"Monstrous manner": style and the early modern theater

Criticism, Summer, 2001 by Amanda Bailey

In what follows, I will demonstrate that while the theater did not offer a radical break with the dominant culture, it distinguished itself from other more orthodox cultural formations through the rituals of consumption it promoted. By celebrating the profane logic of the marketplace rather than the dictates of established social codes, the theater promoted an ethos of irreverent conspicuous consumption. In some spheres, conspicuous consumption was naturalized by the assertion of "manner" or taste, which served as the symbolic manifestation of authority and a tool of distinction. In the world of the playhouse, manner was reinscribed as style: a highly self-conscious mode that realized the process of self-presentation as spectacle. In contrast to the sartorial practices of the Court such as sprezzatura (and other rhetorical gestures of comportment) that served to suture the gaps between the social position of the wearer and the cultural significance of his clothes, the sartorial practices associated with the theater did not imaginatively resolve the contradictions that surrounded clothes as indices of status. Authorities identified mean men on the streets of London and at the playhouse by their "monstrous manner" of attiring themselves (TRP, 2:193). At first glance, this characterization suggests a history of how authorities categorized certain men. There is, however, another history embedded in the anecdote that follows, one that recounts how certain men distinguished themselves by this very "monstrous manner."

2. Regulating Sumptuousness

On January 24, 1565 Richard Walweyn was arrested for wearing "a very monstrous and outrageous great pair of hose." (15) The surviving records do not describe Walweyn's hose, and we can only speculate what the arresting officer found to be "monstrous" and "outrageous" about them. It is most likely that Walweyn's hose were extraordinarily large due to the impressive amount of padding they contained. Walweyn, a servant, may have violated any number of the provisions that made up the 1562 clothing proclamation, which, among its other aims, attempted to regulate the fad for over-stuffed and elaborately decorated stockings that had "crept alate into the realm" (TRP, 2:189-90). Much of the 1562 edict was devoted to determining which rank of men could wear what kind of hose, and, according to the proclamation, servants such as Walweyn were allowed to wear only "plain" hose (TRP, 2:189-90). Considered members of "the meaner sort," servants were not permitted to wear hose made of velvet, satin, or "any other stuff above the estimation of sarcenet or taffeta," or stockings that were stuffed with more than a yard and three quarters of material (TRP, 2:189-90).

The description of Walweyn's hose as monstrous provides some information about what Walweyn wore, but it also reveals something about the way in which he wore his great hose. Monstrous meant extraordinary in the sense of strange, and in the early modern period the word was used to describe not only the unnatural aspects of an object but also the disruptive and "uncivil" ways that an object was put to use. (16) Deployed in combination with the adjective outrageous, the word monstrous could evoke a range of meanings that call upon its linguistic connections to the words "warning" and "sign" and to the verb "to show." In the sixteenth century, there was a strong connotative relationship between the monstrous and what we have come to categorize as the obscene. (17) Insofar as the monstrous was obscene it was caught up in a scopic economy, one that mandated that the strange be shown or revealed to the curious onlooker. At once performative and perverted, the epistemology of the monstrous anticipated the logic of the theatrical, which dictated the unnatural pairing of conspicuous display and irreverent social practice. The following discussion of Elizabethan clothing regulations considers how these laws discursively produced and reproduced the monstrous as a category that accumulated specific social meaning in relation to sartorial transgression. By mobilizing nascent cultural anxieties about mean men misusing the signs of luxury to flaunt their own social dissidence, Elizabethan clothing laws brought the monstrous to light.