'Wardrobe Stuffe':

Clothes, Costume and the Politics of Dress in Ben Jonson's The New Inn

JULIE SANDERS

UNIVERSITY OF KEELE

In Cressida, a contemporary drama about boy actors in the 1630s London commercial theatres, which premiered in 2000, one particularly memorable scene at I.vi involves an attempt by two boy performers to steal costumes from the storage room of a now-defunct theatre company. The costumes are valuable women's gowns; woven of silver, gold and silk, they are estimated to be worth upwards of £80, a veritable fortune in the Caroline period. In previous scenes of the play, the audience has witnessed the boys who are employed by John Shank, the drama's protagonist, caring for and costing their stage outfits; we are by this stage, therefore, well aware of the economic value of theatre costume (Wright 2000). Those members of the audience aware of Shank's real-life history will also know that he was a member of the King's Men (Shakespeare's former company) and that, as a financial sideline, he bought, sold and rented costumes as well as boy actors. When he died in 1635, Shank's will famously required that the King's Men recompense his widow to the tune of £50 for his share in the books and costumes belonging to the company. He also requested a further £16 and 12 shillings for two specific gowns he claimed the company had received from him (Stallybrass 1996, 297).
As it turns out in Cressida, another person comes into the costume store and steals the said dresses while the boy actors, Stephen and Honey, are hiding and their plans are, therefore, thwarted. Nevertheless, the talismanic as well as economic power of clothing is firmly established by this scene, in which the three glittering dresses have been hanging as visible and tangible prizes on the stage. Clothes and clothing were important and valuable commodities and objects in the early Stuart period, both to acting companies, where they served as vital tools of the trade, and in wider society. Clothes were at various turns invested with the powers of magical transformation, the assertion of identities, personal and national, and the power to subvert hierarchies of rank and gender. Unsurprisingly, early modern drama with its investment in metatheatre found a rich seam of tropes in clothing and dress. This essay is an investigation of the resonance of costume, metaphorical and material, in one specific Caroline play, Ben Jonson's The New Inn (1629), which deploys the semiotics of dress in a sustained fashion across its five acts. The dialogue is awash with terms relating to costume, dressing-up and disguise: 'standards', 'suits', and 'apparel' are the order of the day and the events of the play feature cross-class as well as cross-gender attire, which serves to render the material and moral signification of clothing a central theme. Jonson is not simply rehearsing a familiar and recurrent theatrical fascination with the possibilities of costume, though, of course, that is a strong element of the play's dramaturgy. His interest is also undoubtedly socio-political, with particular reference to two important court offices of the late 1620s: the Office of the Revels and the Office of the Wardrobe. Careful investigation of the precise ramifications of these allusions in the play further assists us in locating The New Inn as a play that is very much a product of the concerns and practices of the early part of the troubled Caroline reign.
Martin Butler has written persuasively about the context provided for The New Inn in 1629 by recent events in parliament, in particular attempts to force the king to accept the Petition of Right (Butler 1992). But it is also revealing to read the play in the context of contemporary Caroline court reforms. In the late 1620s and early 1630s, the Office of the Wardrobe was just one of several court departments and institutions which the Caroline regime was seeking to reform. In 1625 Charles I had inherited a severely stretched Treasury and needed to act swiftly to curtail excess expenditure. The historian G.E. Aylmer concluded some years ago that 1629 and 1630 were the years of maximum economy in the royal households (Sharpe 1992, 236). Expenditure in the area of the wardrobe would have been considerable in the early years of the reign with both a king's and a queen's household to be fitted out. Expenditure in fact reached upwards of £27,000-30,000 per annum. In 1628, a special commission was granted powers to investigate the particular abuses in the Office of the Wardrobe and a detailed report on the subject was produced by the Privy Council in 1630.
One particular document in the National Library of Scotland relates to this moment in the history of the Caroline government. Produced in the King's hand on 15 April 1630, it laid particular emphasis on errant tailors and tradesmen:
That this sayde Clerke of his M^atte Wardrobe or his sufficient Deputie shalbe always present att the delyvery of all such stuffe, gold, silver or silke . . . Cloth, fustian, lynnen or any other necessaryes whatsomoor as shalbe delyvered to any Artifficers from the Great Wardrobe or any Tradesman, for the granishinge, trymminge and makinge upp or the ripayreinge whatsoever for the King and Queens Service or for Ambassadors and apperteyninge to the Service of his M^ate Wardrobes. And that the sayde Clerke shall make recorde of ther quallity and quantity, thereof in a Booke to be kept by him. And also the sayde Artifficer shall sitt downe in his Bill what he receavith for this same accordingly. (National Library of Scotland, MS 191)

The same document reveals that the fact has emerged in the royal households that work paid for on a regular per annum basis was not necessarily being carried out:
That whereas allowance is yearely made to diverse Arressmen and Taylors belonging to the sayde Great Wardrobe for repayringe and mendinge of Hangings and other Stuffe, within his M^ate Wardrobes of Bedds, and the Sayde wardrobes uppon the late view thereof appeared to be in greate decay, and little repararóns done thereto that no allowance or payment be from hence forthe made to any of them for any riparóns whatsoever done to any of his M^ate sayde wardrobe stuffe or for any necessaries ymployed about the repayringe and mending thereof, but such as is certifyed by the Clark of the Wardrobes and the Wardrobe in whose Custody this same stuff remayneth under ther hands to be done and used accordingly and that the sayd workmen be payde their wages Quarterly or every halfe yeare . . . and for as much as ther hath been heretofore abussis committed by some of M^ats wardrobes in takinge and searinge out of the lynings of his M^ats Arrases and tapestry, or hangings and for returning them to the Great Wardrobe without any lyning in them . . . (National Library of Scotland, MS 191)

The New Inn has its own errant tailor in the figure of Nick Stuff who misappropriates the dresses he has fashioned for his elite female clients for the purposes of dressing up his own wife and engaging in sexual antics. Tailors served on the early modern stage as stereotypical figures of sexual ambiguity, deployed as go-betweens or social intermediaries; Needle in Jonson's 1632 The Magnetic Lady performs this function for much of that play, although the needle/prick/penis puns he is endlessly subject to are given a very tangible reference when he is revealed to be the father of the illegitimate child born to one of the female characters during the course of the drama. As the above-quoted documents indicate, however, tailors were under scrutiny as figures of potential corruption along with a number of other public servants employed by the court. The new Caroline regime and the financial legacy of indebtedness left by its Jacobean predecessor led to a raft of policies and committees that represented a concerted effort to make genuine economies and bring royal offices back under stricter control. The Office of the Wardrobe was a particular focus of this policy-making. This essay will argue therefore that the Stuff plot-line of The New Inn is part of a wider concern with this contemporary Caroline atmosphere of perceived corruption and attempted reform, which results in a play deeply invested in exposing the rank-driven operations of costume. The semiotics of dress in this text serve as revealing indicators of Jonson's theatrical and social politics.
The New Inn is set in a Barnet inn-house called 'The Light Heart', presided over by Goodstock, the Host. When the play opens, he is trying, somewhat in vain, to cheer up the melancholic Lord Lovel who is a guest in his hostelry. Lovel is pining for a woman, the heiress Lady Frances Frampul, but conceals his true affections. This is because he made a deathbed promise to his late mentor Lord Beaufort that he would watch over his son; that son being a suitor of the said Lady Frances, Lovel finds himself in a curious double bind. To add to his pain, Lovel discovers that Lady Frampul has come to the inn for a day of 'sports' or theatrical game-playing ('the day's sports devised i'the inn' [I.vi.44]), along with her quasi-Platonic suitors, Lords Latimer and Beaufort. Her chambermaid Prudence is to dress up as queen for the day and preside over a mock 'Court of Love'. As part of their theatrical project, Prudence and Frances decide to dress up the Host's adopted son Frank as Laetitia, a waiting-woman. This is where cross-dressing in gender terms as well as social terms (a chambermaid dressed as a queen) enters the play. Beaufort falls for 'Laetitia' and marries her in secret, only to be denounced for marrying a boy. By Act V, however, in a series of far-fetched revelations, Frank turns out to have been Laetitia all along – Lady Frances's long-lost sister and therefore co-heir to the Frampul family estate. Goodstock proves to be the sisters' father, Lord Frampul, also in disguise, and Frank/Laetitia's Irish Nurse is identified as his wife (and, by extension, the sisters' mother). By the close, then, all is harmony and reconciliation: Frances and Lovel are conjoined and Latimer offers to marry Prudence, impressed as he is by her dignity and integrity of character and unconcerned by her lack of noble status. Unlike a Shakespearean romance, Prudence does not turn out to be a long-lost princess: indeed, in the closing moments of Act V several male characters conspire to provide her with a dowry and therefore a practical opportunity to transcend her rank.
The point in The New Inn where the centrality of costume to the playtext's concerns is made explicit is at II.i in what has come to be called by critics the 'dressing scene'. We see Lady Frances attempting to squeeze her waiting woman Prudence into one of her own dresses. The exchange provides an opportunity for the elite mistress to indulge in some size-related comments at her servant's expense:
[Enter] LADY [FRAMPUL and] PRUDENCE [pinning her lady's gown on herself.]
LADY FRAMPUL Come, wench, this suit will serve: dispatch, make ready.
It was a great deal with the biggest for me,
Which made me leave it off after once wearing.
How does it fit? Will't come together?
(II.i.1-4)
The stage business is clear from Prudence's response to her lady's closing question; presumably through gritted teeth, she declares: 'Hardly' (II.i.4); the two women will be struggling to draw together the under-sized dress's corsetry: 'Girt thee hard, Pru' (II.i.6). Lines later in the same scene will draw audience attention back to lacings on the garment loaned to Prudence for the inn theatricals: 'Thou art not cruel, / Although strait-laced I see, Pru!' (II.i.31-3) says Lady Frampul in punning mode. Her joke is on the homophonic relationship between 'cruel' and 'crewel', the latter being the rich embroidery which many dresses in the early seventeenth century were adorned with. The lacing of women's dresses and corsets had already become a commonplace metaphor for prudish or puritanical behaviour: we retain this sense of being 'strait-laced' today.
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have recently observed the social relations implicit in the intricate design of female attire at this time: 'The intricacies of lacing meant that dressing and undressing were social processes that required . . . other pairs of hands' (Jones and Stallybrass 2000, 23) 1 These 'other pairs of hands' were likely to be those of social inferiors and servants; in the case of elite women the task was most commonly the responsibility of a chambermaid, such as Prudence. 2 Immediately, then, Jonson's stage tableau in II.i of The New Inn offers an image of social inversion, as a mistress strives to lace up a servant's dress. It is possible to identify in this stage image, a suggestion of egalitarianism in the Prudence-Lady Frances relationship. Critical accounts of this scene have tended to concentrate on their camaraderie: Helen Ostovich, for example, comments: 'In the dressing scene, the friendship between the two women reveals itself in their shared pleasures and imitations' (Ostovich 1997, 12). Whilst it would be wrong to dismiss this understanding of the women's intimacy entirely (ensuing events depend, after all, on their co-operation in the performance of the 'day's sports'), the bitchiness and implicit sense of superiority involved in Lady Frances's comments about Prudence's size here should not be underestimated. Clearly the physiognomy of the actors in these roles would be different, with Prudence being the taller and larger of the two. Ostovich offers a utopian reading of the signification of this: 'Iconographically, their difference in size may imply the maid's greater wisdom and prepare the audience for her upward leap in social status in Act V' (1997, 13). This sits uneasily, however, with the play's later dependence on the substantial size of Pinnacia Stuff, the tailor's equally errant wife who appears in Act IV in a dress made to Pru's measurements. Pinnacia's size renders her the object of the inn company's vicious humour:
BEAUFORT  A bouncing bona-roba as the Fly said.
FRANK  She is some giantess: I'll stand off
For fear she swallow me.
(IV.iii.22-4)
Lady Frances may claim that she intends Prudence to far exceed her in appearance:
'Tis rich enough, but 'tis not what I meant thee!
I would ha' had thee braver than myself,
And brighter far.
(II.i.33-5)
However, theirs is inescapably a class-ridden relationship and one in which Frances is always quick to seize the upper hand. The power dynamics of their interactions are made manifest in Act IV when Frances rails on Prudence's failure to read her mind in the midst of the company's countenanced dissembling:
PRUDENCE  I swear I thought you had dissembled, madam,
And doubt you do so yet.
LADY FRAMPUL  Dull, stupid wench!
Stay i'thy state of ignorance still, be damned,
An idiot chambermaid! Hath all my care,
My breeding thee in fashion, thy rich clothes,
Honours and titles wrought no brighter effects
On thy dark soul than thus?
(IV.iv.311-17)
In this outburst, Lady Frances appears to describe Prudence as her Pygmalion-esque creation: for all the intimacy and confidences of this relationship, which Ostovich and others are right to note as offering an alternative to the play's failed patriarchal networks, it is still one in which a note of elite control is clearly sounded. The two women's reactions to clothes and costumes in the course of the play serve to make this power-related aspect of their relationship explicit.
Lady Frances informs Prudence that when the occasion for her wearing the dress comes to an end, she may sell the item on to the commercial playhouses and thereby make some profit from it: ' 'Twill fit the players yet / When thou hast done with it, and yield thee somewhat' (II.i.35-6). This 'social circulation' of clothing, as Jones and Stallybrass term it, had certainly been common practice in the Elizabethan period; Shank of the King's Men, as we have indicated, made money by selling and loaning clothes to acting companies; Philip Henslowe, manager of the Rose Theatre, did much the same. A poem by John Donne, most likely written in the 1590s, hints at the quotidian nature of selling clothes to actors or theatres:
As fresh and sweet as their Apparells be, as bee
The fields they sold to buy them; For a King
Those hose are, cry the flatterers; And bring
Them next weeke to the Theatre to sell;
Wants reach all states; Me seemes they does as well
At stage, as court; All are players, who e'er lookes
(For themselves dare not goe) o'r Cheapside bookes,
Shall find their wardrops [wardrobe's] Inventory . . .
(Satyre IV, ll. 180-7)
Accounts from the Office of the Revels, a companion office of sorts to that of the Wardrobe in the Tudor and Stuart periods, detail comparable acts of recycling: one entry notes how costumes are 'Imployed into ffrockes and priestes gownes with wide Sleves translated twise agayne in to torche bearers and used by the players and to them geven by Composicion' (Cited in Astington, 1999, 157). Jean MacIntyre has recently questioned the extent to which this practice was normal as opposed to exceptional, suggesting that it was largely confined to amateur performances rather than any organized system of donation or sale to the professional playing companies (MacIntyre 1992, 51). Certainly, when Sir John Suckling donated all the costumes from the production of his play Aglaura in 1637 when it transferred from a court performance to the Blackfriars private theatre, it was noted as unusual:
Two of the Kings Servants, Privy-Chamber Men both, have writ each of them a play, Sir John Sutlin and Will Barclay, which have much Applause. Sutlin's Play cost three or four hundred Pounds setting out, eight or ten suits of new Cloaths, he gave the Players; an unheard of Prodigality.
(Cited in Gurr 1980, 183)

Nevertheless, Jonson's mention of the practice in The New Inn suggests that it was not that uncommon, certainly by the Caroline period. Tellingly, this is also the moment when MacIntyre records a marked increase in holdings recorded in the wardrobe inventories of the professional companies.
Lady Frances clearly has no qualms about her dress ending up in the costume store of a commercial theatre. Prudence, however, is deeply troubled by the prospect: 'That were illiberal, madam, and mere sordid / In me, to let a dress of yours come there' (II.i.37-8). To reassure Pru, Lady Frances invokes the theatrum mundi trope that at I.iii.128 was deployed by the Host in describing the events at his inn: 'Tut, all are players and but serve the scene, Pru' (II.i.39). Pru's anxieties would not be unfamiliar to early modern audiences of the play. Many Elizabethan anti-theatrical tracts, such as Philip Stubbes's The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), had focused on the dangers inherent in an institution which encouraged people to dress above their rank or against their sex. Attacks on the theatre spread outwards into a wider concern about clothing and identity in society at large. Stubbes was deeply opposed to people dressing in excessively luxurious fabrics unless they held public office:
as for the priuat subiects, it is not at any hand lawful that they should wear silks, velvets, satens, damasks, gould, siluer, and what they list (though they be neuer so able to maintain it) except they being in some kinde of office in the common wealth, do vse it for the dignifying and innobling of the same . . .
(Stubbes 1583, Ciiv; cited in Smith 1995, 27)
Tudor sumptuary laws had been established to litigate against such excess and to control the wearing of attire suitable to one's rank and office, especially in church and at the workplace (although the enforcement of these edicts was patchy and inconsistent) (Hunt 1996; Newman 1991, 111-27). In 1604 many of these specific laws had been repealed, but the moral concern with clothing persisted throughout the Jacobean reign (Jones and Stallybrass 2000, 187-8). In 1619, John Williams, preaching before James VI and I, reflected on the lands which people sold to finance the petty vanity of their wardrobes:
To see a man (who is but a Steward of what he possesseth, and to render a fearefull account of the same) to have a Farme clapt upon his feete, a Coppy holde dangling vp and downe his legges, a Manor wrapt about his body, a Lordship hanging vpon his shoulders, nay (peraduenture) the Tythes (Christs patrymonie) turned to a Cap, and the bread of the poore to a plume of feathers: and all this waste to no ende then this, that people might come out and see, this man cloathed in soft rayments.
(Williams 1620, 18; cited in Smith 1995, 27)
The trope deployed here by Williams, of land being translated into clothing, was common on the early modern stage and one Jonson had himself invoked on a number of occasions throughout his career. For example, Carlo Buffone in Every Man Out of his Humour (1599):
First, to be an accomplished gentleman, that is, a gentleman of the time, you must give o'er housekeeping in the country and live altogether in the city amongst gallants, where, at your first appearance, 'twere good you turned four or five hundred acres of your best land into two or three trunks of apparel. You may do it without going to a conjurer.
(I.ii.41-47)
and Truewit in Epicene (1609):
Then if you love your wife, or rather dote on her, sir, o, how she'll torture you . . . she must have that rich gown for such a great day, a new one for the next, a richer for the third; be served in silver, have the chamber filled with a succession of grooms, footmen, ushers, and other messengers, besides embroiderers, jewellers, tirewomen, sempsters, feathermen, perfumers; while she feels not how the land drops away, nor the acres melt, nor foresees the change when the mercer has your woods for her velvets.
(II.ii.79-97)
Lady Frances's behaviour as heir to the Frampul estate is described in analogous terms by Lovel in The New Inn:
HOST But yet the lady, th'heir, enjoys the land.
LOVEL And takes all lordly ways to consume it
As nobly as she can: if clothes and feasting
And the authenticated means of riot will do it . . .
(I.v.76-9)
The request by the imagined individual in the extract from Epicene quoted above that she be 'served in silver' may be a reference to carrying vessels for food and drink, but may also refer to the livery to be worn by the multitude of servants this lambasted female archetype wishes to attend her. Silver livery would be one of the most expensive colours to select. As Peter Stallybrass has noted, 'Renaissance England was a cloth society; it was also a livery society' (Stallybrass 1996, 289). Livery, the term deriving from the French livrance meaning to deliver or distribute, indicated which company or household a person belonged to. A uniform of a sort, it encoded an individual within a network of social obligations and accountability: 'the delivery of clothes from master to servant . . . marked the latter's subservience' (Stallybrass 1996, 289-90). In this context, Lady Frampul's loan of her dress to Prudence looks like an innovative version of livery, inscribing her within the Frampul household as well as within the performance she is to give on behalf of her mistress that day. It is perhaps telling that in II.iii of the play Trundle, Lady Frances's coach-driver enters onto the stage. Instructing him in his particular responsibilities as part of the 'trick' the women have devised (to dress the Host's adopted son Frank as a lady attendant on Pru for the purposes of the 'day's sports'), Pru makes it clear that Trundle is a paid member of her mistress's household and that his wage depends on strict adherence to her instructions. It seems likely that Trundle would appear dressed in the Frampul livery as if to underline this position of obligation and subservience. The scene is, of course, also an example of Prudence meting out to others the superior imperatives she has to endure from her mistress. The notion of livery as an outward show of obligation recurs later in the play when Nick Stuff, the tailor, play-acts the role of footman to his own wife, when she feigns the dress and superior attitude of an aristocratic woman. Several references are made to his velvet livery in IV.iii. Even actors in this period, who by being in theatre were eschewing a more traditional form of apprenticeship, wore the livery of the aristocratic household they were connected to by patronage. Every second year, for example, at Easter, the King's Men received a livery for each member of the company, which consisted of three yards of scarlet for a cloak and a quarter of a yard of crimson velvet for a cap (Stallybrass 1996).
The network or web of obligations that the giving or donation of livery or even clothing more generally inscribed people within is evident in the context of The New Inn in terms of Prudence's felt obligations to her mistress. It is those obligations that Prudence casts off when her mistress turns on her so brutally in Act IV:
PRUDENCE  Why, take your spangled properties, your gown,
And scarfs.
        [Tearing off her gown.]
LADY FRAMPUL  Pru, Pru, what dost thou mean?
PRUDENCE  I will not buy this play-boy's bravery
At such a price, to be upbraided for it
Thus every minute.
(IV.iv.320-4)
It is revealing that Prudence evokes the theatre in her choice of vocabulary here. Her dress and scarves are 'properties' in the sense that they belong to her mistress but also in the sense that they have been used in the performance at the inn. Prudence no longer wants to feel beholden to a mistress who will rail at her in the manner in which Frances has just done and therefore she has no intention of profiting from the sale of these items (as Frances had earlier suggested to her when she mentioned the possible deal with the players). The economic analogy Pru makes is with the boy actor who also had to purchase, or pay for the loan of, the costumes he used to play the women's parts in professional theatre (cf. MacIntyre 1992, 83).
Theatre was obviously a particularly rich context in which to consider the potency and talismanic power of costumes. Much early modern drama depended on plot-lines of disguise and concealed identity and The New Inn is no exception. When, in Act V, Goodstock, the Host, reveals his true identity as the Lord Frampul it is through costume, and the assistance of his servant (dresser?) Fly, that he presumes to reassert that lost self:
Fly, take away mine host.
[Pulls off his disguise.]
My beard and cape here from me, and fetch my lord.
(V.v.86-7)
This brings a very precise meaning to the commonplace that 'the clothes maketh the man'. The semiotics of clothing here are self-evident; they are also intrinsic to the genre of theatre where costume assists in the identification (sometimes in a misleading way) of profession, rank, gender, age and even nationality. Shakespeare invokes a similar sense of costume's power to define identity when, at the close of Twelfth Night, Viola remains the page Cesario in her associates' eyes until such time as she appears in her woman's 'weeds' – an event which the audience, controversially, never witnesses onstage, thus ensuring the Viola-Orsino relationship retains an air of sexual ambiguity right up to the end (Orgel 1996, 50).
But theatre was not the only site of conscious display of clothing as items to be 'read' or interpreted. The court, as cultural historian Malcolm Smuts has shown, was a central space in which clothing and materials were deployed to make political and social statements (Smuts 1996, 91). The obvious embodiment of this on the stage of The New Inn is Jonson's exuberant creation of Sir Glorious Tipto, a self-aggrandizing knight in the mould of The Alchemist's Sir Epicure Mammon. Sir Glorious (whose surname of Tipto both makes reference to the idea that he is a vain show-off – to go on tiptoes was to bear oneself proudly – and to the court fashion of high-heels) defines himself and others in terms of wardrobe. He is disgusted to find that the Host of 'The Light Heart' is so humbly attired: 'But why in cuerpo? / I hate to see an host, and old, in cuerpo' (II.v.48-9). Cuerpo means to go without a cloak or upper garment: Jonson gives clues as to how the Host should be dressed in this respect. His will be a simple costume of doublet and hose (he is also apparently wearing a velvet cap since at II.vi.38 Sir Glorious refers to him disparagingly as 'old velvet-head'). As Tipto declares with barely-concealed hostility:
Light, skipping hose and doublet:
The horse-boy's garb! Poor blank and half-blank cuerpo,
They relish not the gravity of an host
Who should be king at arms and ceremonies
In his own house . . .
(II.v.50-4)
'Blank and half-blank' refers to the simple colours of the Host's costume. 'Blank' means white or simple; 'half-blank' therefore refers to parti-coloured hose. The adjective 'skipping' is used in a pejorative sense to mean slight or cheap (that is lacking value in Tipto's materialistic and consumption-driven view of the world). We can imagine how the actor playing Tipto might be dressed in contrast to the Host. He is interested in the latest Continental fashions and accessories (especially those from Spain), from ruffs to gloves, as his continued railing on the Host's appearance makes clear. He provides the audience with a veritable Grand Tour of the latest European modes:
I would not speak unto a cook of quality,
Your lordship's footman, or my lady's Trundle
In cuerpo! If a dog but stayed below
That were a dog of fashion, and well-nosed,
And could present himself, I would put on
The Savoy chain about my neck, the ruff
And cuffs of Flanders, then the Naples hat;
With the Rome hatband, and the Florentine agate,
The Milan sword, the cloak of Genoa set
With Brabant buttons, all my given pieces –
Except my gloves, the natives of Madrid –
To entertain him in; and compliment
With a tame cony, as with a prince that sent it.
(II.v.57-69) 3
Tipto wants to present himself here as one who would talk to a 'downstairs' type or a messenger from a prince so long as he is well-dressed. But, in typical Tipto fashion, in the process he reveals himself as being the biggest snob of all in that he will not deign to talk to someone whose clothes are not 'in vogue'. The New Inn is a play that persistently investigates notions of meritocracy: Tipto's entirely materialistic version is satirized mercilessly.
Of course, there were concerns, many of them expressed in legal edicts, about how people dressed throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods, but these concerns constituted the antithesis to Tipto's desire for everyone to dress extravagantly. Tudor sumptuary laws had focused on restricting people's efforts to 'dress up', that is to dress above their social station. Related concerns can also be identified in complaints that were lodged objecting to the sale or loan of costumes, a practice already identified as being intrinsic to the practice and maintenance of amateur, court and professional drama companies at that time. In 1572, a haberdasher called Thomas Giles complained to the Office of the Queen's Revels that the Yeoman of the Revels John Arnold was leasing out masquing costumes to 'all sorts of persons'. Amongst the list, he included not only the Inns of Court and several aristocrats, but also London citizens, including a Blackfriars tailor who loaned one such outfit for his wedding (MacIntyre 1992, 57). Giles suggested that some of these clothes were being lent to 'the meanest sorts of men', subjecting them in the process to 'foulness both of the way and weather and soil of the wearers . . . to the great discredit of the same apparel, which afterward is to be showed before her highness and to be worn by them of great calling'. Intriguingly, several items are also recorded by Giles as being sent to inns and taverns in Cheapside (presumably for acting purposes). Of course, in truth, Giles made his complaint because he saw his own trade of haberdashery being diminished by the Revels' Office loans policy and he was making his complaints some fifty years before Jonson's play. It is true that sumptuary laws were largely repealed and relaxed in the Jacobean period, but in the early years of the Caroline reign, amid the general atmosphere of reform, there were attempts to reinforce some of these social controls.
The sense Giles conveys that clothes can be polluted by their wearers is a notion attested to at various points in The New Inn. Both Prudence and Lady Frances uphold this view when it transpires that the dress commissioned for Pru's performance as Queen of the Sports has been worn for erotic and social titillation by the commissioned tailor's wife. As a first response, the women want the expensive gold satin dress burned:
LADY FRAMPUL Pluck the polluted robes over her ears;
Or cut them all to pieces, make a fire o'them.
PRUDENCE To rags and cinders, burn th'idolatrous vestures.
(IV.iii.92-4)
The religious iconicity accorded vestments in this outburst (the polluted robes are to burned as if they were heretics) not only appropriates anti-Catholic rhetoric for a highly secular subject but also provides Lady Frances with a later excuse for rescuing the dress from the flames. If the vestment can be affected by the wearer, for Prudence to wear the golden dress immediately divests it of any previous pollutative associations:
Sweet Pru, aye, now thou art a queen indeed!
These robes do royally and thou becom'st 'em,
So they do thee! Rich garments only fit
The parties they are made for; they shame others.
How did they show on Goody Tailor's back?
Like a caparison for a sow. God save us!
Thy putting 'em on hath purged and hallow'd 'em
From all the pollution meant by the mechanics.
(V.ii.1-8)
Once again, the reality of Lady Frances's rank-driven perceptions cannot be ignored. Her discourse is scornful; she calls Pinnacia Stuff 'Goody Tailor's wife' stressing her social status in that title of 'Goody' (it may also be relevant that witch trials often referred to their defendants as 'Goody'). She compares her to a pig, an analogy continued by Prudence who is no less merciless, when she refers to the grease left by Pinnacia's 'haunches' or thighs on the material (V.ii.13-14). Of course, the value of the golden dress should not be underestimated. This fires the women's anger. Outlay on wardrobes was one of the major expenses of a Stuart noble: Malcolm Smuts has noted that in 1611 Lady Arbella Stuart paid £1500 for a single dress (Smuts 1996, 92).
Tipto's aforementioned catalogue of Continental fashions and his social attitudes also uncovers some of the socio-spatial dimensions of this beautifully constructed play. The New Inn observes the dramatic unities, set as it is on one day in a Barnet inn. But this observation belies the subtle and complicated juxtapositions that Jonson establishes between the 'upstairs and downstairs' communities of 'The Light Heart'. In the same way as his clothing meritocracy unravels itself, so Tipto's efforts to establish a 'citizen militia' from various poor employees and guests in the inn, his 'Sparta' as he defines it, ends up as a petty tyranny in which he is chief dictator.
The semiotics of Tipto's appearance are clear from the text. Since the vainglorious knight dislikes the muted tones of the Host's costume, we might also deduce that a production would dress Tipto in the popinjay colours of the court fop. In a play so intricately concerned with fashion, it is perhaps not surprising that Jonson gives some very clear notions of how particular characters might be dressed at given points in the script. Several references are made to Lovel's melancholic or saturnine disposition in the first act and it therefore seems reasonable to suggest that the actor in that part might well have been dressed in the conventional black of the melancholic (invoking deliberate echoes of Hamlet, of course). His sober appearance in the courtroom scenes would be fitting for his sober reflections on serious topics such as love and valour. By contrast, the court characters, especially the extravagant Tipto but also the physical epicurean Lord Beaufort, would be dressed in the bright colours, shimmering fabrics and lacy affectations of the Caroline courtier (the traditional image of the cavalier with the plumed hat). Theatre relies on the semiotic shorthand of costume to inform audiences swiftly and efficiently about the attitudes and dispositions of its characters. Of course, by deploying this easy shorthand it also manages to offer a trenchant critique of the extent to which costumes or the insignia of office give people status and standing in society without the body or person underneath having in any way to embody the 'truth' of that guise. Shakespeare's plays persistently return to the notion that monarchy is in part defined only by ceremonial costume and performance. Religious integrity, too, can be feigned, as Feste the clown demonstrates in Twelfth Night when he performs the part of a curate to torment the incarcerated Malvolio. In The New Inn, the Host and Fly hint at a similar hypocrisy being invested in ecclesiastical garments when they discuss the hasty marriage between Beaufort and 'Laetitia' in the inn's stable:
HOST I ha' known many a church been made a stable,
But not a stable made a church till now:
I wish 'em joy. Fly, was he a full priest?
FLY He bellied for't, had his velvet sleeves
And his branched cassock, a side sweeping gown,
All his formalities . . .
(V.i.13-18)
That this priest's services have clearly been purchased via a very secular form of 'angels' (V.i.23) – a nickname for coins bearing the image of St Michael – merely endorses the suggestion of self-serving in the image of the well-fed, paunchy minister.
One intriguing point of speculation when thinking about the actual costumes employed in the first performance of The New Inn at the Blackfriars in 1629 is how Prudence might have appeared when she played the Queen. We know as a point of plot that in the final scenes she will be attired in the golden dress reclaimed from Pinnacia Stuff, but the earlier dress that she borrows, with some reservations as we have seen, from her mistress seems to spark memories, at least in onlookers, of one real queen: Elizabeth I. Praising Pru's regal conduct, the Host observes: 'First minute of her reign! What will she do / Forty years hence, God bless her!' (II.vi.10-11). The reference is clearly to Elizabeth's extended reign and it is tempting to ponder whether the players might not have enhanced the comparison by having Prudence dressed to resemble the late queen. There was certainly a precedent at court for dressing up in the late sovereign's wardrobe, recycling the memory as well as the material evidence of her iconic reign. In a letter dated 1603 and addressed to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Arbella Stuart recorded: 'The Queene [Anna of Denmark, James VI and I's spouse] intendeth to make a mask this Christmas to which end my Lady of Suffolk and my Lady Walsingham have warrants to take of the late Queenes best apparell out of the Tower at theyr discretion.' 4 Could a 1629 performance of The New Inn have resisted the opportunity to trade on some of the aura of the Elizabethan era in the transformative context of the theatre? One key to the fact that this practice of recycling at court was continued by the era in which Jonson's play was written and performed can be found in an inventory produced of the Denmark House holdings in 1627. Listing many items from the wardrobe, and specifically Anna of Denmark's leftover clothes, it also mentions several of Henrietta Maria's coterie in relation to these items. 5 The social circulation of clothes at court was as familiar to Jonson in the early Caroline period as it had been to Arbella Stuart at the time of the Jacobean accession.
The dramatic genre also relies on costume for some of its finest moments of revelation or coup de théâtre. Jonson was no exception: the fifth act denouement of Epicene where the silent wife of Morose is revealed to have been a boy actor all along is echoed in The New Inn, although with a further tricksy layer, in the scene that depicts the public humiliation of Beaufort. The aristocratic kinswoman of Lady Frampul he assumes he has married is identified as the Host's son Frank. Fly is again the theatrical dresser and un-dresser, pulling off Frank's head-dress to uncover the 'truth'. Of course, within moments, we learn that Frank really is Laetitia, Lady Frances's long-lost sister who had been sold to the Host in the guise of a boy. In these multi-layered happenings, Jonson both reveals theatre's absolute dependence on the relationship between clothes and identity but also consciously destabilizes it. The dangers and moral superficiality of reading people by their surface appearances is exposed in Beaufort's less than noble reaction to the series of revelations. He is appalled when the Host reassures him that the legal status of his marriage is after all intact since 'Frank' is really a girl. This is because he now believes her to be a member of the labouring poor rather than a member of his own aristocratic tribe. He assumes himself the victim of a plot to marry her off to a rich man in order to secure her future (Jonson would deploy a similar plot-line in The Magnetic Lady in 1632). It is in this glimpse of the fate of poor women that we see exactly why the Host, and indeed Beaufort, are anxious to provide Prudence with a considerable dowry by the close of the play in order to maximise her chances in the social hierarchy. Beaufort is swift to cast off Laetitia when he believes her poor and insists he will take his case to the Star Chamber:
Was that your plot, Fly?
Gi'me a cloak, take her again among you.
I'll none of your Light Heart fosterlings, no inmates,
Suppositious fruits of an host's brain
And his Fly's hatching, to be put upon me.
(V.iv.38-42)
His assertion that they should 'Let beggars match with beggars' (V.iv.45) is yet another example of where the claimed meritocracy of the Light Heart inn is placed under pressure from conventional prejudices and vested interests. The Nurse (who we will soon learn is really Laetitia's mother, the lost Lady Frampul) who until now has spoken through a drunken haze, the comic aspect of her discourse enforced by Jonson's insistence that she speak in cod-Irish, a version of the 'Englished' Gaelic he had used previously for comic ends in The Irish Masque (1613) (cf. Blank 1996; Sullivan 1999), now becomes a voice of trenchant criticism in the gathering:
Nay then, my lord, it's not enough, I see,
You are licentious but you will be wicked.
You're not alone content to take my daughter
Against the law, but having taken her,
You would repudiate and cast her off
Now at your pleasure, like a beast of power,
Without all cause or colour of a cause,
That a noble or an honest man
Should dare t'except against: her poverty.
Is poverty a vice?
(V.iv.47-55)
Beaufort's answer to the Nurse's closing question is telling: 'Th'age counts it so' (V.iv.55). There is a topical and personal resonance to Jonson's rumination on social status and the hierarchy of wealth in this play, as his sober reflections on his own financial position in the epilogue suggests. Poverty is restricting his art in the Caroline era when he no longer enjoys the generous pensions afforded him by James VI and I: 'had he lived the care of King and Queen, / His art in something more yet had been seen' (Epilogue, ll. 21-2). We should note however that Beaufort is never forced by the play to revise his prejudices: Laetitia's confirmed identity as a lord's daughter simply renders her an acceptable commodity in the marriage market. Yet the central role of costume in The New Inn appears to play its own part in criticizing Beaufort's egotistical and high-handed behaviour. In a physical enactment of his eagerness to reach the bridal bed with his new wife following their ad-hoc stable ceremony, Beaufort literally tears off his clothing onstage in a version of marriage ritual that saw the metal-tipped laces or 'points' that fastened (for example) codpiece to hose thrown to the wedding party to be caught by onlookers (the modern version is the throwing of the bridal bouquet): 6
PRUDENCE Give us points, my lord.
BEAUFORT Here take 'em, Pru, my cod-piece point and all.
I ha' clasps, my Laetice' arms; here take 'em, boys.
[Throws off his doublet, etc.]
(V.iv.35-7)
The stage direction's coy reference to 'his doublet, etc.' belies the fact that his lines instruct us that he starts to unlace his codpiece too. When Beaufort's mistakes over the marriage are revealed to the onstage company, he is exposed in the most physical sense of being partially undressed onstage. The Host makes a great joke of this a few lines later when he announces the 'truth' of Laetitia's identity: 'Gi' him his doublet again, the air is piercing. / You may take cold, my lord. See whom you ha' married' (V.iv.44-5). These costume-related points of action offer an obvious means of identifying in this scene where audience sympathy is intended to focus itself.
The cruelty of an age that conducts itself socially according to wealth and rank is further demonstrated in the play by the fate of the tailor and his wife, Nick and Pinnacia Stuff. The reason why Prudence was forced to wear a dress belonging to her mistress in II.i was the failure of the 'errant tailor' (II.i.6) to deliver the gold satin dress commissioned for the occasion. So furious are the two women that they spend much of II.i devising brutal punishments for the hapless Nick, including cropping his ears with his dressmaking scissors and giving him an ell of taffeta (a measure of a particular cloth) as an enema (II.i.21-8). As already noted, tailors were common objects of humour on the early modern stage, as indeed were tradesmen in general, as some of Frances's and Prudence's scorn for 'mechanics' indicates:
LADY FRAMPUL These base mechanics never keep their word
In anything they promise.
PRUDENCE 'Tis their trade, madam,
To swear and break: they all grow rich by breaking
More than their words; their honesties and credits.
(II.i.8-11)
It later emerges that the dress has been purloined by the tailor in order to dress up his wife for erotic purposes. This constitutes a highly visual interpretation of Pinnacia's aspiration to a higher station in society than that of a tailor's wife, a figure who was commonly mocked in ballads and broadsides as the essence of common behaviour, akin to a fishwife as the butt of jokes and stereotypes. Nick Stuff has clearly encouraged such dressing-up several times in the past for their joint sexual gratification. His wife adorned as an elite mistress, he then subjugates himself in the role of a footman, dressed in velvet livery. Jonson increases the comic potential by suggesting that a short actor should play Nick Stuff to contrast with the gargantuan proportions of his wife. The pair then chase around the suburbs of London in a hired coach. As Pinnacia herself describes:
It is a foolish trick, madam, he has;
For though he be your tailor, he is my beast.
I may be so bold with him, and tell his story.
When he makes any fine garment will fit me,
Or any rich thing that he thinks of a price,
Then I must put it on and be his countess
Before he carry it home unto the owners.
A coach is hired and four horses; he runs
In his velvet jacket thus to Rumford, Croydon,
Hounslow, or Barnet, the next bawdy road;
And takes me out, carries me up, and throws me
Upon a bed –
(IV.iii.60-71)
Beaufort describes this as 'A fine species / Of fornicating with a man's own wife' (IV.iii.76-7). Stuff is clearly turned on by the sheer wealth and material value embodied by the fabrics he works with. He is, as the Host details, 'The very figure of preoccupation / In all his customers' best clothes.' (IV.iii.79-80).
We are introduced to two coach-drivers in the course of The New Inn: Lady Frampul's coachman Trundle, who, as already noted, would most likely be attired in the livery of her household, and the coachman hired by the Stuffs for the day, Barnaby (that they only rent the accoutrements of aristocratic life underlines the feigned nature of their status). When he enters onstage, Barnaby is visibly soaking since his hat blew off en route. The reason why he did not retrieve this item from the road is equally revealing:
The wind blew't off at Highgate, and my lady
Would not endure me 'light to take it up,
But made me drive bare-headed i'the rain.
(IV.i.15-17)
There is a very precise reason why Pinnacia forbids Barnaby to retrieve his headgear which is to do with the contemporary social etiquette of coach travel. Convention held that the coachman of a countess rode bare-headed, in wet or fine weather. Pinnacia is, as we later learn, trying to pass herself off as a countess (when Stuff reveals she is his wife, she describes herself as 'dis-countessed' but not 'dis-countenanced' [IV.iii.61, 62]), and so Barnaby's mishap suits her purpose. Of course, Jonson cannot resist some further jokes at Pinnacia's expense, when Jordan wonders if this is the reason why she forbade the cap's retrieval:
JORDAN That she might be mistaken for a countess?
BARNABY Troth, like enough! She might be an o'er-grown duchess,
For aught I know.'
(IV.i.18-20)
A 'duchess' was a particularly large variety of pear commonly grown in the seventeenth century so once again Pinnacia's size is being drawn to audiences' attention.
Stuff recognises the mistake he has made in coming to the inn where Lady Frances, his best customer, is in residence. But it is his wife who is punished most overtly. Having already been made the subject of aggressive male sexual reference when she arrived at the inn ('Let's lay her aboard' – the pun is on her forename which refers to a pinnace or small ship, but which was also a slang term for a prostitute), once the extent of her misdemeanours is revealed, she is subjected to abuse at the hands of the Host and Beaufort, and most disturbingly Lady Frances and Prudence. Their discourse and actions prove troublingly akin to those of the tribal males of the inn's downstairs community:
HOST  Pillage the pinnace.
LADY FRAMPUL  Let his wife be stripped.
BEAUFORT  Blow off her upper deck.
LATIMER  Tear all her tackle.
(IV.iii.90-91)
Pinnacia is treated as if she were a convicted prostitute before the law. Stripped down to her flannel undergarments, she is sent home in a cart, her husband banging a basin before her (97-9). This ritual public humiliation is a version of the skimmingtons and charivaris so common in neighbourhood versions of justice in this period. Admittedly, Jonson has made Pinnacia and Nick a subject of humour and amusement for the audience and we never see the full brutality of their shaming onstage, always a distancing dramatic device, but even so there is a violence in the arbitrary justice meted out by the community of the inn. That Prudence proves as active in this conduct as any casts at least some doubt on how 'ideal' a character she is. Her unquestioning endorsement of society's prejudices means that she subjects Pinnacia to the same judgements that elsewhere in the play she feels herself the victim of. Stuff pleads with her for mercy but is curtly rebutted and Prudence's lack of empathy for Pinnacia is further demonstrated in her reaction to the 'soiled' dress. The 'meritocracy' of the Light Heart remains in doubt.
The 'revels' or 'sports' of the day's events at the inn may also have their own more precise set of references to theatrical practice than the usual carnivalesque modes to which they are related. In its image of a group of courtiers and attendants come to perform a day's theatre at an inn-house, the play offers its own variation on the courtly and provincial masques and entertainments that Jonson himself was an exponent of at this time. The Office of the Revels had been formed in 1545 under Henry VIII to look after equipment intended for use in court celebrations (mainly, but not solely costumes). According to Jean MacIntyre, the Revels department initially functioned to maintain existing apparel and properties, though gradually it gained responsibility for acquiring new ones (MacIntyre, 1992, 51). It employed a veritable army of carpenters, painters, prop-makers and wigmakers and developed a considerable store of items for the use of the court. One Elizabethan inventory indicates a year's works for the Revels Office:
Translatinge newe makinge garnysshinge furnisshinge and fynisshinge of dyvers and sundrye garmentes Apparell vestures and propertyes as well of Maskes as for playes and other pastymes sett forth and shewen in her Maiesties presence with the chaunge and Alteracion of the same to serve her Highnes pleasure and determynacioun as occasion required from tyme to tyme upon comandement to be in Areddines when it was called for.
(R.O. Eliz., 79; cited in MacIntyre 1992, 92)

Gradually its responsibilities expanded to include the selection and revision of entertainments offered to the Crown by corporate bodies in the City of London, schools and amateur groups. Eventually, this took the form of responsibilities for censoring the texts intended for these occasions.
The fabrics and clothes used in such events were often provided by the sister institution of the Office of the Wardrobe and as the Revels took on its new identity as an office for censorship and licence so the Wardrobe's responsibilities in these areas increased. The Wardrobe was located partly at Whitehall (where many of the costumes required for court masques were stored) and at an office in the Blackfriars region of London. The Revels offices were also located here for the prime reason that it provided easy access to cloth supplies and skilled labourers (Astington 1999, 14). The residual traces of their presence can be seen today in the nomenclature of the church of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe. Jonson had, of course, been a resident of this precinct of London and so might be expected to be familiar with its topography and signification. In addition, The New Inn was written for the Blackfriars private theatre which gives additional resonance to Prudence's description of the dressing-up box of clothes or 'standard of apparell' that she and her mistress have brought to the inn in Barnet (II.ii.44-5). Contemporary audiences would probably have walked by the Wardrobe on their way to watch the performance. As with plays like Bartholomew Fair or The Alchemist, which itself makes cultural capital of its setting in the Blackfriars region and the theatre of the same name, Jonson is making his text directly relevant to its audiences and its setting.
That topicality can, then, be easily extended to provide a contemporary political resonance to the playtext as well. Positions in the Office of the Wardrobe and comparable positions at court in the King's and Queen's Bedchambers (such as that of Keeper of the Queen's Wardrobe, a role mentioned in the 1603 letter by Arbella Stuart cited earlier in this article) were much sought-after and highly remunerated appointments. 7 At the time when Jonson wrote The New Inn, one of the Gentlemen of Charles I's Wardrobe was James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, one of the king's most prominent courtiers. He was a notorious spendthrift and contemporary gossip did suggest that he lined his own pockets at the expense of his court offices. Whilst the pay for running the Office of the Wardrobe was set at £222 13s 4d, Lionel Cranfield would later claim that Hay took as much as £4000 per annum in perks and materials (Jones and Stallybrass 2000, 20). 8 He was renowned in particular for his expenditure on clothes: in 1616, for the purpose of an embassy to Paris, he ordered his entire wardrobe to be retailored (Raylor 2000, 50). It is therefore possible that some allusive satire of the Earl is contained in both the extravagant characterisation of Sir Glorious Tipto (Carlisle was at various points in his career linked to the Hispanophile factions at court) and the 'errant tailor' Stuff. Allusions to Hay would further strength the links made between 'the day's sports' in the inn and provincial and metropolitan entertainments since he and his wife, Lucy Percy Hay, Countess of Carlisle, were linked to several such entertainments throughout the late Jacobean period (Sanders 2000, 449-64). One such, the 1617 Lovers Made Men, the text for which was authored by Jonson himself, was performed in Hay's official residence at the Wardrobe in Blackfriars for the benefit of the French ambassador.
The connections with the Hay coterie appear persuasive, but The New Inn is no simple roman-à-clef; its operating allusions and topical referents are more subtle and embedded than such a structure would dictate. Nevertheless, it seems significant and worthy of the extended comment I have offered here that in 1629, when the reform of the Office of the Wardrobe was a major crown policy, and when rank and dress were re-emerging as concerns of the Caroline regime, a Blackfriars play appears that is obsessed with clothing and that features the plot-line of an errant tailor and misappropriated 'wardrobe stuffe'. Clothes, costume and the politics of dress may have been recurring tropes in early modern drama, but the semiotics of dress in Jonson's play have a precise topical, as well as traditional, frame of reference. As ever, through his drama, Jonson draws attention to the social, political and theatrical practices of his own moment, in this case capturing both the hopes and the anxieties of the early Caroline regime.
The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of the AHRB in funding research for this article and the contribution of staff and students at Lancaster University where some of its ideas had an early experimental outing.

Notes

Jones and Stallybrass also make the point that the dominance of lacings made clothes detachable and portable, a point stressed in the 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The New Inn in which trunks of clothing, veritable 'dressing-up boxes' in the context of the action, were carried onto and off the stage at regular intervals. I am grateful to the Shakespeare Centre Library in Stratford-upon-Avon for permission to consult materials relating to this production in the course of my research. For more on clothing and costume in this period, see Arnold (1985).
Jones and Stallybrass record the particular example of Mary Verney who in 1646 wrote anxious letters to her husband, who was in exile on the Continent, about her fear that she might lose her chambermaid Luce Sheppard and have to face the less careful ministerings of a lower-ranked servant in her dressing rituals (1996, 23).
A similar catalogue is offered in a parody of the well-dressed Jacobean theatre-goer in Henry Fitzgeoffrey's Notes from the Blackfryers (London, 1617), sigs. Fv-F2:
Knowest thou yon world of fashions now come in
In Turkie colors carued to the skin,
Mounted Polonianly untill hee reeles,
That scornes (so much) plaine dealing at his heeles.
His Boote speakes Spanish to his Scottish Spurres,
His Sute cut Frenchly, round bestucke with Burres.
Pure Holland is his Shirt, which proudly faire,
Scornes to out-face his Doublet euerywhere.
Cited in Jones and Stallybrass (2001, 66).
To Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, 18 December 1603 (Steen, 1994, 197). The masque referred to is Samuel Daniel's The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. For more on the significance of this Elizabethan iconography to Anna of Denmark's masquing traditions, see McManus (2002, 107).
Society of Antiquities, London, MS 137. I am indebted to James Knowles for this item of information. MS 203 in the same collection provides wardrobe instructions for 1631.
This ritual is mentioned in Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood's The Late Lancashire Witches (London, 1632), H3r: 'Now do I thinke upon the codpiece point the young jade gave him at the wedding'.
The highest wages for women at court were for the Ladies and Gentlewomen of the Bedchamber (Stallybrass 1996, 291).
Jones and Stallybrass (2000, 20). Not that Cranfield was averse to benefitting from such perks of office himself. He took some £2000 worth of unused black cloth remaining after Anna of Denmark's funeral for his own purposes.

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