"Monstrous manner": style and the early modern theater

Criticism, Summer, 2001 by Amanda Bailey

3. Sumptuousness as Excess

The clothing proclamation of 1580 begins by condemning "the great excess of apparel ... in the inferior sort" (TRP, 2:454), and goes on to issue a warning against those who may attempt to appear sumptuous by "devis[ing] any new kind of form of apparel" or "garnish[ing]" the apparel that they already possess (TRP, 2:461). Describing those men who would through innovation try to appear to be worth "greater charge than appertaineth to his degree and quality" (TRP, 2:461), this proclamation is particularly concerned with those who may have decorated or embellished their "mean" appearance with luxurious items. The law closes by commanding mean men to "leave off such fond disguised and monstrous manner of attiring themselves" (TRP, 2:462). By focusing on those who accessorized their mean apparel with aristocratic items, the royal administration acknowledged those who distinguished themselves by their monstrous pairing of high and low. Revealing a profound concern about how the sumptuous dresser wore his clothes, rather than simply what he wore, the Elizabeth an administration attempted to identify and classify who the mean sumptuous dresser was.

According to the rhetoric of the law, the mean sumptuous dresser was excessive. Most generally, the adjective excessive referred to the apparel of the offender, who was often charged with "the wearing of such excessive and ordinate apparel" (TRP, 2:136). His outfit may have been excessive in any number of respects, in that it may have used an exorbitant amount of cloth, been decorated in an extravagant fashion, or been made out of particularly costly materials. Certainly, as in the case of Richard Walweyn and his over-sized hose, the sumptuous dresser was not inconspicuous. Walweyn was one of those serving-men who, as one contemporary noted, "flaunt[ed] it out in these [excessive] kinds of hosen...." (36) The word excessive, though, functions in the rhetoric of the law as both as an adjective that describes the offender's apparel and as a verb that describes the offender's behavior: he "exceeded" and "daily more exceed[ed] in the excess of apparel" (TRP, 2:187). The offender's infraction is described as an "enormity," which like a disease "grows," rather than "abates," and "spread[s] amongst the youth" (TRP, 2:193; 3:4). Similarly, the recurring phrase "the monstrous abuse of apparel" stresses that offenders were distinguished by their "monstrous manner of attiring themselves," a phrase that appears frequently in Elizabethan clothing proclamations (TRP, 2:193; 3:175; 2:462). Words such as outrageous, inordinate, and monstrous--with their connotations of unnatural and perverse--indexed the practice of sumptuousness marking the performative way in which these men wore sumptuous items as a phenomenon that was ultimately more threatening than social mobility or its disruptive counterpart, social fluidity.

The notion of excess as a classifiable set of behaviors is articulated within "An Homily against Excess of Apparel," a sermon that Elizabeth assigned to all church officials in 1588. While the sermon sets out to chastise both men and women, a substantial portion is devoted to those men who repeatedly violate the provisions of Elizabethan clothing laws. Invoking biblical authorities and injunctions, the homily ultimately condemns those who practice the "foul and chargeable excess ... of apparel" on grounds that by violating these "necessary laws" these subjects pose a "great peril" to the realm. (37)