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  • Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama
  • Patricia Phillippy
Farah Karim-Cooper. Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. x + 221 pp. 17plates. $80.00.

In this engaging book, Farah Karim-Cooper studies the polemical, discursive, and material aspects of the early modern "cosmetic culture" in England, and then displays remarkable intelligence and insight as she explores this culture's reflections in and impact on the period's drama, including plays by Middleton, Jonson, Webster, and Shakespeare. Although this is not the first critical attempt to locate the place and define the role of cosmetics in early modern drama, it is certainly the most thorough and convincing. Karim-Cooper's interest in material culture supports and supplements her readings of the plays with fascinating commentary on "a cultural phenomenon that would gesture towards monarchy, death, art, poetry, race and gender" (32).

Tracing the complex connections between acts of self-fashioning in the cosmetic culture and on the early modern stage, Karim-Cooper builds upon previous studies (particularly those of Annette Drew-Bear and Tanya Pollard), but qualifies them as well. 1Karim-Cooper's exhaustive research expands Drew-Bear's already large pool of primary sources, which she handles with a critical subtlety that surpasses her predecessor. Karim-Copper assumes, rather than argues, that cosmetics were a common feature of early modern players' appearance onstage. Despite the paucity of documentary evidence supporting the claim that actors used cosmetics (as the author reasons, cosmetics could have been owned by individual players rather than by the company), Karim-Cooper surveys the frequent associations of painting and acting within the early modern cosmetic debate, and goes on to explore the various ways in which making up and the cultural attitudes attending it permeated the early modern English stage. In the course of this discussion, she produces fresh interpretations of familiar moments, scenes, and passages in these plays that take on new richness and [End Page 389]resonance when set in relation to the nascent beauty industry of the period. Parting ways with Pollard, moreover, Karim-Cooper argues for a "cosmetic restoration" (67) on the Jacobean stage in which plays do not merely echo the anticosmetic sentiments common in early modern (particularly Protestant) polemics, but re-evaluate and appropriate the self-creation implicit in women's making up to empower the male playwright. "Appropriated by dramatists," she writes, "and popularised by the stage, the cosmetic materials, language and face painting scenes enraptured audiences" (32) while enabling playwrights to foreground questions of art and nature, truth and falsehood, inward mind and outward show; issues intimately bound to theatrical representation and shared by the early modern culture of cosmetics.

The substantial payoff of Karim-Cooper's approach comes in six excellent chapters, each studded with moments of brilliance, insight, and revelation. Karim-Cooper demonstrates that the aging or deceased body of the painted queen, Elizabeth I, informs theatrical treatments of women's painting and cosmetics not only in relatively obvious cases such as Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy(where Vindice paints the skull of the dead Gloriana), but also in Hamlet. In a fine examination of the closet scene, she maintains that "[c]ultural fantasies about the objects of Elizabeth's own closet are in play" (191) and argues that in the play more generally, "Shakespeare meditates upon the meanings of paintedness, representation and theatricality, while he explores political questions and anxieties that may be rooted in cultural imaginings about the ageing body of the Queen of England" (195–96). Jonson's treatment of women's painting in The Devil is an Assand Epicoenedoes not merely echo anticosmetic polemicists, Karim-Cooper argues, but offers a topography of the seventeenth-century London market economy, in which women were powerful consumers, and indexes anxieties about foreign infiltration rampant in the early modern beauty industry, tied to and manifested in "a discourse of [cosmetic] ingredients" (112) evident in Jonson's works. In The Duchess of Malfiand The White Devil, "Webster demonstrates the ways in which cosmetic metaphors and materials link themselves neatly to contemporary epistemological discourses, thus providing an intellectual framework for his theatrical and artistic expression" (109). Cosmetic metaphors...

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