Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama

Farah Karim-Cooper, FARAH KARIM-COOPER

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.