Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: The Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions.

This study very usefully sums up the evidence for face-painting in medieval, Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean drama in England. There are separate chapters on Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare and extensive notes and bibliography. Professor Drew-Bear emphasizes the moral and figural significance of face-painting, interpreted in a wide sense to include skin whitening, hair coloring, and other cosmetic adornments. These were mostly associated in the homiletic and satirical literature with hypocrisy, lustful allurements, and the devil's work. Bosola's lecture to the symbolic Old Lady in The Duchess of Malfi (1614) sums up contemporary thinking about "scurvy face-physic" (57).

Medieval and Renaissance dramatists in England were well aware of the poisonous (or at least highly toxic) nature of cosmetics. Ceruse, a base for fucus or red paint, was made of white lead and vinegar, and sublimate of mercury, used for whitening the skin, was also a dangerous substance. Many portraits of the period, including those of queen Elizabeth, show an exaggerated whiteness of the face mixed with a brilliant crimson coloring of the cheeks. In his Conversations, Ben Jonson said that Elizabeth "never saw herself after she became old in a true glass. They painted her and sometimes would vermilion her nose" (85). The Latin word fucus also meant deceit, disguise, and dissimulation, especially of a whore, but it also has an obvious punning relation to the word "fuck." The best cosmetics as well as the best poisons came from Italy, especially Venice.

Drew-Bear is concerned with the theatrical implications of face-painting. She thinks that boy actors who played women were heavily made up. Thus Ophelia's face-painting, so bitterly denounced by Hamlet in III, i, would be something literally seen on stage, and heavy makeup in her mad scene would underscore her bawdy discourse. The visual cues strengthen the audience's conventional associations with face-painting. We should keep in mind that men, especially in portraying effeminate courtiers like Osric in Hamlet, also used cosmetics on the Renaissance English stage.

Ben Jonson probably makes more significant use of face-painting than any other Elizabethan dramatist. There are cosmetic scenes in six of Jonson's plays. In Sejanus (1603), the physician Eudemus's painting of Livia's face is connected with his advice to her on how to poison her husband. This scene obviously anticipates the sensational Overbury affair in which Sir Thomas Overbury was poisoned at the behest of the Countess of Essex because of his opposition to her plans to marry Robert Carr. There is another striking cosmetic scene in Catiline (1611), in which makeup and politics are cunningly juxtaposed in a scene of gossiping court ladies.

The wealth of examples quoted in this book serve to make evident the connection between face-painting and moral hypocrisy. Drew-Bear only touches on the relation of face-painting to the larger theme of painting in medieval and Renaissance drama. The hypocritical, greedy Painter in Timon of Athens, for example, is not very different from the painted ladies of the drama, and Shakespeare's "terms of art" seem always to be ambivalent at best. But that is dearly the subject of another book.

MAURICE CHARNEY Rutgers University