Abstract
Although rarely considered in studies of Early Modern English drama, costumes were vital to the practice of play-making in Shakespeare’s London. On the essentially bare stages of the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses, the visual experience for playgoers was overwhelmingly established by the theatrical apparel that actors wore in production. A rotating repertory of plays made it highly impractical to employ extensive set pieces and wings and backdrops were not introduced into English public theatres until after the interregnum. And yet, the Shakespearean stage did not want for spectacle. Costumes were extensively and deftly employed to provide a rich visual experience to playgoers who came not only to hear a play but to see it as well. Theatrical apparel was so important to the practice of producing drama in early modern England that costumes constituted a theatre company’s single largest expenditure. They cost more than play texts and even more than the playhouses themselves.1 Without attempting to detract from the importance of Shakespeare’s language, we must acknowledge that costumes were considered crucial to the original staging of his plays.2
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Notes
G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 88; James H. Forse, Art Imitates Business: Commercial and Political Influences in Elizabethan Theatre (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1993), 15; Jean MacIntyre and Garrett P. J. Epp, ‘“Cloathes worth all the rest”: Costumes and Properties’, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 284.
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have gone so far as to argue that in early modern England, the theatre ‘was a new and spectacular development of the clothing industry’, in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 176.
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘General Introduction’, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 59.
For a thorough introduction to the history of English sumptuary legislation, I recommend Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926).
All Shakespeare quotes are drawn from William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
Barbara A. Mowat, ‘“The Getting up of the spectacle”: The Role of the Visual on the Elizabethan Stage, 1576–1600’, The Elizabethan Theatre 9 (1983): 72.
Jean MacIntyre considers the practice of theatre companies to accumulate and build costume stores in Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1992).
The costumes and visual semiotics of the period is the subject of Robert I. Lublin, Costuming the Shakespearean Stage: Visual Codes of Representation in Early Modern Theatre and Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).
Hats were part of typical Elizabethan apparel and were worn by actors and audience members alike. In Hamlet, Ophelia marks Hamlet’s lunacy by noting that he had no hat on his head. For a discussion of the hat and its importance to Shakespearean drama, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 4th edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–3.
William O. Scott, ‘The Speculative Eye: Problematic Self-Knowledge in Julius Caesar’, Theatre Survey 40 (1988): 85.
Lucy Barton, ‘Why Not Costume Shakespeare According to Shakespeare?’, Educational Theatre Journal 19 (1967): 55. It is worth further noting that in her injunction that directors stage Shakespearean productions in Elizabethan and Jacobean apparel, Lucy Barton devotes little time to the Roman plays and none to how contemporary audiences might view Elizabethan apparel on Roman characters.
This quiet, extended moment is made more compelling by the fact that most of the film is dominated by extremely rapid cuts that rarely settle on a single image for more than a few seconds. See Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide (New York and London: Norton, 2008), 109.
G. K. Hunter, ‘Flatcaps and Bluecoats: Visual Signals on the Elizabethan Stage’, Essays and Studies 33 (1980): 25–7.
Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 3 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 5.
David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.
Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975), 38–9.
Historian Keith Wrightson has noted that ‘the most fundamental structural characteristic of English society was its high degree of stratification, its distinctive and all-pervasive system of social inequality.’ Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 17.
Daniel Rosenthal, Shakespeare on Screen (London: Hamlyn, 2000), 32.
Cay Dollerup, ‘Danish Costume on the Elizabethan Stage’, The Review of English Studies n.s. 25.97 (February 1974): 54.
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© 2013 Robert I. Lublin
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Lublin, R.I. (2013). Shakespearean Visual Semiotics and the Silver Screen. In: Brown, S.A., Lublin, R.I., McCulloch, L. (eds) Reinventing the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319401_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319401_15
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