Costume and Disguise

Anna Pruitt

1In The Whore of Babylon, costumes help the viewer understand the shifting identities and allegiances of the players on stage. In order to understand how meaning is transferred from clothing to character, one must understand the role of clothing in the Renaissance. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass write about the power of clothes in the Renaissance: "Clothes [...] take an existing nature and transnature it, turning the virtuous into the vicious [...] the male into the female, the godly into the satanic" (2). Because clothing was so powerful, sumptuary laws regulated the wearing of certain colors, fabrics, and ornaments according to class. For instance, only the queen could wear clothing trimmed in ermine and the color gold. These laws helped to maintain a system where class and social rank could be identified by clothing. As such, clothing worked as a powerful signifier on the Renaissance stage. However, the form of the theater also undermined its own system of signification since costumes were merely "commodities which, in the form of props, took on only temporary meaning during the life of a performance and which could be discarded and replaced" (Jones and Stallybrass 13). Theater underscored the fact that clothing is, after all, transferable. Clothing could signify identity, but it could also easily mislead. Though Dekker initially uses clothing to create a binary between the Babylonians and the Faeries, the system of signification is increasingly complicated throughout the play.

2Early in the play, costumes operate by helping the viewer understand the meaning of the scene. For instance, the play opens with a dumb show in which Truth enters in "sad abiliments; vncrownd: her haire disheueld" (TLN 28-29). After the death procession of the old queen (meant to represent Catholic Mary Tudor), Truth reappears "Crowned (being cloathed in a robe spotted with Starres)" (TLN 37-38). Truth's father Time similarly transforms from a figure "in black, and al his properties [...] of the same Cullor" (TLN 30) to a figure "shifted into light Cullors" (TLN 36). We depend upon the change in clothing to understand the dumb show's meaning: Truth is aligned with Titania (meant to represent Protestant Elizabeth). The message is reinforced by the similarity of Truth's "robe spotted with Starres" to the royal vestments owned by Elizabeth herself. The conflation of the historical figures (the two queens) and the allegorical figures (Truth and Time) point to the beginning of a collapse between myth and history, but at this point the appearance/reality binary is still intact. The Dumb Show instructs us to believe what we see. Truth returns in glorious dress at the same time that Titania begins to rule as queen. If transparent truth and Protestantism are on one side of the binary, then disguise and Catholicism are on the other. But as soon as the play establishes this binary it begins to undermine the opposition through its own reliance on disguise.

3The seductive, theatrical Babylonians use disguise to infiltrate Fairyland and to make turncoats of the less loyal Faerie subjects. The Third King proves apt at the art of disguise. He dresses as a soldier, a scholar, and a courtier to recruit Faeries to turn against Titania. Dressed in the traditional wool hat of a scholar, the Third King approaches Campeius. Campeius initially doubts the link between the Third King's cap and his identity, saying "Oh Sir, I haue seene many heads vnder such wool. That scarce had braines to line it" (TLN 1033-34). However, Campeius is easily swayed to the Babylonion side, prompting the Third King to note "Asses, I see, / In nothing but in trappings, different be" (TLN 1181-82). The Third King succeeds in each of his different disguises, suggesting that the link between appearance and reality is not as stable as it appears in the opening dumb show.

4But if the binary between appearance and reality breaks down, what marks identity? Or, even more threateningly, is it possible that identities can change? In the play, the Third King disguises himself to look like the Fairies in order to convince the fairies of his authenticity and then convert them into Babylonians. In the theater, an Englishman disguises himself as the character of the Third King in order to "fool" the playgoers into believing his performance as a dangerous outsider and sway their allegiance to the Protestant cause in England. Believing his performance would link the playgoers with the turncoat fairies who turn their loyalties to Babylon.

5The comparison between the playgoers and the turncoat Faeries becomes more explicit when considering the fact that the Third King's "disguises" were literally the same clothes worn by the playgoers and their fellow countrymen. The scene can be read as an Englishman dressed like an Englishman who has the identity of a traitor. In the wake of the "homegrown" Gunpowder Plot, this scenario was very real. Arguably the most serious attempt on James's life, the Gunpowder Plot was hatched by English Catholics, not Catholics on the Continent.

6On one hand, Dekker argues that the gullibility of the turncoat Faeries and deceit of the Babylonian/Catholic King are reprehensible. On the other hand, Dekker depends on actors in disguise and the "gullibility" of the audience in order to make his argument. Jean E. Howard remarks that the play "uses antitheatrical polemic in a way that diminishes its force by revealing both the interested nature of its deployment and the instability of the binarisms upon which it depends" (56). Dekker's vilification of the Babylonians depends on the audience's ability and willingness to intuit a moral difference between a character in costume and a character in disguise. Both depend on a simple change in clothing, which has no stable meaning because it can be added and removed. The breaking down of the appearance/reality binary in the play revealed a truly unsettling reality in early seventeenth-century English society: anyone could be a traitor. Clothing and speech could be used to conceal identity just as they could be used to reveal identity. Contrasting clothing as the expression or constitution of identity and clothing as disguise or deceit in The Whore of Babylon reveals that Dekker's play is as much about the dangerously theatrical demands of didacticism as it is about the supposedly stark contrast between Babylon and Fairyland.