A theme-free ‘Shakespeare Sunday‘ week is harder to deal with than you might believe.

Like an A-Level student being told that they can write their own coursework question, it’s a lot more daunting than being given a brief and then mischievously pushing how far you can go with it, which is my usual MO (and which will be every A-Level student’s MO, if I’ve had anything to do with them).

If there’s a prompt for my choosing ‘costume’ THIS weekend, it’s a subliminal one.

Or is it because everyone who sees them is complaining that I wear shorts with rips in them to weed in the garden?

Either way …

There’s a part of me that rails against any system which equates appearance and character. What we might call the ‘Halo Effect’.¹

Not least because I was once told by a girlfriend that I could make the most expensive suit look scruffy.

Reader, we are still together. But I have never forgotten the remark, as you can see.

I’ve learned to embrace my scruffiness, but at the same time I hate the idea that my students live in a world where, increasingly, appearance equals personality or worth. Being a Shakespeare nerd, this makes me ‘exercised’, which I’m going to define as ‘interested and vicariously angry’, about the Sumptuary Laws.

The what?

Over to Nigel Heard:

These laws had first been introduced in 1337 and were retained until 1604. The objective of this type of legislation was to control the dress and behaviour of each group within society.²

It’s the ‘dress’ part I’m most interested in today. The behaviour part, what we might call acting with ‘decorum’? That’s definitely a post for another day.

First, you had to dress according to your rank or ‘station’. That extended to things like the colours and the fabrics any social group were ‘allowed’ to wear.

There is, by the way, an interesting comparison with how you spoke. Blank verse is often associated with status and education, while prose can mark lower-status characters, or those of the upper strata who are ‘slumming it’, eg Hamlet with the gravediggers; or those thought to have ‘lost it’, eg Hamlet, again, pretending to be mad.

Second, aristocratic dress was expensive and valuable. Especially particular colours. Not for nothing do the ordinary inhabitants of the better historical dramas look dull. Who could afford highly regarded, rare, and therefore expensive colourful dyes?

Masters and mistresses. Lords and Ladies.

Not servants (unless liveried by their masters at great expense in what was a very showy sign of wealth).

Favoured servants were often bequeathed wardrobes of apparel, but (stop and think about this) they would be breaking the law to wear something which was of a colour or fabric style above their station.

Inherited something nice?

Enter the theatre.

Decent costumes, where available, were highly valuable to a theatre company. Actually it makes me wonder if the roof on Elizabethan theatres was more to preserve the costumes than the actors.

To the point, then.

We could go one of two ways.

In Hamlet, Polonius tells his departing son:

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,³

The world judges the man by his appearance. Understood: if not necessarily agreed with by this particular scruff.

Or … we can look to Lear.

Through tatter’d clothes small vices do appear;

Robes and furr’d gowns hide all.⁴

And there, I think, Shakespeare turns the whole thing inside out.

The problem isn’t simply that we judge people by what they wear.

It is that we are too easily persuaded by what they wear.

The robe doesn’t merely signify power. It can create the appearance of virtue, authority, respectability – even innocence.

Lear’s speech continues:

… Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it

Put the right clothes on the wrong person and society may not simply fail to recognise the truth.

It may actively protect the lie.

And that makes Lear far more uncomfortable than a play about a king who loses his kingdom.

Lear spends much of the play discovering that being a king, looking like a king, being treated like a king, and being worthy of being a king are four entirely different things.

You know me by now. Always searching for intertextual equivalents, and when it comes to Shakespeare, usually for something modern – relevant, never relatable.

In my reading journey, perhaps the ultimate modern embodiment of the well-dressed monster has to be Patrick Bateman.⁵

It saddens me to have to say it, but nowadays I end up appending the same sort of comment every time I mention that book.

Pay attention

Despite the fact that I usually say you can pretty much say what you want in interpreting literature, if you think ‘American Psycho‘ is an instruction manual, you are wrong. So wrong, that someone should be checking in on your mental health.

Back to Lear, then … mostly.

Eventually, the clothes come off.

So do the titles.

So does the certainty. 

Somewhere on the heath, with Poor Tom beside him and ‘unaccommodated man‘ beginning to emerge from all the robes, furs, ceremonies and possessions, Shakespeare starts asking a rather more awkward question:

WHAT are we when everything that tells the world WHO we are has been stripped away?

I suspect that’s a question worth getting a little exercised about.

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Sources and Further Reading

Title: ‘Sharp Dressed Man’, ZZ Top, in Eliminator (Warner Bros Records, 1983)

1. Edward L. Thorndike, “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 4.1 (1920), 25–29 ↩︎
2. Nigel Heard, Tudor Economy and History (Access to History series), (Hodder and Stoughton, 1992) ↩︎
3. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006) ↩︎
4. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997) ↩︎
5. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) ↩︎