Stone: Lost Ladies

Abstract

Returning to the topics of death, resurrection, and transfiguration with which the book begins, this final chapter explores the stage convention of ‘whiteface’ and the shared materiality of idols, corpses, spirits, and statues in relation to two conceptually and theatrically affiliated King's Men plays performed circa 1610-1611: Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy. As the chapter demonstrates, white stage paint creates the theatrical effects of gender, death, ghostliness, and identicality in the all-male theatre, which means that a whitened face can variously signify that the boy actor is playing the part of a virtuous woman or a whore or a corpse or a ghost or a living woman playing dead or a living woman feigning stoniness. Paint therefore collapses ‘difference’, with serious consequences for social relationships, especially intimate ones; in Shakespeare's romance and in Middleton's revenge tragedy, a woman's painted face creates an epistemological crisis that can only be resolved via a process of recognition and acknowledgment.