The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (23 page)

Shakespeare makes another rather specialist reference to head-tires just a year later. In
Much Ado about Nothing
, a new tire is part of Hero’s wedding get-up, over which her maidservant Margaret casts a critical eye: ‘I like this new tire within excellently, if the hair were a thought browner’ (3.4.12-13). Margaret is saying, pickily, that she would prefer this newly purchased tire if the hair of the headpiece were a touch darker. It does not quite match Hero’s own dark hair, and will therefore be discernible as false, the desired effect of the tire being an indistinguishable match.

The appearance of ‘Marie Mountjoy, Tyrewoman’ in the household accounts of Queen Anne in 1604 may well be a result of her contact with two of the leading figures in the King’s Men - Shakespeare, who was her lodger in that year, and John Heminges, who lived close by and whose managerial role within the company may include a specific involvement in the purchasing of costume.

It is well known that Queen Anne was a devotee of court masques and spectacles in which, in the manner of the French
cour de ballet
, she and her female favourites were the principal participants. Perhaps Marie was called on to provide headwear and hairdressing for these royal entertainments. We have glimpses elsewhere of specialist female head-dressers involved in shows put on at court, including this rather piquant entry -

[For] the hyer of heares for headdes and rewards, to the French woman for her paynes and her Dawghters paynes that went to Richmond & there attended upon Mr Hunnyes his Children [the Children of the Chapel Royal, directed by William Hunnis] & dressed theire heads &c, when they played before Her Majesty.
³⁸

This was a generation ago - the entry is from the Revels accounts for 1573-4 - but introduces an interesting parallel: ‘the Frenchwoman and her daughter’. What more natural than that Marie Mountjoy, attending on the Queen and other ladies of rank, should be accompanied and assisted by her daughter Mary?

A string of sumptuous, state-of-the-art masques are associated with Queen Anne, of which the first two fall within the period of Marie’s own brief reign as royal tiremaker. The earliest was Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’s
Masque of Blacknesse
, commissioned by Anne in 1605, but little documentation remains of this show. There is a much fuller record, both documentary and pictorial, of the
Hymenaei
, performed on 5 January 1606, probably in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, to celebrate the ill-fated wedding of the 3rd Earl of Essex to Frances Howard (later annulled on the grounds of the Earl’s sexual incapacity). It was another collaboration between Jonson and Inigo Jones, the latter providing the ‘design and act’; the music was by Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger, and choreography by Thomas Giles.
³⁹

Much of the dialogue of
Hymenaei
was delivered by actors, but the climax was a splendid tableau in which Juno, goddess of marriage, probably played by Queen Anne herself, appeared among clouds on the upper part of the stage, flanked by two groups of four ladies representing her ‘Powers’. One of these ladies was Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, the daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, and by good fortune her accounts for the period survive. They show that she paid out more than £100 for the privilege of appearing in
Hymenaei
. A few days before the performance she paid £80 ‘to Mr Bethall the gentleman huisher [usher] for the maske’, and to this general contribution can be added the following costs for her costume:

⁴⁰
This ‘tyre woman’ fulfils both types of role suggested by the term. The chief item she provides is a piece of headgear - the lavish ‘coronet’ worth £6 - but she also supplies more general costume requirements: a ruff, silk stockings, shoes. The performers would probably have had access to royal suppliers for their costumes, so this unnamed tirewoman may be Marie Mountjoy, the only tirewoman named in Queen Anne’s accounts of this period.

Three full-length portraits, one of them attributed to John de Critz the elder, show ladies in masque costume from this show. One now at Woburn Abbey (see Plate 21) is identified in a later inscription as Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford. Another is at Berkeley Castle, probably in connection with Elizabeth, Lady Berkeley - the daughter of Lord Hunsdon - who was also one of the performers in
Hymenaei
. There is an element of the production-line in portraits like this, and they may not be very exact likenesses. They commemorate an occasion, the portraitist a kind of early version of the society photographer. The costume seen in the paintings accords with Jonson’s directions for the final scene of the masque - the ‘full gathered’ skirt ‘of carnation striped with silver’, and ‘beneath that another flowing garment of watchet [sky blue] cloth of silver laced with blue’ - though there are some divergences of detail in the paintings, as there probably were in the performances.
⁴¹

Jonson’s costume notes are specific about the head-tires worn by the ‘Powers’ of Juno, and here too the portraits concur. Their hair is ‘carelessly bound under the circle of a rare and rich coronet’ - £6 worth of coronet, in fact, as we know from the Countess of Rutland’s accounts - ‘adorned with all variety and choice of jewels, from the top of which flowed a transparent veil down to the ground, whose verge returning up, was fastened to either side in most sprightly manner’. This headwear caught the eye of a member of the audience, John Pory, who wrote in a letter: ‘The women had every one a white plume of the richest heron’s feathers, and were so rich in jewels upon their heads as was most glorious.’
⁴²
The exuberant constructions we see in these portraits would certainly merit Falstaff’s commendation as ‘tires-valiant’. They express to the full this theatrical aspect of the tiremaker’s trade.

16

In the workshop

T
hat the Mountjoys supplied headgear to Shakespeare’s theatre company is plausible, and may be the first connection between them. But the certain connection between them is that Shakespeare had rooms above their workshop, so it is the manufacturing of tires, the daily business of tiremaking, which impinges on him.

We have some fragmentary details about the practicalities of the Mountjoy workshop. In the preamble to litigation with his son-in-law Mountjoy mentions that he ‘did buy into the shop . . . silvered wire and other commodities concerning their trade to the value of £10 or thereabouts’. He is referring to the period when he and Belott were working together as partners (he mentions it because Belott should have contributed some of the money but did not). This was a specific period of about six months (‘half a yeare’) during 1606-7, so we might suggest outgoings of about £20 per annum on these tiremaking ‘commodities’ or materials.
⁴³
The ‘silvered wire’ would be used to make the framework of the head-tire - ‘Where is my wyer?’ asks Lady Rimelaine as she prepares her tire - and would also be connected with the making of gold and silver thread, of which more below.

We also know of another purchase, or series of purchases, for in the will of one Peter Courtois - by the sound of him a fellow-Frenchman - it is recorded that ‘Mr Mungeoy’ owed him £2 10s 11d for ‘purled work’. The will is from 1603. Courtois, who had his business in the Blackfriars, is described as a ‘bandmaker’ - in other words a maker of embroidered bands for hats, collars, cuffs, etc. The ‘purled work’ he supplied to Mountjoy is ‘thread or cord made of twisted gold or silver wire, and used for bordering and embroidering’ (
OED
).
⁴⁴

Another commodity Mountjoy bought into the workshop (because no craftsman could actually make it) was human hair. By tradition this was supplied from corpses. Such is the implication in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 68 -

The golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away
To live a second life on second head . . .

- and in
The Merchant of Venice
, where the ‘golden locks’ of a wig are described as ‘the dowry of a second head, / The skull that bred them in the sepulchre’. It would be an exaggeration to say that all false hair was shorn from the skulls of the dead, but this is the association. The only other source is the heads of the living, which is less sinister but has an overtone of desperation. Horse-hair was also used, but not quite
de rigueur
; hemp even less so. Human hair was preferred by those who could afford it, as it is today - according to her hairdresser, Victoria Beckham spends around £6,000 a year on hair extensions, using ‘real hair’ from Poland, Russia and India.
⁴⁵

The silvered wire and the purled work are recorded purchases, but there is good evidence that these or related materials were also made in the workshop. One might anyway suppose so: this was a highly competitive market, and buying in expensive finished materials added further pressure to already tight profit margins. Better to make your own, where possible: ‘vertical integration’.

Among the meagre items of ‘houshould stuffe’ which Mountjoy grudgingly gave to Stephen and Mary Belott in 1605 are the following work-related items:

An old drawing table
Two old joined stools
One wainscot cupboard

One twisting wheel of wood
Two pair of little scissors
One old trunk and a like old trunk
One bobbin box

Leaving aside the cupboard and trunks we have here a brief synopsis of the tiremaker’s equipment.

The ‘drawing table’ looks at first glance like a table on which to do designs and templates for tires - drawing in the sense of draughtsmanship - but it is more likely to be a workbench for wire-drawing, a process which involved pulling rods of gilded silver, heated or ‘annealed’ for ductility, through dies of decreasing gauge until the required thinness was reached.
⁴⁶
The tiremaker would not deal in the earlier stages of the process, which required equipment akin to the blacksmith’s, but in more subtle renderings of fine-gauged wire. There are at least two grades used in a head-tire - the stiffer wire which forms the framework of the arrangement; and a much finer wire used for the gold and silver thread which decorates the tire. This wire-drawing activity may suggest that the workshop also produced other wired structures used in the fashion trade, such as the ‘supporters’ or ‘underproppers’ which held up heavily starched ruffs, collars, rebatos and so on. These would be made of much the same gauge of wire as the head-tire.

The wooden ‘twisting wheel’ donated to the fledgling tiremakers was a small spinning-wheel used for twisting or twining thin filaments of yarn to make thread. By far the most common application was silk-twisting. Thus a handbook of 1688 defines a twisting wheel as ‘an engine wherewith 2, 3 or more silk threads are twisted or turned all together into one entire double thread’.
⁴⁷
The slender filaments of silk to be twisted into thread were known as ‘sleaves’. They were drawn out, prior to the spinning, from a bundle of coarse raw silk called ‘sleave silk’ or ‘sley silk’ (nowadays more likely be called ‘silk floss’). In 1588 an ounce of ‘slaye sylke’ cost 8d.
⁴⁸
A number of silk-twisters from Picardie are recorded in the 1593 Return of Strangers: we might think of silk-twisting as a Picard craft or industry which Mountjoy learned in his youth, and which he later applied in the more specialist area of tiremaking.

The wheel was also used for making gold or silver thread, which consists of a thin strip of flattened gold or silver, ‘wrapped or laid over a thread of silk by twisting it with a wheel’.
⁴⁹
(‘Gold’ in this context is almost always gilded silver.) These gold or silver threads could in turn be plaited into gold or silver ‘twist’, which is corded like a miniature rope. The ‘purled work’ purchased from Mr Courtois was a kind of twist; the gold twist best known today is the braiding on the sleeves of naval officers’ and airline pilots’ uniforms. The twisting wheel controls the tension, which must be got absolutely right. If it is too slack the cord does not hold together; if it is too tight the cord kinks.

All three products of the twisting wheel - silk thread, gold and silver thread and gold and silver twist - were used in the creation of head-tires.

An integral part of the twisting wheel was the bobbin on to which the intertwined thread or twist was wound. That ‘bobbin box’ donated to the newly-weds presumably contained a set of bobbins of various sizes. They were at this time wooden, but had originally been made of bone - whence ‘bone lace’, produced by spinning as distinct from needlework. Cotgrave’s 1612 dictionary associates bobbins with gold and silver threadmaking: he defines French
bobine
as ‘a quill for a spinning-wheel; also a skane or hank of gold or silver thread’.