbrook, ‘Shakespeare’s Recollections of Marlowe’. Bradbrook focuses upon Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Marlowe in terms of language rather than staging, although she does observe that ‘this enormous icon, much bigger than life, with “sable arms / Black as his purpose”, foreshadows, with his arrested action as he stands over Priam, his sword held aloft, an image we are to see, of Hamlet himself standing over the kneeling Claudius . . . in its primitive violence and rhetorical emphasis quite un-­Shakespearean, though of course well suited to stand out from the text of this play’, p. 203. See also Paster’s richly suggestive discussion of this passage in Humoring the Body. Paster observes that ‘Shakespeare’s version of the fall of Troy’ comes in red, black, and white, which is to say in ‘the key colors and thermal markers of early modern humoralism’, pp. 29–30.  5. Heywood, An Apology for Actors. Overbury, New and Choise Characters of Several Authors.  6. Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, p. 64.  7. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 151.  8. See de Grazia, Quilligan and Stallybrass (eds), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. See Harris and Korda (eds), Introduction to Staged Properties, as well as Karim-­ Cooper’s rationale for her own study of Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, p. 2. In addition to these three works, other important studies related to the visual field of the early modern stage include Stallybrass and Jones, Renaissance Clothing; Sofer, The Stage Life of Props; Stern, Making Shakespeare, and Fisher, Materializing Gender. See also Karim-­ Cooper and Stern (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres.   9. See Harris and Korda on ‘The Myth of the Bare Stage’, Staged Properties, pp. 2–7. For his concise breakdown of the ‘long history’ of this idea of bareness, see also Smith, The Key of Green, pp. 210–11. Kiefer similarly argues that ‘the notion that the theatre was inattentive to visual display cannot be sustained’ in Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre, p. 9. For ‘primitive’ and ‘infantile’, see the epigraph from Batchelor, cited above in n.1. My emphasis is on how this ‘myth of the bare stage’ positions medieval theatre. 10. See Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 149, and Batchelor, Chromophobia, p. 12. See also Pleij, Colors Demonic and Divine. 11. On the location of the earliest purpose-­built theatres, see Stern, Making Shakespeare, p. 15. See also Mullaney, The Place of the Stage. 12. Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions.

­18    Inventions of the Skin 13. Stern, Making Shakespeare, p. 16. 14. On the subject of the interior of the theatre, see Harris and Korda, Staged Properties, p. 4; the account of the pillars can be found in the diary of the Dutch traveller, Johannes DeWitt. 15. Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura, Libri Sex; cited Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 150. 16. Kiefer, Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre, p. 7. 17. For Elizabeth’s attitudes to images and words, see Kiefer, Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre, p. 1; for her discussion of attitudes toward women’s use of cosmetics, see Karim-­Cooper, Cosmetics, especially her chapter on ‘The Opposition to Cosmetics’; see also Dolan, ‘Taking the Pencil Out of God’s Hand’, pp. 224–39. The text of Elizabeth’s edict cited in Angeloglou, A History of Make-­up, p. 48. John Donne, ‘That a Wise Man is Known by Much Laughing’, from Juvenilia, Or Certaine Paradoxes, and Problemes (London, 1633), original emphasis, printed in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Coffin and Donoghue, p. 301. 18. Wotton, Elements of English Architecture, p. 71. See also B. J. Sokol, Art and Illusion in The Winter’s Tale, p. 57. 19. Cited Sokol, Art and Illusion in The Winter’s Tale, p. 59. 20. From An Homilie Against perill of Idolatrie, and superfluous decking of Churches (London, 1571). For her astute analysis of this homily, see Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse. 21. Womack, English Renaissance Drama, p. 41. 22. Batchelor, Chromophobia, pp. 83–4; Shepherd, Theatre, Body, and Pleasure, p. 1. 23. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, p. 13. 24. Ibid. p. 7. 25. See for example Wright, The Passions of the Minde in General, a popular treatise on this subject which went through a number of printings. See also James, Passion and Action. 26. For Paster, Pyrrhus’s ‘innermost blackness of purpose – reciprocally produced by and producing a mind darkened by the burning of choler – is not distinguishable from the complexion that is its sign’, Humoring the Body, p. 36; ‘body-­scape’ is her phrase, p. 37. 27. Traub, Desire and Anxiety, especially p. 28. Traub is speaking of more ‘immaterial’ relationships amongst subjects rather than actual stage processes. 28. On the way that direct address to the audience constructs selfhood, see Escolme, Talking to the Audience. Escolme remarks that this dynamic of ‘making evident the work behind the illusion’ without estranging or alienating the viewer is ‘quite alien to much current Western theatrical sensibility’, p. 11. 29. Smith, The Key of Green, p. 242; his emphasis. 30. Escolme, Talking to the Audience, p. 11. 31. See Womack, Ben Jonson, p. 111. 32. Sofer, ‘How to Do Things with Demons’, pp. 1–21. 33. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, p. 31. 34. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 21. 35. Elias, The Civilising Process. See also Hillman, ‘Homo Clausus at the Theatre’,

Introduction     19 pp. 161–85. On ‘Trans-­ fluxible’ skin, see Crooke, Microcosmographia (1615), p. 175; see also Paster, Humoring The Body, p. 19. 36. Paster, Humoring the Body, p. 19. 37. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, p. 15. 38. Ibid. p. 38. 39. See Haydocke’s translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge (London, 1598), p. 130. On paints as poisons, see also Karim-­Cooper, Cosmetics. See also the chapter on ‘Cosmetic Theatre’ in Pollard, Drugs and Theatre. 40. Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis, p. 270. 41. Jeamson, Artificiall embellishments, p. 5. 42. See Dolan cited above in note 17. 43. Unlike the processional format of the English plays, the Modane play was mounted on a wooden stage built for the occasion and later dismantled, the timber sold. See Meredith and Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama, p. 6. 44. Enders, Death by Drama. 45. See Womack on the ‘structural memory’ of the medieval persisting into Shakespeare’s theatre, English Renaissance Drama, p. 44. 46. Heywood, Art of Love, pp. 74–5. 47. Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis, p. 254. 48. In addition to Connor, see also Benthien in Skin. 49. For bibliographical details on all of the studies informing this project, see notes 8 and 17 cited above. Callaghan, ‘Othello was a white man’, in Shakespeare Without Women; on facepainting, see also Drew-­ Bear, Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage. 50. Karim-­Cooper, Cosmetics, p. 199. 51. Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking. 52. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, p. 34. Felski, ‘Context Stinks!’, p. 575. 53. Barnabe Rich, The Honestie of this Age, p. 15.

Chapter 1

Light: Staging Divinity in the York Cycle

I shall spitt in his face, though it be fare shining Towneley Play 22 of The Scourging1

Six days after the first prophecy of his Passion, Jesus led his disciples Peter, James, and John up a mountain. He drew them apart in order to reveal to them something they had never before seen: his divinity, now visible in the sudden radiance of his face and clothing. Andreas Andreopoulos calls this event of the ‘Transfiguration of Christ’ the bible’s ‘fullest theophany’: there is no other place in the entire bible where the curtain between the material and the invisible world is completely lifted visually, and there is no other place where the manifestation of the divinity of Christ is witnessed in such a dramatic way.2

Narrated in Luke 9: 28–45, Mark 9: 1–35, and Matthew 17: 1–9, the Transfiguration is also briefly mentioned in 2 Peter 1: 16–18. Matthew’s version, however, was the most read in the pre-­Reformation West:3 And after six days Jesus taketh unto him Peter and James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart: And he was transfigured before them. And his face did shine as the sun: and his garments became white as snow. And behold there appeared to them Moses and Elias talking with him. And Peter answering, said to Jesus: Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. And as he was yet speaking, behold a bright cloud overshadowed them. And lo, a voice out of the cloud, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him. And the disciples hearing, fell upon their face, and were very much afraid. And Jesus came and touched them: and said to them, Arise, and fear not. And they lifting up their eyes saw no one but only Jesus. And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying: Tell the vision to no man, till the Son of man be risen from the dead.4

­22    Inventions of the Skin Luke and Mark confirm this progression of events (the ascent up the mountain, the change of appearance, the arrival of Elijah and Moses, the voice of God in the cloud), with some variations of emphasis. Silent on the subject of Jesus’ face, Mark employs a charmingly domestic analogy to stress the whiteness of Jesus’ clothing: ‘And his garments became shining and exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller upon earth can make white’ (Mark 9: 2). Luke describes the apostles as ‘heavy with sleep’ at the arrival of Elijah and Moses and ‘afraid, when they entered into the cloud’ (Luke 9: 32, 35). And whereas Matthew does not explain Peter’s offer to stay on the mountain and build three equal shrines to Moses, Elijah, and Jesus, Luke and Mark each take this to mean Peter was so overcome by the spectacle that he ‘knew not what he said’ (Mark 9: 5).5 By warning the apostles not to speak of what they saw ‘till the Son of man be risen from the dead’, Jesus looks ahead from his transformation to his Crucifixion and Resurrection. Pope Leo I explained this connection between ‘glory’ and ‘cross’ as follows: ‘the Transfiguration chiefly occurred for this end that the scandal of the cross should be taken away from the hearts of the disciples; and so that since they had been given the revelation of his secret majesty, the abasement of the Passion might not confound their faith’.6 In terms of its iconographic presence in the West, however, the Passion is by far the more visible event. Late medieval art dwelled feverishly on the pathos of Christ’s suffering, and the major English cycle dramas staged the Passion in such graphic detail critics have since felt compelled to explain the blood that John Spalding Gatton wondered ‘attracted rather than repelled men and women of the middle ages’.7 The dominant explanation for this apparent surfeit of blood has been that ‘realistic’ representations of Christ’s suffering helped to encourage the ‘affective piety’ so much in evidence from the twelfth century onward.8 Emphasising instead Jesus’ divinity, the Transfiguration, by comparison, barely seems to register. In her Iconography of Christian Art, for example, Gertrud Schiller locates only two surviving artifacts from England related to the Transfiguration: an Anglo-­Saxon ivory relief (c. 900) and a Suffolk screen painting (c. 1500).9 To this list we can add a stained-­glass church window representing the Transfiguration located above the altar of the Corpus Christi chapel at St Mary, Fairford, Gloucestershire, dating to the early sixteenth century.10 The Transfiguration was, however, a topic of the cycle drama staged throughout medieval Europe (in France and in Italy, if not in Germany or Holland).11 To be sure, of all the arts, theatre is perhaps the ideal medium to represent such a dynamic and visually ravishing event. For

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Stephen Williams, ‘the resurrection stories contain mysteries of recognition, appearance, disappearance, and motion. There is drama enough at the empty tomb. But none are as visually spectacular as the transfiguration’.12 In England, the episode is taken up in Play 23 of the York cycle, presented by the Curriers, the guild responsible for the dressing and the colouring of leather.13 As we shall see, in bringing forth their pageant of The Transfiguration of Christ, the Curriers exploited the full resources of the medieval stage, including gilding to represent the radiance of Jesus’ transfigured countenance.14 In what follows, I briefly outline the Transfiguration’s history of interpretation before turning to the pageant’s dynamic of demonstration and explanation, ‘wonder’ and ‘witnessing’. Reconstructing the play’s performance possibilities, I also address how these matters of stagecraft potentially signal different relationships between Jesus’ human ‘person’ and his divine ‘persona’.15 Play 23 defines a distinctive signifying idiom of divinity that recurs across those pageants that also take up the mystery of Christ’s dual nature, including especially the resurrection stories and the pageant of the Last Judgment. Indeed, the pageant’s eschatological significance was of immediate personal relevance for late medieval subjects. If the Transfiguration foreshadows Jesus’ resurrection, St. Thomas Aquinas confirms that it also speaks to the mystery of post-­mortem identity by previewing the form that resurrected bodies will take: ‘Christ through his Transfiguration revealed to the disciples the body’s glory, which pertains to humans alone’.16 That ‘goldface’ was a frequent sign for this glory in art and in drama has been widely noted. Speculating that this iconographic convention in fact reflects theatrical practice, Emil Mâle calls the appearance of a yellow-­faced Christ in fifteenth and sixteenth-­century stained glass ‘a relic of the religious theatre’: In the mystery plays, to give the effect of radiance, the face of the actor playing the part of Jesus was smudged over with yellow-­gold paint. In the margin of the Mystery of the Passion by Arnould Gréban we read, ‘Here the clothes of Jesus should be white and His face resplendent like gold’, a text which is given significance when compared to the following rubric from the Passion of Jean Michel: ‘Here Jesus enters the mountain to put on the whitest of robes, and to overlay His face and His hands with gold’.17

Mâle does not mention that both of his examples refer to performances of the episode of the Transfiguration.18 Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter similarly confirm that in English religious drama, ‘traditionally God is masked or painted in gold’.19 The lone surviving inventory from the York cycle, the Mercers’ indenture of 1433 for their pageant of Doomsday, lists a diadem with a gilded mask

­24    Inventions of the Skin for Jesus and gold masks, diadems, and yellow wigs for the resurrected apostles present at the Last Judgment.20 Often made from leather, God-­ masks could be ‘gilded’ with more reflective materials such as metallic gold leaf, a substance that Twycross and Carpenter point out could also have been applied directly to the face with adhesive.21 Although no play of the Transfiguration survives from Chester, play expenses include sums spent on the gilding of players’ faces in pageants dramatising episodes from Jesus’ childhood and earthly ministry – in other words, at moments when we might not expect to see his divinity emphasised so concretely. In the Chester Smiths’ pageant of Jesus and the Doctors in the Temple, for example, the face of the child Jesus (the ‘litle God’) is painted gold, and a gilded Jesus also rode into Jerusalem in the Chester Cordwainers’ pageant of the Entry.22 Surveying the costume conventions for the portrayal of divinity in medieval Europe, Lynette Muir remarks that ‘English plays alone’ tend to represent the pre-­risen Jesus or ‘Christ in his Manhood’ with a gilded or a masked face.23 If, then, the historical event of Jesus’ transformation on Mt. Tabor was not widely represented in late medieval religious art, the sign of gold for divinity was nonetheless a familiar convention that the pageant of The Transfiguration is thus able to explain. Importantly, ‘gold’ in this pageant is not merely a sign, but also a dramatic process that is the explicit subject of the plot; given the pageant’s self-­reflexive commentary on the staging of divinity, I find it strange, then, how thoroughly The Transfiguration has been overlooked, even within otherwise comprehensive studies of the York cycle or of the representation of ‘Christ’s body’ in medieval drama more generally.24 The ur quick change of the cycle drama, the Transfiguration, moreover, enacts the rhythms of disguise and revelation, metamorphosis and exposure, evident throughout the York cycle – and discussed throughout this study.

I In 1457, Pope Callistus III issued a papal bull requiring the Feast of the Transfiguration to be observed on 6 August (the date of its observance in the East) in order to commemorate the defeat of the Turks at the Siege of Belgrade, news of which having reached Rome on 6 August of the year before.25 This new feast date failed to capture the popular imagination in England, however, likely because the Transfiguration narrative already traditionally belonged to the season Pamela King notes explicitly celebrated the mystery of ‘the dual nature of Christ’: Lent.26 Accordingly, the York missal lists Matthew 17: 1–9 as the reading

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for the mass on Ember Saturday before the Second Sunday in Lent, a practice that did not subside with the addition of the August feast date; other readings scheduled for this week include the Last Judgment.27 As I now turn to a few representative discussions of the Transfiguration, my intent is to show how an English lay audience might have understood the event’s eschatological significance, rather than to imply that any of the expositions I cite directly influenced the York playwright. Even the briefest sketch of the Transfiguration’s history of interpretation, moreover, helps shed light on the pageant’s more puzzling details. In the Latin West, the Transfiguration is typically read as an epiphany of the Trinity: Jesus present in the flesh, the Father in voice, and the Holy Spirit in the form of the cloud. Patristic commentators also attribute the appearance of Moses and Elijah to the fact that both are types or tokens of Christ and both, during their own lifetimes, spoke to God; indeed, Moses’ own face shone upon his descent from Mt. Sinai (Exodus 34: 29–30).28 Nowhere is it suggested that the transfigured Jesus temporarily loses his humanity. In the sermon I quoted above, for example, Leo warns ‘it is equally perilous to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is only God, not man, as it is to think that he is only man, not God. We must confess both equally’.29 Tertullian likewise uses the Transfiguration to rebuke ‘those who make Christ to be one being and Jesus another’, and Jerome to explain that ‘no one should suppose that [the transfigured Jesus] lost his former shape or appearance or that he left off his real body and assumed a spiritual or ethereal body’.30 There is less consensus about the precise origins of the light Jesus manifests, a debate Dorothy Lee succinctly frames as confusion over whether ‘the light and glory of the transfiguration come from within Jesus himself, as the expression of his hidden self, or are the gift of God coming from without’.31 If the Transfiguration showed the apostles the glory of Jesus’ divine body, this glory did not belong to Jesus alone, as Bede explains in his sermon In Quadrigesima: When the Lord was transfigured before his disciples, he revealed to them the glory of his own body which was to be manifested through the resurrection. He shows how great will be the splendor of the future bodies of the elect after the resurrection. On this matter he says elsewhere: ‘then shall the just shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’. And here, as a sign of his own future splendor, his face is as radiant as the sun . . .32

In the aftermath of the Last Judgment, the bodies of the faithful will shine as Christ shone at the Transfiguration. Bede, however, cautions that because experienced on earth, the Transfiguration cannot fully express the beauty of heaven, ‘where we shall see the founder and

­26    Inventions of the Skin builder of that city, not as at present as if in a shadow or through a glass, but face to face’. A later source in the vernacular, the fourteenth-­century Stanzaic Life of Christ, discusses the Transfiguration narrative as a story of a resurrection appearance; accordingly, the writer mentions Christ’s transformation upon the ‘hulle that Tabor hight’ alongside his discussion of Christ’s visits to the three Marys, Thomas, and the pilgrims at Emmaus (7676): For on that hulle, as redden we, Transfiguret was God almight, As in the gospel mon may se Wo-­seuer wil rede all on right

(7681–4)

If diminishing the potential for the event to compensate for the sight of Jesus’ suffering (that is, as having happened before Jesus’ death, and not afterward), this reading of the Transfiguration emphasises instead its eschatological significance. The devotional text that perhaps takes us the closest to the York audience of the later Middle Ages is Pseudo-­Bonaventure’s Meditationes Vitae Christi (which circulated in the vernacular in Nicholas Love’s early fifteenth-­ century translation, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ). Correctly locating the event before the Passion, the Meditationes fleshes out the conversation amongst Jesus, Moses, and Elijah that Luke alone mentions but briefly (‘And behold two men were talking with him. And they were Moses and Elias, Appearing in majesty’, Luke 9: 30–1): Moses and Elias came also, conversing with Him on the Passion He was to undergo, and saying ‘Lord, it is not necessary for you to die, for one drop of your blood would redeem the whole world’. And the Lord said, ‘The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep, and I too must do this’ (John x, 11). Here there was also the Holy Spirit in the form of a bright cloud, and the voice of the Father came from the cloud, saying ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; to Him listen’ (Matt. Xvii, 5). The disciples fell to the ground and when they rose, as from sleep, they saw only the Lord Jesus.33

Love’s description of the disciples as prostrated by their encounter with the divine corresponds closely to the York playwright’s dramatisation of this event, as we shall see below. Mitigating the ‘scandal of the cross’ by blazoning Jesus’ divinity, the Transfiguration ultimately speaks to ordinary human experience. And because, in Simon Shepherd’s words, ‘theatre is, and has always been, a place which exhibits what a human body is, what it does, what it is capable of’, I suggest that the York cycle – as theatre – is best positioned

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to represent the Transfiguration as a sensual experience that, howsoever disorienting or overwhelming, inaugurates a process of knowing, witnessing, and acknowledging Christ’s true identity that continues across the cycle and climaxes in the multiple ‘face to face’ encounters represented in Play 47, the Mercers’ pageant of Doomsday.34

II The York Ordo Paginarum of 1415 lists The Transfiguration of Christ as coming after The Temptation of Christ in the Desert and before The Feast in the House of Simon; the twelve pageants that make up the Passion cycle begin shortly thereafter, with The Entry into Jerusalem.35 Like The Transfiguration that follows it, the Smiths’ Temptation addresses the mystery of Jesus’ dual nature. Here, a devil submits Jesus to various tests in order to discover ‘if he be man in bone and bloode’ or ‘if Godhed be in hym hidde’ (45; 50). In turn, the starving Jesus refuses to perform the miracles that would betray his divinity; what is kept hidden from the audience in Pageant 22 is therefore openly shown to the audience in Pageant 23. Most critics now agree that the York cycle played more or less in its entirety over the course of a single day, with pageant wagons stopping to perform at ten to twelve fixed stations marked by banners. The first performance of the day would be the Barkers’ presentation of The Fall of Lucifer at the ‘head of Micklegate outside Trinity Gates’, and the last, the Mercers’ play of Doomsday at the Pavement.36 Eileen White and David Crouch have convincingly demonstrated the range of vantage points these different stations would offer: some loci of performance would be wider, others narrower, some would offer scaffold seating to paying customers and only limited room for the poorer spectators standing on the ‘fringes’, while the most privileged spectators, including city officials, sometimes watched the plays from inside rented rooms.37 It is equally important to note that these stopping points carried different ideological freight. The Pavement, for example, was both York’s major marketplace and the town’s place of public execution (and thus a richly significant locale to showcase pageants concerned with judgment and retribution); we must therefore bear in mind what Sarah Beckwith calls the defining ‘polysemousness’ of the city of York as a performance space.38 The pageant of The Transfiguration begins with Jesus, Peter, James, and John approaching the pageant wagon from the street: ‘. . . comes forth with me in fere, / For to yone mountayne will I goo. / Ther schall

­28    Inventions of the Skin ye see a sight / Whilk ye have yerned lange’ (7–10). Suggesting that Jesus ascends the wagon and the apostles remain behind on the level of the street, this dialogue establishes the platea as the space of ‘witnessing’, the wagon, the locus of spectacle and authoritative explanation. Side by side in the street, the audience shares the same perspective upon the spectacle as the apostles; what historically was shown privately to three core disciples is now an event staged before many.39 The disciples have evidently been mulling the mystery of the Son’s relationship to the Father for quite some time: ‘Shewe us thy Fadir’, thus saide ye then, ‘That suffice us withouten more’. I saide to you and to all men, ‘Who seis me, seis my Fadyr thore’. Such wordis to you I spakke In trewthe to make you bolde, Ye cowde noght undyrtake The talez that I you tolde.

(17–24)

As a reward for their discipleship, Jesus promises to clarify the mystery of his identity: ‘Takis hartely hede, for ye schall here / That I wille telle unto no moo; / And als ye schall see sightis seere / Whilke none schall see bot ye alsoo’ (3–6). The apostles’ path to understanding Jesus’ true nature is, however, far from straightforward, since the sheer sensory force of the spectacle overwhelms the apostles and requires repeated verbal explanation from Jesus, Moses, Elijah, and finally God the Father. This apparent conflict between the didactic purpose of the vision and its destabilising effect on the perceiving bodies of the apostles is consistent with the narrative of the gospels: when they first see Jesus’ radiance, the apostles are variously described as sleepy, as frightened, and as overcome.40 After Jesus’ opening remarks, the apostles talk exclusively amongst themselves; their shift of focus indicates that Jesus has in fact exited to change costume, perhaps gone ‘inside the mountain’ like the actor who plays Jesus in Jean Michel’s 1486 play of the Passion (‘Here Jesus enters the mountain . . .’). To be sure, several York pageants call for sudden or concealed entrances and exits facilitated by a range of devices and methods, for example ramps set up behind the wagon or trapdoors.41 Like the ‘custom-­built theatrical machines’ used to stage The Ascension, The Assumption of the Virgin, and Doomsday, the Curriers’ wagon was likely a ‘double-­decker’ one equipped with lifting machinery to manage the ‘descent of God’ as a voice in the cloud.42 Jesus’ exit is followed by the arrival of the prophet Elijah and the lawgiver Moses:

Light     29 John: All that he hyghte us holde will hee; Therfore we will no forther frayne, But as he fouchesaffe So sall we undirstande. Peter: Beholde, her we have nowe in hast Som new tythandys.

(55–60)

Most likely appearing ‘as from within’ the pageant wagon via the method that permitted Jesus’ departure, each figure explains his duty ‘to bere witnesse’ to Jesus’ identity (69). Elijah declares that he has come from Paradise ‘Cristis name to clarifie’, and Moses that he was summoned from the Limbo ‘This solempne syght for I schuld see’ (78).43 Nothing indicates whether Elijah and Moses appear similarly illuminated alongside Jesus (especially whether Moses, having himself been ‘transfigured’ upon Mt. Sinai, is represented with a shining face). The text is also unclear about the timing of Jesus’ movements: when the Old Testament figures appear, does the transformed Jesus re-­enter with them? Elijah and Moses each address their opening speeches to ‘Lord God’, although their choice of demonstratives suggests that Jesus is standing between them: ‘That this his owne Sone is /And Lord of lastand liff’; ‘Oure formefadyrs full fayne / Wolde se this solempne sight / That in this place thus pleyne / Is mustered thurgh thi myght’ (71–2; 81–4, my emphasis). These speeches could, however, handily ‘occupy the interval’ of Jesus’ costume change.44 If this is correct, Jesus would then re-­appear after Moses finishes speaking; the length of time the pageant allots for him to change his costume bears on the possible materials of his Transfiguration, a point I pursue below. Despite Peter’s command to ‘behold’, the apostles do not appear to register anything at all that Elijah and Moses say. In turn, neither do Elijah and Moses acknowledge the apostles. It is only several lines after their opening speeches that James, for instance, reacts to their presence: James: What it will worthe, that wote noght wee, How wayke I waxe, ye will not wene, Are was ther one, now is ther thre. Methynke oure maistir is betwene. . . . The tothir two fayne wolde I knawe And witte what werke tham hedir has wonne.

(89–102; 101–2)

When last they looked Jesus was alone, whereas he now appears to them transformed in face and clothing and flanked by two unknown figures. The apostles’ failure to see and hear is crucial, although their hiatus of awareness produces narrative redundancy by requiring Moses

­30    Inventions of the Skin and Elijah each to explain their presence twice. I see this redundancy as a stage direction for the actors playing the apostles to signal their astonishment or indeed their sleepy incomprehension: when the three men return to their senses, they experience the first two elements of the Transfiguration – Jesus’ change of face and clothes, the arrival of the Old Testament figures – in the proper sequence, as essentially simultaneous events. By having a more complete perspective upon the action, the audience at this juncture is thus more ‘in the know’ than Peter, James, and John, for whom the Transfiguration truly begins at the conclusion of Moses’ first speech. Peter’s comments are especially rich in descriptive detail: Peter: Brethir, whatevere yone brightnes be? Swilk burdis beforne was nevere sene. It marres my myght, I may not see, So selcouth thyng was nevere sene. . . . His clothyng is as white as snowe, His face schynes as the sonne. To speke with hym I have grete awe, Swilk faire before was nevere fune.

(85–100)

Turning doctrine into theatre, the pageant translates what St. Augustine called the ‘four properties of the glorious body’: the seeming speed of Jesus’ change represents the ‘agility’ and the ‘subtlety’ of the divine body while the sudden radiance represents ‘glory’ and ‘impassability’. The change of clothing could be facilitated through the use of a double cloak coloured differently on either side, or indeed through the layering of clothing, with a more homely tunic or robe (possibly of purple) concealing the garb of the Transfiguration underneath.45 Given that the Curriers were responsible for the dressing and colouring of leather, the blindingly white garment of ‘transfiguration’ likely showcased their own handiwork, and Alan Justice has also speculated that the ‘cloud’ that later descends was also made from white leather.46 Depending on the theatrical materials involved, the effect of the shining face would, however, be more difficult to execute. As I elaborated above, archival evidence from England points to the use of either gilded masks or gold facepaints to signal God’s radiance.47 Evidence from outside of England also confirms this, although the Revello play of the Transfiguration provides yet a third option: And when Jesus is on the mountain let there be a polished bowl which makes the brightness of the sun striking the bowl reflect on Jesus and towards his

Light     31 disciples. Then Jesus shall let fall his crimson garment and appear in white garments. And if the sun is not shining, let there be torches and some other lights.48

Materialising the ‘persona of Christ’ in different ways, each of these methods would consequently shape the pageant’s doctrinal message. The use of a ‘convex silver reflector’ to focus and direct sunlight or candlelight, for example, might best reflect an understanding of the light of Transfiguration as originating in God’s labour – as added to Jesus from without, rather than as coming from within, although of course any lighting effect could be used to augment an effect of gilding, rather than substitute for that effect.49 The Revello direction also specifies that the spotlight be ‘directed towards’ the apostles as if to illuminate them as well. Transfiguring other persons besides Jesus, such an effect would emphasise the apostles’ own eventual glorification – and by extension, the audience’s. Light alone, however, would diminish the significance of the Transfiguration as something that happens specifically to Jesus’ body.50 In contrast, both facepaints and masks would more directly incorporate the actor’s physicality into the performance. Both techniques attach to the body, especially any paint applied directly to the skin, and both techniques would more thoroughly transform the appearance of the actor. Visually setting apart the transfigured Jesus from the apostles, a gold mask would effectively signify the impassability and otherness of the divine form; so too might a mask amplify the actor’s voice, thereby transfiguring speech along with body. The Late Chester Banns (which may have been revised as late as the 1570s) offer some insight into how the masked actor might have been viewed at the time. Nervously acknowledging that the convention of the gold-­faced god is perceived differently after the Reformation, the Banns encourage potentially wary spectators to think of the actor’s mask as providing sufficient distance between actor and role: Ffor noe man can proportion that godhead I saye To the shape of man face nose and eyne But sethence the face gilte doth disfigure the man yat deme A Clowdy coueringe of the man, a Voyce only to heare And not god in shape or person to appeare.51

This defence of theatrical convention harmonises with more recent ­discussions of masked acting. For Erika Fischer-­Lichte, the use of masks in ‘cultic’ theatre allowed actors to play gods without blasphemy. Although she has in mind classical Greek theatre, her remarks are instructive:

­32    Inventions of the Skin Here, the human being is not speaking and acting for himself, but rather he functions behind the mask, as a medium of the god: the god speaks and acts through him. For this reason, the identifiable person of the actor also has to disappear completely behind the mask: the actor is absorbed by the character, without actually being or becoming the character. For the mask as a nonface, as a sign for the face, refers precisely to the lack of a face and thus to the difference between the actor and the role – between the human being and the god . . . The mask itself reminds the audience that it should bear in mind the difference between the actor and his role.52

In the context of this particular pageant, however, the notion of the mask as a ‘nonface’ poses potential problems: would its use depersonalise what is meant to be the privilege of a face-­to-­face encounter, howsoever overwhelming or confusing for the apostles? Granting that this episode demonstrates ‘the person of Jesus taking on the persona of Christ’, we must not forget the various patristic admonitions against subordinating one of those roles to the other. A painted face would not similarly wholly eradicate the performer’s humanity, so to speak; a gilded face is still a gilded human face, after all. For this reason, I find it to be the convention that would most closely integrate the mortal and human aspect of Jesus’ identity with the eternal and divine – an integration that would become all the more pronounced when we recall that in the cycle drama, stage blood was similarly made from paint. While a mask could be easily donned and then removed, thus leaving Jesus ready to move on to the next station to enact his Transfiguration once more, the more robust stage directions from the continental ‘mysteries’ and Passion cycles indicate how such sudden transformations involving paint were managed. Directions to painters appear in records of performances of ‘The Agony in the Garden’ at Lucerne and the ‘Resurrection’ at Mons: ‘the painter inside the mount is to splash him with blood’; ‘Note to warn the painter at this point to go to Paradise to paint Raphael’s face red’.53 Fascinating for what it suggests about the labour behind dramatic illusion, this tactic of the hidden painter allows for a quick transformation within the performance – but not necessarily a transformation back to normalcy, since adhesive paint is harder to remove than to apply. If, then, Jesus’ face were painted, the pageant would conclude with him counselling the need for secrecy with the radiant marks of a miracle still visible on his face: ‘This visioun lely loke ye layne, / Unto no leffand lede it lere / Tille tyme mannys Sone have suffered payne / And resen fro dede, kens it than clere’ (233–6).54 It is important to note that in no way are we to understand Jesus’ costume of Transfiguration as a disguise. Complicating our expectations of how such changes of appearances work in later, secular drama,

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Jesus’ ‘true’ or most fully realised identity is here uncovered through the addition of mediating layers of costuming, rather than the removal of them. By demanding faith in things seen rather than unseen, the Transfiguration reveals Jesus’ identity by a technology that temporarily removes the guise of the Incarnation: the actor’s bare face. I say the ‘guise’ of the Incarnation rather than the ‘disguise’, but must acknowledge the ontological confusion that is present here: the Smiths’ pageant, for example, suggests that Jesus took human form to deceive the devil (an interpretive possibility that is also raised in Play 37 of The Harrowing of Hell, as we shall see). Hilary of Poitiers proposes something similar when he remarks that the true ‘wonder’ of the Transfiguration was that ‘Jesus was not permanently illumined throughout his entire ministry’, although the more orthodox position warned against de-­emphasising Jesus’ humanity, since to do so would be to undermine the significance of his sacrifice and resurrection.55 Given the complexity of these issues, it is not surprising that the apostles’ confusion about the mystery of Jesus’ dual nature persists. John proposes all three figures on the wagon be questioned about the nature of the truth being demonstrated: ‘I rede we aske tham all on rowe / And grope tham how this game is begonne’ (103–4). Elijah and Moses identify themselves for the second time and reiterate their own duty to ‘To witnesse that Goddis Sone is this’, and Jesus reminds the disciples that they, too, must now go forth and testify to what they have seen: My dere discipill, drede you noght, I am youre soverayne certenly. This wondir werke that here is wrought Is of my Fadir almyghty. Thire both are hydir brought, The tone Moyses, the todir Ely, And for youre sake thus are thei sought To saie you, his Sone am I. So schall bothe heven and helle Be demers of this dede, And ye in erthe schall tell My name wher itt is nede.

(133–44)

Failing to register Jesus’ instructions, Peter instead proposes that they all remain behind on the mountain to build three equal shrines to Jesus, Elijah, and Moses.56 With much fanfare of blinding light and ‘hydous noys’, God the Father descends in the form of a voice in a cloud to bear witness to his Son. Only twice in the Synoptic Gospels is a voice from heaven heard, first at the Baptism, and now here:57

­34    Inventions of the Skin Pater in Nube: Ye ffebill of faithe, folke affraied, Beis noght aferde for us in feere. Both erthe and eyre with clowdes clere. This is my Sone, as ye have saide, As he has schewed by sygnes sere. Of all his werkis I am wele paied, Therfore till hym takis hede and here. Where he is, thare am I; He is myne and I am his: Who trowis this stedfastly Shall byde in endles blisse.

(169–80)

The cloud then disappears, removing Elijah and Moses with it. The apostles’ reaction of amazement suggests that by this point in the pageant, the Curriers have exploited the full resources of the medieval stage, from impressively quick costume changes, to miraculous ascents and descents, to lighting and sound effects, and of course, to striking bodily transformations:58 Peter: A, Lorde, what may this mervayle be? Whedir is this glorious gleme al gone? We saugh here pleynly persones thre, And nowe is oure Lorde lefte allone. This mervayle movis my mynde And makis my flessh affrayed. James: This brightnes made me blynde, I bode nevere swilke a brayde. John: Lorde God, oure maker almyghty, This mater evermore be ment, We saw two bodis stande hym by And saide his Fadir had thame sent.

(185–96)

The proliferation of special effects makes it difficult to determine the pageant’s climax: does the entrance of the Father in less tangible but no less impressive form eclipse the metamorphosis of the Son? And once again, the apostles – who appear to have fallen to the ground, since Jesus commands them to ‘rise uppe’ – remain unable to advance from seeing to knowing (183). For T. J. Bishop, ‘the disciples cannot straighten out into perception what they experience only too fully as plenitude’.59 This plenitude stimulates rather than sates the appetite for spectacle: having just seen Jesus’ divine face, Peter (rather ungratefully) asks why he was not also allowed to see the face of God ‘in his fayrenes’, and is consequently rebuked for asking above his ‘degree’ (218–20). The pageant’s final injunction not to publicise this vision until after Christ has risen registers the incompletion of their education about Christ’s dual nature.

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It will take further encounters before they become expert witnesses to Christ’s identity like Elijah and Moses. The action of this pageant follows a clear pattern: marvels are shown, marvels are puzzled over, marvels are explained, marvels are puzzled over again. The apostles encounter Jesus through the instrument of their feeling bodies rather than through more abstract or verbal modes. At times this mode of reception risks sensory overload, leaving the apostles hurt, stunned, dazzled, deafened, but only partially edified about Christ’s divinity. To be sure, the apostles’ physiological dislocation when confronted with divinity prepares them for future moments of recognition; although her subject is contemporary theatre, Alice Rayner’s discussion of the phenomenology of the ‘ghost’ captures something fundamental about how this late medieval pageant represents divinity as known through bodily experience: The ghost is known only by its affective presence, when one asks from a state of wonder, What am I seeing, how does this happen, where is this coming from, this ‘thing’ happening before my eyes?60

In just this manner does the York cycle, especially the apparition stories, depict Christ as known by his affective presence, although the cycle represents the movement from ‘sensing’ to ‘knowing’ as messily regressive. For example, even though the spectacle of Transfiguration schools Peter, James and John about Jesus’ dual nature as human and divine, they nonetheless appear confused when they encounter the resurrected Jesus at the beginning of the Thomas pageant – although they themselves are savvier witnesses at this juncture than Thomas himself, who, like Mary Magdalene, like the pilgrims at Emmaus, initially fails to recognise Jesus at all. Taking in both sign and word, wonder and authoritative explanation, the York audience therefore enjoys a more privileged perspective upon the mystery of Christ’s identity that is also informed by their own position within salvation history: after ‘man’s son has suffered pain, and risen from the dead’; after the Passion, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. Conscious, moreover, of the whole fact of dramatic illusion, the audience is attuned not just to what is happening, but to how divinity is being signified via concrete theatrical effects that the repeat pageant-­goer will have seen before; after all, this cycle is performed on an annual basis. Thus on one side we have the apostles’ affective response to spectacle that points away from representation, from stage business, and toward the sensory ‘real’; on the other, we have a late medieval audience able to perceive those signs for divinity as eliciting a particular devotional response of wonder from the apostles, but also as belonging to a t­ heatrical language

­36    Inventions of the Skin repeated from pageant to pageant, year to year, and deriving from specific theatrical technologies that also express artisanal skill and craft identities. Just as Martin Stevens identifies the Skinners’ Entry into Jerusalem as the ‘ultimate York play’ because of its self-­reflexivity (that is, the pageant enacts its own subject matter of processional drama), so too do I see the Curriers’ pageant of The Transfiguration as occupying a central role within the cycle for its self-­reflexive commentary upon the staging of Jesus’ divinity, and I turn now to those pageants that explore further the meaning of Jesus’ golden face.61

III Culminating in the Mercers’ pageant of the Last Judgment, those pageants that Rosemary Woolf calls the ‘triumphal and eschatological plays’ each revisit the material signs shown in The Transfiguration as they each demonstrate a series of witnesses – including Peter, James, and John, who notably appear in several of these pageants – struggling first to recognise Jesus, and then to acknowledge the demands this recognition places upon them. Concretely signifying Jesus’ ‘werke’, the multiple references to light below indicate, I suggest, that he is in fact gilded in many of these pageants. In the Saddlers’ Play 37 of The Harrowing of Hell, Jesus sends a light down into Limbo as a ‘signe . . . of grace’ (19–20). Adam interprets the light as ‘solace’, Eve recognises it as the divine light that once shone ‘in paradise full playne’, and Moses explicitly connects it to his own personal experience of Jesus’ Transfiguration on Mount Tabor (41; 47): Of that same light lernyng have I; To me, Moyses, he mustered his myght And also unto anodir, Hely, Wher we were on an hille on hight. Whyte as snowe was his body And his face like to the sonne to sight.

(85–90)

This memory of the Transfiguration in the midst of the Harrowing suggests that the mysteries explored in that earlier pageant are now coming to fruition as prophesised, and indeed further insights into Christ’s dual nature here emerge. Responding to Satan’s question about his parentage (and therefore clarifying his actions during The Temptation), Jesus explains that he hid his divinity within his human form ‘for the love of man’ but does not, in turn, deny the substance of his mortal body, nor indeed his kinship to Mary:

Light     37 Satan: God Sonne, thanne schulde thou be ful gladde Aftir no catel neyd thowe crave. But thou has leved ay like a ladde And in sorowe as a symple knave. Jesus: That was for hartely love I hadde Unto mannis soule it for to save, And for to make thee mased and madde. And by that resoune thus dewly to have Mi Godhede here I hidde In Marie modir myne, For it schulde noght be kidde To thee nor to none of thyne.

(241–52)

As his opening prologue establishes, Jesus descends into Hell having left his body behind in his tomb, and it is unclear how the York pageant signified this division of body from soul. Given the explicit mention of the Transfiguration, I think it is likely that his face is gilded, especially so since he is acting here in his capacity as Christus Rex, the majestic ‘kyng of blisse’ (184). The light that shines down into Limbo, then, could emanate from his own person, although that does not rule out the simultaneous use of a torch or reflective surface to amplify the effect. That Jesus does not directly touch anyone in this pageant – he uses Michael as his instrument to bind Satan – points to an additional method this pageant used to draw attention to Jesus’ atypical bodily status (339–40). The Carpenters’ Play 38 of The Resurrection makes Jesus present in a variety of forms: in the sudary shown to the three Marys by the angel who greets them; in the emptiness of the tomb, which the Second Pilgrim from The Travelers to Emmaus reports as having been illuminated: ‘For some of oure women for certayne thei saide / That thai sawe in ther sightis solas full seere, / Howe all was lemand light wher he was laide’ (114–16); and most important, in the flesh: ‘Tunc Jhesu resurgente’ (186). Actually seeing Jesus rise from his tomb, the audience is ‘one jump ahead’ of the characters in that they immediately recognise Pilate’s clumsy conspiracy to conceal the absence of the body as already having failed.62 While the Gospels do not give an account of the Resurrection, visual representations of this event often show the risen Jesus illuminated and with visible wounds (and sometimes stepping over the sleeping soldiers sent by Pilate to keep watch).63 In particular, pageants 39–41 of the apparition stories – The Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene, The Travelers to Emmaus, and Doubting Thomas – recall The Transfiguration in key ways. Again evincing the ‘subtlety’ of the glorious body, Jesus makes sudden entrances and exits in Doubting Thomas and in Emmaus:

­38    Inventions of the Skin First Pilgrim: . . . unterly have we tane entent. Ow, I trowe some torfoyr is betidde us. Saie, wher is this man. Second Pilgrim: Away is he wente, Right now satte he beside us. First Pilgrim: Beside us we both sawe him sitte, And by no poynte couthe I parceyve hym passe. Second Pilgrim: Nay, be the werkis that he wrought full wele myght we witte Itt was Jesus hymselffe, I wiste who it was.

(159–66)64

Coming as they do after Jesus’ resurrection, these apparition stories bear the burden of proving Jesus is no disembodied spirit. If The Transfiguration begins with a human Jesus who then manifests his divinity, Doubting Thomas begins with an illuminated Jesus mysteriously appearing and disappearing before our familiar trio of Peter, James, and John: Peter: A, brethir dere, what may we trowe, What was this sight that we saughe nowe Shynand so bright, And vanysshed thus and we ne wote how, Oute of oure sight? John: Oute of oure sight nowe is it soghte; Itt makith us madde, the light it broght. What may it be? James: Sertis I wotte noght But sekirly Itt was vanyté in oure thought, Nought ellis trowe I it be.

(20–30)

The apostles’ confusion is perhaps puzzling – after all, they’ve met Jesus in this guise before. Once again, I find Alice Rayner’s discussion of the phenomenology of perception applicable to the York cycle, and the apostles’ misrecognition of the resurrected Christ: ‘Recognition or reknowing or unforgetting is, rather, a particular kind of perception: it is a sensation of seeing for the first time’. 65 Jesus then demonstrates he has returned to them, ‘bloode and bone’, by eating and by allowing Thomas to probe his ‘bledand’ wounds: ‘Here in my side putte in thi hande / And fele my woundis and undirstande / That this is I’ (153; 175–8). In the Winedrawers’ pageant of Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalen, Mary also fails to recognise Jesus until he shows her his wounds: ‘Marie, of mournyng amende thy moode / And beholde my woundes wyde’ (62–3). Jesus does not, however, allow Mary to touch him. Instead, he invites her to behold him as simultaneously wounded and mortal, impassible and eternal:

Light     39 Marie, in thyne harte thou write Myne armoure riche and goode: Myne actone covered all with white Als cors of man behewede With stuffe goode and parfite Of maydenes flessh and bloode; Whan thei ganne thirle and smyte Mi heede for hawberke stoode. Mi plates wer spredde all on brede That was my body uppon a tree; Myne helme covered all with manhede, The strengh therof may no man see; The croune of thorne that garte me blede, Itt bemenes my dignité. Mi diademe sais, withouten drede, That dede schall I nevere be.

(94–109)

Wearing a white leather jerkin (‘actone’) scored with the marks of his wounds and a ‘diademe’ that implies his majesty, Jesus’ costume manifests his dual nature: his lineage through the Virgin gives him flesh that can be rent, his lineage through God ‘strength therof may no man see’, flesh that acts like armour. Tellingly, Mary responds to Jesus’ human vulnerability rather than to his majesty by repeatedly remarking upon the wetness of his freshly-­bleeding injuries (81; 112). Her emphasis on wetness signifies to the audience that these are live wounds rather than static scars – and charges the encounter with a tactile sensuality even as Jesus famously tells her to ‘touch him not’. This simultaneously suffering and majestic Christ is also central to the iconography of the cycle’s climactic pageant, the Mercers’ sumptuous Doomsday pageant enacting the Last Judgment. As foretold in the Tailors’ pageant 42 of The Ascension, Jesus returns at the world’s end in ‘flessh and fell’ (123): Here may ye see my woundes wide The whilke I tholed for youre mysdede Thurgh harte and heed, foote, hande, and hide Nought for my gilte butt for youre nede. Beholdis both body, bak, and side How dere I bought youre brotherhede. Thes bittir peynes I wolde abide To bye you blisse thus wolde I bleede.

(242–5)

York’s final pageant reflects at length upon the suffering Christ endures during his Passion, just as the apparition stories and The Ascension similarly include detailed descriptions of Jesus’ wounded, bleeding body.

­40    Inventions of the Skin The Gospels make clear, however, that when Jesus returns, his body will also appear glorious. The indenture therefore includes in the ‘array’ for Jesus both a ‘sirke wounded’ and a ‘diademe with a veserne gilted’; so too do three of the seven apostles present also wear gilded masks, wigs, and crowns.66 Noting these details of costume, Garret Epp describes the Christ of the Doomsday pageant as ‘a God that is both wounded Son and glorious all-­powerful divinity, perfectly human and unhumanly perfect’.67 To be sure, the spectacle of a simultaneously bloody and gilded Christ is of central doctrinal importance within a pageant that defines Judgment Day as the day when all bodies become transparent – or rather, the day when all bodies materialise their ‘werkis’. Commanded to ‘rise and fecche flessh’ and return to be judged, good and bad souls alike discover that the life they led is now written on their faces (86): Oure wikkid werkis thei will us wreye That we wende never schuld have bene weten; That we did ofte full pryvely, Appertely may we se them wreten. Allas, wrecchis, dere mon we by, Full smerte with helle fyre be we smetyn. Nowe mon nevere saule ne body dye, But with wikkid peynes evermore be betyne.

(129–38)

Put in Hamlet’s memorable terms, Doomsday obliterates the concept of ‘that within which passes show’. ‘Before us playnly bese fourth brought / The dedis that us schall dame bedene’: exteriority is interiority for the good souls and bad souls whose black or white masks, in addition to their wigs, hose, and ‘sirkes’, plainly denote their damnation or salvation (161–2). If indeed we can speak of social life on Judgment Day, we might say that it is at once made easier and more difficult to navigate by the body’s picturing forth of the soul: easier, because everyone is equally legible; difficult, because a strong feeling of shame attaches to this compulsory publication of formerly private sins, Adam and Eve stripped of their fig leaves. The climactic image of the York cycle is therefore neither Man of Sorrows nor remote deity, but a Christ whose dual nature is materialised through the co-­presence of signs that show his humanity and signs that show his divinity, an ostentatio vulnerum joined to what we might call an ‘ostentatio gloriarum’. I emphasise this detail of staging not because it has never before been noticed – see Epp above, and Meg Twycross in particular has commented astutely on this very subject – but because its implications have not been sufficiently addressed or, more important still, connected back to the significance of the Transfiguration.68 The

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same distinctive fifteenth-­century habit of mind Gail McMurray Gibson explains as the ‘tendency to transform the abstract and theological to the personal and concrete’ produces concrete images of the glorious body as well as the suffering one.69 In art and in drama, that majesty is most forcefully expressed in the sign of gold: the gold-­masked God of the Te Deum window in the York Minster, golden-­faced Christs in painted glass, the gold diadems and wigs worn by actors playing Christ and the glorified apostles, and of course the cycle drama’s most distinctive image for divinity, the golden face, whether masked, as in the Doomsday pageant, or painted. Only The Transfiguration pageant self-­reflexively addresses this convention of representation: ‘gold’ is what the pageant is about. And if ‘emphasis on the suffering humanity of Jesus gave medieval men and women confidence to see in him a loving brother, and to claim the rights of kin’, surely the eschatological significance of this event provides its own form of reassurance. After all, ‘Christ through his Transfiguration revealed to the disciples the body’s glory, which pertains to humans alone’.70 Indeed, and if Muir is correct in what might be a distinctively English practice, the sign of gold appears in pageants that most emphasise Jesus’ humanity. Although we don’t have guild expenditures for this pageant, the York Cordwainers’ Play 28 of The Agony and the Betrayal intriguingly suggests that in the midst of betrayal, Jesus is temporarily transfigured before a group of witnesses including – yet again – Peter, James, and John.71 The Knight who arrests Jesus after Judas’ betraying kiss finds himself suddenly blinded by light (‘Allas, we are loste for leme of this light’) and the ‘Jews’ who witness this event respond in terms that ironically echo the apostles’ reaction to The Transfiguration (263): I Jew: We, oute, I ame mased almost   in mayne and in myght. 2 Jew: And I am ferde, be my feyth,   and fayne wolde I flee, For such a sight have I not se 3 Jew: This leme it lemed so light, I saugh never such a sight: Me mervayles what it may mene. Jesus: Doo, whame seke ye all same, yitt I saye? 1 Jew: One Jesus of Nazareth, hym wolde we neghe nowe. Jesus: And I am he sothly.

(263–73)

This pageant also invokes the quem queritas trope out of sequence: before the Resurrection. Jesus’ presence is sought and found not in the

­42    Inventions of the Skin emptiness of a tomb, but disclosed by a special effect that the audience understands – in contrast to the Jews and the Knights, who do not. They understand because they have seen this sign before, and have a context for recognising it. The moments in which Christ is recognised or misinterpreted, lost or found, are thus consistently attached to a set of recurring theatrical effects. Evidence from the cycle drama staged in other English cities further corroborates the appearance of gilding effects in pageants primarily read as emphasising Jesus’ humanity rather than his divinity. Although traditional account of Jesus’ life holds that his identity as the son of God was largely kept secret, the Child Jesus in the Chester Smiths’ pageant of Christ and the Doctors in the Temple nevertheless had his face painted gold, as I mentioned above. More intriguing still is the evidence that in some plays of the Passion sequence, Jesus was both bloody and illuminated. In the Towneley Play 22 of The Scourging, for example, the Second Torturer declares ‘I shall spit in his face, though it be fare shining’, and records from Coventry indicate the use of a suit of skin and gilded wig in that same pageant of ‘flagellation’ (72).72 The visual conventions of the York cycle implicate the audience as the most ‘privileged’ viewer, the most ‘in the know’ about Jesus’ identity: in the York pageants discussed above, Christ is misrecognised in spite of the costume conventions that establish his identity. Indeed, we might say that the cycle as a whole presents a continuum of witnessing, with experts on Jesus’ identity such as Moses and Elijah at one end of the spectrum, those who struggle with the mystery of his presence at the other, and the three core apostles (named as characters in The Transfiguration, Doubting Thomas, The Ascension, and possibly meant to be understood as among the apostles present at Doomsday) somewhere in the middle. And because in pageants such as The Temptation he treats the Incarnation as a disguise to be penetrated, we can locate on this continuum the Devil as one of the poorest ‘readers’ of Christ’s body (Christ’s claim in The Harrowing that he has ‘hidden his Godhead’ plays upon this). Creating a strong sense of dramatic irony with obvious theological implications, the cycle depicts characters within the fiction as responding to a divine presence York audiences, in contrast, see differently. Insofar that surviving records demonstrate the use of similar conventions and material properties in cycles staged in different English cities, my argument extends to England’s religious drama writ large. At York, Mary mistakes a crowned man for a gardener. At Chester, the temple elders are mystified by how well an ‘ordinary’ boy summarises Mosaic law. In the Towneley cycle, the Torturer spits in the shining face of a

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man he perceives to be helplessly vulnerable. As I noted above, in no way can we say that Jesus appears ‘in disguise’ – even if those who encounter him sometimes behave as if he is disguised, my discussion of the materiality of divinity suggests he is anything but, especially when he appears in the fullness of his identity as both human and divine, ‘perfectly human and inhumanly perfect’. Ostentatio vulnerum, ostentatio gloriarum: I take this principle for a stage direction, then, and one that enjoins an approach to Christ’s body licensed by the very papal bull that first established the feast of Corpus Christi in the first place: ‘we rejoice with pious weeping and weep with devout jubilation, happy in our lament and sad in our joy’.73

Notes   1. All references to The Scourging taken from Bevington, Medieval Drama.  2. Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis, p. 42.   3. See Stevenson, Rooted in Detachment, p. 8; Stevenson also observes that ‘the iconography’ of the Transfiguration ‘tends to reflect Matthew’s features’.   4. All biblical citations are taken from the Douay-­Rheims translation of the Latin Vulgate bible.  5. For a table summarising these variations see Stevenson, Rooted in Detachment, pp. x–xi. See also Grant, Spiritual Discourse, pp. 26–9.   6. For an extensive compilation of commentaries on the Transfiguration, see McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ, qtd p. 282.   7. Gatton, ‘There Must be Blood’, p. 80.  8. See Owens, Stages of Dismemberment; Davidson, ‘Sacred Blood’, pp. 436–58; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. For her account of ‘affective piety’, see Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion.  9. Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 1, pp. 150; 145–52. Duffy furthermore mentions one private family chapel painted with ‘texts from the Office of the Transfiguration’, p. 45. 10. For images related to the English mystery cycles, see http://www.english. cam.ac.uk/medieval/index.php 11. Muir, ‘Playing God in Medieval Europe’, p. 35. 12. Williams, ‘The Transfiguration of Jesus Christ (Part 1)’, pp. 13–25. 13. For information on the York guilds see Swanson, Medieval Artisans. See also Justice, ‘Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle’, pp. 47–58. 14. Pace Muir, who implies that in England ‘the words of the apostles’ alone are enough to indicate the effect of Jesus’ transformation, ‘Playing God in Medieval Europe’, p. 117. 15. Hume and Milhous have usefully defined this method as ‘production analysis’: ‘By this term we mean interpretation of the text specifically aimed at understanding it as a performance vehicle . . . while heavily grounded in textual analysis, such criticism will be undertaken on the principle that

­44    Inventions of the Skin what should emerge is a sense of multiple possibilities in actual performance.’ Producible Interpretation, p. 10. 16. From his Summa Theologica, 3a.45.3, ad1, qtd in Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, p. 54. 17. Mâle, Religious Art, pp. 108–9. As Happé rightly notes, however, we need not deduce ‘a one-­way traffic from iconography to drama’ or indeed the reverse; ‘the truth is more likely to be in a process of interaction’, Cyclic Form, p. 68. 18. Staged respectively around 1450 and 1486, both of these Passions were in fact narrative cycles staged over the course of several days; see Happé, Cyclic Form, pp. 41–2. 19. Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 220. 20. REED: York, ed. Johnston, pp. 55, 78. On the Mercers’ indenture, see Johnston and Dorrell, ‘The York Mercers’, pp. 11–35. See also Tydeman, The Medieval European Stage 500–1550, p. 212. Tydeman’s translation of the indenture has the advantage of distinguishing the costuming conventions amongst the seven apostles: three of them wear masks as well as diadems, whilst the remaining four appear to wear yellow wigs and diadems. I suggest that the three apostles singled out to wear the masks are meant to be understood as Peter, James, and John, the trio of core disciples present at the Transfiguration and at multiple other episodes of the cycle. 21. Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 314. 22. REED: Chester, ed. Clopper, pp. 32, 36, 67, 70, 75. 23. Muir, ‘Playing God’, p. 33. See also Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 225. To be masked, or to be painted in gold – given the focus of this study, that is a question (if not the question) to which I return below. When speculating about the possible theatrical technologies deployed within the medieval cycle drama, we must proceed with caution; that masks appear to have been used in the York Doomsday pageant does not rule out the use of other technologies elsewhere, nor indeed the use, within single pageants, of various combinations of materials to produce the ‘radiance’ of divinity. 24. Within literary criticism there are very few sustained studies of this pageant. One notable exception is Bishop’s discussion of the pageant’s ‘dramaturgy of wonder’ in Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder; see also Aronson-­ Lehavi’s discussion of the Transfiguration in Street Scenes. The first sentence of Stevenson’s recent monograph on the Transfiguration cited above in n. 3 suggests this gap is not unique to literary criticism: ‘It’s something of a surprise that the Transfiguration of Christ – described in three gospels and the Second Letter of Peter – has received so little attention in recent times’, p. vii. 25. Andreopolous, Metamorphosis, p. 65, who notes that this date was chosen for ‘historical rather than theological and liturgical reasons’. 26. See King, ‘Calendar and Text’, p. 41. 27. Ibid. p. 46. 28. ‘And when Moses came down from the mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord. And Aaron and the children of Israel seeing the face of Moses horned, were afraid to come near’; the annotation to this

Light     45 verse explains the term ‘horned’ means ‘shining, and sending forth rays of light’. 29. Qtd McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ, p. 281. 30. Ibid. pp. 270; 255. 31. Lee, Transfiguration, p. 17. 32. Qtd McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ, p. 292. 33. Pseudo-­Bonaventure in Mediationes On The Life of Christ; An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Ragusa and Green, p. 228 (the illuminated manuscript, MS. Ital. 115, does not have a corresponding illustration for this event). 34. Shepherd, Theatre, Body, and Pleasure; see also Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, p. 54. 35. All citations to the York cycle are from Davidson, The York Corpus Christi Plays available online. 36. Crouch, ‘Paying to See the Play’, pp. 64–111. See also White, ‘Places to Hear the Play’, pp. 49–78. 37. Crouch explains ‘any standing audience would gain only a restricted view from the sides of the wagons, and would be constantly pushed aside to make way for each pageant as it moved into place. There would seem to have been little scope for free audience movement through the clogged and heavily-­policed streets, in the way that was once assumed’, ‘Paying to See the Play’, p. 101. 38. Beckwith, ‘Ritual, Theatre, and Social Space’, p. 75. See also Barrett, Against All England, pp. 65–7, and Anne Higgins, ‘Streets and Markets’, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. Cox and Kastan, pp. 77–92. 39. Also noting this movement, Walsh includes The Transfiguration in the grouping of pageants he identifies with ‘high places and travelling scenes’: ‘fluid units of action, often beginning at some remove from the wagon, that moved through the audience and shaped space within it; and “high places”, the wagon-­top itself, where the principal action would be played and upon which the “travelling scenes” are focused’. See ‘High Places and Travelling Scenes’, p. 138. See also Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, pp. 54–8. 40. The apostles’ astonishment, moreover, establishes that the spectacle of Transfiguration is at once sensually concrete and ineffable or inexpressible, a potential paradox St. Ambrose attributed to our necessarily limited human perspective upon divinity: ‘Peter saw his glory, and those with him saw it also, though they were heavy with sleep. This was because the incomprehensible splendor of the divinity weighs down our bodily senses’. 41. See Davidson, ‘Staging the York Creation, and Fall of Lucifer’, p. 168. 42. In his discussion of medieval stage ‘resources and effects’, Tydeman proposes a ‘cloud-­vehicle’ that ‘could be used to convey a single figure to Earth or to Heaven, as in the York Transfiguration’, The Theatre in the Middle Ages, p. 172. 43. The annotation to this episode explains that the two figures share in Jesus’ transfiguration: ‘Marke in this Transfiguration many maruelous points as, that he made not only his owne body, which then was mortal, but also the bodies of Moyses and Elias, the one dead, the other to die, for the time as it were immortal: thereby to represent the state and glorie of his body and

­46    Inventions of the Skin his Saincts in heauen . . . By which maruelous transfiguring of his body, you may the lesse maruel that he can exhibite his body vnder the forme of bread and vvine or otherwise as he list’. For this post-­Reformation exegete, the greater ‘marvel’ is not Jesus’ change of face, but the host’s transformation from bread to flesh – and so the lesser miracle of the Transfiguration is offered as evidence for the plausibility of Christ’s living presence in the Transubstantiation. 44. See Bevington’s discussion of quick changes in the morality plays in From Mankind to Marlowe. 45. Noting that the majority of the images of Jesus ‘during his sojourn on earth’ in fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­ century church windows show him wearing purple, Mâle once again speculates that this pictorial convention in fact reflects ‘theatrical custom’, Religious Art, p. 108. 46. Justice, ‘Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle’, p. 52. 47. See also Twycross and Carpenter’s discussion of staging materials, especially ‘God and the Angels’, Masks and Masking, pp. 220–32. 48. See Meredith and Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama, p. 114. 49. Similarly, in the very first pageant of the cycle, the Barkers’ Creation of the Angels and the Fall of Lucifer, light signifies kinship with the divine. Angelic bodies ‘schemerande’ and ‘schynande’ because they ‘merour’ the ‘might’ that originates in God: ‘Of all the mightes I have made, moste nexte after me / I make thee als master and merour of my mighte. / I beelde thee here baynely in blys for to be, / I name thee for Lucifer, als berar of lyghte’ (33–6). 50. In his 1633 tract An Exposition Upon the Second Epistle General of St. Peter, ed. James Sherman (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848), Thomas Adams (‘the Shakespeare of the Puritans’) teaches of the Transfiguration that ‘Some are of the opinion, that this clarity was in the air about him, not in the body of Christ; but that is false, for himself was transfigured’, p. 183. 51. REED: Chester, ed. Clopper, p. 247. 52. Fischer-­Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, p. 76. 53. Meredith and Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama, pp. 108–9. 54. At York, all of the pageants were performed according to a tight schedule over the course of one day; as a result, any effect would have to be both practicable and repeatable – unless the role of Jesus were doubled, with one actor playing the human Jesus and the other playing the divine, paint might not permit the actor to be correctly costumed for the performance at the next station. Of course, if in performance the role of Jesus were doubled – one human Jesus, one divine Jesus – then timing is no longer an issue; a dramatic body switch could be accomplished very quickly, although this technique would effectively split Christ’s dual nature across two people and literalise, if only in performance, Tertullian’s anxiety about ‘those who make Christ to be one being and Jesus another’, qtd McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ, p. 255. 55. Ibid. 56. Exegetes have explained Peter’s curious response as his failure to recognise that Jesus has superseded the Law and the Prophets of the Old Testament and, more seriously, as a dereliction of duty. Peter’s role as disciple requires that he descend from the mountain to engage with the world, a moral

Light     47 imperative vividly illustrated in Raphael’s canvas of the Transfiguration (1516–1520), which unusual amongst paintings of this event represents a group of supplicants waiting at the mountain’s foot (including a possessed boy whom the apostles prove unable to cure). 57. See Meredith and Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama, for ‘cloud-­ masked pulleys’ in continental drama. 58. I’m following Walsh here: ‘in the absence of illuminating records directly pertaining to staging for the vast majority of the plays, one must resort to internal indicators in the texts themselves. The process of argument from implied stage directions is admittedly a risky one. Our modern values of “theatricality” are ever likely to interfere. But if a pattern of spatial indicators can be detected in a play-­text, then we might be permitted to advance a staging model based upon them provided, of course, that it does not contradict the known physical conditions of the Cycle’, in ‘High Places and Travelling Scenes’, p. 137. 59. Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, p. 57. 60. Rayner, Ghosts, p. xxiii. 61. Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, p. 51. 62. Twycross, ‘Playing the Resurrection’, p. 282. 63. Again, see the images correlating to this pageant at http://www.english. cam.ac.uk/medieval/index.php 64. The text is obscure at line 159; Chester N. Scoville and Kimberley M. Yates’s modern translation reads ‘[What the – ? How?] Entirely we were intent – / Oh, I trust that some trouble betides us’! 65. Rayner, Ghosts, p. xix. 66. For their account of the indenture, see Johnston and Dorrell, ‘The Doomsday Pageant of the York Mercers’, pp. 29–34. 67. Epp, ‘Visible Words’, p. 301. 68. Ibid. p. 301. See also Twycross in her article ‘Beyond the Picture Theory’, pp. 589–617. 69. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, p. 7. 70. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 236. 71. In his notes for this pageant, Davidson (The York Corpus Christi Plays) does not connect the light to the event of Transfiguration at all, and merely says ‘The bright light radiating from Jesus is rare in the visual arts’. 72. REED: Coventry, ed. Ingram, p. 74. Davidson in ‘Sacred Blood’ notes this evidence, but does not discuss the implications of the gold (nor have I seen anyone anywhere connect the possible mixed dramaturgy of the Passion to the Transfiguration). Davidson focuses on Jesus’ garments, which he says were ‘ideal for displaying his blood’, p. 442. Twycross and Carpenter very briefly discuss the implications of blood and gold mixed together, Masks and Masking, pp. 226–8, focusing on how this mixed effect might strike contemporary audiences as ‘distancing or incoherent’, p. 228. 73. Qtd Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, p. 51.

Chapter 2

Blood: Enter Martius, Painted

The play’s style is bare. It holds little of the undulating, heaving swell of Othello’s music, the fireworks of Julius Caesar, the fine frenzies of Lear or Macbeth . . . Rather there is here a swift channeling, an eddying, twisting, and forthward-­ flowing stream; ice cold, intellectual, cold as a mountain torrent and holding something of its iron taste . . . There is little brilliance, little colour. G. Wilson Knight, 1951 The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has an invariably public dimension. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (2004)1

In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608), Caius Martius makes a play for the consulship of Rome that fails when he refuses to show the Roman crowds his wounded body. This reluctance is original to Shakespeare. According to Plutarch by way of Sir Thomas North (1579), the historical Martius complied with custom and ‘shewed many woundes and cuttes apon his bodie, which he had receyved in seventeene yeres service at the warres’.2 Shakespeare’s Martius, however, shrinks from this type of exhibition. It is a part he would ‘blush’ in acting: ‘I cannot / put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them / For my wounds’ sake to give their suffrage’ (2. 2. 133–5). Critics often point to this refusal as evidence of Martius’ characteristic ‘anti-­theatrical bent’ – a profound distaste for self-­display that might also explain the play’s lukewarm history of reception. As Bridget Escolme puts it, ‘How does the ­audience experience a dramatic hero who lacks the empathetic quality of v­ ulnerability in soliloquy and refuses to stand still and be looked at’?3

­50    Inventions of the Skin Criticism on Coriolanus is, I suggest, preoccupied with explaining the body we do not see at the expense of engaging with the body we do. A fact of staging often overlooked is that Caius Martius spends most of the play’s first act so covered in blood he appears ‘flayed’, appearing in 1. 5 ‘bleeding and assaulted by the enemy’ and remaining so bloodied until his exit in 1. 10, the effect maintained for nearly 300 lines.4 Provocatively, given his supposed disdain for acting, Martius describes this blood as a costume, as a disguising ‘mask’ (1. 9. 10), and explicitly as a ‘painting’ that must be removed offstage (1. 8. 69). By calling his blood paint – which, given early modern staging conventions, it was – Martius reminds the audience of the theatrical materials sustaining the illusion of his woundedness. More than soldierly bravado, his metadramatic rhetoric advances his ideal image of himself as heroically complete. That is, by emphasising the artificial over the naturalistic dimension of his injuries, Martius severs blood from its relationship to vulnerability and refuses the sympathetic identification the spectacle of wounds typically enlists. Instead of a dangerous leakage, blood-­as-­paint becomes a hardening enamel or armor, and his important claim that his ‘mask’ of paint conceals his ‘blushes’ from view suggests that his blood grants him precisely the bodily privacy, the refuge from the gaze, that the ritual of the gown demands he surrender. With a reading of Coriolanus as its central case study, this chapter considers what G. F. Reynolds once speculated ‘must have been a messy nuisance’: stage blood.5 I begin by surveying the archival evidence for the use of paint for blood in late medieval and early modern drama. I then examine a representative range of surviving stage directions from canonical and non-­canonical plays in order to identify what is ­conventional – and what is unusual or innovative – about the critical significance and the practical execution of blood effects on the early modern stage. As Erika Lin reminds us, ‘not all moments in early modern drama were created equal’, and I single out for particular attention scenes in which blood effects are executed in full view of the audience and moments when characters disrupt the mimetic fiction by acknowledging the materiality of stage blood.6 I am especially interested in the use of stage blood as a masking device in plays such as Look About You (1599), The Politician (1639), and Coriolanus. As I argue below, this use of blood within a context of deception troubles the persistent view of blood as a sign, or indeed as the pre-­eminent sign, of ‘realism’. It may well be that the association of blood with realism makes the use of ‘paint’ seem incongruous, even unsatisfying, as a substitute for blood within dramatic illusions; after all, as a form of cosmetics, paint in the early modern period was often the

Blood     51

defining sign of hypocrites, ‘double-­dealing ambidexters’, and designing women. However, once we admit stage blood into a rich network of cosmetic significations, new possibilities for discussing stage violence open up that are of particular significance for Coriolanus and his desire, in Janet Adelman’s words, to be perceived as ‘sui generis’: as invulnerable, as independent, and as isolated from the crowds he so despises.7

I. The blood that flowed liberally within late medieval religious drama in England is often described as having a devotional value dependent upon its realistic presentation. Accordingly, Margaret Owens points out that those responsible for staging plays and pageants about saints, martyrs, besieged hosts, and Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion ‘took painstaking efforts to construct convincing illusions of violence’.8 For Clifford Davidson, the sight of stage blood ‘in the context of the religious dramas . . . brought people into touch through the sense of sight with the saving blood of Christ . . . this was potentially an “ocular experience” that would result in communication with a transcendent reality’.9 Elsewhere Davidson expresses his argument even more emphatically when he implies that blood effects help provide the impression ‘that this is what it was actually like when Christ was crucified’.10 Although some critics do offer more nuanced views of this blood symbolism, the consensus on medieval drama is that when it came to the inculcation of incarnational piety, graphic realism encouraged what ‘pale abstraction’ could not: audience sympathy and identification with Christ and his martyred saints.11 If religious doctrine justified the blood that John Spalding Gatton claims ‘attracted rather than repelled men and women of the Middle Ages’, the dominant view of the secular stage blood in early modern drama is that it fascinated audiences accustomed to a range of bloody spectacles including public executions, bear-­baitings, and visceral blood-­ sports.12 For Andrew Sofer, the loss of the religious framework of the mystery plays transformed stage blood from a ‘vehicle of spiritual renewal’ to a ‘vehicle of theatrical voyeurism’ with important commercial value – in his opinion, it is no accident that Thomas Kyd’s bloody Spanish Tragedy was one of the theatre industry’s earliest blockbusters.13 Sofer’s pithy formulation notwithstanding, early modern arguments for the salutary or cathartic effects of tragedy indicate the endurance of a moral framework for viewing bloodshed just as the grim ‘japing’ of the soldiers as they nail Christ to the cross in the York pageant of The

­52    Inventions of the Skin Crucifixion indicates that religious drama accommodated potentially disruptive notes of laughter.14 Scholars continue, however, to classify blood as one of the few reliably ‘realistic’ elements erupting within the otherwise non-­illusionistic space of the early modern stage. Thus G. F. Reynolds suggests that a ‘Grand Guignol taste for horror’ encouraged a ‘realistic’ deployment of blood effects, despite the risk they posed to expensive costumes; Leo Kirschbaum, that stage blood was both ‘factual and messy’; Andrew Gurr, that realistically-­rendered blood ‘intensified’ the spectacle of violence; and Tiffany Stern, that the prevalence of blood in early modern plays is especially striking ‘given that so much else is left to the poetry’.15 In 2006, the education arm of London’s Globe Theatre convened a panel of critics and practitioners to discuss the topic of stage blood. Although the panel registered the familiar anxiety over costumes, they agreed that ‘in the Renaissance period blood was represented on the stage in a realistic and not a stylistic way’.16 None of these accounts, however, define what exactly constitutes a realistic representation of blood, or for whom, or within what context, or how much or how little blood makes a spectacle seem realistic in the first place. Nor should arguments over blood’s sensationalist or devotional appeal rule out its capacity to elicit a wider range of conceptual and emotional responses, including shock, pity, laughter, admiration of actorly skill, and recognition of blood’s allegorical or symbolic significance. Stage blood is a bloody nuisance indeed, and not merely for the reasons Reynolds suspects. Rather, the contemporary critic who wishes to account for the ‘ocular experience’ it enjoins faces some tough problems of reanimation, contextualisation, and interpretation. To begin this process, we must first materialise stage blood as a theatrical property. Notwithstanding the occasional call for animal viscera (hearts on daggers, tongues, or the ‘sheeps gather’ mentioned in the surviving backstage-­plot for The Battle of Alcazar), I take Martius at his word, and argue that when the early modern stage required players’ bodies to be bloodied, water-­soluble pigments rather than animal blood, red wine, or red vinegar was used – as was also clearly the case with reusable props such as swords and daggers.17 The archival evidence collected in the Records of Early English Drama furthermore points to the frequent (although not exclusive) use of red paint for blood effects; indeed, the mystery cycles so often required the labour of painters that it is no great exaggeration to call that office itself the sine qua non of medieval stage violence. The Painters’ guild supplied the pigments necessary to depict Christ’s bloodshed in the pageant of The Crucifixion, while the Pinners supplied the nails. Cudgels and whips (the ‘instruments of the

Blood     53

Passion’) could be doctored with paint and recycled from performance to performance. The York Mercers’ property inventory of 1433 mentions a ‘sirke, wounded’, a leather coat that both represented Christ’s nakedness and displayed the red painted marks of his wounds. Records related to the staging of Canterbury’s popular Saint Thomas à Becket play include sums spent on ‘the painting of Saint Thomas’s head’ and ‘a new leder bag for the blode’.18 A striking use of red paint or dye can be found in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which vividly proves the truth of the doctrine of transubstantiation by showing a host that copiously bleeds when subjected to the ‘tests’ of some sceptical Jewish merchants. Philip Butterworth asserts that ‘some combination of vermilion and pyrotechnics’ was used to create the play’s sensational effect of a cauldron of boiling blood:19 Here shall þe cawdron byle, apperyng to be as blood. Malchas: Owt and harow! what deuyll ys herein? All thys oyle waxyth redde as blood, And owt of the cawdron yt begynnyth to rin. I am so aferd I am nere woode.

(673–6; my emphasis)

The play also includes the directions ‘Here þe Ost must blede’ and ‘Here the owyn must ryve asunder and blede owt at þe cranys, and an image appere owt with woundys bledyng’ (480; 712). Evidence related to the staging of religious drama throughout Western Europe further confirms the habitual use of red paint for blood. A Provençale manuscript for a performance of the Crucifixion calls for a sponge soaked with ‘vermilion’: ‘An iron cap, and then some sponges on that iron cap that are all full of vermilion or blood, and then placed atop those sponges will be a false wig’. The Admont play of the Passion deploys red paint at the Flagellation, the crowning of Christ with thorns, and the Deposition: a servant brings whips and rods dipped in red paint. When they strike Christ’s body it becomes bloody . . . They press the crown onto his head together with a small sponge dipped in red paint . . . The servants go along and break the thieves’ legs with a club wound round with sponges dipped in red paint.20

Frequently mentioned in the above accounts, the Anglo-­ Norman word ‘vermilion’ is important to the history of stage blood that I am narrating here. The OED dates the word to the thirteenth century. As a noun, it meant a red pigment, either ‘cinnabar or red crystalline mercuric sulphide’; as a verb, it meant ‘to colour or paint with’, and in two suggestive additional usages, it meant both ‘to besmear with blood’

­54    Inventions of the Skin and ‘to blush’. In their exhaustive study of the ‘materials and methods of masking’, Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter show that vermilion was used both ‘for painting scenery, props, and pictures’ as a cosmetic, although there was some real physical danger in the latter, as Henry Peacham observes in his treatise on The art of drawing with the pen, and limming in water colours (1606): ‘your fairest and most principall Red is Vermilion, called in Latine Minium, it is a poison, and found where great store of quicksilver is’ (86).21 In a pamphlet ‘shewing that the villanies of leawd women, excell those of men’, Robert Greene decries the use of ‘Painters vermilion’ by ‘tallow-­faced whores’, and in a popular sermon entitled The White Devil, or the Hypocrite uncased (1613), Thomas Adams warns his archetypal ‘Hypocrite’ that ‘God shall smite thee, thou painted wall; and wash off thy vermillion dye with the rivers of brimstone.’22 For Adams, Hypocrisy’s false face of paint defines her as a hypocrite – and as a stand-­in for the Catholic Church. As a stage technology, vermilion thus creates the illusion of such ‘authentic’ bodily states as bleeding and blushing while still retaining suggestive religious and cultural associations with physical and spiritual decay and specifically feminine deception.23 Especially given the widespread use of paint for a host of other special effects, I see no good reason to assume that the use of red paint for blood abruptly terminated with the decline, by 1580, of the mystery cycles. Granted, surviving inventories such as Henslowe’s ‘diaries’ do not yield much information about the use of the more ephemeral theatrical materials, but as these accounts tend to focus on the most expensive and durable props – costumes, beds, chairs, tombs – this silence is not surprising.24 Scattered references to ‘bladders’ and ‘spunges’ indicate that some of the familiar medieval delivery devices for blood remained in use well into the early modern era.25 We know less, however, about the agents involved in the development, distribution, and application of early modern special effects than we do about those same figures within late medieval drama. Andrew Gurr’s view that actors ‘probably made and concocted their own makeup’ strikes me as problematic when it comes to the more complicated special effects. The earliest play-­texts themselves often provide our best source of evidence about the execution of visual effects within early modern drama – if not the precise commercial or artisanal origins of those effects from outside the theatrical circuit.26 The prologue to Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor mentions ‘wounds’ in a catalogue of the representational devices Jonson resented for potentially appealing to audiences more than his poetry. The audience is warned that they must not expect to see such sights as

Blood     55 . . . a child, now swaddled, to proceed Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed, Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot-­and-­half-­foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars: And in the tiring-­house bring wounds to scars.

(7–12)

Demonstrating what Peter Womack has called Jonson’s characteristic ‘desire to insulate the play from the actuality of the show’, the prologue demystifies theatrical illusion by alerting the audience to the origins of wounds in makeup applied backstage in the tiring house, and I would set this passage next to Farah Karim-­Cooper’s account of the same location.27 Although Karim-­Cooper has in mind the tools needed to facilitate an actor’s quick-­change from blackness to whiteness in the play The English Moor (1637), a process I discuss in the next chapter, her speculative analysis also sheds light onto the management of blood effects: Either tiremen/tirewomen or fellow actors could assist, one with removal, the other with application. Makeup was a standard theatrical tool and face-­ painting scenes were common theatrical devices. The tiring house had to have been equipped with the various materials necessary for the application (brushes, boxes, paints, sealants) and for the speedy removal of makeup (cloths, distilled water, oils).28

The vermilion used to stain a cheek or a lip could handily convey the static redness of a scar. That said, plays often require stage blood to evince far more mobility: to ‘spurt’ and to ‘strike’, to circulate beyond the confines of the actor’s body and command the audience’s attention (that paint is capable of being adhesive, sometimes stubbornly so, as well as messily transferable further evinces its flexibility as a theatrical device). A closer look at a representative sampling of the stage directions mentioning blood from the earliest printed texts and manuscripts helps us to identify what is conventional practice about the use of stage blood on the early modern stage – and what is distinctive or innovative.

II. As Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson note in their Dictionary of Stage Directions, the majority of the cues calling for blood effects involve objects rather than bodies. Most often, these objects are weapons such as swords, knives, and daggers, and also fabrics such as the bloody napkin from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587) – an iconic item that also appears in A Warning for Faire Women (1599), Beaumont

­56    Inventions of the Skin and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge (1615), and As You Like It, in which the sight of a ‘napkin / dyed’ in Orlando’s blood causes Rosalind to falter in her part of Ganymede by swooning (4. 3. 155). Examples of more descriptive stage directions involving weapons include the cue ‘. . . dreadfull Musicke sounding, Enter Junius Rusticus, and Palphurius Sura, with bloudie swords, they wave them over his head’, from Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1629), and the instruction for Atë, the Goddess of Folly, to enter ‘with Thunder and Lightening, all in black, with a burning Torch in one hand, and a bloody weapon’ in the dumb show that begins The Tragedy of Locrine (1594). Noting that the bloody dagger was ‘a conventional icon of vengeance’, Huston Diehl makes a persuasive case for the symbolic significance of such bloody tableaux: Many (but not all) of the violent elements of Renaissance English tragedy are both emotionally charged and symbolic. Stage violence may in a given context allude to existing iconographic traditions of the Renaissance, the same traditions manifested in the visual arts of that era. Such a view of violence regards the bloody instruments of murder, the grotesque limbs of dismembered bodies, and the cruel and inhuman devices of torture presented on the Tudor and Stuart stage not simply as sensationalist stage violence but as symbolic icons which express widely understood moral and ethical concepts.29

As we seek to account for audience response to early modern theatrical conventions, we must keep in mind the variety of practices that trained viewers to be literate in the terms of what Diehl calls a ‘Renaissance public symbolism’: church-­ going, the reading of popular books of emblems, the watching of civic pageants and court masques.30 Dessen has likewise drawn attention to the ‘allegorical or symbolic logic behind stage violence’, and Womack confirms that ‘very significant sections of emblematic vocabulary were still in living use in Elizabethan theatre; in masques and civic pageants, but also as structural elements in new plays’.31 Offering the spectator a surplus of aural and visual stimuli – the sight of fire and blood, the sound of music and thunder – stage directions such as this one from Locrine also remind us that the early modern theater engaged the full order of the senses. A smaller number of directions call for body parts to be bloodied: hands, arms, faces, and heads (and this confinement of blood to discrete body parts likely indicates some care taken to preserve clothing).32 Like the black stage hangings sometimes hung out to ‘prepare the auditors for tragedy’, bloody hands were an especially potent emblematic sign.33 In Thomas Preston’s tragedy of Cambises (1561), for example, the allegorical figures Cruelty and Murder enter ‘with bloody hands’, and in A Warning for Fair Women (1599), Tragedy enters ‘with a bowle of bloud in her hand . . . Murther settes down her blood, and rubbes their

Blood     57

hands’.34 When, in Julius Caesar, Brutus bathes his hands in Caesar’s freshly-­spilled blood, he turns himself into just such a ‘speaking picture’: Grant that, and then is death a benefit. So are we Caesar’s friends, that have abridged His time of fearing death. Stoop, Romans, stoop, And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords: Then walk we forth even to the market-­place, And, waving our red weapons o’er our heads, Let’s all cry ‘peace, freedom and liberty!’

(3. 1. 104–11)

Calpurnia foresees this moment when she dreams of her husband’s statue ‘which like a fountain with an hundred spouts / Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans / Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it (2 .2. 77–9). In Antonio’s Revenge (1601), John Marston makes the play’s tyrant, Piero, interchangeable with the revenger by having them both enter in the same guise. In the opening moment of the play Piero enters ‘unbraced, his arms bare, smeared in blood, a poniard in one hand bloody’; later, after killing Piero’s son, Julio, Antonio similarly enters ‘his arms bloody, bearing a torch and poniard’ (3. 5. 13; I return to this play below). Perhaps the most famous bloody hands in all of early modern drama belong to the Macbeths, permanently stained by the blood of Duncan: Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.

(2. 2. 58–61)

Or, for Lady Macbeth, ‘here’s the smell of blood still’ (5. 1. 42).35 That all of these directions above are tied to ‘entrances’ returns us to the tiring house: whatever bloodying occurs happens backstage, prior to the action. If a player needs to appear in later scenes cleansed of blood, the play must be written to allow for this (and so the extent of a given effect can sometimes be gauged from the time allotted to remove it). For practical as well as for aesthetic reasons, then, tragedies often reserve the most elaborate scenes of bloodshed to the very end. When such displays are confined to the last scene of the play, the company does not need to worry about clearing the stage of corpses or navigating quick changes of costume. Some plays do, however, call for blood effects to be applied openly in full view of the audience. In Thomas Goffe’s Tragedy of Orestes (1617),

­58    Inventions of the Skin an academic play performed by students at Oxford’s Christ Church Hall, the titular hero suspects his mother Clytmnestra and his stepfather Aegysthus of the murder of his father, Agamemnon. In 4. 8, Orestes exacts his revenge by stabbing their young child; when the child lives to plead for his life, he ‘Stabs it againe, that the blood spirts in his face. Turnes it to her’. Then, in a grim perversion of the drinking of the communion wine in the Catholic mass, Orestes forces the parents to drink the child’s blood: ‘Fills two cups with the Heniochus childs blood: gives it them’. Finally, Orestes stabs both Clytmnestra and Aegysthus, leaving all three bodies onstage to be discovered by his grandfather, Tyndarus, in the next scene, 5. 1: ‘What doe I see? ha, blood? the little child / Dead; his daughter bleed, Aegysteus kill’d?’ The text implies that Orestes does indeed force both parents to drink their child’s blood. It is possible, then, that a concealed bladder or paint-­soaked sponge facilitated the ‘spurting’ effect that the stabbing of the child requires, and that red wine was used to fill the two cups, a detail potentially corroborated by Orestes’ cruelly litotic response to Tyndarus’ lament: ‘Your Lordships eyes doe faile, ‘tis but spilt wine’, a statement that further reinforces the allusion to Catholic ritual. Eventually graduating from Oxford with a Bachelor of Divinity degree, Goffe wrote Orestes as an academic exercise designed to help him ‘practice [his] style either in prose or verse, to be well acquainted with Seneca’, in the words of the Christ Church don, playwright, and theatre apologist William Gager.36 In writing Orestes, Goffe also drew upon popular revenge tragedies, most notably Hamlet and Antonio’s Revenge. By scripting ‘one of the bloodiest and most protracted revenges in the history of the Elizabethan drama’, Goffe proved he could equal or surpass the professional playwrights of the London stage.37 The death of the unnamed child in Orestes eclipses Marston’s already graphic depiction of the murder of the child, Julio, whose blood Antonio smears on the tomb of his father to appease his ghost. G. K. Hunter describes the act as a ‘Black Mass’ in which Antonio uses blood to ‘cense’ and ‘asperge’ Andrugio’s tomb (although given its enactment of the Greek concept of haimassein, in which ‘to stain the altar with blood is a pious duty’, Antonio’s blood ritual can also be viewed as pagan):38 And now there’s nothing, but Piero left. He is all Piero, father all. This blood, This breast, this heart, Piero all, Whom thus I mangle. Sprite of Julio, Forget this was thy trunk. I live thy friend. Mayest thou be twined with the soft’st imbrace

Blood     59 Of clear eternity; but thy father’s blood, I thus make incense of, to vengeance.

(3. 3. 55–62)

The deed accomplished, Antonio heaves his ‘blood-­ dyed hands to heaven’. Antonio’s Revenge was performed by the Children of St. Paul’s; whereas we often encounter the sentiment that audiences must have found the spectacle of murdered children especially shocking, the sight of child revengers might have been even more disturbing (or possibly distancing, if we imagine instead that the presence of child actors places the spectacle of revenge within parodic quotation marks). If Marston did intend the murder of Julio to suggest Eucharistic sacrifice, Goffe makes the disenchantment of Catholic ritual all the more apparent by showing blood that is actually drunk from a chalice, and I view Goffe’s depiction of blood ritual in Orestes as an act of authorial self-­fashioning – a gauntlet, as it were, thrown at the feet of the ‘common players’. I turn now to two additional plays that, like Orestes, bring the management of blood out of the tiring room and onto the stage, and that – like Coriolanus – emphasise the cosmetic and theatrical origins of stage blood by showing its use as a masking device for the face: the ­anonymous Lord Admiral’s play Look About You (1599) and James Shirley’s tragicomedy The Politician, performed by Queen Henrietta’s Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre around 1639.39 I cannot say for certain whether Shakespeare was familiar with the 1599 ‘aggressively theatrical’ comedy of multiple disguises,40 although I do suggest Shirley was familiar with both Coriolanus and Look About You. I am less interested, however, in the relationships amongst these plays than in the different possibilities for audience engagement that emerge with these atypical usages of stage blood. The plot of Look About You is driven not by literary concerns, but by the desire to give free and giddy reign to its lead actors’ histrionic skills. The trickster Skinke goes through nine changes of identity, and in one vivid sequence makes inspired use of supposed animal blood. In the scene below, Skinke enters disguised as Prince John (he’s wearing the Prince’s hat, cloak, and sword), discards those tokens, changes clothes with a servant boy, and bloodies his face: Skinke: . . . What Pyg, or Goose, or Capon have you kill’d, Within your Kitchin new? Drawer: A pyg new stickt. Skinke: Fetch me a sawcer of the bloud, quicke run; . . . Lend me thy Aprone, runne and fetch a pot from the next roome, . . . O brave boy, excellent bloud: up, take my cloake

­60    Inventions of the Skin And my hat to thy share, when I come from Kent, ile pay Thee like a King.

(1547–64)

The real Prince John and those pursuing Skinke duly mistake him for an abused servant, and Skinke escapes arrest: ‘Hange your selves, this darkenes shall convay me out of doors / Ile swim the Thames, but Ile attaine Black-­heath’ (1587–8). Elsewhere in Look About You beards are hastily attached, clothes are changed, gaits are altered, and voices disguised.41 To wash the face of blood within this compressed time frame, however, is a significantly more difficult feat to manage: Skinke receives the saucer of blood around line 1562, according to the script bloodies his ‘head and face’ between that moment and the entrance of the real Sir John at line 1567, exits at line 1589, and returns ‘like a Hermit’ at line 1845; this means that the actor needs far more time backstage to remove the blood, than time onstage to apply it (indeed, Skinke’s boast that he’ll ‘swim’ to Blackheath calls attention to this process of removal). This use of blood as a mask disrupts the audience’s expectation of the kind of evidence blood typically constitutes within early modern drama. Stage blood makes abstractions concrete, as in Murder’s bloody hands, or provides ‘filthy witness’ to dark deeds, as when revengers enter stained with the proof of their retributive violence (Macbeth, 2 .2. 45). Flowing from breast or side, blood proves the body’s vulnerability. Rising to the cheek in the sign of the blush, blood blazons guilt, or lust, or love, or shame. In contrast, Skinke’s theatricalised masking dispenses with blood’s incarnational or authenticating power. Just like the ‘mummers’ who used soot, ashes, dirt, and other ad hoc ingredients to obscure their faces during times of carnival and misrule, Skinke improvises with the materials at hand to obscure his face, the location that Sarah Carpenter and Meg Twycross call ‘the center of communication of the self’.42 Later in the period, James Shirley repurposes this very blood-­ as-­ disguise motif in The Politician, a tragicomedy set in Norway. Fleeing an angry crowd of ‘rebels’ who blame him for the murder of their beloved Prince, the machiavel Gotharus (the ‘politician’ of the title) meets up with the ‘court parasite’, Sueno, who has adopted a disguise in order to flee the same mob. Just as in Look About You, Gotharus first exchanges clothes with Sueno (‘off with that case; it may secure me . . . nay, your beard too’) before disguising himself with Sueno’s blood as a strategy of last resort: Gotharus: Yes, take that, and that, for killing of Haraldus. Now I’m sure you will not prate. Sueno: Oh, murder!

Blood     61 Within Follow, follow. Gotharus: I cannot ’scape. Oh help invention. He bloodies himself with Sueno’s blood, and falls down as dead.

(4. 5. 20–4)

Although the text does not specify exactly which body parts Gotharus bloodies, the fact that the scenario so closely follows the scene from Look About You suggests the use of blood as a mask for the face. After all, Gotharus does not want the rebels merely to think that he, Gotharus, is dead – he does not want to be recognised at all. That Sueno’s blood conceals, rather than reveals, the identity of his killer can also be seen as an ironic reversal of ‘bier-­right’, the notion that the corpse of a murder victim will bleed in the presence of the murderer (thus Richard is exposed as the killer of King Henry VI when, in Richard’s presence, Henry’s wounds ‘open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh’, Richard III, 1. 2. 56). Blood, beard, and cloak do the trick, and by the time the rebels realise their mistake, Gotharus has fled (he is offstage from 4. 5. 34 to 4. 6. 30).43 With the crowd still in pursuit, Gotharus is obliged to throw himself on the mercy of his enemy, the old Duke Olaus, who proposes that Gotharus hide himself in the empty coffin of the Prince, whom Olaus explains is currently being ‘embalmed’. The Prince is, in fact, alive and well, a fact known to Olaus and to the audience. The rebels enter, seize the coffin in order to give it a proper burial (they carry it out at 4. 5 and carry it in at 5. 2), and Gotharus is on the brink of being buried alive when the Prince appears on the scene. The coffin is opened, Gotharus is revealed, the rebels gleefully anticipate tearing him to pieces – until they realise he’s already dead. The audience only now learns that the ‘cordial’ Gotharus’s mistress gave him in 4. 4, just prior to the bloody disguise scene, was in fact a slow-­acting poison: ‘a wholesome poison which, in his poor fears / and fainting when the rebels first pursu’d him, / It was my happiness to minister’ (5. 2. 240–2). The fact that the audience has been privy to the play’s other acts of deception makes this surprising disclosure especially effective, and Gotharus’ panicked attempt to save himself can now be viewed in an entirely different light.44 In The Politician, neither the fictional nor the literal materiality of the blood is acknowledged as directly as it is in Orestes and Look About You. However, plays that feature paint disguises frequently invoke the threat of poison, as for example when tyrants die from kissing the poisoned lips of painted corpses in The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, and The Duke of Milan.45 I suggest that The Politician condenses Gotharus’ ingestion of poison with his macabre

­62    Inventions of the Skin act of bloody masking – an association that would become all the more explicit if, upon his return in 4. 6, Gotharus climbs into his coffin still bloodied. Transforming from life-­giving fluid to medicine to perfuming incense, blood in the scene quoted above from Antonio’s Revenge likewise takes on different material lives: Ghost of my poisoned Sire, suck this fume; To sweet revenge perfume thy circling air With smoke of blood. I sprinkle round his gore, And dew thy hearse with these fresh reeking drops.

(3. 3. 63–6)

Tanya Pollard has conclusively established the shared materiality of paints, perfumes, and poisons – all were species of ‘drugs’ containing ingredients found in the apothecary’s shop, and I argue that it is stage blood’s cosmetic origins – whether or not openly acknowledged within the mimesis – that explains these sequences of associations.46 This investigation into the logic of stage blood reveals that blood effects are not limited to one particular genre, time period, or playing space: stage blood flows in plays performed by professional adults, professional children, and non-­ professional students, in the earliest outdoor amphitheatres, in the more expensive indoor playhouses of the later Jacobean and Caroline periods, at court, and in the university hall theatres. To be sure, the more intimate and candle-­lit indoor venues may have showcased special effects involving the actor’s body especially well. If bloody hands and bloody daggers were emblematic signs for tragedy, some of the most distinctive usages of stage blood can be found in comedies and tragicomedies. A company’s concession to the practical problems managing blood effects can be discerned from the percentage of directions that confine blood to props, ‘pates’, and limbs. With Diehl and Dessen, I agree that the majority of early modern playgoers would have been able to recognise the symbolic dimension of this bloodshed – and that their appreciation of an allegorical context for viewing scenes of violence would not have diminished the capacity for stage blood to shock, to move, or to elicit ‘voyeuristic’ thrills. Moreover, I have argued for the persistence of medieval techniques and materials well into the early modern period, although it is clear that the Reformation created new horizons of expectation for viewing bloodshed – a fact that Thomas Goffe, for example, deftly exploited in The Tragedy of Orestes. At no point during his Passion, however, does Jesus address the materiality of his blood, nor does he call into question its authenticity by acknowledging it as a theatrical effect, since to do so would be to undermine the devotional purpose of his suffering. In contrast, early modern

Blood     63

playwrights often script characters that emphasise the theatricality of their bloodshed for the complex performance dynamics such moments can enjoin. Also demonstrating the playing company’s desire to display actorly virtuosity, the self-­consciously theatrical moments I singled out above reveal to the audience the ‘inner workings of the fantasy machine’, in Susan Zimmerman’s apt words.47 Mingling representational and presentational elements, these scenes make the audience complicit in the ‘act of representation itself’, although I do not wish to suggest the scenes subsequently lose their affective power; to be taken inside the tiring room is not necessarily to be ushered outside of a play’s fiction. In both Orestes and Look About You, for example, characters appear to deconstruct theatrical illusion by commenting upon the material identity of the stage blood: that it is pig’s blood, or that it is wine. Leaving aside the question of whether these remarks are in fact accurate about stage materials – clearly such statements can be both self-­reflexive and untrue – those claims reinforce, rather than dismantle, the plays’ respective illusions. Orestes’ understatement that the blood is merely wine twists the knife in the grandfather by callously contradicting the graphic evidence of the death of his family, or indeed by briefly offering Tyndarus false hope that these deaths are perhaps feigned. The audience’s awareness of the theatrical mechanisms that allow these deaths to be represented in the first place does not diminish the spectacle’s tragic impact. On the contrary, it is precisely the gap in perspective between what the audience sees, and what Tyndarus sees, that heightens the tragedy. In Look About You, the fiction of pig’s blood emphasises Skinke’s extraordinary resourcefulness (e.g., this consummate trickster can make a disguise out of anything). Although the audience knows no animal has just been butchered backstage, the spectacle is nevertheless comically grotesque – ‘Skinke’ and the actor playing him share the same skin, and the idea of animal blood applied directly to the face draws the actor’s own corporeality into the fiction; to borrow a phrase from Bert O. States, ‘something indisputably real leaks out of the illusion’, although in this case something real leaks into the illusion.48 For Anthony Dawson, the audience’s awareness of the actor himself as distinct from the character he impersonates ‘while potentially present throughout the performance, could of course be activated at certain moments as part of an effort to achieve a specifically self-­reflexive effect’.49 The convention of cross-­gender disguise is the most frequently discussed, and best theorised, example of such an activation; I argue throughout this book that a gesture akin to Skinke’s application of ‘blood’ to his skin is another. The actor’s physiology is a ‘potentiality’ within the play that is activated

­64    Inventions of the Skin when players are painted or stripped of paint in view of the audience, or when players metadramatically comment upon what it feels like to inhabit their painted bodies.50 In Coriolanus, Shakespeare exploits this potentiality as a technique for the construction of dramatic character. Throughout act 1, Martius emphasises the fact that his blood, which he explicitly refers to as paint, makes him initially unrecognisable, and later unreadable. This blood does not allow Martius to pretend he is someone else altogether, as in Look About You or The Politician, but by foregrounding the theatricality over the ‘realism’ of his bloodshed, Martius is able fully to occupy his ideal vision of himself as alone and inviolate, or, as Maus puts it in her headnote to the play, as an ‘impermeably walled city’. As I pursue below, his attention to the artifice of his blood as a ‘painting’ and as a ‘mask’ and his subsequent discussion of how it feels to be bloodied – and how it feels for him, bloody, to relate to others – help create the theatrical impression of interiority. Ultimately, the play reveals a language of self-­speaking vitally different from the poetry of soliloquy and ‘modern’ introspection more commonly associated with the Shakespearean tragic hero.

III. Shakespeare’s last tragedy opens on a scene of hunger and warfare, with a fight over the distribution of grain and a battle pitting Rome against the Volsces. Beginning in 1. 4 with the battle at Corioles, stage directions call for Martius to appear ‘bloody’. The first cue comes after Martius is shut within Corioles’ gates to fight the Volsces ‘himself alone’. Briefly reported ‘slain’ (1. 5. 19), he disproves this report by passing across the stage ‘bleeding and assaulted by the enemy’ (1. 5. 32). In 1. 6, Lartius comments on Martius’ increasingly battered condition: Lartius: Worthy sir, thou bleed’st. Thy exercise hath been too violent For a second course of fight. Martius: Sir, praise me not. My work hath not yet warmed me. Fare you well. The blood I drop is rather physical Than dangerous to me. To Aufidius thus I will appear and fight.

(1. 6. 14–19)

The first few images of Martius we see, then, show him visibly bleeding and quick to control how that blood signifies to others. As Gail

Blood     65

Paster reads this exchange, Martius takes care to define this bloodshed as a ‘voluntary and therapeutic’ bloodletting rather than as a depleting leakage.51 This freely-­flowing blood also demonstrates Martius’ generosity of spirit – the very quality the plebeians later fault him for lacking. But given Martius’ notorious disdain for ‘seeming’, his quick move from medical metaphors to imagery drawn from acting is striking. Martius imagines how his bloody appearance will serve him when he meets Aufidius: ‘To Aufidius thus / I will appear’, the declaration also anticipating the moment in act 4 when Martius presents himself to Aufidius, his face muffled and disguised as a beggar (my emphasis).52 Encouraging the audience to view his blood as a costume, his actorly ‘thus’ undermines the commonplace that the model of identity Martius adopts is one wholly staked on a refusal to be seen performing. The same pattern is repeated in 1. 7 as in 1. 5. Once again a report of Martius’ death circulates amongst the soldiers, and once again Martius appears, bloody, and proves otherwise: Enter MARTIUS, bloody Cominius: Who’s yonder That does appear as he were flayed? O gods! He has the stamp of Martius, and I have Before-­time seen him thus. Martius: Come I too late? Cominius: The shepherd knows not thunder from a tabor More than I know the sound of Martius’ tongue From every meaner man. Martius: Come I too late? Cominius: Ay, if you come not in the blood of others But mantled in your own.

(1. 7. 21–9)

Cominius’ choice of the word ‘flayed’, together with the important suggestion that Martius is unrecognisable, implies a liberal application of blood to both body and face that amplifies the blood effects from the prior scene; later in the play, Cominius describes Martius at this moment as ‘face to foot / a thing of blood’. In other words, the text clearly calls for blood effects that are large-­scale, significant, and long-­ lasting. Martius remains bloodied until 1. 10, at which point Cominius dispatches him to the tiring-­house with the reminder ‘the blood upon your visage dries; /’tis time it should be looked to’ (1. 10. 93–4). We can extend the stage life of Martius’ blood back even further if we include the verbal imagery that precedes the sight of Martius in 1. 5: Volumnia’s wishful vision of her son with ‘bloody brow’, an image that horrifies the wife (‘O Jupiter! No blood!’) and thrills the mother:

­66    Inventions of the Skin It more becomes a man Than gilt his trophy. The breasts of Hecuba When she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood At Grecian sword, contemning.

(1. 3. 36–40)

Anticipating the very rhetorical gesture her son himself will make, Volumnia envisions blood as a glorifying ornament. Her reference to gilding might also remind the audience of the gilded God of the Corpus Christi plays, thereby strengthening Volumnia’s deification of her son – although in 1608, the reference could equally remind playgoers of the many gilded statues whitewashed, defaced, or destroyed during the ‘chromoclastic’ upheavals of the Reformation.53 A similar chain of associations occurs to Lady Macbeth in the aftermath of Duncan’s murder when she discusses framing the grooms by smearing them with blood: Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures. ’Tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal; For it must seem their guilt.

(Macbeth, 2. 2. 50–4)

The imagistic transformation from blood to gilt to ‘guilt’ registers the origins of both effects in theatrical paint – and points to the enduring memory of the potent visual images of late medieval drama, replete with ‘painted devils’ and bloodied and gold-­faced Christs. In her reading of Coriolanus as a type of ‘Wound-­Man’, a popular image from early modern anatomy texts, Cynthia Marshall sees in the image of the bloodied Martius the possibility of empathetic identification with a hero whose presence is ‘sufficiently gruesome that it will carry a component of imagined pain’.54 Other critics have registered a parallel between Martius and his ‘homological other’, the satyr Marsyas, flayed whole by the god Apollo until he was, in Arthur Golding’s translation, ‘nought else than one whole wounde. The griesly bloud did spin / From every part, the sinewes lay discovered to the eye, / The quivering veynes without a skin lay beating nakedly’ (6. 494–6).55 Ovid claims the sight of Marsyas moved all onlookers to tears: And all the Nymphes, and all that in those mountains kept their sheepe, Or grazed cattell theareabouts, did for this Satyr weepe. The fruitfull earth waxt moyst therewith, and moysted did receyve Their teares, and in hir bowels deepe did of the same conceyve. (6. 501–4)

Blood     67

There are, however, other contexts for seeing Martius at this moment that do not presume the arousal of pity. A vision in red, Martius’ emergence from Corioli’s gates provides an explosion of symbolic color onto the stage, his blood ‘heralding’ his martial valour. Translating into English Andrea Alciati’s assignation of different colours to different temperaments and occupations, Geoffrey Whitney in A Choice of Emblemes (1586) associates red with both soldiers and young boys, the ambivalence fitting nicely with the play’s alternating visions of Martius as a warrior and as a ‘boy of tears’: ‘The collour Redde, let martiall captaines get, /And little boies, whome shamefastnes did grace, / The Romaines deck’d, in scarlet like their face (134).56 His blood mixed with the blood of his enemies, Martius appears ‘thus’ to Aufidius, like the murderers in Macbeth, ‘steeped in the colours of his trade’, presenting less like the pitiable Wound-­Man than as an emblematic figure for the revenger, a vengeful Pyrrhus stalking the streets of Troy ‘head to foot / . . . total gules, horridly tricked / With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons’, as Hamlet speaks it (2. 2. 436–8).57 Unlike Hamlet, Martius does not need to ‘drink hot blood’ in order to act decisively, as Hamlet wishes he could: he is hot blood, ‘capable to do such bitter business as the day / would quake to look on’ (3. 3. 360–2). Whatsoever its provenance, Martius’ garment of blood renders him unrecognisable – and also otherworldly or divine, if we take seriously the false reports of his death. Discussing the various accounts of the resurrected Christ’s post-­mortem visits to his disciples, Sarah Beckwith reminds us that ‘the theme of otherness and unrecognizability seems to be one of the central features of the apparition stories’ of the New Testament.58 The Christ who returned to visit Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and the pilgrims at Emmaus displayed the marks of his wounds as proof of the resurrection of his body. In the apparition stories, then, blood helps to materialise the identity of a person who is not initially recognised, whereas in act 1 of Coriolanus, blood preserves Martius’ unknowability while nevertheless granting him an aura of divinity. Accordingly, R. B. Parker sees Martius as a ‘striking stage emblem of the glamour and charisma of survival from death’, and we can imagine that the figure he cuts inspires fear and wonder as much as, or indeed instead of, pity.59 Cominius later confirms Martius’ divinity (using Martius’ own theatricalised language) by describing him to the senate as a figure of cosmic potency: He was a thing of blood, whose every motion Was timed with dying cries. Alone he entered The mortal gate of th’city, which he, painted With shunless destiny, aidless came off,

­68    Inventions of the Skin And with a sudden reinforcement struck Corioles like a planet.

(2. 2. 105–10)

Blood and singularity – alone he entered, aidless came off – are the twin properties that make Martius so remarkable, his blood distinguishing him from others rather than evincing the humanity he shares with them.60 In 1. 7, Martius directly addresses the soldiers who thought he was dead. If they wish to follow him against the Volsces, they must first share his perspective upon his own bloodshed: If any such be here . . . As it were sin to doubt . . . that love this painting Wherein you see me smeared; if any fear Lesser his person than an ill report; If any think brave death outweighs bad life, And that his country’s dearer than himself, Let him alone, or so many so minded, Wave thus to express his disposition, And follow Martius. They all shout and wave their swords, take him up in their arms, and cast up their caps O’me alone, make you a sword of me? If these shows be not outward, which of you But is four Volsces? (1. 7. 67–78)

The scene is highly theatrically self-­conscious. Martius performs for the masses even as he displaces the possibility of deception onto the crowd (‘if these shows be not outward’), and when the soldiers hoist him aloft, his body itself becomes the emblematic bloody weapon featured in so many of the iconic tableaux noted above. His blood might be abundant, but by calling attention to its materiality as a ‘painting’, Martius rejects blood’s ability to elicit pity or sympathy and consequently attempts to banish pain from what might otherwise be viewed as the spectacle of his suffering. Martius wishes to be seen as adorned, or indeed as disguised, rather than as injured, a desire he makes even more explicit when in 1. 9 he meets Aufidius face-­to-­face for the first time in the play: ‘Alone I fought in your Corioles walls, /And made what work I pleased. ‘Tis not my blood / Wherein thou seest me masked’ (1. 9. 8–10). Confirming that Martius is indeed effectively masked and mantled in blood in 1. 9, Aufidius fails to recognise him when they meet again in Antium: Coriolanus: If, Tullus,  [Unmuffling]

Blood     69   Not yet thou know’st me, and seeing me dost not   Think me for the man I am, necessity   Commands me name myself. Aufidius: What is thy name?

(4. 5. 54–7)

This lapse only makes sense if this is the first time Aufidius is seeing Martius’ bare face (and thus Aufidius’s confusion about the identity of his unexpected guest is not simply attributable to ‘wine-­ flushed stubbornness’, as Harley Granville-­Baker sees it, but instead provides ­evidence about the play’s visual staging).61 Martius continues to make metadramatic statements about his appearance that do not so much disrupt the fiction of battle as reinforce the greater fiction of Martius’ heroic masculinity defined as his sui generis uniqueness ‘as if a man were author of himself / and knew no other kin’ (5. 3. 36–7). After his soldiers hail him by his new name, ‘Coriolanus’, Martius declares that the bodily cues typically subject to the scrutiny of others are, in his case, illegible: I will go wash, And when my face is fair you shall perceive Whether I blush or no.

(1. 10. 67–9)

What John Ripley calls Martius’ ‘sanguinary appearance’ conceals those blushes that would otherwise betray the soldier’s somatic and therefore ‘authentic’ response to the idea of public exposure: shame at being seen to court, seen to crave, public approval (better it is to die, better to starve).62 If the blush signals a loss of face, Martius’ paint provides a face-­saving device. In Golding’s account of the flaying of Marsyas, the removal of the skin discovers the body’s interior for all to see, a state of exposure more intense, more unbearable, than mere nakedness. To be flayed is to be shattered, and in another translation of the myth the agonised satyr cries out ‘why do you tear me from myself?’63 In contrast, Martius’ blood wards off the anatomist’s searching gaze: spectators cannot see into him because his blood hides, rather than displays, his ‘core’. The first act of Coriolanus therefore revises the Marsyas myth from a story of shameful exposure to a story of enclosure. Defined by Kenneth Gross as a ‘transparent revelation of the mind’, this blush that we might or might not see (like those maddeningly present but absent wounds), this eruption that seems to gesture towards Martius’ interior, is Martius’ version of Hamlet’s ‘within’.64 Hamlet, however, wishes to distinguish between false exteriors and ‘true’ interiors, whereas Martius appears to locate his selfhood in his

­70    Inventions of the Skin control of his body’s surface – or rather, in control of the range of ­significations his body emits. The presence or absence of a mask therefore explains Martius’ wildly divergent attitudes toward self-­display in evidence throughout the play. In pointed contrast to his comfort with his own public visibility in act 1, in act 2 he argues that to appear in the marketplace in a ‘napless vesture of humility’ is a ‘part’ he would ‘blush in acting, and might well be taken from the people’: . . . To brag unto them ‘Thus I did, and thus’, To show them th’unaching scars, which I should hide, As if I had received them for the hire Of their breath only!

(2. 2. 142–7)

And when Volumnia encourages her son to dissemble to the plebeians for the sake of his political career, Martius argues that any form of acting at all would degrade his masculine identity: Away, my disposition; and possess me Some harlot’s spirit! My throat of war be turned, Which choired with my drum, into a pipe Small as an eunuch or the virgin voice That babies lulls asleep!

(3. 2. 111–15)

Unusually for a soldier, Martius is beardless; in his ‘seven ages of man’ speech in As You Like It, Jaques defines the archetypal soldier as one who is ‘full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard’, and Martius seems especially sensitive to insults that undermine the masculine i­dentity he forged in battle at sixteen when he fought ‘with Amazonian chin’ against Tarquin, but yet seems to maintain so tentatively, as if precariously constituted (Aufidius’ final taunt ‘boy of tears’ is well calculated).65 The sign or the guarantor of masculinity in Coriolanus is thus a bloody mask that allows Martius to perform, to exhibit himself, and yet to remain unadulterated by that performance. Unmasked, the war hero risks being exposed as a whore, as a eunuch, or as a boy. By now, the paradox should be evident. With his rhetoric of fairness and blushing, Martius clearly engages with early modern cosmetic ­discourse – and in the period is no substance so flagrantly artificial as paint, no material so problematically associated with women, with actors, and with the protean transformations of theatre. The importance of the blush as a sign recurs throughout anticosmetic writing, a discourse with a long history of misogynist panic about women’s

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‘self-­fashioning’. For the moralising polemicist Thomas Tuke, painted women were socially and even spiritually unknowable: What shal God say to such in the Last Judgement, when they shal appeare thus masked before him with these antifaces: Friends, I know you not, neither do I hold you for my creatures, for these are not the faces that I formed. (B3v)66

A false face of paint could hide women’s blushes from view or indeed, as we saw above, vermilion could be used to mimic the blush and therefore contaminate this important, because involuntary, sign of virtue and modesty.67 I wish to stress the counter-­intuitiveness of Martius’ turn to cosmetic language about an essence as constitutively masculine as his ‘laudable’ blood – especially given his sensitivity to the imputation that his selfhood is in any way performative.68 With the important exception of blackface performance, rarely if ever do early modern plays invite the audience to contemplate the paintedness of the adult male body. Consider, for example, Aaron’s contemptuous dismissal of Tamora’s callow sons in Titus Andronicus: What, what, ye sanguine, shallow-­hearted boys! Ye white-­limed walls! ye alehouse painted signs! Coal-­black is better than another hue, In that it scorns to bear another hue.

(4. 2. 96–9)

Aaron sees the potential for Chiron and Demetrius to be painted as evidence of their effeminacy and their status as not-­men: their white skins can be defaced or inscribed – perhaps the actors playing the Goth brothers were indeed painted or marked as ‘other’ in some way – whereas his own complexion, by contrast, is incapable of being altered (so says the white actor painted black, a tension I take up in the next chapter).69 An additional example of the animus against painted men can be found in 5. 1 of Philip Massinger’s tragicomedy The Bashful Lover (1636), when the Duke Lorenzo rails against the ‘mountebank’ physician who tries to paint him with cosmetics: Me? most of all, thou monster: What a Mock-­man property in thy intent Wouldst thou have made me? a meer Pathick to Thy devilish art, had I given suffrage to it. Are my gray hairs, the ornament of age, And held a blessing by the wisest men, And for such warranted by holy Writ, To be conceal’d, as if they were my shame?

­72    Inventions of the Skin Or plaister up these furrows in my face, As if I were a painted Bawd or Whore? By such base means if that I could ascend To the height of all my hopes, their full fruition Would not wipe off the scandal. No, thou wretch, Thy cozening Water and adulterate Oil I thus pour in thine eyes, and tread to dust Thy loth’d Confection, with thy trumperies: Vanish for ever. (p. 76)70

The Duke shares Martius’ distaste for advancement via ‘base means’, although they do not share the same vision of what precisely it is that debases the self. As a method of gender differentiation, Martius’ emphasis upon the theatrical materiality of his blood is complexly ironic, to say the least. His rhetoric does, however, illustrate the advantages that often accompany a dramatic character’s adoption of a disguise device: privacy of emotions, mobility of movement, liberty of speech, the freedom to work one’s will. It is worth emphasising Martius’ recourse to disguise in act 1 and later in act 4 when he arrives in Antium ‘in mean apparel, disguised and muffled’ (S. D. 4. 4. 1). As Peter Hyland observes, with the ‘only exception of King Lear’, Shakespeare typically avoided putting characters into disguise in his tragedies, and, as I noted above, Martius himself has consistently been read as a ‘recalcitrant actor’ averse to performance.71 I argue instead that for the duration he sports his mask and mantle of blood, Martius inhabits a secondary identity – not one that is entirely different from his primary identity, as Poor Tom is to Edgar, but rather an identity that most closely approximates his best vision of himself (or, to be sure, Volumnia’s best vision of her son). That a man this flayed is still ambulatory, still able to rally his troops, fight Aufidius, and disdain any praise for his ‘little’ actions means that he is not a man but a ‘carbuncle’ or flawless ruby, a ‘sword’, a city-­levelling ‘planet’, ‘Jove’s statue’, a god – but above all, somebody or some thing differently embodied from others and not a ‘man of their infirmity’ (1. 5. 26; 1. 7. 76; 2. 2. 110; 2. 1. 252; 3. 1. 86). Martius’ language of paint and masking can also be understood in what I defined in the Introduction as ‘psychophysiological’ terms – an important lens for understanding early modern performances of dramatic character. The play devotes relentless attention to ‘the troubled surface of the hero’s body’, and throughout, Martius appears obsessed with his own skin-­as-­surface: he worries about what his skin makes visible, desires to appear whole and not riddled, and recoils in disgust at the bodies of others.72

Blood     73

At least one writer of the period suggested that a coating of cosmetics could remedy the frailty of the skin. In his defence of cosmetics titled Artificiall embellishments (1665), Thomas Jeamson proposes that ‘The Body, that weak and moving mansion of mortality, is exposed to the treacherous underminings of so many Sicknesses and Distempers, that its own frailty seems petitioner for some artificial Enamel, which might be a fixation to Natures inconstancy’, enamel defined as a hardening and perfecting addition to the surface of the body (p. 5). In the same treatise Against Painting and Tincturing of Women (1616) I quoted above, Tuke describes the capacity for paint to encase the body in more negative terms when he observes that women lay on their paint in such thick layers that ‘a man might easily cut off a curd of cheese-­cake from either of their cheeks’ (B3v). Martius expresses a more seemly version of this conviction that a coating of cosmetics might render the body reassuringly impregnable by forming a second skin. His visceral disgust at other people’s bodies – in particular, at their fragmented parts – has often been pointed out. Zvi Jagendorf sees images of the ‘grotesque body’ recurring throughout Coriolanus (‘everywhere we encounter legs, arms, tongues, scabs, scratches, wounds, mouths, teeth, voices, bellies’) and Stanley Cavell makes the related claim that Martius is afraid of ‘simply being part, one member among others of the same organism’.73 Martius’ encasement of paint wards off the ‘grotesque’ from encroaching upon him even as it helps him attain the classical bodily ideal of inviolacy: bloodied up, he is hard like a jewel or a statue, ‘opaque, closed off, finished, a body all surface and no interior’, although of course I have been suggesting that the spectacle of the bloody Martius helps create the theatrical effect of his interiority.74 More needs to be said about how Martius’ anti-­illusionistic invitation to see his blood as paint nevertheless creates a powerful reality effect. Martius is not, of course, ‘really’ wounded – but as I expressed above, the actor who personates him ‘really’ is painted. Martius’ articulation of his felt subjectivity therefore ‘befogs the distinction between the real and the imaginary’: the theatrical reality of paint drying upon an actor’s body, together with the religious, medical, and cultural associations of ‘paint’ more generally, helps to determine how the actor’s body comes to signify within the dramatic fiction.75 Washed clean of the blood that grants him somatic integrity, Martius appears correspondingly vulnerable and volatile – as if, to use a more contemporary idiom, he suddenly finds his skin too thin to contain his preferred self-­image.76 After the first act, other characters remark upon Martius’ frequent and sudden shifts in temperament. This is one of the many contradictions the play generates: that Caius Martius is at once the

­74    Inventions of the Skin picture of Roman stoicism and the picture of emotional lability. Sicinus observes that setting Coriolanus into a rage is ‘as easy as [setting] dogs on sheep’, and the play is full of indications noting the impulsivity that makes Martius such a terrible politician: ‘His heart’s his mouth. / What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent’ (2. 2. 243; 3. 1. 257–8). The tribunes seize upon this quality and use it to their political advantage: Put him to choler straight. He hath been used Ever to conquer and to have his worth Of contradiction. Being once chafed, he cannot Be reined again to temperance; then he speaks What’s in his heart, and that is there which looks With us to break his neck.

(3. 3. 25–30)

But throughout the first act Martius is in command of himself and others, far from the volatile soldier whom the tribunes so handily manipulate. Comparatively speaking, no such cues for sudden shifts in temperament appear in act 1 (a fact that would be immediately evident if we had the script in its ‘part’ the way the player acting the part of Martius would have received it).77 The enclosure of paint appears to remedy Martius’ native intemperance, to stop up his choler, and to bring his ‘runaway body of the passions’ to a period of arrest. His integument of paint thus constitutes more than a barrier to the public gaze – it makes him stoically composed in a way he is not for much of the remainder of the play. For the length of time in act 1 that he bleeds, Martius is the most heroically intact, and it is a specifically material and theatrical, rather than textual or verbal, phenomena that makes this paradox of the effusion-­as-­‘Enamel’ possible.

IV. If I have defined the difference between the first act and the rest of the play (especially the second act, in which Martius must submit to the gown of humility ritual) as a difference in Martius’ experience of himself as either powerfully opaque or as vulnerably transparent, I have left out a brief but significant moment of self-­loss occurring at the end of the first act that complicates this reading. In narrating this incident, Shakespeare departs once again from his source in Plutarch, and I believe this moment is as central to the play as Martius’ refusal to show his wounds:

Blood     75 Coriolanus: I sometime lay here in Corioles, And at a poor man’s house. He used me kindly. He cried to me; I saw him prisoner; But then Aufidius was with in my view, And wrath o’erwhelmed my pity. I request you To give my poor host freedom. Cominius: O, well begged! Were he the butcher of my son he should Be free as is the wind. Deliver him, Titus. Lartius: Martius, his name? Coriolanus: By Jupiter! forgot. I am weary, yea, my memory is tired. Have we no wine here? Cominius: Go we to our tent. The blood upon your visage dries; ’tis time It should be looked to. Come.

(1. 10. 81–94)

Verging on hyperbole, Cominius’ response ‘were he the butcher of my son he should / Be free as is the wind’ suggests that Martius is not incapable of persuasive eloquence. However, that Martius must then be prompted to supply the poor man’s name implies that an uncomfortable pause falls after Cominius’ command to ‘Deliver him, Titus.’ Plutarch instead narrates the incident as follows: Among the Volsces there is an olde friende and hoste of mine, an honest wealthie man, and now a prisoner, who living before in great wealth in his owne countrie, liveth now a poore prisoner in the handes of his enemies: and yet notwithstanding all this his miserie and misfortune, it would doe me great pleasure if I could save him from this one daunger: to keepe him from being solde as a slave. The souldiers hearing Martius wordes, made a marvelous greate showte among them: and they were moe that wondred at his great contentation and abstinence, when they sawe so little covetousnes in him, then they were that highely praised and extolled his valliantnes.78

Shakespeare therefore embellishes upon his source by having Martius’ impulse to pity falter. In point of fact, Shakespeare composes not one, but two different episodes of forgetting, since according to his own testimony, Martius forgot the man when still within the walls of Corioles when Aufidius came into view and ‘wrath overwhelmed [his] pity’ (that he is capable of at least this self-­diagnosis shows he is capable of some degree of self-­examination, contrary to David Wheeler who ­maintains that ‘Coriolanus never has a moment of self-­ examination or self-­ 79 reflection’). When, in front of his soldiers, he has a chance to correct his mistake, he forgets again. The intriguing question is why Shakespeare adds the detail of forgetfulness at all, and why it happens when Martius appears ‘face to foot’

­76    Inventions of the Skin covered in blood. The moment raises the possibility that the reification of Martius as Jove’s statue and ‘thing of blood’ risks his dehumanisation.80 Or that, by making himself opaque to others, Martius becomes opaque to himself and subsequently fails to be ‘well read in his own body’, in the words of Helkiah Crooke.81 The ‘Martius-­Machine’ now appears to be powering down, and I suggest Freud’s comments below help to illuminate a process of unmasking that climaxes in the gown of humility ritual, but perhaps begins here, just before Martius is about to wash off his blood: Under the heading of unmasking we may also include . . . the method of degrading the dignity of individuals by directing attention to the frailties which they share with all humanity, but in particular the dependence of their mental functions on bodily needs. The unmasking is equivalent here to an admonition: such and such a person, who is admired as a demi-­god, is after all only human like you and me.82

Martius is suddenly struck by the fact that he has a body, and a tired and a hungry one at that – although he pretends it is his ‘memory’ that is tired; Cominius in effect has to lead him offstage (‘Go we . . . Come’). Crucially, Martius’ admission that he has a body with needs accompanies a desire to show pity to somebody else. The question of pity cannot therefore be separated from Martius’ sense of his own embodiment, which, in turn, is bound up in his view of his own blood. (The only other invocation of Jupiter in the play: Valeria’s plangent ‘O Jupiter! No blood’, 1. 3. 35.) Martius’ impulse to pity founders because pity cannot coexist with the radical self-­containment he seeks. To use Judith Butler’s concise description of what happens when a person seeks to ignore the condition of their relationality to others: his narrative falters, as it must.83 Martius cannot express pity when masked and closed off, just as he insists his own blood must elicit awe, and not pity, from others, just as he insists that his wounds be hidden and pain-­free. While clearly a source of strength throughout much of the first act, his bloody costume also concretely materialises his refusal of his obligations to others, his likeness to others, his ties to other people.84 Pity comes on stage in the form of a gap, a falter, or, to return to the image of the hardened body, a sudden crack (if the play Coriolanus were a tragicomedy, the play might, at this moment, shift gears towards a comic resolution, with Martius stepping down from the pedestal, as it were, awoken into new possibilities as a leader).85 By act 4, once Martius has been banished from Rome and has joined forces with Aufidius, his ability to show pity becomes Rome’s overriding

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political concern: ‘we are all undone / unless the noble man have mercy’. To move Martius is to save Rome. First Cominius, then Menenius, then finally Volumnia approach him. Cominius finds Martius unassailable: ‘I tell you, he does sit in gold, his eye / Red as ’twould burn Rome, and his injury / the jailer to his pity’ (5. 1. 63–5). Red for blood, gold for gilding and transfiguration, Cominius appears to re-­deify Martius only to evacuate the apotheosis by depicting Martius’ body as a jailhouse: Cominius imagines ‘pity’ as something entombed within Martius, not to the glorification of the soldier, but to the cost of the community at large. Menenius tries to appeal to Martius by approaching him as a father. Martius replies that Rome’s lack of gratitude has obliterated all family ties: Wife, mother, child, I know not. My affairs Are servanted to others. Though I owe My revenge properly, my remission lies In Volscian breasts. That we have been familiar, Ingrate forgetfulness shall poison rather Than pity note how much.

(5. 2. 78–83)

Who’s the ingrate? Martius means Rome, but the ambivalent locution, in addition to our memory of his earlier episode of ‘forgetfulness’ in 1. 10, applies equally well to Martius as the ingrate who refuses to note his familial and moral obligations to others. An important component of Martius’ desire for bodily closure, I suggest, is his avoidance of the mutuality of pity. To pity would mean to acknowledge other people’s claims upon him, just as to expose his wounds would require him to acknowledge his similarity to other people. At this moment, before Menenius, he remains impenetrable, once again like a god: Menenius: When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading . . . He sits in his state as a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done is finished with his bidding. He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in. Sicinius: Yes, mercy, if you report him truly. Menenius: I paint him in his character. (5. 4. 15–22)

If Sicinius is right, and mercy truly is an attribute of divinity, then Martius has been badly mistaken in his own self-­construction. Existence for Martius swings between emotional lability and self-­sufficiency: each state lacks something, the first the ability not to speak ‘what’s in his mouth’, the second the capacity to pity.

­78    Inventions of the Skin At the time of this exchange Menenius does not yet know that Martius has, in fact, relented to Volumnia. To be sure, the moment when he finally does show pity, Martius recognises he is undone: . . . O my mother, mother, O! You have won a happy victory to Rome; But for your son, believe it, O believe it, Most dangerously you have with him prevailed, If not most mortal to him. But let it come.

(5. 3. 186–90)

Relenting to Volumnia and through Volumnia’s intercession, returning to the Rome from which he was banished, does indeed prove mortal. This recognition (‘but let it come’) is shortly followed by Martius’ dismemberment at the hands of multiple Volscian conspirators within the walls of Corioles, the former scene of his victory – a death seemingly welcomed by Martius, who prior to this moment has avoided being touched at all. In a grim repudiation of Martius’ desire never to merge with the crowd, the play closes on the prospect of his blood flowing freely amongst the enemies who devour him. The manner of his death thus emphasises the messy transferability of stage blood, its capacity to spread and to circulate rather than to preserve, to enclose, and to bind: ‘Cut me to pieces, Volsces. Men and lads, / Stain all your edges on me’ (5. 6. 112–13). * * * The major complaint of twentieth-­century criticism of Coriolanus is that something is missing. ‘Coriolanus lacks something’. Martius is ‘unusually empty’. He is ‘uneloquent’. He is ‘the least introspective of Shakespearean heroes’. He is ‘a very straightforward, reactionary son of a so-­and-­so, and it’s quite easy to get on to him as his thoughts are not deep’. He is ‘frigid’ and the play is ‘cold’. The play lacks ‘the poetic expansiveness characteristic of the mature Shakespeare’. The play lacks ‘figurative imagery’. ‘The play’s style is bare’. The play lacks ‘imaginative effect’ and ‘poetic atmosphere’. Most apocalyptically, perhaps: ‘inwardness, Shakespeare’s largest legacy to the Western self, vanishes in Coriolanus and never quite makes it back in later Shakespeare’.86 Certainly if we search the play for the self-­scrutiny of Hamlet, or the bottomless performativity of Cleopatra, or the hallucinatory visions of Macbeth, we will indeed find the play, and its hero, lacking. Nor will the spectator accustomed to dramatic ‘naturalism’ find, in Martius, an emergent ‘bourgeois’ humanist subject with a progressive and coherent character arc and identifiable moment of anagnorisis, one who, in

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David Wheeler’s words, ‘comes to grips with what has happened to him’ – in terms that make psychological sense to us.87 But it is wrong to say that Martius never invites us inside, because he does. That is, Martius’ metadramatic language estranges us by telling us what we cannot see and cannot know – at a crucial moment of spectacular self-­display – but at the same time it brings us relentlessly into contact with the body, its surfaces and recesses, blanches and blushes, fits and starts. This self-­ speaking demands our recognition of a historically specific embodied presence rather than a timeless, ahistorical tragic hero, and lends further support to Anthony Dawson’s identification of the acting body’s instrumentality ‘in delivering a sense of interiority’ in early modern drama. This is not, however, to say that we cannot translate Martius’ wish for impregnability into more modern terms. The play’s central fantasy of the body-­turned-­adamantine or the body-­as-­statue anticipates, for example, the male fantasies Klaus Theweleit catalogues in his interviews with WWII soldiers: recurring fantasies of the skin as armor and the body as a machine possessing ‘a kind of hardness that would enclose, canalise or otherwise discipline the threatening fluidity attributed to the female body’.88 The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s concept of the ‘skin-­ ego’ or ‘moi-­peau’ can, moreover, also usefully be considered alongside the premodern attitude to the body in evidence in Coriolanus.89 For Anzieu, the skin forms a protective ‘psychic envelope’ and is the subject’s primary place of interface and exchange with the outside world; he theorises that defects in the skin-­ego manifest in a dysmorphic sense of the skin as riddled with holes, or in actual skin diseases such as excema and hives. Compellingly defining the skin as the ‘vulnerable, unreliable boundary between inner and outer conditions and the proof of their frightening, fascinating intimate contiguity’, Steven Connor explains the fetishistic appeal of shiny black latex in terms that Martius might well appreciate, as the desire to acquire a protective second skin: The rubber fetishist’s gear suggests the hardness and restraint of the inorganic, while displaying the contrary qualities of elasticity. The shining skin suggests a change of biological order – the human become mineral, reptile or mechanical. The hardened skin is a visual as well as a physical shield.90

Lartius’ description of the bloody Martius as a ‘carbuncle entire’, for example, suggests this very change of biological order. On a par with Lear’s recognition that he is not ‘ague-­proof’, Martius’ lone confession of the physiological likeness he has so strenuously attempted to deny throughout the course of the play therefore strikes me as the tragedy’s most moving moment: ‘I melt, and am not / of stronger earth than others’ (5. 3. 28–9). Martius speaks this (as an aside, perhaps,

­80    Inventions of the Skin or to Aufidius, who is standing next to him?) when he sees his wife, Virgilia, kneel before him in her petition to save Rome. That he immediately abandons this perspective to insist ‘I’ll never be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand / as if man were author of himself / and knew no other kin’ does not, in the end, diminish the power of the confession (5. 3. 35–7).

Notes   1. My thinking about Coriolanus has been influenced by Butler’s discussion of vulnerability in Precarious Life. See especially the chapter ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’.  2. See North’s translation of Plutarch on ‘The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, from Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romanes, 1579. Printed in Coriolanus, ed. Brockbank, p. 332. All Shakespeare quotations taken from the Norton Shakespeare (1997). I refer to Caius Martius Coriolanus as ‘Martius’ throughout, given that for the majority of the play-­ time I focus on, he has not yet received the name ‘Coriolanus’.  3. See Escolme in her contribution to the Introduction to Bliss’s edition of Coriolanus, p. 105. On Martius’ antitheatricality, see also Lowe, ‘Say I play the man I am’, pp. 86–95. In an important re-­reading of the play Eve Rachele Sanders offers a more nuanced interpretation of Martius’ relationship to theatricality, but nonetheless maintains that ‘in the first three acts, Coriolanus adamantly refuses to assume different roles and rehearses all the stock arguments of the antitheatrical pamphleteers in order to defend an essentialist stance’. Sanders evaluates the play alongside pro-­and anti-­ theatrical discourse, specifically as these writings debate the merits of student performances of plays at Oxford in 1592. She does not discuss anticosmetic discourse (itself a form of antitheatrical discourse), nor does she consider the implications of Martius’ metadramatic acknowledgment of his blood as a kind of costume. Instead, she identifies in the play a ‘trajectory . . . from anti-­theatrical ideologue to shape-­shifting actor’ and singles out what she sees as Martius’ lone concession to acting in act 4, where he appears disguised before Aufidius. See ‘The Body of the Actor in Coriolanus’, pp. 387–412.   4. In the introduction to his edition of Coriolanus Parker notes this as well: ‘only one director that I know of and extraordinarily few critics have gone nearly far enough’ with the fact that Martius is ‘unrecognizably soaked in blood’, p. 65. One important exception is Kirschbaum, ‘Shakespeare’s Stage Blood’, p. 535. In her essay ‘Coriolanus and the Politics of Theatrical Pleasure’, Marshall notes but does not develop ‘the peculiarities of Coriolanus’ association with blood, which extends beyond that of any other Shakespearean tragic hero’, p. 458. See also Paster’s chapter on ‘Laudable Blood’ in The Body Embarrassed.  5. Reynolds, The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater, p. 41.   6. Lin, ‘Performance Practice and Theatrical Privilege’, pp. 283–98.

Blood     81  7. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 151.  8. Owens, Stages of Dismemberment, p. 34.   9. Davidson, ‘Sacred Blood’, p. 451. 10. Davidson, ‘The Realism of the York Realist and the York Passion’, p. 278. 11. Davidson, ‘Sacred Blood’, p. 186. See also Sponster’s chapter on ‘Violated Bodies’ in Drama and Resistance, especially p. 152. For his survey of this topic, see his chapter on ‘Absorbing Interests’ in Sofer, The Stage Life of Props. 12. Gatton, ‘There Must be Blood’, p. 80. 13. Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, p. 80. 14. In The Play Called Corpus Christi, Kolve argues that the laughter belongs to the mimetic fiction, and that the sight of the ‘tortores’ turning the business of Crucifixion into a rough game ‘would be answered by silence and awe in the audience’, p. 138. 15. Reynolds, The Staging of Elizabethan Plays, p. 41; Kirschbaum, ‘Shakespeare’s Stage Blood’, p. 529; Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642; Stern, Making Shakespeare, p. 19. 16. See Karim-­Cooper and Nelson (eds), ‘Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre History Seminar on Stage Blood’, with conclusions and findings by Karim-­Cooper and Lucy Munro, p. 3. With an appendix assembled by Munro collating a number of stage directions involving blood, this document (together with Dessen and Thomson’s Dictionary of Stage Directions) was invaluable in the writing of this chapter, although I do not agree with all of their ­findings (in particular, their view of the use of animal blood; see note 17 below). I also refer readers to Lucy Munro’s forthcoming chapter ‘“They eat each other’s arms”: Stage Blood and Body Parts’ in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Karim-­Cooper and Stern; I have not yet had the pleasure of reading her conclusions at this time of writing. 17. Noting the possibility of ‘other material resources’ including vermilion, the Globe report proposes that ‘animal blood is likely to have been used in the early modern playhouses . . . in early modern London, animal blood would have been readily available due to the prevalence of butchery in the streets in London’, p. 23. This is entirely possible for certain kinds of blood effects (blood pooling on the stage), but when blood needs to be applied directly to a player’s skin, I maintain that only water-­soluble pigments, and not animal blood or red vinegar, would create the right adhesive effect. 18. REED records for Canterbury, ed. Gibson, pp. 1529–30; see Owens, Stages of Dismemberment, p. 38; see also Wickham, Early English Stages, and Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage. 19. Butterworth, Theatre of Fire, p. 18. 20. See Meredith and Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama, p. 109; their translations. 21. Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 317. 22. Greene, Theeues falling out; no page sig. Adams, The Works of Thomas Adams, vol. 2, p. 239. In a companion sermon, The Black Devil (London, 1615), Adams further defines ‘Hypocrisy’ as ‘a rotten and stinking carkasse . . . hid in a Sepulcher painted over with vermillion’, vol. 2, p. 56. Lyric poetry and prose romances tend to look more favourably upon a

­82    Inventions of the Skin woman’s ‘vermilion’ cheeks, provided those blushes were real rather than artificial. 23. Although Shakespeare uses the word vermilion only once (in Sonnet 62), in a number of instances he uses the more general ‘paint’ to express, often simultaneously, the same range of meanings I noted above: blood, blushes, heraldic tinctures, and morally suspect feminine cosmetics. Troilus, for example, questions the grounds of the Trojan war by saying ‘Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair, / When with your blood you daily paint her thus’ (Troilus and Cressida, 1. 1. 86–7); Timon exhorts Alcibiades ‘to follow thy drum / with man’s blood paint the ground, gules gules’ (Timon of Athens, 4. 3. 58–9); the King of France imagines his English rival as ‘sweep[ing] through our land / with pennons painted in the blood of Harfleur’ (Henry V, 3. 5. 48–9); a battered Richard Plantagenet describes his son Edward as fighting ‘with purple falchion, painted to the hilt / in blood of those that had encountered him’ (Henry VI Part 3, 1. 4. 12–13); and Somerset cautions Vernon not to prick his finger as he plucks the white rose of York ‘Lest bleeding you do paint the white rose red’ (Henry VI Part I, 2. 4. 50). These utterances evince the characteristically self-­reflexive nature of early modern theatre: even as they bodied forth imaginary worlds, the plays of the period compulsively drew attention to the materials and processes that sustained those worlds. 24. See Douglas Bruster’s chapter on ‘The dramatic life of objects in the early modern theatre’ in the collection Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Harris and Korda, especially p. 72. 25. A reference to a ‘bladder of vinegar, prikt’ can be found in Cambises (1561) and to a bloody ‘spunge’ in The Princess (1635). Although never performed, the closet drama The Rebellion of Naples (1649) includes the performance-­oriented direction ‘He thrusts out his head, and they cut off a false head made of a bladder fill’d with bloud’. 26. In his article on ‘The Body of Stage Directions’, Dessen defends this methodological approach to the reconstruction of the stagecraft of early modern drama as follows: ‘To rely primarily on stage directions is . . . to stay within the realm of what was or could have been done in the original productions’, p. 27. 27. Womack, Ben Jonson, p. 37. 28. Karim-­Cooper, ‘This alters not thy beauty’, p. 147. 29. Diehl, ‘The Iconography of Violence’, p. 30. Diehl also notes the number of dumb shows in which personifications of revenge appear carrying daggers, often dripping with blood; Locrine, Jocasta, The Misfortunes of Arthur, and The Battle of Alcazar, p. 31. 30. Ibid. p. 28. 31. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions, p. 107; Womack, Ben Jonson, p. 43 32. See Karim-­Cooper and Nelson (eds), ‘Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre History Seminar’, p. 23. 33. Stern, Making Shakespeare, p. 98. 34. In her article on ‘The Sacralization of Revenge in Antonio’s Revenge’, Spinrad locates one possible biblical source for bowls of blood in Exodus 24: 6–8, when Moses sacrifices a calf and pours half of the blood into

Blood     83 basins, p. 178; in a sermon titled ‘The Fatal Banquet’ Thomas Adams describes the devil toasting Nero, who ‘thirsts for homicides’, in ‘bowls of blood’ in The Works of Thomas Adams, vol. 1, p. 161. 35. One wonders whether William Prynne (consciously or not) had in mind this striking emblematic image of bloody hands when he described the defiling effect of theatrical applause in his lengthy attack on the theatre, Histrio-­ Mastix (1633): ‘if we believe Tertullian, these Applauses so pollute men’s hands, that they can neither lift them to God in prayer, nor yet stretch them out to receive the Sacrament in an holy manner. God requires Christians to lift up holy hands to him in prayer: to bring cleaned, washed, pure hands and hearts unto his sacraments, not stained with the filth of any sinne’. 36. Gager cited in John R. Elliott Jr, ‘Early Staging in Oxford’, A New History of Early English Drama, ed. Cox and Kastan, p. 68. Elliott observes that plays were also staged at Christ Church Hall during the Christmas revels, and we might well imagine how The Tragedy of Orestes would have appealed to a boisterous audience: ‘The student audience was frequently unruly, and to control them, sword-­bearing ushers called ‘whifflers’ were appointed, who locked the rowdiest of them in the porter’s lodge and carried out others who had fainted or been trampled in the crowded hall’, p. 69. 37. O’Donnell, ‘Shakespeare, Marston, and the University’, p. 484. 38. In ‘The Sacralization of Revenge’, Spinrad accounts for Antonio’s actions as follows: ‘more likely, Antonio has used his hands to do the sprinkling, dipping them into Julio’s blood and shaking or smearing them over his father’s hearse. In fact, he has just been feeling all over Julio’s body to prove that the dead trunk is nothing but the earthly remains of Piero’, p. 174. On the concept of haimassein, see C. Fred Alford, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 69 (citing Walter Burkert, Greek Religion). 39. Quotations from Look About You taken from the Tudor facsimile series (AMS Press, 1970). Quotations from The Politician taken from Fehrenbach (ed.), The Politician by James Shirley. 40. See Hyland’s discussion of the play’s multi-­disguise plot in ‘Face/off’, p. 23, and in Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage. 41. Suggesting an interesting circulation of objects between court and public theatre (even if imaginary), one scene mentions a ‘beard and haire’ left over from a court masque (line 1195). 42. Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 8. 43. It is unclear from the text whether he returns in the same guise or not – that is, changed and also washed clean of blood. For a discussion of the management of quick changes at the indoor Blackfriars theatre, see Lois Potter, ‘How Quick was a Quick Change?: The Alchemist and Blackfriars Staging’, Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage, ed. Kanelos and Kozusko, pp. 200–11. 44. As with any surprise device, some audience members might, of course, anticipate the trick. 45. Pollard, Drugs and Theatre. 46. As Gerard Langbaine evidently was the first to note, Shirley based the plot of The Politician upon an episode in Book I of Lady Mary Wroth’s

­84    Inventions of the Skin The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (Fehrenbach, p. xxxii). Given the play’s origins in pastoral romance, it is worth noting that Edward Archer’s 1656 catalogue of plays classified by type lists The Politician as a comedy, despite the fact that the title page of the first printed quarto of the play calls it a tragedy (Fehrenbach, p. x). Other seventeenth-­century catalogues classify The Politician as a tragicomedy, a label that I believe best captures this play’s tone. For his discussion of the sources for The Politician and the different classifications of the play in different catalogues, see Fehrenbach’s introduction. 47. Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse, p. 91. 48. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, p. 31. 49. Dawson and Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing; see Dawson’s chapter on ‘Performance and participation’, p. 34. 50. Ibid. p.34. Here I’m continuing to adapt Dawson’s discussion of the boy actor. See also Shapiro’s concept of ‘theatrical vibrancy’ in Gender in Play. 51. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 96. 52. The disguise is also another departure from Plutarch. For his discussion of the gestural ‘thus’, see Menzer, ‘That Old Saw’. 53. The word ‘chromoclastic’ comes from the historian Michel Pastoureau. 54. See Marshall’s chapter on ‘Wound-­Man’, p. 107. In her exciting reading of Coriolanus, Marshall raises several of the questions I pursue here but does not discuss Martius’ metadramatic engagement with theatrical materials. Most important, I disagree with her reading of the possibility for empathetic identification with the sight of Martius bleeding. 55. Nims (ed.), Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For a brief discussion of Martius and Marsyas see Marshall, ‘Coriolanus and the Politics of Theatrical Pleasure’, p. 459. See also Benthien’s reading of the myth of Marsyas in her chapter on ‘Flayings’ in Skin. 56. See also Smith’s discussion of A Choice of Emblemes in The Key of Green, p. 61. 57. Q1 of Hamlet reads ‘guise’ instead of ‘gules’, emphasising the sense of ‘masked’ or ‘disguised’. 58. See Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 75. 59. See Parker (ed.), Coriolanus, p.66; see also Cavell’s chapter on ‘Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics’ in Disowning Knowledge, p. 157: ‘I see Coriolanus not so much as imitating Christ as competing with him.’ 60. There is a textual crux here: The Norton editors punctuate this speech so that Martius is, in their words, seen to be ‘covered with the blood of his victims, unable to avoid their fate’. Other editions punctuate the speech differently, including Parker: ‘Alone he entered the mortal gate of the city, which he painted / with shunless destiny’. Parker glosses the line to mean that the city gates were ‘marked with blood for a destiny it could not avoid (like the red crosses that identified houses stricken with the plague)’, Coriolanus, p. 228. 61. Cited in Parker (ed.), Coriolanus, p. 299 (note to line 65). 62. Ripley, Coriolanus on Stage, p. 46. 63. For a discussion of ‘shameful death’ and nakedness, see Neill, Issues of Death, p. 8. 64. Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, p. 80.

Blood     85 65. See 2. 2. 77–99 for Cominius’ account of this battle. For his discussion of the role of beards in constituting masculinity, see Fisher, Materializing Gender. 66. Tuke, A Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing. 67. Braithwait, The Good Wife. See also Iyengar’s discussion of blushing in her Shades of Difference, especially Chapter 5. 68. See Paster’s chapter on ‘Laudable Blood’ in The Body Embarrassed. 69. See also Callaghan’s reading of this scene in Shakespeare Without Women, p. 80. 70. See Karim-­Cooper, ‘This alters not thy beauty’, for her argument that Massinger ‘represents makeup as the device that bedevils and associates it with lechery’, p. 145. 71. Hyland, Disguise, p. 72; phrase ‘recalcitrant actor’ is Eve Rachele Sander’s. 72. Marshall, ‘Wound-­Man’, p. 94. 73. Jagendorf, ‘Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts’, p. 233. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, p. 169. 74. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 15. For Leonard Barkan, the intuition of a hidden essence is precisely what the spectacle of the statue invites: ‘sculpture lent itself naturally to a sense that it contains something, an essence or truth trapped inside’: ‘you will see whether I blush or no’. Barkan, ‘Living Sculptures’, pp. 639–67. 75. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, p. 119. 76. If in the first act Martius evinces what St. Augustine calls the ‘subtlety’ of the divine body by suddenly appearing and re-­appearing to contradict rumors of his death, his movements in the second act reflect his diminishing power. Entering at 2. 1. 147 ‘in state’ to the flourishing of sennets and the proclamation of heralds, he exits to ‘go to the Capitol’ at 2. 1. 190 after registering his reluctance to solicit the commons: ‘I had rather be their servant in my way / than sway with them in theirs’. He re-­enters accompanied to the sound of sennets, then after an abortive exit at 2. 2. 62, where he is twice told to ‘keep his place’ and ‘sit’, he exits at 2. 2. 73 rather than ‘hear his nothings monstered’. Martius enters briefly without ceremony at 2. 2. 127 when ‘called for’ to make one more plea not to have to partake in this ritual, exits at 2. 2. 151, and finally re-­appears at 2. 3. 35 in his ‘gown of humility’. Each subsequent entrance underscores Martius’ loss of control, a loss also evidenced in his mounting agitation. Menenius’ repeated instructions to ‘sit’ make Martius appear childish – presumably the actor is being cued to stand as if about to depart several times throughout 2. 2 – as does Martius’ repetition of phrases beginning ‘I had rather’ until he finally begs to pass over the custom altogether (2. 2. 132–5). 77. See Stern’s work on cues and parts in Making Shakespeare and also Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts. 78. North’s translation of Plutarch found in Brockbank’s edition of Coriolanus, p. 326. 79. Wheeler, Coriolanus: Critical Essays, p. xvii. 80. Multiple critics have pointed out the fact that the terms in which Martius is praised risk shading over into objectifying him or flattening out his subjectivity: thing, carbuncle, machine, etc. 81. Crooke, Microcosmographia. Also discussed in Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity.

­86    Inventions of the Skin 82. From Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; quoted in the postscript to Cavell’s essay, Disowning Knowledge, p. 173. 83. ‘I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must. Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something’. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 23. 84. My reading here is informed by Cavell’s discussion of Coriolanus in Disowning Knowledge and also by his work on ‘acknowledgment’ in The Claim of Reason. 85. See Gross’s examination of animated statues throughout The Dream of the Moving Statue. 86. These words and statements appear throughout the critical corpus on Coriolanus. For a summary of these attitudes and her statement that ‘Coriolanus lacks something’, see Marshall, ‘Wound-­Man’, p. 94; for his claim that Martius is an easy character to play, see Laurence Olivier qtd Ripley, Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, p. 292; for his claim that inwardness vanishes in Coriolanus, see Bloom, The Invention of the Human, p. 583. 87. Wheeler, Coriolanus: Critical Essays, p. xvii. My emphasis. For an excellent account (and an approach to character that is congenial to my argument here) of how the early modern stage constructed selfhood, see Escolme, Talking to the Audience. 88. See Connor, Book of Skin, p. 55, discussing Theweleit; see also Theweleit, Male Fantasies. 89. Anzieu, The Skin Ego. See also Connor’s discussion of Anzieu, for example pp. 49–50 in The Book of Skin. 90. Connor, The Book of Skin, pp. 65; 54.

Chapter 3

Black: Mastering Masques of Blackness

Black all over my body, Max Factor 2880, then a lighter brown, then Negro No. 2, a stronger brown. Brown on black to give a rich mahogany. Then the great trick: that glorious half-­yard of chiffon with which I polished myself all over until I shone . . . The lips blueberry, the tight curled wig, the white of the eyes, whiter than ever, and the black, black sheen that covered my flesh and bones, glistening in the dressing-­room lights. I am . . . I am I . . . I am Othello . . . but Olivier is in charge.1 Laurence Olivier, On Acting

Laurence Olivier was an actor famous for working from the outside in.2 His approach to Shylock, for example, began with large, prosthetic false teeth: ‘I had teeth made that totally altered the shape of my face . . . The mouth was the thing’; his Richard III likewise came together only after Olivier ‘decided on the shape of his nose’.3 The most notorious of the actor’s prosthetic transformations was his metamorphosis from ‘Olivier’ to ‘Othello’ in the celebrated, if controversial, 1964 National Theatre production of the tragedy (from an interview with Life magazine: ‘the whole thing will be in the lips and the colour’).4 Requiring hours of careful application of makeup to his body, the theatrical process Olivier underwent for each performance is the stuff of backstage legend: the story of various people ‘walking in on a naked Olivier, of various hues between Brighton white and Caribbean black’; the story of the makeup rubbing off onto a snow-­white Desdemona played by Maggie Smith.5 Stage paint allowed Olivier fully to immerse himself in the part. In his memoirs, he lovingly recalls the sensuousness of this artificial blackness, its hue, its shine, its ability to cast into relief his ‘whiteness’, ‘the white of [his] eyes whiter than ever’. Olivier’s fantasy, however, is one of transformation without consequences, as his repeated assertion ‘I am in charge’ maintains. Or strives to maintain: Olivier insists upon his self-­ mastery with rather too much fervour. Has the actor created a new skin to inhabit, a ‘protective coating’ that overlays his own without altering

­88    Inventions of the Skin it, or has something else happened? Perhaps Olivier himself is conflicted about just what it is this pre-­show ritual conjures into being: ‘Black . . . I had to be black. I had to feel black down to my soul’6. Now is he total guise. This suggestive anecdote raises the central questions of this chapter, which focuses upon performances of racial masquerade at court and in the public playhouses from 1605 to 1637.7 I begin with Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605), in which Queen Anna and eleven of her ladies perform costumed as the ‘daughters of Niger’, members of the ‘blackest nation of the world’ who seek to wash themselves white in British waters (16).8 Frequently pointing to Sir Dudley Carleton’s dismissal of the spectacle as ‘loathsome’, critics have labelled Blackness an apprentice piece showing Jonson not yet able to reconcile poetic form with masque spectacle – and reluctantly at the mercy of Anna’s wish to be a ‘blackamore’ (18).9 Fifteen years later, Jonson once again revisited the device of blackface in The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621), a masque written for the king’s controversial favourite, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, who played the role of a ‘tawny’ gypsy of Egyptian origins. If indeed Blackness failed to please, Gypsies certainly succeeded.10 Staged three times, this masque reportedly earned Jonson a pay raise and the promise of future honours.11 What distinguishes The Masque of Blackness is not the novelty of its representation of Moors, but its material methods. Instead of wearing masks, gloves, and leggings as was the more conventional practice for court masques of blackness, Anna and her ladies were painted in heavy black makeup similar to the paint worn by professional actors. By the 1580s, paint was the primary means for representing racial otherness within English drama, and the use of paint over fabric crucially shapes the scope and significance of the resulting racial impersonations. As we have seen, paint, especially if applied to large portions of the body, cannot be readily removed, and it is important to note that before the early 1620s, blackness on the English stage is either a fixed property (Othello, Aaron) or, less typically, a disguise that is acknowledged but not removed during the course of the performance: Hortenzo and Philip as ‘Zarack’ and ‘Baltazar’ in Lust’s Dominion (1600), Francisco as ‘Mulinassar’ The White Devil (1612), and Jolenta as an unnamed ‘black nun’ in The Devil’s Law Case (1619). The ironies that result from a blackface disguise that is never discarded are particularly jarring in the case of Lust’s Dominion, which ends by staging the very spectacle of miscegenation it has tried to avoid – the white Isabella engaged to the blackened Hortenzo, the blackened Philip expelling all the Moors from Spain:

Black     89 And now Hortenzo to close up your wound, I here contract my sister unto thee, With Comick joy to end a Tragedie. And for this Barbarous Moor, and his black train, Let all the Moors be banished from Spain

(5. 6. 200–4)

The daughters of Niger do not fit easily into either category. They are not ‘in disguise’, and given the limitations in 1605 of blackface paint, they remain unchanged at the masque’s conclusion; the mere prospect of their future transformation, however, destabilises the essentialism of their black identities. By 1621, Jonson evidently had a suppler blackface paint at his disposal, a detail of staging the poet takes unusual pains to explain in a set of additions he wrote for the third and most public performance of the masque at Windsor Court. This means that The Gypsies Metamorphosed stages the racial metamorphosis that Blackness promises but defers. In point of fact, Gypsies provides the earliest evidence of the use of paint in a racial disguise in which the disguise gets removed during the course of the performance.12 Together, Jonson’s two masques thus represent important moments in the history of English blackface performance: in both cases it is the cosmetic, as much as the poetic, dimension of the masques that shapes the impersonations. As we shall see, a readily-­ removable blackface paint allows for a more vividly literal way to explore the sometimes-­fluid, sometimes-­fixed boundaries between black and white. Jonson’s Masque of Blackness haunts future plays about racial change – especially performances involving women, both real and fictional, who temporarily masquerade as ‘Moors’. In 1632, Queen Henrietta Maria joined the iconography of her court to that of her predecessor by c­ ommissioning a pastoral drama featuring a blackface disguise plot from the courtier (and Buckingham protégé) Walter Montagu, to be performed by the Queen and her ladies at Somerset House. Reworking Jonson’s motifs of blackness and beauty, The Shepherds’ Paradise scripts a character who adopts the disguise of ‘Moor’ in order to flee a situation that threatens her chastity. In a play that explores both the limits of female self-­expression and the dangerous mobility of erotic desire, the black ‘mask’ conceals the signs of her shifting emotions from prying eyes while allowing her to test, unrecognised, her lover’s fidelity. In Blackness, Anna and her women danced but did not speak. In a striking departure from customary practice, Henrietta and her ladies did both. If not the first, this performance was certainly among the first times English women spoke, sung, and appeared in male dress on stage,

­90    Inventions of the Skin albeit a private one. William Prynne’s antitheatrical screed Histrio-­ Mastix (1633), famous for its charge that women actors are ‘notorious whores’, was taken at the time to refer to the gossip surrounding the rehearsals for Shepherds. In turn, this elite and controversial play inspired something of a vogue for plays with blackface disguise plots; indicating that, by the 1630s, the convention of blackface disguise became intertwined with issues of female self-­representation and female theatricality, two comedies and one tragedy featuring maids-­in-­Moorish garb survive from the period: William Berkeley’s The Lost Lady (1637), performed by the King’s Men; Richard Brome’s The English Moor (1637), performed by the re-­formed Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men; and William Heminge’s The Fatal Contract (1638/9), also performed by Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men.13 Although all three plays allude to the court shows of blackness that precede and inspire them, the final play I consider in this chapter, the tragicomedy The Lost Lady, most directly responds to The Shepherds’ Paradise. Like her courtly counterpart, Berkeley’s heroine retains the blackface disguise in order to test the fidelity of her lover. Notably, this blackface disguise also deceives the audience, who only discover that the ‘Moor’ is in fact the titular ‘lost lady’ at the play’s end. In contrast to the advantages the blackface disguise provides elite women within the fantasy structure of The Shepherds’ Paradise, however, The Lost Lady delivers a far more ambivalent vision of female theatricality in that the disguiser is violently punished for her duplicity. Berkeley’s ‘lost lady’ is, of course, no lady at all, but a professional actor attached to the King’s Men. That the actor is the site of two simultaneous illusions of race and gender raises questions about what exactly gets revealed when a painted boy is ‘washed white’ in full view of the audience. I now turn to the complex and often conflicting range of significations that blackface paint accrues over a thirty year period, from Jonson’s idea of the fixed constancy of black skin that nevertheless can be transformed under the right conditions (or fail to be transformed), to the overtly theatrical stain that temporarily mars the Duke of Buckingham, to the co-­option of blackface disguise as a protective ruse for elite white women, and finally, to blackface as a symbol of threatening feminine theatricality.

Black     91

I. Jonson’s annotations to the text of Blackness indicate Anna herself requested a masque of Moors: ‘hence, because it was her majesty’s will to have them blackamores at first, the invention was derived by me’ (18– 19). The idea for a court masque of blackness is not itself innovative. In his catalogue of English performances from 1533–66, for example, Martin Wiggins mentions at least five different ‘Masques of Moors’, all of them performed at court during the period of the Christmas revels.14 A 1548 ‘masque of young moors’ used ‘long black velvet gloves reaching to above the elbow, black leather netherstocks, caps of coarse budge, and visors’ to simulate blackness; a 1559 ‘masque of moors’ made similar use of ‘black velvet sleeves, buskins, and gloves’.15 Costumed in diaphanous, free-­flowing materials that were partly transparent, Anna and eleven of her ladies were instead painted black and fitted in wigs made to look like tightly curled black hair.16 Although nothing in Jonson’s notes indicates who decreed that paint rather than fabric be used, most critics attribute the decision to Anna: Hardin Aasand cites her ‘deliberate request that her own ‘carcase’ become blackened’, Andrew Gurr credits Anna with having ‘paint supersede masks in the seventeenth century’, and Virginia Vaughan declares that ‘what is radical in Anna’s request is her desire to use black pigment’ (my emphasis).17 Although we cannot know for certain whose decision this in fact was, many critics see Anna’s choice as a deliberate act of self-­fashioning (whether a consciously ‘subversive’ one is open to debate); to be sure, later performances that invoke the memory of this masque explore the convention in relation to morally complex acts of feminine self-­fashioning. English blackface performance has a long history involving a number of competing traditions outside of its use in public and in court entertainments. Face-­blackening was an important component of English festive disguising; mummers used cheap materials such as burnt cork, ash, and soot to blacken their faces, as did stock characters like fools in the Morris dance. Indeed, this association of blackface with Christmastime festivities in particular perhaps explains why it is that ‘masques of moors’ were thought appropriate fare for the winter court revels. Such acts were, however, sometimes linked to criminal activity, and civic proclamations banning ‘disgisingyes with eny feynyd berdies, peyntid visers, diffourmyd or colourid visages’ recur from the fourteenth century on. For Clare Sponsler, the assumption of blackface was therefore one of a range of performative acts that ‘made and unmade criminal identity’ in the late medieval period.18 Surviving guild accounts also list payments for black paint used in mystery plays, indicating that

­92    Inventions of the Skin face-­blackening agents number among the first known uses of theatrical paint altogether: ‘item payde for blacckyng of the Sowles facys;’ ‘Itm pd for Collering ye blacke Solls faces;’ ‘payd for penttyng of the blake soles faces’.19 As I discussed in relation to the York cycle pageants of The Fall of Lucifer and The Last Judgment, this contrastive use of blackness against whiteness (or darkness against luminosity) was a crucial element of the visual vocabulary of late medieval drama. To provide an additional example, in the morality play Wisdom Who Is Christ, the figure of ‘Anima’ wears ‘wyght clothe of golde gysely purfyled wyth menyver, a mantyll of blake þerwppeon’.20 Wisdom explains the colour symbolism of Anima’s costume as follows: Thes tweyn do sygnyfye   Yowr dysgysynge and yowr aray, Blake and wyght, fowl and fayer verily,   Euery sowll here, þys no nay, Blake by sterynge of synne þat cummyth all-­day,   Whych felynge cummythe of sensualyte, And wyghte by knowenge of reson veray   Off þe blyssede infeynt Deyte

(149–56)

Black is foul and white is fair: the state of the soul is legible via external signs, and the ‘stage picture’ this morality play presents is thus easy to read. Notwithstanding other, less obviously transgressive precedents for courtly ‘masques of Moors’ during Tudor times, the fact that fools, devils, and damned or spotted souls all wear forms of blackface helps to explain the masque’s negative reception from its English audience in particular: if ever a convention groaned under the weight of its competing meanings, was multiply haunted by prior histories of use, surely blackface is it. Perhaps acknowledging this very history, Blackness opens with a song emphasising the precedence of form over surface colour: Sound, sound aloud The welcome of the orient flood Into the west; Fair Niger, son to great Oceanus, Now honoured thus, With all his beauteous race, Who, though but black in face, Yet are they bright, And full of life and light, To prove that beauty best Which not the color but the feature Assures unto the creature.

(76–87)

Black     93

Echoing the Song of Song’s praise of the ‘black but comely’ bride, this opening salvo reinforces the audience’s awareness of stage materials by drawing attention to the white, European features underneath the black overlay.21 Having heard that foreign poets have slandered their beauty, the daughters of Niger travel north-­west to ‘steep their bodies’ in Britannia’s whitewashing waters (313). Despite this premise, Blackness defers the desired metamorphosis for one full year: ‘So that, this night, the year gone round, / You do again salute this ground, / And in the beams of yond’ bright sun / Your faces dry, and all is done’ (325). The masque’s lack of a final revelation scene in which the women re-­appear white raises the question of with what, precisely, were the nymphs painted. Although we should read such pictorial representations with caution, both the Inigo Jones drawing of this masque and the Peacham sketch of Aaron the Moor suggest that around the time of this performance, a very dark pigment was used for blackface. Scottish court revels accounts provide a further clue toward this paint’s composition. Sarah Carpenter and Meg Twycross report that in 1554 a painter is compensated for painting players’ bodies and scenic backdrops alike, ‘with no implication that either techniques or materials might differ between the two’.22 Sifting through the records of payments Philip Henslowe noted in his ‘diary’, Farah Karim-­Cooper makes the similar case that players may have applied the same pigments to their bodies as they did to the walls of the playhouse.23 Unlike a mask, this black paint would have allowed the women’s facial features to be seen, although this does not imply that the resulting effect is ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’, contrary to Eldred Jones’s suggestion that in Blackness Jonson attempts to set ‘new standards of realism’ for the genre.24 Granted, paint signifies differently from masks, but as we saw in the previous chapter, as a stage prosthetic, paint announces rather than effaces its own theatricality. The women’s faces and bodies were visible – indeed, erotically charged given their sheer apparel and painted chests and limbs – but the dense black paint evidently also disguised their identities, combining the personal and the anonymous in a way that spectators found problematic. In two different letters describing the masque, Carleton calls the sight of the blackened women ‘strange’ and ‘loathsome’. He further complains that the royal masquers were ‘hard to be known’, a serious criticism given the fact that the courtly masquers’ real-­world identities were not meant to be compromised by their acting roles.25 Virginia Vaughan speculates that Anna ‘may have used black makeup to experience her own “to-­be-­looked-­at-­ness”’.26 Although it is impossible to reconstruct Anna’s motivation for wanting to appear as ‘a blackamore at first’, given the disguising element of blackface

­94    Inventions of the Skin Anna might equally have been attracted to the prospect of temporarily negating her identity as much as asserting it. Her body displayed on the stage, Anna and her fellow masquers could experience their own ‘to-­be-­ looked-­at-­ness’ without revealing anything of their interiority, a fantasy of exposure without risk, so to speak, that we saw in Coriolanus and shall encounter again in The Shepherds’ Paradise. Blackface paint also inspires vivid fantasies about its effect on, and between, persons. When Anna dances with the Spanish ambassador as part of the masque, Carleton worries about the integrity of the disguise: ‘[The Spanish ambassador] took out the Queen and forgot not to kiss her hand though there was danger it would have left a mark on his lips’. The song that follows this dance urges the masquers to ‘come away, come away’ to immerse themselves in water, an injunction that perhaps limits prolonged contact between masquer and spectator. Because of its transferability, paint in performance reminds us of our enmeshment with others: selves are never discretely separate vessels. Theories of skin colour difference attributing blackness to painting practices further credit paint with the potential to transform ‘essential’ properties. Drawing upon ideas advanced by Thomas Browne, John Bulwer in his treatise Anthropometamorphosis (1650) proposes that the Moors’ ancestors had an ‘affectation of painting’ that led to the race becoming permanently black by a process of ‘artificial denigration’. When subject to the force of the imagination (the ‘affectation’) and to habitual use, paint is thus seen to alter permanently the collective ‘selves’ of an entire race.27 Fears of this sort recur throughout anticosmetic tracts attacking face paints in general for their corrosive effects on bodies and minds.28 To cite two brief but representative examples, Thomas Tuke calls paint ‘very offensive to mans flesh’ and Phillip Stubbes accuses painted women of ‘turning truth into falshoode, with painting and slibbersawces’.29 Anticosmetic sentiment helps to explain why the sight of blackfaced lady masquers might have struck some viewers as problematic: the choice pushed the masque’s representation beyond simple impersonation to something in which the masquers’ bodies potentially risked a permanent ‘taint’, a risk amplified by the fact that Anna appeared in this masque when she was six months pregnant. In the text of Blackness, Jonson exploits the valences of black paint to re-­fashion native English whiteness. Jonson addresses the masque’s language specifically to the material facts of the spectacle – he writes a masque of black paint, not one of masks or fabric. The paint, however, both helps and hinders his goals. By articulating increasingly contradictory definitions of blackness through the figure of Niger, Jonson attaches

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negative meaning to the black skin he then proposes to wash away, leaving in its wake a refined English beauty ‘scorched no more’ (233). Exploiting the connection between paint and theatricality helps him discredit the more positive significations of black skin and confirm whiteness as a temperate norm; at the same time, the limitation in 1605 of the paint itself, too dense to be removed for the performance, ultimately compromises the masque’s success. The Masque of Blackness presents African women who ‘are’ black but who long for a racial transformation. From the very beginning, the masque imagines blackness in contradictory terms: blackness is fixed, but capable of reversal; it denotes essential truths but also belies them, as the opening song’s distinction between form and color suggests. The figure of Niger (father of the nymphs and the masque’s central voice) most forcefully articulates this multivalency. Defining blackness as both a superficial and an essential property and imbuing blackness with shifting moral and physiological significance, Niger comes to raise irresolvable questions about the relationship between the body’s external surfaces and its internal depths. The painted black-­and-­white female body becomes a focal point around which general cultural anxieties about female agency, duplicity, and theatricality coalesce – anxieties that washing the women white, it is hoped, will dispel. Played by a professional actor whose skin was also painted black, Niger defends his daughters’ skin color on two distinct grounds: that blackness is a mark of the sun’s favour and that black coloration, unlike white coloration, is permanent. Suggesting that the sun is ‘the best judge and most formal cause / of all dames’ beauties’, Niger invokes the climatological explanation for blackness which relates skin colour to exposure to the sun (116–17). The women are black because the sun loves them; to be sure, they are the ‘first-­formed dames of the earth’, a claim Jonson attributes to Diodorus Siculus (113). The masque then reverses the typical relationship between sun and complexion: basking in this English Sun-­King’s ‘light sciential’ will ‘blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse’ (225–6). Incorporating classical and medieval sources, early modern climate theory links blackness to geography and environment rather than defining it as an unalterable property of the individual body. This notion of the body’s relationship to the world testifies to the transformative powers of environments, as for example in the frequently repeated account of the New World Indians who, after spending time in England, ‘could not be discerned from Englishmen’, or indeed cases of Englishmen themselves going native in the Americas.30 While climate theory permits ethnological distinctions between peoples to be drawn – for example, for

­96    Inventions of the Skin southerners to be considered subtle but physically weak and n ­ ortherners dull but hardy – these distinctions need not be regarded as essential and unchanging: ‘Invite them boldly to the shore; / Their beauties shall be scorched no more’ (232–3).31 In other words, early modern climate theory views racial identities as potentially fungible. Niger, however, also praises black skin for its indelibility, a claim repeated in such diverse discourses as treatises against the use of cosmetics and lyric poetry.32 Early modern poems about female beauty often celebrate the fact that black complexions, unlike white complexions, cannot be painted upon. The speaker of Edward Herbert’s ‘Sonnet of Black Beauty’, for instance, values blackness for its changelessness: Black beauty, which above that common light, Whose Power can no colours here renew But those which darkness can again subdue, Do’st still remain unvary’d to the sight, And like an object equal to the view, Art neither chang’d with day, nor hid with night When all these colours which the world call bright, And which old Poetry doth so persue, Are with the night so perished and gone, That of their being there remains no mark, Thou still abidest so intirely one, That we may know thy blackness is a spark Of light inaccessible, and alone Our darkness which can make us think it dark.33

Moralists who attack face painting similarly praise black skin as that which cannot be adulterated. According to this logic, ‘black’ signifies ‘incapable of falsification’ and therefore implies an essential antitheatricality. Niger lauds black beauty in these terms, as static and immutable rather than fleeting: That in their black the perfect’st beauty grows, Since the fixed color of their curled hair, Which is the highest grace of dames most fair, No cares, no age can change, or there display The fearful tincture of abhorred grey, Since Death herself (herself being pale and blue) Can never alter their most faithful hue; All which are arguments to prove how far Their beauties conquer in great beauty’s war, And more, how near divinity they be That stand from passion or decay so free.

(119–29)

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Expanding upon the psychophysiological meaning of blackness, Niger proposes that the women’s fixity of hue denotes, and indeed determines, a serene body that neither changes nor decays. He further claims that the constancy of black skin reflects his daughters’ capacity to govern their emotions: ‘and more, how near divinity they be / that stand from passion or decay so free’. Classical, medieval, and early modern discussions of the connection between colour and disposition also sometimes associate blackness with constancy, as Mary Floyd-Wilson points out in her discussion of shifting ‘geohumoralist’ conceptions of ethnicity; it is only by the later seventeenth century that racial blackness comes to be predominantly associated with intemperance and, most characteristically, jealousy.34 Of course, as the sole spokesperson for black beauty Niger risks overstating his case, as the sheer length of his defensive speech (seventy-­plus lines) makes clear. Niger’s authoritative praise of blackness raises questions, however, about the degree to which blackness expresses or conceals truths about interior states. According to the masque’s use of climatology, skin colour indicates proximity to the sun (in which case ‘black’ has some stable denotative value) but, as I suggested, such climatological meanings are capable of reversal. The opening song, moreover, draws a distinction between ‘true’ beauty and outward form – the women are black but bright and comely. Niger also describes the women as temperamentally constant: presumably their interiors are as serene as their fixed, unalterable surfaces suggest. From this perspective, blackness outwardly embodies truths about inner states, the women black and therefore comely. The English public stage’s early spectacles of black villainy similarly depend upon a one-­to-­one relationship between blackness and interior states. Consider George Peele’s Muly Mahamet, ‘Blacke in his looke, and bloudie in his deeds’, or indeed Shakespeare’s Aaron, his soul ‘black like his face’ (1. 1. 19; 3. 1. 204). Ian Smith calls this correspondence between surface and depth in the case of black stage villains a ‘flatness of self that equates inside and outside in a spectacular plentitude of the surface: what you see is what you get’.35 Whether the subject of scrutiny is a conventional stage villain or the daughter of Niger, surface blackness provides a reliable guide to ­interior states. What complicates all such equations of ‘skin’ and ‘within’ is that stage blackness is so often accompanied by self-­reflexive references to the paint that creates it.36 In English blackface performance, blackness always implies a more complex ontology than meets the eye. Even if the particular instantiation of the convention insists on the sympathy of outside with in – black in looks, bloody in deed; serene in hue, serene in

­98    Inventions of the Skin mind – attention is inevitably called to disjunctions between felt interior and performed exterior. This is the paradox of blackness’s relation to the interior: blackness is simultaneously held as a sign that confounds knowability, as in carnival revelry and blackface disguising, and pointed to as reliable evidence of interior states – of naturalness and authenticity, in anticosmetic discourse and lyric poetry; and of villainy and damnation, according to the visual shorthand of the theatre. The theatrical experience of blackness as a specifically cosmetic and therefore changeable surface integument directly undermines the representation of blackness as indicative of constancy, most acutely in performances that imagine the possibility of racial transformation. Jonson makes deliberate use of this tension between blackness’s essential antitheatricality (so defined within anticosmetic and lyric discourse) and the obvious theatricality of a cosmetic disguise. Framed as it is in increasingly metadramatic language, Niger’s association of blackness with divine permanence is difficult for the audience to accept. Talk of ‘tinctures’, of death’s palette of ‘blues’ and ‘grays’ failing to inscribe the black, certainly reminds those present that the women’s skin colour results from the application of paint. With the temporary and cosmetic nature of the masque’s blackening device at the fore, Niger’s praise of indelible black skin rings false: ‘And more, how near divinity they be / That stand from passion or decay so free’ (128–9). By the masque’s midpoint Niger has articulated separate epistemologies, the climatological and the anticosmetic or lyric – both of which cast doubt on the other. Furthermore, Niger’s argument that black skin does not ‘display’ the signs of age and change undermines his association of blackness with temperance and constancy. That is, the very changelessness of blackness places interiority beyond the spectator’s reach, a trope Philip Sidney deploys when he lauds Stella’s ‘sweet blacke which veiles the heaven’ly eye’.37 These women are not necessarily free from passion – they are opaque, their dark skin failing to register the signs of their emotions visibly on their face. Blackness, so the masque instructs, is ultimately a mystery – mysterious as to its origins, whether it arises from climate or biology, and mysterious as to what it might express or prevent from expressing. Blackness gets deeper, not flatter. Writing some years later in Sylva Sylvarum, Francis Bacon similarly suggests that blackness obscures rather than reveals or determines bodily truths: ‘As for the Aethiopes, as they are plump and fleshy, so (it may be) they are sanguine and ruddy coloured, if their black skin would suffer it to be seen’ (my emphasis).38 What you see is not what you get. The cumulative effect of Niger’s speech keeps the women’s bodies firmly before the spectators’ gaze, teaching the spectators that their

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blackness eludes interpretation – and might make the women skilled at deception. In what may have played in performance as an ironic aside, Niger suggests his daughters might have ‘feigned’ in order to convince their father of the truth of their quest: To frustrate which strange error oft I sought Though most in vain, against a settled thought As women’s are, till they confirmed at length By miracle I with so much strength Of argument resisted; else they feigned.

(152–6)

Having fruitlessly used reason to counter his daughters’ self-­loathing, Niger is overmatched when the goddess ‘Aethiopia’ appears in a vision with the order to seek Britannia. In a moment that has received scant critical attention, Niger in fact casts doubt on the truth of this report: ‘else they feigned’. Under the surface of Niger’s defence of blackness lurks the suspicion that women are jealous; unreasonable; incontinent, given the way the women’s despairing tears ‘swell’ Niger’s boundaries; and now, possibly deceitful.39 Niger’s reassurance some lines later ‘ – And sure they saw’t, for Ethiops never dream’ – seems designed to inflame the very suspicion it purports to calm (160). Once more: what you see is not what you get. And this, I propose, is Jonson’s point. By putting into motion so many competing meanings of blackness, by using the associations that accrue to the wearing of paint itself, by taking blackness from a figure for readability to a figure for unknowability – and by then proposing to wash away that theatricalised blackness in salvific British waters – Jonson creates a positive signification for native whiteness. Destabilising and then dispensing with the black surface helps credit the white interior that remains behind, as one thing is made to look natural and transparent by contrast with something deemed artificial, theatrical, mysterious, shifting, and unstable. The reds and whites of English femininity (equally artificial when we see them presented emblematically in 1608’s Masque of Beauty) come to represent permanence, temperance, and authenticity as Jonson makes anticosmetic discourse reverse its own investments in a blackness read as inimical to artifice. Representing blackness with paint allows Jonson to sever blackness from any source of positive meaning and re-­direct those meanings toward whiteness, mystifying blackness and clarifying whiteness in the process. If, as some critics have argued, England’s expanding contact with foreign nations prompted the English more urgently to interrogate their own ethnicity at the beginning of the seventeenth century, then the very materials of blackface performance

­100    Inventions of the Skin help redefine whiteness and blackness in the context of an emerging British nationalism.40 The Masque of Blackness concludes with what by now seems an utterly predictable valuation of white over black, but Jonson employs a complex set of representational and rhetorical strategies to achieve this end. His project is complicated by the idiosyncratic materiality of paint, a medium that is at once ephemeral and superficial and nevertheless stubbornly difficult to remove, at least in this 1605 performance. At this time the technology of blackface is such that no stage action can correspond to Jonson’s narrative. A careful reading of the masque, however, shows Jonson purposefully working with the medium of paint and its multiple articulations of blackness, and not in spite of it. When he next takes up this device, Jonson has a more flexible blackface paint at his disposal, one that facilitates the circulation of an altogether different narrative about surfaces and depths: a readily removable blackface allows Jonson to exploit the theatricality of blackface paint as a temporary deviation that can easily be cast off, all the better to reaffirm the boundaries between ‘black’ and ‘white’.

II. In The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621), Jonson thus returns to the use of paint to create the effect of temporary blackness. Gypsies attempts to rehabilitate a specific national figure: George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham and the masque’s patron. At the time of the masque’s production, Buckingham had recently withstood a parliamentary crisis over his family’s involvement in monopolies scandals and other abuses of political power. Given this context, Jonson’s representation of the King’s favourite as a roguish and thieving gypsy might have bordered on the offensive.41 When Jonson revised Gypsies for its only public performance at Windsor court (the first two performances of the masque were in Villiers family homes), he made a number of changes that ‘sanitise’ some of the masque’s humour and amplify its formal praise to the monarch.42 What has gone unnoticed about the Windsor revisions, however, is that its two major additions emphasise stage trickery involving paint. In the Windsor version of Gypsies, Jonson painstakingly explains the magic of the men’s transformation from gypsy to gentleman and transfers responsibility for this metamorphosis to the court apothecary, whom Jonson credits with having made the ‘ointment’ involved in the spectacle (1387). Two compatible possibilities account for the Windsor revisions’ emphasis on paint: first, that underscoring

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stage trickery distances Jonson and Buckingham both from the negative connotations of the gypsy disguise; second, the legacy of Blackness and its failure to wash the women white compels Jonson self-­consciously to address his now successful re-­ engagement with this particular technology. Performed in late summer 1621, Gypsies casts Buckingham, friends, and family members as dark-­skinned gypsies of supposedly Egyptian origins. The actual pedigree of early modern gypsies was wildly indeterminate, as indeed were the criteria that determined who counted as ‘gypsy’. The target of antivagrant legislation but also protected by various statutes as a separate culture with their own laws, gypsies were loosely associated with Egypt and known both for thievery and for their practice of face-­blackening: They are a people more scattered than Jews, and more hated: beggarly in apparel, barbarous in condition, beastly in behaviour, and bloody if they meet advantage. A man that sees them would sweare they had all the yellow jaundice, or that they were tawny Moors’ bastards, for no red-­ochre man carries a face of a more filthy complexion. Yet they are not born so, neither had the sun burnt them so, but they are painted so: yet they are not good painters neither, for they do not make faces, but mar faces. By a by-­name they are called gypsies; they call themselves Egyptians; others in mockery call them moon-­men.43

Taken from Thomas Dekker’s ‘rogue book’ Lantern and Candlelight (1608), the passage above reiterates the familiar explanations for skin colour difference: heredity, environment, and fakery. Certainly Dekker interprets the gyspies’ colour as expressive of their essential villainy, even if the paint is an affectation; in other words, the gypsies’ characters are written upon their ‘marred’ faces. For the purpose of his masque, Jonson seizes upon skin colour as the gypsies’ most striking feature, repeatedly noting the performers’ ‘olive’, brown’, ‘dark’, and ‘tawny’ complexions.44 The plot of Gypsies is straightforward, especially by comparison to the more complexly allegorical Blackness: led by Buckingham as ‘Captain’ of the gypsies, the gypsy masquers read the fortunes of the audience members, rob some country folk played by professional actors, and then exit during the bawdy Devil’s Arse song in order to re-­enter washed white: ‘The gypsies were here / Like lords to appear, / With such their attenders / As you thought offenders, / Who now become new men, / You’ll know ‘em for true men’ (1171–6). At the masque’s climax, the audience sees the performers’ native whiteness restored and the rustics’ stolen goods returned to them, blackness – like thievery – shown to be but a temporary deviation from an otherwise upright norm.

­102    Inventions of the Skin Jonson tailored the masque to each of its performance venues. The first two performances took place at Burley, Buckingham’s own seat, and Belvoir, the estate of his father-­in-­law. The most substantial revisions were made for the masque’s final and most public performance at court. Martin Butler rightly points out that this Windsor audience would have been the masque’s most hostile, the ‘court grandees’ having good reason to be sceptical of Buckingham, who just a few months prior to the masque faced public criticism about various abuses of power.45 According to Buckingham’s biographer Roger Lockyer, when the Parliament of 1621 met, the Commons’ anger about monopolies abuse came to be focused ‘directly on Buckingham’s family and indirectly on himself’.46 King James defended his favourite in front of the Lords but stipulated that if Buckingham were indeed found guilty of an ethical violation, he was to be regarded ‘as he was when he came to me, as poor George Villiers; and if he prove not himself a white crow, he shall be called a black crow’.47 A narrative that accuses Buckingham of theft – however playfully – only to redeem him at the last minute certainly seems to address this recent conflict. Butler proposes that Jonson manages the court’s potential scepticism of Buckingham by shifting the focus to James: the Windsor revisions temper the masque’s more risqué humour and amplify the formal praise to the monarch. A curiosity that Butler and other readers of this masque have failed to address, however, is that the Windsor text’s lengthiest additions dismantle the theatrical wonder of the masque’s sudden revelation of whiteness. When in other plays Jonson overtly discusses props and theatrical processes (see, for example, the prologue to Every Man In His Humour mentioned in the Introduction) he does so to lament the vulgar stage spectacle that distracts his dimwitted audience from his poetry – an odd argument indeed to make in front of a courtly audience at a masque. Nevertheless, at Windsor, the rustics who dance in the antimasque ask how they themselves might become gypsies.48 The Patrico (or ‘hedge-­ priest’) responds that becoming a gypsy depends upon having the right materials, in this case dye made from walnut juice added to a tallow base: If your hand be light, I’ll show ye the slight Of our Ptolemy’s knot; It is, and ‘tis not; To change your complexion With the noble confection Of walnuts and hog’s grease, Better than dog’s grease

(1081; 1116–23)

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The informal, homely nature of the ingredients suggests that the gypsy identity is one readily available, and it turns out that this ‘Ptolemy’s knot’ is not so terribly difficult to unravel. At Burley and at Belvoir, the Patrico simply responds to the rustics’ question as follows: Is this worth your wonder Nay then you shall understand more of my skill For I can (and I will) Give you all your fill Each Jacke with his Gill, And shew you the King, The Prince, too, and bring The Gypsies were here Like Lords to appeare, With such their attenders, As you thought offenders, Who now become new men Youle know ‘hem for true men.

(895–907)

The Burley and Belvoir texts therefore emphasise the spectacle of metamorphosis, which is to say the magical re-­appearance of the ­‘offenders’ as ‘new men’ without any advance explanation as to how this might have been achieved, or what artificial additions – and subtractions – might have been necessary to execute the change. In contrast, at Windsor Jonson minimises the wonder of the sight by clarifying the material processes behind the illusion of racial difference. An epilogue added to the Windsor performance furthers this project of demystification to such a degree we might wonder why this amount of explanation is even necessary (does the courtly audience need reassurance that this is all ‘make believe’, much like Snug the Joiner worries he ought to reassure the ‘ladies’ that he is not, in fact, a real lion?). The Patrico explains in even more detail how the playwright engineered the masque’s change of face: At Burley, Bever, and now last at Windsor (Which shows we are gypsies of no common kind, sir), You have beheld, and with delight, their change, And how they came transformed may think it strange, It being a thing not touched at by our poet; Good Ben slept there, or else forgot to show it. But lest it prove like wonder to the sight To see a gypsy, as an Ethiop, white, Know that what dyed our faces was an ointment Made and laid on by Master Wolf’s appointment, The court lycanthropos, yet without spells,

­104    Inventions of the Skin By a mere barber, and no magic else. It was fetched off with water and a ball, And to our transformation this is all, Save what the master fashioner calls his; For to a gypsy’s metamorphosis Who doth disguise his habit and his face, And takes on a false person by his place, The power of poetry can never fail her, Assisted by a barber and a tailor.

(W. 1379–8)

The epilogue attributes the men’s transformation to a removable cosmetic tincture made and applied by the King’s apothecary, John Wolfgang Rumler, dismissed here as a ‘mere barber’. The reference to the ‘Ethiop’ resurrects the memory of The Masque of Blackness, pointedly contrasting its failure to wash its women white to this successful metamorphosis enabled by a more tractable technology. This epilogue, moreover, marks a very rare occasion in which Jonson inserts his own name into the masque’s text, although crucially, Jonson credits other offices than ‘poet’ for the spectacle: the court apothecary, who because of his office has expertise in cosmetics; the tailor; and of course the ‘master fashioner’, King James. These additions reduce stage magic to household materials and prosaic offstage ablutions, and I suggest these reductive moves are necessary to Jonson’s project of exonerating Buckingham before his most critical audience. The dismantling of one layer of illusion sustains the masque’s more important fiction: that these gypsies are really gentlemen, and have been so all the while. In this case, to insist on the paint’s temporariness is to insist on the stability of the performers’ underlying identities, specifically upon Buckingham’s underlying ‘whiteness’ defined as his moral probity and gentlemanly honour – is, in other words, to refuse the possibility that ‘blackness’ touches or expresses in any way the men’s essences. In Blackness, the women ‘are’ African nymphs seeking to alter their complexion. The masque’s promised metamorphosis therefore requires paint be a vehicle for mystery, the blackening agent pressed to signify both truth (blackness as fixed and innate) and disguise (blackness allied to artifice and theatricality). Jonson tries to yoke together these significations as part of his strategy to glorify English whiteness, but for the reasons I identified above, the project ends up qualified. In Gypsies, Jonson openly acknowledges the stage device that temporarily simulates the gypsy identity because the success of this masque requires the audience to be aware of the illusion as illusion. In other words, the flagrant theatricality of stage paint in this case serves rather than disrupts the masque’s fiction. Buckingham’s exoneration therefore occurs

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i­ndependently of James’s munificence: Buckingham needs no magic to prove himself ‘white’. All three performances are Buckingham events, but the court performance, by focusing on stage materials, conveys its message of validation the most forcefully.49

III. If the memory of Blackness informs Jonson’s subsequent engagement with the trope of racial change, so too do later Stuart court performances featuring elite white women who masquerade temporarily as ‘Moors’ refer to it as well, most notably Walter Montagu’s pastoral romance The Shepherds’ Paradise (1633).50 Like Blackness, this play was set designed by Inigo Jones and written to be performed by a select group of courtly women close to the Queen, with the important distinction that these elite women not only took speaking roles, but also appeared in male dress. The Shepherds’ Paradise thus pushed at the boundaries of what was considered acceptable for women masquers, an important point to which I shall return. The queen herself took the part of Bellessa, the white ‘Queen of Beauty’ who reigns over the titular ‘shepherds paradise’, a pastoral retreat-­cum-­salon for men and women who have sworn vows of chastity and single life. Likely a talented performer or a ‘particular favourite’ of Henrietta Maria, Sophia Carew played the primary female role of ‘Fidamira’, later the Moor ‘Gemella’, later still revealed to be the lost ‘Princess Miranda’, sister to Bellessa.51 Although no similar set of instructions from Queen Henrietta Maria to Montagu survive (as they do from Anna to Jonson), the repetition of this convention of blackface disguise illuminates the significance of this trope to a program of self-­determination in a play scripted for women to perform: as Sophie Tomlinson argues, in the seventeenth century the genre of pastoral drama was ‘explicitly concerned with sexual ethics’ and ‘geared towards a female audience and readership . . . preoccupied with the problem of how women may chastely testify their love’.52 In The Masque of Blackness, Niger praised black skin for its constancy and ‘serenity’: blackness is that which cannot be adulterated. The Shepherds’ Paradise refigures this constancy as chastity; the play furthermore envisions racial masquerade as a method for white women to circumvent a scopic economy and seize control of the ‘silent rhetoricke’ of their expressive, desiring bodies. Apparently The Shepherds’ Paradise wasn’t ready in time to celebrate Charles’s birthday, as Henrietta Maria wished. Both the set and espe-

­106    Inventions of the Skin cially the actors needed more time, and no wonder: in a letter, John Pory wrote ‘my lady Marques her part a lone is as long as an ordinary playe’ and another observer remarked ‘they have not yet announced the day for the queen’s pastoral, because the performers are not all ready’.53 Sarah Poynting aptly describes the play ‘as a prose romance which happens to be written entirely in dialogue’, and indeed the bulk of the narrative is taken up with endless debates about when to love, if to love, how to love chastely, how to recognise the signs of love in others – and how to mask the signs of love in oneself. A dual anxiety about self-­betrayal and the compatibility of love and chastity motivates the blackface plot.54 Wishing to thwart the unwanted romantic advances of the King of Spain while still remaining civil to him, Fidamira flees the court in the guise of ‘Moore’: And I am bound in sence of all his gracious care, to provide against the perversion of all this into sinne, & to secure his Innocence even to my hazard; Therefore I must suddenly from home; And heaven to encourage me in this intent presents me with such a retreat, as may make the extremity a blessing: the Shepheards Paradice, thither will I fly . . . then shall I be free againe for my Agenor; whome (since this face hath now endanger’d in the loss of me) I’le change it till I may deliver it to him, Therefore it shall put on mourning, for its faults & his absence: This order admitts equally of all nations, & as a Moore I will fly thither; Love, let not this Averse disguise Those of thy order scandalize. Thy order’s not advanc’d by beauty So much as by a true loves Duty. (1210–28)

She then exits at the end of this scene, reappearing ‘disguis’d like a Moore’ some considerable time later at the beginning of the third act: ‘The kings impatient search hath followed me soe fast, as it hath been my habitt, not my legs, that hath sav’d me from surprizall’ (1497–9). The length of time Carew spends backstage for this initial change of costume – together with repeated references to Gemella’s darkened face and the timing of subsequent costume changes – indicates that paint as well as Moorish dress (‘habitt’) was used to signify blackness.55 As Tomlinson notes, Fidamira’s disguising ‘galvanizes the plot’ by motivating yet another of her suitors (the Prince Basilino, son of the King) to begin searching for the person he was supposed to be betrothed to in the first place, the Princess of Navarre (Bellessa).56 At first, the play’s conception of the relationship of blackness to female beauty and virtue appears ambivalent. By acknowledging that the disguise might provoke scandal, Fidamira perhaps reminds the audience of the negative response that the spectacle of the blackfaced

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Queen Anna elicited. Fidamira several times expresses uneasiness with her duplicity, and in fact changes her name from one that suggests fidelity to ‘Gemella’, one that suggests doubleness. She also seems to view blackface paint as a form of self-­punishment, a way to chastise the reds and whites that so fired the King’s lust. Nevertheless, it is as Gemella that Fidamira is admitted to the ‘paradise’ by a nearly unanimous vote. Bellessa wins over the lone dissenter with a defence of black beauty: The Contrarietyes of nature, are Made for their apposition, not compare; The Darkenes of the night may be as faire For it, as can the dayes serenest ayre And soe this coulour of it selfe may bee Lovely as our’s in it’s own Degree.

(1777–82)

Elsewhere, too, Gemella’s blackness is said to ‘becomes [her] soe well as if Beauty it selfe (weary of white & redd) had retir’d a while to blacke for a variety’ (1525–7). To a greater degree than The Masque of Blackness, this pastoral therefore represents blackness as compatible with Eurocentric notions of beauty. From Fidamira’s perspective, however, the value of the disguise has little to do with promoting some token measure of cultural relativism. Instead, this temporary blackness grants her the freedom of movement that allows her to escape a situation that imperils her chastity and also the chance to speak to her inconstant lover ‘Agenor’ while remaining unknown to him when, in an additional act of disguise, she appears to him as a ghost: ‘I confesse I could wish his repentance, only to expiate that fault of mine, my lookes can never perswade him to it; & for that I must put on this Colours contrary: & like a Ghoast appeare unto him’ (3128–31). Although her re-­entry at line 3219 ‘like a Ghost’ is preceded by a speech in which she anticipates a change of colour, the rapidity of her re-­entry and the fact that immediately after this scene she re-­enters as Gemella suggest that this effect of ghostliness is created by the addition of a veil that allows the blackened Gemella temporarily to double back to whiteness, if not to her own true identity.57 Although Agenor does not recognise her in this disguise, the King, who enters at 3250 ‘following Fidamira as a Ghoast’, recognises her by voice.58 This forces Gemella to confess herself to him: ‘I must reveale my selfe & trust him; or his willfulness in following me, must needs discover mee; Besides tomorrow is the day that shall unridle all our Storyes. I am resolv’d’ (3259–61). Most importantly, blackness offers Fidamira the ability to conceal her own dangerously mobile reds and whites from public scrutiny.

­108    Inventions of the Skin Throughout The Shepherds’ Paradise, women worry that the signs their bodies produce – their blushes, their shifts in colour – will betray them. Bellessa herself expresses this fear of unwanted self-­ revelation most forcefully in a solo song addressed to Cupid: I find a glowing heat that turnes red hott My heart, but yet it doth not flame a jott: It doth but yet to such a Colour turne, It seemes to me rather to blush then burne, You would perswade me that that a flaming light riseing will change this Colour into white I would fain in this whites inference Pretend pale guilt or Candid Innocence.

(2994–3001)

Bellessa is all too aware that ‘a blush may spell disaster’.59 But as The Masque of Blackness establishes, this fear of the body’s self-­betrayal belongs to white women alone. In contrast, the fixed uniformity of Fidamira’s black face hides all such evidence of her inwardness. Thus in spite of its origins in deception, the blackface disguise serves Fidamira’s ethical commitment to the pastoral and courtly values of truth, civility, and above all, constancy in love: ‘In this generall Earth quake, then how can we hope for unmov’d constancy in love? It is I then for being constant – among these Changes am unnaturall’ (2834–7). For Karen Britland, Fidamira is the play’s ‘virtuous lodestone’, and I argue that her black coloration makes this visible by turning her body into a concrete emblem for constancy: blacked up, impregnable to the gaze, and chaste, Gemella’s own embodiment echoes the bounded space of the shepherds’ paradise itself, ‘secur’d by natures Inclosure of it, on all sides by impregnablenes, as if it was meant for Chastity only to make a plantation here’ (846–9).60 To be sure, this equation of a blackface disguise with literal and figurative forms of ‘impregnability’ returns us to Martius, and his perception of his own paintedness as a form of enclosure. In keeping with the masque genre’s investment of the power to transform bodies in the monarch alone, it is Henrietta Maria as Bellessa who, having learned the truth of Gemella’s true identity in the previous scene, oversees her ‘miraculous’ transformation from blackness to whiteness. During the last scene the women exit the stage to elect the queen of beauty, leaving the men onstage to wait to hear the outcome. Bellessa returns leading in a veiled Gemella, and at the opportune moment draws back the veil to expose Gemella’s unexpectedly white face (this second use of veils pointing a suggestive convergence of fabric and paint in the forging of theatrical second skins):

Black     109 Pantamora hastily running: Pant: Heaven hath sent you hither opportunely Sr to defend the rights of this Society, The will of the ffoundresse (whc appoints the Queene to be chosen principally for her beauty, is now violated in Gemella, who now is chosen En: Bell: all the Ladyes King: Is she chosen Queene as a Moore? Pant: Unles heaven hath wrought a miracle for her since she was so, when she was chosen; King: Could you forget Justice Madam? You are too much interested in gratitude to Beauty, to be consenting to this choice; Belles: I should be unjust to beauty Sr should I disavow it; Thus I justefy my choice, expecting admiration, not exception; She pulls off her scarfe Gemel: None can wonder somuch as I Madam that you would expose yourselfe to the blemish of an errour for my sake; Belles: What say you Ladyes now to this choice; Cam: ‘Tis such a one as hath asmuch Beauty as your leaving of the playce admitts of. (3712–19)

The King, of course, already knew that Fidamira was masking as Gemella, as does his son Basilino whom he tells in an aside (3640–1). It is therefore unclear from the text how much of a surprise this revelation of Fidamira’s identity really is (indeed, the ‘real’ surprise is the belated recognition of Fidamira as Miranda, sister to Bellessa). Moreover, if under the cover of the offstage election the process of whitewashing is taking place (both within the fiction and in reality), then Gemella’s succession to the crown cannot be construed as an endorsement of black beauty, even a qualified one, given the language of ‘violation’; the discovery scene therefore reiterates the masque genre’s familiar celebration of the superiority of white English beauty to all other complexions, despite the praise afforded to blackness.61 The temporary assumption of a racialised identity does, however, allow the aristocratic white woman the means to construct herself as a spectacular – but not, crucially, as a revelatory – subject.62 The same makeup that makes Fidamira the most strikingly different, indeed flagrantly visible performer on the stage facilitates her paradoxically antitheatrical theatricality, or virtuous duplicity. The conclusion further cements the play’s association of blackness with chastity: since in the course of her disguising Fidamira acquires ‘such a perfect knowledge of all men’ that she ‘does neglect them all’, she happily succeeds Bellessa as the next Queen of Beauty, an office only unmarried women can hold, and is therefore able gracefully to reject the King’s final offer of marriage (3122–3).

­110    Inventions of the Skin Played by Queen Henrietta Maria, Bellessa, in contrast, leaves paradise in order to marry. Although I do not think we are meant to view Fidamira-­Gemella-­Miranda’s final vow of celibacy in negative terms, given the emphasis placed on marital love within Queen Henrietta Maria’s court I suggest it is possible to read the act of blackface masquerade as one that results in isolation: to be ‘opaque’ to others is to deny the mutual recognition that intimacy requires. Directly inspired by The Shepherds’ Paradise, Sir William Berkeley’s 1637 blackface disguise play The Lost Lady performs this very reading.63 Staged by the King’s Men at court and at the Blackfriars theatre, The Lost Lady repeats many of the same plot elements as Shepherds: a woman’s assumption of a secondary blackface identity for the mobility of movement it affords; her exploitation of that disguise to test a lover’s fidelity; and finally, her brief appearance as the ghost of her ‘true’, white self. The Lost Lady cannot, however, be said to celebrate the figure of the female actor. If Queen Henrietta Maria’s court provided a venue for aristocratic women to push at the boundaries of female performance, it seems the public theatre – using the same convention of blackface disguise – pushed back.

IV. The Lost Lady opens with the tragic story of the lady Milesia ‘barbarously murthered’ by her uncle when he discovers her love affair with Lysicles, an enemy of her family. Milesia’s ashes are interred in a tomb which Lysicles visits ‘nightly’ (233). Unbeknownst to the audience, however, Milesia is in fact alive disguised as the Moor Acanthe, an ‘Egyptian Lady . . . excellent in the mistery of Divination’ (634–40). The disguise allows her to circulate unimpeded to spy upon her lover, whom she suspects of pursuing another woman. The presence of Milesia’s ashes supposedly interred in a ‘tomb’ visible in certain scenes links the dead Milesia to the living Acanthe on the level of language: within the play, the word ‘shade’ variously means ghost; a spiritual plane of existence; and physical blackness. Acanthe suggests that ‘every night / [Lysicles] courts his former flame hid in the ashes / of his lost Mistress’, an evocative statement given that Milesia is indeed hidden behind the so-­called ashes of blackface and that in speaking to Acanthe, Lysicles speaks to his lover unaware (742–4). Insofar that her murder is the first thing the play reports, Milesia’s adoption of blackface disguise recalls the medieval stage practice of using blackness in the form of soot, blackface, or ashes to imperson-

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ate the dead, her removable blackface a way to signal the ‘death’ from which, at the play’s end, she will be miraculously resurrected. In 4. 1, the dead come onstage when the ‘ghost’ of Milesia – which is to say the veiled Acanthe – appears to Lysicles as he weeps at Milesia’s tomb in a scene that echoes Fidamira’s own ‘haunting’ of Agenor: The Ghost ariseth thy Colder marble; ha what miracle are the Gods pleased to worke to each affection? The Phaenix is created from their ashes, pure as the flames that make em, still the same the same Milesia, Heaven does confess in this that she can only add unto thy beauty by makeing it immortall Lett it be lawfull for thy Lysicles to touch thy sacred hand, and with it guid my wandring soule unto that part of heaven thy beauty does enlighten

(1766–79)64

The tomb was likely a stand-­alone property capable of being thrust forth from the curtained discovery-­space at the back of the playhouse stage; as I discuss in the next chapter, the King’s Men used this same tomb or one like it under very similar circumstances in 1611 when they performed Thomas Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. Rehearsing the race quick change that will secure the play’s comic ending, the addition of the veil – necessary from a practical point of view, since the actor is still disguised in paint – transforms the body from black to white, this shroud paradoxically making the body more, not less, recognisable, for Lysicles immediately takes the veiled figure for Milesia: ‘Milesia againe, blest Saint now I am sure / thou art what thou resemblest’ (1816–17). Whether the audience recognises Acanthe in the ghost is hard to know, although this scene in particular certainly hints at Milesia’s disguised identity, as we shall see. Like the ‘Egyptian charmer’ Othello claims ‘could almost read / the thoughts of people’, Acanthe has a reputation for being able to read people’s minds (3. 4. 54–6): Her ffather was of Greece, a wealthy Merchant And his busines enforceing him to leaue his Countrey He marryed a Ladie of that place where he liv’d, Who excellent in the mistery of Divination hath Left that knowledge to her only daughter, enricht with Thousand other modest virtues.

(637–42)

­112    Inventions of the Skin Praising the constancy of her black skin, Hermione also calls Acanthe ‘as secret / as the night she resembles’, an admirable trait given the many confidences to which Acanthe, because of her reputation for ‘diviniation’, is privy. The play therefore sets blackness’s inability, in materialist terms, to be adulterated – that is, its capacity either to absorb or to resist outside additions – within the context of interpersonal communication. Acanthe’s blackness frustrates the mutuality of human exchange, her colour indicating a closed system wherein secrets are taken in without any reciprocal gesture back, where there is absorption of information without return. These qualities make for a good spy. They do not, however, make for a good lover, and the play gradually moves toward defining blackness as a sign of treachery. Written for the women of the Caroline court to perform, The Shepherds’ Paradise represents male desires as dangerously mobile; after interrogating the fickle Agenor, for example, Fidamira chooses to remain celibate. Unlike Agenor, however, Lysicles is constant. Once he has resolved the ghost’s doubts about his love for Milesia, the ghost rather bizarrely informs him that ‘Acanthe’ is responsible for Milesia’s death: ‘all that I ever did shee’s conscious of / and jealous of your love unto Hermione […] this Moor is the cause that I do walke in shade’ (1869–70; 1886). This decision to blame herself seems unaccountable unless we assume Milesia wishes to distance herself from ‘Acanthe’ and the unlicensed knowledge she acquired through her disguise; once she discovers that Lysicles is indeed faithful, her chosen disguise becomes objectionable, even shameful. Vowing revenge for ‘Acanthe’s’ supposed betrayal of Milesia, Lysicles arranges for Acanthe to be poisoned, procuring a drug from a ‘Physician’ guaranteed to bring about ‘the horridst tortures treason ere justefyed’ (2094). Act 5 thus opens with the Moor writhing in pain on her bed: The vertuous Acanthe has bin tormented With paines nothing is able to expresse But her owne groanes, she ffeares, shee’s poison’d talkes of you, of tombes, and of Milesia, and in the midst of all her torture sayes her distrust & Jealousie deserves a a greater punishment

(2173–9)

Jealousy, paint, blackness, poison: Acanthe’s suffering is overdetermined (and we have seen the association of paint with poison and lethal drugs before). I suggest the play encourages viewers to see the blackface disguise itself as invasively toxic as the substance she just ingested. Despite her obvious physical pain, Lysicles considers his actions just:

Black     113 & nowe the punishment has overtane her here and for her shewes of verture, they are Masques to hide the rottenness that lyes within.

(2189–92)

In so speaking, Lysicles condemns Acanthe in terms familiar from anticosmetic and antitheatrical writings. But that is not all: post-­Histrio-­ Mastix, a tract that Sophie Tomlinson argues ‘turned female acting into a livewire issue’, Berkeley’s choice of ‘Masque’ cannot help but point to the court of Queen Henrietta Maria.65 I grant this argument might seem counterintuitive. Why would a play written by a royalist playwright, one so clearly modelled on The Shepherds’ Paradise and intended for performance at court as well as at the Blackfriars, put a negative spin upon the Queen’s own iconography? It is undeniable, however, that at the very least, the play offers an ambivalent attitude toward female acting in general that can also be found in other ostensibly pro-­Henrietta Maria plays of the period performed by professional male actors, most notably James Shirley’s comedy The Bird in a Cage (1633).66 By this point in the play, the familiar meaning of blackness as constancy and chastity has been thoroughly reversed: blackness now symbolises artifice and specifically feminine dissimulation. Acanthe accepts Lysicles’ judgment of her character and calls herself a ‘martyr’ (2224) unwilling to ‘confess’ in order to protect her lover from the consequences of his mistake. However, it is to remedy this suffering that Irene performs the gesture that brings about Acanthe’s undisguising. At line 2072, the text includes the direction ‘Bed ready water & towel’; several lines later Irene uses these items to remove the Moor’s makeup: Irene: Bring some water here, she does but swoone: So chafe her Temples, – Oh Heavens! what prodigy Is here! her blacknesse falls away: My Lord, looke on This Miracle, doth not Heaven instruct us in pitty Of her wrongs, that the opinions which prejudice Her vertue, should thus be wash’t away with the Blacke clouds that hide her purer forme? Hermione: Heaven hath some further ends in this Than we can pierce: More water, she returnes to life, And all the blacknesse of her face is gone. Irene: Pallas, Apollo, what may this portend? My Lord, Have you not seene a face like this? Lysicles: Yes, and horrour ceazeth me: ’Tis the Idea Of my Milesia. Impenetrable powers, Deliver us in Thunder your intents, And exposition of this Metamorphosis.

(2233–49)

­114    Inventions of the Skin The instrument of her physical relief, water is also the agent of her undisguising. Bathing Acanthe’s face in view of the audience, Irene partially removes the blackface makeup with water and a towel. This is meant to be a powerful coup de théâtre revelation of identity, since the Moor’s true identity has been kept from the audience as well as the characters on stage.67 The material source of Acanthe’s blackness is, however, never explained within the play’s fiction: as befits the genre of tragicomedy, this revelation of identity is perhaps meant to be a seen as a ‘resurrection’ reminiscent of the awakening of another ‘lost lady’ in an earlier King’s Men play: The Winter’s Tale. Accordingly, Acanthe declares she is ‘by miracle preserv’d’, confesses to her true identity, and ‘asks pardon’ of the ‘constant’ Lysicles. At this juncture of the play, however, only part of the blackface disguise has been washed off (the actor returns completely white some 150 lines later). Lysicles therefore turns to Petrarchan rhetoric to augment this scene of revelation, describing Milesia as white as Lillies, as the snowe that falls upon Pernassus, if the red were heere as I have seen’t enthron’d, the riseing day would get new excellence by being compard to her Argos nor Ciprus, Egipt never saw A beauty like to this.

(2303–8)

Because Milesia/Acanthe is for the moment both Moor and white heroine, Lysicles compliments colours she is not yet displaying: ‘if the red were here’. The passage captures a moment of transition from blackness to beauty. Describing a face poised on the threshold of a flush, Lysicles insists upon the blush’s authentic evanescence, its groundedness in the body and in his own corroborating language rather than its origins in cosmetic artifice. But of course the actor playing Milesia is not a white woman, but a white boy. Given that gender on the stage, like racial difference, is materialised out of stage paints, we must consider, then, what audiences actually see when a male actor playing a female part is washed white, so to speak – that is, the removal of one layer of black makeup must also involve the temporary displacement of stage femininity, since presumably the face that is revealed under the paint is the bare face of the actor. Far from dismantling the illusion of stage gender, however, the sudden revelation of the ‘Maid’ under the guise of ‘Moor’ distracts attention from the fact that the maid is a tricked-­out boy whose red and whites, when next we see ‘her’, will be similarly materially produced: as a boy’s body is washed white, audiences see one system of cosmetic

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significations yield to another, the triumphantly restored and reinvigorated red and white of artificial stage femininity presented, by contrast to the temporary black ‘guise’, as real, natural, and authentic (the same dynamic Jonson attempted to explore in his Masque of Blackness). In this play, the sudden reversion to Milesia/Acanthe’s apparently ‘essential’ underlying whiteness dispels worries about female duplicity and theatricality. The Lost Lady thus ends having correlated ‘blackness’ to jealousy, scepticism, and death, and whiteness to a resuscitated faith in mutual trust founded upon a woman’s bodily transparency, these connections enabled both by the material valences of the paint itself and the history of its use within dramatic practice.

Notes  1. Olivier, On Acting, p. 158.   2. ‘The actor who starts from the outside is more likely to find himself in the parts he plays than to find the parts in himself’. Olivier cited in Brustein, Letters to a Young Actor, p. 78.  3. Olivier, On Acting, pp. 176; 116. See also Brustein, Letters to a Young Actor, p.78.  4. ‘The Great Sir Laurence’, Life Magazine, 1 May 1964; qtd Vaughan in Performing Blackness on English Stages, p. 100.  5. See Holden, Laurence Olivier. From Giles Cates’s essay ‘on Laurence Olivier in Othello’: ‘I go to see Olivier in “Othello”, not once but twice. And I have to stand for both performances. But it was breathtaking. It was absolutely an incandescent performance, and I see this actor who at that time must have been in his 50s. And he has black all over his body. He’s got it in his ears, in his nose, between his fingers, between his toes. He wears a loincloth, by the way. This man has black over every inch of his body, so much so that you think the poor guy must have had to bathe in Albolene cream afterward’. Cates compares the intrepid Olivier to the young actress he fired for ‘balking at wearing leg makeup’. In Backstage: The Actor’s Resource, 20 July 2011. http://www.backstage.com/bso/content_display/ news-­and-­features/e3ifad244e1b13472a317244ce75deede5a  6. Olivier, On Acting, p. 153; original emphasis.   7. I am indebted to Vaughan’s discussion of similar issues in her Performing Blackness, especially her chapter on ‘Europeans Disguised as Black Moors’. As shall be evident below, my thinking about the medium departs from hers in crucial ways, as do my readings of individual texts. For her stimulating discussion of blackface paint, see also Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women.  8. All citations to Jonson’s masques refer to The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel, with the exception of Gypsies, where I sometimes quote from W. W. Greg’s side-­by-­side reproduction of all three texts of Gypsies: see Jonson’s Masque of Gypsies.  9. See Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, p. 128. For Dudley Carleton’s

­116    Inventions of the Skin ­ escription, see his letter to John Chamberlain dated London, 7 January d 1604/5 in Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, ed. Lee, p. 66. Other contemporary descriptions of the masque are more generous. Ottaviano Lott, secretary to the Florentine ambassador, mentions the masque’s ‘sumptuousness’; the French ambassador called the masque ‘a superbe ballet’. See Barroll, Anna of Denmark, p. 103. 10. For a more nuanced discussion of Blackness’s reported failure to please, see Orgel, ‘Marginal Jonson’, pp. 144–75. 11. Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, p. 70. 12. See my article on the role of the court apothecary Johann Rumler with respect to this innovation in stage makeup. Stevens, ‘Assisted by a Barber’, pp. 7–11. 13. I have discussed two of these blackface disguise plays elsewhere. See Stevens, ‘Mastering Masques of Blackness’, pp. 397–427, and ‘“The Eunuch Much Sears Her Breast”: Remedying Adulteration in William Heminge’s The Fatal Contract’, in Thunder at a Playhouse, ed. Kanelos and Kozusko, pp. 212–33. 14. Wiggins and Richardson, British Drama, p. 498. 15. Ibid. pp. 180; 338. 16. For a reading of the masque’s costumes, see Mickel, ‘Glorious Spangs and Rich Embroidery’, pp. 41–59. 17. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, p. 199; Vaughan, Performing Blackness, p. 65; Aasand, ‘To blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse’, p. 274. Floyd-­ Wilson acknowledges the ‘purposeful’ use of paint but reads that purpose very differently (reading it in connection to Jonson’s project, as she sees it, to address the question of Scottish assimilation); see her brilliant reading of the masque in English Ethnicity and Race. 18. See Chambers, The Medieval Stage, vol. 1.393–4: ‘Orders of the city of London in 1334, 1393, and 1405 forbid a practice of going about the streets at Christmas ove visere ne faux visage, and entering the houses of citizens to play at dice therein.’ See also Sponsler, ‘Outlaw Masculinities’, pp. 321–47. 19. REED: Coventry, ed. Ingram: 1560s entries. See also Pollard, Drugs and Theatre. 20. See Bevington, ‘Blake and whyght, fowl and fayer’, pp. 136–50. 21. On the early modern context of the Song of Songs with respect to racial representation, see Hall, Things of Darkness. In Wisdom, the five white-­ clad virgins who attend upon Anima also first enter singing from the Song of Songs; in Anima’s spiritual journey from innocence through a period of defacement (in which she appears onstage ‘in þe most horrybull wyse, fowlere þan a fende’) and finally to beauty and purity once more, we can therefore locate an under-­remarked context for Jonson’s drama of blackness and beauty – and indeed for similar narratives of transformation ­discussed throughout this book – although Blackness does not invoke the morality play’s straightforward association of blackness with corruption. 22. Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 317. I’m indebted to Twycross and Carpenter’s research into masking conditions and discussion of the different signifying valences of masks and facepaints. See in particular their ‘Ideas and Theories of Masking’. 23. Karim-­Cooper, ‘This alters not thy beauty’, pp. 136–7.

Black     117 24. Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, p. 121. 25. For an insightful discussion of the relationship between female masquer and role, see Gossett, ‘Man-­Maid begone!’, pp. 96–113. 26. Vaughan, Performing Blackness, p. 66. 27. Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis. 28. See also Pollard, Drugs and Theatre; Dolan, ‘Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand’; Karim-­Cooper, Cosmetics. 29. Tuke, A Treatise Against Painting; Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses. 30. Discussed in Boose’s article ‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’, pp. 35–54. See also Lionel Wafer’s first-­person account in A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (London, 1699). Wafer discusses at length his time spent among the Panamanian Indians: ‘For at this time I went naked as the Salvages, and was painted by their Women; but I would not suffer them to prick my Skin, to rub the Paint in, as they use to do, but only to lay it on in little Specks’ (p. 35). Later his shipmates mistake his identity: ‘The four Englishmen with me were presently known and caress’d by the Ships crew; but I sat a while cringing upon my Hams among the Indians, after their Fashion, painted as they were, and all naked but only about the Waist, and with my Nose-­piece (of which more hereafter) hanging over my Mouth. I was willing to try if they would know me in this Disguise, and ‘twas the better part of an Hour before one of the crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cry’d out Here’s our Doctor . . . I did what I could presently to wash off my paint, but ‘twas near a Month before I could get tolerably rid of it’, pp. 41–2. 31. As Floyd-­Wilson first makes clear in her essay ‘Temperature’, at the time of the masque’s production humoral and climate theory denigrated extreme northern complexions as well as extreme southern ones: ‘Following classical and medieval sources, early modern climate theory conventionally associates blackness with physical weakness, wisdom, and political subtlety, and whiteness with physical strength, barbarousness, and dull wits. Medium complexions suggest a balance of mental and physical attributes’, p. 185. Jonson’s masque attempts to re-­frame these distinctions by making whiteness stand for temperance and balance. For a more sustained articulation of these ideas, see Floyd-­Wilson, English Ethnicity. 32. On blackness and the anticosmetic debate, see Hall, Things of Darkness, pp. 85–92. 33. Printed in the appendix to Hall, Things of Darkness, p. 276. 34. Floyd-­Wilson, English Ethnicity, in particular her chapter ‘Othello’s Jealousy’. 35. Smith, ‘White Skins, Black Masks’, p. 34. See also Smith, ‘White Skins, Black Masks’, for the phrase ‘skin and within’. 36. Many critics have noticed that blackface performance is inevitably accompanied by some form of metadramatic commentary on the makeup itself; see for example Vaughan, Performing Blackness, p. 54, and Karim-­Cooper, ‘This alters not thy beauty’, pp. 140–9. 37. This reverses in interesting ways the common argument about masked acting that paint ‘liberates’ the actor and permits him to demonstrate a greater expressivity: see Rudlin, Commedia Dell’Arte. 38. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum.

­118    Inventions of the Skin 39. Gossett reads this as evidence for Jonson’s ‘attitude toward women, an ambivalence verging on antipathy’: ‘Surface compliment in the early queens’ masques only slightly conceals fear and dislike of women. In Blackness the audience sees that the black daughters of Niger are ugly, petulant, and frivolous, “as women always are”’, ‘Man-­Maid begone!’, p. 99. See also Siddiqi, ‘Dark Incontinents’, pp. 139–63. 40. See in particular Floyd-­Wilson, ‘Temperature’: ‘As England increasingly perceived Africa in a colonial context, early modern “science” transformed dark skin into a mystery that signified nothing outside a moral framework’, p. 186. 41. For an engaging but untenable argument suggesting that Jonson deliberately turned Buckingham into a gypsy in order to discredit him, see Randall’s Jonson’s Gypsies Unmasked. See Butler, ‘We Are One Mans All’, pp. 252–73 for his refutation of Randall. 42. See Butler, ‘We Are One Mans All’, pp. 252–73. For a general discussion of Buckingham and his life, see Lockyer’s biography, Buckingham, the Life and Political Career of George Villiers. 43. Printed in The Elizabethan Underworld, vol. 1, ed. A. V. Judges, p. 344. 44. For an explanation of early modern gypsy culture in connection to this masque, including how native English would try to ‘pass’ as gypsies for a variety of reasons, see Netzloff, ‘Counterfeit Egyptians and Imagined Borders’, pp. 763–93. 45. See Butler, ‘We Are One Mans All’ and Jonson, Masque of Gypsies, ed. Greg, for Greg’s discussion of the revisions to the Windsor text. 46. Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 90. 47. Ibid. p. 94. 48. For a scheme of the main Windsor revisions, see Jonson, Masque of Gypsies, ed. Greg, p. 47. 49. The Windsor additions nevertheless reveal Jonson’s residual anxiety with his medium. In both of his masques of racial change, Jonson distributes authority for the spectacle elsewhere: in the case of Blackness, he credits Anna with at least the desire (if not the choice of methods) to appear as a ‘blackamore’, and in Gypsies he invokes the involvement of a quasi-­medical authority, Rumler, in addition to crediting the labour of the tailor. This need to cite an authority in the context of blackface performance points to worries that inhere in the spectacle of racial masquerade itself, worries I attribute to early modern conceptions of the body’s ‘passability’ but also to the medium’s sometime-­intractability within a live performance. These very concerns, however, also make paint a fruitful vehicle for demonstrating theatrical prowess. 50. All citations taken from Montagu, The Shepherds’ Paradise, ed. Poynting. 51. See Poynting, ‘Henrietta Maria’s Notorious Whores’, in Women and Culture, ed. McManus, p. 170. 52. Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, pp. 48–9. Tomlinson also discusses this play in an article on ‘Theatrical Vibrancy on the Caroline Court Stage: Tempe Restored and The Shepherds’ Paradise’ in McManus’s Women and Culture, pp. 186–203. 53. Montagu, The Shepherds’ Paradise, ed. Poynting, p. ix; Poynting quotes from Amerigo Salvetti, a ‘Tuscan visitor’ to the court.

Black     119 54. I also see in this trope a racialised theatricalisation of ‘la dame incognue’ motif from the prose romance L’Astrée, one of the primary sources for seventeenth-­century pastoral drama and what Tomlinson calls ‘the textbook for European courtly manners’. See her article, ‘Theatrical Vibrancy on the Caroline Court Stage’ in McManus, ed. Women and Culture, p. 186. This ‘Unknown Woman’ meets with her lover Alcippe (the father of Celadon) only when he is brought to her blindfolded, and only at night. In other words, she uses the darkness of night as her ‘mask’; for Laurence Gregario, this ‘disguise of darkness provides total anonymity without the substitution of a false identity . . . she is the only character in L’Astrée whose sole identity is her disguise, and who functions as a personification of the motif’. See Gregario, The Pastoral Masquerade. 55. Pace Tomlinson, who assumes that ‘no woman was again as daring as Queen Anna on the seventeenth-­ century English stage’ because Anna remained blackened and that Montagu ‘modifies the earlier disguise in a way which allows him to stage Fidamira’s transformation’ as the theatrical climax. Tomlinson therefore speculates that ‘Fidamira’s disguise as the Moor Gemella consists simply of a black veil’ (‘Theatrical Vibrancy’ in McManus, ed. Women and Culture, p. 195). See note 57 below; again, these 1630s representations of racial change were possible because of changes to the technology of blackface itself . 56. Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Vibrancy’ in McManus, ed. Women and Culture, p. 194. 57. As I suggested, it is unclear whether Gemella appears as a ghost – or as the ghost of Fidamira; her exchange with Agenor suggests he simply interprets her as a ghost or angelic presence. Gemella exits at 3140, returning at 3219 as her own ghost; she then exits at 3280 and returns at 3471 in a scene headed ‘Enter Bellessa: Fidamira: having mutually related their storyes & discover’d themselves to each other’. Crucially, they are alone onstage; it is therefore possible that the garb of Moor is removed between 3280–471. This explains the veil that is present in the final scene (mentioned in note 58 above): although the audience sees Gemella return as the white Fidamira at 3471, the other characters have not. The addition of the veil is therefore required to defer the revelation of whiteness to the moment of dramatic necessity: the final discovery scene under the direction of Bellessa. That on the public stage, angels and ghosts were often materialised using forms of whiteface does, however, raise some provocative possibilities for the staging of the ghost scene – whether some form of layering makeup was used over the blackface for the ghost scene (applied between 3140 and 3219), then all of it removed (and the reds and whites of beauty restored) for the undisguising that concludes the play. Two further possibilities: the guise of Gemella is removed after the private meeting with Bellessa , which is to say right at the break before the next and last scene (3495), thus requiring Gemella to be veiled for the duration of the final scene in its entirety; or indeed the removal takes place between 3659–714, when Bellessa and the ladies are offstage electing the queen of beauty. 58. The King’s ability to penetrate the disguise of Ghost is left somewhat unexplained; it may be that he recognised her voice.

­120    Inventions of the Skin 59. Tomlinson, ‘Theatrical Vibrancy’ in McManus, ed. Women and Culture, p. 193. 60. Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, p. 114. 61. On possible scenarios for the timing of the change, see note 57 above. 62. See Britland, Drama at the Courts, p. 3 quoting Heather Weidemann on the female subject of Wroth’s Urania. Weidemann suggests Wroth ‘represents women not so much as spectacles as revelatory subjects’. 63. The Shepherds’ Paradise was performed privately and not printed until 1659. As a member of the court, Berkeley could well have been among the guests invited to see the play performed; the play was, moreover, directed by the King’s Man Joseph Taylor, who according to Lois Potter ‘conducted rehearsals at court from 15 September 1632 to 9 January 1633’, the date of the first performance. Potter speculates that the King’s Men actors would have ‘known a good deal about the play’; thus we can assume two different avenues for Berkeley’s familiarity with his source material. See ‘Topicality or Politics’, in The Politics of Tragicomedy, ed. McMullan and Hope, p. 85. 64. The stage direction ‘Milesia ready in Tombe’ occurs in the previous scene at line 1729, pointing to the backstage movements of actors and props as they ready for this important scene. 65. Tomlinson, ‘She That Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture’ in The Politics of Tragicomedy, ed. McMullan and Hope, p. 190. 66. Shirley’s play is printed with an ironic dedication to William Prynne, and thus appears to defend the Queen against this most vocal of detractors – but, as Tomlinson points out, the play’s depiction of ‘female revels’ in fact ‘actually illustrates Prynne’s notorious equation’ of actresses with ‘whores’. Ibid. p. 196. 67. Of course, audiences would be able to understand the device in terms of other court and popular plays of racial disguise from the 1630s: it is therefore unclear how ‘surprising’ this revelation, in fact, was.

Chapter 4

Stone: Lost Ladies

‘However you disguise your bodies, you lay not on your colours to think that they sinke into your soule’ Thomas Nashe, Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1598)

I turn now to two Jacobean plays that explore the shared materiality of idols, corpses, spirits, and statues: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. Both are King’s Men plays staged at the Blackfriars; both date roughly to the same period of 1610–11, although critics typically read the less canonical Middleton play as having been inspired by, rather than inspiring, Shakespeare’s tale of a statue that miraculously returns to life. Sarah Beckwith succinctly captures the revenge tragedy’s ‘sustained interaction’ with the romance: ‘each play features a tyrant; each play flirts with funerary and statuary art, and with the language of superstition, idolatry, and iconoclasm; each has a lady in a sequestered “tomb”’.1 In The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, the Tyrant, mad for the love of the unnamed ‘Lady’ who has thwarted his advances by killing herself, breaks into the Lady’s tomb, steals her body, and then arranges to have her corpse painted in an attempt to mask the signs of her body’s decay. The Tyrant’s plans go awry via the agency of his rival Govianus, who turns the Lady’s corpse into an instrument of revenge by painting poison upon her lips. Revisiting the motifs of resurrection and transfiguration I discussed at the outset of this study, the Lady’s spirit – which first appears in dazzling white amidst a great light – returns to oversee the reburial of her body; soul and body thus share the stage in the play’s final act. Given the problems inherent in determining the dates of plays’ earliest performances, we cannot say for certain which play did, in fact, come first; Shakespeare may well have transformed a tyrant’s death by painted corpse into a tyrant’s restoration by painted statue.2 Both plays dwell at length upon their heroine’s paintedness. Reported dead, Hermione appears in the final scene as her own freshly painted

­122    Inventions of the Skin memorial effigy, ‘newly performed’ by the master painter ‘Julio Romano’, an artist so skilled at mimicking the signs of life even the gods marvel at his talent. If Middleton’s Lady begins the play by insisting upon her ‘unalterability’, which is to say her resistance to idolatrous or unchaste adornment, the play’s final act shows her whitefaced corpse being painted in full view of the audience. In both plays, then, ‘paint’ creates the illusion of stoniness and death – and of course, the prior illusion of life and gender in an all-­male theatre, a theatrical exigency that complicates any virtuous stage lady’s pretensions to natural beauty: as per the commonplace, paint makes it hard indeed ‘to distinguish between a good woman, and a bad’. That paint sustains all of these crucial illusions – gender, life, death, transfiguration, stoniness – introduces significant ontological uncertainty into both plays. Is a painted woman chaste or unchaste? When is a painted disguise in fact a ‘disguise’ – is a whitened corpse an actor playing dead, or a character strategically playing dead within the fiction? A potential source for both of the plays’ images of ‘effigies’ that may or may not awaken if the proper rites are observed, Book Ten of Ovid’s Metamorphoses provides two different examples of statues that illustrate this very ambiguity: the ‘filthy’ Propoetides, in Kenneth Gross’s words ‘the first prostitutes, hardened, shameless, and unblushing women who deny the divinity of Venus, and whom the goddess . . . turns to stone’ and the virtuous woman a horrified Pygmalion sculpts out of stone in response to the spectacle of the Propoetides’ debauchery:3 Yit durst the filthy Propets stand in stiffe opinion that Dame Venus was no Goddesse, till shee beeing wroth thereat, Too make theyr bodies common first compelld them everychone, And after chaungd theyr former kynd. For when that shame was gone, And that they wexed brazen faast, shee turned them too stone, In which betweene their former shape was difrrence small or none. Whom forbycause Pygmalion saw too leade theyr lyfe in sin, Offended with the vice whereof greate store is packt within The nature of the womankynd, he led a single lyfe. And long it was ere he could fynd in hart too take a wyfe. Now in the whyle by wondrous Art an image he did grave Of such proportion, shape, and grace as nature never gave Nor can too any woman give. In this his worke he tooke A certaine love. The looke of it was ryght a Maydens looke, And such a one as that yee would beleeve had lyfe, and that Would moved bee, if womanhod and reverence letted not: So artificiall was the work. (255–71)

At first glance, the cautionary tale of the Propoetides might be read as reassuring: corrupt women outwardly become what inwardly they

Stone     123

are. But as the Pygmalion story suggests, and as the myriad Petrarchan sonnets lamenting the flinty ‘hardness’ of the ‘cruel fair’ confirm, the chaste woman is herself also ‘stony’ in her resistance to love. If, then, vice and virtue alike harden flesh into stone, this ambiguity of meaning forces attention to the inward state that makes ‘stoniness’ either a sign of chastity or the definitive proof of its absence. For Leonard Barkan, the intuition of a hidden essence is precisely what the spectacle of the statue invites: ‘sculpture lent itself naturally to a sense that it contains something, an essence or truth trapped inside’.4 If something like ‘inwardness’ alone determines ‘difference’ or meaning then we have a problem, as King Duncan knew (and Macbeth exploited), since ‘there is no art / to find the mind’s construction in the face’; if this crisis of interpretation poses a significant threat especially to male-­female relationships, it presents a rich topic for exploration within drama, as we now shall see (1. 3. 11–12).

I. Middleton’s ‘winter’s tale’ of anxious spirits and broken tombs is lurid, even by Jacobean standards. The Second Maiden’s Tragedy makes especially inventive use of the corpse as a prop: bodies are rarely left alone to be discretely carried offstage, but are used as doorstops, hauled from tombs, painted, propped up in chairs to be worshipped – and, given the Tyrant’s ‘corpse-­infatuation’, possibly worse.5 Although the play begins with the Tyrant’s deposition of the rightful King, Govianus, the Tyrant has only acted in order to poach Govianus’s girlfriend, the unnamed and apocalyptically chaste Lady. Martin Wiggins thus classifies the play as a ‘sex tragedy’, albeit an ‘explicitly Christian morally conservative’ one, and Anne Lancashire has also convincingly located the play within the context of a late medieval and Renaissance homiletic tradition.6 In this play, Middleton furthermore revisits the character-­types and motifs of his 1606 Revenger’s Tragedy, most notably the trope of the poisoned kiss; taking our cue from Polonius, then, we might call the play an erotical-­homiletical revenge tragedy, or, better yet, a cosmetical-­erotical-­ homiletical revenge tragedy, since paint sustains the play’s central illusions of femininity, saintliness, transfiguration, ghostliness, and corruption. When first we see her the Lady is, like Hamlet, defiantly wearing mourning weeds: Tyrant: Black! Whence rise that cloud? Can such a thing be seen In honour’s glorious day, the sky so clear? Why mourns the kingdom’s mistress? Does she come

­124    Inventions of the Skin To meet advancement in a funeral garment? Back! She forgot herself. ’Twas too much joy That bred this error, and we heartily pardon’t. Go, bring me her hither like an illustrious bride With her best beams about her; let her jewels Be worth ten cities; that beseems our mistress, And not a widow’s case, a suit to weep in. Lady: I am not to be altered. Tyrant: How! Lady: I have a mind That must be shifted ere I cast off these, Or I shall wear strange colours. ’Tis not titles Nor all the bastard honours of this frame That I am taken with.

(1. 1. 113–27)

The blackness of the Lady’s dress signifies her spiritual and bodily resistance to the Tyrant’s desire to court her via jewels and material goods. To submit to the Tyrant is to ‘wear strange colours’, a prediction that comes true after her death – only it is Govianus, and not the Tyrant, who actually ‘colours’ her corpse. According to the moral logic of the play, Govianus and the Lady are ‘good’ because they value the essence of things rather than specious outward show, unlike the Tyrant, whom Lancashire suggests is ‘unable to raise his sights above the merely physical and therefore transitory’.7 While this last is true to a degree, the Tyrant’s avowed desire for the Lady to come to him willingly rather than by force indicates that he does value the Lady both body and soul; as he puts it, she must come to him ‘gently and kindly, like a debt of love / Or ‘tis not worth receiving’ (1. 1. 193–4).8 Granted, by the play’s third act the Tyrant has grown tired of waiting for the Lady’s consent, and he breaks into the house in which she is confined with the intent to kidnap and rape her. His violence is nevertheless driven by his pursuit of something beyond the Lady’s body, although that which he seeks will by definition elude him, as Northrop Frye’s remarks upon ‘virgin-­baiting’ make clear: Deep within the stock convention of virgin-­baiting is a vision of human integrity imprisoned in a world it is in but not of, often forced by weakness into all kinds of ruses and stratagems . . . what is symbolised as a virgin is actually a human conviction, however expressed, that there is something at the core of one’s infinitely fragile being which is not only immortal but has discovered the secret of invulnerability that eludes the tragic hero.9

With no avenue left for escape, the Lady begs Govianus to kill her in order to preserve her honour: ‘Prevent mine enemy. Away with me; / Let me no more be seen. I’m like that treasure / Dangerous to him that keeps

Stone     125

it. Rid thy hands on’t’ (3. 74–6). Govinanus ‘runs at her’ but swoons at the critical moment, and it therefore falls to the Lady to kill herself. After her death, Govianus eulogises her as a series of protected essences: The whole world Yields not a jewel like her; ransack rocks And caves beneath the deep. Oh, thou fair spring Of honest and religious desires, Fountain of weeping honour, I will kiss thee After death’s marble lip. Thou’rt cold enough To lie entombed now by my father’s side. Without offence in kindred there I’ll place thee, With one I loved the dearest next thee. Help me to mourn, all that love chastity.

(3.246–55)

A body enclosed within a tomb, a jewel hidden in a cave, a spirit locked within marble, a male body hidden behind a theatricalised exterior: within the fiction and within the theatre, the Lady’s ‘core’ or interior – thus far, at any rate – is always in tantalising retreat. The one detail that complicates this picture of the Lady’s inviolability is the fact that her tomb already contains a body, since Govianus defies convention by interring the Lady in his own family tomb rather than alongside her ‘kindred’ (Govianus’s remark that she’s now ‘cold enough / to lie entombed’ by his father’s side inserts a disruptive note of sexual jealousy into the scene, one that anticipates the Tyrant’s theft and violation of the corpse). The Lady’s suicide does not, however, remove her from the play. On the contrary, in death, the Lady multiplies, and she returns as a corpse, a disembodied voice, and then twice in the form of her spirit. No sooner does he hear about her death than the Tyrant breaks open the Govianus family crypt to claim her: Enter the Tyrant [with Soldiers] again at a farther door, which opened brings them to the tomb where the Lady lies buried. The tomb here discovered, richly set forth. The monument woos me; I must run and kiss it. Now trust me if the tears do not e’en stand Upon the marble. What slow springs have I! ’Twas weeping to itself before I came. How pity strikes e’en through insensible things And makes them shame our dullness! Thou house of silence, and the calms of rest After tempestuous life, I claim of thee A mistress, one of the most beauteous sleepers That ever lay so cold, not yet due to thee

­126    Inventions of the Skin By natural death, but cruelly forced hither Many a fair year before the world could spare her. We miss her ’mongst the glories of our court When they be numbered up. All thy still strength, Thou grey-­eyed monument, shall not keep her from us. Strike, villain, though the echo rail us all Into ridiculous deafness! Pierce the jaws Of this cold, ponderous creature.

(4. 3. 1–26)

The stage direction ‘the tomb here discovered’ suggests that the tomb was a stand-­alone property capable of being exposed or thrust forth from the curtained discovery-­space at the back of the Blackfriars stage; Henslowe’s inventory, for example, lists three such tombs.10 The tomb itself exerts a powerful affective pull upon the Tyrant, who appears to view it as a ‘metonymic double for the corpse sealed within it’.11 He kisses the tomb and then, in a fantasy of stone springing to life under his touch, he imagines that it weeps, although he himself cannot.12 Julia Briggs speculates that the tomb-­ property ‘may even have included an effigy of the Lady herself, as Jacobean tombs often did’.13 Given that this multi-­use prop is meant to be seen as the Govianus family sepulchre (and later ‘flies open’), we might not expect to find it fronted with an image of the Lady; rather, the scene encourages us to view the body the Tyrant retrieves when the ‘stone is moved’ as itself an effigy. Statue-­like in her chastity in life, death grants the Lady the ‘monumentality’ of sculpture:        O blessed object! I never shall be weary to behold thee; I could eternally stand thus and see thee. Why, ’tis not possible death should look so fair; Life is not more illustrious when health smiles on’t. She’s only pale, the colour of the court, And most attractive; mistresses most strive for’t And their lascivious servants best affect it.

(4. 3. 59–66)

‘Paintedness’ thus supplies the context for viewing the Lady’s body, obliquely in the allusion to painted tomb sculptures and overtly in the Tyrant’s reference to the courtly women who resort to artifice to maintain their fashionably pale skins – unlike those women, however, the Lady is ‘naturally’ pale because she is dead. Once again, in performance, this distinction between natural and artificial complexions collapses, given the cosmetics needed to execute all of the transformations the Lady undergoes: if the transition from

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boy actor to Lady requires the application of reds and whites to the face, the transition from Lady to corpse demands that those reds and whites be buried under a uniform pallor. As Farah Karim-­Cooper has established, ‘whiteface’ was a common method for signalling death and ghostliness in early modern drama.14 Accordingly, Lancashire asserts that ‘the Lady’s dead body must be entirely white – cheeks, lips, and all’, and Susan Zimmerman that she is ‘probably whitened with lead powder or paint’; the play allots ample time between the removal of the Lady’s body in 3. 1 and the violation of her tomb in 4. 3 to effect this change.15 Observing that many recipes for white facepaints also contained such light-­reflective ingredients as ‘cleer Silver-­coloured Herbs, Shel-­Fish, and Stones’, namely crushed pearls and oyster shells, Karim-­Cooper argues that the luminosity of whiteface would show especially well in intimate and candle-­lit spaces (much like the Blackfriars): ‘the use of silver, gold, or pearl would allow the face of the actor to glisten in dimly lit halls and was therefore associated with court masques, dances and interludes’.16 To be sure, the Tyrant’s apostrophe to the Lady’s corpse dwells at length upon her luminosity: O, the moon rises! What reflection Is thrown about this sanctified building E’en in a twinkling! How the monuments glister As if death’s palaces were all massy silver And scorned the name of marble! Art thou cold?

(4. 3. 80–4)

Even as he acknowledges the fact that this ‘house’ is now empty and, later, that ‘dead ashes’ cannot be reignited, the Tyrant reveres the statue-­ corpse for the traces of its former life still immanent in the dead flesh (and concretely visible, perhaps, in the light the white-­painted corpse continues to cast): Since thy life has left me, I’ll clasp the body for the spirit that dwelt in’t, And love the house still for the mistress’ sake. Thou art mine now, spite of destruction And Govianus, and I will possess thee.

(4. 3. 110–14)

Although the Tyrant’s ongoing attachment to the body risks the sin of idolatry, explicitly so in 5. 2 when he stages her body to the court and orders his soldiers to do her ‘obeisance’, his belief that the corpse possesses intrinsic value because it continues to maintain a connection to the Lady’s soul is shared by no less of an authority than the Lady herself, as we shall see (S. D. 13. 5).

­128    Inventions of the Skin The scene of the Tyrant’s grave-­robbing immediately shifts to a scene in which Govianus similarly approaches the tomb to do it reverence. Key details invite us to see Govianus as honouring, rather than as worshipping, the dead. He visits her grave in the early morning rather than the dead of night, for example, and he enters carrying a ‘book’ rather than a ‘close lanthorn and pickaxe’ (4. 2. 45): Govianus: Eternal maid of honour, whose chaste body Lies here like virtue’s close and hidden seed, To spring forth glorious to eternity At the everlasting harvest – WITHIN I am not here. Govianus: What’s that? Who is not here? I’m forced to question it. Some idle sounds the beaten vaults send forth. On a sudden, in a kind of noise like a wind, the doors clattering, the tombstone flies open, and a great light appears in the midst of the tomb; his Lady, as went out, standing just before him all in white, stuck with jewels, and a great crucifix on her breast. Mercy, look to me! Faith, I fly to thee! Keep a strong watch about me! Now thy friendship! Oh, never came astonishment and fear So pleasing to mankind! I take delight To have my breast shake and my hair stand stiff. If this be horror, let it never die! Came all the pains of hell in that shape to me, I should endure ’em smiling. Keep me still In terror, I beseech thee. I’d not change This fever for felicity of man Or all the pleasures of ten thousand ages. Lady: Dear lord, I come to tell you all my wrongs. Govinaus: Welcome! Who wrongs the spirit of my love? Thou art above the injuries of blood; They cannot reach thee now. What dares offend thee? No life that has the weight of flesh upon’t And treads as I do can now wrong my mistress. Lady: The peace that death allows me is not mine; The monument is robbed. Behold, I’m gone; My body taken up. (4. 4. 42–62)

Although the potential puns and double entendres in Govianus’s speech disturb the solemnity of this encounter and consequently undermine his presentation as a moral exemplar (‘I take delight / to have my breast shake and my hair stand stiff’), the scene recalls earlier religious drama, most notably the early morning visit of the three Marys to Christ’s empty tomb with the Lady herself speaking the words of the angel who declares ‘non est hic’.17 If before the tomb property was ‘pushed aside’,

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here it thrillingly ‘flies open’ amidst a great light and noise to reveal to the audience that heretofore hidden jewel, the Lady’s elaborately decorated spirit.18 These special effects indicate that the Lady is no ordinary revenant. What the audience witnesses is nothing less than a spectacle of Transfiguration: the Lady’s appearance newly garbed in white and illuminated by a striking lighting effect recalls Jesus’ change of face and clothing on the summit of Mt. Tabor. The belief that the body would be reconstituted and reunited with the soul was central to early modern Christianity and enshrined in the ‘order for the burial of the dead’ in The Booke of Common Prayer (1609): ‘I shall rise out of the earth in the last day, and shall be covered again with my skinne, and shall see God in my flesh’. For St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘man cannot achieve his ultimate happiness unless the soul be once again united to the body’; Govianus has precisely this reunion of body and soul in mind when he addresses the Lady as a ‘close and hidden seed’ that will eventually ‘spring forth glorious to eternity’ (4. 4. 43–4).19 Importantly, the Transfiguration provides a glimpse of the form that glorious future body would take – here, in the Lady’s bedazzled body, her reflective whiteface glistening in the candlelight, Middleton gives us another such preview.20 Ironically, her transfigured form resembles, but categorically outdoes, the form the Tyrant wished her to take in life: ‘Go, bring me her hither like an illustrious bride / With her best beams about her; let her jewels / Be worth ten cities’ (1. 1. 119–21; more on the practical management of the Lady’s various transformations below).21 Seventeenth-­ century English Protestants without a doctrine of Purgatory, however, were less certain about where the soul went before its reunion with the body: did it die with the body, sleep, wander, or go directly to heaven (and if the latter, has the soul not, then, bypassed Judgment Day)?22 Calvin thought it best not to ask about this unknowable period between death and resurrection (‘over-­ curious inquiry ­respecting the intermediate state is neither lawful nor useful’), but by 1553, the official Protestant teaching clearly stated that ‘the soulles of them that departe this life doe neither die with the bodies, nor sleep idlie’.23 Govianus takes this orthodox position that the Lady’s soul has gone to heaven and is therefore beyond ‘the injuries of blood’. He nevertheless buries her body with the appropriate degree of reverence, an act which rejects the theological arguments of stricter dualists such as St. Ambrose, for instance, who argued that the soul’s immediate resurrection makes it ‘purely wasteful for men to build sumptuous ­ tombs as though they were receptacles of the soul and not merely of the body’.24

­130    Inventions of the Skin At stake here are the various theological arguments for the relationship of the soul to the body in life and, indeed, after death. In contrast to the dualists, those thinkers (among them Luther, Tyndale, and Milton) who subscribed to the controversial but popular doctrine of ‘mortalism’ held that the soul and the body died together, went into the grave together, and rose together without ever having endured a period of separation; early moderns would also have known this belief as ‘psychopannychism’ or ‘soul sleep’.25 Against St. Ambrose, mortalism provided the rationale for practices that commemorate and revere the dead, for example the anointing of the corpse with perfumes: ‘Flesh and spirit lie down together in darkness. Not a shell or a husk, the corpse is the repository of all its former life . . . mortalism invests the dead body with extraordinary dignity’.26 If, on the one hand, the Lady’s evident consciousness undermines the mortalist view – she’s clearly not ‘dead’ or otherwise insensible – on the other, she appears to subscribe to this doctrine’s valuation of the corpse when she commands Govianus to restore her ‘peace’ by defending the sanctity of her corpse: The peace that death allows me is not mine; The monument is robbed. Behold, I’m gone; My body taken up. . . . I am now at court In his own private chamber. There he woos me And plies his suit to me with as serious pains As if the short flame of mortality Were lighted up again in my cold breast; Folds me within his arms and often sets A sinful kiss upon my senseless lip.

(4. 4. 60–72)

By demonstrating the glory of the reconstituted and resurrected body, the Transfiguration can be seen to authorise the mortalist view of body and soul; that is, the soul alone is never the whole person. Accordingly, by saying ‘I am not here’, the Lady locates her subjectivity in her absent body ‘even now, now, very now’ being abused at court. Her assertion of posthumous harm implies that she is in fact responsive to the Tyrant’s ‘suit’ – she responds with disgust, but in caressing her the Tyrant does not handle mere ‘earthe and ashes dunge and dust’ devoid of any residual connection to the Lady.27 I see the Tyrant’s necrophilia as a belief in the sanctity of the corpse taken to its pathological extreme. In 5. 2, stage directions specify that the Lady is brought out sitting ‘in a chair, dressed up in black velvet which sets out the paleness of the hands and face, and a fair chain of pearl ’cross her breast, and the crucifix above it’ (S.D. 13. 1–3) Wishing to mask the signs of the

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corpse’s decay, the Tyrant has hired an artist to come paint her, in so doing unwittingly supplying Govianus with the opportunity to work his revenge. What the Tyrant appears to desire is a decorated subject-­object warm enough ‘gently and kindly’ to receive his advances – but not too lively to defy him yet again by insisting that she cannot be altered. His fantasy therefore relies upon the role of paint within a ‘ritual of containment’ I outlined in the Introduction, specifically a male fantasy of exerting ownership and authority over a woman by painting her exterior. Disguised as a ‘picture-­drawer, a ladies’ forenoon tutor’, Govianus paints the Lady’s face to the strains of an offstage memento mori song emphasising the body’s active decay: ‘one night of death makes [beauty] look pale and horrid; the dainty preserved flesh, how soon it moulders’ (5. 2. 16–17). Even as the Tyrant acknowledges the impossibility of his pursuit – ‘but fate’s my hindrance, and I must only rest content with art’ – his running commentary speaks as much to necromancy as to idolatry (5. 2. 32–3): So shall we By art force beauty on yon lady’s face Though deaths it frowning on’t a storm of hail To be it off. Our pleasure shall prevail. . . . O, she lives again! She’ll presently speak to me. Keep her up; I’ll have her swoon no more; there’s treachery in’t. Does she not feel warm to thee? . . . the heat wants cherishing, then. Our arms and lips Shall labour life into her. Wake, sweet mistress! ’Tis I that call thee at the door of life.

(5. 2. 109–20)

As Govianus paints the signs of animation upon the corpse’s whitened face, the actor’s body becomes the site of multiply-­layered illusions: death overlaid upon gender, artificial ‘life’ overlaid upon death.28 Zimmerman speculates that the painting effect would appear ‘ghoulish – the Tyrant’s corpse-­strumpet reconstructed as primordial death-­mask’.29 ‘Death-­mask’ is apt indeed: Tyrant: Ha! I talk so long to death, I’m sick myself. Methinks an evil scent still follows me. Govianus: Maybe ’tis nothing but the colour, sir That I laid on. Tyrant: Is that so strong? Govianus: Yes, faith, sir. ’Twas the best poison I could get for money.

(5. 2. 120–5)

­132    Inventions of the Skin The Lady has never tasked Govianus with revenge – only with her body’s reburial – and we can see this painting of her corpse as a desecration: the body she cares for so deeply has been turned into a grotesque trap (Govianus registers this when he ‘trembles’ at this ‘unhallowed business’, 5. 2. 91–2). In a final coup de théâtre, however, the spirit of the Lady returns to endorse Govianus’s action: ‘My truest love, / Live ever honoured here, and blessed above’ (5. 2. 163–4). No longer ‘stuck with jewels’ and illuminated by a bright light, the Lady has shed her guise of Transfiguration and now appears ‘in the same form as the Lady is dressed in the chair’, clad in the sober black she wore when she was alive (S.D. 152. 1–2). For the first time in the play, body and soul appear onstage at the same time, and the costume change registers their close association rather than the strict separation of dross from spirit. This symbolism is complicated by the necessity of having two different actors playing the corpse and the spirit and by the contrasting stage pictures their differently-­painted faces present – although the underlying whiteface worn by both actors would in fact facilitate the illusion of the two actors’ identicality by flattening out their own distinct facial features. Although some critics have suggested that a dummy was used for the corpse-­painting scene, I see a much simpler solution: the play-­text indicates that the King’s Man who played the living Lady, Richard Robinson, also played her transfigured spirit in 4. 4. If Robinson again played the spirit in 5. 2 – and a different actor took the part of the non-­speaking corpse in both 4. 3 and 5. 2 – there would be ample time to achieve all of the cosmetic effects and costume changes upon which the play relies (famous for his ability to play women’s parts, Richard or ‘Dick’ Robinson may also have played the part of Hermione).30 With the Tyrant dead and his throne restored to him, Govianus once again delays reburying the body, since his first act of state is to crown the Lady his queen: Here place her in this throne; crown her our queen, The first and last that ever we make ours, Her constancy strikes so much firmness in us. That honour done, let her be solemnly borne Unto the house of peace from whence she came As queen of silence.

(5. 2. 200–5)

Behaving much like the Tyrant he just deposed, Govianus enthrones the Lady’s body to be revered; for Martin Wiggins, ‘the distance between him and the necrophilic King narrows to a hair’s breadth’. An anxious Lady returns for the last time to escort her body offstage: ‘The Spirit

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. . . enters again and stays to go out with the body, as it were attending it’ (S.D. 205.1–2). The play concludes with an aphoristic couplet comically inadequate to the task of summarising Middleton’s sensationalist tragedy: ‘I would those ladies that fill honour’s rooms / Might all be borne so honest to their tombs’ (5. 2. 211–12). Once her body is borne to its tomb, are we to imagine that the soul of the Lady falls back to ‘sleep’? As an emissary from Calvin’s forbidden ‘intermediate’ time, the Lady does not, alas, tell us much beyond her desire to lie down together with her body and rest, undisturbed, in darkness. Middleton appears less interested in explicitly advocating a coherent theology of death and resurrection than he is in exploiting the dramatic and theatrical possibilities of staging the soul’s ongoing relationship to the body. The play has been accused of ideological confusion, and with good reason; united in their desire for the Lady, any difference between Govianus and the Tyrant collapses over the course of the play. Middleton’s original audience may well have found the line between honouring the dead and idolatrously worshipping the dead impossible to discern, and I, for one, find it impossible to rationalise the play’s myriad and spectacular special effects to an iconoclastic agenda. Middleton’s evocation of the doctrine of mortalism, however, accounts for what some readers have taken to be inexplicable: the soul’s concern for the corpse. Investing the corpse with dignity rather than deriding it as ‘wormes meat’, mortalism maintains that the ‘person’, defined as the union of body and soul, lives, dies, and is reborn without ever having endured a separation. In other words, the popular heresy maintains the self’s continuity of identity against what Calvin called ‘that violent separation, which nature shunneth’. In turn, the Transfiguration shows us the form this resurrected body/soul will take after the Last Judgment, as John Donne explains in a 1620 sermon he preached on Corinthians 15: 50: Now we shall looke a little into the qualities of bodies in the resurrection; and that, not in the intricacies, and subtilties of the Schoole, but onely in that one patterne, which hath been given us of that glory, upon earth, which is the Transfiguration of Christ; for, that Transfiguration of his, was a representation of a glorified body in a glorified state . . . When Christ was transfigured in the presence of Peter, James and John, yet they knew him to be Christ. Transfiguration did not so change him, nor shall glorification so change us, as that we shall not be known (my emphasis).31

Donne cared deeply that his personal identity, understood as the conjunction of soul and body, endure after his death; that the apostles are capable of recognising Jesus at his moment of Transfiguration reassures him of this.32

­134    Inventions of the Skin Under the play’s campy sensationalism thus lurks an unexpectedly hopeful story about the afterlife of love. With the Tyrant’s men knocking on the door, the Lady tries to convince Govianus to kill her by reassuring him of their posthumous reunion: Govianus: Must I lose thee then? Lady: Th’are but thine enemies that tell thee so. His lust my part me from thee, but death, never; Thou canst not lose me there, for, dying thine, Thou dost enjoy me still. Kings cannot rob thee.

(3.142–6)

Govianus’s belief in a future heaven in which men and women will live together as glorified but individuated beings recognisable to each other helps explain his decision to bury the Lady in his own family tomb alongside ‘the one he loved the next dearest’, his father: this is the company he wishes to keep in the grave; this is the community he wishes to rejoin upon his resurrection. His expectation perhaps jostles uneasily against the teaching in Matthew 21: 30 and Luke 20: 34–6 that the resurrected ‘neither marie wives, nether are maried’, although this precept has also been taken simply to mean that there is no reproduction in heaven. Our affects or senses may change, granted, but our human communities will endure. For Middleton, then, as for the preacher Thomas Adams, though ‘death breakes off our societie, yet there shall be a day of meeting. We shall know and be known’ (original emphasis).33 Finally, we can see the crucial role of stage materials in performing the practical and symbolic work of turning the living body of the boy actor into a dead woman and a transfigured spirit we perhaps come to view as a ‘Jacobean saint’, as Anne Lancashire does. If paint creates the theatrical effects of gender, death, ghostliness and identicality, its ­polysemousness – the very quality that makes it such a useful dramatic tool – can in fact obscure ‘difference’: a painted face can variously mean that the boy actor is playing the part of a whore or a virtuous woman or a corpse or a ghost or a living woman playing dead or a living woman playing the part of a statue. It is only within the context of social relationships, then, that ‘difference’ can be established, especially when it comes to the difference between a ‘good woman and a bad’. In other words, the painted face derives meaning from the ethical orientation the other takes toward that face; this is the plot of The Winter’s Tale, to which I now turn.

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II. ‘There was a man who dwelled by a churchyard’. The scary story that Mamillius whispers in his mother’s ear speaks to the sixteen years of The Winter’s Tale the audience does not see: Leontes’ daily visit to the single grave of his wife and son. Like The Second Maiden’s Tragedy but in an altogether different key, Shakespeare’s romance also explores the possibility for posthumous love, since it ends with a married couple miraculously reunited after the death of a wife. Or rather, reunited after what we have taken to be the death of a wife – unusual for the playwright, who rarely withholds essential information from his ­audience, Shakespeare allows us to believe along with Leontes that Paulina’s report of Hermione’s death is true. We do not see Hermione again until the final scene. Even if the actor playing Hermione is out of our sight, Hermione remains present to our gaze, and I begin my discussion of The Winter’s Tale by considering how the forms in which Hermione haunts the text after her ‘death’ bear upon her final appearance as a painted statue that Perdita and Leontes are warned not to touch. With the news of Mamillius’ death, Hermione ‘swoons’ and is taken offstage. At first it is unclear what has happened – Leontes hopes she’s merely ‘overcharged’ with emotion, and might still recover – but when Paulina returns, she reports that Hermione is dead: I say she’s dead; I’ll swear’t. If word nor oath Prevail not, go and see: if you can bring Tincture or lustre in her lip, her eye, Heat outwardly or breath within, I’ll serve you As I would do the gods.

(3. 3. 201–5)

Leontes later verifies Paulina’s account: ‘for I saw her, as I thought, dead, and have said in vain many a prayer upon her grave’ (5. 3. 140–2). If Shakespeare’s audience knew Shakespeare’s source, Pandosto, the Triumph of Time (1588), they would have no reason to anticipate Hermione’s return, since in Robert Greene’s prose romance Hermione’s counterpart, Bellaria, dies with the news of her son’s death. Similarly overcome with emotion after what he feels is his betrayal of Marc Antony, Enobarbus in Anthony and Cleopatra swoons and is brought offstage.34 One of the watchmen who witnesses this moment speculates, like Leontes, that Enobarbus ‘may recover yet’, only Enobarbus – like Mamillius – dies of a broken heart; perhaps Hermione has done so as well.

­136    Inventions of the Skin That said, as Peter Womack has pointed out, by 1611 theater-­goers would also have encountered any number of characters who ‘rise up’ to contradict the reports of their deaths, from the comic resurrection of Luce in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) to the more emotionally charged return of the wronged wife, Dorothea, in another work in the Greene corpus, the history play James IV (1590), to the range of Shakespearean characters who either play dead, like Falstaff, or who are mistakenly, or strategically, reported dead: Hero, Claudio, Thaisa.35 Although in the majority of these cases the audience is privy all along to the truth, their experience of these different sorts of stage deaths might have left the first spectators of The Winter’s Tale uncertain about the fate of the offstage Hermione. Not so Antigonus, who concludes that Hermione ‘has suffered death’ after her ghost appears to him in a vision so vivid ‘never was dream so like a waking’ (3. 3. 41; 17–18). This spectral Hermione who appears to Antigonus displays an ominously different affect from the stoical ‘daughter of the Emperor of Russia’ who declares to the court ‘she is not prone to weeping’ (3. 2. 117; 2. 1. 110): In pure white robes, Like very sanctity, she did approach My cabin where I lay, thrice bowed before me, And, gasping to begin some speech, her eyes Became two spouts.

(3. 3. 21–5)

Shortly after relating his dream-­vision Antigonus is devoured by a bear that Jonathan Bate, in tracing out the play’s Ovidian motifs, convincingly links to Hermione: the bear from the Metamorphoses who ‘is a wench got with child’, the virgin huntress Callisto whom Jove rapes and whom Juno transforms into a bear shortly after Callisto gives birth to Jove’s son.36 If the bear evokes Hermione, we might well imagine that the bear (authorised by Apollo?) performs Hermione’s justice by punishing Antigonus for adopting Leontes’ diseased perspective upon the baby’s paternity: ‘. . . this being indeed the issue / Of King Polixenes, it should be laid / Either for life or death, upon the earth / of its right father’ (3. 3. 40–5). Hermione thus appears to die only to return as a weeping ghost and then (perhaps) as a vengeful bear, and it is not too far of an imaginative leap to see the lineaments of another genre lurking underneath the tragicomic form of The Winter’s Tale: the revenge tragedy, the proper generic home of ghosts who returns to exhort the living to avenge the injuries done to them – as well as the home of corpses whose uncannily reanimated bodies become instruments of revenge.

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Once again making the absent Hermione present, a crucial exchange between Paulina and Leontes further associates Hermione with revenge. For sixteen years Paulina has held Sicilia to the terms of Apollo’s oracle by enforcing Leontes’ celibacy. According to the lords of the court, Leontes has sufficiently atoned for past crimes; for ‘royalty’s repair’ Dion counsels him to remarry lest ‘dangers, by his highness’ fail of issue, / drop upon his kingdom’ (5. 1. 27–8). To ensure that Leontes is not swayed by these reasonable voices, Paulina raises the ghost of Antigonus: For has not the divine Apollo said? Is’t not the tenor of his oracle That King Leontes shall not have an heir Till his lost child be found? Which that it shall, Is all as monstrous to our human reason As my Antigonus to break his grave And come again to me, who, on my life, Did perish with the infant.

(5. 1. 37–44)

It is a curious piece of persuasion. If the prospect of the lost child’s recovery is as ‘monstrous’ as the idea that Antigonus might yet break his grave to return to her, then Paulina holds Leontes to the terms of his penitential celibacy by forecasting no end to it at all. By taking up Paulina’s motif of the reanimated spouse, however, Leontes shows that her logic has succeeded. If Hermione were to see One worse and better used, would make her sainted spirit Again possess her corpse, and on this stage, Where we offenders mourn, appear soul-­vexed, And begin, ‘Why to me’?

(5. 1. 56–60)

The gesture to the ‘stage’ turns the audience into Leontes’ co-­conspirators: we, too, will be haunted for our collusion in Hermione’s slander, although the worst punishment is reserved for the hypothetical second wife: ‘she would . . . incense me to murder her I married’ (5. 1. 61–2). Leontes conjures Hermione as an unsettling union of spirit and decomposed flesh, a ‘revenant’ all the more horrifying for its occupation of a ‘suspended state of half-­life and half-­death’.37 If, as I suggested above, statues invite speculation about what lies inside, the same holds true for spectres. Steven Connor offers one perspective upon ghostly interiority by proposing that ‘ghosts are crustacean, for they tend to take the form of a vapour inside a shell: encased in armour, or, as Mummy

­138    Inventions of the Skin and Invisible Man, held together by the cerements that they themselves hold up’ (original emphasis).38 Also construing the dead Hermione as a vessel capable of being filled up, Paulina imagines her own spirit joining her lady against Leontes: Were I the ghost that walked I’d bid you mark Her eye, and tell me for what dull part in’t You chose her. Then I’d shriek, that even your ears Should rift to hear me, and the words that followed Should be, ‘Remember mine.’

(5. 1. 63–7)

‘Remember mine.’ If the tales told in springtime Bohemia are bawdy ones about wenches got with children, or improbable ones about singing fish, or moralising ones about crossbred flowers (‘for I have heard it said / there is an art which in their piedness shares / with great creating nature’), Sicilia remains a landscape haunted by stories of empty graves, walking spirits, and wife-­killers. One more ghostly encounter intervenes before the statue scene. No sooner has Paulina demanded that Leontes publicly swear never to marry until his ‘first queen’s again in breath’ than a courtier announces the unexpected arrival of Prince Florizel and his ‘princess – the fairest I have yet beheld’ (5. 1. 86–7). Leontes sees in Florizel the true image of his father: ‘your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you’ (5. 1. 123–5). With the idea of Hermione immediately apparent to him, it is important to note that Perdita does not strike Leontes like a ghost, for Perdita, we are told, perfectly resembles the ‘majesty’ of her own mother, a likeness Leontes confirms when Paulina rebukes him for the warmth of his admiring gaze (5. 2. 32): . . . Not a month ’Fore your queen died she was more worth such gazes Than what you look on now. Leontes: I thought of her Even in these looks I made.

(5. 1. 224–8)

While we do not have to believe Leontes when he claims to look upon Perdita wholly without sexual desire, the source of Perdita’s attraction is her resemblance to Hermione.39 If Florizel is the perfect copy of Polixenes and Perdita the copy of Hermione, then what stands before Leontes waiting for his blessing is what he so feverishly imagined ‘in the level of his dream’: Hermione

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and Polixenes as lovers, the ‘strumpet’ and the ‘harlot king’. For Rene Girard, ‘this scene resurrects a past that never was, the distorted past of Leontes’s jealousy’, but instead of surrendering to this past, Leontes welcomes the pair as stand-­ins for his lost children:40 Most dearly welcome! And your fair princess – goddess! O! Alas, I lost a couple that ’twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as You, gracious couple, do.

(5. 1. 130–4)

Paulina has in fact primed him to see them in this way: Had our prince Jewel of children, seen this hour, he had paired Well with this lord. There was not full a month Between their births. Leontes: Prithee, no more, cease. Thou know’st He dies to me again when talked of. Sure, when I shall see this gentleman, thy speeches Will bring me to consider that which may Unfurnish me of reason. They are come.

(5. 1. 115–22)

At this moment, Leontes is able to recognise and acknowledge what before, in the grips of his sceptical crisis, he could not, and so he promises to act as a ‘friend’ rather than as an enemy to their desires.41 By giving in to the violence of his passions Leontes became, in the words of the oracle, a ‘jealous tyrant’; now, a new order is possible. This does not mean that Leontes has forgotten the past, and indeed he plangently registers what cannot be regained: ‘What might I have been, / Might I a son and daughter now have looked on, / Such goodly things as you?’ (5. 2. 175–7). Given the optimism of what I have just outlined, it may now seem churlish to insist that the potential for darkness we might call the ‘Sicilian strain’ persists into the remarkable next scene that tells, rather than shows, the recovery of Perdita’s true identity. In 5. 2, three different gentlemen together narrate a story so improbable ‘that ballad makers cannot be able to express it’ (5. 2. 22–3). The third gentleman – Paulina’s steward – is the most informed. He alone appears to have been present for the events he describes, and thus it is he who confirms the contents of the ‘fardel’, reports the fate of Antigonus, describes the reconciliations between father and daughter and King and King – and it is he who first informs us of a statue

­140    Inventions of the Skin in the keeping of Paulina – a piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. (5. 2. 86–90)

This is the only time Shakespeare mentions another artist by name. Famous not for sculpture but rather for his three-­dimensional ‘mannerist’ paintings, Giulio Romano (c.1499–1546) was a pupil of Raphael’s – it was Romano, for example, who put the finishing strokes on Raphael’s last painting of the Transfiguration (1520) after Raphael died before completing it.42 The first edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550) praises Romano’s skills as rivaling even the gods: ‘Jupiter saw sculpted and painted bodies breathe and the homes of mortals made equal to those in heaven through the skill of Giulio Romano’.43 Evidently, Romano was also a dab hand at dirty pictures – the series of erotic engravings I modi, better known in Shakespeare’s England as ‘Aretine’s postures’, was taken from Romano’s designs, and he furthermore supplied costumes and painted scenery for aristocratic masques and theatrical productions (I am tempted to imagine that his contributions to drama included the painting of performers’ bodies as well).44 An artist whose output therefore encompassed the sublime, the erotic, and the theatrical, Romano seems just the figure to bring ‘tincture or lustre’ to Hermione’s memorial statue. This story of the statue’s origins establishes its authenticity as a work of art and, most important to my purposes, also establishes that the statue’s most striking feature isn’t its stoniness, but rather its paintedness – to be more specific, its fresh-­paintedness, for as Paulina tells us twice, this paint is still wet. The potential transferability of the paint from statue to supplicant is central to the unfolding of this recognition scene, as I now shall argue, but I wish first to point out a practical reason this wetness is called to the audience’s attention. Because Hermione is played by a boy – very likely by that well-­known specialist in painted ladies mentioned above, Richard Robinson – Hermione is never onstage not painted, and it is only the fiction that the paint is not yet dry that allows the audience to see this version of Hermione as a ‘newly performed’ work of art. Simply put, the paint’s wetness constitutes the disguise.45 Wet paint that circulates body to body via the touch, moreover, makes the very act of touching visible, quite literally illustrates the circumstance of our enmeshment with others: people affect each other, they ‘touch’ each other in both the tactile and emotional registers of the word. As Elizabeth Harvey writes, ‘although touch is usually associated with the surface of the body, it becomes a metaphor for conveyance into

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the interior of the subject, particularly the capacity to arouse emotion’.46 Sometimes this emotion is disgust, as when the boy page in Epicoene resents his mistress for kissing him with her ‘oil’d face’ or when Sir Dudley Carleton fears that foreign dignitaries might become sullied by the touch of the painted ‘daughters of Niger’ during the dance that concludes The Masque of Blackness, or something more urgently visceral, if we think about the blood of the slain Julius Caesar circulating hand to hand to hand amongst the conspirators who assassinated him. For a complex host of reasons that only become clear after Hermione ‘stirs’, Paulina wants this moment of touch deferred. When Perdita asks to kiss the statue’s hand, Paulina tells her to stand back since the colour is not yet dry (5. 3. 48). Leontes also wants to kiss the statue’s lips, and is told even more emphatically to keep his distance: Good my lord, forbear. The ruddiness upon her lip is wet. You’ll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own With oily painting.

(5. 3. 80–3)

B. J. Sokol points out that ‘all of Shakespeare’s three other uses of “oily” are condemnatory’, as for example when Cordelia criticises the ‘glib and oily art’ of her sisters.47 The warning evokes the threat of mutual contamination: if Leontes touches the statue the artistic effect will be ‘marred’, but in so touching it, he himself risks becoming ‘stained’, morally compromised. Sokol poses the question ‘what harm could it mean for Leontes to kiss the statue’s painted lip’, and concludes that Paulina’s ‘sensually inhibiting role’ prevents Leontes from turning the statue into a fetish – what separates The Winter’s Tale from The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, so it would seem, is Paulina.48 This intervention also means that we do not see Perdita and Leontes ‘popishly’ revere Hermione as a painted idol, although as Michael O’Connell notes, ‘his reaction, and particularly that of Perdita, raise what we can understand as the worst fear of the iconoclasts, that a stone might so affect onlookers as to draw them to veneration’.49 O’Connell is not the only critic to acknowledge the undeniably religious dimension of this statue scene. Louis Montrose, for example, once raised the possibility that ‘a Jacobean audience could experience as intense an emotional and intellectual satisfaction from a performance of The Winter’s Tale as from a divine service’, and Sarah Beckwith argues that the play ‘replaces the memory theater of the ghost world with the memory theater of a new theatrico-­religious paradigm of resurrection’.50 For Glynne Wickham, the scene evokes both the quem queritas trope

­142    Inventions of the Skin and the cycle resurrection plays: ‘with Hermione’s statue behind its closed curtains in Paulina’s chapel we are back in the dawn of English drama’.51 Of Paulina’s warning to Perdita ‘O, patience! / The statue is but newly fixed, the colour’s not dry’, Wickham remarks that she ‘could easily have said, ‘Noli me tangere’, and been as clearly understood’.52 In the York cycle, it falls to the Winedrawers’ guild to stage this moment from John 20: 17 when Christ tells Mary ‘Touche me not: for I am not yet ascended to my Father’. As we saw in Chapter 1, Mary repeatedly commented on the wetness of Christ’s wounds: ‘Mi Lorde Jesu, I knowe nowe thee; / Thi woundes thai are nowe wette’; ‘Thy woundes hath made thi body wete / With bloode that was thee withinne’ (81, 112–13). By emphasising the ‘liveness’ of Christ’s scars, Mary reinforces the teaching that Christ’s sacrifice is ongoing. Here, the statue’s wetness emphasises the urgent immediacy of the encounter – something is happening, and it is happening now. Shakespeare furthermore uses this noli mi tangere topos to amplify the narrative tension he has already generated by twice having Paulina mock-­threaten to close the curtain on the statue – before we are certain about what we are seeing, where this is coming from, will the vision be removed from our eyes?53 Finally, there is another way that Paulina’s injunction builds tension. For all that her prohibition is salutary, either by keeping idolatrous or perverse impulses at bay, or theatrically effective, by stoking the audience’s anticipation, it is also ominous. My own answer to Sokol’s question of what harm might come from a kiss is different from the one he provides, for in focusing on the symbolic and psychoanalytic reasons for Paulina’s instructions, he misses the more immediate theatrical context for viewing the play’s climactic scene. An expert in painting, a clandestine plan, a woman killed by a tyrant – these plot elements all point to what was, by 1611, the pervasive convention of the poisoned kiss.54 In plays such as Soliman and Perseda (1592), The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), and of course The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, tyrants die after kissing the poisoned lips of a painted woman or painted female corpse. After 1611 the motif recurs in at least five more tragedies, including one that borrows extensively from Middleton, Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (1622). Thus, as we saw earlier in this chapter, in many dramatic plots a painted body acts as a vehicle for revenge. In The Winter’s Tale, a painted body is instead central to a scene of reunion that presents Leontes with a crucial ethical choice, and of all the ironic affiliations of The Winter’s Tale with The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, I find its substitution of the possibility of reconciliation for the certainty of revenge to be the most striking. Given the oft-­remarked ‘Janus face’ of the play (an orientation succinctly cap-

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tured in the First Gentleman’s description of the reunited Leontes and Camillo looking ‘as though they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed’, 5. 2. 13), audiences might be forgiven for imagining that each successive performance of The Winter’s Tale contains the possibility for the climactic scene to turn out differently – for a Hermione to choose not to come down from the pedestal, for a Leontes to kiss and then fall ‘sick’, like the Tyrant, for a world to be ruined rather than redeemed. This two-­ facedness equally applies to the contrarian magic of paint in drama as well as in life, which is to say paint’s capacity to transfigure, adorn, and preserve as well as to adulterate and harm. James A. Knapp astutely notes that ‘many of the more reflective moments’ in Shakespeare’s plays represent ‘a moment of seemingly simple perception become a crisis of responsibility’, and he therefore diagnoses Leontes’s tyranny as stemming from his ‘flawed response to the demands of an image beyond his understanding, an image of alterity, in the sense given to that term by French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas – the unknown and unknowable other person’.55 In wintry Sicilia, Leontes responds to the image of Hermione by concluding beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is an adulteress, and the evidence he marshals for this is the ‘ripe moving’ of his own imagination. The final scene presents him with a second chance to respond to that same image, and I want to press on the symbolism of the play’s climactic face-­to-­face encounter of penitent husband and memorial statue, since Paulina’s ceremony requires Leontes to respond to the culture’s most potent sign of unchastity, duplicity, and feminine corruption: the painted face. The Winter’s Tale repeatedly invokes the storehouse of common knowledge via the recurring refrain ‘they say’, and we know what ‘they say’ about painted faces: ‘A painted wench is like a whore-­house sign.’ ‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.’ ‘Doth not the word of God call . . . a gilt or painted idol, or image, a strumpet with a painted face’ – strumpet the very name Leontes has ‘proclaimed’ Hermione ‘on every post’.56 It has furthermore been the argument of this book that the painted face can, at times, symbolise ‘alterity’ itself. The climax of the York cycle reminds us that the only time when the ‘problem of other minds’ ceases to be a problem is after time has stopped: on Judgment Day, when we shall all appear to God and, important, to each other wearing our true faces, although Thomas Tuke darkly predicts that painted women will remain unrecognisable even on that day of doom: What shal God say to such in the last Judgement, when they shal appeare thus masked before him with these antifaces: Friends, I know you not, neither do I hold you for my creatures: for these are not the faces that I formed.57

­144    Inventions of the Skin Leontes’s response to the painted Hermione therefore demonstrates his crucial willingness to accept what Othello, for example, found intolerable: that there can be a ‘corner’ in the thing you love to which you do not have access:       O curse of marriage, That we can call these delicate creatures ours And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad, And live upon the vapour of a dungeon, Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others’ uses.

(3. 3. 272–7)

For Beckwith, Hermione’s recovery therefore depends on the renunciation of epistemology as our mode of access to others. For the insistence on knowing others as the very basis of our access to them . . . will make the others in our lives disappear, petrify them or turn them into nothings.58

Concentrating on Hermione’s figurative stoniness rather than her actual paintedness, Valerie Traub reads this scene very differently: ‘Warm’ but not hot, Hermione is chastened (made chaste), her erotic power curtailed. Upon her revivification, Hermione is granted one speech of eight lines, and this speech a maternal blessing and query directed toward her daughter. Her silence toward Leontes bespeaks a submissiveness, or perhaps an emotional distancing, most unlike her previous animation. Rather than a victory for the wronged heroine, the final scene works as wish-­fulfillment for Leontes . . . Hermione can be sacramentalized because the threat she represented has been physically encased in stone . . . Hermione-­as-­statue safely re-­members, but does not em-­body, the threat of female erotic power.59

Shakespeare compulsively depicts men who experience a crisis of interpretation over a woman’s body (Claudio, Othello, Leontes, Posthumous Leonatus, the speaker of the sonnets).60 It follows that for a woman no longer to be capable of provoking a hermeneutic crisis she must become transparent, for to possess inwardness at all is necessarily to retain agency – which is why Othello exchanges the livelier, ‘begrimed’ version of Desdemona for the monumentalised, ‘alabaster’ one. Leontes gets his living wife back; rather than reading the guise in which Hermione returns to him as the visible correlative of her containment, as Traub does, given the broader cultural significance of feminine paintedness I argue that her theatricalised surface signifies her erotic agency and, indeed, her essential unknowability. I therefore read Hermione’s silence as her capacity to withhold her inwardness from Leontes – to keep that corner of her mind dark, if she so chooses. She does not speak to Leontes

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– not yet – but what Hermione does choose to do yields the play’s most optimistic image: Paulina: Music, awake her; strike! Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach. Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come, I’ll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away. Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs: Start not; her actions shall be holy as You hear my spell is lawful. Do not shun her Until you see her die again, for then You kill her double. Nay, present your hand. When she was young, you wooed her; now in age Is she become the suitor? Leontes: O, she’s warm! If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating.

(5. 3. 98–119)

Taken as embedded stage directions, Paulina’s lines ‘come’, ‘stir, nay, come away’ shows us that Hermione draws out the time before she offers Leontes her warm and open hand. Once he takes it, as Polixenes and Camillo tell us, they embrace. By the fifth act, a change has occurred with respect to attitudes towards women’s erotic agency, and how that agency might disrupt marital bonds. Mamillius, who as T. J. Bishop notes is given the privilege of speaking the play’s figuratively resonant rather than merely ‘proverbial’ title, addresses this topic just before he starts to whisper a story in his mother’s ear.61 What he says constitutes the prologue to ‘the winter’s tale’ he tells his mother: Mamillius: Not for because Your brows are blacker – yet black brows, they say, Become some women best, so that there be not Too much hair there, but in a semicircle Or a half-­moon made with a pen. Second Lady: Who taught you this? Mamillius: I learned it out of women’s faces.

(2. 1. 8–12)

What we have just seen of the child’s indoctrination in misogyny at his father’s knee makes this comic moment of precocious banter also disturbing; childhood is never so innocent a time as Polixenes makes it out to be, when ‘we knew not / the doctrine of ill-­doing, nor dreamed / that any did’ (1. 2. 71–3). What is the story that Mamillius is in the process of learning – that women are legible or illegible, chaste or unchaste,

­146    Inventions of the Skin e­nticing or threatening, that they adopt false faces to attract men? Although the child is removed from the play before we have a chance to find out, The Winter’s Tale as a whole dramatises what happens when a man draws the wrong conclusion from a woman’s face: he becomes the man who dwelled by a graveyard, sentenced to celibacy and penitence; or, still worse, he falls in love with a statue, he embraces a corpse. The Winter’s Tale concludes on a note of renewal that nevertheless registers the precariousness of human relationships. Perdita has returned, springtime has come again, unions are ratified – including the unexpected match of Paulina to Camillo, a union Leontes proposes and about which Paulina, like Isabella at the end of Measure for Measure, remains silent. Sixteen years have passed, and all of the play’s children mentioned before Time walks onstage to inform us of this fact are either dead or grown up, like Perdita and the three unnamed daughters of Antigonus and Paulina, or else they were only ever hypothetical to begin with – the ‘boys’ and the ‘girls of nine’ who according to Paulina would never have entertained such ‘green and idle fancies’ as Leontes does about Hermione (3. 2. 181–2). The passage of time, however, means that two of the three marriages can no longer produce issue (and here we can see one important limit to Hermione’s erotic agency – a marriage that is no longer fecund cannot generate anxiety about paternity and lineage). The repair of two kingdoms therefore depends upon the marriage of Florizel to Perdita, who volunteers her own perspective upon artifice when she expresses discomfort with festive disguising and who would no more grow ‘bastard’ flowers in her garden than she would paint her face: I’ll not put The dibble in earth to set one slip of them, No more than, were I painted, I would wish This youth should say ’twere well, and only therefore Desire to breed by me.

(4. 4. 99–103)

The paint on Hermione’s face does not express her adulteration so much as it requires Leontes to acknowledge Hermione as her own subject – importantly, the paint asks something from Leontes rather than says something about Hermione – and thus Perdita’s conventional moralising is not at odds with what I take to be the play’s argument about women’s faces. Perdita does not wish Florizel to be attracted to her for the wrong reasons, although in saying this she confirms the entrapping seductiveness of cosmetic beauty. A lover of ‘great creating nature’, Perdita then

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imagines ‘strewing’ Florizel with ‘bold oxlips’ and phallic fleur-­de-­lis. Florizel playfully interprets this as a funereal rite: Florizel: What, like a corse? Perdita: No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on, Not like a corpse – or if, not to be buried, But quick and in mine arms. Come, take your flowers. Methinks I play as I have seen them do In Whitsun pastorals. Sure this robe of mine Does change my disposition.

(4. 4. 129–34)

After piously insisting on her aversion to artifice, Perdita, who, as a boy actor, is both painted and ‘pranked up’, gets carried away: ‘sure this robe of mine / does change my disposition’; it is hard to tell whether her acting stirs her desire or her desire removes her inhibitions about acting.62 Florizel responds warmly to Perdita’s ‘cleanly-­wantonness’, in pointed contrast to Othello, for example, who nervously declares his own sexual appetite to be ‘defunct’ when Desdemona publicly demands ‘the rites by which [she] loves him’. Tellingly, the lovers’ banter explicitly evokes the striking tableau from Cymbeline (1609) of Imogen discovered embracing the flower-­strewn and headless corpse of what she thinks is her husband:          How, a page? Or dead or sleeping on him? But dead rather, For nature doth abhor to make his bed With the defunct, or sleep upon the dead.

(4. 2. 357–60)

Once more with the Sicilian strain: Perdita’s wish for Florizel’s ‘corse’ to be ‘quick’ and ‘in her arms’ evokes Imogen’s night spent in the grave even as it anticipates – or remembers – the abhorrent necrophilic embrace of Tyrant and dead Lady. Human relationships are always at risk of turning tragic – the greater the intimacy, the greater the risk – and thus the commitments that bind ‘feeling, thinking, and intending subjects’ must repeatedly be renewed, as Paulina rightly knows when she warns Leontes not to ‘shun’ his wife ‘until you see her die again; for then / You kill her double’ (5. 3. 105–7).63 Indeed, just moments after Hermione comes to life Leontes must demonstrate the truth of his own resurrection. Leontes has ordered everyone to leave the stage. Hanging in the air, his charged demand ‘what’ implies that Hermione and Polixenes are frozen in place, wary of history repeating itself. . . . Let’s from this place. What? Look upon my brother. Both your pardons,

­148    Inventions of the Skin That e’er I put between your holy looks My ill suspicion.

(5. 3. 148–50; Folio punctuation)

For contemporary playgoers, the resolution of the play perhaps depends upon what the director takes this ‘what’ to mean: what it is that Leontes sees that makes him ask this question; whether Polixenes and Hermione behave as if reassured; in what forms, what pairs, what family units the characters exit the stage.64

III. I conclude this chapter by asking who authored the statues of Hermione and the Lady, in multiple senses of the words ‘author’: source, originator, creator, prompter, ruler. By painting the Lady, the Tyrant imagines he creates the Lady 2. 0, an immortal beloved he can then rule, although his fantasy requires what he can never attain – the willing consent of a corpse. The Tyrant’s plans go awry via the agency of his rival Govianus, who turns the Lady into a painted instrument of revenge. The Lady’s soul authorises Govianus’s revenge, and checks him when his own handling of her body becomes inappropriately reverent. With respect to Hermione, the nod to Julio Romano’s artistry helps authenticate the statue and sustain the fiction of the disguise, but Paulina, the ‘mankind witch’ who presides over the ceremony of resurrection and reconciliation, also expresses ownership of the statue: ‘if I had thought the sight of my poor image / Would thus have wrought you – for the stone is mine – / I’d not have showed it’ (5. 3. 57–9). Many readers take Leontes to have ‘authored’ the statue of Hermione – his denial of his wife turned her to stone and his acknowledgement of her, and the injury he did to her, revives her. Hermione tells us that she has ‘preserved’ herself in the hopes of reuniting with her lost ‘issue’, and her insistence upon her own authority may be viewed as a positive expression of the notion that a painted woman ‘is her owne creatrisse’. And finally, we must consider the two authors, Middleton and Shakespeare – each of whom authorise each other’s creations, given the plays’ conceptual and theatrical affiliations, and each of whom are authorised by the other sources they drew upon and, indeed, by a theatrical culture founded upon repetition, revision, citation, and allusion: Ovid, prose romances, sermons against idolatry, revenge tragedies featuring poisoned kisses, and of course dramatic practices going back to the ‘dawn of English theater’ and preserved in the materials of theatre:

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the cycle pageants of resurrection, recognition, and Transfiguration, the Easter visit of the three women to Christ’s empty tomb.

Notes  1. Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, p. 138.  2. I have used Lancashire’s edition of Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, although I also refer readers to Julia Brigg’s recent edition of the play under the title The Lady’s Tragedy in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Taylor, Lavagnino and Jackson. Briggs proposes that ‘Middleton wrote this play to be performed by the King’s Men at their indoor theatre at Blackfriars, late in 1611’, p. 834. Ros King suggests that Shakespeare wrote the play ‘for performance at court in the winter of 1610–1611’. The earliest reference to a first performance of The Winter’s Tale is Simon Foreman’s account of having seen the play performed at the Globe in May 1611; notably, he does not mention the statue scene. See King, Shakespeare Handbooks: The Winter’s Tale, pp. 1–3.  3. Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, p. 72.   4. Barkan, ‘Living Sculptures’, pp. 639–67.   5. See 3. 1. 184, 4. 3, and 5. 2. On ‘corpse-­infatuation’, see the introduction to Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, ed. Lancashire, p. 27.   6. Wiggins (ed.), Four Revenge Sex Tragedies, p. xiv. Lancashire locates the play’s affiliation with earlier religious and allegorical drama ‘. . . in the generic and otherwise significant names of the characters (for example, Lady and Wife), in the unlocalised scene, in the moral counterpointing not only of main plot and subplot but also of specific characters, in the frequent occurrence of general moral criticisms common in homiletic works (attacks on, for example, cosmetics, fine clothes, courtiers, and the lusts of women)’ in her edition of Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, p. 39.   7. Lancashire, p. 40.   8. So too does the Tyrant wish to torment Govianus both body and soul: ‘Thy banishment were gentle, were that all. / But, t’afflict thy soul, before thou goest / Thou shalt behold the heav’n that thou must lose, / In her that must be mine’ (1. 1. 103–6).  9. Frye, The Secular Scripture, p. 86. 10. See also Neill, Issues of Death, p. 308. Lancashire speculates that the property ‘must have been fairly large and elaborate’, possibly with a ‘movable top or side’, although of course the property could simply be any stone-­like object capable of being placed in front of the discovery space, which would then, once the stone was removed, signify as the tomb’s ‘interior’ (indeed, the Tyrant’s instruction to the Soldier to ‘place you the stone again where first we found it’ suggests this latter possibility, 4. 3. 128). A number of early modern plays call for coffins or tombs, and Williamson argues persuasively that these properties represent important points of continuity with pre-­Reformation drama: ‘Tomb properties were a regular feature of the so-­ called mystery plays, which depicted Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. Practically speaking, these properties had to be large and stable enough to

­150    Inventions of the Skin house an adult male . . . under the right conditions, the use of tomb properties opens up a new “structure of feeling” based on the interplay between absence and presence, but also on the productive tension between the Catholic past and the secularized present’; Williamson, The Materiality of Religion, p. 36. 11. Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, p. 20. 12. Acknowledging the tendency of stone to seep water, this figurative description also evokes the mythological Niobe, whose grief over her lost children transforms her into a rock that continuously sheds tears (so too does Govianus, holding the Lady’s dead body, address her as a ‘fountain of weeping honour’). 13. Julia Briggs, headnote to The Lady’s Tragedy, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Taylor, Lavagnino and Jackson, p. 834. 14. Karim-­Cooper, Cosmetics, pp. 174, 177. 15. Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse, p. 102. 16. Karim-­Cooper, Cosmetics, p.138. 17. See Briggs, The Lady’s Tragedy in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Taylor, Lavagnino and Jackson, p. 837; see also Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness on Middleton’s take on the trope of resurrection, pp. 138–40, especially p. 139. 18. The text does not indicate whether the Lady rises from the tomb or suddenly appears beside him. 19. Book IV, Summa contra Gentiles, trans. Charles O’Neill (Notre Dame: University of Indiana Press, 1975), p. 79. Discussed in Davis, ‘Traditional Christian Belief in the Resurrection of the Body’, p. 325. 20. Provocatively, the Tyrant’s description of this glowing body also recalls the Wife’s narrative of herself as standing at her window bathed in moonlight, ‘cold’, ‘thinly clad’, her own painted face glistering under candlelight as she confesses to the Blackfriars audience her erotic longing. 21. I wish to pause on the direction ‘stuck with jewels’. Most readers take this to mean that the Lady appears wearing jewels, but given the adhesive properties of paint, stones or sequins could be applied to the painted face and would then stick as the paint dried. Surely this method offers a striking way to represent the glorious body. 22. See Burns, Christian Mortalism; see also Henry, ‘Milton and Hobbes’, pp. 234–49. On the topics of death, resurrection, and mortalism, see also Marshall, Last Things and Last Plays, and Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse as well as her article ‘Animating Matter: The Corpse as Idol in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy’, pp. 215–43. 23. Article XL of the Forty-­Two Articles of the Church of England (1553). 24. Cited and discussed in Marshall, Last Things, p. 45. 25. For her discussion of mortalism with respect to John Donne, see Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, pp. 8–9. 26. See Kerrigan, ‘The Heretical Milton’, pp. 125–66. 27. John Hall, ‘The Court of Virtue’ (1565); cited Kerrigan. 28. As Zimmerman points out, the very act of painting the face in full view of the audience ‘emphasises the artificiality of the corpse’s supposed sexual allure – the boy beneath the saint, the strumpet, and the woman’, The Early Modern Corpse, p. 105.

Stone     151 29. Zimmerman, ‘Animating Matter’, p. 233. 30. See Briggs, The Lady’s Tragedy in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Taylor, Lavagnino and Jackson, p. 235, for this possibility. 31. Potter and Spearing, The Sermons of John Donne, vol. 3, p. 117. 32. See also Targoff cited above in note 25. 33. Adams, The Works of Thomas Adams, vol. 2, p. 391. 34. Lopez discusses the ambiguous death of Enobarbus in his essay ‘Imagining the Actor’s Body on the Early Modern Stage’, pp. 187–203. 35. On ‘Rising Up’ see Womack, English Renaissance Drama; Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness; and Johnston, ‘The Emerging Pattern of the Easter Play in England’, pp. 3–23. 36. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, p. 224. 37. Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse, p. 182. 38. Connor, Book of Skin, p. 32. 39. In Trevor Nunn’s 1969 production, for example, Judi Dench played both parts; see King, Shakespeare Handbooks: The Winter’s Tale, p. 138, who points out the difficulty this created for the statue scene. On the history of doubling these roles, see also Bartholomeusz, The Winter’s Tale in Performance. 40. Girard, A Theatre of Envy, p. 328. 41. For Girard, this is an important moral victory: ‘Unless we see this uncanny repetition of Leontes’ most dreadful experience, we will fail to understand why he comes so close to stumbling a second time; we will not feel the sympathy that, for the first time, he deserves’, A Theatre of Envy, p. 328. As Cavell has pointed out, this recuperation of vision has political, and not just personal, ramifications: ‘Always seen as a matter essential to the flourishing state, recognizing (legitimizing) one’s child now appears as a matter essential to individual sanity, a discovery begun perhaps in Hamlet and developed in Lear’, Disowning Knowledge, p. 204. For a general discussion of the figure of the ‘tyrant’, see Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants. 42. For his detailed discussions of Giulio Romano, see especially Sokol’s fascinating chapter on ‘Julio’s Tale’ in Art and Illusion in The Winter’s Tale, pp. 85–115; see also King, Shakespeare Handbooks, pp. 108–9, and Salingar, Dramatic Form, pp. 7–8. 43. Vasari, qtd King, Shakespeare Handbooks, p. 109. 44. On Aretino’s reputation in England, see Daileader, ‘Back Door Sex’, pp. 303–34. 45. There is no way of knowing, alas, whether statue-­Hermione is painted differently from how she appeared before – more vividly, or with more thickly applied colour, or with more whiteface underneath to simulate her ‘stoniness’; since those who see her insist that she is uncannily life-­like for a statue, perhaps not. Leontes does comment on the statue’s ‘wrinkles’, although again it is unclear whether he is simply ‘eking out’ in words the notion of her having aged or describing an actual visual difference between the Hermione of the first three acts and the Hermione of the fifth: cosmetically-­engineered signs of aging that would also distinguish Hermione from that copy of her, Perdita, since both would have been played by young men. 46. See Smith’s discussion of touch throughout Phenomenal Shakespeare,

­152    Inventions of the Skin especially his chapter on ‘Touching Moments’; see also the volume Sensible Flesh, ed. Harvey, especially Harvey’s introduction. 47. Sokol, Art and Illusion in The Winter’s Tale, p. 77. 48. Ibid. 49. O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, p. 141, his emphasis. 50. Montrose, ‘The Purpose of Playing’, p. 62; Montrose’s claim is also discussed in O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, p. 142. See also Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, p. 128. 51. Wickham, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage, p. 264. 52. Ibid. p. 264. See also Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, pp. 135–8. 53. I am here paraphrasing a passage from Rayner quoted in Chapter 1; for the original quote see Ghosts, p. xxiii. 54. See Pollard’s chapter on the ‘Theatre of Seduction’ in her Drugs and Theatre. 55. Knapp, ‘Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale’, p. 254. 56. Edward Guilpin, Satire 2 from Skialetheia (1598); Hamlet, 3. 2. 137–8; Homily Against the Peril of Idolatry. 57. Tuke, A Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing. 58. Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, p. 130. 59. Traub, Desire And Anxiety, pp. 45–6. See also Dolan, ‘Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand’, who argues that Hermione ‘enables a comic resolution because she is not presented as an agent; the troublesome issue of female artistic agency is sidestepped through the interventions of Paulina and Romano’, p. 228. 60. See Cavell, Disowning Knowledge; see also Maus, Inwardness and Theater. 61. Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, pp. 125–6. 62. For Bishop, ‘Sexual inventiveness, it seems, creates out of its own – human – energy a correspondent impulse into fiction and theatre’, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, p. 156. 63. The phrase is Yachnin’s; see ‘Personations: The Taming of the Shrew’. 64. See also King’s discussion of this moment, Shakespeare Handbooks: The Winter’s Tale, p. 76.

Epilogue

If body is always deep but deepest at its surface. Anne Carson, from ‘Seated Figure With Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin’

It has been the aim of this book to challenge the narrative of Shakespeare’s ‘bare’ stage by looking at what I called the ‘ground zero’ of early modern theatrical representation: the body of the actor. The study began out of a sense of the possibilities of colour, out of a conviction that the special effects I discuss were commercially important as well as poetically resonant as well as sensually impressive – as well as theatrically useful in the representation, within drama, of stage characters who appear to possess depth and complexity. That is, to attend to the cosmeticised actor is to discern a specific vocabulary of inwardness that, once noted, opens up important and often unexpected connections amongst plays. Whether coloured red, white, or black, whether shown bleeding or masquerading or feigning femininity, painted bodies present us with different iterations of similar affective experiences and dramatic scenarios, from a warrior’s temporary sense of his impenetrability, despite his woundedness, to a woman’s sense of her own unassailable chastity; from a lurid death mask that kills what it touches, to a painted statue that might, just might, do the same. Unlike more detachable theatrical prosthetics, paint directly incorporates the actor’s own physicality into the fiction at a time when ‘psychology and physiology were one’. It has furthermore been my argument that materials unite medieval and early modern theatre in important ways. Marvin Carlson’s deceptively simple concept of theatrical ‘ghosting’ is crucial to my approach: the view that behind props and, indeed, behind bodies themselves lurk past appearances of those props and of those bodies, where the ‘conscious recycling of a wide variety of elements from production to production’ contributes to the richness and density of theatre.1 The twin

­154    Inventions of the Skin spectres of the bloody Christ of the Passion plays and the ‘subtle’ Christ of the apparition stories haunt Coriolanus’s appearance on stage after he has been reported killed in battle. When ‘lost’ women are retrieved from within blackface disguises envisioned as temporary ‘tombs’ and when statues miraculously come to life, I see the Visitatio Sepulchri transformed in a secular setting. Reading Play 23 of the York cycle, I find ‘transfiguration’ an evocative metaphor for all dramatic transformations that articulate ‘essential’ truths using explicitly theatrical mediums. Narrated in Matthew 17: 1–9, performed by the York Curriers, sermonised by John Donne, and retold by Thomas Middleton, the episode of the Transfiguration of Christ promises something like a best-­case scenario for the body: that, after death and judgment, bodies will be reconstituted as glorious and, important, as recognisable, individuated beings. Only thus can human communities be restored: ‘What individuals share most vitally in common is the body; it is by virtue of our bodies that we belong to each other.’2 However, the painted face can also bring about the destruction of communities, for, as we have seen, paint can be used to withdraw from social life, to unmake identities, and to hasten the body’s decay. Paint’s dualism – its capacity to beautify as well as to poison – is aptly captured in the closing couplet of The Shepherds’ Paradise, now to serve as the closing couplet of this book: And when Heavens heate shall draw you to the skye May you transfigur’d not disfigur’d dye.

Notes 1. Carlson, The Haunted Stage, p. 173. 2. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 43. See also Marshall, Last Things and Last Plays.

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Index

Aasand, Hardin, 91 Adams, Thomas, 31, 54, 82n34, 134 Adelman, Janet, 51 Andreopoulos, Andreas, 21 Angelolou, Maggie, 5 Anna of Denmark, Queen, 88, 91–4, 105, 107 Anthony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 78 anticosmetic discourse, 16, 70–3, 94, 98–9, 113, 143 Antonio’s Revenge (John Marston), 57–9, 62 Anzieu, Didier, 79, 86n89 apothecaries, 104 apparition stories, 37–9; see also York cycle plays Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon, 24 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 56, 70 Augustine, Saint, 30 Bacon, Francis, 98 bare stage, myth of, 3–6, 17n9 Barish, Jonas, 73 Barkan, Leonard, 73, 123 Barkers (York guild), 27 Barrett, Robert, 27 Barroll, Leeds, 88 The Bashful Lover (Philip Massinger), 71 Batchelor, David, 1, 6 Bate, Jonathan, 136 The Battle of Alcazar (Peele), 52, 97 beauty and artifice, 13, 99, 114, 126, 146

defenses of black beauty, 96–7 English femininity, 99 of transfigured bodies, 23, 25 Beckwith, Sarah, 27, 67, 121, 141, 144 Bede, 25 Benthien, Claudia, 13 Berkeley, William (The Lost Lady), 90, 110, 120n63 Bevington, David, 92 Bishop, T. G., 34, 145, 147 blackface, 13, 15–16, 87–120 appeal for elite women, 88–91 and boy actors, 114–15 Christmas revels, 91 and colour symbolism, 92, 97 and constancy, 8, 90, 97–8, 105, 108, 112–13 death and resurrection, 113–14 and English festive disguising, 60, 91 of gypsies, 101 impact upon acting techniques, 93–4 important ‘firsts’ within English blackface performance, 89 materials of, 16, 91–3, 101, 103–4 and ‘naturalism’, 93 and Olivier, 87–8 and permanent racial change, 13, 94 as poison, 113 racial quick-changes, 106, 113–14 as resistant to adulteration, 96–8

Index     169 transferability, 87, 94 as transgressive, 88, 92, 94 blood, 11–12, 15, 49–86 affective piety, 22 ‘bier-right’, 61 of Christ, 22, 32, 39–43, 62–3 delivery devices for use in stage effects, 52, 54, 58 as emblematic in Renaissance drama, 56–7 as mask, 12, 15, 50, 60–1, 64, 70, 72 materials of, 52–4, 81n17 and mobility, 54–5 as poison, 61–2 as protective enamel, 50, 73–4 as realistic effect, 15, 22, 50–2, 64 as stylised effect, 52 vermilion, 53–4 Bloom, Harold, 78 blush and anticosmetic rhetoric, 70–1, 114 and authenticity, 19, 11, 108 black skin’s inability to blush, 97–8 in Coriolanus, 15, 49, 50 and fakery, 53–4 and shamelessness, 122 and women’s fears of self– exposure, 108 body of actor as ‘ground zero’ of performance, 6, 153 multiply layered in paint, 12, 114–15, 131 physiology and dramatic character, 9–10, 73, 79, 153 Booke of Common Prayer, 129 Bradbrook, M. C., 2 Braithwait, Richard, 71 Britland, Karen, 108–9 Brome, Richard, 90; see also The English Moor Browne, Thomas, 94 Bulwer, John, 13, 94 Burbage, Richard, 3 Burns, Norman, 22 Bushnell, Rebecca, 151n41 Butler, Judith, 49, 76, 86n83

Butler, Martin, 102 Butterworth, Philip, 53 Callaghan, Dympna, 14, 116n7 Callistus II, 24 Calvin, John, 129, 133 Carew, Sophia, 105–6 Carlson, Marvin, 153 Carpenter, Sarah, 14, 23–4, 54, 60, 93 Carson, Anne, 153 Catholicism, 15, 50–1, 58–9, 62 church as painted ‘strumpet’, 6, 54 Cavell, Stanley, 73, 76, 151n41, 144 Chambers, E. K., 53, 91 Chester, 11, 24, 42 Late Chester Banns, 31 Christ in apparition stories, 35, 37–9, 67, 154 as child, 24, 42 as Christus Rex, 37 and Crucifixion, 35, 51–3 and dual nature, 15, 23–4, 27, 33–6, 39–40, 46n54 four properties of glorious body, 30, 154 gilded, 23–4, 30, 32, 36–7, 40, 42, 66 Man of Sorrows, 40 and Passion, 21–3, 26, 32, 39, 42, 51, 53, 62, 154 and Resurrection, 22, 32, 35, 37, 41 chromophobia, 1 Connor, Steven, 3, 9, 18n15, 79, 137 Cordwainers (Chester guild), 24 York guild, 41 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 15, 49–51, 64–80, 154 changes from source in Plutarch, 49, 74–5 cosmetic discourse, 70–2 disguise, 65, 68, 72, 80n3 flaying, 66, 69 Martius, conception of his skin, 79–80 Martius, like Christ, 67

­170    Inventions of the Skin Christ (cont.) Martius, like Jove’s statue, 72, 76 pity, 67–8, 75–8 Corpus Christi plays, 6, 11, 22, 43, 66; see also York cycle plays cosmetics, 3 crucial element of stage design, 14, 16, 50 lyric poetry, 96 painted men, 71 remedy for frailty of skin, 73 as toxic, 10, 19n39, 54, 61–2, 112–13, 121, 131, 142, 148, 154 see also paint Crooke, Helkiah, 9, 76 Crouch, David, 36 Crucifixion, 22, 35, 51–3; see also York cycle plays Cupid’s Revenge (Fletcher), 56 Curriers (York guild), 14, 23, 28, 30, 34, 36, 154 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 4, 147 Cynthia’s Revels (Jonson), 5 Daileader, Celia, 140 Davidson, Clifford, 22, 41, 47n72, 51 Dawson, Anthony, 9, 63 de Grazia, Margreta, 3 Dekker, Thomas, 101 Dessen, Alan, 55–6, 62, 82n26 The Devil’s Law Case (Webster), 88 Diehl, Huston, 56, 62, 82n29 disguise, 7, 9, 24, 59, 121, 131 blackface, 6, 15–16, 88–90, 93–4, 98, 101, 104–8, 110–14, 116n13, 154 blood, 6, 15, 59–61, 65 and Christ, 32–3, 42–3 paint, 12, 121–2, 140, 148 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 9 Dolan, Frances, 10, 14, 144 Donne, John, 5, 133, 154 Dorrell, Margaret, 24, 40 Drew-Bear, Annette, 19n49 Duffy, Eamonn, 8, 41, 43n9 The Duke of Milan (Massinger), 61, 142

Eagleton, Terry, 154 Elements of English Architecture, 5; see also Wotton, Sir Henry Elias, Norbert, 9 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 5 Enders, Jody, 12 The English Moor (Brome), 55, 90 The Entry into Jerusalem (Chester), 24; see also York cycle plays Epicoene (Jonson), 5, 141 Epp, Garrett, 40 Escolme, Bridget, 8, 18n28, 49 Every Man in his Humour (Jonson), 102 face as centre of self, 60 and human communities, 154 mask a ‘nonface’, 32 painted face as sign of alterity, 143–4 recognition from the ‘other’, 7, 123, 143–4 Felski, Rita, 14 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 31 Fisher, Will, 14, 85n65 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 97, 116n17, 117n31, 118n Foakes, R. A; see also Henslowe’s ‘diary’ Freud, Sigmund, 76 Frye, Northrop, 124 Gager, William, 58 Gatton, John Spalding, 22, 51 ghost costume and makeup, 107, 110, 119n57, 129, 132 of Fidamira in The Shepherds’ Paradise, 107, 110 of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, 136 and interiority, 137 of the Lady in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 128–9, 132 of Milesia in The Lost Lady, 110–12 and the phenomenology of recognition, 35

Index     171 and tombs, 111, 128 Gibson, Gail McMurray, 22, 41 Girard, René, 139, 151n Globe Theatre (sixteenth century), 4 New Globe Theatre, London, 52, 81n16–17 Goffe, Thomas, 58–9, 62; see also The Tragedy of Orestes goldface, 6, 14, 23–4, 31, 66, 143; see also Christ: gilded gilt or gilding, 3, 15, 23–4, 30–2, 36, 40, 42, 77 idols, 6, 66 materials, 30–3 Golding, Arthur, 66–7, 122; see also Ovid Gossett, Suzanne, 93, 118n39 Gosson, Stephen, 4 Grant, Patrick, 22 Granville-Baker, Harley, 69 Gréban, Arnould, 23 Greene, Robert, 54, 136, 135 Gross, Kenneth, 69, 86n85, 122 Gurr, Andrew, 52, 91 The Gypsies Metamorphosed (Jonson), 16, 88–9, 100–5 race quick-change, 104–5 removable blackface paint, 89, 116n12 Hall, Kim F., 93, 96 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 1–2, 10, 58, 67, 69, 78, 123 1603 compared to 1623 printing, 1–2 and Pyrrhus, 1–2, 7, 67 Happé, Peter, 23, 44n17 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 14 Harvey, Elizabeth, 140, 152n46 Haydocke, Richard, 19n39 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, 89, 105–8, 110, 113 Henry, Nathaniel H., 129 Henslowe’s ‘diary’, 93 Herbert, Edward, 96 Heywood, Thomas, 2 Hilary of Poitiers, 33 Hillman, David, 9

Histrio-Mastix, 83n35, 90, 113; see also Prynne, William ‘homo clausus’, 9 Hume, Robert, and ‘production analysis’, 43n15 Hunter, G. K., 58 Hyland, Peter, 72 impregnability, 2, 15, 73, 79, 108 and blackface, 79 and blood, 2, 15, 73, 79 of statues, 123 interiority in blackface performance, 94, 98 in Coriolanus, 73, 79 of ghosts, 137 of painted bodies in Renaissance drama see paint: stage characters of statues, 122–3 visibility of at the Last Judgment, 40 Iyengar, Sujata, 85n67 Jagendorf, Zvi, 73 James I, King of England, 16, 102, 104 James IV (Robert Greene), 136 James, Susan, 18n25 Jeamson, Thomas, 73 Jesus Christ see Christ Jesus and the Doctors in the Temple (Chester cycle), 24, 42 John, Gospel of, 26, 142 Johnston, Alexandra F., 24, 40, 151n35 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 14 Jones, Eldred, 93 Jones, Inigo, 4, 93, 105 Jonson, Ben, 5, 16, 54–5, 88–95, 99–105, 115; see also Cynthia’s Revels; Every Man in his Humour; The Gypsies Metamorphosed; The Masque of Blackness Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 49, 57, 141 Justice, Alan, 30

­172    Inventions of the Skin Karim-Cooper, Farah, 14, 55, 93, 127 Keifer, Frederick, 5 Kerrigan, William, 130 King Lear (Shakespeare), 49, 72 King, Pamela, 24 King, Ros, 140, 149n2 Kirschbaum, Leo, 52 Knapp, James A., 143 Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont and Fletcher), 136 Knight, G. Wilson, 49 Kolve, V. A., 52 Korda, Natasha, 4, 14, 17n8–9, 54 Lancashire, Anne, 123–4, 127, 134, 149n10 Lantern and Candlelight, 101 The Last Judgment, 15, 23–5, 36, 39, 40, 92 glorified bodies at, 25, 133 painted women judged at, 71, 143 see also York cycle plays: Doomsday Lee, Dorothy, 25 Lent, 24 Leo I, 22, 25 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 143 Lin, Erika, 50 Lockyer, Roger, 102 Look About You (Anon), 15, 50, 59–64 Lopez, Jeremy, 135 The Lost Lady (Berkeley), 16, 90, 110–15 and racial quick-change, 113–14 and resurrection, 114 as romance, 114 and threat of female actor, 113–15 Love, Nicholas, 26 Lucerne, 32 Luke, gospel of, 21–2, 26, 134 Lust’s Dominion (Anon), 88 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 2, 49, 57, 60, 66–7, 78, 123 McGuckin, John, 22, 43n6 Mâle, Emile, 23, 46n45 Mark, gospel of, 21–2

Marlowe, Christopher, 2, 9; see also Doctor Faustus; Tamburlaine Marshall, Cynthia, 66, 78, 84n54, 129, 154 Mary Magdalene, 12, 35, 37–9, 42, 67, 142 Mary, mother of God, 36 masks of blood, 12, 15, 50, 60–1, 64, 70, 72 in cultic or ritual theater, 31–2 death-mask in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 131, 153 gold masks in cycle drama, 23, 31; see also goldface Late Chester Banns, 31 as prosthetic device compared to paint, 9, 32, 93 The Masque of Blackness (Jonson), 16, 88–100, 104–5, 107–8, 141 defence of black beauty, 96–7 influence on later court performances, 89–90, 105 Inigo Jones drawing, 93 materials of blackface, 91–4 Peacham drawing, 93 race quick-change, 93, 99–100 masques, 83n41, 108–9 criticism of, 90, 113 and elite women performers, 88–90, 93–4, 105, 109 of Moors, 91; see also blackface Matthew, gospel of, 14, 21–2, 24, 26, 134 Maus, Katharine, 7, 64 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 146 Meditationes Vitae Christi, 26 metatheatricality, 9, 13, 15, 57, 82n23 of blood, 62–3 in pageant of The Transfiguration of Christ, 24, 36, 41 of paint effects applied in full view of the audience, 7, 13, 50, 57, 90, 122 Mellurin, Thomas Sr. and Thomas Jr., 11–12, 15; see also painters Menzer, Paul, 65

Index     173 Mercers (York guild), 27, 36, 39, 53 Doomsday indenture, 23, 44n20 Meredith, Peter, 12, 14, 31, 32, 33, 53 Mickel, Leslie, 91 Middleton, Thomas, 15, 121, 123, 129, 133–4, 142, 148, 149n2, 154; see also The Revenger’s Tragedy; The Second Maiden’s Tragedy Milhous, Judith, and ‘production analysis’, 43n15 Milton, John, 130 Modane, 11 Montagu, Walter, 16, 81, 105; see also The Shepherds’ Paradise Montrose, Louis, 141 mortalism, 129–30, 133 Muir, Lynette, 24, 41, 43n14 Mullaney, Steven, 4 Munro, Lucy, 81n16 Neill, Michael, 69, 126 Netzloff, Mark, 101 North, Sir Thomas, 49; see also Plutarch O’Connell, Michael, 141 Olivier, Laurence, 78, 87–8, 115n5 Ordo Paginarum, 27 Ovid, 148 Art of Love and advice for facepainting, 13 Marsyas, 66 Metamorphoses, 66, 122–3, 136 Propoetides, 122–3 Pygmalion, 122–3 see also Arthur Golding; statues Owens, Margaret, 51 paint death, 2, 6, 11, 16, 96, 98, 111, 122, 131, 134 definition of, 3 dualism of, 154 gender, 11, 14, 90, 114–15, 122, 131, 134 ghostliness, 16, 107, 110, 119n57, 123, 127, 134

identicality, 132, 134 luminosity, 16, 23, 30, 44n23, 127 prosthetic, 2, 9, 93, 153 race see blackface as second skin, 2–3, 73, 79, 109 stage characters and interiority, 3, 6–10, 32, 50, 63–4, 72–3, 114, 122 and stage design, 14, 16, 50 transferability, 140–1 see also blackface; blood; cosmetics; goldface; whiteface painters as disguise in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 131 instructions to in medieval drama, 11, 32, 53 labour of, 11–12, 51 stage violence, 51–3 York guild, 52 Palfrey, Simon, 74 Passion, 21–3, 26, 32, 39, 42, 62, 154 plays of, continental Europe, 23, 32, 53 plays of, England, 41, 51–3 Paster, Gail Kern, 9, 17n4, 18n26, 65 Peacham sketch of Titus Andronicus, 93 Peele, George, 97; see also The Battle of Alcazar Peter, gospel of, 21, 44n24, 46n50 The Play of the Sacrament (Croxton), 53 Pleij, Herman, 4 Plutarch, 49, 74–5 The Politician (Shirley), 15, 50, 59 paint as poison trope, 62 sources, 83n46 as tragicomedy, 83n46 use of blood as a mask, 60–2 Pollard, Tanya, 14, 64, 94 posthumous love, 130, 134–5 Potter, Lois, 120n63 Poynting, Sarah, 105–6 ‘problem of other minds’, 7, 122–3, 143–4 on Doomsday, 40 Propoetides, 122–3

­174    Inventions of the Skin prosthetics, 87, 93 paint as unruly prosthetic, 12–13 Protestantism and ‘bare’ stage, 4 status of body after death and before resurrection, 129, 134 Prynne, William, 83n35, 90; see also Histrio-Max Purgatory, 129 Pygmalion, 122–3 quem queritas, trope of, 41, 141–2, 149, 154 in York cycle plays, 37 Quilligan, Maureen, 3 Randall, Dale, 118n41 Rayner, Alice, 35, 38, 142 Reformation, 6, 7, 12, 31, 62, 66; see also bare stage, myth of Resurrection, 6, 16, 121, 148–9; see also Christ: in apparition stories of Christ, 22, 23, 25–6, 33, 35, 129, 133, 141–2 in Coriolanus, 67 in The Lost Lady, 114 in medieval drama, 15, 23, 32, 37–8, 41 ‘rising up’ in Renaissance drama, 136 in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 129, 133–4 in The Winter’s Tale, 141–2, 147 The Revenger’s Tragedy (Middleton), 61, 142 Reynolds, George Fullmer, 50, 52 Rich, Barnabe, 16, 134 Richard III (Shakespeare), 61, 87 Ripley, John, 69 Robinson, Richard, 132, 140 The Roman Actor (Massinger), 56 Romano, Giulio and ‘Julio’, 140, 148 Rudlin, John, 118n37 Rumler, John Wolfgang, 104 Saddlers (York guild), 36 Sanders, Eve Rachele, 80n3 Schiller, Gertrud, 22 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 10

The Scourging (Towneley), 21, 42 The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (Middleton), 123–34 idolatry, 25, 127, 132 management of costume and makeup changes, 132; see also whiteface mortalism, 129–30, 133–4 painting of corpse, 131–2 poisoned kiss, 131–2 posthumous love, 134 relationship of body to soul, 129–30, 133–4 transfiguration, 129–30, 132, 150n21 violation of Lady’s tomb, 125–7 Seneca, 58 Shakespeare, William, 2–4, 6, 12, 15, 16, 59, 64, 72, 74, 75, 78, 121, 135, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148, 153; see also Anthony and Cleopatra; As You Like It; Coriolanus; Cymbeline; Hamlet; King Lear; Macbeth; Richard III; The Winter’s Tale Shapiro, Michael, 64 Shepherd, Simon, 6, 26 The Shepherds’ Paradise (Montagu), 16, 89, 90, 94, 105–10, 154 equation of blackness with constancy, 108 gossip surrounding, 90, 106, 113 management of racial quickchange, 106–7, 119n57 vehicle for elite women, 109–10 Shirley, James, 59–60; see also The Politician Siddiqi, Yumna, 99 Smith, Bruce R., 4, 8, 67, 140 Smith, Ian, 97 Smith, Maggie, 87 Sofer, Andrew, 9, 14, 51 Sokol, B. J., 5–6, 141 ‘Sonnet of Black Beauty’, 96 The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 51, 55 Spinrad, Phoebe, 57–8 Sponsler, Clare, 51, 91 Stallybrass, Peter, 3, 14 Stanzaic Life of Christ, 26

Index     175 States, Bert O., 9, 63 statues Aldgate civic statues, 5 bodies transformed into statues, 10, 79 in Coriolanus, 72–3, 76 effigy of the Lady in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 126 of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, 8, 12, 17, 121, 135, 139, 140–8, 151n45 indeterminacy of, 134 interiority of, 73, 85n, 123 Julius Caesar, 57 paintedness of, 5, 140, 151n Stern, Tiffany, 3, 4, 52, 56 Stevens, Andrea R., 116n12, 116n13 Stevens, Martin, 36 Stevenson, Kenneth, 22 stoniness, 6, 122–3, 140, 144; see also impregnability; statues Stow, John, 5 Stubbes, Phillip, 3, 12, 94 Survay of London, 5 Swanson, Heather, 23 Tabor, Mt., 21, 24, 26, 36 Tailby, John E., 12, 14, 31, 32, 33, 53 Tailors (York guild), 39 Tamburlaine (Marlowe), 2 tapestries painted arrases, 4 stage hangings, 4, 8, 56 Targoff, Ramie, 130, 133 Tertullian, 25, 46n54, 83n35 Theweleit, Klaus, 2, 79 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 23, 129 Thomas à Becket, Saint, 53 Thomson, Leslie, 55 tiring house, 55 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 6, 71, 97 tombs blackface disguise imagined as ‘tomb’, 114, 154 stage properties, 111, 124–8, 149n Tomlinson, Sophie, 105–6, 113, 119n55

touch, 3, 37, 49, 78 and noli mi tangere trope, 8, 12, 38–9, 135, 141–2 paint making visible the act of touching, 87, 94, 141–1 Towneley, 21, 42 The Tragedy of Locrine (Anon.), 56 The Tragedy of Orestes (Thomas Goffe), 57–8, 62–3 Transfiguration as best-case scenario for the body, 154 in early English art, 22 as epiphany of the trinity, 25 Gospel narratives of, 21–2 painted by Raphael, 140 in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 121, 128–30, 132–4 see also York cycle plays: The Transfiguration of Christ Traub, Valerie, 8, 144 Tuke, Thomas, 71, 73, 94, 143 Twycross, Meg, 14, 23, 24, 40, 54, 60, 93 Tydeman, William, 24, 28, 44n20 Tyndale, William, 130 Vaughan, Virginia Mason, 88, 91, 93 vermilion, 53–5, 71, 82n23 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 88–90, 100–5 ‘virgin-baiting’, 124 Visitatio Sepulchri, 154 Walsh, Martin, 28, 34 A Warning for Faire Women (Anon), 55 Webster, John, 2, 88; see also The Devil’s Law Case; The White Devil Wheeler, David, 75, 79 The White Devil (Webster), 88 White, Eileen, 27 whiteface, 121–52 corpses, 121, 126 luminosity of, 126–7, 129 materials of, 127 statues, 121–3, 126 Wickham, Glynne, 141–2

­176    Inventions of the Skin Wiggins, Martin, 91, 123, 132 Williams, Stephen, 23 Williamson, Elizabeth, 149n10 Winedrawers (York guild), 38, 142 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 135–49 death of Hermione, 135 idolatry, 141 noli mi tangere trope, 141–2 quem queritas trope, 141–2 resurrection, 136 as revenge tragedy, 136 wrinkles, 151n45 Wisdom Who Is Christ, 92 Womack, Peter, 6, 9, 12, 55, 56, 136 Woolf, Rosemary, 36 Wotton, Sir Henry, 5 Wright, Thomas, 7 Yachnin, Paul, 9, 63, 147 York, city of audience, 26, 35, 42 pageant route, 27–8 York cycle plays The Agony and the Betrayal, 41

The Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalen, 37–8, 142 The Ascension, 28, 39, 42 The Assumption of the Virgin, 28 The Creation of the Angels and the Fall of Lucifer, 27 The Crucifixion, 51–2 Doomsday, 23, 27–8, 39, 40–2 Doubting Thomas, 37–8, 42 The Entry into Jerusalem, 27, 36 The Feast in the House of Simon, 27 The Harrowing of Hell, 33, 36, 42 The Resurrection, 37 The Temptation of Christ in the Desert, 27, 36, 42 The Transfiguration of Christ, 14–15, 21–43 The Travelers to Emmaus, 35, 37, 67 York Minster, 41 Zimmerman, Susan, 63, 127, 131, 150n28