Abstract
The themes of presence and absence that I investigated in the previous chapter in relation to the legible materiality of the practices are also an ideological concern about play-making and a means of exercising (self-) reflexivity. Early modern writers employed disguise motifs in representing barbers and surgeons in the theatre. But this produced a binary effect: while barbery often functioned as a disguise for something else — and as such was disclosed referentially on the stage — surgery is frequently a covered-up process in dramatic action, often remaining an offstage phenomenon. Both, however, reveal something inherent about constructions of performance and modes of representation, as well as stylistic features of drama. If, as Gary Taylor argues, ‘meta-theatricality relieves the audience of any burden of belief’, then the barber in particular is at the very heart of routines that expose pretence and sham for what they are.1
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Notes
Gary Taylor, ‘Divine []sences’ in Shakespeare Survey Volume 54: Shakespeare and Religions, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), pp. 13–30, p. 15.
See Christian Billing, ‘Modelling the Anatomy Theatre and the Indoor Hall Theatre: Dissection on the Stages of Early Modern London’, Early Modern Literary Studies 13: Special Issue (2004), 1–17.
Hilary Nunn, Staging Anatomies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), see esp. Introduction and Chapter 1.
See Jean Elizabeth Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London; New York: Routledge, 1994);
Stephen Orgel, Impersonations (Cambridge: CUP, 1996);
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York; London: Routledge, 1999).
Peter Hyland, Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 111.
Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), p. 128 (see pp. 117–28).
See Peter Stallybrass, ‘Worn Worlds’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 289–320;
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 182, 197;
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd edn (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), pp. 187–200.
For discussions on the early modern circulation of costume/clothing and Henslowe’s costume department accounts see Natasha Korda, ‘Household Property/Stage Property’, Theatre Journal 48:2 (1996), 185–95 (esp. pp. 188, 194–5);
Korda, ‘Women’s Theatrical Properties’ in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 202–29; Stallybrass, ‘Properties in Clothes’ in Staged Properties, pp. 177–201;
Will Fisher, ‘Staging the Beard’ in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 230–57.
On early modern costume see Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas, Occupational Costume (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1967). On the technology of disguise, see Hyland’s second and third chapters of Disguise on the Early Modern Stage.
Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites (Cambridge: CUP, 2009);
Victor Oscar Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965), pp. 121–2. [Freeburg’s monograph was first published by Columbia University Press in 1915.]
Samuel Rowlands, Humors Looking Glasse (1608), A2v. On the glass, self-reflection, and refashioning, see Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006), pp. 37–9.
Douglas Biow, ‘Manly Matters’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40:2 (2010), 325–46, p. 334.
Ben Jonson, ‘Epilogue at Windsor’ in A Masque of the Metamorphosed Gypsies in Works, ed. William Gifford (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company; New York: J. C. Derby, 1855), line 7 to the end.
See Midsummer Night’s Dream, I.ii. On Bottom’s beards, see Fisher, pp. 243–4. Cf. Mark Albert Johnston, Beard Fetish in Early Modern England (Ashgate: Farnham, 2011), pp. 86, 120. And reference to ‘Gentleman-like-beards or broker-like-beards’ in George Wilkins, The Miseries of Inforst Mariage (1607), D4v.
Sidney Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (London: Blades, 1890), p. 260.
See Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), pp. 4–16 (pp. 4–5).
See Lloyd Davis, Guise and Disguise (Toronto; London: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 3–18. For Davis, ‘Dis-guise … suggests a doubled guise, which exceeds a “usual manner” of self-presentation’ (p. 11).
M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1984), pp. 371–81 (pp. 372–3, 380).
See Neil Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), pp. 14–30.
Young, p. 432. Cf. George C. Boon, ‘Tonsor Humanus’, Britannia 22 (1991), 21–32.
See Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), pp. 22–3; Fisher, pp. 243–4 when he speculates on blatant artificiality of beard wearing on the early modern stage and the difference between beard prostheses; Johnston, ‘Prosthetic Absence in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholmew Fair’, ELR 37:3 (2007), 401–28.
Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare and Language (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), pp. 99–113 (p. 106). Cf. Nashe’s description of the ‘rude simple countrey’ of the North (Terrors of the Night (1594), Eir).
Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005), p. 199.
See Grantley, p. 96; Lucy Munro, ‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Generic Experimentation’ in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (New York; Oxford: OUP, 2006), pp. 189–99 (p. 190);
Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), pp. 121–4.
Todd H. J. Pettigrew, Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), p. 137.
Patricia Parker, ‘Barbers and Barbary’, Renaissance Drama 33 (2005), 201–44.
See J. R. R. Christie, ‘The Paracelsian Body’ in Paracelsus, ed. Ole Peter Grell (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 269–92 (p. 274)).
Steinberg, p. 218; Dillon, ‘Is Not All the World Mile End, Mother?’, MaRDiE 9 (1997), 127–48 (p. 130).
Philip Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd edn (Cambridge: CUP, 2002).
Tony Hunt, The Medieval Surgery (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), p. 68.
Margaret Pelling, ‘Public and Private Dilemmas’ in Medicine, Health and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1600–2000, ed. Steve Sturdy (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 27–42 (p. 36); see pp. 36–38 on ‘contractual medicine’.
Julie Gardiner, Michael J. Allen, and Mary Anne Alburger (eds), Before the Mast (Portsmouth: Mary Rose Trust, 2005), p. 198.
On the name Lancelot/Lancelet and its association with incisions and conversions, see Patricia Parker, ‘Cutting Both Ways’ in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 95–118. Monsieur Thomas parodies social — rather than religious — conversion with the eponym attempting to reform his wild self and become a gentleman under the eyes of his man, Launcelot.
Deborah E. Harkness, ‘A View from the Streets’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81:1 (2008), 52–85.
Cf. D. A. Evenden, ‘Gender Differences in the Licensing and Practice of Female and Male Surgeons in Early Modern England’, Medical History 42:2 (1998), 194–216;
A. L. Wyman, ‘The Surgeoness’, Medical History 28:1 (1984), 22–41;
Margaret Pelling, ‘Compromised by Gender’ in The Task of Healing, ed. Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1996), pp. 101–33 (pp. 112–4, 119–20); Pelling (with Frances White), Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), pp. 189–224;
M. A. Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), esp. pp. 135–50. William Kerwin’s third chapter in Beyond the Body (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp. 62–96, joins revisionist historians in highlighting women’s ubiquitous presence in medical practices throughout the period, although his focus is on ‘wisewomen’, or ‘woman healers’ rather than the domestic pursuits of females of the household.
See Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 42–59.
John Donne, ‘The Relic’ in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 75–6 (line 6).
Quotations are taken from Thomas Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005).
See Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), pp. 79–106, for a discussion of early moderns’ view of Jews’ interaction with poisons and remedies.
Lee Bliss, ‘Destructive Will and Social Chaos in “The Devil’s Law-Case”’, MLR 72:3 (1977), 513–25, p. 518.
Anon, 2 Return from Parnassus [The Scourge of Simony] in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1949).
Richard Sugg, Murder after Death (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press; Bristol: University Presses Marketing, 2007), pp. 19–31;
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned (London: Routledge, 1996).
Sugg, p. 13. Cf. Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005), who explores the paradoxical nature of the ‘dynamic’ cadaver in early modern England and discusses the unsteady boundaries between life and death, which are examined with reference to the problematic vitality and sexuality of the staged corpse (pp. 1–23; 130–3).
Michela Calore, ‘Enter Out’, MaRDiE 13 (2001), 117–35 (esp. pp. 128–30).
Cf. Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 164–8 on the ‘“inside” scene’.
William Gruber, Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 88.
Celia R. Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 23 (see pp. 23–50).
Jean Elizabeth Howard, ‘Early Modern Work and the Work of Representation’ in Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 243–50 (p. 247).
See Tanya Pollard, ‘“No Faith in Physic”: Masquerades of Medicine Onstage and Off’ in Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 29–41 (pp. 34–5).
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© 2016 Eleanor Decamp
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Decamp, E. (2016). ‘Lend me thy basin, apron and razor’: Disguise, (Mis)Appropriation, and Play. In: Civic and Medical Worlds in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471567_3
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