The Taming of “Gentleman” Lucentio: Clothing Control in Early Modern Englandand The Taming of The Shrew

Abstract

A motif of in The Taming of the Shrew serves to function not merely as a comic convention but as a representation of clothing control discourses of Elizabethan England. Tracing out the ways in which such discourses developed in the Tudor and other contemporary sociological works and moral tracts, this paper establishes a perspective in which the conventions and their attempted regulations are seen to have constituted a site of cultural conflict engendered by the social mobility of the period. At one end of the conflict were the governmental reinforcements of regulations and their moral supporters that sought to maintain traditional status distinction, and guard against economic hazards caused by over-spending on luxuries. At the other end emerged the riches, a class of merchant-citizens, with their aspiration to dress above their traditional status and even to purchase the status of gentry. Re-located within this context, the male characters in the Lucentio-Bianca plot, as a group, represent the most active, and problematic, site of social mobility of early modern England; that is, the increasingly flexible boundaries between and gentry. Appellated as Gentleman, Lucentio in particular embodies the upward traces of social mobility: the eldest son of a merchant-citizen ennobled by education and/or inheritance of wealth. Furthermore, dressed in sumptuous apparel apparently above his status, he becomes a transgressor of the Sumptuary Laws and a target of contemporary moral tracts that specifically denounced the youths of gentry and upper citizenry who studied/sojourned in Italy and brought their habit of conspicuous consumption, as well as their learning in Machiavellism, back home. As a whole, the Padua society in the play is represented by its rich citizens and finally characterized by its indulgence in conspicuous consumption. In the midst of social struggle fought between traditional and emergent order of status and corresponding conventions, a contemporary London audience might have found in the riches of Padua a portrait of London merchants and their sons transgressing the traditional social hierarchy and bringing in a new order of the day.