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Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama. By FARAH KARIM-COOPER. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Illus. Pp. x + 222. $80.00 cloth.
Reviewed by ANNETTE DREW-BEAR
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"...