Abstract
‘Many Barbers and Surgeons were fined in London for presuming to “sett up shoppe” without a license’.1 Court minutes of the Company’s records show a flurry of such fines in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century: on 24th July 1599 ‘Richard Samborne complayned of one Phillip Winter for settinge upp a shoppe in paules church yarde beinge not free’.2 The threat of unlicensed practice lay in its material manifestation as much as in the figure of the practitioner and was dealt with as such. Unlicensed barber Wheekes was ordered on 4th November 1600 to ‘take downe his basons and macke no shewe twowardes the streete’.3 At all times, practitioners were forbidden to display vessels of blood as an advertisement for bloodletting, regular or irregular.4 Barbers were not only instructed not to ‘shave wasshe, poule or trymme’ customers on Sundays (and other holy days), but they were also forbidden to ‘hange upp set or put out any … Basons or … potts upon … poule Racke shoppe windowes or otherwise’ on these days.5 Barber Marmaduke Jefferson was fined on 8th May 1599 ‘for hangeing oute his basones on Maye daie’.6
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Notes
Sidney Young, Annals (London: Blades, 1890), pp. 192, 191.
William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 1, 41.
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage1574–1642, 3rd edn (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), p. 187.
See James Watt, ‘John Woodall’ in Notable Barber Surgeons, ed. Ian Burn (London: Farrand Press in association with The Worshipful Company of Barbers, 2008), pp. 153–77.
See ‘Introduction’, Randle Holme, ‘The Manuscript of the Third Book of The Academy of Armory as it was for the Printing’ in Academy of Armory or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon, ed. I. H. Jeaynes, Vol II (London: Roxburghe Club, 1905), pp. v–xii. The collection of Holme’s manuscripts is held at the British Museum (Harl. 2026–2035).
Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 4–7.
On the barber’s shop as a social centre, see Margaret Pelling, ‘Appearance and Reality’ in London 1500–1700, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (London: Longman, 1986), pp. 82–112 (p. 85).
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 163–200 (pp. 163, 173, 198–9).
John Lyly, Midas in Galatea/Midas, ed. George K. Hunter and David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000).
See Elizabethan and modern translation: Ovid, Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (1567); Ovid, Metamophoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford, New York: OUP, 1998).
Mark Albert Johnston, ‘Playing with the Beard’, ELH 72:1 (2005), 79–103 (p. 91).
Volpone recognizes that he enjoys ‘More in the cunning purchase of [his] wealth/Than in the glad possession’ (Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Robert N. Watson, 2nd edn (London: A & C Black; New York: WW Norton, 2003), I.i.31–2).
Carla Mazzio, ‘The Senses Divided’ in Empire of the Senses, ed. David Howes (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2005), pp. 85–105 (p. 86).
Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 3.
John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, ed. David Crane (London: A & C Black; New York: W W Norton, 1997).
Douglas Bruster, ‘The Dramatic Life of Objects in the Early Modern Theatre’ in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 67–96 (pp. 74–5).
Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatres (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), see pp. 117–34 (p. 121).
Ben Jonson, Epicoene, ed. Roger Holdsworth (London: A & C Black; New York: WW Norton, 2002).
Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 35.
See Sandra Cavallo, ‘Health, Beauty and Hygiene’ in At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (London: V&A Publications, 2006), pp. 174–87.
For a discussion of the substances (rather than the tool-sets) women used in cosmetics, see Karim-Cooper, pp. 34–63. Cf. Philip Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd edn (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), p. 146.
Cf. Mark Albert Johnston, ‘Bearded Women in Early Modern England’, SEL 47:1 (2007), 1–28 (p. 6).
Gordon Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (London: Athlone, 1997), pp. 89–90, 192.
Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 135.
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed (Ithaca, New York: Cornell U P, 1993), p. 24.
Richard Sugg, Murder after Death (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press; Bristol: University Presses Marketing, 2007), p. 2. In his study of Sejanus, William W. E. Slights is struck by Jonson’s ‘total absence of the anatomist’s systematic and orderly presentation of the human body and its parts’ (‘Bodies of Text and Textualized Bodies in Sejanus and Coriolanus’, MaRDiE 5 (1991), 181–93 (p. 185)).
Patricia Parker, ‘Cutting Both Ways’ in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 107.
‘Introduction’ in Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter, ed. Ronald Brunless McKerrow (London: David Nutt; Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1904), p. x.
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (London: Methuen, 1968), see V.49–65.
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© 2016 Eleanor Decamp
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Decamp, E. (2016). ‘Settinge up a shoppe’: Inventories and Props. In: Civic and Medical Worlds in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471567_2
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