Rosemary Hill

Hello, and welcome back to London Revisited, a close reading series from the London Review of Books.

I'm Rosemary Hill, and I'm delighted to be joined again by Vanessa Harding, Professor Emerita of London History at Birkbeck.

Hello, Vanessa.

Hello, Rosemary.

We've got to London in the 1590s, one of the most celebrated, perhaps the most familiar periods in its history.

This is the London of theatres and particularly, of course, the London of Shakespeare.

Of a thriving print culture, it's a city reshaped by the Reformation and spreading alarmingly, for some people,

into the surrounding countryside.

Then it's an extraordinary moment and we're going to start by going to Shakespeare's Globe in Southwark in 1599 in the company of a Swiss tourist called Thomas Plater.

Not only is it very obvious that Thomas Plater was interested in absolutely everything except the play,

So those of us who fantasize about visiting Shakespeare's London and imagining it would be wonderful to hear and see these plays need to be aware that there were then, as there are now, people who just eat nuts and look around at other people.

But what we might also notice is that very interesting detail right at the end.

where he talks about the actor's costumes, these really rather grand clothes.

making do and mending up to a point.

Also, presumably, if you were somebody's lady-in-waiting or chief valet and you inherited an incredibly elaborate set of doublet and hose or something, you wouldn't feel very comfortable about wearing them, even though we didn't actually have sumptuary laws.

It would have been regarded as, well, odd.

And so selling them on to a theatrical company

would have been a good idea.

But the other thing which becomes very clear from other people's accounts as well of the theatre at this date, and indeed all the way up to the 19th century, is that historical costume wasn't a thing.

So Thomas Plater is seeing Julius Caesar in a doublet and hose, and everyone is dressed in 1590s costume.