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    Fashion in the Time of William Shakespeare: 1564–1616
    Fashion in the Time of William Shakespeare: 1564–1616
    Fashion in the Time of William Shakespeare: 1564–1616
    Ebook105 pages51 minutes

    Fashion in the Time of William Shakespeare: 1564–1616

    By Sarah Jane Downing

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    Garments and accessories are prominent in almost all of William Shakespeare's plays, from Hamlet and Othello to A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night. The statement 'Clothes maketh the man' was one that would have resonated with their audiences: the rise of England's merchant class had made issues of rank central to Elizabethan debate, and a rigid table of sumptuary laws carefully regulated the sorts of fabric and garment worn by the different classes. From the etiquette of courtly dress to the evolution of the Elizabethan ruff, in this vibrant introduction Sarah Jane Downing explores the sartorial world of the late-16th century, why people wore the clothes they did, and how the dizzyingly eclectic range of fashions (including ruffs, rebatos and French farthingales) transformed over time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateOct 10, 2014
    ISBN9781784420123
    Fashion in the Time of William Shakespeare: 1564–1616
    Author

    Sarah Jane Downing

    Sarah Jane Downing is a freelance writer with a special interest in the eighteenth century. She has written widely about the arts, contributing to national and local magazines and newspapers.

    Read more from Sarah Jane Downing

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      Book preview

      Fashion in the Time of William Shakespeare - Sarah Jane Downing

      VISIT

      WOOL, GLORIOUS WOOL

      SHAKESPEARE BELIEVED THAT ‘clothes maketh the man’ and dressed his characters accordingly using costume not only to denote character, but also to drive plot through subterfuge and disguise, notably through cross-dressing. Garments and fashions feature in almost all of his plays, occasionally even as the pivot of the story, as with Malvolio’s stockings in Twelfth Night , the handkerchief in Othello and the sleeve given as a love token in Troilus and Cressida .

      Shakespeare extensively explored what could happen if the strict rules of dress were transgressed, from the potentially serious consequences of violating the social contract, to the folly of individual vanity. He raises more than a smile when characters cross-dress, opening up issues of identity and sexuality at a time long before individual expression was considered important.

      Shakespeare’s use of disguising women as improbable pageboys seems rather clumsy to the twenty-first-century eye but in the late sixteenth century it was a popular dramatic device that had quite a different resonance. There was a curious frisson of seeing a young crack-voiced boy playing a girl who was pretending to be a young man, which would have been enjoyed by theatregoers as much as farcical humour. Fashionable young men of the time delighted in all kinds of finery and made themselves look quite effeminate, to the disgust of conservative commentators – as Shakespeare described, like the ‘hawthorne buds’ that pranced around court – and it was not too much of a theatrical stretch for a woman to be convincingly disguised as a handsome young man.

      Moralists like Philip Stubbes were deeply upset by women adopting male styles, describing them as ‘stinkyng before the face of god and offensive to man’.

      Elizabethans were used to finding amusement in role exchange since it was a popular element of festivities each Christmas, introduced by the Lord of Misrule. Most often it consisted of a lowly servant exchanging roles with a lord, but from the 1580s on there are reports of women exchanging clothes with husbands or brothers that were written of with bitter disapproval by Puritan commentators. Unsettled by the ‘unnaturalness’ of a female monarch, they held a deep-seated fear that women who adopted breeches under their skirts for riding or wore masculine styles of doublet or hat would be tempted away from their rigidly defined female role into immoral freedom. Mary Fitton, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, caused outrage when she slipped out at night to meet her lover disguised in a man’s cloak with her skirts tucked up in a most unseemly manner to mount her horse; the misuse of cloak and skirt were almost a greater scandal than the lover!

      Such excitement was strictly for the silk-brocaded classes; for the rest it was wool, from the finest worsteds down to itchy homespun. Wool was at the heart of the economy, so much so that the Lord Chancellor’s seat of power in Parliament was upon a woolsack sent by wool merchants as a reminder of their place as the backbone of English wealth. It was the need and desire to establish new markets for English wool in the 1560s that encouraged daring entrepreneurs to travel to mysterious lands such as Persia, Russia, West Africa, Morocco and the Americas. They established trade links and enriched the kingdom with territories such as Virginia and newly discovered commodities of potatoes, tobacco and cotton, while laying the groundwork for England to rule the waves. Sadly it was also the birth of Britain’s participation in the slave trade.

      Lord Mayor and Aldermen (Lucas van de Heere, c. 1566–71). Made in rich wool and fur-lined, the Guild gown was a status symbol that could be earned only by a lifetime of hard work.

      If wool was the heart of the economy, then fashion was its lifeblood, producing wealth and driving demand. No longer content to wait until their senior years to wear the furred finery of a Guild gown, the nouveau riche wanted to enjoy the silks and velvets imported from Venice, or exciting fabrics such as russels, darnick and tuff mockado that were newly in production in England as part of

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