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Contribution to Book
"A comely presentation and the habit to admiration reverend": Ecclesiastical Apparel on the Early Modern English Stage
The Sacred and the Profane in Early Modern English Literature (2008)
  • Robert Lublin
Abstract
Notions of the sacred and the profane took on a particular significance in late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century England. This period, chronologically circumscribed on one side by the Protestant Reformation and on the other by the Civil War, was a time of enormous religious change. These changes found articulation in the theatre of the period. Plays such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Middleton’s A Game at Chess make significant use of historically specific understandings of Protestantism and Catholicism. Scholars have noted the religious aspects of these plays before, but what has garnered less critical attention is the manner in which the costumes worn in production took part in the process of negotiating the religious arguments of the time.
            This essay explores the manner in which the clothes one wore in early modern England and the costumes employed on the public stages visually asserted one’s religious ideology. The importance of such a study becomes clear when we note the frequency with which priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, friars, nuns, and Puritans appeared in performance. The costumes worn in production figured significantly in the establishment of meaning on stage and engaged evolving understandings of what was sacred and what was profane in early modern England.
Keywords
  • ecclesiastical,
  • apparel,
  • clothing,
  • costumes,
  • shakespeare,
  • early modern,
  • theatre,
  • drama,
  • renaissance,
  • priest,
  • bishop,
  • cardinal,
  • pope,
  • friar,
  • nun,
  • puritan
Publication Date
2008
Editor
Mary A. Papazian
Publisher
University of Deleware Press
Citation Information
Robert Lublin. ""A comely presentation and the habit to admiration reverend": Ecclesiastical Apparel on the Early Modern English Stage" NewarkThe Sacred and the Profane in Early Modern English Literature (2008) p. 57 - 83
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/robert_lublin/10/