I still remember, as a trainee teacher, almost being dared to teach Richard III at A Level.

I didn’t know the play at all. What I did know was Shakespeare, and the specification. What sealed the deal was the phrase: “You might not get the chance to teach it again.”

Which was understandable, given the predominance of Hamlet, King Lear and, to a lesser extent, Othello.

So I jumped at it.

And the rest, as they say, is history. By the time I reached Richard III in my Shakespeare read-through, three or four years later, I was besotted.

PTS 07/039: (Find Me) Somebody To Love

Still am.

Richard is as much the consummate, flamboyant showman as Freddie Mercury, or Prince (or at least Richard was until – ironically, pretty much the moment when he’s crowned).

But these weekly posts are more than trips down memory lane.

They’re an opportunity to look at something I wrote nine years ago and ask whether I still think the same way.

Sometimes I do.

Sometimes I really don’t.

And sometimes the old idea turns out to have grown.

One thing I wrote about was my sympathy for characters who ‘don’t look right’. I think my reading has complicated that idea since then. There are certainly more examples: Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Mrs Quasimodo’ springs immediately to mind.

But I’m increasingly interested in something adjacent to physical appearance: people who don’t DRESS as expected.

I touched on this recently in a Shakespeare Sunday post.

As a classroom teacher, I was fascinated by uniform.

Students almost universally hate it, but I’ve sometimes asked classes what they do when a non-uniform day comes around. Shamefacedly, they almost always admitted to creating an ad hoc uniform.

In other words, they all turned up wearing much the same thing, after lots of out-of-school discussion.

It’s an observation rather than a criticism, and makes perfect sense, really. Clothes aren’t simply about what we like. They tell other people who we are — or, sometimes, who we would quite like them to think we are.

There’s the evolution.

In 2017, I was talking about ‘accidents of nature’.

In 2026, I seem to be more interested in the choices we make about our appearance.

And that sends me back to the literature. (Although don’t get me wrong – in a different blog I’d happily talk about Freddie (the leotards and THAT yellow jacket), Prince’s restless reinventions, and probably Madonna, too.)

But today I’m thinking about Piers Gaveston in Marlowe’s ‘Edward II‘, getting above himself by “wearing a lord’s revenue on his back”, through the Handmaids’ scarlet robes and white headpieces, to Patrick Bateman’s almost absurdly important wardrobe.¹

Costume can tell us about status, ambition, conformity, rebellion, sexuality, power, and identity, before a character has said very much at all.

Nine years on, then, I think I’m reading appearance rather differently.

And that’s pretty much the point of rereading, isn’t it?

Over to you: tell me about a text you’ve read where costume was a significant part of the story.

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1. as ever, I’m going to remind everyone who needs to hear this that American Psycho is NOT, and NEVER will be, an ‘instruction manual’. Referencing the book should never be treated as an implied approval of the character. ↩︎