Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (review)

In this accessible, lively, and engaging book, Farah Karim-Cooper sets out to establish and define "a distinct culture of cosmetics" (4), placing her study "within a critical discourse centred upon the materials and material practices of early modern English culture" (6). Her focus on "female cosmetic practice" (23) in relation to cultural materialism and the links she makes between cosmetics and "questions about gender, art, theatre, race and politics" (6) distinguish her work from my own Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage (1994), which examines how the painted faces of both women and men function as theatrical signals in Renaissance drama. Karim-Cooper's focus is more far-ranging, so that she goes beyond the moral meaning of cosmetics to argue paradoxically for their positive functions. She succeeds for the most part in conducting a "comprehensive enough analysis of what can be termed the early modern culture of cosmetics and how it impacted upon the contemporary world of drama" (1–2), although her study would have been even more comprehensive had she not omitted significant attention to male face-painting.

Karim-Cooper argues in chapter 3, "Cosmetic Restoration in Jacobean Tragedy," that in Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy and Second Maiden's Tragedy, "cosmetic paint . . . becomes a cleansing agent for the political body and a meta-theatrical device used to revalue cosmetic materiality within a theatrical context" (67). In The Second Maiden's Tragedy, "the use of cosmetics as political medicine expunges its associations with moral impurity" (67). In this play and in The Revenger's Tragedy, Queen Elizabeth's "body is exhumed and the two dead ladies in these plays memorialise her political legacy by recalling the late queen's own theatrical display of cosmetic paint to exert her unique brand of political potency" (68).

The author's materialist approach to cosmetic signifiers suits what she terms the "contradictory construction of femininity within Webster's plays" (90), so that chapter 4, "John Webster and the Culture of Cosmetics," provides a range of striking insights. She explores what she terms the "epistemological basis" for "Webster's cosmetic imagery" (98): "images of art, Catholicism, witchcraft, traps, food, death, disease, medicine, skin, the body, colour, ships, tombs and effigies, nature, and animals," all of which "are images that in some way speak to the contemporary discourse on cosmetics" (98) and open up our understanding of the links between his cosmetic imagery and contemporary discourses. In "Jonson's Cosmetic Ritual," Karim-Cooper discusses "Cosmetics as Prosthetics" (112), citing critics who "[use] the term 'prosthetic' to refer to the ancillary attachments or objects useful or necessary for the construction of gender and the eventual display of the then gendered subject" (112). She sees cosmetics as having "a double prosthetic function on the stage" as both "objects necessary in the construction of femininity" and also "stage props" (114). She contends, "Curiously, Jonson's linguistic inclusion of cosmetic ingredients into his dramatic language and his requirement for cosmetic materiality on the stage, though satirically motivated, celebrates, paradoxically, the cultural diversity of the cosmetics industry, its geographical pervasiveness, and its usefulness to the industry of playing" (129). One telling aspect of Jonson's use of cosmetics omitted here is Jonson's equally vigorous exposure of male face-painting in 5.4 of Cynthia's Revels and in Catiline, Volpone, Epicoene, and The Devil Is an Ass.

The chapter "Cosmetics and Poetics in Shakespearean Comedy" "focus[es] on Shakespeare's use of cosmetic signifiers as ingredients on the stage and tropes on the page" (135) in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labors Lost. In addressing the question of whether actors painted, she declares, "Actors painted their faces; the dramatists knew it and pointedly register this in the language and imagery they use to evoke cosmetics" (137). She notes that "Henslowe's diary records the payments to painters and purchases of paint for the walls of the playhouse," and she speculates that "the players may...