In the first episode of Shakespeare's Pants, Anjna talks about cleaning and washing the body in early modern England, with lots of fun references to ablutions in Shakespeare's works.
Insights from Dr. Sara Read, Dr. Tara Hamling, Dr. Hannah Lilley, Amie Bolissian, Lorna Giltrow-Shaw and Nic Fulcher. We also hear lots of extracts performed by Rich Bunn, Charlie Clee, Catherine Forrester, Lucy Aarden and Pete Smith.
In the first episode of Shakespeare's Pants, Anjna talks about cleaning and washing the body in early modern England, with lots of fun references to ablutions in Shakespeare's works.
Insights from Dr. Sara Read, Dr. Tara Hamling, Dr. Hannah Lilley, Amie Bolissian, Lorna Giltrow-Shaw and Nic Fulcher. We also hear lots of extracts performed by Rich Bunn, Charlie Clee, Catherine Forrester, Lucy Aarden and Pete Smith.
Episode One: Washing
[00:00:00] Anjna Chouhan: Welcome to Shakespeare's Pants: the podcast that explores the ins and outs of English domestic activity during the life and times of William Shakespeare. My name is Anjna and I'm a Shakespearian, which is a strange thing to do with one's life. But in my attempt to be useful for a change I'm using my otherwise pointless superpower to make history and literature come together for you, my lovely listeners. Over the course of this series, I'll be talking about daily routines across the various sorts of people in the 16th and early 17th centuries. And I'll be addressing the realities of dealing with universal bodily functions and the practicalities of living a healthy, and even stylish, life in a world that predated our own narratives about hygiene, life coaches, and even beauty gurus.
And so without further ado here is my podcast: Shakespeare's [00:01:00] Pants!
In this episode, I'll be exploring early modern washing and bathing. I'll be talking to experts who shed some light on medical and religious understandings of keeping clean as well as literary scholars and historians who explain more about the cultures around washing and bathing, which varied according to status.
So let's straight to it with Episode One: Washing.
A cursory glance at life as documented in the works of Shakespeare, tells us that our assumptions about smelly Elizabethans may be somewhat reductive. There are over 22 individual references to literal bathing and around 35 to the washing of body parts across the plays and poetry. It's a start anyway!
[00:02:00] For our first episode of Shakespeare's Pants, I'll be exploring how people washed and what early modern understandings of cleanliness really were. What exactly did washing oneself look like in the early modern period? Let's listen to Dr. Sara Read from Loughborough University.
Sara Read: Well, I always come back to this proper, but that's traditional in the 17th century. Wash your hands often, your feet seldom and your head never. And I think that sums up whole ethos in a really neat sentence. People did wash hands and face with, uh, with, um, soap. And the thing about soap is that it's the same soap, you know, that they used for everything and say it's the washing soap and the washing up soap and, and everything like that.
So there's no sort of, you know, we've got our creams and potions and jars all over the house and washing up liquid downstairs. And there was none of that you had to, you know, your soap was your soap!
Anjna Chouhan: Keeping your hands clean seems to have been common advice in household [00:03:00] manuals from the period. One such book was called The Government of Health by physician William Bullein in 1558, who wrote:
Actor: What should men do, which is reasonable, but to keep himself clean and often to wash the hands, which be also the instruments to the mouth and eyes with many other things comely to serve the body.
Anjna Chouhan: So Bullein tells us that it's reasonable to wash the face and hands and all the bits that serve the body. This is all very sensible. And he wasn't the only one. In 1600 civil law student, Wlliam Vaughn, outlined 15 rules for a good healthy daily routine, which include going to the toilet, getting dressed, combing the hair, teeth rubbing, washing the face eyes, ears, and hands in that particular order. And then before going to bed, he recommends washing the face and mouth with cold water, some more tooth rubbing and some [00:04:00] urinating. Both Bullein and Vaughn were advocating, washing, and general cleaning of the body parts for health. But in a much older book called The Birth of Mankind, we find some pretty specific body parts being referenced. I'll let Sara explain.
Sara Read: The Birth of Mankind: it's the first English language translation of a midwifery reproduction textbook. And it's translated from a Latin text that was originally a German text, it's a really colorful text in scope you know in terms of book history, it goes bobbing all around Europe before it goes to London; but in 1545, the printer gets a doctor to do a new version. And Thomas Reynalds' version adds this extra chapter at the end and it's called, uh, 'The Beautifying Part of Physic'. And it's a whole chapter on beauty, um, remedies. And one of thes things in there is what to do if you've got a rank savour in the armpit!
Anjna Chouhan: Contrary to schoolroom assumptions [00:05:00] about icky Elizabethans, people were genuinely bothered by rank savours of the body. and this is because bad smells were thought to carry diseases. Here's Nic Fulcher from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to explain more.
Nic Fulcher: Dirt is associated with disease and dirt and disease and poverty, all go together. Things that smell bad are associated with disease. This whole concept of the miasma, you know, a bad smell is, is going to soak into you and make you ill. And that sort of stretches into bodily odour, smelly breath, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Anjna Chouhan: Wiping and washing your bits of business was definitely on the agenda.
Sara Read: The idea of keeping clean is to keep healthy, you know. Um, so you keep your teeth clean to prevent diseases and things like that of the mouth, rather than for cosmetic purposes.
Anjna Chouhan: Just listen to the requirements made by the soldier Coriolanus [00:06:00] in Shakespeare's a Roman play, before he deigns to speak with the plebians.
Actor: Bid them wash their faces and keep their teeth clean.
Anjna Chouhan: I think Coriolanus sounds a bit like William Bullein. Wash your face and clean your teeth, and then you'll be comely or respectable. We'll come back to respectability shortly because I'm still struck by the awareness of connections between dirt and health. There's a lovely language manual written by Claudius Hollyband and Peter Arundelle in the mid 1500s, designed to teach language learners all about domestic vocabulary through dialogues. Have a listen to this passage where a mother instructs her maid on how to deal with the baby.
Actor: Wash him before me. Have you clean water? Oh, my little heart. God bless thee! Rub the crown of his head, wash his ears and put some fine clout behind them to keep them dry and clean. Wash his face, lift up his little [00:07:00] hairs. Is that not some dirt I see upon his forehead? What's that upon his eyelids. Methinks that his eyes are somewhat watrish. Make them clean. Pick his nostrils, wipe his mouth and his lips. Thou art pretty and fat, my little darling. Wash his armpits. Have you not washed the insides nor the soles of his feet? Forget not to make clean his toes and great toe, and all. Give him some suck. I pray you take heed to wipe well the nipple of your dug before you put it in his mouth for fear that there may be any hair or other things which may hurt him.
Anjna Chouhan: There's so much attention to detail here: the dirt on the forehead, the picking of the nostrils and washing of his big toe; and the idea that a bit of dirt or stray hair might hurt the child, shows a very clear emphasis on hygiene. So I think we can say that washing was very important to our early modern counterparts.
Physicians and [00:08:00] lifestyle advisors tended to recommend washing and cleaning with cold water, but there were very sensible reasons for doing this. This is William Bullein again:
Actor: To wash the hands in cold water is very wholesome for the stomach and liver, but to wash with hot water engendereth rheums, worms and corruption in the stomach because it pulleth away natural heat unto the warmed place, which is washed.
Anjna Chouhan: Early modern physicians were concerned about moving and pulling heat around the body because they were heavily influenced by ancient Roman physician Galen, and his theory of the four humours. Here to explain more about this is Amie Bolissian who's currently working on her PhD at the University of Reading.
Amie Bolissian: Simplifying massively, it was about balancing the temperature and moisture of the body while keeping everything [00:09:00] flowing healthily inside and outside, and the organs healthy. We've got the four main humours and these were seen as important elements of the body. They were thought to have two useful properties each. Firstly blood, the most important, and believed to be the most abundant. This was warming moistening. Phlegm was cooling and moistening. Cholar or yellow bile was warming and drying, and melancholy - black bile - was cooling and dry. A person could naturally have a little more of one or the other, and this would affect what doctors called their constitution or their temperament.
Anjna Chouhan: So the significance of cooling the body with water was far more complicated than just a simple desire to be clean because encouraging temperature changes would manifest in alterations to mood, appetite, and even to fertility, because the body was perceived to be very, very porous. You don't want excess amounts [00:10:00] of water entering your body and disrupting the balance of the humours. Which is why very few people have baths. Here's Dr. Sara Read again.
Sara Read: I don't think there was the notion that you'd go and have a bath to come out feeling clean. If you did do full body immersion at home, it tended to be for medical reasons.
Anjna Chouhan: This is physician William Vaughan in 1600.
Actor: Cold and natural baths are greatly expedient for men, subject to rheums, dropsies, and gouts. Neither can I easily express in words how much good cold baths do bring unto them that use them. Howbeit with this caveat I commend baths to wit, that no man distempered through venery, gluttony, watching, fasting or through violent exercise, presume to enter into them.
Anjna Chouhan: William [00:11:00] Shakespeare's son-in-law, John Hall, was a physician who kept lots of notes about his patients, to many of whom he recommends bathing for all sorts of conditions, from headaches to itching, pustules, swooning, scurvy, painful joints, and even for diarrhea.
So usually the baths are made with things like sage and wormwood, sweet clover and even in some instances with beer. The one condition for which bathing was not recommended was plague. Here to explain more is Lorna Giltrow-Shaw, who is studying for a PhD at the Shakespeare Institute.
Lorna Giltrow-Shaw: To bathe, to kind of submerge oneself and to expose your pores to that in plague time would be bad because it would be temporarily altering your, the state of your humours. To actually place your body in, in a vulnerable position during plague time was not a thing to be done. However, You've got William Bullein [00:12:00] in his, The Government of Health in 1558, writes that dry baths or hot houses, which were effectively saunas with, with dry herps placed in them. He actually said it's good in a time of pestilence providing, and I love this, providing it's not done on an empty stomach!
Actor: The best bathing is in a great vessel. Or a little close place with the evaporation of diverse, sweet herbs well sodden in water, which have virtue to open the pores, softly letting out feeble and gross vapours, which live between the skin and the flesh, this kind of bathing is good in the time of pestilence or fever. In the end of the baths, it is good to anoint the body with some sweet oil to mollify and make soft the tissues and thus to conclude of bathing, it is very [00:13:00] wholesome, so that it be not done upon an empty stomach. Pulses may come there by, or to take a sudden cold after it.
Anjna Chouhan: I'm very curious about what the actual bathing process was like. And it turns out it depended very much on your wealth and position. Early modern society was divided by sorts. You had lower or labouring sorts, middling sorts, and upper sorts. The upper sorts were landed: they tended to inherit their wealth and their estates; and the labouring or lower sorts were exactly that, they were labouring, they were the working people. In the mid 15th century, a man named John Russell published The Book of Nurture, which expounds on service to a man of high rank, mostly in verse. So it covers things like how to dress, how to serve food, and in what particular order. There's lots of advice about sauces for fish, and it covers things like preparing a bath [00:14:00] or what he calls a stew for your master.
Actor: If your sovereign will to the bath. His body to wash clean , hang sheets, roundabout, the roof do this as you mean.
Every sheet full of flowers and herbs, sooth and green.
And look, ye have sponges five or six theron to sit or lean.
Look there be a great sponge thereon your sovereign to sit.
Thereon a sheet, and so he may bathe him there as fit.
And at his feet also a sponge if thereby any to put
and always be sure of the door and see that it be shut.
A basin full in your hand of herbs hot and fresh,
and with a soft sponge in hand, his body that ye wash,
rinse him with rose water, warm and fair upon his flesh.
Then let him to bed.
Anjna Chouhan: There's a couple of things that really interest me about this. First of all, the [00:15:00] washing and herbs and rinsing with rosewater, and then the emphasis on privacy. So first the practice of putting scents and herbs into water was called sweetening. And it's curious that Russell's narrative seems to really champion comfort with all those soft sponges and pleasant sensations, including smells and warm herbs placed upon the skin. It's very sensory and it's very, very calculatedly upper sort. This is not for the lower, certainly not for the middling sorts of people. So it's telling that Russell was writing from the perspective of a serving man. That is that the bath is prepared for someone who can not only afford a bathing vessel and a room in which to keep it, but also the labour of a human being just to attend it.
Shakespeare often has a lot of fun mixing sorts of people with the kinds of activities they were used [00:16:00] to. An example that ties in with washing comes from an early play in his career, the Taming of the Shrew, in which a drunken beggar named Christopher Sly is scooped off the street and taken into an upper sort home or an aristocratic home where he's tricked into believing that he, himself, is a lord with fine garments, servants, and a beautiful wife. Listen out for the trappings and domestic details in this extract.
Actor: Carry him gently to my fairest chamber and hang it round with all my wanton pictures. Balm his foul head in warm, distilled waters and burn sweet wood to make the lodging sweet. Procure me music ready when he wakes to make a dulcet and a heavenly sound. And if he chance to speak, be ready straight and with a low submissive reverence say: what is it your honor will command? [00:17:00] Let one attend him with a silver basin full ofrRose water, bestrewed with flowers. Another bear the ewer, the third, a diaper and say: would it please your Lordship cool your hands?
Anjna Chouhan: A lot of these instructions, focus on Sly's senses. He's going to be balmed, sweetened, lulled attended, bathed and cooled. The details are revealing. The water for his foul head is warm and distilled - and warming water was labour intensive, especially if you're doing it with herbs, which is what is entailed in the distilling process. The warmth would have been to encourage heat in his body to move to his head. So everything about this process is very, very upper middling to upper sorts of activity.
Consider that silver basin. There are a range of silver basins in the V&A museum [00:18:00] from the 1500s to the early 17th century. Some of them are intricate and ornamental having been made in Venice and Spain. My personal favorite is a stunning London-made basin in the shape of a shell and a matching ewer fashioned after a mermaid. It's easily found in their online collections so do take a look. I'm not suggesting that this is what was being used in the play, but when you take into account the precious material, the manufacture, storage and the polishing required for such an item, you realise that a silver basin is an extremely valuable domestic object.
The point, being that a silver basen and ewer were probably items on which Sly has never set his eyes. So the sight of servants proffering them for his use would be utterly absurd to audiences. And it's this [00:19:00] absurdity that might get a little lost in translation, certainly in modern interpretations. Sly's lack of interest in his clothing and appearance is directly correlated to his status as a lower labouring sort. There simply wasn't the resource or time for him to worry about these things. For the majority of the lower and even some of the lower middling sorts, the only real option for full bodily immersion was a river, streams and wells or fountains. But of course, if you're using a river or stream, you need to be able to swim and drowning was a very real risk.
Scholar Craig Spence points out in his work on violent deaths in early modern England that drowning was a very real threat that even accounted for more sudden deaths in London than by fire, which is historically considered the most dangerous of the elements. The ability to swim was not [00:20:00] universal. Therefore drowning was quite a common way to die. I've counted at least 43 literal references to drowning across the body of Shakespeare's works. Make of that what you will.
Actor: Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned none, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night. For, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp, was drowned!
Anjna Chouhan: So let's take it as read that full bodily immersion and bathing were quite unusual activities. However, if you were a middling sort being clean was extremely important. So to learn more about middling sorts and how they related to the people around them, let's listen to some experts. This is Dr. Hannah Lilley from the University of Birmingham.
Hannah Lilley: The middling were a really varied group, but broadly they were less wealthy than the landed gentry so [00:21:00] they tended not to have an inherited estate; but they were definitely more wealthy than the poorest or the wage dependent members of society. The middling conducted a variety of trades and they tended to be self-employed. We might, kind of, recognise job titles like carpenters apothecaries, grocers and sailors. The middling spent money on household surroundings, goods, and they were also invested in their own professional advancement. They actively sought to increase their cultural capital through leisure activities, new furniture, um, and good social networks.
Anjna Chouhan: Let's listen to Dr. Tara Hamling.
Tara Hamling: There's a really interesting relationship between the spiritual and the moral and the practical in this period. So, you know, there are all kinds of good reasons why you need to wash your hands and your face and keep clean. But that act of keeping clean is demonstrated because of what it says about your [00:22:00] moral and your spiritual status. So everybody is invested in being seen to be clean both physically and spiritually. So there's that really interesting blurring in this context because of the very particular religious environment and the Protestant environment and the emphasis on all kinds of moral, uh, elements to kind of, uh, always demonstrate you're inner state, through your physical state.
Anjna Chouhan: The crossover between cleanliness and morality started to manifest itself in the kinds of objects that middlings sorts invested in, including ear scoots and toothpicks.
Tara Hamling: So one of the toothpicks that I have in mind is in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection. It's a hand, it's basically a hand of time, uh, with a scythe at the end and the scythe forms the toothpick element. And at the other end is a little skull and a typical motif to make [00:23:00] you meditate on death. It's actually an incredibly beautiful thing. So it's made from ivory and it's made, it's got a little Ruby inset in it. So it's not -although it's obviously something that you would use as an individual, you would want people to see this because it's very ornate, it's very expensive and it's in a beautifully made, and it has this additional kind of indication of your pious identity.
It's really interesting that toothpicks and ear scoops are often offered as a sort of combo um, uh, element in an ornament that would be worn. One of them is in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust collection. It's not quite clear whether that pick is for a tooth or maybe it's for under the nails but it can work either way. And obviously the scoop. This is quite interesting. You think about that being used and then worn! Um, both of these items have a, a loop, so it can be suspended from the neck and worn. So those of them were meant to be seen. It represents, I think the sort of middling status - an average middling status, [00:24:00] something that, you know, again, you're wanting to show that you are, uh, attentive to personal grooming, sensitive to personal hygiene, therefore clean both physically and spiritually. The other example, which is kind of similar, but more ornate is a silver example, which was recovered from the Jamestown settlement in Virginia. So probably dating to the first decade of the 17th century - so within Shakespeare's lifetime, and it's just the most lovely thing it's made from silver. It's still in amazing condition and it's in the shape of a dolphin. But the realities of Jamestown settlement, you know, the horrors that people had to face that starvation death disease, um, and also kind of ongoing threat from the indigenous peoples. And you've got someone walking around with this very ornate combo of ear scoop and toothpick.
Anjna Chouhan: So being respectable wasn't just about being clean. It was about being seen to own the paraphernalia in order to keep you clean. And [00:25:00] this is why the Clown in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale mistakes the rogue Autolycus ,for a gentlemen, because he says:
Actor: He seems to be the more noble in being fantastical. A great man, I'll warrant. I know by the picking on's teeth.
Anjna Chouhan: The Clown concludes that Autolycus must have some wealth because he owns a fancy toothpick. Although keeping clean with a moral duty, it was a bit of a social minefield trying to navigate through all the rules about what was acceptable and what wasn't. Here's Nic Fulcher to explain some more.
Nic Fulcher: If you are one of the carters who is, uh, you know, tasked with emptying out the town's privy, you are probably going to be stripping off and swimming or bathing in the - in the local river, far more than other people would. The Queen had fantastic bathrooms and bath houses. [00:26:00] I believe it's Richmond Palace, where they had running water, both hot and cold, and it was delivered through, um, silver oyster taps, you know, so, so the means were there to actually be able to do it.
It's just this attitude that if you immerse yourself in it, you're going to cause yourself to become ill. Which is why probably you end up with this social snobbery because the labourers, the poo dealers, the farmers, and what have you, are the ones who are going to be swimming in the creek, just because it's the easiest thing to do. But that seems to be a lowly thing to do.
Anjna Chouhan: Being respectable across the sorts was often about appearance. Clean faces and hands weren't just hygienic, they were also indications of spiritual cleanliness. Whether you washed your hands in a silver basin, cleaned your teeth with an ivory pink, or even dunked your body in a local river, the way in which our early modern ancestors washed and bathed [00:27:00] was an important cultural signifier of their social and economic status. Not to mention a way of telegraphing, their understanding of the link between dirt and disease or what we call hygiene. So keep those rank savours at bay, don't get in the bath unless you're poorly and definitely stick to cold water!
That's the end of the first episode of Shakespeare's Pants! Tune in next time to learn all about early modern linen and underwear.
In this episode you heard from Dr. Sara Read, Amie Bolissian, Dr. Hannah Lilly, Dr. Tara Hamling, Nic Fulcher and me, Dr. Anjna Chouhan. You also heard the voices of Richard Bunn, Charlie Clee, Lucy Aarden, and Catherine Forester. A thousand thanks for lending your ears to Shakespeare's Pants. Farewell.
Jingle: Shakespeare's Pants!