The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  ‘Come dress my head,’ milady demands. First she must have her scalp rubbed: ‘Come, Jolye, rubbe well my head, for it is very full of dandrife.’ For this procedure there are ‘rubbers’, which the page has earlier been ordered to warm. Next she has her hair combed, but ‘give me first my combing-cloth, otherwise you will fill me full of hayres’. Two combs are used, one of ivory and another ‘boxen’ (of boxwood), and when the combing is done, the page is ordered to clean them with ‘combe-brushes’ and to use ‘a quill to take away the filth from them’.

  Madame de Rimelaine is planning to wear her ‘French hood’ but Jolye tells her the weather is fine, so she resolves on a ‘head attyre’ instead. She calls for ‘my jewels that I weare on my head’; they are in the ‘long box’ in her closet. She demands: ‘What is become of my wyre? Where is the hair capp? Have you any ribans to make knots? Where be the laces for to bind my haires?’ We again note that the tire is something assembled, rather than a ready-made artefact - a ‘hair-cap’ or caul to fit over the head; a wire framework in which jewels can be set; a quantity of ribbons and laces to tie things into place, as well as to decorate. Finally, ‘now set on my carkanet of precious stones’.17

  Erondell’s dialogue also gives a handy vocabulary of French tire-related terms in use in 1605. The tire itself is un atour, though in its more general sense of head-dressing it is simply une coiffure.18 The structure of wires which supports it is un mole (which today generally means a jetty) and the ‘hair cap’ is une houppe. These are words you would hear used in the Mountjoys’ workshop.

  We are close here in time, language and ambience to the Mountjoys. Erondell probably knew them within the French community of Jacobean London, and perhaps his knowledge of head-tiring owes something to their expertise in the subject. What do we know of Monsieur Erondell (or ‘Mr Swallow’)? He was from Normandy, and was in England by the mid-1580s, translating Huguenot propaganda and teaching French. Thereafter nothing is heard of him till the appearance of the French Garden. (There is a Peter Swallow listed in the 1593 Return of Strangers, but he is a Dutch blacksmith.) One thing we do know is that Erondell was for a while French tutor to Sir Thomas Berkeley: he dedicated the French Garden to Berkeley’s wife Elizabeth, from whom he had received ‘gratuites faveurs’.19 Not for the first time this brings up the name of the Careys, Lord and Lady Hunsdon, for Elizabeth Berkeley was their daughter - their only child. There is a venerable theory that Elizabeth’s wedding to Sir Thomas Berkeley in February 1595 was the occasion of Shakespeare’s nuptial fantasia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  We know of two people in the Hunsdon orbit with whom Marie was acquainted at one time or another - Alice Floyd, servant to Lady Hunsdon; and William Shakespeare, poet of Lord Hunsdon’s theatre troupe - and she may also have been acquainted with Peter Erondell, French tutor to the Hunsdons’ son-in-law.

  There is anyway a parallel between the imagined head-dressing of Erondell’s French Garden and the actual head-dressing offered by the Mountjoys, and it is one that reminds us of their status. Mrs Mountjoy is not Madame de Rimelaine, but the one who receives the orders: Jolye the ‘waiting gentlewoman’. (This is one of the definitions of ‘tirewoman’ given by OED - ‘a woman who assists at a lady’s toilet, a lady’s maid’, though this relates to the more general sense of ‘attire’.) In 1605, the year that Erondell’s manual was published, the King’s Men staged the first performance of Ben Jonson’s comic masterpiece Volpone. The affected Lady Would-be is a classic tire-wearer, and we watch her imperiously fretting with her two ‘waiting-women’, rather as Madame de Rimelaine does with hers -

  LADY WOULD-BE: Come nearer. Is this curl

  In his right place? Or this? Why is this higher

  Than all the rest? . . . I pray you, view

  This tire, forsooth: are all things apt, or no?

  WOMAN: One hair a little here sticks out, forsooth.

  LADY WOULD-BE: Does’t so, forsooth? . . .

  Pray you both approach and mend it. (3.2.42-53)

  This is the sort of thing Marie Mountjoy had to put up with, as she attended to the tires and coiffures of her rich clientele.

  Tires and wigs were worn by queens, princesses, maids of honour and grandes dames like Madame de Rimelaine and Lady Would-be - all eminently respectable. From a different angle, however, the tire was a typical instance of the sinful vanities and superfluities of female fashion. The prophet Isaiah sets the tone, foretelling the downfall of the materialistic ‘daughters of Zion’ - ‘The Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon’ (AV, Isaiah 3.18).

  Nashe has some strident comments in his homiletic broadside of 1593, Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (dedicated to the future Lady Hunsdon). He targets tires and wigs as part of a general diatribe on women’s vanity:

  Their heads, with their top and top-gallant lawn baby-caps, and snow-resembling silver curlings, they make a plain puppet-stage of . . .

  Thy flaring, frounzed periwigs, low dangled down with love-locks . . .

  As angels are painted in church windows with glorious golden fronts beset with sunbeams, so beset they their foreheads on either side with glorious borrowed gleamy bushes . . .

  These ‘borrowed gleamy bushes’ are what we would call hair-extensions, also at the time called ‘borders’. Nashe adds that they ‘signify beauty to sell, since a bush is not hanged forth but to invite men to buy’. He is referring to the ivy bush hung outside wine-shops, but there is an obvious bawdy overtone. He suggests that this sort of elaborate headwear is associated with prostitution - beauty for sale. His friend Robert Greene refers more bluntly to ‘street-walkers’ in their ‘quaint periwigs’.20

  In the same year we find another writer talking of ‘lascivious Jessabells’ who ‘set out their broidred haire with periwigs’. They appear to be ‘fine & proper women’ but in reality ‘live in pleasure enjoying the lust of the flesh, most filthely making a pastime thereof’.21 If Nashe’s pieties sound unconvincing, these are even more so - the writer was Dr Forman, for whom lust of the flesh was a favourite pastime. In similar vein Thomas Middleton - a disciple of Nashe, and a future collaborator with Shakespeare - describes his prototype of female vanity, ‘Insolent Superbia’, as a wearer of tires and wigs:

  But O her silver-framèd coronet

  With low-down dangling spangles all beset,

  Her sumptuous periwig, her curious curls . . .22

  A visual counterpart to this depiction of tire-wearing as gaudy and immodest is Isaac Oliver’s allegorical watercolour on a theme of virtue and pleasure, c. 1590-95 (see Plate 29), in which the flashily dressed figures on the right are wanton pleasure-seekers, the sprawled man reminiscent of the Prodigal Son among the harlots.23 The central woman of this group, dressed in gold with her breasts exposed, is a vivid portrayal of a courtesan by one of the best immigrant painters in London. She wears a showy head-tire of lace and gauze, a border studded with black bugles, and tightly primped blonde hair which may well be a wig. ‘Courtesan’ is euphemistic: essentially one means an upmarket prostitute.

  These writers and artists trail an idea that lavish tires and periwigs are a trademark of prostitutes, or anyway women of dubious reputation, and it is not surprising that we glimpse tire-wearing women among the desirable but dodgy ‘dames’ in the audience of the playhouse. Thus Father Orazio Busino, chaplain at the Venetian embassy, found himself at the Fortune theatre in 1617, ‘amongst a bevy of young women’.24 One of them, a ‘very elegant dame’, placed herself beside him, and asked him for his address ‘both in French and English’. The priest ‘turned a deaf ear’, but not, it seems, a blind eye, for he gives an enthusiastic description of her clothing. She wore three pairs of gloves, which she took off one after the other, finally ‘showing me some fine diamonds on her fingers’. He notes her yellow satin bodice, her petticoat of gold tissue with stripe, her robe of velvet with a raised pile, and finally her head-tire, which was ‘heav
ily perfumed’.

  Another ‘dame’ is spotted at a playhouse, probably the Blackfriars, in Henry Fitzgeoffrey’s Satyres (1617). She too wears something fancy on her head, indeed she is identified by it -

  But stay! See heere (but newly entred),

  A Cheapside Dame, by th’ tittle on her head!

  Plot, villain, plot! Let’s lay our heads together.

  We may devise perchaunce to get her hither . . .

  Heer Mrs! Pox on’t, she’s past, she’l not come o’re,

  Sure shee’s bespoken for a box before.

  OED gives various meanings for ‘tittle’ but none connected with headwear. It looks for a moment like an early version of ‘titfer’, but the latter is rhyming-slang (tit-for-tat: hat). Perhaps it is a jocular coinage for a head-tire.25

  The Mountjoys’ clientele included Queen Anne, and no doubt some aristocratic and courtly ladies, possibly including Ladies Hunsdon and Kitson, but it is also drawn from this more louche milieu of fashion-mad young Superbias, dolled-up dames at the playhouse, courtesans and prostitutes. Like Shakespeare and his company, the Mountjoys supply the great growth-industries of leisure and pleasure which give Jacobean London its rackety boom-town aura.

  15

  The ‘tire-valiant’

  We would see head-tires and periwigs at the playhouse, bobbing like exotic flotsam above a sea of faces, and then turning our attention back to the play itself we would find this reflected in the presence of tires and wigs onstage. This is a point of intersection in the story of Shakespeare and the Mountjoys, a common denominator. It is plausible, though probably not provable, that they came to know one another within a context of theatrical costuming.

  The play-companies had a voracious appetite for costume. It has been calculated that the wardrobe of a thriving company in the early seventeenth century might be worth up to £1,000. A breakdown of purchases made by Philip Henslowe - owner of the Rose theatre, where the Lord Admiral’s Men played - shows that over a six-year period (1597-1603) he paid out £561 for ‘apparel and properties’, the bulk being for costumes.26 These are very large sums: the contents of the tiring-house at the Rose were probably worth more than the theatre itself. Among the costumes to be found there were the ‘coat with copper lace’ and ‘breeches of crimson velvet’ which Edward Alleyn wore as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and ‘Henry the fiftes dublet & vellet gowne’, and a jerkin and cloak for Dr Faustus, and ‘vi grene cotes’ for the merry men in Munday’s feeble Robin Hood plays.27

  Plays were not fully costumed according to their fictional period and setting. Even in historical dramas much of the apparel onstage was contemporary Elizabethan-Jacobean wear. Hamlet is an early-medieval Danish prince but a description of him by Ophelia (2.1.79-81) shows that Burbage played the part in doublet and hose. In the only visual record of a Shakespeare production - a drawing of c. 1594 showing a scene from Titus Andronicus - at least two of the seven figures are in Elizabethan dress (see Plate 22).28 The look of the plays is duplicitous, as the texts themselves are - we are at once somewhere else, and in the here and now. Rather than realism, the costuming aimed for splendour and glitter: it belonged to the ancient element of spectacle. According to the Swiss tourist Thomas Platter, who saw plays at the Globe and elsewhere in 1599, ‘the actors are most expensively and elaborately costumed’. Sir Henry Wotton was impressed and slightly worried by the ‘pomp and majesty’ of the costumes in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII (1613) - ‘the knights of the Order with their Georges and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats and the like’. Their effect, he feared, was ‘to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous’.29

  In this sense the theatre had a symbiotic relationship with the fashion industry. It participated, both as a purchaser and as a showcase, in ‘a massive capitalist development in the circulation of clothing’.30 The Jacobean ‘city comedies’ brought on to the stage a precise sociology of contemporary costume. The intent was often satirical but the latest styles, the newest look, were there to be seen by an audience full of cash-rich potential shoppers.

  Among the costumes would be found tires and periwigs. Wigs are a fundamental aspect of costuming - they transform, disguise, re-identify, and they would certainly be needed to turn short-haired boy-actors into long-haired women. In the sketch of Titus Andronicus, Queen Tamora has long fair-looking hair which is probably a wig. A famous line of Hamlet’s describes an old-fashioned actor in a wig - ‘It offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings’ (3.2.8-11). We can guess that Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, noted for his hair which ‘hangs like flax on a distaff’, was played by an actor in a long flaxen or blond wig. The scary wigs worn by devils in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus were particularly memorable. In Middleton’s Black Book (1604) Lucifer says of the piratical old soldier Prigbeard, ‘He has a head of hair like one of my devils in Doctor Faustus,’ while John Melton recalls the ‘shagge-haired Devils’ who ran ‘roaring over the stage with squibs in their mouthes’ in a performance at the Fortune.31

  Periwigs feature in a ‘Sonnet’ - in fact, a ballad - which describes ‘the pitifull burning of the Globe playhouse’ in 1613. The conflagration rages through the tiring-house, destroying both costumes and props -

  The perrywigges and drumme-heades frye,

  Like to a butter firkin;

  A woefull burning did betide

  To many a good buff jerkin.

  Then with swolne eyes like druncken Flemminges,

  Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges

  This balladeer seems to have some knowledge of the company - he also mentions Burbage and Henry ‘Condye’ (Condell) - so he may be accurately describing Heminges’s role as production-manager, having particular care of costumes and props, and thus specifically distressed by this destruction.32

  Head-tires would also be part of the theatrical wardrobe, bedecking ladies of rank or fashion, and perhaps also more fanciful figures such as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The ‘Queen of Fairies’ at the end of the Merry Wives (actually Mistress Quickly in disguise) is described as having ‘ribbons pendant flaring ’bout her head’, which sounds like a tire of some sort. Hamlet’s envisaging of a player’s costume refers first to plumed headgear - ‘would not this, Sir, and a forest of feathers . . . get me a fellowship in a cry of players?’ (3.2.263-6). These fantastical headpieces shade into the elaborate masque costumes of the early seventeenth century, which certainly featured tires. Conversely, the realistic ‘city comedies’ featured tires because they were a contemporary fashion or affectation. That scene in Volpone where Lady Would-be fusses about her tire would be played by a boy-actor wearing one - probably ridiculously ornate. And a stage-direction in Jonson, Marston and Chapman’s Eastward Ho! (1605) has the spoilt goldsmith’s daughter Gertrude entering ‘in a French head-attire’ (1.2, s.d.).

  We find head-tires in the costume-lists of the Admiral’s Men. In an inventory of 1598 there are ‘vj head-tiers’, and in a list of 1602 ‘ii hedtiers sett wt stons’.33 The latter were perhaps the work of a Mrs Gosen or Goossen, who appears twice in Henslowe’s accounts as a supplier of head-tires -

  pd at the apoyntment of the companye vnto mrs gosen for

  a head tyer the 22 decembr 1601 the some of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xijs [12s]

  pd at the apoyntmente of the company to mrs goossen for

  a headtyer the 7 of febreary 1601 [i.e. 1602] the some of . . . . xijs

  This gives a going rate of 12 shillings for a head-tire in 1602; if they are the tires ‘sett wt stons’, the stones must be fake, which is sufficient for stage purposes. It is possible Mrs Gosen was foreign, at any rate her married name - usually Anglicized to Gosson - is Dutch. There is an interesting clan of Gossons in London, descended from a Dutch joiner, Cornelius Gosson, who settled in Canterbury. The best known is Stephen Gosson, author and controversialist, but in 1601 he was the vicar of St Botolph’s,
Bishopsgate, and his wife Elizabeth is unlikely to be the woman paid by Henslowe. Perhaps the tiremaker was the wife of William Gosson, listed in the subsidy rolls for Southwark, and thus local to Henslowe’s Rose theatre.34

  Another supplier to the company was a certain Mrs Calle. On 1 January 1603 she received ten shillings for ‘ij curenets [coronets] for hed tyers’.35 This is specified as being ‘for the corte’, so was connected with a court entertainment rather than a public playhouse.

  As previously lamented, there survives no day-to-day documentation of Shakespeare’s company comparable to that of the Admiral’s Men at the Rose, but there is no reason to doubt that the costume-lists of the Chamberlain’s Men (or from 1603 the King’s Men) would have featured head-tires, and that their ledgers would have included payments to tiremakers for supplying them.

  We lack the documentation, but if we look in the playscripts of the company’s chief author we find various glancing references to tires, and one or two rather more than glancing. The earliest is in Two Gentlemen of Verona, c. 1590 or earlier, where Julia gazes on the portrait of the noble Silvia and says wistfully,

  I think

  If I had such a tire this face of mine