2. Undergarments

In the second episode, Anjna discovers the world of pants. Well, what passed for undergarments in early modern England, how they were cleaned, and why any of this matters in Shakespeare's works. Wisdom from Dr Sara Read, Dr Hannah Lilley, Amie Bolissian, Nic Fulcher and Lorna Giltrow-Shaw.  Voicework by Catherine Forrester, Jonathan McGarrity and Rich Bunn. 
Please rate and review the pod where possible, and follow me on Twitter @ShakespearesPa2.

Transcript

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[00:00:01] 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. I am a Shakespearean, which is a strange thing to do with one's life. 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. Without further ado, here is my podcast, Shakespeare's Pants.

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[00:00:37] Speaker 2: Shakespeare's Pants.

[00:00:40] Anjna: In this episode of Shakespeare's Pants, I'll be finding out about early modern undergarments, what they looked like and how people took care of them. I'll also be connecting all of this back to Shakespeare in a vague attempt to make a bit more sense of both the history and moments within the plays themselves. Let's do it with Episode Two, Undergarments.

In the previous episode of Shakespeare's Pants, we discovered that our early modern English ancestors did indeed wipe and wash themselves, and that people of all sorts, notably the middling upwards, had a vested interest in being seen to be physically clean because it signified their spiritual, and by implication, moral cleanliness.

As well as faces and hands, linen or undergarments was a sure way to gauge a person's bodily and spiritual hygiene. Undergarments were made from linen, which is what they became known as, simply linen. Here's Dr. Sara Read to explain more.

[00:01:49] Dr. Sara Read: The idea wasn't that you immersed your whole body. It was that if you are a bit sweaty, you'd go and change your linen shift for a clean one because then it was thought to draw impurities out of the body. It wasn't just a clothing item. It was actually doing a function on your body as well.

[00:02:04] Anjna: In fact, linen was so absorbent that most people used scraps and strips of it for rubbing or chafing of the flesh in place of washing. Rubbing of the teeth, body, and hair was standard practice and advocated for all ages, notably the elderly. Chafing the flesh, particularly older flesh with linen, was considered healthy as well as cleansing. This is Amie Bolissian who researches the early modern older body.

[00:02:34] Amie Bolissian: They didn't want them to lose any important moistures out of their body. They were a little worried that, well, doctors were anyway, were a little worried that if you expel too much moisture out of your body as an older person, then you might take some of the good humors that you need.

This idea of enlivening the skin and enlivening an older body which was withered and decayed by rubbing them and waking them up, you've made it sweat a bit, which is good, and you've expelled some of the extraneous corrupt matter that you don't need, brought the blood to that bit, which is good and that's made that helpful. If you've rubbed the limbs, you've enlivened it and wakened it up with the spirit.

This idea of the lively spirits heading out towards the exterior parts of your body, not only would that aid those parts of the body, but if you are attracting fluids away from the center of the body, then some of the fluids might be the harmful corrupted ones. This was a good thing. You would much rather have something go wrong with your feet or your hands than your heart or your head or your lungs.

[00:03:49] Anjna: We use linen to move corrupted humors to the outer edges of the body, but there is more to linen than just being absorbent and good for chafing. Let's hear from Nic Fulcher from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

[00:04:04] Nic Fulcher: Linen's really good. It's really straightforward to weave because it has a very long natural thread. Linen can be incredibly fine. You can weave it so it's almost transparent. We all moan today, don't we, about linen because it creases, but we do forget that it's easy to wash, easy to clean, and easy to dry.

[00:04:22] Anjna: Whereas we might now consider undergarments as supportive or protective wear for the flesh, for the early modern period, linen was protection for expensive garments from the body.

[00:04:36] Nic: If you look very carefully at Tudor portraiture of ladies where you can see the velvet line usually just across the bust line, you'll see a white line underneath her, or a pale line underneath it which is exactly where the smock is sitting protecting the dress above it.

[00:04:52] Anjna: Let's begin with women's linen.

[00:04:54] Nic: The main item of underwear, as we understand the term today, is actually a smock, usually made of linen, so basically, a very large shift with sleeves all the way to the wrist, at least below the knee if not all the way to the floor.

[00:05:11] Anjna: If women were wearing smocks, what were men wearing?

[00:05:16] Nic: You're wearing a shirt, which is effectively the same thing. Men's tend to go to waist level, and then are split from the waist to about knee level. The reason for the split is so that when you're getting dressed you can effectively tuck it between your legs, which means that you can then get your breeches on over the top of it.

[00:05:37] Anjna: From the middle ages, men's wear began to evolve into something more protective for the genitals until braies became the norm, a kind of loose boxer short tied at the waist with a belt.

[00:05:51] Nic: For men, you have two options. You either have what is known as long braies or short braies.

[00:05:56] Anjna: In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio sees the nurse and her servant, Peter, and he announces them as a shirt and a smock. This is the equivalent of calling a man and a woman a vest and a bra. It's clearly designed to be a bit vulgar; typical Mercutio, really. What's clear here is that the smock is synonymous with women and the shirt with men.

Linen was also a very useful tool for women on their periods. Here is Sara, again.

[00:06:30] Sara: People who did fashion some sanitary protection used linen clouts. Clouts is an actual name for everything that you might do with a cloth. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, refers to, in some of his poems about a double clout. The idea was that you got your piece of linen, you folded it several times, and then basically you just scrunched it between your legs and hoped for the best.

[00:06:52] Nic: In some household accounts including Elizabeth I's wardrobe, that very occasionally in private accounts you will also find references to very thin belts. It seems likely that to deal with the monthly situation or the situation of menstruation, that you were wearing a belt around your waist and literally having long strips of cloth tucked through the belt at the back, passed through between the legs, and tucked through at the front.

The bottom halves of smocks and some petticoats are usually red dyed with madder or dyed with more expensive types at the dye. Again, the practical hygiene side of things here is that if you do bleed or soak, you're not actually staining the cloth that you're wearing or if you are, it doesn't show up.

[00:07:47] Anjna: All fabric, linen included, was an expensive investment. Like everything in the early modern period, the quality to which you had access depended on your disposable income, and by extension, your status or your sort.

[00:08:01] Nic: Of course, linen undergarments could be as elaborate and as expensive as some of the top materials. You've seen those portraits where the sleeves are slashed down so that you can see the undergarment underneath it. That's a really interesting thing because it's a way of showing off that even your undergarments are really, really expensive.

[00:08:25] Anjna: This is all well and good for the upper sorts, but for some of the middling and all of the lower sorts, linen was likely to have been simple and changed only once a day. Drawing attention to it by poking it out of sleeve slits was a luxury afforded only to the very wealthy.

In fact, linen was so valuable that it was bequeathed in wills to descendants and commonly to charitable causes. For example, men from the middling sorts often left money to their wives specifically for the purpose of procuring linen and making undergarments for the local poor.

In 1611, churchwardens for the Christ Church Parish in Bristol set out a list of costs for the clothing and feeding of an orphan, noting that a pair of hose for a baby would cost sixpence, and two smocks would cost two shillings and one pence. By way of comparison, a pair of adults' leather shoes in a Bristol shoemaker shop around the same time cost between 16 pence and two shillings. That's the same price as two tiny linen smocks for a baby girl. I like to think that puts it into perspective.

To be able to wash linen, you need time, hence expensive linens were indications that you could afford the labour associated with keeping as well as wearing these fabrics. Mistress Quickly, the jovial landlady in the Henry IV plays makes an appearance in the comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor in which she acts as housemaid to the French doctor, Caius.

[00:10:03] Mistress Quickly: The French doctor, my master, I may call him my master, look you, for I keep his house, and I wash, wring, brew, bake, scour, dress meat and drink, make the beds, and do all myself.

[00:10:16] Anjna: Quickly is a manifestation of the doctor's middling status because she does his washing and his wringing for him. It's telling that in Hampton Court Palace, the only women employed to work there worked with the laundry. Women employed to clean clothes were known as washerwomen. Despite being essential to the running of a respectable household, in social terms, they were incredibly lowly. Nic explains why.

[00:10:46] Nic: You would have to have bare arms to be able to do the washing. Showing bare arms in society means that you really are the lowest of the low.

[00:10:54] Anjna: In order for the middling and upper sorts to sport clean linen and follow the rules, washerwomen had, in a perverse sense, to do the opposite. They had to get dirty and flout the social niceties.

The volume of linen one accumulated for washing was directly linked to status. The more you can afford to wash, the more you can own and wear. There's a fun reference to this in Henry IV Part 2 when Prince Hal jokes with his companion Poins about the latter's bad underwear habits.

[00:11:28] Prince Hal: What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name, to know thy face tomorrow, or to take note how many pair of stockings thou hast. With these and those that were thy peach-colored ones. Or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, one for superfluity and another for use, but that the tennis-court keeper knows better than I, for it is a low ebb of linen with thee when thou keepest not racket there.

[00:11:58] Anjna: Hal is essentially mocking Poins for having few undergarments. That's two pairs of stockings and two shirts. He jokes that if Poins doesn't show up for tennis matches, it's probably because he's run out of underwear. I love the expression, low ebb linen. We should all adopt this. Hal's little dig at Poins reminds the audience that he is a prince with access to endless fabrics and linens, not to mention the leisure time to keep changing. There is, of course, another theory, which is that actually, Poins is wealthy. Here's Sara Read.

[00:12:35] Sara: One of the ways that they demonstrated that was how infrequently you could have a wash day. If you had so much linen it could pile up for a month or longer, that showed how rich you were. Whereas, if you were always forever having to wash your shift because you owned two and you were wash and wear, then you weren't wealthy.

[00:12:55] Anjna: From this perspective, Poins actually has plenty of linen, which is why he's currently in 'low ebb' because he's deliberately allowed it to pile up to demonstrate his wealth.

Being wealthy didn't necessarily preclude one from having foul linen. In Shakespeare's late romance, Cymbeline, the foolish courtier, Cloten, is introduced to the audience with the following lines.

[00:13:23] Cloten: Sir, I would advise you to shift a shirt. The violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice. Where air comes out, air comes in. There's none abroad so wholesome as that you vent.

[00:13:42] Anjna: In short, Cloten reeks of sweat from all his activity. His attendant lord advises him to shift a shirt, basically to put on clean linen, something, incidentally, that he refuses to do. I like to imagine this scene being performed really comically with Cloten wafting around while his attendants inch further and further away from him.

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, there's at least a scene and a half dedicated to the adventures of a laundry basket, into which the hapless knight, Sir John Falstaff, is comically bundled and subsequently tossed into the river with all the foul linen.

[00:14:22] Sir John Falstaff: It was a miracle to escape suffocation, and in the height of this bath, when I was more than half stewed in grease like a Dutch dish to be thrown into the Thames, and cooled glowing hot in that surged like a horseshoe. Think of that. Hissing hot. Think of that, Master Brooke.

[00:14:48] Anjna: Falstaff is mortified by the heat and stench from the greasy laundry, and then frozen by the sudden and unexpected immersion into the river. As we remember from the previous episode, this extreme change in temperature is considered very bad for the health. The laundry episode in The Merry Wives is a helpful reminder that access to water was vital for cleaning clothing for obvious reasons. A proper water source like the Thames was also very handy for wincing away that gritty soap.

[00:15:22] Nic: Lye soap is a very alkaline product made from sodium hydroxide. You find sodium hydroxide in animal fats, but you also find it in ashes. You often find that soaps are made of animal fat and mixed with the ashes, which allows the chemical reaction to produce soap.

Again, there's a pecking order with soaps. Some soaps are very basic and almost black in color. Then you go up through the range where they become gray, or you then end up with really fine white soaps, if you can afford it, but because they are really abrasive soaps and quite hard chemical saps, when you've done the washing, you've got to do an awful lot of rinsing. Actually, the Thames is a great place for that.

[00:16:03] Anjna: Once linen was washed, it had to be dried.

[00:16:07] Nic: Because nobody had actually got round at this point to inventing linen lines as we know them today, usually, they're laid out on beautiful nice clean lawns to dry in the sunshine. You use your hedgerows and your bushes outside to drape your linen over because it will dry.

[00:16:26] Anjna: The drying of linen on hedges and lawns came with its hazards. Our naughty Knight, John Falstaff, is put in command of a vagabond, Danny in Henry IV Part Two, who was so poor they can't afford linen.

[00:16:41] John Falstaff: There's but a shirt and a half in all my company and the half shirt is two napkins tacked together and thrown over the shoulders like a Harold's coat without sleeves, and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host at St Alban's, or the red nose innkeeper of Daventry, but that's all one. Pale fine linen enough on every hedge.

[00:17:05] Anjna: This is a reference of the naughty practice of stealing linen off hedges, which is the equivalent of pinching kNicers from washing lines. Shakespeare's plays are riddled with references to foul linen, invariably a signifier of aberrant character or behavior. For instance, Falstaff's army is described as back-bitten with marvelous foul linen. They are, one assumes, not to be trusted. The Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, shocks Ophelia by visiting her closet with a pale shirt on show through his unlaced doublet, and more worryingly, his stockings fouled and ungartered.

As well as unsavoriness of soul and body, and in Hamlet's case, mind, foul linen was a sign of discourtesy, a selfishness if you will, because cleaning one's clothes meant reducing the potential to endanger others through exposure to bad airs or contagions. Our early modern ancestors got terribly exercised about bad air or miasma because it was thought to be a sign of disease.

Let's take a moment to consider how ill savers were handled in the early modern period. This is Lorna Giltrow-Shaw, a doctoral student at the Shakespeare Institute.

[00:18:32] Lorna Giltrow-Shaw: If there was a bad smell, it meant that the air is polluted. This could be caused by a variety of things such as rotting waste in the streets, spoilt food, cesspits, and even bad breath. Whenever you smelt an awful smell, it could indicate plague.

[00:18:48] Anjna: In order to counteract bad smells, people carried around things called pomanders. These were dispensers, usually round, with small holes that contained a scented sponge or herbs that would sweeten the air around the wearer. This is Dr. Hannah Lilley.

[00:19:06] Dr. Hannah Lilley: There were quite a few of these beautifully elaborate gold pomanders and silver pomanders that survived within a museum context. One was even founded by a mud locker a few years ago along the banks of the River Thames and is now in the British Museum. It's gold, and it's adorned with pearls.

There are portraits from the 16th and 17th centuries from across Europe where people are wearing pomanders as an aesthetic addition to someone's dress. It very much would signal to the people around the wearer that they were of extremely high status.

[00:19:45] Anjna: If you couldn't afford a fancy gold or silver pomander, you'd probably have one made from wood such as the boxwood one found on the Mary Rose Ship amongst one of the archer's belongings.

[00:19:58] Hannah: It's interesting that this Mary Rose example, boxwood one, is one of the only ones to survive from the Mary Rose. The wearer has still tried to pimp it up a bit, and accessorize it because they've added this silk string to it in order to attach it to their scabbard. Even then, you can see how someone of middling status might elevate an object to accessorize it in order to make it a bit more interesting.

[00:20:26] Anjna: Given that pomanders were so pervasive, it stands to reason that early modern England was a smelly place. This is partly due to the ways in which waste was accumulated. Fit a time for that in the next episode.

Regardless of which sorts our English ancestors fell into, it's pretty certain that they purchased or inherited linen under garments, depending on their resources, and that they had fairly high standards about keeping these bits of linen neat and tidy.

Not everyone had access to clean water, and even fewer people had the time to scrub and wash and dry, so having clean linen, regardless of sort, was the most obvious way of signaling your sense of self-worth, integrity, and the resource that you had available to support your undergarment habits. Remember to scrub your scummy soap, pimp those pomanders, and never get into low ebb linen day.

That's all for this episode of Shakespeare's Pants. Tune in next time for everyone's favorite subject: going to the loo in early modern England!

In this episode, you heard from Dr. Sara Read, Amie Bolissian, Nic Fulcher, Lorna Giltrow-Shaw, Dr. Hannah Lilley, and me, Dr. Anjna Chouhan. You also heard the voices of Catherine Forrester, Jonathan McGarrity and Richard Bunn. Thank you for listening to Shakespeare's Pants. Adieu.

[00:22:02] Speaker 2: Shakespeare's Pants.

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