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Shakespeare’s Restless World is currently being broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Today’s episode City Life, Urban Strife examines an apprentice’s cap from 400 years ago.

Woollen cap that would have been worn by an Elizabethan artisan or apprentice.
© Trustees of the British Museum

James Shapiro, Professor of English, Columbia University

When I think about how ubiquitous hats were in Shakespeare’s day it makes me think of going to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and seeing everybody wearing a baseball cap or watching Mad Men and seeing so many working men wearing fedoras back in 1960.

We no longer live in a culture where everybody wears caps or hats – and hats no longer signify the same things. Shakespeare did live in such a time and he understood exactly what it meant. On stage, that moment in several of his plays when actors all throw their caps in the air would have meant something quite specific to theatre-goers. The survival of this cap speaks to things from the Elizabethan era that have almost been lost to us.

Throwing caps in the air could be a sign of celebration, it could be an expression of joy, or it could also be an expression of let’s throw the social order over.

In early modern culture, almost everybody from the highest to the lowest levels of society lived and worked in somebody else’s household in one capacity or another. An apprentice was somebody who was learning a trade and to become a master at that trade you had to undergo an apprenticeship. So in terms of what we think of as social class, the early modern ‘apprentice’ is a more fluid term than we might imagine, not the 19th century Dickensian image that it typically evokes.

Those who wore the cap in Elizabethan England were not just apprentices. There was a law, instituted in 1571, that every male aged six and above who was not a gentleman had to wear a wool cap—an effective way for the government to support the crucial wool trade. These caps had to be worn by every male on Sundays and on holidays. They didn’t have to wear them seven days a week but it was the law that you had to wear a woollen cap quite like this one.

The Elizabethan government had an investment in what people wore. These sumptuary laws would ordinarily tell you what you should not wear. In 1597, for example, Queen Elizabeth issued a proclamation ordering people of lower social orders not to wear various kinds of clothing or trim limited to those above their social station. This was a way of visibly creating, or reinforcing, social divisions. Most sumptuary laws were meant to ensure that when you walked down the street you knew who was your social superior and who your inferior.

In specifying what you should wear, instead of what you shouldn’t or couldn’t, the ‘statute cap’ is an exception to that. The cap is the only sumptuary law we know in which the government said you are going to wear this on Sundays and holidays – and obviously not everybody liked that.

In fact, Shakespeare’s own uncle flouted the law.

In October 1583 (when Shakespeare was still living in Stratford and was probably 19 years old or so) his uncle Henry, who lived nearby in Snetterfield, was fined eight pence for refusing to wear his cap to church, according to the form of the statute. When uncle Henry refused to pay up he was fined him another two pence.

Henry was a farmer and this is a time in the Midlands when enclosure was on the rise. I suspect that he was not the only farmer who deeply resented rich land owners enclosing fields and turning fields into places for sheep rather then for grain or workers to earn a living. So I don’t think his refusal to wear a cap was a fashion statement so much as a political statement that not everybody had signed onto these statute caps.

Filed under: Shakespeare's Restless World, What's on, radio series, Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Restless World is currently being broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Today’s episode Ireland: Failures in the Present looks at the great military crisis of the Elizabethan regime.

The woodcut Rorie Oge in the Forest from Derricke's Image of Ireland, 1581. © Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections Department

Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex

The situation in Ireland represented two things; one is positive, as the English see it, a great opportunity to govern a nation and to make huge amounts of money through people going over and winning land confiscated from the Irish who have rebelled.

But the other side of this situation is England’s worst nightmare. The Irish are predominately Catholic, they are always threatening to unite with the Spanish and that is really what people are particularly afraid of; the fear of Irish savagery uniting with Spanish Catholicism to overthrow all civilised Protestant English values.

If Ireland was lost, there was a genuine fear that England, as an isolated Protestant country in predominantly Catholic Europe, would be destroyed and the Reformation would be still born. English independence would be engulfed by foreign powers. It is a terrifying prospect that is apocalyptic in the way that it is represented by many people.

A modern day comparison might be Cuba and the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the crisis you had the fear that there would actually be a destructive war that would engulf civilisation and you had the idea of Russian forces on America’s shores. I think that is exactly how the English felt about Ireland and the Spanish, that this was a back door into England that could result in the destruction of everything they had tried to build up over the years.

I think the comparison also holds because the Cuban crisis recedes relatively quickly. What’s so strange about history in this period is that after 1601 and the defeat of the Irish forces, Spanish power seems to collapse at the same time. By the time you get to 1607, 1608, things look very, very different and even the gunpowder plot doesn’t make the impact that it would have done a few years earlier.

Filed under: Shakespeare's Restless World, What's on, radio series, Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Restless World is currently being broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Today’s episode Europe: Triumphs of the Past looks at displays of power.

Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare scholar

Ceremony is the thing that makes a monarchy happen. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the King reflects on the importance of ceremony, but he refers to it as `idol’ ceremony.

The English have always done royal ceremony and pageantry very well and it is one of the main devices that keep the monarchy going. So in Shakespeare’s time, something like the funeral procession of Queen Elizabeth or the coronation procession of King James would have been huge public events, the streets of London would have been thronged and the elite would actually have been there in the Abbey, at the front when the coronation or the burial took place.

There is an interesting difference between the way that Queen Elizabeth and King James used ceremony. Elizabeth, perhaps because of her insecurity about her own position on the throne, as a woman, a woman without an heir, and a Protestant, relied a lot on public ceremony, processions through the streets and indeed through the nation; visitations to great aristocratic households. She also moved a lot from palace to palace; the court was mobile. One week they would be at the palace at Whitehall and another week they would be down river at Greenwich, another week up river at Nonesuch or Richmond. The public saw this extraordinary bejewelled figure of the Queen.

King James was reluctant to display himself in public in this way. He did make use of ceremony, in particular made use of theatrical entertainments with the court masks in which the royal family and the courtiers participated in theatre and music and dancing. But this was very much an enclosed thing aimed at the elite who were invited to attend, aimed at visiting royalty, visiting diplomats and so on. So there is an interesting contrast between the importance of public spectacle for Queen Elizabeth and this more private, enclosed sense of the court that King James had.

Filed under: Shakespeare's Restless World, What's on, radio series, Shakespeare