Chapter 2 - ‘Thou Look’st Pale’: Narrating Blanching and Blushing on the Early Modern Stage

Summary

This chapter focuses on how two involuntary (and often invisible) physical responses, blanching and blushing, are performed and narrated on the early modern stage, asking who describes bodies, whose bodies are described, and what is at stake in the act of description. Whipday explores how blanching and blushing intersects with early modern hierarchies of gender, class, family, and race, especially as mediated by the (white) body of the (boy) actor in ‘blushface’ and blackface performances of femininity. In so doing, she examines narrated bodily responses as dramaturgical devices for negotiating relationships between the physicality of character and performer; between performer and audience in the audience’s engagement with the world of the play as mapped onto the simultaneously real and imagined body of the actor; and, between onstage characters within hierarchical familial, domestic, and service relationships.