The materiality of disguise in the King’s Men’s repertory, 1603-1625

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Holehouse, Lucy Alice (2024). The materiality of disguise in the King’s Men’s repertory, 1603-1625. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

The King’s Men’s use of stage materials placed the company at the forefront of disguise innovation on the early modern commercial stage. Analysis of their use of costumes, cosmetics, and characterisation shows how the King’s Men used new technologies and built upon previous tropes and materials to innovative disguise drama. Yet, their disguise repertory remains unexplored. By interweaving material culture studies, repertory studies, and theatre history, this thesis tells the inextricably material story of early modern disguise drama in the King’s Men’s repertory. It provides insight into the heterogenous audience and the development of the stage to show that aiming for a singular, ‘true’ reading of an early modern play is decidedly antithetical to the early modern English stage. Throughout, I argue for the ambiguity of the early modern stage, showing that acknowledgement of uncertainty can illuminate, not obscure, our understanding of disguise drama and the questions of identity therein.

Chapter One, ‘“[h]is patch’d cloake throwne off”: the materiality of discovery scenes’ explores the discovery, the moment in which the disguiser’s identity is revealed. It demonstrates how disguise studies has, thus far, failed to engage with the material and phenomenological nature of the early modern English stage and the gaps in knowledge that stem from this, thus providing a methodological framework for the following chapters. Chapter Two, ‘“[t]his smockified shirt, or shirted smock”: gendered disguise and the ambiguity of costume’, discusses the degendering of linen undershirts in the mid-1610s to explore how ungendered items of clothing are used to blur gender boundaries in depictions of gendered disguise. This chapter reiterates the argument underpinning recent work in trans studies: that gender performance does not equate to gender identity. Chapter Three, ‘“[r]un your beard into a peak of twenty!”: age prosthetics as gendered disguise’, approaches the beard from a material standpoint, considering the physicality of the prosthetic beard and the impact of beardedness and beardlessness on the social status of players. Through its consideration of masculine presentation, this chapter shows that ‘gendered disguise’ is not a term that is only refers to inter-gender disguises, but intra-gender disguises as well. Chapter Four, ‘“[a] wrong done to beauty”: staging beauty and disfigurement through cosmetic disguise’, explores the use of cosmetics like pox stickers, artificial sunburn, artificial wrinkling, and umber. Early modern understandings of beauty and racial Otherness are at the heart of this chapter’s considerations, as it seeks to demonstrate how critical race theory, material culture, and theatre history can inform and strengthen one another’s arguments. Chapter Five, ‘“[c]all in your crutches, wooden legs, false bellies”: the props of representational disguise’, looks beyond the predominantly visual focus of the previous chapters. Through consideration of sound and small representational props it explores the soundscape of the playhouse to demonstrate that disguise is not just a visual spectacle, but a multi-sensory, embodied form of stagecraft. Ultimately, this thesis shows that, by broadening our understanding of the sartorial significance of disguise materials and the ambiguousness of outward presentation, we can better recognise the heterogenous nature of an early modern theatre audience, and the uncertainty implicit in the plays written for them.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):