Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage

The Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions

Annette Drew-Bear

1994
$65.00
ISBN 1611480719

This is the first book to show how the painted face functioned as theatrical signal in Renaissance drama. Explaining the connection between red, white, and black makeup and sexual sin, devilish seduction, and poison, Annette Drew-Bear surveys how Renaissance dramatists used face-paint in tragedy to express a wide range of social, political, and sexual corruption. She also shows that in Renaissance comedy, playwrights exploited the many bawdy meanings of fucus, or cosmetic paint, to dramatize that "theres knauery in dawbing."

Drew-Bear argues that both on the stage and in society, the painted face was seen in moral terms. To understand the significance of face-painting in Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists, modern readers need to recover the convention of seeing a painted face as revealing an internal moral state. Demonstrating that stage face-painting conventions grew out of moral treatises, sermons, and social custom, Drew-Bear traces the origin of symbolic patterns of facial adornment and deformity in Medieval and Tudor drama. She shows how Ben Jonson developed his own satiric version of the cosmetic or fucus scene in six of his plays to dramatize the hypocrisy of both men and women. Shakespeare used red, white and black painted faces in typically more complex and richly ironic ways than his contemporaries.

About the author:

Annette Drew-Bear is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Jefferson College.