Face-Painting and Anti-cosmetic Discourses in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This paper examines Shakespeare’s Sonnets in light of early modern discourses against cosmetics. Exploiting the two contradictory beauties that the fair youth and the Dark Lady represent, Shakespeare appears to value natural above artificial beauty. His attitude towards the Dark Lady, however, is ambivalent: her dark complexion is eulogized as natural beauty, but it is simultaneously degraded as a mark of her evil mind. Her questionable nature is partly in line with pervasive condemnation of face-painting in early modern England. Although face-painting was part of women’s daily activities, it was regarded as whoredom. The Dark Lady’s art of seduction that holds her male suitors in romantic thrall evokes a male fear of her sexuality, and hence her darkness is perceived as her moral degeneracy. Shakespeare criticizes both facial and verbal painting as unnatural and untruthful. The moral division between nature and art, however, poses an artistic dilemma that asks Shakespeare to put rhetorical painting on plain words to versify real beauty. I argue that Shakespeare suggests that nature and art are not contradictory, but these two realms are rather complementary.
Abstract
This paper examines Shakespeare’s Sonnets in light of early modern discourses against cosmetics. Exploiting the two contradictory beauties that the fair youth and the Dark Lady represent, Shakespeare appears to value natural above artificial beauty. His attitude towards the Dark Lady, however, is ambivalent: her dark complexion is eulogized as natural beauty, but it is simultaneously degraded as a mark of her evil mind. Her questionable nature is partly in line with pervasive condemnation of face-painting in early modern England. Although face-painting was part of women’s daily activities, it was regarded as whoredom. The Dark Lady’s art of seduction that holds her male suitors in romantic thrall evokes a male fear of her sexuality, and hence her darkness is perceived as her moral degeneracy. Shakespeare criticizes both facial and verbal painting as unnatural and untruthful. The moral division between nature and art, however, poses an artistic dilemma that asks Shakespeare to put rhetorical painting on plain words to versify real beauty. I argue that Shakespeare suggests that nature and art are not contradictory, but these two realms are rather complementary.
참고문헌 (21)
- Burrow, Colin, "The Complete Sonnets and Poems", pp.1~158 (2002), Oxford UP
- Camden, Carroll, "The Elizabethan Woman" (1975), P. P. Appel
- Carney, Jo Eldridge, "‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another’: Face Painting in the Renaissance", Lamar Journal of the Humanities, 1(2), pp.21~34 (1995)
- Colish, Marcia L., "Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts 1", pp.3~14 (1981), U of Pittsburgh P
- de Grazia, Margreta, "Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays", pp.89~112 (1999), Garland
- Dolan, Frances E., "Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England", PMLA, 108(2), pp.224~239 (1993)
- Drew-Bear, Annette, "Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: The Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions" (1994), Bucknell UP
- Garner, Shirley Nelson, "Let Her Paint an Inch Thick’: Painted Ladies in Renaissance Drama and Society", Renaissance Drama, 20, pp.123~139 (1989)
- Hall, Kim F., "Things of Darkness : Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England" (1995), Cornell UP
- Harvey, Elizabeth D., "A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets", pp.314~328 (2010), Wiley-Blackwell
- Hunt, Marvin, "Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Ess", pp.369~389 (1999), Garland
- Hutson, Lorna, "New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts", pp.154~175 (1992), Routledge
- "The Oxford English Dictionary" (2009)
- Karim-Copper, Farah, "Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama" (2006), Edinburgh UP
- Phillippy, Patricia, "Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases and Early Modern Culture" (2006), The Johns Hopkins UP
- Reichardt, Dosia, "Their Faces are Not their Own : Powders, Patches and Paint in Seventeenth-Century Poetry", Dalhousie Review, 84(2), pp.195~214 (2004)
- Shakespeare, William, "Antony and Cleopatra, The Norton Shakespeare", pp.2619~2708 (1997), Norton
- Shakespeare, William, "The Complete Sonnets and Poems" (2002), Oxford UP
- Shakespeare, William, "The Norton Shakespeare", pp.1659~1759 (1997), Norton
- Snook, Edith, "Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History" (2011), Palgrave
- Tuke, Thomas, "Blood and Knavery: A Collection of English Renaissance Pamphlets and Ballads of Crime and Sin", pp.177~193 (1973), Fairleigh Dickinson UP