‘How do I look today?’:
Cosmetics, Cross-Dressing and Desire in The Devil is an Ass
AMANDA PENLINGTON (UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK)
Annette Drew-Bear’s excellent article on Jonson’s face-painting scenes
exposes the frequency with which he (more than any other Renaissance
playwright) contributes to Early Modern debates on cosmetics. Taking up
the central conceit of The Devil is an Ass, where Satan warns against
Vices ‘most like to Virtues’ (I.1.121), Drew-Bear’s exegesis reveals the
sophistication with which Jonson uses face-paint, or ‘fucus’,1 to satirize
court manners and vanity, which ‘epitomize moral dissimulation’. DrewBear also draws on An Epigram. To the small Poxe, where Jonson
represents the contemporary cosmetic guru Sir Hugh Platt ‘as a pander or
bawd who entices women to practice unnatural face-painting’; and in To
Sicknesse Jonson’s idea is ‘that licentious prostitutes who use “Madam
Baud-bees bath” deserve to catch the large pox’. Cosmetics’ ability to
inspire desire despite what lies beneath the paint is one of the starting
points of my essay, which continues from Drew-Bear’s closing remark
that Jonson develops fucus scenes ‘to dramatize his uniquely forceful
vision of men and women who would seem other than indeed they are’.2
Whilst Drew-Bear sees Jonson’s texts warning against the evils of
cosmetics alongside moral commentators (such as Thomas Tuke), I
would suggest that The Devil is an Ass, Jonson’s final play to utilize a
face-painting scene, presents a more ambivalent attitude to the power of
cosmetics.
1
Fucus is used commonly in the literature of the time as a generic term for cosmetics.
In the beauty industry today fucus is often used as an alternative ingredient name for
Marine Algae or Bladderwrack, ‘Glossary’, Guinot: Createur de Cathiodermie
(Ascot, Berkshire: R. Robson, [n.d.]), p. 12.3.
2
Annette Drew-Bear, ‘Face-Painting Scenes in Ben Jonson’s Plays’, Studies in
Philology 77 (1980), 388-401, p. 399, p. 394, p. 401; Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass,
ed. by Peter Happé, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1994). For other studies of the use of cosmetics in Renaissance plays and society, see
Annette Drew-Bear, ‘Face-Painting in Renaissance Tragedy’, Renaissance Drama 12
(1981), 71-93, Shirley Garner Nelson, ‘“Let Her Paint an Inch Thick”: Painted Ladies
in Renaissance Drama and Society’, Renaissance Drama 20 (1989), 123-39,
‘Beauty’s Poisonous Properties’, Shakespeare Studies 27 (1999), Frances E. Dolan,
‘Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in
Early Modern England’, PMLA 108 (1993), 224-39, and Carroll Camden, The
Elizabethan Woman: A Panorama of English Womanhood, 1540 to 1640 (London:
Cleaver Hume, 1952). For general histories of cosmetics, see Maggie Angeloglou, A
history of make-up (London: Studio Vista, 1970), Fenja Gunn, The Artificial Face: A
History of Cosmetics (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), John Liggett, The
human face (London: Constable, 1974), and Richard Corson, Fashions in Makeup:
From Ancient to Modern Times (London: Peter Owen, 1972).
Jonson does voice conventional anti-cosmetic attitudes in The
Devil is an Ass, such as face corrosion, tooth decay, sour breath, and the
displacement of colour through ‘industrious’ (licentious) motion
(IV.3.27-46), but these are dismissed as ‘poet’s reasons’ (IV.3.47). Anticosmetic reasoning goes no further and Jonson offers instead two
extensive lists of ingredients (IV.4.18-24 and IV.4.30-40), the latter of
which is further explained in the form of a recipe (IV.4.42-56). The
ingredients given are plausible and, therefore, not notably satirical for
their strangeness.
What complicates Jonson’s depiction of this School for Ladies is
that the cosmetic guru is indeed an expert in presenting a false face: the
‘Spanish Lady’ is male. Wittipol is a young gallant, newly returned from
travelling (as many cosmetic gurus of the period were), and disguised as
female for admission into the presence of Frances Fitzdottrel, the
(married) woman he loves. As in Epicoene, Jonson here reverses the
prevailing feature of cross-dressing in Renaissance drama by having a
male character cross-dress as a woman.3 Whilst in Shakespeare the
female character cross-dressed as a young man allows the (male) actor
playing the woman to wear breeches for most of the play, Jonson’s
reversal draws attention to the very convention of cross-dressing on the
Renaissance stage. Through Jonson’s deployment of metatheatre, the
(real) actor Dick Robinson is alleged to cross-dress for Wittipol in private
performances at his lodgings (II.8.64-75). As Orgel has shown, fears of
actors seducing (thereby feminizing) audiences through the illusion of
cross-dressing and then extending the fantasy from the theatre into ‘real’
life were features of anti-theatrical tracts.4
Wittipol, like Robinson, is an accomplished female impersonator.
His rehearsal is as Frances, with only words and gestures signifying the
role (I.6.154-92) but as the Spanish Lady his performance is enhanced by
a wig, a costume and cosmetics. His ‘female’ appearance attracts
Frances’s husband and the power of cosmetics to transform and solicit
desire is played out. In Bartholomew Fair Jonson refutes (with a puppet)
anti-theatrical attitudes that equate theatre with gender confusion and
licentiousness (V.5.91-9). But Jonson’s decision to explore gender,
3
Epicoene also includes memorable attitudes to the use of cosmetics: Ben Jonson,
Epicoene, ed. by L. A. Beaurline, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1966), I.1.80-130; IV.2.74-92.
4
See Stephen Orgel, ‘Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for
Women?’, in Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum and Michael Moon (eds.), Displacing
Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 7-29.
appearance, desire and performance is even more provocative in The
Devil is an Ass.5
Alongside the actor (Robinson?) playing Wittipol as the Spanish
Lady are four other male actors transformed into women by cosmetic
additions: Tailbush, Pitfall, Frances and Lady Eitherside. By reversing the
cross-dressing convention whilst debating cosmetics and using
metatheatre, Jonson exposes to laughter (through the duped Fitzdottrel)
the audience’s desire for cosmetically-enhanced boys.6
But before Jonson presents Wittipol’s superficial gendertransformation in Act IV, the playwright colludes in the appeal of
‘natural’ women on stage. Frances, the ‘woman’ Wittipol desires, to the
point where he ‘plays with her paps’ (stage direction, II.6.70) and
itemizes her (supposedly non-artificial) beauty in song ‘Do but look on
her eyes, […] hair, […] forehead, […] brows, […] face’ (II.6.94-101), is
as much of a staged construction as the Spanish Lady. Jonson’s lyric
reveals his delight in the construction of desirable ‘women’ through the
combination of words and cosmetic devices on the Renaissance stage.
5
Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. by E. A. Horsman, The Revels Plays
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979).
6
For a consideration of the use of artificial hair and breasts to enhance actors’
performances, see Peter Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the “body beneath”:
speculating on the boy actor’, in Susan Zimmerman, Erotic Politics: Desire on the
Renaissance stage (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 64-83.