"Monstrous manner": style and the early modern theater

Criticism, Summer, 2001 by Amanda Bailey

Oh beware therefore both what you wear, and how you wear it. Thomas Dekker, The Gull's Horn-Book (1609)

1. Sumptuousness

ELIZABETH I'S WARDROBE INVENTORY for the year 1600 lists 99 robes, 102 French gowns, 67 round gowns, 100 loose gowns, 126 kirtles, 96 cloaks, and 26 fans, in addition to her official Coronation, Parliament, Order of the Garter, and Mourning apparel. (1) Described by one contemporary as "a strutting bird of fantastic plumage," Elizabeth possessed over three thousand dresses the year she died. (2) Clothes were important to the queen and not merely because she had a passion for them. Apparel was one of the primary means through which she realized her authority. While Elizabeth's clothing symbolized her majesty, the clothes of her subjects signaled their various social positions. In early modern England, status--never an abstract set of external determinations--was represented and constituted by the material, and apparel was one of the preeminent forms by which individuals experienced and expressed their sense of social value. While the phrase "the clothes make the man" has become a cliche, in a period in which rank was expressed by its "social physiognomy" the claim that clothes made men had profound implications. (3) Using this Elizabethan maxim as a jumping off point, this essay begins to theorize and historicize the notion that clothes "made" men by considering how a certain class of men used clothes to make something out of what had been made of them.

In early modern England clothes made men sumptuous. In 1590 Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland, considered neither prodigal nor unique, spent over half his annual income on clothing. (4) Elite male dress was opulent, and men wore luxurious fabrics such as velvets and taffetas, as well as fashions that required the intricate layering of expensive silks and satins. The average nobleman went to great expense to outfit himself. His jerkin alone was made of as much as eight yards of gold or silver embroidered material. It was, like his doublet, slashed or blistered, revealing brightly colored silk cloth that was pulled through the various cuts or panes. His shirtfront boasted a large ruffed collar that measured at least twelve inches in breadth. His silk hose bulged with up to a yard and a half of costly material, which served to accentuate his calf. (5)

Members of the elite looked to luxurious apparel to proclaim their gentility. One popular primer for courtiers emphasized that sumptuous display was an elite prerogative, since "riches ... are a ready instrument to put in practice certain virtues belonging to gentry ... whereby gentry, like a glass stricken with the beams of the sun, is made more bright and shining." (6) A whole body of literature emerged in this period exclusively devoted to advising gentlemen and women to wear their sumptuous apparel in the correct manner. Conduct manuals instructed their readers to model their outfits with an air of sprezzatura on grounds that such rehearsed nonchalance would distinguish the elite sumptuous dresser from those social aspirants who wore their wealth with the visible effort that signaled ill-mastered luxury. The notion that certain virtues needed to be put in practice or that sumptuous clothes should be worn with sprezzatura did not undermine the supposition that expensive apparel was the natural extension of elevated status. (7)

In an atmosphere where "clothes ranked second only to hospitality as a status symbol and as a vehicle for conspicuous consumption" there was significant pressure on those who had recently ascended the social ladder to appear as elite (Stone, 562). Clothes were expensive, and some men sold off portions of their newly acquired land to generate enough cash to amass a wardrobe. John Kingston of Lincolnshire, for example, liquidated 220 [pounds sterling] worth of land to pay for his silk and satin clothing. (8) With the income to afford an elite lifestyle, the newly rich purchased the outward trappings of gentility that their "betters" claimed as their exclusive right. The aristocracy, which asserted that sumptuous clothes could not make but rather proclaimed gentility, viewed these "new men" as upstarts who threatened to alter the rules of discrimination that structured the boundaries of its collective identity. (9)

While outsiders who based their authority on sumptuous display threatened aristocratic prerogative, the traditional economy of elite consumption was also undergoing changes from within. As members of the elite lost political efficacy, they increasingly came to rely upon expenditure as the foundation of their prestige. The demilitarization of the aristocracy and the erosion of their financial base that began in the earlier part of the sixteenth century contributed to the diminishment of the tided elite as a viable social force. Many elite subjects were, in effect, in much the same position as those whom they sought to define themselves against. It was in this period, as historians have noted, that many established families fell into ruin in their compensatory turn towards symbols of luxury such as sumptuous clothes. (10)