In his attack on cosmetics Thomas Tuke insists that ‘the Ceruse or white Lead, wherewith women use to paint themselves was, without doubt, brought in use by the divell, the capitall enemie of nature’. This clichéd analogy, used time and again by moralists, that painted ladies are like painted devils, draws upon the popular links made between poisonous ingredients, moral corruption and the female body. Curiously, this moral analogy is subverted in two Jacobean revenge tragedies by Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) and The Second Maiden's Tragedy (1611). Politically poignant are these two tragedies that dramatise the exhumation of a mourned dead lady (one of them called ‘Gloriana’, the other simply known as ‘the Lady’), whose remains are subsequently painted and used to entrap and kill a sexually perverse tyrant, thereby transforming the notion that cosmetic paint is a corrosive material; instead it becomes a cleansing agent for the political body and a meta-theatrical device used to revalue cosmetic materiality within a theatrical context.

It has long been established that some poisons were key ingredients in mineral cosmetic recipes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, therefore, a pervasive and realistic threat. Tanya Pollard's analysis of the role of poison in ‘cosmetic theater’ argues that early modern critics of cosmetics insisted that ‘women who adorn themselves with the material poisons of paint not only suffer from spiritual contamination, but translate this taint back into material poisons which they transmit to other victims’.

Though satirical and intentionally humorous, this colourful excerpt from Thomas Tuke's anti-cosmetic tract betrays an anxiety about woman's fundamental lack of readability. Tuke reveals an implicit distrust of artifice. To understand the relationship between cosmetic drama and early modern society, it is necessary to get to grips with the cultural reception of beautification found within the non-dramatic writing of the period. I want to suggest that from a wide range of early modern texts, what we see emerging is the formation of a culture of cosmetics that found its visual footing on the stage.

In the oppositional texts there are three primary objections to cosmetics: the belief that alteration of the body is a crime against God; the ethnocentric fear of foreign ingredients and commodities of a cosmetic nature; and the necromantic effect of face paint, which suggested not only the physical unreliability, but also the poisonous and contaminative nature of women and even art. Anti-cosmetic diatribes unearth a deeply rooted fear not just of cosmetic paint and its potential toxicity, but rather of what it signifies: gender, theatricality, race and the performative nature of political power.

When I received my PhD, my examiners asked how I came up with the idea to write about early modern cosmetics. I blushed because I did not really want to tell them that it came to me in the months before I started my PhD when I was working at a cosmetics counter at Bloomingdales in Newport Beach, California. They laughed though, and said I should mention it in my preface. So here it is. I was amazed at the amount of money that women were spending on cosmetics. Literally thousands of dollars a day were lavished on lipstick, eye shadow and concealer. I found myself judging these women, and had to ask myself why. Why should they be judged for beautifying themselves? Then I remembered Bosola's attack on painted ladies in The Duchess of Malfi, and I thought that there was something profoundly disturbing in the images he uses to describe cosmetic practices; for example, women who flay their skin to obtain a smooth complexion end up looking like ‘abortive hedgehogs’. It made me want to grapple with the ideological paradoxes at the heart of Western conceptions of beauty and the processes of beautification that respond to such conceptions. I have spent a lot of years on this and have found too much information; my only hope is that I have brought it together lucidly and coherently and that it invites further discussion and debate.

John Webster's contributions to the 1615 edition of Overbury's Characters includes a ‘fayre and happy Milke-mayd’, whom Webster describes as

Character devising was primarily a rhetorical exercise, a chance for writers to flex their wit and satirical muscles. Webster describes the milk-maid's beauty and charm within an anti-cosmetic context. She does not use art to make herself beautiful, instead she is ‘decked with innocence’ and her labour provides her with the health and vitality that would draw beauty to her cheeks. Webster seemingly participates in an anti-cosmetic discourse in this example, by raising nature above art, but it is a rhetorical exercise whereby, skillfully, he surpasses the anti-cosmetic polemicists by using wit, literary form and metaphor to address the issue of beauty within a fairly new genre. Similarly, in his dramatic works, Webster seems to denigrate cosmetic embellishment; for example, in The Devil's Law-Case, painting is described as ‘odious’ and women described as ‘creatures made up and compounded / Of all monsters, poisoned minerals, / And sorcerous herbs that grows’ (IV, ii, 291–3).

Although written in the 1650s about a university performance of a Spanish tragedy, Edmund Gayton's description of two scholars/actors having their faces ‘meal'd’ to represent ghosts is evidence that actors wore cosmetics during dramatic performances in the late sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries. The word ‘meal’, used here to describe the faces of the actors, recalls the use of crumbs of barley bread and milk in some facial cosmetics; ‘meal’ is also a term contemporaries used to satirise the painted or powdered faces of women in anti-cosmetic literature.

The first two words of Hamlet, ‘Who's there?’ (I, i, 1), followed forty-five lines later by the entrance of the apparition, played by an actor whose face, undoubtedly, would be ‘mealed’, encapsulate the play's engagement with the complex network of meanings attached to painted faces on the early modern English stage.

Towards the end of his life, in the 1590s, an anxious Robert Greene warns his fellow university-educated playwrights about an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygrs heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you’. The usual commentary on this allusion to Shakespeare tends to overlook the use of the word ‘beautified’ in this ferocious piece of criticism. In early modern England this word was used to describe the process of making something or someone beautiful by artificial means: to ‘make faire to the eie or eares’ ‘adourne’, ‘to be decked, garnished, dressed, trimmed’; John Florio defines ‘to beautify’ as ‘to paint, to make faire’ and his suggested synonyms include ‘to furnish, to adorne, to decke, to store, to perfect, to supply. Also to garnish, to trap’. Writers who dispensed recipes for cosmetics also use this term frequently, like Thomas Lupton who suggests seven whole eggs and vinegar to ‘beautifie’ the face. Greene contends that Shakespeare is a plagiarist, a phoney, and he does so using language that describes cosmetic embellishment. The type of beautifying that Greene refers to is base and false, but also, the implication is that it is transparent. One would know that it is not a natural beauty, but merely beautified. Beautification is a cosmetic process, and most early modern writers would be aware of the contemporary resonance of the word.

For centuries cosmetics have offered the promise of perfection. Paints and powders, brushes and pencils are the artistic tools with which woman can re-create the self. Yet historically, cosmetics have been perceived as mere ornament, secondary, trivial, even deceptive. The subject of beautification, however, was an important discourse within the dramatic, social and literary worlds of early modern England. Domestically, kitchens were actively engineering the cosmetics that would be on display in the public sphere as well as on the stage. This book will draw attention to the cultural preoccupation with cosmetics by exploring a wide range of early modern texts and the theatrical appropriation of cosmetic metaphors and materials. It also places overdue importance upon the subject of early modern beauty practices by arguing that the contemporary culture of cosmetics extended beyond practice and vanity and into the domains of theatre, art and poetry. Given the prominence of the phenomenon of cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance drama, surprisingly little attention has been paid to it as a whole in the Renaissance period. Certainly, there have been excellent studies, such as Annette Drew-Bear's brief survey of face painting conventions on the Renaissance stage, and Frances Dolan's article, ‘Taking the Pencil out of God's Hand: Art, Nature and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England’, which charts the analogous relationship between the art/nature debate and moral discourse on cosmetics.

The aim of this book has been to address the question I cited in the Introduction: ‘should or shouldn't seemingly vain objects be deemed worthy of serious attention?’ Most critics who have examined the theological and misogynistic oppostion to cosmetics argue that the dramatic representation of cosmetics is grounded in a fundamental devaluation of beautification. This view is relatively shortsighted. Early modern English culture had a complex and ambiguous relationship with the notion of paintedness. As I have argued, the painted iconography of Queen Elizabeth I was simultaneously an emblem of political potency, and a marker of an unmistakable femininity. While anti-cosmetic polemicists cried out against the various methods and materials women were using to beautify their bodies, a proliferation of cosmetic recipes, continental and English, were being printed between the 1590s and 1650s. These competing narratives suggest an inevitable tension between prescription and practice, and they demonstrate the increasing significance of material practices in the formation of individual identities.

Cosmetic ingredients and the metaphorical language offered by cosmetic discourses provided dramatists like Middleton, Jonson, Webster and Shakespeare with crucial and vividly dramatic materials for their art. Boy actors were painted, or painted themselves, to signify femininity; actors who played clowns, ghosts, walls, twins and spirits also painted their faces. Dramatists capitalised upon the ironic dimensions of the face painting debate, the rich contradictions in condemning painted faces and the cultural significance of cosmetic materiality.

In 1616 Barnabe Rich complained that ‘we have spoyled the Venetian Curtizans of their alluring vanities, to decke our English women in the new fashion.’ Acknowledging the influence Venice had upon English self-presentation, Rich contributes to contemporary assumptions about the Italian city by aligning it with female sexuality and commerce. Rich also reminds us, in his reference to the Venetian courtesans, of the relationship within the English imagination between uncontrollable female desire and Venice itself that fuelled much of its dramatic representation. The painted courtesan embodies the connections between cosmetics, female sexuality and commercial exchange. One of the dedicatory poems on the opening pages of Lewes Lewkenor's 1599 translation of Contareno's The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice describes the city as a maiden that has been misled into vanity by the corruption of the age:

Paradoxically, Thomas Coryat's criticism of the cosmetic practices of the Venetian courtesans is at times curiously detailed, giving English women the opportunity to emulate the rituals that are being denigrated.

In a satirical poem called ‘A Paradox of a Painted Face’, written in the mid-seventeenth century, the author demonstrates the multivocality of the cultural attitude towards cosmetics by emphasising the contemporary attraction to painted faces, while using terms like ‘cunning’, ‘deceive’ and ‘fraud’ to demonstrate their association with hypocrisy:

It is a familiar paradox that painted beauty is alluring, but the attraction to artifice is slightly dubious on religious as well as on poetical grounds. A desire for deception, is implicit in the attraction to painted faces, and in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, painted artifice was a powerful material reminder of the human need for aesthetic pleasure. Thus there is a dialogical relationship between aesthetics and deception, which means that face painting can be viewed as an art form unto itself. Ovid, read widely in the Renaissance, instructs ladies in his Art of Love to use cosmetics to correct their natural deficiencies, but he tells them that they must hide it from their suitors, suggesting that it is their deception or artifice to which the potential suitors are attracted: ‘Why must I know the cause of the whiteness of your cheek? Shut your chamber door: why show the unfinished work? There is much that it befits men not to know; most of your doings would offend, did you not hide them within’.

I take it as an axiom of post-structuralist social theory that various determinations of social life – the economy, the family, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and so on – are to be considered in principle independent of one another: not just relatively autonomous, but completely autonomous from one another, with no privilege being automatically assigned to any one instance over all the others. This axiom is perhaps most evident in Foucault, who took his teacher Althusser's notion of the ‘relative autonomy’ of social determinations (politics, economics, ideology and so on) one step further to insist on their absolute autonomy from one another (Foucault 1972). But it is also evident in Derrida's insistence that the structurality of structure be understood not to harbour any centre that would privilege one structural element or instance over the others (Derrida 1972, 1994). In Deleuze and Guattari, finally, the axiom appears under the rubric of immanence: determinations are immanent within the social field they determine, without any transcendent instance determining all the others (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). But it then becomes an empirical or conjunctural question as to how these various instances intersect and interact with one another in specific circumstances, for even absolute autonomy definitely does not entail complete isolation. So if one were able to show that, let us say, familial and economic determinations under certain circumstances in fact reinforce one another, that would be an important result of examining them in relation to one another, as parts of what we might call an undetermined or non-deterministic whole.

Remarking on the place of Deleuze's thought in contemporary political circles, Slavoj Žižek has recently suggested that: ‘Deleuze more and more serves as the theoretical foundation of today's anti-globalist Left’ (Žižek 2004: xi). This situation, however, is not cause for celebration on Žižek's part. Following Alain Badiou, Žižek argues that the current leftist reading of Deleuze is little more than an anarcho-desiring cliché that is ultimately complicit with the postmodern orientations of contemporary capitalism. Indeed, he writes that: ‘There are, effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism’ (Žižek 2004: 185). This assessment is not quite of Deleuze in total, but of a ‘popular image’ of Deleuze; an image formed of a certain Marxism, a particular reading of Deleuze's ontology, and an aspect (albeit a key one) of Deleuze's own work – a Deleuze ‘guattarized’ in his work with Guattari (Zizek 2004: 20). It is evident that for Žižek a prominent manifestation of this popular image of an anti-globalist Deleuze is Hardt and Negri's Empire, where there is a clear meeting of Deleuzian figures of becoming, multiplicity, control and so on, with Marxian formulations of labour, capital and communism. Though Žižek initially endorsed Empire on the dust-jacket as a ‘rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time’, he now sees it as a ‘pre-Marxist’ work that conceals ‘its lack of concrete insight’ in ‘Deleuzean jargon of multitude, deterritorialization, and so forth’ (Žižek 2001: 192).

In their dialogues and collaborations, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari enquire of the nature of borders. They summon principles of inclusion and exclusion associated with borderlines. They eschew expressions built on the polarities of ‘either … or’ and in their own diction replace binary constructions with the conjunctive ‘and’. Furthermore, in ‘Rhizome,’ the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, they argue for rhizomatic connections – fostered in language by ‘and … and … and’ – to replace what they call the arborescent model of the ubiquitous Western tree (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In constant movement, the tissues and tendrils of rhizomes call attention to the horizontal surfaces of the world in which they proliferate. They bring to their observer a new sense of space that is seen not as a background but a shape that, with the rhizome, moves and forever changes. In the field of play Deleuze and Guattari often produce hybrid, even viral connections and downplay the presence of genealogies conveyed in the figure of the tree bearing a stock-like trunk. Rhizomatic connections form open territories that are not constricted by the enclosing frame of a rigid borderline.

In the same breath the two philosophers argue for ‘smooth’ spaces of circulation. They take a critical view of ‘striated’ spaces, replete with barriers and borders that are part of an ‘arborescent’ mentality. Striated spaces cross-hatched by psychic or real borderlines drawn by the state (social class, race, ethnicities) or by institutions (family, school), prevent the emergence of new ways of thinking.

No notion is more contested in European politics and social theory than the sociopolitical space of the European Union (EU). The EU is a molar political entity that has become an internationally significant economic player, but it also offers a critical political vision that universalises its own concept of ‘civilisation’. As a progressive project, the EU constitutes an alternative to the aggressive neo-liberalism of the USA on a number of key issues (privacy; telecommunication; genetically modified food and the environment) and as an advocate of human rights and world peace. It is a project that is faced with a diverse set of contradictions.

On the one hand, Europe celebrates transnational spaces, but on the other hand, it is witness to the resurgence of hyper-nationalisms occurring at the micro-level. The cosmopolitan global city and paranoid Fortress Europe stand face-to-face as opposite sides of the same coin. In an attempt to bypass the binary of global versus local, and so as to destabilise the established definitions of European identity, I will narrate an alternative vision of Europe's ‘becoming-minoritarian’. The decline of Eurocentrism will be taken as a premise that points to a qualitative shift in our collective sense of identity. Contained within the progressive project of the EU are the seeds for a post-nationalist sociopolitical space, which is to say, putting it in more Deleuzian terms, the possibility of a radical ‘becoming-minoritarian’ is immanent to the sociopolitical space of the EU.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze says that you can never know a philosopher properly until you know what he or she is against. To know them at all, you have to know what puts fire in their soul, what makes them take up the nearly impossible challenge of trying to say anything at all. Too many people are content to say Deleuze, like Nietzsche, was against Hegel without ever asking why. And those who do trouble themselves to ask this question are too often satisfied with a merely philosophical answer. But if Deleuze found Hegel's philosophy intolerable it was not simply because he thought that the dialectic was a badly made concept, or that he objected to a metaphysics predicated on negation. These are the complaints of a sandbox philosopher and Deleuze was certainly not that. Hegel's philosophy was intolerable to Deleuze because in his eyes it offers a slave's view of the world (Deleuze 1983: 10). Worse, it is a model of thought that seems to participate in the legitimation of the very system that enslaves us by installing the master–slave dialectic at the centre of our ratiocination, making it seem like this is the only choice we have, effectively denying us in advance the option of asking our own questions and forming our own problematics. But this critique is only meaningful (for example, authentically critical) to the extent that it is read in terms of Deleuze's conception of philosophy's purpose, which is precisely Marxian to the extent that, like Marx, they hold that the point of philosophy is not simply to understand society, but to change it.

Why philosophise? Why think? What is the function, purpose or point of philosophy in a world directed more and more towards efficiency, outcomes and economy of effort? Why suspend action and life for the sake of an idea? It is possible to answer these questions, via Deleuze, with two mutually exclusive sets of answers. The first ‘Platonic’ path would stress the incompleteness of actual life. Existing life, the life of the organism that strives to maintain its own being (to remain as it already is), perceives and responds to a given world. However, that world can only be said to be, to be actualised, because there is some condition or logic beyond being. What exists beyond beings is the Idea: a thing can only exist as this or that actual being because it instantiates or actualises some form. For Plato such forms – the logic that is the truth and proper being of the world – require a turn away from the physical and sensible life that fluctuates through time, to those forms from which time unfolds. This Platonic logic has a curious status in contemporary continental philosophy. On the one hand, there is Heidegger's classic critique of this logical turn whereby Plato establishes a being which will become the proper object or paradigm for human self-development (Heidegger 1998: 166). This critique of a separate or higher being that is other than this world is anticipated by Nietzsche, who will diagnose the belief in a ‘higher world’ or ideal of man as a failure of life and will.