Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama

About this book

This revised edition examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatize the Renaissance preoccupation with cosmetics. The author explores the then-contentious issue of female beauty and identifies a "culture of cosmetics", which finds its visual identity on the early modern stage. She also examines cosmetic recipes and anti-cosmetic literature focusing on their relationship to drama in its representations of gender, race, politics and beauty. This book offers a new analysis of the construction of whiteness as a racial signifier; provides an original insight into women's cosmetic practice through an exploration of ingredients, methods and materials used to create cosmetics and the perception of make-up in Shakespeare's time; includes numerous cosmetic recipes from the early modern period found in printed books and never published in a modern edition.