It has been the aim of this book to challenge the narrative of Shakespeare's ‘bare’ stage by looking at what I called the ‘ground zero’ of early modern theatrical representation: the body of the actor. The study began out of a sense of the possibilities of colour, out of a conviction that the special effects I discuss were commercially important as well as poetically resonant as well as sensually impressive – as well as theatrically useful in the representation, within drama, of stage characters who appear to possess depth and complexity. That is, to attend to the cosmeticised actor is to discern a specific vocabulary of inwardness that, once noted, opens up important and often unexpected connections amongst plays. Whether coloured red, white, or black, whether shown bleeding or masquerading or feigning femininity, painted bodies present us with different iterations of similar affective experiences and dramatic scenarios, from a warrior's temporary sense of his impenetrability, despite his woundedness, to a woman's sense of her own unassailable chastity; from a lurid death mask that kills what it touches, to a painted statue that might, just might, do the same. Unlike more detachable theatrical prosthetics, paint directly incorporates the actor's own physicality into the fiction at a time when ‘psychology and physiology were one’.