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

The importance of the semiotics of clothing has long been recognized in studies of early modern English culture and drama. Clothing marked both social rank and gender, and items of clothing constituted perhaps the chief (and most expensive) stage properties of the early modern English theater. Not surprisingly, most studies of the cultural significance of clothing on the stage have focused on the theater’s subversion of the categories of rank and gender. If clothing should provide straightforward signs of the wearer’s birth and sex, as Elizabethan sumptuary legislation and antitheatricalists such as Philip Stubbes claimed it should, then through their sartorial play London’s all-male acting companies confused this sign system, severed the connection between appearance and being, and suggested the ontological groundlessness of the period’s hierarchies of authority. One thinks here of Middleton’s Michaelmas Term or Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Amanda Bailey’s book attempts to complicate this picture. Bailey’s book focuses on the social relations and subject-positions materialized among groups of young males by sartorial excess. Groups of marginalized young men — household servants, apprentices, and students — constituted a subculture in early modern England, Bailey argues, and it was through clothing that they negotiated their relationship with the dominant patriarchal culture, articulating an alternative and largely homoerotic mode of masculinity. The theater, Bailey suggests, facilitated this subculture not only by providing young males with a gathering place where, free from the gaze of their masters, they could flaunt their apparel, but also by providing them with the opportunity to purchase such subcultural essentials as tobacco and secondhand clothing. The theater interpellated these young men as consumers, and through their mode of consumption they registered their difference from if not outright opposition to dominant culture. Crucially, Bailey insists, the youths were not out to imitate or pass for members of the dominant culture, unlike men on the make such as Middleton’s Andrew Lethe. Rather, “these men, who had limited funds for even second-hand purchases, cobbled together outlandish ensembles by retrieving those items that had been excluded from primary arenas of display, and by infusing them with their own sense of glamour. Their second-hand style, which juxtaposed disparate items, conveyed fragmentation rather than coherence, and by engaging modes of ‘confrontational dressing,’ they simultaneously assimilated and parodied those aesthetic categories that underwrote the sartorial codes of the dominant culture” (44). And, Bailey adds, they did so not merely to “brave” their betters but for the sheer pleasure of it: clothes were their fetish.

After laying out the background in an introduction and opening chapter, Bailey provides fine analyses of three plays — The Taming of the Shrew, Edward II, and Every Man Out of His Humour — that not only reflect these cultural concerns but reflected them back to the youths who made up a considerable portion of their audience, thus further shaping the subculture they dramatized. The chapter on The Taming of the Shrew examines the play’s representation of master-servant relationships, arguing that the male servant’s status as his master’s ornament could lead to a strange relationship reversal that the male servant could exploit to brave his master through his mode of dress. The following chapter provocatively argues that style, not politics, is at the heart of Edward II. According to Bailey, the play’s central conflict, between the conservatively outfitted barons and the impudent, stylish young men Edward increasingly comes to favour, mirrors the situation at court in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign. The book’s concluding chapter provides a brilliant analysis of Jonson’s dizzyingly metatheatrical representation of the loitering, posturing, and theater-going that were among the chief activities of the clothes-crazy male youth subculture. In Every Man Out, all the world’s a catwalk. Although Bailey chose to limit her study of the drama to these three Elizabethan plays, presumably because in 1604...