The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (22 page)

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’

W
e 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 w
^t
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 m
^rs
gosen for
a head tyer the 22 decembr 1601 the some of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xij
^s
[12s]

pd at the apoyntmente of the company to m
^rs
goossen for
a headtyer the 7 of febreary 1601 [i.e. 1602] the some of . . . . xij
^s

This gives a going rate of 12 shillings for a head-tire in 1602; if they are the tires ‘sett w
^t
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
Were full as lovely as this of hers. (4.4.182-4)

The latest is in
The Winter’s Tale
,
c
. 1610, the ‘toys’ for the head which Autolycus the pedlar advertises -

Any silk, any thread,
Any toys for your head,
Of the new’st and fin’st, fin’st wear-a . . . (4.4.319-21)

- being a humble reflection, for country girls, of the radiant courtly tire. There is also a reference in
Antony and Cleopatra
(
c
. 1608), where Cleopatra recalls scenes of erotic cross-dressing with Antony, but perhaps in this case ‘tires’ = robes:

I drunk him to his bed,
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan . . . (2.5.22-4)

The most interesting and extended references occur in two plays he wrote in 1597-8. The first is in
Merry Wives of Windsor
, when Falstaff is energetically wooing a reluctant Mistress Ford -

FALSTAFF: I would make thee my lady!

Mrs FORD: I your lady, Sir John? Alas, I should be a pitiful lady.

FALSTAFF: Let the court of France show me such another! I see how thine eye would emulate the diamond. Thou hast the right arched beauty of the brow that becomes the ship-tire, the tire-valiant, or any tire of Venetian admittance.

Mrs FORD: A plain kerchief, Sir John: my brows become nothing else, nor that well neither. (3.3.45-54)

The first and last of these Falstaffian head-tires can be readily explained. The ‘ship-tire’ is presumably a head-dress fashioned in the form of a ship, or a ship’s sails. It might be something like the ‘attyre . . . in form of two little ships made of emeralds’ described in Jorge de Montemayor’s pastoral novel
Diana
(
c
. 1559), with which Shakespeare was familiar in translation; or like the tall headwear which Nashe calls ‘top-gallant caps’ (the ‘top-gallant’ being one of the sails of an Elizabethan galleon).
³⁶
And the ‘tire of Venetian admittance’ simply means a head-tire elaborate enough to be acceptable in Venice, then the byword for extravagance of dress.

The puzzling item is the ‘tire-valiant’. H. R. Oliver, in the Arden edition of the play, takes ‘valiant’ as merely intensive - something like a tire de luxe - but this seems unsatisfactory. In the 1602 quarto of the play - a corrupt text, supplanted by the longer Folio text, but incorporating some authentic material from early performances - the phrase appears as ‘tire vellet’. This is a known variant of ‘velvet’, but this rather heavy material is not particularly associated with tires. The eighteenth-century editor George Steevens thought the phrase should be ‘tire-volant’, which would suggest a ‘flying’ tire.
³⁷
This does not seem a bad idea, especially as the play later features Mistress Quickly wearing a head-dress with ‘ribbons pendant flaring ’bout her head’. The sense of ‘flaring’ is precisely fluttering or flying. Another possibility not aired before is that the quarto’s ‘vellet’ is a misreporting of ‘veilèd’.

But whether this particular tire is valiant, velvet, volatile or veiled, we get from this snatch of dialogue an interesting idea of the particular contextual niche into which head-tires fit in Shakespeare’s mind. They are associated with courtly French ladies; they complement the ‘arched beauty’ of a woman’s brow; they are the antithesis of the homely ‘kerchief’ worn by provincial middle-class Englishwomen like Mrs Ford.

As we have seen, the
Merry Wives
was performed by the Chamberlain’s Men in the spring of 1597, to celebrate the investiture of the troupe’s patron, Lord Hunsdon, in the Order of the Garter. Marie Mountjoy has a known connection with the Hunsdon circle at this time, and I have wondered if she was a supplier of head-tires to Lady Hunsdon, and if this was how she came to know Shakespeare. This is conjecture, but perhaps Falstaff’s little riff on tires, and on the handsome French ladies who wear them, adds to the possibility. It would be a stratum of in-joke suitable for this courtly performance in honour of the Hunsdons.