Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England (review)

“Style,” wrote Alfred Whitehead, “is the fashioning of power.”¹ Whitehead’s famous statement attains new significance in Amanda Bailey’s investigation of early modern fashion and transgressive style by groups of young men, both actors and social actors, who challenged social power by flaunting. Where Whitehead located style in a controlled and economical way of thinking and writing, Bailey finds a quite eloquent and effective social discourse in the strategically extravagant actions of dissident dressers who paraded London in apparel more sumptuous than their social rank entitled them to. If by braving, swaggering, jetting, publishing, and flaunting excessive styles of dress, they did not fashion power, they appropriated power’s trappings and thus “used clothes to make something out of what had been made of them” (45).

Bailey uses material on the cloth trade, the used-clothing market, sumptuary laws, sermons, and conduct texts, among other sources, to show how certain groups of young men, including highborn younger sons and lowborn actors in theatrical companies—inspired by theatrical practices in which luxurious clothing is featured onstage even as it is also thematized in the plays—appropriated rich apparel to subvert, challenge, and offend the social hierarchy that disadvantaged them. For Bailey, these men constitute an important masculine subculture; she relates their sartorial activism not only to three playtexts by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson but also to questions of same-sex intimacy. She positions her work within ongoing debates on material culture and subject-object relations. On the one hand, Bailey sees early modern subjects socially mediated by possessions and objects that themselves produce forms of exclusion and inclusion: clothes make the man. On the other hand, the flaunter aggressively acted upon cultural norms through practices in which the material object was understood as a cultural instrument of the subject and a sign of his social agency.

Bailey reads The Taming of the Shrew not only as a play concerned with relations between men and women in marriage but as one with a triangulated domestic structure in which, for example, Petruchio’s lectures to Kate on thrift (3.2) are undermined by the servant Grumio’s excesses and irreverent visual statements, suggesting a serious problem of domestic governance in which wifely subservience and the servant’s insubordination are prominently at odds. The early modern definitions of “shrew,” linked to social disturbance by both women and men, underscore the complex domestic and erotic issues of Shrew. Bailey argues convincingly that the household is a disorderly, even chaotic, arena of heteroerotic and homoerotic struggle.

Bailey’s reading of Marlowe’s Edward II stresses the role of Italian fashion and notoriety and Edward’s fatal attraction to an Italianate Gaveston who, in Marlowe’s adaptation from Holinshed, flamboyantly dresses himself and infects the court with offensive entertainments. She faults criticism on the play for “fail[ing] to illuminate how sexual and stylistic excess are linked” (78), and she stresses the play’s interest in opposing mannerist (artifizioso) and mimetic (sprezzatura) style, not just in the clothing of the Italianate man as condemned by Ascham in The Schoolmaster but especially in forms of “aesthetic defiance” (78).

A chapter on Jonson’s Every Man out of His Humor expands Bailey’s study into the topic of urban spatialization, arguing that Jonson’s innovative drama “plots the transformation of a theatre traditionally conceived as a theatrum mundi into a theatrum civitatis” (105) by focusing on the city gallant and his extravagant habits of dress and consumption. This figure of the gallant, Bailey contends, is the urban star who breaks down the distinction between stage and city life and whose ongoing performances reveal the unsettled structures of early modern identities.

An ambitious study with many strands, Flaunting successfully demonstrates the previously unrecognized importance of flaunting activity in three plays. It might have been interesting to refer to other Shakespeare plays that feature prominent master-servant relations, such as Twelfth Night, The...