Cleane Linnen is my Mistris, and my Theame
Flowes, like an over-flowing plenteous streame …
From whence all soyl’d pollution is exiled,
And therefore Cleane is called undefiled:
’Tis faire, ’tis clarifi’d, ’tis mundifi’d,
And from impurity is purifi’d.
John Taylor, ‘The Praise of Cleane Linnen’
(1624)1
The significance of clean linen in early modern England can perhaps best be understood in light of the period’s changing norms of hygiene and their influence on modes of embodiment and dress, social interaction and space, and cultural institutions and forms.2 Social historians document a dramatic shift in the sixteenth century away from immersing the body in water to laundering its linens as the preferred mode of achieving cleanliness.3 Much attention is paid in this context to the disappearance of public bathhouses (popular across Europe during the Middle Ages), whose demise is attributed to fears of contamination following repeated outbreaks of plague and other epidemics, such as syphilis.4 Henry VIII’s closure of London’s licensed ‘stews’ (bathhouses notorious as brothels) following an outbreak of syphilis in 1546 is adduced as an example of this trend.5 Yet the impact of fears of bodily permeability and contagion and the ideals of cleanliness and civility to which they gave rise on the professional stage have remained largely unexplored. Although it is well known that the public playhouses were routinely closed in times of plague,6 scholars have failed to draw any connection between contemporary concerns over hygiene and that quintessential icon of the Shakespearean stage, the pristinely laundered, bleached, and starched linen ruff. The staging of clean linens, we hasten to add, was by no means limited to ruffs: cuffs, handkerchiefs, shirts, smocks, bed-linens, napkins, tablecloths, and many other forms of linen feature prominently in plays of the period.
In this chapter we examine the central role played by clean linen in producing the English stage as a site of civility rather than physical and moral contagion. When displayed in the commercial playhouses, we argue, laundered linens visually associated the professional players and their playing spaces with domestic and social refinement, distancing them from the soil and toil of their vagrant past and from the perceived filth and contagion of the surrounding suburbs. We focus on the late sixteenth-century comedy of humours, a genre aimed at purging humoural excess, partly through the staging of both befouled and laundered linens. After surveying the shifting social and cultural significance of foul and clean linens during the period, we turn to their staging in two early humours plays: George Chapman’s box-office hit for the Rose Theatre, The Comedy of Humours (1597; printed as An Humorous Day’s Mirth in 1599)7 and Shakespeare’s equally popular The Merry Wives of Windsor (c.1597–1600), advertised on the title-page of the 1602 Quarto as ‘Entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humors’.8 The ‘Entermix[ing]’ of ‘variable’ humours became a popular subject of comedy at the end of the sixteenth century, we maintain, in part because it had quite serious social consequences that help to account for the pivotal role played by linens in these plays.
Our approach to the material culture of the stage parallels that of Amanda Bailey in this volume in that we view linens as ‘mediators’ situated between interrelated fields of materiality (embodied, fabricated, environmental, etc.). Less a discrete, bounded artefact than a porous integument mediating between the humoural body and its ecological environs, linen reminds us that material culture is comprised not by discrete, isolated objects but by both inter- and intra-material relations. Linen’s exquisite sensitivity to the slightest changes in these relations – manifested by its susceptibility to soiling, wrinkling, wilting, and so forth – renders it a particularly apt instance of the way in which materiality is constituted by what Bailey (following Jane Bennett) terms ‘fluid, relational ecolog[ies]’.9 Our analysis of the material dependency of civility on linen in this way parallels Bailey’s analysis of the dependency of masculinity on the dagger in Macbeth. Yet the instability produced by this dependency was perhaps even more pronounced in the case of bleached and starched linens, whose absorbency and delicacy continually threatened their precarious immaculacy and illusory solidity. The threat posed by the detumescent ruff was in this sense quite different from that of the phallic dagger, and all the more menacing insofar as the warding off of this threat was entrusted to the hands of working women rather than elite men.
Whether worn on the body or displayed in social locales associated with the threat of contamination, immaculate linens served as a visible sign that this threat had, however temporarily, been vanquished. Yet this immaculacy was continually undone by toxins from within and contamination from without. Internal toxins exited the body in a variety of excremental forms (e.g. urine, sweat, faeces, semen, blood, etc.), enabling the body to regain humoural balance (as described by Erin Sullivan and Andrew Wear’s contribution to this volume). A blockage of the pores prevented the evacuation of toxins, corrupting the blood and causing disease or death. Wearing an absorbent layer of linen next to the skin and rubbing the skin with clean linen to open the pores – the so-called ‘dry bath’ – were thus considered crucial to good health.10 In The Haven of Health (1584), physician Thomas Coghan specifies the use of linen in such ‘fricacies or rubbings’, advising ‘First to rub the bodie with a course lynnen cloth softlie and easily, and after to increase more & more to a hard and swift rubbing’.11 In 1625, London physician Stephen Bradwell similarly advises city residents, ‘When you rise in the morning rub your sides, armes, and legges … to evacuate those excrements’, explaining, ‘Galen … sayth, that the body ought especially to be kept free from superfluities’. Written during an outbreak of plague, Bradwell’s treatise cautions against immersive bathing: only the face, hands and feet are to be rinsed with plague-preventing concoctions (e.g. ‘Rose-water and Vinegar and white Wine’), but one must ‘Flee all other Bathings’.12 Wearing a layer of clean, starched linen next to the skin not only helped to chafe and open the pores, enabling the excretion of noxious humours, but absorbed and retained them, thereby preventing their reabsorption into the body and providing a protective layer against contamination by external toxins. Clean linens in bed and at table performed similarly salutary functions. Thomas Tryon’s treatise on ‘Cleanness’ in ‘the Preparation of Food … and the Benefits of Clean Sweet Beds’ thus argues, ‘Cleanness in Houses, especially in Beds, is a great Preserver of Health’ because ‘Beds suck in and receive all sorts of pernicious Excrements’. He counsels those who ‘go abroad or travel, to desire clean Sheets’ as a ‘Bulwark to defend them from the pernicious Fumes and Vapours of old stale Beds’, and generally advises ‘Every one that can’ to ‘have plentiful Changes … of Linen’ undergarments and bedding.13
The labour of providing such ‘plentiful Changes’ of clean linen was considerable and performed predominantly by women: the body’s ‘pernicious Excrements’, once absorbed and drawn away from the skin by linens, were retained for washing by housewives and laundresses. Linens were removed, replaced and washed as often as the owner could afford, which for the nobility might mean changing shirts as often as several times a day. The labour of laundering involved soaking in water and beating with bats (shaped like cricket bats), which drove water through the linen fibres, forcing dirt from the fabric (see Figure 18.1).
Soap, made from lye, was used to treat tough stains or odours. Only linens were washed in this way; outer garments could not withstand this violent process and were instead cleansed by airing, brushing, and spot-cleaning.14 Unlike external sartorial signifiers, clean linen undergarments were thus viewed as indicators of inner cleanliness and virtue. In contrast to the dissimulative status of outer garments, clean undergarments purported to be self-evident signifiers of what lay within: a purity not merely of body but of spirit. The emphasis of Protestant Reformers on ‘cleannesse of heart’ rather than ‘outward cleannesse’ reinforced this valorisation of inward cleanliness. Spiritual purification was likened to laundering linens, as when Thomas Taylor speaks of ‘Gods laundrie, wherin his children by beating, scowring, and rubbing are made whiter and whiter’.15 The deep cleansing of the soul necessitated more than brushing soil off the exterior: it required the scrupulous industry and violent vigilance of the laundress scouring her linens.
Paradoxically, as linen gained importance as a signifier of inner cleanliness and virtue, linen underclothes became increasingly visible on the exterior of the body; once concealed, they were now subject to extravagant display. Bands, cuffs, and ruffs, originally part of the undergarment, developed into separate accessories, which grew ever larger and were ornamented with embroidery, lace, and beads. Fashionable doublets and bodices were cut and slashed to reveal the quality and purity of linen shirts and chemises worn underneath.16 Linen handkerchiefs were increasingly used to purge excess bodily humours in a decorous manner and became fashionable accessories in their own right, displayed as signs of refinement.17 The quality and quantity as well as the pristine maintenance of domestic linens of every sort, as reflected in the household inventories of the elite, became indices of status and wealth. In short, clean linen became a basic requirement of civility and social distinction.18
O sweet Linnen, humbly I implore,
(Though of thee I have no aboundant store) …
Assist thy Poet, never let him lacke
A comely, cleanly shirt unto his backe.19
Against this backdrop, we may better understand the visibility of bleached and starched linens on the early modern stage. For their display signalled the civility not only of particular characters or settings but, more generally, of the players and their playing spaces as well. The need for such display gains plausibility in light of contemporary diatribes against the filth and contagion of players and playhouses. John Stephens’ ‘Character of A Common Player’, for example, characterises the typical actor as ‘profess[ing] himselfe (being unknowne) to be an apparant Gentleman. But … his foule Linnen, and faire Doublet, doe (in him) bodily reveale the Broker’.20 The actor’s fair exterior, according to Stephens, conceals a filthy, lousy interior: he is only an ‘apparant Gentleman’, but underneath his showy costume lie ‘foule Linnen’ undergarments, all purchased from a second-hand broker. Countering such attacks, extant portraits of players and playwrights featuring pristine linen bands, cuffs, and shirts are suggestive of inner virtue as well as social refinement. Shakespeare’s starched rebato in the Droeshout title-page engraving of the First Folio (1623), John Fletcher’s quadruply-layered ruff and lace-edged cuffs in a portrait by an unknown artist (c.1620, private collection), and Edward Alleyn’s immaculate, lace-edged ruff and linen cuffs in his portrait in the Dulwich Picture Gallery (c.1626), all work to convey the virtue and refinement of the sitter’s profession.21 Perhaps the most stunning portrait of this kind is of a sitter identified in William Cartwright’s inventory as Nathan Field: ‘master fields pictur in his shurt … an actour’.22 The clean linen ‘shurt’ in which this ‘actour’ (and playwright) is portrayed is elaborately embroidered with blackwork that visually enhances its pristine whiteness. The portrait invites the viewer’s gaze to examine the cleanliness, beauty, and refinement of the actor’s undergarment, which together with his striking gesture – his linen-cuffed right hand is placed over his heart – visually suggest his inner virtue (see Figure 18.2).
Satires of players’ dirty underwear take on a more ominous tone when read in light of contemporary claims that foul linens and the second-hand brokers who purveyed them were conveyors of plague. A royal proclamation of 1603 states that the ‘contagion of the Plague groweth and encreaseth no way more, then by the use and handling of such clothes, bedding and other stuffe as hath bin worne and occupied by the Infected of this disease’, and orders that ‘no Clothes, Stuffe, bedding or garments’ are ‘to be carried or conveyed out of any Infected Houses … to be Sold or Pawned’.23 Thomas Lodge’s A Treatise of Plague, published in 1603 (by which time the former playwright was a practicing physician in London), clarifies the contemporary understanding of infectious disease that underlay the fear of dirty linens. It is especially important, he argues, ‘that the body abound not in superfluities and excrements, which may yeelde matter and foode to putrifaction and contagion’.24 The shirts, smocks, and bed-linens that absorb these superfluous, putrefied, and contagious humours were therefore thought to be especially dangerous. Lodge advises the plague patient ‘oftentimes to change his sheets and his shirt if he have meanes twise or at leastwise once in the day’.25 For the rich, he recommends that the ‘attaynted’ linens ‘ought to be burned’, but for those who do not have the ‘meanes’ to afford this he prescribes a strict laundering regimen: ‘let the cloathes they have used, be bucked and washed in lie, and oftentimes exposed to the northerly winde and sunne, and perfumed with rosemary, Juniper, and such like … which drieth al infectious vapors’.26 Playwright Thomas Dekker complains of the scarcity of linen in London due to plague:
there is many an honest house in London wel stockt before with large linnen, where now remaines not above two sheetes & a halfe, & so the good man of the house driven to lye in the one sheete for shift, till the payre be washt and dried.27
The ‘honest’ household during times of plague is defined less by its ‘wel stockt’ linen cabinet than by the frequency and diligence with which its sheets, however scanty, are ‘shift[ed]’ and laundered.
Whereas civic magistrates were primarily concerned with physical contamination, Puritan pamphleteers focused their invectives on moral contamination. Henry Crosse compares the theatre to ‘a sincke in a Towne, whereunto all the filth doth runne: or a byle [i.e. boil] in the body, that draweth all the ill humours unto it’.28 William Prynne similarly brands theatre ‘the very sincke, and center of all uncleannesse’.29 ‘Stage-playes’, he claims, ‘pollut[e] mens eares farre more than any dirt or filth’ and ‘likewise contaminate and defile them’.30 Drawing on the imagery of plague, he asks, ‘If pestilent, wicked, vitious places will infect mens mindes or manners; what place so dangerous, so leprous, so contagious, as the Play-house?’31 The playgoer who allows his soul to be infected by the ‘filthinesse’ of plays is compared to one who puts ‘apparell, that is fraught with filth and many lice, into a cabinet’ where rich ‘robes and garments are layd up’.32 (Lice were believed to be generated by the ‘excrements’ or superfluous humours absorbed by linens that were not properly laundered.)33 The staging of clean linens in the public playhouses thus worked to counter claims that theatres were vehicles of both physical and moral filth and contagion. It should therefore come as no surprise that linen plays a pivotal role in the comedy of humours, a genre that places humoural excess – often in the form of foul linens – centre stage in order to purge and purify them.34
[T]o be truly Cleane is such a state,
As gaines the Noble name immaculate:
And I wish all mankind the grace might win,
To be (as here I meane) all Cleane within.
As ’tis no grace a man a man to be,
If outward forme want inward honesty.35
George Chapman’s 1597 play An Humorous Day’s Mirth explores the humour in ‘humours’ through the character of Lemot, architect of the action, who provokes characters into ‘performing’ their particular character traits for comedic benefit. Chapman uses humoural theory to create a new trend, on which contemporary playwrights, including Shakespeare and Jonson, quickly capitalised. Set in France, the play’s episodic plot is a series of studies of humorous stereotypes organised by the King of France’s ‘minion’, Lemot, who draws the characters together in a focal scene set at a city ordinary (a tavern serving food). The ordinary’s function is comparable with the theatre as a public space at which bodies congregate to consume and which also allows the civilising function of linen to be foregrounded. The play dramatically and anatomically explores characteristics of the melancholy, scholarly, shrewish, weak, repetitive, old, and gallant, concluding with a convivial wedding celebration that sits awkwardly with the preceding explorations of marital strife.
Lemot casts a spotlight on individual characters’ actions, mannerisms, and verbal tics, and Chapman uses linen to highlight disparities between their civility, social identity, and humoural excesses. In the pivotal Scene 8, set at the ordinary, Lemot picks out each of the play’s gallants in turn, describing them to his companion Catalian. The first victim exposed is Rowley: ‘A very fine gull and a neat reveller, one that’s heir to a great living, yet his father keeps him so short, that his shirts will scant cover the bottom of his belly, for all his gay outside’ (TLN 1219–21).36 Lemot puns on ‘short’, referring both to Rowley’s limited allowance and the consequent shortcomings of his underwear. A man’s undershirt covered the upper body and usually reached to the knees; linen ‘breeches’ were worn beneath.37 Lemot asserts that Rowley’s ‘gay outside’ declares wealth and status not matched by his underwear. Rowley prefers to invest in external markers of status rather than provide himself with decent linen undergarments, suggesting a lack of inner decency. Lemot points to more systemic domestic failings on Rowley’s part as well: ‘but the linings be very foul and sweaty, yea, and perhaps lousy, with despising the vain shifts of the world’ (1222–23). Rowley doubly neglects his ‘neat’ or fine exterior by failing to wear sufficient linen underneath and allowing the linings of his outer garments to become sweaty and lousy. Lemot’s pun on ‘shifts’ extends his criticism: in addition to being a linen undergarment or shirt, a ‘shift’ also meant a change of clothing or the action of changing clothes. The word thus links Rowley’s sartorial poverty (for his under-linen is dirty and in need of being replaced) with the small allowance allegedly made him by his father. Lemot thereby exposes Rowley’s duplicitous identity: rich and impressive on the outside, he is nonetheless dirty, smelly, and, by implication (morally) bankrupt underneath. This exposure effectively works to appropriate and thereby counter similar accusations made against the players themselves by antitheatrical writers: the airing of foul linens onstage purges the character’s superfluous humours and thereby the players’ reputation.
Lemot’s revelations undermine Rowley’s attempt to appear wealthy. Earlier in the scene, Lemot (wolfishly) draws attention to Rowley’s ‘pretty falling-band’, a flat collar made of linen or lace. Collars became increasingly popular during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, taking over from ruffs as the neckwear of choice for the fashionable.38 Whereas the expense in ruffs lay in the excessive lengths of linen required to create fulsome neck decorations and their regular rejuvenation with starch by skilled laundresses, the cost associated with falling bands resided in their decorative design, using labour-intensive cutwork and/or lace. Lemot highlights the gaudiness of Rowley’s falling band by referring to it as ‘pretty’ and ‘fantastical’, which Rowley takes as a complement but which carry the sense of extravagant, eccentric, or only moderately pleasing (OED). In so doing, he signals a crucial cultural shift in the symbolic function of linen, for as clean linen became ever more visible and worn on the exterior of the body, its status as a self-evident signifier of inner virtue was increasingly called into question. Overly ‘fantastical’ linen accessories came to be a sign not of deep ‘cleanliness’ but of superficial, extravagant affectation, if not dissimulation. Lemot further de-values the falling band by falsely flattering Rowley’s ‘good judgement’ and subtly criticising its ‘great show’ (1136). Rowley spends his small income on exterior clothing to give the impression of wealth and status whilst neglecting to clothe the body beneath properly: he overspends on an extremely expensive, visible scrap of linen round his neck instead of on proper undergarments. As Lemot suggests, this is a false economy: the money invested in his doublet is wasted due to the damage incurred by the linings, which will deteriorate from sweat and dirt more quickly without linen protection. The wider implication is that Rowley is neglectful of his personal upkeep, bodily, spiritually, and financially. The mismanagement of clothing and cleanliness here signifies a deeper fault, exemplified by Rowley’s poor grasp of personal finance. Whilst playing cards, he demonstrates an inability to manage his finances, choosing to play cards when he can’t afford to lose, a problem compounded by his borrowing from an old (and hard-working) servant. Rowley’s true character is represented by the status of his linen: the discrepancy between the hidden dirty shirt and visible pristine falling band signifies the wearer’s failings and lack of judgement in more significant economic matters.
The staging of table linens is likewise crucial to the expression of status and power amongst those who work at the ordinary. The dining table was an important site of household physic, which was assisted by clean linen.39 The ‘white veils’ (1023) covering the boards of the table present an immaculate dining experience, which was equally important for running a public ordinary as for a civilised household. White napery functioned as a sign of civilised dining and behaviour and as the absorber of diners’ mess and humoural expurgations. Verone’s Boy complains that if the young gentlemen spy any food particles (such as leeks or ‘chibols’) in the napkins, ‘they say your nose or ours have dropped on them, and then they throw them about the house’ (1033–4). The gallants disrupt the civilising order represented by the dining linen; these antics with the napery suggest social disharmony in the rejection of commonly accepted codes of conduct. Chapman uses the laying of the tables, with its highly visible white linen cloths, to contrast the customers’ unruly behaviour with the staff’s professional response.
The quotidian work of table laying also offers opportunities for Jaquena (the maid, but also the inn-keeper’s mistress) to exert her power, undoing the work of the male staff who have spent the scene so far covering the tables with linen whilst appearing to provide good customer service: ‘I did but take up the cloth, because my mistress would have the dinner in another room’ (1061). Her assertiveness is read as behaving ‘saucily’ (1052) by Jaques and the ‘proudest harlotry’ by the Boy (1070). Jaques says Jaquena ‘uses herself so saucily’ (1052) that he may quit his employment. The term ‘saucy’ usually signifies impudence but here also suggests lasciviousness (OED). Laundresses were frequently accused of offering their clients more services than clean linen alone.40 Although Jaquena is not a laundress, the gallant Catalian later associates her service in providing a clean napkin for him (after he enters ‘sweating’ following a game of tennis) with her sexual availability.
The staging of linen in Chapman’s comedy is thus crucial in its purging of superfluous humours. As we have seen, clean linen formed the backbone of early modern hygiene and civility, conveying status and virtue through its wearing, use, and the work involved in its production and maintenance. Its lack or defilement conversely signalled serious social deficits. Here, the comedy of humour’s display of clean linens at a public ordinary (a surrogate for the playhouse itself), coupled with the revelations of its humorous gallants’ foul undergarments and its hussy’s ‘saucy’ napery, endows theatre with the power to purge superfluous humours through its own brand of cleansing physic. As we shall see, Shakespeare develops the comedic potential of purging humours still further by laundering perhaps the most popular ‘louse’ of the Elizabethan stage, Sir John Falstaff, in the name of foul linens.
All Linnen that wee use to weare, ’tis plaine,
The Laundresse labour give it grace and gaine,
Without her ’tis most loathsome in distaste,
And onely by her paines and toyle ’tis grac’d …
Call not your Laundresse slut or slabb’ring queane.41
Following the extraordinary success of the Admiral’s men’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth at the Rose, the Chamberlain’s men mounted a humours comedy of its own, in which linens (foul and fair) play an equally central role.42 The ‘sundrie variable and pleasing humors’ advertised on the 1602 title-page of The Merry Wives Quarto permeate the play’s linguistic texture, characters, and setting. The word ‘humour’ is spoken 27 times – more than in any other Shakespeare play.43 The ‘Irregular Humourists’ of the Henriad are improbably cast onto the banks of the Thames at Windsor: Falstaff famously lands there like a beached ‘whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly’ (2.1.56–7), along with Bardolph, Pistol, Nym, Justice Shallow (joined by his kinsman Slender), and Mistress Quickly.44 Two additional denizens, the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans and the French doctor Caius, are ostensibly on hand as ‘soul-curer and body-curer’ (3.1.88) to offer physic to the town’s inhabitants. Yet the melancholic parson and choleric physician themselves succumb to intemperance, as does the jealous Ford, whose ‘fantastical humours’ (3.3.156) make ‘any madness … ever yet beheld’ seem ‘but tameness, civility and patience’ (4.2.24–5). The task of purging the town’s superfluous humours is thus left to its housewives and laundresses. This seems only fitting given that it is foul linens that absorb these superfluities in the play and that the work of laundering invariably fell to women. In foregrounding the female labour of laundering, The Merry Wives stages clean linens as signifiers not only of status and virtue but of good housewifery and chastity, just as its foul linens signal ‘sluts and sluttery’ (5.5.46).
The pivotal role of the buck-basket of ‘foul linen’ (3.3.120) in the play’s domestic and gendered economies has received considerable critical commentary in recent decades, although little attention has hitherto been paid to its role in the play’s humoural economy.45 Viewing the buck-basket in this context helps to clarify the stakes of diligent huswifery in the play by locating the exigent labour of laundering under the rubric of physic or ‘medicine’ (3.3.177). As Gervase Markham argues in The English House-wife (1615), by her keeping her ‘linnens’ free from ‘from the filth of sweat, or vermine’ generated by the corrupt humours they absorbed, the housewife maintained both the physical and spiritual health of her household.46 The housewife’s ‘Art of Physicke’, according to Markham, entailed purging the household of ‘all violence of rage, passion and humour’ through ‘behaviour … apparrell and diet’.47 Maintaining the cleanliness of apparel, and of linen in particular, thus manifested not only the ‘outward’ but the ‘inward vertue’ of the housewife and her household. Under the heading ‘Cleane lynnen commendable in a wife’, George Whetstone similarly advises that even if the housewife’s ‘Gownes be plaine, in her lynnen she must be curtous and fine’ because linen undergarments manifest her inner virtue; if her ‘Partlet [i.e. linen covering for the bust] and other Linnen be coorse torne, or sluttishly washed, she shall neither be praysed of straungers, nor delight her Husband’.48 Foul linen posed an internal threat to the health of the household and an external threat to its reputation. Linen that was ‘sluttishly washed’ compromised both the ‘Health and Preservation of Mankind’ by allowing ‘the Excrements and Breathings of the Body [to] generate Vermin’, and by calling the wife’s chastity into question.49 As Thomas Tryon sums up this line of thinking, ‘The whole Preservation of Mens Health and Strength does chiefly reside in the Wisdom and Temperance of Women’ who ‘have the entire Management of all things that concern our Healths’.50
Against this backdrop, the threat posed by the buck-basket of foul linen and the stakes of its laundering take on greater cultural weight. When Falstaff is ‘Rammed’ into the buck-basket filled with ‘foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins’ and ‘the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril’ (3.5.82–6), the superfluous humours of his ‘dissolute disease’ (3.3.176) merge with and are absorbed into foul linens: he is ‘stopped in like a strong distillation with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease’ (ll. 104–5). The ‘Entermix[ing]’ of bodily superfluities in this ‘bath’ of ‘stewed’ (l.109) humoural waste evokes the threat of contagion associated with the stews and playhouse alike, and with it the antitheatrical claim, mentioned earlier, that ‘a Play is like a sincke in a Towne, whereunto all the filth doth runne: or … that draweth all the ill humours unto it’. Far from simply rejecting the spectre of the stage-as-cesspit, however, humoural comedy delves deeply into (the better to purge) it. The playscape thus foregrounds Windsor’s sinks, which include not only the buck-basket but the ‘muddy ditch’ (3.3.14) at Datchet Mead, the ‘slough of mire’ (4.5.65) at nearby Eton, the ‘castle ditch’ (5.2.1), and the ‘pit hard by Herne’s oak’ (5.3.13; 5.4.2). Each of these sinks functions to purge the humoural waste that is drawn into it. The detailed description above of the buck-basket’s humoural ‘stew’, itself saturated with disgust, thus concludes with Falstaff’s washing in the Thames. The depth of this washing, measured by his ‘alacrity in sinking’ (ll. 11–12), is crucial, for it indicates a cleansing that reaches inside and purifies the interior of the body: the ‘Thames water’ washes him inside and out, so that he complains, ‘my belly’s as cold as if I had swallowed snowballs for pills to cool the reins [i.e. loins or kidneys, the seat of lust]’ (ll. 21–2). Falstaff’s ‘whiting’ (3.3.121) bleaches his insides as white as the linens with which he is laundered.
The threat of verminous contagion associated with humoural waste is thus not confined to or contained within the buck-basket. Indeed, it is broached at the play’s outset, when it is intimated that Justice Shallow’s coat of arms is ‘lousy’:
SLENDER: They [i.e. Shallow’s ancestors] may give the dozen white luces in their coat.
SHALLOW: It is an old coat.
EVANS: The dozen white louses do become an old coat well…. It is a familiar beast to man, and signifies love.
SHALLOW: The luce is the fresh fish – the salt fish is an old coat.
(1.1.14–20)
The equivocation arising from Evans’s Welsh pronunciation turns a simple, honorific statement into a slanderous one by transforming Shallow’s ancient ‘coat’, and with it his reputation, into a decaying, lice-infested codpiece. Lest one dismiss the significance of this lousy joke, it reappears elsewhere in the text, propagating like contagious vermin, when Ford, fearing that his ‘reputation’ has been ‘gnawn at’ (2.2.278) by his wife’s parasitical paramour, exclaims, ‘There’s a hole made in your best coat, Master Ford. This ’tis to be married, this ’tis to have linen and buckbaskets!’ (3.5.131–3). Having no ‘old coat’ of arms himself, Ford’s status is conveyed by the acquisition and display of sartorial signifiers whose integrity depends on vigilant housewifery. The ‘unclean knight’ (4.4.56) hidden in his wife’s buck-basket of foul linens, he fears, has ‘gnawn at’ at his ‘best coat’ or fair exterior and reputation from the inside out, like a giant louse engendered by the corrupt humours she has sluttishly (or so he presumes) allowed to fester there.
Although this exchange is absent in the abbreviated Quarto text (a less court-centred ‘acting version for the public stage’), in its place we find a similar point made more concisely through the staging of linen, when Slender swears ‘by this handkercher’.51 His display of this newly fashionable, superficial badge of civility, as slender as its owner, parallels the satire of his kinsman Shallow’s lousy heraldic coat (and of Rowley’s falling band in An Humorous Day’s Mirth) while preparing for the deeper scouring of the unclean knight ‘in the name of foul clothes’ (3.5.93). It also signals the cultural shift in the symbolic function of linen, mentioned in the previous section, from linen as a self-evident signifier of deep ‘cleanliness’ (a wholesome domestic virtue) to one of superficial ‘curiosity’ (a foreign or courtly affectation).52 The contrast between simple, honest cleanliness and sophisticated, dishonest curiosity as figured through linen is central to Falstaff’s attempted seduction of Mistress Ford:
FALSTAFF: Let the court of France show me such another! … thou hast the right arched beauty of the brow that becomes the ship-tire, the tire-valiant, or any tire of Venetian admittance.
MISTRESS FORD: A plain kerchief, Sir John: my brows become nothing else, nor that well neither.
(3.3.48–52)
The curious, courtly head-tires (made of fine imported linen and silk) with which Falstaff is associated are in stark contrast to the ‘plain kerchief’ Mistress Ford uses to ward off his advances. In tapping into the vein of suspicion regarding courtly curiosity, The Merry Wives’ staging of linen subtly works to redefine the civility or refinement they convey among the middling sort. This redefinition further illuminates the form of Falstaff’s punishment when he is washed with equally ‘plain’ linens (e.g. ‘shirts and smocks, socks … stockings, [and] … napkins’ [3.5.82–4]) and is later made to don the fat wife of Brentford’s simple ‘linen for [his] head’ (4.2.77).
If the ‘unwholesome humidity’ (3.3.35–6) that bloats Falstaff’s huge belly stands as symptom of the court’s curious, ‘epicurean’ (2.2.272) tastes, Doctor Caius’s Gallic ‘potions’ (3.1.92) seem designed less to cure than to profit from curiosity (they are fittingly stored in his ‘counting-house’ in the Quarto text [B3v]). The association of both characters with the excremental humours absorbed by foul linens subjects them to the labour of laundresses.53 In Caius’s household, this labour is performed by Mistress Quickly, who is described as ‘his nurse, or his dry nurse, or his cook, or his laundry, his washer and his wringer’ (1.2.3–5), and who describes her own domestic chores as follows: ‘I keep his house, and I wash, wring, brew, bake, scour, dress meat and drink, make the beds and do all myself’ (1.4.88–91). Quickly’s status as both ‘nurse’ and ‘laundr[ess]’ suggests that like the merry wives she ministers ‘physic’ to her household through her responsibility for its diet and cleanliness. In contrast to the merry wives, however, Quickly reveals herself to be a poor humoural diagnostician. Whereas the wives expertly analyse Falstaff’s intemperance and concoct its cure, Quickly erroneously ‘Entermix[es]’ her humours, describing Caius’s choleric fury first as ‘phlegmatic’ and later as ‘melanchol[ic]’ (1.4.69, 86). As in the Henriad, her sexual reputation suffers from repeated aspersions – not least by her own inadvertent innuendos. These are particularly salacious in the Quarto, where she boasts that her master ‘puts all his privities in me…. Washing, brewing, baking, all goes through my hands’ (B3r). Quickly’s familiarity with foul linens and bodily fluids make her vulnerable to the stain of sexual slander: she is called a ‘punk’ and ‘one of Cupid’s carriers’ (2.2.127). Indeed, her role as a ‘she-Mercury’ (2.2.76) or ‘go-between’ (2.2.250) in some ways resembles that of linen itself, in that she mediates between the household’s ‘privities’ and its public reputation.
In contrast to Quickly, whose proximity to foul linens sullies her reputation, the merry wives send their linens out of the household to be washed and bleached by professional laundresses; they thereby remain aloof from the stain of impropriety. Lest this washing of linens outside the home suggest that any filth remains within its ‘privities’, however, the wives scour themselves inside and out: they ‘wrangle with [their] own honesty’ (2.1.76), looking for any ‘unweighed behaviour’ (l. 18) that might explain Falstaff’s untoward advances. They repeatedly insist on their inward, spiritual purity, exclaiming ‘God be my witness … if you suspect me in any dishonesty’ (4.2.125–56) and invoking ‘the witness of a good conscience’ (ll.196–7). Having rejected the courtly curiosities with which Falstaff seeks to tempt them, they send their plain, ‘honest clothes … forth to bleaching’ (4.2.115). Despite the attempt of the ‘unclean knight’ (4.4.56) to ‘sully the chariness of [their] honesty’ (2.1.88–9) the wives protect both their exterior ‘reputation’ and the interior ‘ward of [their] purity’, which are both proven ‘too bright to be looked against’ (2.2.233–4, 237). At stake in this deep cleansing is the inward ‘honesty’ underlying outward honour. Their deep scouring is thus contrasted with Shallow’s ‘lousy’ coat of arms and Slender’s handkerchief, both emblems of specious status. The wives demonstrate that Ford’s suspicions that they merely ‘appear honest’ (2.2.211) and wear a ‘borrowed veil of modesty’ (3.2.37) are unfounded. Male anxiety surrounding the dependency of a man’s health and well-being on the ‘Temperance of Women’ is thereby assuaged, and husbands reassured that they need not ‘meddle with buck-washing’ (3.3.143), for their ‘Wives may be merry and yet honest too’ (4.2.100). Indeed, the wives’ ‘merry’ temperament may be read as a sign of their humoural temperance, as defined by Gervase Markham: ‘it is meet that our English Hous-wife be a woman of great modesty and temperance as well inwardly as outwardly; inwardly … she shall shunne all violence of rage, passion and humour’ so that her outward appearance is ‘pleasant, amiable, & delightfull’.54
Whereas in the Quarto text the honesty restored to honour by the wives’ physic seems aimed at an audience of similar status to their own, in the Folio its implications are brought home to the court. Although both texts emphasise the pristine ‘robe of white’ (4.4.70; Q, F3v, G1v) in which the Fairy Queen is clad in the final masque, in the Quarto a stage direction famously indicates that this role is played by Mistress Quickly (G2r), suggesting that she plays a central part in scouring Falstaff and is herself cleansed in the end, an outcome that would no doubt have pleased female playgoers of the lower and middling sort. In the Folio, however, the Fairy Queen, who ‘hates sluts and sluttery’ (5.5.46), turns to the court, ordering her elves to ‘Search Windsor Castle’ to ensure that it is ‘wholesome’ both ‘within and out’ by ‘scour[ing]’ its ‘chairs of Order’ and ‘coat[s]’ of arms (ll. 56, 59, 61, 63). Far from the court infecting humble households and housewives with its unwholesome appetites and imported curiosities, the simple, cleansing physic of the merry wives is here exported to the court, where it serves to guarantee the honesty of honour, giving new meaning to the Garter motto: ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’ (5.5.69). As defined by Randle Cotgrave, the verb ‘honnir’ denoted not only to ‘dishonour’ or ‘shame’, but also ‘to spot, blemish, pollute, foule’, or ‘defile’.55 The iconic significance of the Garter asserts the honour of knighthood by upholding the integrity of its undergarments, just as the merry wives scour the unclean knight in the name of foul linen.
At stake in The Merry Wives of Windsor’s staging and deep cleansing of foul linens is the reputation not only of the play’s households and householders but of the players and playhouses (re)presenting them, separated from the façade of fiction by only a thin layer of linen – and one presumed to be lousy at that. Nor would the playgoers have remained untouched by the play’s purging of humours, for like Windsor’s nosy neighbours, visiting dignitaries, and interloping courtiers, they are drawn into a playworld (and playhouse) defined as a defiling, civic ‘sincke’. There they are met with a comedy that counters the threat of defilement not simply by parading pristine ruffs and cuffs before playgoers’ eyes but by delving into domestic ‘privities’ where humours intermingle and fester before undergoing a ritual of deep cleansing that scours honour and restores honesty both inside and out. The intermingling of bodies and humours, consumption of food and beverages, and inclement weather that defined the fluid, relational ecology of playgoing in early modern London’s open-air amphitheatres serve as important reminders of just how tenuous the staged immaculacy of linen must have been, while helping to explain the exigency of its performance.
We wish to express our gratitude to Oxford Brookes University for an International Visiting Research Fellowship in support of our collaboration on this chapter.
1John Taylor ‘The Praise of Cleane Linnen With the Commendable Use of the Laundresse’ (1624) in All the Workes of John Taylor the Water-poet … Collected into One Volume by the Author: with Sundry New Additions Corrected, Revised, and Newly Imprinted … (London, 1630), sig. Pp1v.
2See, for example, Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1988 [1985]); Douglas Biow, The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Ithaca, 2006); Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (Toronto, 2007); Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford, 2007); Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, 2009).
3Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, 58; Brown, Foul Bodies, 5.
4Lynn Thorndike, ‘Sanitation, Baths, and Street-Cleaning in the Middle Ages and Renaissance’, Speculum 3:2 (1928): 192–203, esp. 196–198; Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York and London, 2002), 131; Carole Rawcliffe, ‘A Marginal Occupation? The Medieval Laundress and her Work’, Gender & History 21:1 (2009): 147–169, esp. 149.
5See ‘A Proclamation to avoyde the abhominable place called the Stewes’, in Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 1, The Early Tudors, 1485–1553 (New Haven, 1964), 365–366. See also Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘The Regulation of the Brothels in Later Medieval England’, Signs 14:2 (1989): 399–433; Kevin P. Siena, ‘Pollution, Promiscuity, and the Pox: English Venereology and the Early Modern Medical Discourse on Social and Sexual Danger’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 8:4 (1998): 553–574, esp. 559; Brown, Foul Bodies, 20–21.
6See F.P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (London, 1963); Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca and London, 1991); Ellen Mackay, Persecution, Plague & Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2011), esp. 81–104. See also the calendar of playhouse closures due to plague in E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923), 4, 345–351.
7George Chapman, An Humorous Day’s Mirth, ed. Eleanor Lowe (Digital Renaissance Editions, 2013), http://digitalrenaissance.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/AHDM/; all further references are to this edition.
8William Shakespeare, A Most Pleasaunt and Excellent Conceited Comedie, of Syr John Falstaffe, and the Merrie Wives of Windsor. Entermixed with Sundrie Variable and Pleasing Humors, of Syr Hugh the Welch Knight, Justice Shallow, and his wise Cousin Slender. With the Swaggering Vaine of Auncient Pistoll, and Corporall Nym … (London, 1602). All further references to Merry Wives, unless otherwise indicated, are to William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London, 2000). On the relationship between An Humorous Day’s Mirth and Merry Wives and the vogue for humours plays, see Roslyn Lander Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company 1594–1613 (Fayetteville, 1991), 43, 64–65.
9See Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC, 2010).
10Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Castel of Helth (1539) advises ‘chafyinge the body … to extenuate or make thynne the humours, … open the poores’ and thereby prevent ‘the peryll of obstruction’. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth Gathered and Made by Syr Thomas Elyot Knyghte, Out of the Chiefe Authors of Physyke, Wherby Every Manne May Knowe the State of his Owne Body, the Preservatio[n] of Helthe, and How to Instructe Welle his Physytion in Syckenes That He Be Not Deceyued (London, [1539]), sigs. 49r-49v.
11Thomas Coghan, The Haven of Health Chiefely Gathered for the Comfort of Students, and Consequently of All Those that Have a Care of Their Health … Hereunto is Added a Preservation from the Pestilence, with a Short Censure of the Late Sicknes at Oxford (London, 1584), 4.
12Stephen Bradwell, A Watch-man for the Pest Teaching the True Rules of Preservation from the Pestilent Contagion, at This Time Fearefully Over-flowing This Famous Cittie of London. Collected out of the Best Authors, Mixed with Auncient Experience, and Moulded into a New and Most Plaine Method; by Steven Bradwell of London, Physition (London, 1625), 35–36.
13Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Cleanness in Meats and Drinks of the Preparation of Food, the Excellency of Good Airs and the Benefits of Clean Sweet Beds also of the Generation of Bugs (London, 1682), 5–6.
14For the care of clothes, see Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d (Leeds, 1988), esp. 232–234.
15John Calvin, A Harmonie Upon the Three Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke With the Commentarie of M. John Calvine: Faithfully Translated Out of Latine Into English, by E.P. (London, 1584), 381–382; Thomas Taylor, Davids Learning, or The Way to True … Preached and Now Published by T.T. Late Fellow of Christs Colledge in Cambridge (London, 1617), 385. See also Keith Thomas, ‘Cleanliness and Godliness in Early Modern England’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts eds., Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge, 1994), 56–83; Smith, Clean: A History, Chapter 7, ‘Protestant Regimens’.
16Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, 61–70; Ashenberg, The Dirt on Clean, 109; Smith, Clean: A History, 193, Brown, Foul Bodies, 26–30. See also C. Willet and Phillis Cunnington, The History of Underclothes (London, 1951), esp. 14–45.
17Bella Mirabella, ‘Embellishing Herself with a Cloth: The Contradictory Life of the Handkerchief’, in Mirabella ed., Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories (Ann Arbor, 2011), 59–82.
18Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, 64.
19John Taylor, ‘The Praise of Cleane Linnen’, sig. Pp1v.
20John Stephens, Satyrical Essayes Characters and Others. Or Accurate and Quick Descriptions, Fitted to the Life of their Subjects (London, 1615), 295.
21The connection is made explicit in Fletcher’s portrait, as his linen-cuffed hand rests on a crisp, white sheet of linen paper inscribed with a verse praising the playwright’s wit. Reproduced in Tarnya Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare (New Haven and London, 2006), 27, 49, 183.
22Ibid., 135–136.
23Reprinted in a publication of the Royal College of Physicians of London, Certain Necessary Directions, Aswell for the Cure of the Plague as for Preventing the Infection … (London, 1636), sig. H2r.
24Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague Containing the Nature, Signes, and Accidents of the Same, with the Certaine and Absolute Cure of the Fevers, Botches and Carbuncles that Raigne in These … By Thomas Lodge, Doctor in Phisicke (London, 1603), sig. E3v.
25Ibid., sig. G3r.
26Ibid., sig. L2v.
27Thomas Dekker, The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie: or The Walkes in Powles (London, 1604), sigs. B1r-B1v.
28Henry Crosse, Vertues Commonwealth: or The High-way to Honour. Wherin is Discovered, That Although by the Disguised Craft of This Age, Vice and Hypocrisie May be Concealed: Yet by Tyme (the Triall of Truth) It Is Most Plainly Revealed (London, 1603), sig. Q1r.
29William Prynne, Histrio-mastix The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie (London, 1633), 15.
30Ibid., 263, 268.
31Ibid., 498.
32Ibid., 395.
33Tryon, A Treatise of Cleanness, 6–7.
34For an extended discussion of developments in the theoretical understanding of the humoural body, see Sullivan and Wear’s contribution to this volume.
35John Taylor, ‘The Praise of Cleane Linnen’, sig. Pp1v.
36Line numbers refer to Lowe’s online edition.
37For patterns and photographs of original ‘drawers’ see Janet Arnold, Patterns of Fashion 4: The Cut and Construction of Linen Shirts, Smocks, Neckwear, Headwear and Accessories for Men and Women, c.1540–1660, with additional material by Jenny Tiramani and Santina M. Levey (London, 2008).
38For discussion, portrait images, and examples of original garments, see Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion 4, 10–11.
39Sullivan and Wear discuss the importance of eating as well as purgation in the balancing of humours in this volume.
40According to Carole Rawcliffe, the link stems from the medieval period ‘in part because washerwomen enjoyed unusual freedom of movement’. Rawcliffe, ‘A Marginal Occupation?’, 157.
41John Taylor, ‘The Praise of Cleane Linnen’, sig. Pp3r.
42Knutson, Repertory of the Chamberlain’s Men, 65.
43This total does not include references to individual humours, such as phlegm (1), choler (2), and melancholy (6), and related words such as complexion (2) and distemper (3). Marvin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA, 1973).
44The phrase ‘Irregular Humourists’ appears in the list of ‘Actors’ names appended to 2 Henry IV in the 1623 Folio.
45On the buckbasket in Merry Wives, see Richard Helgerson, ‘The Buck Basket, the Witch and the Queen of the Fairies: The Women’s World of Shakespeare’s Windsor’, in Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt ed., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia, 1999), 162–182, reprinted in Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago, 2000), 57–78; Natasha Korda, ‘ ‘Judicious Oeillades’: Surveying Marital Property in The Merry Wives of Windsor’, in Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow eds., Marxist Shakespeares (London and New York, 2001): 82–103 and Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 2002); Wendy Wall, ‘Why Does Puck Sweep? Fairylore, Merry Wives, and Social Struggle’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52:1 (2001): 67–106; and Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2002); Catherine Richardson, Shakespeare and Material Culture (Oxford, 2011), 33–34, 186–87 and ‘ ‘Honest Clothes’ in The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in Bella Mirabella and Patricia Lennox ed., Shakespeare and Costume (London, 2015).
46Gervase Markham, The English House-Wife. Containing the Inward and Outward Vertues Which Ought To Be in a Compleate Woman (London, 1631), 167.
47Ibid., 3.
48George Whetstone, An Heptameron of Civill Discourses (London, 1582), sigs. Y1v, Y2r.
49Tryon, A Treatise of Clenness, 6.
50Ibid., 10, 14.
51Melchiori ed., Merry Wives, 36; Shakespeare, Merrie Wives (1602), sig. A3v.
52Thomas, ‘Cleanliness and Godliness’, 66.
53Falstaff’s belly is described as a ‘dunghill’ (1.3.60), bloated with ‘tuns of oil’ (2.1.57), ‘grease’ (2.1.60, 97), ‘unwholesome humidity’ (3.3.35–36), ‘piss’, and ‘tallow’ (5.5.14). In the Quarto, it is ‘a bladder of iniquitie’ (B4v). Caius is repeatedly linked to urine and laxatives (e.g. 2.3.26, 30, 52–56; 3.1.92), both lucrative tools of his trade.
54Markham, The English House-Wife, 3.
55Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), n.p.
