'You May Look Pale': Whiteness and Love Melancholia in Love's Labour's Lost

'You May Look Pale': Whiteness and Love Melancholia in Love's Labour's Lost

What did it mean to turn pale on the Shakespearean stage? Pale, white, unblemished skin was held as the ideal of beauty in early modern England, artificially reinforced by cosmetics in cultural and theatrical representations of femininity. In early modern medical manuals, however, paleness is repeatedly constructed as one of the key symptoms of the disease of lovesickness, or love melancholia, and its teenage correlate, greensickness. In such texts, as in Shakespeare’s plays, to look pale is a tell-tale sign of such conditions; the complexion of the lovesick apparently drained of ‘colour’ by constant sighing and the consequent release of blood vapours. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon instructs Puck to seek out Helena, whom he will now know by her present appearance and state of being: “All fancy-sick she is, and pale of cheer / With sighs of love that cost the fresh blood dear” (3.2.96-7). For Helkiah Crooke, in Mikrocosmographia (1615), whiteness is the default ‘complexion’. He defines all skin as “naturally white” but then varied in “colour” by the “humours that abound, or the bodies under it” such as the “rosie redness” caused by blood under the face, where the “skin is thin” (73). In the melancholic lover’s body, it is the absence of such “colour” that constitutes ‘paleness’ and, yet, here Crooke’s disturbing standard of underlying whiteness to all skin is suddenly visible. With a consideration of humoral (and geo-humoral) constructions of whiteness in this period, this chapter will historicize the cultural, medical and theatrical implications of Shakespeare’s pale lovers in relation to what Arthur L. Little Jr has recently called “white melancholia” in which the “contours, however inchoate, of the establishment and deployment of racial whiteness” are made visible.

Files associated with this item cannot be displayed due to copyright restrictions.