by Sophie Chiari and Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise
In the following quiz, each answer is related to a particular chapter of The Ecology of Dress in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. We hope, as a result, that this fun test will enable you to get the gist of our volume and to see how, besides its critical engagement with material studies on the one hand, and ecocriticism on the other, it aims to offer a vivid depiction of the early modern age and a fresh vision of cloths and costumes at the time.
How is the Englishman depicted in the first printed visual portrait given of him?
The first printed visual portrait of an Englishman can be found in The first boke of the introduction of knowledge (1555). This is a mid-sixteenth century travel book cum ethnography which was written in Montpellier, France, by the Catholic priest and doctor Andrew Boorde, and which depicts the author himself as naked apart from hat and obligatory breech cloth with a roll of cloth over one arm and a pair of scissors in the other hand.
(Detailed answer provided in Chapter 1, by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton)
What was the name then given to a shoe raised above the ground by means of a cork sole and where did it come from?
It was the chopine, which was part and parcel of the Venetian female apparel: the chopine was a wooden-soled overshoe, hidden under women’s dresses, and highly functional artefacts in a watery city such as Venice. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Prince’s welcoming a boy actor at the court of Elsinore is possibly one of the most well-known references to this type of attire on the English stage and may point to the use of Venetian artefacts in this environment: ‘By’r lady, your ladyship is nearer heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine’ (2.2.418–19).
(Detailed answer provided in Chapter 3, by Anne Geoffroy)
Who are the two eighteenth-century Scottish brothers who portrayed Lear clad in rags, on the one hand, and in royal attire while fighting against the storm, on the other?
Alexander Ranciman (1736-1785) portrayed Lear as overtired, dishevelled, clad in rags or half-bare (King Lear on the Heath, date unknown). He was the elder brother of John Ranciman (1744-1766), who pictured the same Shakespearean character in his royal attire grandiosely fighting against tempestuous gusts (Lear in the Storm, 1767). Both pictures, today, are part of the National Galleries of Scotland collection.
(Detailed answer provided in Chapter 5, by Danièle Berton-Charrière)
What piece of clothing does the shortest poem possibly written by Shakespeare refer to?
It refers to a pair of gloves:
The gift is small:
The will is all:
A shey ander Asbenall.
[Shaxpaire upon a peaire of gloves that mas[t]er sent to his mistris].
This very short poem is kept in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office. ‘Asbenall’ probably refers to Alexander Asbenall or Aspinall (c. 1546-1624), a Stratford friend of Shakespeare.
(Detailed answer provided in Chapter 6, by François Laroque)
What was the Merchant Adventurers’ Company given special dispensation to export in 1564?
Founded in the fifteenth century, the company controlled most of the English cloth trade until the seventeenth century. It was given special dispensation to export 30,000 cloths a year. This undressed cloth was exported to the Low Countries where it was finished, dyed and then re-exported.
(Detailed answer provided in Chapter 7, by Dympna Callaghan)
Who introduced the practice of embroidering flowers on canvas?
It was Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was a prisoner in the Shrewsbury household—Shrewsbury had been made the custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1569, and she remained his charge for fourteen years. Mary certainly used botanical motifs for political messages.
(Detailed answer provided in Chapter 8, by Lisa Hopkins)
What pieces of clothing keep Falstaff from fighting back when he is attacked by Master Ford in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor?
The female ‘gown’, ‘kerchief’ (or scarf), ‘thrummed hat’ and ‘muffler’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 4, scene 2) that the wives force Falstaff to wear effeminize him to the point he cannot fight back. This is one example of early modern ideas on the “performance of gender” through clothing.
(Detailed answer provided in Chapter 9, by Valentina Finger)
Did waterproof clothes exist in Shakespeare’s time?
Yes, they did, even though it is often said that waterproof fabric only dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Surviving mariners’ dress from the period show traces of tar, which confirm that it was waterproofed. But very few clothes were potentially destined to be soaked, as most of them were absorbent and would have been utterly ruined by the effect of water.
(Detailed answer provided in Chapter 11, by Sophie Chiari)
Were all sorts of garments washed in early modern England?
No. It was specifically bedclothes and underclothes rather than outer garments (too delicate to be submitted to the harsh methods of the Elizabethan laundresses, especially when these garments were high-quality items) that were washed at the time.
(Detailed answer provided in Chapter 11, by Sophie Chiari)
The Dutch Willem Barents was a navigator who searched for a northeast passage from Europe to Asia. He went on three expeditions. On their return to Amsterdam on 1 November 1597, eighteen months after their departure, how were the twelve Dutchmen of the third Barents expedition clad?
During this third expedition, the crew became trapped on Nova Zembla for almost a year. Barentsz died on the return voyage, but the twelve Dutchmen who did return to Amsterdam arrived clad in the cloths they had worn in Nova Zembla, with caps furred with white fox skins. (Detailed answer provided in Chapter 13, by Sophie Lemercier-Goddard)
About the book
Offers an ecocritical approach to understanding dress in early modern plays and performance
- Focuses on early modern dress in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the intersections between ecocriticism, cultural materialism and material culture
- Suggests that dress, in the hands of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, was a privileged material in creating unique, literary ecosystems that came especially alive in the playhouse, itself considered as a theatre of the world
- Addresses wider questions of gender and performance in connection with early modern English drama
About the authors
Sophie Chiari is Professor of Early Modern English Literature at Université Clermont Auvergne, France, where she is also the Director of the ‘Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Clermont-Ferrand’, a research institute encompassing the humanities and social sciences. A member of the IHRIM research team, she has edited or coedited various collections of essays including Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare (coedited with John Mucciolo, 2019) and The Experience of Disaster in Early Modern English Literature (2022). Her current research focuses on ecocritical issues in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Her most recent works are Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment (2019) and Shakespeare and the Environment. A Dictionary (2022).
Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise is Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris, France), where she also directs the Epistémè research group within the PRISMES research centre. She was awarded a Research Fellowship by the Institut Universitaire for a project on the interconnectedness of poetic and material circulations within Early Modern Europe (2016–2021). Originally a specialist of poetry and religious history, she was the 2011 recipient of the SAES (French Society for English Studies) special research prize for her monograph on George Herbert, Le Verbe fait image (2010). She currently serves as the vice-president of the Société Française Shakespeare (the French Shakespeare association). Her research profile is interdisciplinary, publishing across genres and adopting a trans-regional perspective as well as a material approach to her analysis of Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and drama, which are the centre of gravity of her work. She co-edited the volume of Shakespeare’s poetry in French translation for the Pléiade, Gallimard (2021), is currently working on a new French edition of Twelfth Night for Gallimard, and has recently translated Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris with Christine Sukic (forthcoming with Garnier Classiques).
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