30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Read Free

not rent them out. In fact, the traffic was in the other direction: many costumes came from real life. Expensive fashionable clothes were bequeathed to servants (for example) by rich employers. Sumptuary legislation prevented servants from wearing them (the legislation aligned social status with fabrics and accessories, dictating who could wear what; hence Faustus's anarchic vision of dressing the undergraduates in silk in Marlowe's Dr Faustus ); and so the servants sold their inherited clothes to the players, turning their bequest into cash.
    Jonson's The Alchemist is set in the period and location in which it was written—London in 1610. Like other city comedies, it depends on topicality: contemporary fashions are satirized in plays from Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) to Massinger's Caroline comedy The City Madam (1632). But there is some evidence to suggest that even historical plays were more conveniently contemporary than historically accurate in their costumes.
    We have only one contemporary picture of a Shakespeare play: a sketch of Titus Andronicus , made c .1595 by the writer Henry Peacham (1578–1644). The drawing, often reproduced independently of the manuscript in which it appears, forms a horizontal band at the top of a manuscript page on which Peacham has written out forty lines from the play. The drawing depicts Tamora, queen of the Goths, pleading to Titus for the life of her sons. At the picture's far right stands the inked black figure of Aaron the Moor; at the picture's far left stand two soldiers; in the center are Titus and the kneeling queen. The drawing is unlikely to represent an actual performance (the prisoner Aaron freely brandishes a sword, for instance!), but it may combine Peacham's memory of a performance of Titus with his reading of the quarto published in 1594. Although the stage action at this point requires three of Tamora's sons, the stage direction (erroneously) provides an entry for only two (see Myth 8); the fact that Peacham draws two sons may suggest that he was illustrating a text he was reading rather than a performance he was remembering. However, the drawing's eclectic mix of styles and periods is more likely to derive from memory than from imagination. Consequently it is helpful in suggesting how one of Shakespeare's historical tragedies was costumed in the 1590s.
    What is notable is that the costumes make no attempt at historical accuracy although there is considerable success in suggesting historical atmosphere. Tamora, fictional queen of a fifth-century people, wears a loose-bodied medieval- or Elizabethan-style gown. Titus wears a Roman toga and carries a spear, but the two soldiers behind him carry Tudor halberds, and one of them, perhaps both of them, also carries a scimitar (an Eastern curved sword). Both also wear wide, baggy pants—an Elizabethan fashion (called “Venetians”). They wear Elizabethan hats (one with a fashionable feather) and medieval body armor. 2 Shakespeare's theater company did not have the resources costume designers use today (books of pictures of historical costumes illustrating changing fashions). This was not a handicap: they had no desire for such resources. What the Peacham sketch makes clear is that the theater company was aiming for accessibility.
    This does not mean that they were careless or cavalier in costume choices. Costumes were their single biggest expense. The canopy over the Globe stage was to protect the costumes, not the actors. Philip Henslowe's Diary records lavish expenditure on satin doublets, taffeta cloaks, silver and copper lace, cloth of gold, velvet breeches, and shagged cloth (worsted cloth with a velvet nap on one side), and is detailed about cuts and linings and ornament and color and design (pinking, facing, spangling). Theater companies' “greatest accumulation of capital was in their clothing stock, which might easily be worth more than the theatre in which they were performing.” 3
    Figure 1 This