"these curious arts": the queer space-time of paint on the early modern stage

WOMEN, GENDER, AND CULTURE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

SPEAKER: Sophia Richardson, MIT

Early modern invocations of paint are fraught with ambiguity, ambivalence, and liminality. Paint enlivens and likens at the same time that it lies, leeches, and leads astray. This talk will sketch out the competing early modern discourses on paint—referring both to visual art and cosmetics—drawing particular attention to the suspicion surrounding the face-painting practices of both women and public-theater players. Probing deeper than the ubiquitous Madonna/whore complex, I draw attention to the strange, strained contortions of time and space whenever paint is invoked: descriptions of simultaneous shrinking and swelling, objects at once two and three-dimensional, time both frozen and fleeting, subjects both living and dead. Philip Massinger’s 1630 play The Picture will serve as my case-study to illustrate the spatial distortions imagined in contemporary treatises, showing how the play stages both literal and more allegorical renderings of paint’s geometrical changeability. William Shakespeare’s 1611 The Winter’s Tale, in turn, demonstrates paint’s temporal instability, manifesting in odd folds of time and indeterminate animacy. Both plays, I will suggest, usher in these elements of spatio-temporal instability by drawing on the un-fixedness—sexual and dimensional—already associatively embedded into discourses of paint, showing how the marital anxieties animating both plots are also miniaturizations of larger metatheatrical concerns over fixity and form.

About the speaker

Sophia Richardson joined MIT’s Writing & Communications Center in 2024, after completing her PhD in Early Modern English literature at Yale University where her dissertation explored how diverse material surfaces furnish early modern writers a figurative vocabulary for their texts. Chapters on glass, paint, fabric, and skin address how texts by authors including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Philip Massinger, Margaret Cavendish, Richard Lovelace, and John Milton imagine language likewise playing with material properties like shine, sheerness, silkiness, or smudginess. Broader interests include anatomy, natural philosophy, and the histories of medicine, fashion, and cosmetics. You can find her work in English Literary Renaissance, Borrowers and Lenders, and as chapters in Critical Insights: Macbeth (ed. William Weber. Salem Press, 2018), The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton (ed. Anna Hegland, Sam Jermy, Will Green, 2024), and forthcoming in Odd Old Ends: Early Modern Literature and Popular Culture (ed. Emily Jones and Matthew Carter). Most of her current work involves spotlighting new adaptations of older literary works and intellectual trends for public audiences, such as her reviews of Netflix’s Sirens for Mid-Theory Collective, Amazon’s Upload for the Pittsburgh Review of Books, Wuthering Heights for Avidly (forthcoming), and an alternate history of Anne Boleyn for the LARB (forthcoming).