The aim of this book has been to address the question I cited in the Introduction: ‘should or shouldn't seemingly vain objects be deemed worthy of serious attention?’ Most critics who have examined the theological and misogynistic oppostion to cosmetics argue that the dramatic representation of cosmetics is grounded in a fundamental devaluation of beautification. This view is relatively shortsighted. Early modern English culture had a complex and ambiguous relationship with the notion of paintedness. As I have argued, the painted iconography of Queen Elizabeth I was simultaneously an emblem of political potency, and a marker of an unmistakable femininity. While anti-cosmetic polemicists cried out against the various methods and materials women were using to beautify their bodies, a proliferation of cosmetic recipes, continental and English, were being printed between the 1590s and 1650s. These competing narratives suggest an inevitable tension between prescription and practice, and they demonstrate the increasing significance of material practices in the formation of individual identities.

Cosmetic ingredients and the metaphorical language offered by cosmetic discourses provided dramatists like Middleton, Jonson, Webster and Shakespeare with crucial and vividly dramatic materials for their art. Boy actors were painted, or painted themselves, to signify femininity; actors who played clowns, ghosts, walls, twins and spirits also painted their faces. Dramatists capitalised upon the ironic dimensions of the face painting debate, the rich contradictions in condemning painted faces and the cultural significance of cosmetic materiality.