A Queen’s Closet Unlocked

04/07/2021

Now that this is out there I can share this

Frock Flicks note: This is a guest post by our friend Joel Reid. He’s trained in theater design and has worked in that capacity plus commissioned work for Civil War, Revolutionary War, Renais…

03/13/2021

Things made for others

03/13/2021

This my Calpurnia, and she’s been on a metamorphosis path from original conception to what her final version will be. I wanted her to have style attributes that would mark her out as being from Italy. Granted, at this point Italy was a collection of city steel provinces and not a single unified nation, and each region had its own distinctive culture and aesthetics.....but to a London audience most of whom had never left the city and would only know about Italy what they may have glimpsed on the Venetian envoys to Elizabeth’s court and the few Italian merchants who would brave trade with a Protestant nation......verisimilitude is not really a primary concern. If she looks passably foreign, and wears things the audience will identify with Rome, then that will be enough. I chose the knot work pattern that was designed as an heraldic device for Isabelle d’ Este as one of the major motifs I’d use, and then the slashed over-sleeve you only see worn in portraits of ladies who married into the Hapsburg family and ended up in Spain or Neapolitan Spanish colony city states. I am opting for the high wired up footage of curls that emulates the Ancient Roman Flavian hairstyle because it is also quite similar in shape and proportion to the wired up hair of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean ladies at court

The base doublet is completely hand sewn, not because I have a particular love of that method of construction, but rather because my sewing machine was in for servicing when I started work on the doublet so I ended up doing it all by hand in the time it took them to do the maintainance and parts replacement on my sewing machine. The over doublet with hanging sleeves will be about 75% hand sewn due to all the surface embellishment the fabric is getting before the pieces are joined up.

03/08/2021

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE
Virtual A&S Project 2020

This is an odd format to present in, but I think I have figured out the best way to organize my thoughts. The images in this gallery are arranged to flow through from the start point of CONCEPTUAL Inspiration, into DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION (and construction detail inspiration from portraits), and into cultural context. I’ll warn you up front, this is going to be a winding circuitous path....but then this time of “sheltering in place” affords a more abstract hold on he through line of a project....its an ideal time to let our minds explore all the connected rabbit holes that interest the particular one we dove down......find out how those intersections influence our understanding of our initial point of focus. Everything we recreate lived its life in a larger world of other things being created simultaneously.

While the main body of the narrative of my thoughts and process will be here I will also include some paragraphs with some of the photos to highlight interesting points gleaned along the way, so there will be additional break out info to peruse. Also, I’m going to write this in a “conversational” style, using a text voice/style to try to convey it as if I were delivering this as an in person presentation.
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So, housekeeping points of order taken care of, I suppose now is the time to get down to the nitty gritty of actually presenting this. To do that effectively, I think a bit of story telling for context will be helpful to set the stage for what is to follow. Going back well before my involvement in the SCA, I have been in love with Shakespeare’s work. I have worked on a number of different productions of various Shakespeare plays spanning the full gamut of artistic interpretations: Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tempest, Measure For Measure, Romeo And Juliet, Troilus And Cressida, Titus Andronicus. Bearing that in mind, it can be no great surprise that when planning a large party with performance aspects for Pennsic.......utilizing a collection of Shakespeare characters would be my go to plan. I chose a set of his plays written and first performed between 1590 and 1607 to keep things focused within the SCA timeline. in each case I endeavored to keep the design of the character’s clothes relevant to social/style trends of the year the play would first have been performed in. Because the party will mimic many of the mechanics of the board game CLUE* (with the Shakespeare characters filling in for Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum etc) each design is going to be executed in a monochromatic color scheme. This presentation will focus mainly on Cleopatra and the process through which I arrived at the design I then executed.

*There is a more involved back story to the merging of CLUE and Shakespeare’s characters, but ultimately for the purposes of this presentation that info isn’t really relevant. But if anyone is curious, I am happy to have break out geek out conversations about this in DM’s or in the comments on the copy of this that will be posted on my profile page.

The characters I will be making clothing for are as follows (with their color schemes noted):

1. Cleopatra (written 1606-07) Yellow/gold
2. Marc Anthony (written 1606-07) Purple/burgundy
3. Lady Macbeth (written 1605-06) red/scarlet
4. Macbeth (written 1605-06) Green
5. Romeo (written 1594-95) turquoise/ cerulean
6. Juliet (written 1594-95) orange/coral
7. Tamora Queen Of The Goths ( 1593-94) Black
8. Titus Andronicus (written 1593-94) White
9. Mistress Overdone (written 1604-05) indigo/“peacock”
10. Titania (written 1595-96) pink
11. Puck (written 1595-96) chartreuse
12. Calpurnia (written in 1599) silver/grey
13. William Shakespeare-1610-brown/tan

Having established this as the framework I’m going to be working in, I started looking at how theater worked in Shakespeare’s time to begin refining my ideas about how to design and execute the clothing for each character. While there are a range of cultures and locales represented in the plays I have pulled characters from, my estimation of how those would have been presented in Shakespeare’s time is that very minimal visual referencing to specific cultures and places would have appeared on stage. Most average Londoners would have no conception of what Julius Caesar’s Rome looked like, or Cleopatra’s Alexandria, or Verona. Most Londoners lived their lives within a very small square mileage of experience, so these people from other countries only had to look “foreign” to be believable as “not Londoners” to the audience’s eyes. So I quickly resolved that all my designs would be screened through the lens of Elizabethan clothing at the time the play was written, as that would have been the foundation that the actors would have built on when assembling their costuming for a role.

Rather quickly I ran into a number of old saws and time honored truths about Billy the bard that turned out to be in part or totally false. At first you might think these are irrelevant to making the clothing for any of these characters...but i disagree. Assembling a better “large view” of how theater functioned in society during Shakespeare’s professional life, and how those employed in it sought to make it a profitable venture very much impacts the way in which you design and construct your clothes if you are seeking to do so in a way that you think best represents the mindset of those doing the same thing back then.

Naturally, I thought a good starting point would be to watch a few productions of plays put on by The Globe, as they do a booming business in presenting Shakespeare’s plays in period clothing, and often with the female roles being played by men* as would have been the case in Shakespeare’s day. I don’t regret for an instant making this choice early in my process, though I quickly started to feel that the Globe might be missing the mark as far as accuracy to how the plays would likely have been showcased in the period. Their Craft is impeccable in a reproductive sense. At no point do I want to imply that I think they are lacking in artistic merit or validity of scholarship. Where I think they are falling short of the mark is in “spectacle”. While it is absolutely true that theatrical performances existed long before Shakespeare first put quill to parchment, it would not be until AFTER Shakespeare’s lifetime that SCENERY and the spectacle of the staging of a play became as important as the narrative text for conveying the story of a play. The Greek Comedies and tragedies, the passion plays of the Middle Ages, the morality plays, even early Comedia Del Arte plays....all relied on the text and its vocal delivery by performers (occasionally augmented with significant hand props) to. Create the theatrical experience for the audience......so the two most prominent factors were the spoken word and the way a personage was dressed were how the story was conveyed. Watching the Globe productions I kept being reminded of the fact that the clothes they dressed the actors in were that….CLOTHES……everyday wear for average to noble Elizabethans. But I seriously doubt if the actors would have walked on stage wearing clothing the audience could as easily see out at a fishmonger’s or at the bakers or in church. They (the actors) were portraying larger than life dramatic characters to a largely illiterate audience with no real scenery and minimal props……those costumes they wore had to do A LOT more work to further the story telling than just “street clothes” would have done. Further, they were seeking to grab and inspire the imaginations of a paying audience who were going to expect some spectacle to keep their attention riveted for 2 hours while they stood tightly packed in the Globe watching the play. Basic street clothing wasn’t going to come up to scratch on its own.

*”men” is a modern generic term that is actually irrelevant as the truth was that the female roles were played by BOYS. On average they ranged from between 13-19 or 20. The most accomplished of these were the lads who had been members of The Queen’s Choristers choir. They would have been reasonably literate, had an understanding of vocal projection, a capacity for rhythm and pacing, and best of all, high soprano and alto pitched voices. But more on women being excluded from professional play acting later.

That might seem pretty straight forward and simplistic, the idea that the way a character was presented visually is integral to the story their text conveys, but its actually a really important thing to consider when thinking of Shakespeare’s plays, and specifically their intended audience. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were flying without a net, they had no instructional texts decoding the relationship between language and visual representation to inform how they presented their work. But they had a fundamental understanding of the fact that their audience had little to no exposure to the classical literature that they built their dramas on.

In general those involved in the theater in Shakespeare’s time were looked down on as the lowest of the low...on a par socially with prostitutes. While the court and the nobility enjoyed watching the occasional play, it was on their terms, in their environment (they did not go to the playhouses first they could help it, theater was brought to them, in their banqueting halls and court yards). The playhouses were situated just outside the City of London proper (across the River Thames) in the precinct that bath houses (stews) and brothels and bear baiting pits were located, and this was not an accidental placement. It was as close to London Society as they could get. And while Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher were thought of a high brow entertainments worthy of court presentation, most of London’s cultural elite treated Shakespeare’s works like they were common trash...fit only for the lower classes....the “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” of its day if you will. Look at Shakespeare’s earlier works……there is a high body count, and LOTS of on stage violence and blood, he was catering to the masses who were tense in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign when tensions about the future were running high. And while Shakespeare was clearly aware of who his plays were being pitched at (and thus who was paying regularly to see them), that didn’t stop him from throwing a complicated and tangled web of character names at his audience, the bulk of whom were only at best minimally functionally literate (they could read and write their name, and make a list of items, and read a shop sign, but had definitely not read the classics or even history texts to be familiar with the characters and places Shakespeare wrote about)so a LOT of emphasis had to fall on the VISUAL of a character’s presentation to help the audience be able to sort through the complex web of the interactions they were seeing. So the clothing and visual appearance of a character had to do a considerably greater amount of story telling if an audience was going to be able to hold that large profusion of characters in their mind for the duration of the play.

For more context about how Shakespeare was perceived and presented in period you can watch this video by Dr. Katrina Marchant who specializes in the early modern era and Shakespeare’s works:

https://youtu.be/r-J5QZEZdk0

In the video she talks about how Shakespeare and theater in general were perceived within Shakespeare’s lifetime. She also hits on one of the other major misconceptions of early modern theater in England that definitely changed how I thought about how the plays are presented.......the notion that it was ILLEGAL for worm to act professionally on stage in England.

This is probably one of the biggest “wrong-facts” about Elizabethan/early modern theater that we still perpetuate today. Don’t get me wrong, I love Shakespeare in Love, its a lovely movie and stage play...but the core premise, that it was illegal for women to act professionally on the stage in England, is absolutely false.

So that then begs the question, since we know that the female roles were not acted by women, WHY was this the case? Money. If a guild could be formed and recognized within London, then the livelihood of the theater owners, performers, writers, shareholders would be more secure. As guilds were male-only institutions, it is more understandable that the theater owners in London would seek to emulate other guild-legitimized professions by themselves disallowing women on stage. It was a social CUSTOM not a law that barred women acting on the stage....and it was ONLY in London.....there were women on stage performing professionally all up and down the length of England in this period (all be it, often foreigners in troupes moving town to town that had originated in whole or in part over on the continent). Women had been performing in theatrical troupes in Italy, France and Spain since the mid 1400s as well as all up and down the length and breadth of England. So some of London society…merchants, laborers who traveled for work, sailors were certainly aware of women on the professional stage, and as such Theater proprietors in London had to know that a good illusion was going to be required if they were going to insist on disallowing women from working in theater professionally.

but why is this important to how I choose to make the clothing for my interpretation of Cleopatra, using the style template of clothing one might find in London society in 1606-07? I think the simple answer is that it can be distilled down to the need for spectacle to fill in the cracks and round off the rough edges separating the text and the audience’s understanding of it. The visual of a character can act as the bridge that allows, draws the audience in and captivates their imagination. If the plays were presented as the Globe now presented its period recreations, with the actors wearing reproductions of accurate Elizabethan apparel, it is tantamount to our modern trope of presenting his work in modern street clothes. Yes it will allow a modern viewer to associate more readily with the characters…but that bridge is necessary some times because the characters are speaking in a form that sounds alien to modern ears, so contextualizing the play in “every day clothing” makes sense as a way to offer modern audiences a way into the text. For an Elizabethan audience, the format of Shakespeare’s writing is not alien, and seeing characters dressed plainly in clothing no different from those seen out on the street would not aid their comprehension, if anything it would dull and muddy it.

In the pictures I have posted, at the end, you will see images of Mark Rylance portraying Cleopatra in a 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra presented by The Globe as well as a few of him in men’s attire as Prospero in The Tempest from a 1995 Globe production, for contrast. At first glance it is really great seeing what you think is a really faithful presentation of the play in a period appropriate style they wear. Period clothing, constructed via period appropriate techniques, are made up in the style commensurate with the time, and are acting on a faithful replica of the stage the play was first presented on.

As an aside, I even like the fact that no effort is made to infuse cleopatra with what we would now think of as “Egyptian style” detailing (a la Liz Taylor in Cleopatra)......the average resident of London in 1606 had zero conception of what Egypt looked like or how Antony or Cleopatra would have dressed or looked. But if you look at the clothes Rylance wears as Cleopatra....they are items of clothing that could readily be found on upper middle class or noble women in the city, they are “street wear” not “theatrical clothing”, and I think in early modern theater that is a very important distinction. But let me add a bit more to your understanding of HOW plays were presented before I break down the reasons why I think the distinction between street and theatrical clothing are important here.

We know that women were not acting in the female roles on the London stage, but the other aspect of seeing mark Rylance portray Cleopatra (or in truth any of the other female roles he has filled for Globe productions to a high degree of performance excellence) is his AGE. When he portrayed Cleopatra Rylance was 39. To a modern audience that is fine, we accept that because she is a strong, fierce, complicated character in his play. but the performative TRUTH is that in Shakespeare’s lifetime, Cleopatra was only ever played by a boy between the ages of 13- and 20! While London theater proprietors were reticent to put women on stage in a bid to establish guild style legitimacy, they recognized that even a plebeian audience was going to require some amount of visual verisimilitude of the actors portraying women on the stage.

Now Shakespeare often built in a cheat, in that he frequently features female characters that disguise themselves as boys (As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Merchant Of Venice, Cymbeline) For the bulk of the play. This makes me wonder if he did so to be able to capitalize on the skills and talents of actors who might have aged out of being able to convincingly look like a woman for the entirety of a play, but still retained enough effeminacy to be able to passably be a girl pretending to be a boy for the bulk of a play. But Cleopatra is on stage for about 85% of that play, she drives the plot, has some very meaty scenes and huge swings of emotion. All of that presented by a 13-19 year old boy.

I think we give Shakespeare a bit more credit than he’s due with reg to being forward thinking and egalitarian about women and their importance. He’s inconsistent from one play to the next(if you look at the order he wrote them in) in terms of how much stage time he gives female characters and how much he lets them drive the plot forward. Were he truly a forward thinker there wouldn’t be as great a disparity when you look at the plays in the order in which they were written. And in large part I think that can be attributed to the fact that at no point was Shakespeare actually writing his plays with the thought that there would ever be a woman portraying any of his female characters. He only ever saw his characters realized through the lens of a male pretending to be a woman. Shakespeare did not write speculatively. That is, he did not write to publish simply to have his play printed and sold. His plays were not printed and sold for profit until after his death. During his lifetime, once written, there were only ever “working copies” created of his full master copy, and the working copies often only contained the parts of the play a given actor had specific need of memorizing to do his part in the show. When Shakespeare wrote he was doing so with the intent that once completed the play would go straight into rehearsal and shortly thereafter onto the stage. Every one of his plays was crafted as a response to what was going on in London society and at court.....but from the common man’s perspective. Shakespeare’s plays were performed “in rep” (repertory). If you’re not a theater geek and thus unaware of what that means, here’s the simple version: the Globe announces its season- Romeo And Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, Tempest. A normal season would be each show running for three weeks of performances with a short “dark” period in between each to reset the stage for the next show. In REP however it’s like this:
Monday Night - Romeo And Juliet,
Tuesday Night- Macbeth,
Wednesday Night-Othello, and so on
(Sunday closed in observance of the sabbath and so as not to get fined). That meant you had 1 cast of actors who had to have 4 * plays memorized and be ready to perform them all in the same week. So when Shakespeare wrote any of his plays, he had to be thinking about the other shows that would be performed in rotation with his new play so he utilized the actors he’d have at his disposal to best effect.

* I chose 4 for demonstration, I have not yet been able to determine how many different plays the Globe presented in rotation during a single season.

You are most likely to see plays with strong female characters that dominate stage time grouped together chronologically because the actor who’d play his strong female had to already be cast in the other plays being presented that season. Shakespeare, at his height of productivity, averaged two new plays brought to stage per year, though he was thought to have been working on writing more than that simultaneously. So the women were played by inexperienced youthful boys who could at least look and sound passably like women (even though the audience was aware at all times that it was a boy playing at being a woman). They (the boy players) had to master the art of feminine illusion, they had to master the text of several challenging plays at once and be able to play them all in one weeks time. They had to provide their own costumes (there were no costume, set and prop designers per se......those duties got shared between the playwrite, the backer, and the actors.) and they had to master vocal projection and timing because the Globe is an open air theater.

Being an open air theater means that sound gets swallowed up as quickly as the words escape your lips, there was no buffering although the circular shape of the Globe would have helped somewhat. Street noise from outside would also have bled in so you’d have that for competition as an actor. And it’s noted that there were regularly clowns employed as plot devices to help clarify the plot or make jokes punchier ........their “part” was sometimes written into plays but more often it wasn’t since they were nonspeaking......but they were there to incite laughter which would be more sound for the actors to work over. Audiences were also not as quiet and respectful as modern audiences, shouting at the action, jeering at the villains, cheering the triumphs and lovers united......all were regular parts of theater attendance then....and created more noise for the actors to have to compete with. One of the most important skill sets that a great many of the young boys who played women’s roles all shared was membership in The Queen’s Choir. Boys who sang in Her Majesty’s choir were well cared for, well fed, taught to read, trained to sing and would often go on to careers on stage since performance was all they knew from a very early age. So they’d have learned about tempo, timbre, pitch, and rhythm as choristers, about enunciating large quantities of complication language, and memorizing large quantities of lyrics to be sung in rotation as needed.

Alexander Cooke and Joseph Taylor are the two men who started in Shakespeare’s company who are attributed with having been the most likely to originate Shakespeare’s most iconic female roles. Both eventually attritioned out of the female roles between 19-21 years of age but stayed on in the company playing male roles. There is no hint that their sexuality was anything other than garden variety heterosexual, both eventually married and sired children while continuing to have careers playing male roles on stage. It appears that while English society would not allow women to act on stage, it did want the illusion of femininity to be reasonably convincing.....to such a degree that audience members who wrote about seeing the plays and aware that all female roles were played by males, still referred to the actors using female pronouns.....meaning that their performances were good/convincing enough to not cause observers to break their perception of femininity even though there was a foundational understanding that that perceived femininity was an illusion.

“Audience members occasionally recorded positive impressions of the quality of the acting of boy players. When one Henry Jackson saw the King's Men perform Othello at Oxford in 1610, he wrote of the cast's Desdemona in his diary, "She [sic] always acted the matter very well, in her death moved us still more greatly; when lying in bed she implored the pity of those watching with her countenance alone."[16] The mere fact that Jackson referred to the boy as "she," when he certainly knew better rationally, may in itself testify to the strength of the illusion.”

Michael Shapiro, "The Introduction of Actresses in England: Delay or Defensiveness?," in Comensoli and Russell, p. 185.

Would we give the role of Cleopatra to a 15 year old girl today, much less a 15 year old boy? Absolutely not. But that was the norm in Shakespeare’s London. So without Scenery to help establish spectacle and place and theatricality, it fell to the author’s text and the actor delivering it to conjure a sense of place and moment in the mind and imagination of the audience. That’s a tall order for a 15 year old boy. But ok, lets for a moment assume that Shakespeare found an absolute virtuoso of acting who was top of his craft at the age of 15. there is still another hurdle that he had to surmount in presenting himself as Cleopatra.....TIME.

So at the start of Romeo And Juliet when the play is referred to in the prologue The chorus makes mention of the duration of the play “...The fearful passage of their death-marked love and the continuance of their parents rage, which but their children’s end, naught could remove is now the TWO HOURS’ traffic of our stage.......” people often don’t realize that plays were constrained to a hard 2 hour time limit by the City officials regulating the play houses in London. So modern stagings of Antony and Cleopatra average a run time of 3 1/2 hours, that means that, in order to avoid fines or being closed by the local authorities for exceeding the time constraints, Plays would have been spat out at top speed, no dramatic pauses, no time for changes of scene, high speed text being shot at the audience in a rapid fire barrage of words. If you work with the commonly accepted formula that. About 1,000 lines of Shakespearean text equates 1 hour of stage time at a normal pace of delivery here is a list of what the average run times would be for the plays I am concerning myself with for these designs:

Antony And Cleopatra: 3,573 Lines, 3 1/2 hour run time
Romeo And Juliet: 3,093 Lines, just over 3 hour run time
Measure For Measure: 2,839 Lines, 2 3/4 hour run time
Julius Caesar: 2,636 Lines, 2 1/2 hours run time
Titus Andronicus: 2,558 Lines, 2 1/2 hours run time
Macbeth: 2,477 Lines, 2 1/2hours run time
Midsummer Night’s Dream: 2,165 Lines, 2 hours 10 minutes run time

But all of these plays had to be crammed into a hard 2 hour time window in order to keep the theater from being penalized. So you have young, inexperienced (compared to their adult male counterparts), boys having to spit dialog as fast as the disclaimer at the end of a modern medication advertisement, playing strong larger than life women on stage in many cases of the plays they are on stage driving the plot and responsible for HUGE blocks of text that establish the action. Place and tone of the play.......that means that the visual associated with those boys needed to be VERY strong, such that it was a sort of brand recognition visualization for the audience. Dressing these boys in girl clothes that were indistinguishable from regular street attire for a London woman of the time would simply not get the job done. Shakespeare’s characters needed to be able to visually grab the audience to start drawing out their loyalties and interest because Shakespeare throws a LOT of characters at his audience in a given play.

What makes me say that? Well, I looked at the early design work of one of the most influential theater and architectural designers of the Shakespearean and Jacobean era....Inigo Jones. Because of his later successes with architecture and theatrical scenery designing, his early sketches have survived and those involved costumes as well as scenery. Jones, unfortunately, does not appear in any of the surviving records, to have worked with Shakespeare or his company on any plays Shakespeare wrote. Existing accounts list him working most often (in the time period of the latter end of Shakespeare’s life) with Shakespeare’s rival Ben Jonson (who would go on to assist in the assembly and publication of The First Folio of Shakespeare’s works after Shakespeare’s death). It was a contentious partnership with the two of them regularly arguing over what was most important on stage, the text or the spectacle with which it was presented. While it is clear, in looking at Jones’ sketches that he was often working with parts and pieces of clothing that were extant at the time in regular life, he was also designing on a fantastical scale using details that bore no relation to the average person’s attire. He deployed a sense of whimsy and the fantastical as a way of capturing the attention and imagination of his audience. Crazy headdresses, illogical and impractical skirts, skimpy layers, zany proportions...he did not hesitate to employ all of these in order to create the iconic images he felt the characters needed to root them instantly in an audience member’s mind, so that the clothing of a character became a more vital and contributing part of that character’s overall statement of self to the audience.

Inigo Jones (1573-1652) was the eldest son of a Welsh cloth worker of the same name. Somewhere between 1598 and 1602 he was sent (by a wealthy patron, either Earl Of Pembroke or the Earl Of Rutland) to study in Italy and learn their style of drawing, having displayed a talent for it at home in England. In 1602 he made his way to Denmark where he worked for King Christian, assisting in the design of both Rosenborg and Frederiksborg palaces. From there he was sent to London when James I and Anne of Denmark made their way down from Scotland on the death of Elizabeth I, he was then attached to Anne’s household and she became his patron for a number of years. It was under her years of patronage that he is credited with the invention of “moveable scenery” and the use of a proscenium arch in presenting stage plays. Between 1605-1640 he collaborated on over 500 stage presentations with Ben Jonson. (“The English House” written by James Chambers”, published 1985 Guild Publishing, p75.)

While we look at modern productions put on by the Globe in which the actors wear very painstakingly researched and produced replicas of period clothing, I think that the designs all too often don’t go far enough. To our modern eye, accustomed to jeans and a t-shirt as standard attire, seeing the actors in the many layers and contrived shapes of what amounts to Elizabethan every day wear IS theatrical. But it is only theatrical to us. To and Elizabethan audience, it would likely have looked boring and dull and would not have helped the text/dialog any because it would not have been doing enough visual story telling, and would make the audience question why they just paid to get in and stand there for two hours if they weren’t going to get some flash for their pence.

bearing those ideas in mind, I looked at when Antony and Cleopatra was written, 1606-07. Three years after the death of Elizabeth I, which itself was not long after the ex*****on death of her last great “flame”, Robert Devereaux. With these iconic examples that a London audience would have no problems seeing the allusions to these two figures in the tone and method of Shakespeare’s presentation of Antony And Cleopatra. So I decided to design a Cleopatra that would sear itself iconically in the audience’s mind, while also having recognizable overtones that alluded to Elizabeth I. To that end I turned to The Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth, attributed to Isaac Oliver and commissioned by Robert Cecil.

Now it has long been debated if that ensemble really ever existed, basked on the amount of artistic allegory is featured in the image. But it was an accepted portrait of her, it would have been known to a decent amount of the public as such. In looking into the image I was able to uncover a video from created by The Historic Royal Palaces Trust in conjunction with an exhibit of the portrait its self along with the Bacton Altar Cloth (lately identified as likely having started its life as an embroidered skirt in Elizabeth I’s wardrobe) and I will link the video below, in which they discuss the process by which they used period materials and technique to make their version of the gown and mantle

https://youtu.be/eAKa53evBSM
Additionally, I returned to Dr Katrina Marchant’s deconstruction of some of the iconography seen in the painting, which you can watch here:

https://youtu.be/84tAGtJh3qw

I decided that given that the snake featured as a symbol of wisdom to an Elizabethan audience, and it’s obvious association with Cleopatra in the form of the Asp...it seemed a foregone conclusion that I needed to feature the snake motif on the dress I designed. Given that Historic Royal Palaces has determined that the eyes and ears on the mantel in the portrait were likely painted on motifs as opposed to embroidered (if the mantel really exists as depicted) and that there is at least one other of Elizabeth’s petticoats that is believed, by Janet Arnold in Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlocked, to be decorated in motifs of animals and plants painted onto an ivory/white silk ground, I decided I’d employ both embroidery and fabric painting as methods to blazon the gown with snake images.

I found a half size replica of a robe and gown in Seventeenth Century Women’s Dress patterns Book 2 (p 33) by Susan north and Jenny Tiramani featured a pattern created by Melanie Braun based on extant examples and a Spanish tailoring manual of the period. In the design the robe is worn over a wheel farthingale style dress, a style still favored by Anne Of Denmark at court, all of which seemed a good base to then elaborate on in creating a Cleopatra design that would be rooted in clothing pieces relevant to the years when the play was written, but that could then be dressed up with detailing to convey the character of Cleopatra as a foreign queen to an audience who would have had no notion of what an actual Egyptian commoner or noble looked like.

From there, I used the pattern drafting and piece prep/working techniques that I picked up in the modern maker seminar and book, as well as the notations on assembly laid out in North and Tiramani’s deconstruction of how the garments were assembled in their book. i did use a sewing machine for long construction seams or repetitive banal things like creating 48 of the “petals” that hang from the skirt. 95% of the detailing seen on the exterior of the gown however is all hand work. She is not quite finished yet, I needed to take a break from sewing to get some home improvement projects done, but all the major construction is completed, i just need to do a lacing placket for under the stomacher and decorate the back of the robe so it will not be such a large expanse of unbroken yellow. But I’d clock her at being about 85% complete. The wheel farthingale I made for this uses actual wood bents (which I have now learned I am not overly fond of working with....but I did it) Some of the process photos will feature the pad stitching of the interior of the body of the robe, the mapping and ex*****on of the embroidery, couching and bead work on the stomacher, the bead work motifs on the bodice and hanging sleeves and skirt petals. I did use cotton broadcloth as the man large quantity fabric yardage, for two main reasons.

first and foremost was the continuity of color saturation. As we are using the game CLUE as our inspiration for these character designs, and each character will be monochromatic, I want them all to have a uniform level of color saturation so that resemble game pieces in that regard. If I were to use a variety of period appropriate fabrics for these designs, the saturation level of the color may or may not match up when you look at them as an assembled group. So in looking at what was available at my local JoAnn Fabrics (to facilitate ease of acquisition) and in a broad spectrum of colors all of which had the same color saturation......their array of cotton broadcloth was easily the winner for selection and availability.

Second reason was cost! I am making 13 ensembles. Yes I have finer fabrics in all the requisite shades to be able to round out and highlight each design, but not enough to make entire ensembles from.......so. I am going to be buying MASSIVE quantities of fabrics and trims by the time this is completed (ideally in time for our 12th Night here in AnTir......when they will hopefully be getting their collective debut ahead of Pennsic 2021).. So I need to have an eye to keeping the cost within reasonable limits for these. Yet again, the Cotton Broadcloth really won the day at being economic and available in the wide array of shades that I needed to be able to do this project.

Despite that “cheat” of using the cotton broadcloth, I am endeavoring to use period appropriate pattering techniques, assembly methodology, embellishment techniques, and period portrait references that would be recognizable to Elizabethan audiences so that each character will have a cultural relevance rooted in the context of what was going on in London at the time the play was written.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into my logic and delving into the why and wherefore behind the creation of the Cleopatra design, and the larger framing context for how I am approaching all the character designs I am working on. i look forward to fielding questions in the comments. But for now i am going to go give my fingers a rest from typing as I compose the follow up points I want to make on some of the individual images in the comments section for each of those.

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- Shakespeare And the performance Of Girlhood: Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, Deanne Williams
-Elizabeth & Leicester: Power, Passion, Politics by Sarah Gristwood
-The Life And Times Of Elizabeth I by Neville Williams (General Editor: Antonia Fraser)
-Dictionary Of The Elizabethan World (Britain, Ireland, Europe, America) by John Wagner
-Shakespeare For All Time by Stanley Wells
-Feast For The eyes (Evocative Recipes &Surprising tales inspired by paintings in the national gallery) by Gillian Riley
-To The Queen’s Taste (Elizabethan Feasts And Recipes adapted for modern cooking) by Lorna Sass
-Renaissance Theater Costume by Stella Mary Newton
-Splendour At Court, Renaissance Spectacle And Illusion by Roy Strong
-Princely Feasts (Five Centuries Of Pageantry and Spectacle) by Bryan Holme

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