Costuming the Shakespearean Stage: Visual Codes of Representation in Early Modern Theatre and Culture by Robert I. Lublin, and: The Shakespearean Stage Space by Mariko Ichikawa (review)

Costuming the Shakespearean Stage and The Shakespearean Stage Space offer complementary approaches to performance and reception in the years 1580 to 1640; even the illustrations on the dust jackets of each book are easily interchangeable. The black-and-white drawing by Henry Peacham of what might or might not be a scene from Titus Andronicus on Robert I. Lublin’s cover and a color photograph of Love’s Labor’s Lost at the Globe Theatre in London on Mariko Ichikawa’s book cover contain information about costume and performing spaces, one supposedly original, the other emulating what a late sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century theater might have looked like. However, while Lublin investigates the significance of how performers were costumed, Ichikawa, despite many references to the tiring-house and its multiple uses—other than the obvious one of holding the stock of costumes—mostly avoids discussing the purposes of costume in creating a theatrical world that complemented or contrasted with the spoken word and the business of conjuring up alternative locations and historical periods.

“Costumes provided one of the primary means by which information was transmitted in performance at the time” (180) is a reiteration of the theme explored throughout Costuming the Shakespearean Stage, whether it be of an historical past, a foreign style, a religious persuasion, or gender difference. The hurdle that Lublin must confront is that theater historians are rarely dress historians. He notes the growth of interest in theatrical costume over the last thirty years, but the majority of the scholars that he cites—Lisa Jardine, Stephen Greenblatt, Stephen Orgel, Peter Stallybrass, Will Fisher, Amanda Bailey—are interested in the idea of theatrical costume within theoretical frameworks, literary and philosophical, rather than the awkward business of what dress historians call “the real thing,” the surviving, often-incomplete, under provenanced garments, textiles, and embroideries that offer some evidence of the colors, construction, and textures worn at this time.

Few dress or textile historians would agree that in early modern England the theater “was a new and spectacular development of the clothing industry,”¹ but this is certainly an understudied cross-disciplinary topic that Lublin tackles with relish, although possibly without being aware of the diversity of good visual sources for this period. His use of “generalized” modern drawings (10) of male and female Elizabethan fashionable dress is somewhat misleading, despite his explanation that “there were a number of basic components of clothing . . . that altered in style but remained staple items” (10). This lack of interdisciplinary curiosity mars his interpretation. As the cover image of Ichikawa’s book reminds us, there is a considerable and growing body of information about carefully researched and traditionally made costume for the stage, notably at the Globe Theatre, where the work of innovative researcher and patternmaker Janet Arnold informs the approach of Jenny Tiramani and her team in the Globe wardrobe department. Books that study surviving examples held in European and North American collections provide important secondary evidence of “the real thing” for theaters wanting to produce styles approximating what was worn and for scholars seeking to understand contemporary choices about play costumes.

Portions of Lublin’s book (parts of chapter 4 and all of chapter 5, on costumes and politics in Middleton’s Game at Chess) have been previously published. Unfortunately, some misspellings found throughout the book but especially in the last chapter (“Loyola Ignatius” for “Ignatius Loyola” [170], “Tutors” for “Tudors” [171n25], and “Indigo Jones” for “Inigo Jones” [189]) were not corrected by either author or publisher. Nonetheless, it is a pleasure to read a book in which theatrical costume is seriously examined rather than relegated to a minor role in theater history studies. I hope that...