Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Illustrations
- Chapter 1 Defining Beauty in Renaissance Culture
- Chapter 2 Early Modern Cosmetic Culture
- Chapter 3 Cosmetic Restoration in Jacobean Tragedy
- Chapter 4 John Webster and the Culture of Cosmetics
- Chapter 5 Jonson's Cosmetic Ritual
- Chapter 6 Cosmetics and Poetics in Shakespearean Comedy
- Chapter 7 ‘Deceived with ornament’: Shakespeare's Venice
- Chapter 8 ‘Flattering Unction’: Cosmetics in Hamlet
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - Jonson's Cosmetic Ritual
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Illustrations
- Chapter 1 Defining Beauty in Renaissance Culture
- Chapter 2 Early Modern Cosmetic Culture
- Chapter 3 Cosmetic Restoration in Jacobean Tragedy
- Chapter 4 John Webster and the Culture of Cosmetics
- Chapter 5 Jonson's Cosmetic Ritual
- Chapter 6 Cosmetics and Poetics in Shakespearean Comedy
- Chapter 7 ‘Deceived with ornament’: Shakespeare's Venice
- Chapter 8 ‘Flattering Unction’: Cosmetics in Hamlet
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In a satirical poem called ‘A Paradox of a Painted Face’, written in the mid-seventeenth century, the author demonstrates the multivocality of the cultural attitude towards cosmetics by emphasising the contemporary attraction to painted faces, while using terms like ‘cunning’, ‘deceive’ and ‘fraud’ to demonstrate their association with hypocrisy:
The Fucus and Cerusse which on thy face
Thy cunning hand layes on to add more grace,
Deceive me with such pleasing fraud, that I
Find in thy Art what can in Nature lye.
It is a familiar paradox that painted beauty is alluring, but the attraction to artifice is slightly dubious on religious as well as on poetical grounds. A desire for deception, is implicit in the attraction to painted faces, and in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, painted artifice was a powerful material reminder of the human need for aesthetic pleasure. Thus there is a dialogical relationship between aesthetics and deception, which means that face painting can be viewed as an art form unto itself. Ovid, read widely in the Renaissance, instructs ladies in his Art of Love to use cosmetics to correct their natural deficiencies, but he tells them that they must hide it from their suitors, suggesting that it is their deception or artifice to which the potential suitors are attracted: ‘Why must I know the cause of the whiteness of your cheek? Shut your chamber door: why show the unfinished work? There is much that it befits men not to know; most of your doings would offend, did you not hide them within’.
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- Information
- Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama , pp. 111 - 131Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006