Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
Summary
Bare
Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both.
When a troupe of travelling actors arrives at Elsinore, Hamlet asks to hear a speech about the slaughter of princes. It begins, so Hamlet reminds them, with Pyrrhus:
The rugged Pyrrhus – he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse,
Hath now his black and grim complexion smeared
With heraldry more dismal, head to foot.
Now is he total guise, horridly tricked
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Baked and imparched in coagulate gore,
Rifted in earth and fire.
(7.340–50)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Inventions of the SkinThe Painted Body in Early English Drama, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013