The Costume Connection
A loan of £10 to buy women’s gowns.
On 12th September 1599, Philip Henslowe made a note in his diary that he had loaned the sum of £10 to ‘Jewbey and thomas towne’. The money was to be used to ‘bye women gownes for page of plemoth’.
The sum that Henslowe paid for these costumes was more than Dekker and Jonson got paid for writing the play. It was intriguing. Why were women’s gowns so important? Were they going to illustrate Eulalia’s change in wealth and status when she became Master Page’s wife? Or were they meant to reveal something else about her?
The sumptuary laws were still in place in England at the time. These laws attempted to dictate which fabrics and garments different classes were allowed to wear. People were expected to dress according to their station. The gap in wealth between the characters of Eulalia and her maid would have been made clear by the costumes each of them wore onstage.
When we read that diary entry of Henslowe’s, we knew that the Page of Plymouth project would have a strong theme running through it relating to fashion and costume.
A running thread: from Story Ruffs to The Wardrobe of Memory.
Fashion and costume connections kept popping up throughout the project. Thomas Deloney, the writer of the ballads, was himself a silk-weaver by trade. Philip Henslowe became a member of the Dyers’ Company and had also been involved in the business of starch-making. Even the murder weapon itself in the Page of Plymouth story, according to pamphlet of 1591, was Master Page’s own kerchief.
The project began with Story Ruffs, a family ruff-making workshop at The Box. Marie Dunaway of Arts University Plymouth and some of her BA Costume Production students brought some of their handmade Tudor costumes and ruffs along to provide inspiration. They showed us how to make our own version of the Elizabethan ruff. Participants tried on costumes and made their own paper ruffs, experimenting with the use of words, colour and embellishment.
Later in the project, Claire Wilcox, Professor in Fashion Curation at University of the Arts London and former Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum gave a talk and workshop at Arts University Plymouth. Her Story: fashion and historicism in the work of Vivienne Westwood discussed how Westwood used her knowledge for fashion history in her work. Westwood had looked at Tudor portraiture and garments in the V&A archive to inform her collection Cut, Slash & Pull. The collection featured the ‘slashing’ technique popular in the Tudor period. Slashing (or ‘pinking’) could transform the look of a piece by making decorative slashes in the outer garment to reveal the contrasting fabric underneath.
In her writing workshop The wardrobe of memory: telling life stories through clothes Claire encouraged participants to bring in a garment, textile or accessory that was special to us. We explored the stories that can be hidden in these and the time, place, people and experience they might bring into focus.
Eulalia’s story told in text and textile
Aware that the voices of non-aristocratic women of the period are often harder to find in the historic records, we were particularly interested to take a look at the story through a female lens.
BA Costume Production students at Arts University Plymouth and course leader Marie Dunaway set to work on creating costumes that would tell Eulalia’s story. After an introduction to Page of Plymouth from project Dramaturg and Producer David Prescott, they embarked on their own research into Elizabethan material culture. They also thought about Eulalia’s interior life, exploring what this young woman of the 1590s may have been feeling.
Meanwhile, at The Box, Women Speak Volumes South West were putting Eulalia’s story into words. The writing group had begun life in Plymouth, through workshops exploring and developing the creative voices of older women (over the age of 41, based on half the average life expectancy of a woman in the UK). Poet and Page of Plymouth writer-in-residence Fiona Benson ran a series of creative writing workshops with the group. Combining historic source material with creative prompts, she encouraged the writers to explore the story and its characters step by step, in five acts.
Fiona shared some of the language around Tudor clothes and the sumptuary laws with the writers, who imagined what their characters were wearing – and what they wanted to be wearing. They shared some of their early pieces with the BA Costume Production students for inspiration, who in turn shared sketches of their early design ideas. Inspired by the students’ decision to represent Eulalia in three stages of her life, the writers provided three new pieces of writing to accompany them.
Working with David Prescott, the two generations of women came together at The Box for Super Saturday marking International Women’s Day. The students presented the costumes they had designed and made by hand in a living tableau, with Women Speak Volumes providing the accompanying words. These two very different artforms combined to follow Eulalia’s story through distinct phases: before marriage, during marriage, and on the eve of her execution.
