Although written in the 1650s about a university performance of a Spanish tragedy, Edmund Gayton's description of two scholars/actors having their faces ‘meal'd’ to represent ghosts is evidence that actors wore cosmetics during dramatic performances in the late sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries. The word ‘meal’, used here to describe the faces of the actors, recalls the use of crumbs of barley bread and milk in some facial cosmetics; ‘meal’ is also a term contemporaries used to satirise the painted or powdered faces of women in anti-cosmetic literature.

The first two words of Hamlet, ‘Who's there?’ (I, i, 1), followed forty-five lines later by the entrance of the apparition, played by an actor whose face, undoubtedly, would be ‘mealed’, encapsulate the play's engagement with the complex network of meanings attached to painted faces on the early modern English stage.