Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama 1400–1642 by Andrea Ria Stevens (review)

From a selection of medieval to Jacobean dramas, this short book examines the effect of the use of body paint in the theatre. The central argument is that the body in its painted form is a key focus for the audience, often replacing other scenographic effects. Stevens divides the book by historical periods, but focuses each on an elemental attachment. For example she links the staging of the medieval York cycle to the concept of “light”, William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus to “blood”, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness to “black” or racial identity and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Thomas Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy to “stone” or the body as statue. Astrength of the book is the use of plays that are infrequently examined and it opens up this body of material in a fascinating way.

Stevens utilises a variety of methodologies in approaching the subject matter such as evidence of performance, textual analysis and some arguments from modern day stagings and critical theory. She frequently crosses periodisation linking medieval and Jacobean concepts and stagecraft. While this sometimes opens up new insights it can also mean that the context of specific cultural indices is lost.

The diversity of methodological approaches sometimes prevents a clear overall argument from establishing itself and the result can be that the book feels rather like a patchwork of material. In the third chapter, however the study exerts its real strength. Here the use of blackface paint is carefully analysed to suggest how it can be used as a device to establish white supremacy in Ben Jonson’s work, as a protective tool for women in Walter Montagu’s The Shepherds’ Paradise and, in Sir William Berkeley’s The Lost Lady, as a critique of the values of women.

Stevens states that it is the “aim of this book to challenge the narrative of Shakespeare’s ‘bare’ stage by looking at what I call the ‘ground zero’ of early modern theatrical representation: the body of the actor” (153). Inventions of the Skin does this very well in the third chapter but at other points the overarching argument is buried under rather literary readings: for example of the text of Coriolanus, in which syntactic rather than staging ideologies tend to dominate.