麻豆约拍

Disguise and Deception: A Pedlar's Trunk

When As You Like It was first performed, a boy actor got dressed up as a girl to play Rosalind, the romantic lead. In the course of the play Rosalind then pretends to be a boy, who then goes on to impersonate a girl. By the time of the epilogue, we no longer know who this character is and he (or should I say she?) knows it too:

Rosalind: If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of

you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that

liked me, and breaths that I defied not; and, I am sure,

as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet

breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy,

bid me farewell.'

(As You Like It, 5.4.211-16)

And with that she (or do I mean he?) ends the play. You can see why puritan critics of the theatre found the whole enterprise deeply subversive and alarming and even today the Elizabethan theatre can sometimes seem a cross between high-brow panto and a trans-gender event for Gay Pride.

At the heart of it all is disguise - disguise as a theatre convention at a time when women were not allowed to perform on stage, but disguise also as an important element of the plots themselves. Edgar, banished by the bad sisters in King Lear, finds that disguise as a beggar is the only way to preserve his life. Rosalind, to escape danger when she and her friend Celia flee to the woods, dresses up not just as a bloke, but as a bloke's bloke. To change identities like this, to set up the moment when the truth is revealed, dressing up is key. For a boy actor to become squeaking Cleopatra required merely his skill and the accoutrements of femininity: dresses and gowns, bonnets and shoes. That was all he needed to suspend our disbelief.

The focus of this programme is an object with disguise and trickery in its very nature. It promises happy endings and sudden reveals, but it also suggests darker tones of potential tragedy. On the surface it is solid and straightforward, it's an Elizabethan trunk of clothes and I'm looking at it in a house deep in the Lancashire countryside. From the outside it looks pretty robust, it's about the size of the bag you might use to carry cricket kit around in and when I try to lift it, it feels pretty heavy. It is made of wood, it looks like pine, and it's been covered with animal hide, probably pony, to keep the water out. When I lift the lid (which I am going to do quite delicately) I can see that the inside is jam-packed with pieces of fabric: there is linen, straightforward white linen, there is embroidered linen, silk, there's what look like damasks and they're brown, red, gold, green, white, some of them very heavily worked, and as well as the fabrics I can see that there is a ring and some beads, and on top of everything is a very fetching pink silk-lined bonnet. These, you might imagine, are the sort of things that any Elizabethan housewife might want to buy. On the outside of the trunk are leather loops, so clearly this box was carried around on a horse. It seems that what I'm looking at is a pedlar's trunk.

Pedlars were welcome arrivals to many people in Shakespeare's England, especially of course to women for whom they principally catered, with their buttons and thread, bows and brocade. In a world where practically all clothes were home-made, a little piece of damask or lace made a lot of difference. Margaret Spufford has uncovered much of what we now know about Elizabethan pedlars:

'The pedlar is a very elusive figure indeed, not only because he is peripatetic, but he is literally, or she, because there were women pedlars too, lived near the edge of society, the vagrant fringe. They were essentially salesmen, they were the travelling legs of the markets. They circulated very widely and they also circulated their goods very widely. They were travellers on foot, travellers on horseback. So before the village shop is very common, you find these people filling in the gaps.'

Like Shakespeare's Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, many pedlars had a good line in promotional jingles:

Autolycus: Will you buy any tape,

Or lace for your cape,

My dainty duck, my dear-a?

Any silk, any thread,

Any toys for your head,

Of the new'st and fin'st, fin'st wear-a?

(The Winter's Tale, 4.4.313-18)

'Pedlars were also entertainers, very much so.'

Autolycus: Come to the pedlar:

Money's a meddler

That doth utter all men's ware-a.

(The Winter's Tale, 4.4.319-21)

'They often earned their nights lodging, or more, by singing.'

Margaret Spufford again:

'It's an aid to selling, they have to be entertainers to make a living so they sing, they tell stories, they tell the latest news, they're talkers.'

All this talking of course made pedlars figures of suspicion. There were all sorts of people travelling the roads, many just tramps or petty thieves. Shakespeare's Autolycus, whose song we heard earlier, is a typically tricky character from this netherworld of travellers and 'rag and bone' men. When he boasts that he is a 'snapper-up of unconsider'd trifles', what he really means is that he steals sheets from the washing line in one town, to sell them on at the next.

I suppose you could say that pedlars were a kind of Elizabethan twitterfeed, and their relationship to the truth was just as uncertain. Travelling about the country as they did, pedlars were excellent sources of news, rumour, gossip and sedition. In 1604 it was said of the loose tongued Alice Bennet of Oxfordshire that she 'goeth abroad to sell sope and candels from towne to towne to get her lyving, and she useth to carrie tales between neighboures'. Like Shakespeare's characters that wander in disguise it was hard to tell just who a pedlar actually might be, and whether goods as innocent as linen and lace might not mask more covert activities.

After Simon Forman saw The Winter's Tale in 1611, he wrote down a list of Autolycus' tricks and concluded 'Beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouss.' Clearly the people you were likely to meet on the road, might not be what they seemed.

Pedlars could be pretty dodgy and so could their trunks, and I've not really been playing fair because the linen, silk and damask in this pedlar's trunk are not bits of material waiting to be transformed into smart clothes for a young Elizabethan woman, they've already been made up - they are the illegal vestments of a disguised Roman Catholic priest.

This pedlar's trunk is now in the collection of Stonyhurst, the Jesuit school in Lancashire, and the curator, Jan Graffius, is explaining to me what we've got here and what's going on:

J Graffius: These are stoles that the priest would wear around his neck, which is a sign of his learning and authority, and then underneath are these rather long decorated braids, these are the girdle that he'd tie around his waist.

N MacGregor: We know that in Shakespeare's England fabrics like this, damasks and silks, were extraordinarily expensive. So where has this material come from?

J Graffius: I think what we have here is a collection of ladies Sunday dresses which pious Catholic ladies have turned into vestments for priests. So this particularly beautiful stole, a lovely gold colour with pink flowers embroidered, you can see how it is pieced and patched from perhaps a garment, perhaps a jacket, cut into tiny bits, no bit wasted and then sewn together. The Catholic faith in England was largely kept alive by women. Women very brave and very resourceful and for ladies to sit and sew was not unusual, whereas you couldn't go out to a shop or supplier and buy these things, they were forbidden.

N MacGregor: And then the beads here then, which I didn't understand before, are actually rosary beads then, I imagine?

J Graffius: They are. This is a disguised rosary because it was obviously illegal to say the rosary and if you look at it carefully, there are the ten small beads here for saying the Hail Mary's and then the larger beads for the Our Father and the Glory Be.

N MacGregor: So we have got the vestments for the priest, the rosary. Now there is something that looks like a slate with wood around it, what is that?

J Graffius: This is an altar stone. Normally in a church every altar has a stone and set into it are relics, the relic of a martyr and the priest needs this to say mass because the consecration of the bread and the wine takes place on top of the altar stone. Catholic priests in those days didn't have churches so they had to carry the altar stone around with them, and also, wrapped in oil cloth, it could be a book, a wallet or something. It didn't necessarily shout what it was.

N Macgregor: But in fact it is a portable church.

J Graffius: It is a portable church yes, with a portable martyr with it.

N MacGregor: And then for the central ceremony of the mass we've got this.

J Graffius: What you have here is a pewter drinking cup, a chalice, but in fact this is just an ordinary Elizabethan cup you would find these in houses and inns and so on. What is unusual is that there is what looks like a little drinks coaster, made out of pewter. But this is a paten and it sits on top of the chalice. It is to cover the wine during the consecration to preserve the mystery.

N Macgregor: So there is everything in this box required for a priest to say mass?

J Graffius: Everything the priest would need, yes, because he couldn't be sure, going from Catholic house to Catholic house, that they would have anything there that he would need, so he would have to take it with him.

Disguise and dissembling were unavoidable for Catholic priests in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Seen as emissaries of the pope and as supporters of the arch enemy, Spain, they were prohibited from even coming to England, let alone being active as priests. In order to minister to the lay people in England who persisted in Catholic worship, they had to come in secret and risk death.

Priests disguised as itinerant salesmen would have greater freedom to travel the country unsuspected. So a chest like ours looks as if it might well have been used by a priest travelling in the guise of a respectable pedlar. What appeared to be fabrics and furbelows, beads and an everyday cup, could easily be mistaken for legitimate goods.

Shakespeare's audience were well aware of this closet religious practice. Some scholars have suggested that some of his own immediate family were secretly Catholic. But everyone would recognise the pattern of disguise and fear. Edgar in King Lear is in flight because if he's caught, he'll be killed:

Edgar: I heard myself proclaimed,

And by the happy hollow of a tree

Escaped the hunt. No port is free, no place

That guard and most unusual vigilance

Does not attend my taking.

(King Lear 2.3.1-5)

He disguises himself as a wandering beggar:

Edgar: Whiles I may 'scape

I will preserve myself; and am bethought

To take the basest and most poorest shape

That ever penury, in contempt of man,

Brought near to beast. My face I'll grime with filth,

Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots,

And with presented nakedness outface

The winds and persecutions of the sky.

(King Lear 2.3.5-12)

The stakes are high. Persecuted, travelling under a false identity in order to do good to his blinded Father, Edgar is a striking parallel of an outlaw Catholic priest, disguised and on the run.

The unmasking of disguise in Shakespeare's plays is usually a cause for delight: Viola is reunited with her brother Sebastian, Portia and Nerissa are restored to their astonished husbands, Rosalind at last revealed to her lover Orlando.

If you were a Roman Catholic in England around 1600 and your pedlar turned out to be a priest, it must have been a moment of similar intense rejoicing. Thanks to a trunk like this one what you believed could now be celebrated in the ritual of the mass that was at the heart of your faith - forbidden by law, but now miraculously possible. In your own home, a room could become a church, where family and friends could gather in a rare forbidden communion.

In the next programme we are looking at another group of people that many Elizabethans viewed with suspicion, not Roman Catholics this time, but what Shakespeare in Henry V called 'the weasel Scot'. We'll be in Edinburgh looking at flags.

Shakespeare quotations are taken from:

As You Like It (London: Penguin, 2005). ISBN-13: 978-0-141-01227-8

The Winter's Tale (London: Penguin, 2005). ISBN-13: 978-0-141-01389-3

King Lear (London: Penguin, 2005). ISBN-13: 978-0-14-101229-2