| "Skin Theaters: The Epistemology of Paint in Early Modern Drama" embraces theater history, early modern discourses of embodiment, and performance theory to investigate a central element of early modern spectacle: theatrical paint, or the cosmetics applied to the skin of dramatic actors. Far from considering paint a negligible element of drama, early modern defenders and detractors of the stage alike imagined it as the essence of theatricality. Recent critical re-evaluations of the significance of stage properties (Peter Stallybrass and Rosalind Jones's Clothing and the Materials of Memory; Natasha Korda and Jonathan Gil Harris's Staged Properties), however, have neglected to consider paint either as a property with its own economic and material histories, or as a vehicle for some of early modern theater's most important metamorphoses.;I conceive this project as joining the archival-based methodologies of theater history and the more speculative theories of early modern embodiment and emotions, in addition to complementing performance-oriented studies of theatrical conventions. Throughout the period and in an array of dramatic circumstances, theatrical paint transforms healthy players into bloodied bodies, white players into Africans, and living players into gods, ghosts, and damned soul. As I focus on three particular instances of paint effects---blood, blackness, and divinity---I consider a wide range of discourses and theatrical practices that bear on the use of paint onstage: antitheatrical pamphlets, anticosmetic tracts, medieval festal disguise, and early modern medical and philosophical writing on drugs, medicines, and bodies.;Paint's role as a medium of disguise or large-scale physical transformation is therefore at the heart of this project, particularly in cases where such transformations are shown onstage or where bodies change radically over the course of a single performance. I suggest paint's onstage application and removal work in varying dramatic registers to foster effects of depth even as these moments advertise a theatrical company's prowess with special effects: in the cases I discuss, paint is an obvious commercial draw, in particular with respect to quick changes involving blackface. Recognizing drama's constant metadramatic engagement with this (often unwieldy) dimension of its own materiality provides a clarifying perspective on the early modern theater's inventions of interiority, psychological plenitude, and cultural difference. Perhaps more important (especially for those of us who persist in imagining a "bare" early modern stage), considering early modern special effects allows us to contemplate the shaping influence of the material conditions of theater-to question the relationships that obtain among visual effects, forms of theatrical and poetic authority, playhouse practices, and the scripts that have come down to us as authoritative "texts."... |
