| dc.description.abstract | This thesis focusses on human and animal skin in early modern drama in London, between the opening of the first permanent theatre in 1576 and the advent of the Civil War in 1642. Analysing a corpus of 466 printed play-texts, it isolates three case-studies: sheepskin parchment as metaphor in late Elizabethan commercial theatre; lionskin pelt as stage property in Jacobean commercial theatre, especially Heywood’s The Brazen Age (1611); and skin coats worn by performers in Stuart masques. Each of these examples provides a starting point from which to explore skin’s three forms in premodern England—as textual medium, as material object, and as edge of the self. As well as being a site of graphic visual meaning, these case studies reposition skin as a three-dimensional surface in the world, expanding early modern drama studies through readings that focus on the sense of touch, and the language of skin and flesh conjured in performance. These investigations reveal how all three of these dermal figures—parchment, lionskin, and second skins—are governed by a critical grammar not of human-animal relationships, but human difference, through their textured construction of social status, gender, and race. This study thereby links eco-criticism and animal studies with critical race theory and studies of early modern gender and social status, via a methodology grounded in sensory and material studies. The thesis demonstrates that skin’s physical status as a site of contact, especially in performance, facilitates rhetorical intimacies in early modern literary texts. These intimacies conceal deep fault-lines in their imagining of sensuality at the edge of human and animal bodies. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that constructions of human difference in early modern English drama can be extended through attention to who is allowed to feel in these play-texts, and who—like an onstage animal skin—is merely felt. | en_US |
