I. Introduction

In an anti-theatrical tract from 1580, “Anglo-phile-Eutheo,” most likely a pseudonym for Anthony Munday, claims that “a two-legged Asse maie be clothed in gold.”[1]  Intended to warn its readers against the pleasures of the senses, this tract inveighs against what it views as the corruption of the Elizabethan stage and the lasciviousness, blasphemy, and debauchery it encouraged.  Munday’s observation that the clothing one assumes might radically misrepresent the body beneath the clothing helps to introduce the central concern of this paper:  the manipulation of identity through the medium of apparel.  I will explore this issue by looking at the incipient early modern fascination with cross-dressing as a social practice and literary topos and by examining the laws and “advice tracts” geared towards sumptuary regulation during late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

The latter half of the sixteenth century witnessed a remarkable boom in preoccupation with transvestism as a social phenomenon and fictional device, as as well as a boom in the promulgation of of sumptuary laws. The last thirty years of the sixteenth century were the most active years for sumptuary regulation in English history.  While cross-dressing has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years, sumptuary laws have been a less popular topic of investigation.  This is the case largely because the two phenomena, at first glance, seem only marginally related:  cross-dressing involved the appropriation of apparel reserved for the opposite sex, while sumptuary laws defined transgressors primarily as those who appropriated finery reserved for members of the upper classes. Sumptuary legislation was promulgated through royal decrees which were often accompanied by elaborate charts designating various types of cloth and styles as lawful or unlawful for members of particular social groups.  However, more informal and more broadly oriented attempts to regulate the use of apparel also abounded in early modern England.  While gender is not a key issue in the English law books, it is often an important concern for writers who advocated reform of social ills through stricter regulation of fashion.[2]  The surprising lack of attention to gender in the sumptuary laws, therefore, by no means indicates a culture-wide lack of concern for the regulation of apparel along gendered lines. 

The disparate nature of discourses on clothing indicate that controversies over apparel might help shed light on a wide variety of social practices.  Yet writings that focused on regulation of fashion as a moral imperative—whether centering on cross-dressing or the “disorder of degrees” caused by sumptuary violators—shared an important set of characteristics.  Those who transgressed cultural and legal norms governing the wearing of clothing displayed a failure to comply with injunctions that appearance and cultural identity should be mutually constitutive.  “Regulation literature” focused on this split as a source of moral degeneration.  Still, writers of such literature were engaging in an essentially conservative enterprise, and social practice continually infringed on the sumptuary models they proposed. 

In this essay, I examine a small cross-section of these models and a number of the historical cases and literary representations that subverted them. Female cross-dressers identified an astonishingly wide variety of motivations for their behavior.  Some women cross-dressed for reasons that appear consonant with what we would now describe as early feminism; others felt they could not achieve particular aims—escape from sexual danger or legal troubles, employment in traditionally male-dominated occupations, or the pursuit of love for another woman—unless they seemed to be men.  Female cross-dressers also derived from diverse social groups, from the upper echelons to the lower middle-class.  It is impossible to ascribe to them any one set of ideological incentives. 

Sumptuary violators, on the other hand, usually wanted simply to wear the finery they could afford to buy:  to attain status by displaying refined tastes.  However, sumptuary violators could also include members of the upper classes, both men and women, who had few legal restrictions on their apparel, but who were thought to display the most visible products of their consumption in an “excessive” and unseemly manner.  In exploring the variety of motivations for female cross-dressing and for the violation of cultural and legal injunctions surrounding the proper use of apparel, I hope to demonstrate that early modern controversies over clothing tended to stand in for something else.  This “something else”—whether presented as a challenge to political, national, legal, or patriarchal authority, or as a combination of factors—formed the core of most conservative critiques. 

II. Crossing Over

In recent years, scholarly discussions of cross-dressing have tended to polarize around the question of whether or not transvestism posed any significant challenge to early modern gender norms.  Critics like Jean Howard and Marjorie Garber view cross-dressing as a reaction against a rigid system of gender differentiation. Howard argues, for example, that “crossdressing threatened a normative social order based upon strict principles of hierarchy and subordination, of which woman’s subordination to man was a chief instance, trumpeted from pulpit, instantiated in law, and acted upon by monarch and commoner alike.”[3]  Other scholars, like Valerie Hotchkiss and Sara Van den Berg, have positioned themselves explicitly against this stance.  Hotchkiss maintains that “female transvestites, both in literature and as documented historical cases, conform to androcentric models by assimilating maleness.”[4]  Similarly, Van den Berg points out that male literary characters who cross-dress often do so in the pursuit of a woman who would be otherwise inaccessible.[5]  Ultimately, she argues, such characters affirm rather than challenge traditional gender roles.

In practice, however, the choice between either “transgressing” or “affirming” gender norms was far from binary.  The historical cases and literary models I will examine demonstrate that while cross-dressing operates most obviously on the level of gender, its actual use tended to bring a whole complex of other forms of transgression into play. Indeed, the ostensible gains to be made by cross-dressing often had less to do with the cultural structure of relations between the sexes than with the political, financial, or personal difficulties that cross-dressing helped (or in some cases, did not help) them to overcome.

I would argue that a more careful examination of the various contexts in which cross-dressing occurred is necessary for any in-depth consideration of the ultimate ramifications of early modern gender-bending. Indeed, I propose that female cross-dressers can be organized into roughly four categories. The first category consists of women who cross-dressed in order to avoid undesired marriages or sexual advances, or to achieve some holy aim. The second category consists of women who cross-dressed for romantic or sexual purposes.  Some of these women cross-dressed because their husbands found it impossible to establish a traditional home life, often because their occupations kept them from settling in one location for long periods of time; others found themselves or their partners subject to legal or political difficulties—even exile—and fled in disguise.  A few women who cross-dressed for romantic purposes did so in order to pursue the love of other women, though this phenomenon was less common.[6]  The third category consists of women who hoped to obtain positions, perhaps as sailors or soldiers, that were traditionally reserved for men.  Rudolph Dekker and Lotte Van de Pol have shown that for the period between 1550 and 1839, women who cross-dressed frequently did so out of financial exigency or a patriotic desire to serve their country.[7]  Such women, who often negotiated both class constraints and the limitations imposed on them by their gender, viewed cross-dressing as a means to the achievement of particular goals.  Finally, the fourth category—least important for the concerns of this paper—consists of women who cross-dressed temporarily in the celebration of carnival festivities.[8]

The most striking examples of the first category of cross-dressing women occur not in the early modern but in the medieval period.  Valerie Hotchkiss has identified thirty-four female cross-dressing saints in medieval hagiographical lore.  Many of these women disguised themselves as men in order to avoid undesired sexual advances or pressures to marry; others seem to have been motivated by a desire to attain holiness through celibacy and mortification of the body.[9]  The repentant prostitute and the woman seeking to atone for sins that have brought her social (and possibly legal) troubles are also relatively common figures in this category. 

Many of these women became monks and lived in monasteries, undetected as women, until after their deaths.  Their posthumous veneration as saints indicates that part of their accomplishment lay in their very ability to suppress their femaleness.  While the medieval church did not encourage cross-dressing, Hotchkiss points out that “as actualizations of male metaphors for faith, cross-dressed women symbolically depict the power of Christianity to ‘transform’ its adherents”; moreover, “the act of inverting sex, which repudiates sexual relations, reflects the growing emphasis in the early centuries of Christianity on celibacy and sexual renunciation.”[10]  The female saints thus embodied God’s power to inspire devotion so intense that it enabled a few women to overcome the “natural” impediments to their salvation:  their moral weakness and their sexuality.

The second category, women who cross-dressed for romantic purposes, can be split into two subdivisions:  women of the upper classes whose choice of mate caused political controversy, and women of the middle and lower-middle classes who cross-dressed in order to accompany their working husbands on voyages.  Elizabeth Southwell and Lady Arbella Stuart are examples of the former.   In 1605, Southwell disguised herself as a man in order to escape England with her husband, Sir Robert Dudley.  Sir Robert Dudley was bastard son of the Earl of Leicester, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth who was perpetually being implicated in conspiracies to poison wives and competitors.[11]  Leicester had secretly married Lady Sheffield, Dudley’s mother; he later regretted his actions and attempted to repudiate the marriage through a financial settlement, but his wife refused his offer.  The couple was never officially divorced, and each partner subsequently remarried.  After Leicester’s death, the court failed to render these later marriages null, and thereby denied Dudley his rightful share of his father’s considerable property.  Moreover, Dudley soon found himself not only without an inheritance, but also in extreme legal straits:  Leicester’s widow, the countess of Essex, had charges brought against him in the Star Chamber for criminal conspiracy.[12]  Though Dudley had a wife and children, he fled the country with Southwell, dressed as a man, in tow.  They received papal approval to marry, and settled down to a prosperous life in Florence. 

Lady Arbella Stuart’s case ended less happily.  Her father’s grandmother was Henry VIII’s eldest sister through marriage, and she thus stood after James I in the line of English succession.  Indeed, some early seventeenth-century commentators argued that she should have come before James in the line of succession, since an English native was to be preferred over a foreigner.[13]  Arbella’s was a life that began in controversy:  the marriage of her parents, Charles Stuart and Elizabeth Cavendish, had been met with intense disapproval by Queen Elizabeth, who had no desire for Charles to produce a potential rival for the throne.  As one biographer has commented, “to the queen Arbella was an embarrassing reminder of her own mortality, a card in the diplomatic pack to be played in the game of European politics; to be offered in marriage to foreign princes but never allowed to marry.”[14]  After Queen Elizabeth’s death, Arbella was treated cordially by King James, but she remained no more free to marry than before.  However, marry she did:  in 1610, she secretly wed William Seymour in direct defiance of the king’s orders.  In 1611, Arbella was placed in strict confinement; Seymour was imprisoned in the Tower.  She escaped under the cover of man’s clothing and boarded a ship for Calais, intending to meet with her husband, who had also escaped.  But her flight was discovered, and Arbella was imprisoned in the Tower, where she remained until her death in 1615.

Stephen Orgel, commenting on Elizabeth Southwell and Lady Arbella Stuart’s cross-dressing, points out that their cases both “involve the negotiation by the women themselves of forbidden marriages,” and concludes that their “reversal of gender usurps patriarchal prerogatives, and represents a radical refusal to be commodified in the marriage market.”[15]  Yet Orgel’s contention that Elizabeth and Arbella’s secret marriages constituted a “radical refusal” of conjugal commodification overstates the case:  they did, after all, choose to marry.  At stake was not so much the system of marriage per se—which was, undoubtedly, a patriarchal system—but rather their political and financial significance for those tied to them.  Sir Robert Dudley jeopardized the property Leicester’s widow had inherited from his father, and since the countess of Essex had influence at court, she was able to disemperil herself by having Dudley indicted with conspiracy.  Southwell chose the most expedient method she could think of in order to be with him when he fled. 

Lady Arbella, on the other hand, had always posed a threat to monarchs with an obvious interest in neutralizing the power or preventing the birth of rivals to the English throne.  Her very existence placed her in an awkward position with regard to the hierarchy of monarchical authority, and it is not difficult to see why she might have felt compelled to behave “in an extraordinary and self-destructive manner.”[16]  Still, Elizabeth and Arbella’s actions were indeed a challenge:  a challenge to what authorities regarded as the women’s rights within the social order, if not to the social order itself.  There is no evidence that either woman opposed gender hierarchy—or any other type of hierarchy, for that matter—in principle.  But they used their bodies as “false” cultural signifiers in attempts to achieve mobility within a system that restrained the field of decisions they were allowed to make.

Such attempts to achieve otherwise impossible aims through the manipulation of clothing became a popular theme in literary works of the period.  Works like Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600), for example, help to demonstrate the issues of power and authority that cross-dressing can raise.  In the famous trial scene from the play—a scene that Elizabeth Southwell and Lady Arbella Stuart may have had in mind when they planned their escapes—Portia and Nerissa disguise themselves as men to prevent Antonio from dying at Shylock’s hands.  However, while they stage the trial in part out of loyalty to their husbands, the final scenes of the play focus on the controversy surrounding Bassanio and Gratiano’s decision to give their rings—which they had sworn to their wives they would always keep—to the “lawyer” and “clerk” as tokens of gratitude.  When the two husbands return home, their wives pretend to "discover" the fact that the rings are missing and feign anger at their absence.  Bassanio protests with an appeal to extenuating contextual circumstances:

Sweet Portia,
If you did know to whom I gave the ring,
If you did know for whom I gave the ring,
And how unwillingly I left the ring
When naught would be accepted but the ring,
You would abate the strength of your displeasure.  (V.i.208-14)

Portia's response, however, hinges not on context but on more transcendent qualities:

If you had known the virtue of the ring,
Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,
Or your own honor to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring.  (V.i.215-18)

Interestingly, the temporary and contextually-inspired cross-dressing of the two women enables them to accomplish an act that their husbands could not—the rescue of Antonio—and to insist on their more timeless virtues, their worthiness as wives.  Shakespeare implies that the two women have gained a permanent advantage in their relationships through their facility in the politics of disguise, yet that advantage remains solidly grounded within an otherwise traditional marriage structure.

Cross-dressing thus operates in diverse trajectories of power, in which gender plays a part but often is not the transgressors’ primary concern.  This is the case with transvestism among the middle and lower-middle classes as well as among the elite. Dekker and van de Pol have shown that many women who cross-dressed in the Netherlands and England during the early modern period did so out of a desire to accompany their husbands as sailors on long journeys.  Many of these women, because of the intimate environment aboard ships, were discovered and forced to debark.  At times, however, female cross-dressers managed to forge successful careers for themselves as men and gained remarkable notoriety, even royal reward.[17]  Yet such extreme approbation of middle- and lower middle-class female transvestites was primarily an elite phenomenon.  Among the middling sort, female cross-dressers generally received a less positive reception.[18]  In this context, the female cross-dressers who created the most waves were those who carried carnival festivities a bit too far, appearing in church dressed in men’s attire.  Even when such women were caught, however, the penalties imposed on them were rarely stiff.  As David Cressy has observed, “these were mostly minor offenses, more jests and pranks than challenges to the gendered social order, and their punishment was appropriately mild.”[19]

Yet women who cross-dressed were oddities, and cultural responses to virtually any oddity ranged from praise to repulsion.  Mary Frith (1584? – 1659), also known as “Moll Cutpurse,” was one of the most famous cross-dressers of the seventeenth century.  She exemplifies the women of category three—those who cross-dressed not out of romantic or religious motives, but rather a desire to enter traditionally male occupations. Frith became something of an underground overlord, attaining “great notoriety as a bully, pickpurse, fortune-teller, receiver, and forger.”[20]  Contemporaries made several references to her in their writings, and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker based a play on her, The Roaring Girl (1611). 

Masculine behavior is a more overt theme in the story of Mary Frith than in the other examples I have thus far offered.  In the anonymous introduction to what purports to be Moll Cutpurse’s autobiography, The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse (1662), the writer presents Mary’s capers as the result of a “masculine spirit” that had dominated her even as a young child, “above all breeding and instruction.”[21]  However, Frith’s masculine behavior did not translate to cultural maleness.  Indeed, she was renowned not only for her transvestism, but also for her refusal to be treated as a man sexually.  A section from her “diary,” for example, recounts her indignation at being the butt of a trick played only on men:

There was a shameless Jade, as noted in this Town as my self at this time, but for far more enormous Actions; she was called Abigail, her way of living (she being a kind of Natural) was by ringing the Bells with her Coats for a Farthing, and coming behind any Gentleman for the same hire, and clapping him on the back as he turned his Head, to kisse him, to the enraging of some Gentlemen so far as to cause them to draw their Swords and threaten to kill her.  This stinking Slut, who was never known to have done so to any woman; by some body’s setting her on to affront me, served me in the same manner.  I got hold of her and being neer at home, drag’d her to the Conduit, where I washt her polluted lips for her, and wrencht her leud Petticoats to some purpose, tumbling her under a Cock, and letting the water run, till she had not a dry thred about her, and had her soundly kickt to boot.[22]

The author of the text, whether it be Frith or no, makes a point of attributing the source of her outrage not merely to being the object of trickery, but also to being the object of sexual trickery by a woman who “was never known to have done so to any woman.”  While the gentlemen of the town reacted to Abigail with anger but restrained themselves from punishing her, Frith’s status as a woman provides her with the license to act:  she punishes Abigail as a woman but in a masculine manner.  Mary Frith’s case shows that even an outright rejection of the primary cultural signifier of femininity—women’s clothing—did not necessarily lead to an all-encompassing “reversal of gender.”  Moll knew that everyone else regarded her as a woman, and made no attempt to disabuse her contemporaries of that notion, but rather lived as a masculine woman:  a “roaring girl,” indeed.

In cases of cross-dressing, gender is seldom the sole locus of transgression.  Indeed, it often serves as an index to and sign of other forms of transgression, only some of which are overtly gendered.  When Elizabeth Southwell eloped with Sir Robert Dudley, she assisted her husband in escaping both the possibility of imprisonment and his existing marriage.  Both of these actions were illegal, while the temporary transvestism she staged in order to facilitate their plans was not.  When Arbella Stuart married William Seymour, she crossed legal boundaries that dictated that, as a possible successor to the crown, the monarch should have final say over her choice of marriage partner.  Cross-dressing nearly enabled her to bypass these boundaries, but was by no means the issue at hand when she was imprisoned in the Tower. 

Among the middle classes, women who cross-dressed were regarded with ambivalence.  But their reception differed from person to person; some hailed these women’s ability to perform heroic deeds under male cover and wrote with fascination of their exploits.  Others reviled them, but even then, the cause for repulsion is not always explicitly gender-related.  When Mary Frith held a bull-baiting and named the bull after the Earl of Strafford and the ineffectual dogs who attacked it after Protestant dissenters, claiming to have “Allegorized the whole story” of the struggle between the Royalists and the Roundheads, she was set upon by “Phanaticks there who caught hold of my words, and began to question me.”[23]  Her ability to spur political anger—and not her male dress—is the key source of opposition here. 

The most conservative and sweeping form of opposition to cross-dressing manifests itself in the anti-theatrical texts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  Anti-theatricalists urged the closing of the English playhouses, claiming that theaters bred lasciviousness in playgoers, abused the Sabbath and the name of God, and at best were a waste of time that could be better spent in devotion to God and moral self-improvement.  Significantly, authors of anti-theatrical polemics often regarded not just apparel, but the body itself as subject to immoral manipulation. 

A 1580 tract, A Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres, amalgamates two separate documents:  the first is a translation of a “savage attack on the vices which beset the Roman world” by Salvian, a bishop of fifth-century Marseilles.[24]  The second document, as I mentioned in the opening of this essay, has been attributed to Anthony Munday, and is an invective against the abuses of the Elizabethan stage.  For Munday, the theater is a sensory feast at which “thinges be disclosed to the eie, and to the eare, as might a great deale better be kept close.”[25]  Yet the body is both a site of weakness and a powerful instrument for inciting others to action.  It is this seeming paradox that renders plays dangerous, for theaters bring the weak bodies of the audience under the powerful spell of the players.[26]  As Munday observes, “it is marvelous to consider how the gesturing of a plaier, which Tullie termeth the eloquence of the bodie, is of force to move, and prepare a man to that which is il.”[27]

Moreover, Munday identifies in the body a crippling weakness in powers of discernment, a mistrust of the information gained by the senses.  Sin is difficult to detect precisely because it disguises itself as harmless entertainment.  Munday thus addresses not only the power of the theater to affect its audiences’ moral status through performance, but also the difficulty of discerning the good from the bad in performance:

It were il painting the Divel like an Angel, he must be portraied forth as he is, that he maie the better be knowen.  Sinne hath alwaies a faire cloake to cover his filthie bodie.  And therefore he is to be turned out of his case into his naked skin, that his nastie filthie bodie, and stinking corruption being perceaved, he might come into the hatred and horror of men.  For as we are naturalie of our selves evil and corrupt:  so are we naturalie given to love our selves, and to be blinded with our own affections, insomuch that, what we knowe to be evil, we are not ashamed either openlie to defend, or slilie to cloake.[28]

Munday presents us with a dichotomy:  on the one hand, if the Devil were to unmask himself, throwing off his “fair cloake” to reveal the “filthy body” underneath, we would be better able to revile him.  On the other hand, Munday suggests that even when we have identified something as evil, we willfully blind ourselves to its malevolence; we “slilie cloake” the very evil we should be rejecting. The Devil cloaks his maliciousness first, but we do the job for him once he has gained our affections.  Munday’s emphasis on the perils of the senses is thus bound up with the perils inherent in the naturally sinful human condition.  The notion of the “cloake”—the mask that prevents us from recognizing evil—thus applies not only to literal incidents of disguise, but also to sensory pleasures more generally.  Cross-dressing, in this scheme, is a particularly detestable form of cloaking, but is by no means the only target of anti-theatrical polemic.

The conservative position exemplified by Munday did not go unchallenged by contemporaries.  Plays like Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) illustrate the ways in cross-dressers—or playwrights, closely allied with cross-dressers due to the nature of the transvestite English stage—might turn the tables on those who would purport to rail against their actions.  The Deuteronomic prohibition against the wearing of the apparel of one sex by the other was often cited to bolster the biblical authority of anti-theatrical rhetoric.  However, as  Jonson demonstrates, biblical injunctions were subject to interpretation, and the interpreter’s own moral status had much to do with how his authority was perceived. 

The puppet show that Leatherhead produces near the end of Jonson’s play parodies the Deuteronomic opposition to cross-dressing by exposing virtually all the visitors to the fair as wearers of either physical or moral masks.  Jonson appropriates the metaphor of the “cloake” that is so central to invectives like Munday’s, but uses it to expose the hypocrisy of excessive moralizing rather than the dangers inherent in sensory pleasures.  To illustrate this message, Jonson structures the last scenes of the play around a series of “conversions” that are facilitated through a series of unmaskings.  The puppet play staged at the end of the drama, a parodic vulgarization of Marlowe and Chapman’s Hero and Leander and Richard Edwards’ Damon and Pithias, is quintessential low humor:  its characters berate each others’ sexual misadventures and resort to blows in the ensuing melee.  Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy, the stereotypical Puritan hypocrite, interrupts the show to rail against its “profanations.”[29]  However, when he resorts to the Deuteronomic argument against actors, the puppet Dionysius takes up his garment to prove that he is sexless:  his performance cannot be against the word of God because he has no biological sex.  Deprived of his last rhetorical stand and chastened, Busy must let the show go on. 

Soon afterward, Wasp, Bartholomew Cokes’ tutor, “unmasks” his truculently moralizing stance by admitting that he has been in the stocks, and has therefore forfeited his claim to authority over his charge.  Finally, Adam Overdo, the magistrate who has disguised himself in order to uncover “enormities” at the fair, removes his costume and attempts to report the enormities that he has discovered.  Instead, he learns that he has been guilty of gross misjudgment—a crippling deficiency for a magistrate.[30]  At Quarlous’ suggestion, Overdo relents and invites the cast to supper at his home.  The controversy over the supposed acts of puppet transvestism bring into focus the misguided moralizing of those who would maintain “order” at the fair.  The play’s most serious transgressors are those who have represented themselves as morally superior but who lack the integrity to uphold the image they project.  These characters are brought face-to-face with the falseness of their self-representation—a falseness far more serious than the transvestism of a few sexless puppets, or of entire troupes of cross-dressing boy actors.

Yet many contemporaries remained convinced that something was drastically amiss.  It is impossible to guess how many women may have succeeded in pulling off the supremely difficult feat of passing as men.  However, the cases of women who were caught—and the highly visible examples of cross-dressing in literary texts—generated suspicion among moralists.  Here, we may want to remember Anthony Munday’s warning about the Devil’s “faire cloake” and his extreme mistrust of the senses.  For anti-theatrical writers like Munday and Stephen Gosson, the cultural texts attached to the body were woven into a “Gordian knot”:  such writers were convinced that disorder was rampant even where it was not apparent.  Known cases of transvestism helped to stoke their fear that others were out there—the problem was reading the signs rightly.  Munday and Gosson responded to this dilemma by calling the knot a knot, and trumpeting the “natural order” as an untangled version of it.  The intense suspicion this practice generated is reflected in the efforts of English monarchs and of independent citizens to squelch the disorder of degrees and estates that improper use of apparel supposedly perpetuated, and thereby to set the “natural record” straight.  In attempts at sumptuary regulation, as in cases of cross-dressing, apparel often serves as an index to a wide range of cultural practices, power structures, and class concerns.

III. The Sumptuary Project

While the first English sumptuary laws in were enacted in 1363, their heyday was the last thirty years of sixteenth century.  Only six laws were enacted in the fifteenth century, but twenty were passed in the sixteenth century.  Parliament ultimately repealed these laws at the beginning of King James I’s reign in 1604.  The repeal of the laws, however, did not necessarily indicate an abandonment of the desire to regulate the wearing of apparel.  As Alan Hunt points out, “the picture that emerges is one of a failure to act because the basis of that intervention becomes more problematic.  The compulsion for regulation, the sumptuary ethic, remained, but it now met not so much explicit resistance (although there was now occasional explicit opposition), but rather it wavered as it encountered indecision and lack of agreement about how the project should be pursued.”[31] 

The eventual difficulty of settling on a sumptuary target helps set the stage for the variety of practices sumptuary regulation aimed to squelch.  Its central concerns were threefold:  the discouragement of “excessive apparel,” the maintenance of class distinctions through the regulation of the types of cloth and styles members of certain social stations could wear, and the protection of the English economy through the promotion of domestic goods—particularly woolens—as opposed to the expensive silks and other finery imported from countries like France and Italy. 

A typical document from 1558 expresses all three of these concerns.  This Elizabethan proclamation urged the observance of “sundrey holsome lawes” governing the wearing of clothing in England.[32]  Noting that statutes enacted during the reign of King Phillip and Queen Mary were being widely transgressed, Elizabeth announced her disapproval of “excessiue and inordinat apparell, as in no age hath ben sene the lyke.”  She then sketched a plan for the distribution of information regarding her intention to renew enforcement of the sumptuary laws that were already in place, acknowledged that a brief period of toleration would be set before sumptuary regulation began in earnest, and asserted that the law would prosecute those “disordred subjectes” who persisted in their abuses. 

The chart that accompanied Elizabeth’s proclamation outlined a program of acceptable use of apparel that changed on a sliding scale according to the degree or income of those who wore it:  for example, only earls, viscounts, barons, and others of superior station could wear cloth of gold, silver, or tinsel; only barons’ sons, knights, or those capable of spending over 250 pounds per year could wear velvet in their outergarments; and only those capable of spending over 100 pounds per year could wear taffeta, satin, or silk camlet in their gowns or coats.  Elizabeth’s proclamation promotes the health of the English economy by restricting the wearing of cloth made outside the realm.  The “disordered subjects” of her legal rebuke contributed to a climate in which the senses were either overstimulated through egregious excess or confused by the inability to identify members of lower classes properly, and in which those who could afford to do so abandoned the cloth—and, it is implied, the economy—of England in favor of more sumptuous foreign goods.

However, the subjects Elizabeth targeted were notoriously stubborn in their refusal to pay the laws any heed.  Ultimately, the decision to prohibit enactment of sumptuary laws by royal decree may have stemmed from their ineffectiveness.  Sumptuary laws were notoriously difficult to enforce, and local law enforcement officials seem to have had little desire to carry out their royal commands by prosecuting transgressors. 

This phenomenon helps to account for a distinct tone of pessimism that creeps into the later proclamations, many of which directly addressed the multitudes of people who were blithely ignoring the existing laws, and many of which re-articulated the scope of previous laws with very few changes.  When changes were made, they often introduced concessions to a rising middle class increasingly capable of purchasing the finery that had been declared illegal for them to wear.[33]  However, even the concessions stimulated little conformity with the laws, for they were made for people who were not paying attention to the statutes in the first place.  An Elizabethan proclamation against excess in apparel from 1577, for example, opens with the following assertion: 

Whereas the Queenes Maiestie hath by sundry former Proclamations notified unto her loving Subjectes of this Realme, the great inconvenience and mischiefe that hath growen to the same, by the great excesse of apparell in all states and degrees, but specially in the inferiour sort, contrarie to divers lawes and Statutes of the Realme, whereof notwithstanding there hath folowed no redresse, or very litle at al:  whereby hath appeared no lesse contempt in the offendours, then lacke of duetifull care in those to whome the auethoritie to see due execution of the lawes and orders provided in that behalfe was committed, which thing might give her Majestie just cause (were it not that of her own gratious disposition she is naturally inclyned rather to clemencie than seueritie, so long as there is any hope of redresse in other ways) to commit the execution of the sayde lawes, to such persons as would haue proceeded therein with all extremitie.[34]

Like Munday and Gosson, Elizabeth called a knot a knot.  In doing so, however, she admitted both to the disorderly state of things and to her government’s extreme difficulty in rectifying sumptuary abuses.[35]

Class was always a focus of official sumptuary regulation, but English sumptuary laws were often silent on distinctions among men and women within the class guidelines that had been set.  Alan Hunt has noted that working women were the only female targets of English sumptuary laws in 1483, and that between 1514 and 1574, the laws had no special provisions for women whatsoever.[36]  The silence of official voices on matters of gender, however, did not obviate the possibility that more informal attempts at cultural regulation of apparel along gendered lines would take place. In 1534, William Thomas—probably the same William Thomas who was a well-known Italian scholar and influential personage in the court of Edward VI, but who was executed for treason on the accession of Queen Mary[37]—translated two orations from the Roman histories of Livy.[38]  Accompanying the translations are several explanatory documents. 

The first of these explanatory documents is a letter from the printer to the reader that places Thomas’ translations in a sixteenth-century context:  several gentlemen and gentlewomen had gathered at a feast in London, where a conflict soon arose between a man of the company who vehemently railed against women’s excessive ornamentation and a woman who resented both the content of the man’s invectives and his lack of gentility in presenting them.  The man then launched into a recitation of Livy’s version of a speech by Cato, from the fourth century A.D., concerning the controversy over the law Oppia.  This law, enacted during the economic turmoil of the Punic Wars, restricted women’s use of gold in their apparel, forbade the wearing of “garmentes wrought of diuers colours,” and prevented women from publicly riding in chariots.  After the wars ended and the Roman economy again prospered, the women of the city sought to have the laws repealed.  Cato strongly opposed these women’s attempts to have their “auncient ornaments” restored.  As the translation reports, he charged the men present in assembly to squelch the rebelliousness of the city’s women. 

Interestingly, the force of Cato’s oration hinges not on the sumptuary provisions of the law Oppia in itself, but rather in the necessity of restraining women who seek to have some influence on the laws that concern them.  This presumptuousness, Cato claims, would have disastrous consequences for the men of Rome if it proceeded unchecked.  Women who opposed laws would soon consider themselves equal to their husbands, and when women considered themselves equal to their husbands, they would subvert all male authority in asserting their liberty.  Moreover, Cato explicitly links the rebelliousness of women with lasciviousness.  In doing so, he locates the danger of women’s transgression not in their desire for ornaments per se, but rather in their desire to achieve some power over the state of Roman law—a desire that he identifies as a specifically sexual form of immorality with manifold consequences for the structures of authority in which men were the masters of their wives, daughters, and sisters.

According to the explanatory letter, the gentleman’s adumbration of Cato’s argument had a sobering effect on the party of feasters, who received the gentleman’s speech with several minutes of silence.  After a time, however, William Thomas answered the gentleman’s reference to Cato by citing another speech:  the oration by Lucius Valerius that follows and opposes Cato’s in Livy.  This account presents a very different picture of the women’s quest to have the law Oppia repealed than does Cato’s.  The argument hinges on two central claims regarding women and liberty:  first, Valerius points out that nothing would prevent men from restraining excess of apparel in their wives, daughters, and sisters if the law were abrogated.  Second, and more interestingly, he claims that the women naturally “abhorre that libertee, that is like unto widowhead, or the death of their parentes or children”; in fact, he points out, women would prefer to have the regulation of their behavior in the hands of their husbands rather than in the statutes of the realm.  Valerius counsels temperance in the use of manly power, arguing that men should keep women “in [their] protection and defence, and not in servitude:  that [they] might rather be called fathers or housbandes, than masters.” 

The letter reports that Thomas’s citation of Valerius temporarily settled the dispute.  After some debate, the party “agreed, that all clenly ornamentes were laufull unto women, so longe as thei provoked neither concupiscence, nor vaine glorie:  wherein that ended the mattier for that tyme.”  The woman who had disagreed so vehemently with the Cato-quoting gentleman nevertheless requested that Thomas translate a copy of each oration for her.  He agreed to do so, but with the caveat that she “kepe it to hir selfe.”  A copy of his letter to her explains his motivations for wanting to maintain secrecy:  “in no wyse lette it passe your handes, lest men shoulde thinke, with flatteryng you, I shoulde goe about to mainteyne a thyng most necessary to be restreigned.” 

Thomas’ concerns help bring into focus the ambivalence of his use of Valerius to defend the ornamentation of women, for while he feels it his duty to respond to the misogynistic invectives of the man at the feast, he balks at the possibility that others might interpret his defense as countenancing women’s excess—a concern that the woman in question promptly ignored, although not without expressing some anxiety over the reader’s reaction to her decision to “go public” with the orations by having them printed.  As the printer notes in his prefatory letter, “Willyng me besides on hir behalfe, to beseche you all (gentle reders) not to thinke she hath done it of any purpose, to mainteine excesse (whiche she hir selfe naturally abhorreth) but even simply for the plesaunt and well handlyng of the mattier:  to stoppe their mouths, that with raylyng on womens maners, seeme to procure theim selves a credite.” 

What is striking about this document are the ways in which each of the principals in the argument—from the versions of Cato and Valerius cited during the debate to the woman and Thomas—distance themselves from the issue ostensibly at hand:  the regulation of women’s apparel.  None of the debaters questions that there is such a thing as excess in apparel and that it should be restrained, but each has a different perspective on the implications of a policy of governance for a larger social order. 

Cato’s oration presents sumptuary law as a necessary component of maintaining hierarchy between the genders, while Valerius presents such law as a subordination of men’s powers to those of the state, arguing that the abrogation of the law will in fact make both men’s power and their ability to use it with temperance more manifest.  Thomas translates these orations because he has been requested to do so, but he is careful to deny any sympathy for abuses of apparel that he (or at least a number of his associates) regards as destructive.  Finally, the woman herself acknowledges the detestable nature of excess in apparel, but seizes upon the orations as fodder against the hypocrisy of men who disparage women in order to elevate their own moral status.  As the printer recounts, she tells the gentleman that if he “could bryng men as well to reforme their hertes, as [he] woulde have women doe their apparaile, [he] shoulde never nede thus to braule with us.”  We might detect in this statement a faint foreshadowing of Jonson’s rhetorical technique in Bartholomew Fair:  the insistence that those who trumpet moral standards for others must conform to those standards themselves. 

Sumptuary regulation focusing on gender did not always target women as the “disordered” subjects of its opposition.[39]  Indeed, at some historical points sumptuary regulation targeted men as the primary transgressors and approved of the conduct and apparel of women.  John Evelyn’s Tyrannus, or, The Mode:  In a Discourse of Sumptuary Lawes (1661) helps to illustrate this contrast nicely.  In this document, Evelyn bitterly opposes the fashion of upper-class English men, and urges King Charles II to pass laws against a mode of dress that he deems excessive, effeminate, and worst of all, French.  The latter two criticisms are in fact closely related, for Evelyn links the English tendency to emulate French fashion with a failure to express national pride and dominance in a distinctive form of clothing, and thus to both stylistic and cultural effeminacy.  Earlier forms of sumptuary regulation, as we have seen, also attempt to encourage a particularly English style of dress, but they do so largely by requiring that all but the upper classes buy and wear cloth made in England.  Expensive imports such as silks and gold embroidery were—in theory at least—reserved for the privileged classes, and the motivation behind these laws was often economic in nature.  However, Evelyn focuses not on the economic, but rather on the cultural implications of the abuse of upper-class privilege in matters of fashion: 

I will not reproch the French for their fruitful Invention, or any thing that is commendable, but ‘tis well known, who those Gavaches are, which would impose upon all the world beside; and I have frequently wonder’d that a Nation so well conceited of themselves, as I take our Country-men to be, should so generally submit to the Mode of another, of whom they speak with so little kindnesse.  That the Monsieurs have universally gotten the Ascendent over other parts of Europe, is imputable to their late Conquests; but that only their greatest vanity should domineer over [Us], speaks us strangely tame.  For my own part, though I love the French well (and have my reasons for it) yet I would be glad to pay my respects in any thing rather then my Clothes, because I conceive it so great diminution to our Native Country, and to the discretion of it.[40]

Evelyn appeals to national pride by likening the prevalence of the French “mode” to a conquest:  the English have managed to stay out of the governmental clutches of the French, but the “Gavaches” have infiltrated English borders in a more insidious manner.  Such an invasion of fashion, Evelyn claims, suggests that the English are “strangely tame,” that they lack the pluck to assert their country’s cultural dominance.

Evelyn soon describes the implications of French influence on the English in gendered terms.  He labels the practice of wearing pantaloons as one that makes a man into a “hermaphrodite and of neither sex,”[41] compares watching “aery Gallants” speak to their mistresses to being “in the country of Amazons,”[42] and links both to the detestable English fondness for French manias.  Evelyn attributes the cause of English effeminization to rule by the French—who might as well be women, as far as Evelyn is concerned.  As he laments,

So as one who should judge by the appearance, would take us all to be of Kin to the fellow that begs without Armes, or some great Mens Fools:  Me thinks we should make water sitting, and since we invert our Sex, learn to handle the distaffe too; Hercules did so much when he courted Omphale, and those who sacrific’d to Ceres put on the pettycoat with much confidence… On the Reverse, All Men now wear coats, and no Beards.  O Prodigious Folly!… And I am even astonish’d at the scandal of it.[43]

IV. Conclusions

For Evelyn, the inversion of sex—a type of cultural cross-dressing that includes emulating the dress of the French as well as that of women—derives from the “Prodigious Folly” of those who “put on the pettycoat” (both literally and metaphorically) without realizing the consequences of their actions.  We have returned, once again, to the figure of the self-indulgent body that perpetuates disorder through apparel, to the abuses that sumptuous wealth encourages, and to the naivete of those who do not realize that their clothing constitutes identity—that clothes both make and unmake the man.

Ironically, however, we have also returned to the theme of the split between apparel and the body beneath.  For Evelyn’s admonishments hinge on the assumption that there is a “natural” English order that the French have managed to obscure—that the English are not really the Amazons they appear to be, but rather are strong, upstanding patriots who have temporarily forgotten to fulfill their sumptuary obligations to the state.  Part of the problem was the inability to trumpet the natural order loudly enough to make it seem as natural as sumptuary advocates and anti-theatricalists asserted it to be. The very perception that sumptuary laws were needed indicates something of the cultural opposition with which the laws were met.  Similarly, cross-dressers stimulated the “need” for denunciation, but the very proliferation of such denunciations suggests that for those who cared, the problem was far from solved. 

Indeed, the problem may have been unsolvable precisely because cross-dressing and sumptuary violation tended to operate in tandem with various other forms of transgression—of political, legal, economic, and gendered cultural norms—and thus could not be reduced to a single problem.  Just as cross-dressers and sumptuary violators manipulated their identity in a manner that brought various structures of power into play, so their opponents saw the need for renewed vehemence—for grander theories and more sweeping polemics—grow in proportion.  And yet, for all the energy put into invectives against abuse of apparel, it remained as difficult as ever to tell an ass from a human when it dressed in cloth of gold.