| The “preposterous excess” in apparel, declared Philip Stubbes in 1583, was a principal threat to early modern London's social stability. For Stubbes, and conservatives like him, London's poor were turning the world upside down as they flouted the Sumptuary laws and dressed above their station in fashionable clothes they stole or purchased from purveyors of the illegal trade in secondhand clothing. In this society, as literary representations will show, clothes materialized the social hierarchy and its network of mutual dependencies and obligations, and upper-class fashions illegally worn by the common sort revealed that identity was not a stable category with a real, natural referent, but a molding of appearances and a site of social and economic contestation.; To recover a sense of the historical agency of the non-elite women and men who fabricated illegal identities to climb the ladder of success, this dissertation examines various literary representations of their crimes of fashion and identity fabrication. Its chapters are organized to follow the cycle of theft and consumption that structured the illegal trade in secondhand clothing. Chapter One begins with representations of the acts of random pilferers in Henry Gosson's narrative account of clothing thief Elizabeth Abbot's hanging, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, 2 Henry IV, and The Tempest, and Ben Jonson's The New Inn to explore imaginatively the symbolic importance of the bits of finery that commoners sported on London's streets. Chapter Two focuses on Mary Frith, the best known female criminal receiver in London, and pairs the discourse of Frith's arrest record with Middleton and Dekker's play, The Roaring Girl, to argue that in the flesh, Mary Frith was an embarrassment to social authorities; however, because writers put her so completely at their society's disposal, she also functioned as a kind of social resource. Chapter Three pairs pawnbroker Philip Henslowe's business diaries with Thomas Middleton's plays, Michaelmas Term, and Your Five Gallants to explore the intriguing correlation between London's pawnbrokers, its profligate male fashion-plates, and the new urban phenomenon of the gallant rogue, lower-class men who fueled the illegal trade in secondhand clothing as they dressed the part of gentlemen. |
