For he is most careful to tell us the dress and appearance of eachcharacter.'Racine abhorre la realite,'says Auguste Vacqueriesomewhere;'il ne daigne pas s'occuper de son costume.Si l'ons'en rapportait aux indications du poete,Agamemnon serait vetud'un sceptre et Achille d'une epee.'But with Shakespeare it isvery different.He gives us directions about the costumes ofPerdita,Florizel,Autolycus,the Witches in MACBETH,and theapothecary in ROMEO AND JULIET,several elaborate descriptions ofhis fat knight,and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb inwhich Petruchio is to be married.Rosalind,he tells us,is tall,and is to carry a spear and a little dagger;Celia is smaller,andis to paint her face brown so as to look sunburnt.The childrenwho play at fairies in Windsor Forest are to be dressed in whiteand green -a compliment,by the way,to Queen Elizabeth,whosefavourite colours they were -and in white,with green garlands andgilded vizors,the angels are to come to Katherine in Kimbolton.
Bottom is in homespun,Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by hiswearing an Athenian dress,and Launce has holes in his boots.TheDuchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her husband inmourning beside her.The motley of the Fool,the scarlet of theCardinal,and the French lilies broidered on the English coats,areall made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue.We know thepatterns on the Dauphin's armour and the Pucelle's sword,the creston Warwick's helmet and the colour of Bardolph's nose.Portia hasgolden hair,Phoebe is black-haired,Orlando has chestnut curls,and Sir Andrew Aguecheek's hair hangs like flax on a distaff,andwon't curl at all.Some of the characters are stout,some lean,some straight,some hunchbacked,some fair,some dark,and some areto blacken their faces.Lear has a white beard,Hamlet's father agrizzled,and Benedick is to shave his in the course of the play.
Indeed,on the subject of stage beards Shakespeare is quiteelaborate;tells us of the many different colours in use,and givesa hint to actors always to see that their own are properly tied on.
There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw hats,and of rustics inhairy coats like satyrs;a masque of Amazons,a masque of Russians,and a classical masque;several immortal scenes over a weaver in anass's head,a riot over the colour of a coat which it takes theLord Mayor of London to quell,and a scene between an infuriatedhusband and his wife's milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.
As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress,and theaphorisms he makes on it,his hits at the costume of his age,particularly at the ridiculous size of the ladies'bonnets,and themany descriptions of the MUNDUS MULIEBRIS,from the long ofAutolycus in the WINTER'S TALE down to the account of the Duchessof Milan's gown in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING,they are far toonumerous to quote;though it may be worth while to remind peoplethat the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to be found inLear's scene with Edgar -a passage which has the advantage ofbrevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthingmetaphysics of SARTOR RESARTUS.But I think that from what I havealready said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very muchinterested in costume.I do not mean in that shallow sense bywhich it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds anddaffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethanage;but that he saw that costume could be made at once impressiveof a certain effect on the audience and expressive of certain typesof character,and is one of the essential factors of the meanswhich a true illusionist has at his disposal.Indeed to him thedeformed figure of Richard was of as much value as Juliet'sloveliness;he sets the serge of the radical beside the silks ofthe lord,and sees the stage effects to be got from each:he hasas much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel,in rags as he has incloth of gold,and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.
The difficulty Ducis felt about translating OTHELLO in consequenceof the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief,and his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moorreiterate 'Le bandeau!le bandeau!'may be taken as an example ofthe difference between LA TRAGEDIE PHILOSOPHIQUE and the drama ofreal life;and the introduction for the first time of the wordMOUCHOIR at the Theatre Francais was an era in that romantic-realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and M.Zola theENFANT TERRIBLE,just as the classicism of the earlier part of thecentury was emphasised by Talma's refusal to play Greek heroes anylonger in a powdered periwig -one of the many instances,by theway,of that desire for archaeological accuracy in dress which hasdistinguished the great actors of our age.
In criticising the importance given to money in LA COMEDIE HUMAINE,Theophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a newhero in fiction,LE HEROS METALLIQUE.Of Shakespeare it may besaid he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets,andthat a climax may depend on a crinoline.
