The First Elizabeth by Carolly Erickson

Author:Carolly Erickson [Erickson, Carolly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction, Élisabeth Ire, Queen of England, reine d'Angleterre, 1533-1603, Elizabeth I, Rois et souverains, Queens, Elisabeth (England, Königin, I.), (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780671417468
Google: uV1nAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: B007R93BYO
Goodreads: 234676
Publisher: Summit Books
Published: 1982-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

Irish red to amber or auburn, any hue was possible, along with the startling, but undeniably trend-setting, shades of purple and orange and speckled yellow.

Women departed less spectacularly at first from the conventions of dress that had prevailed in Queen Mary's reign. The time-honored layering of stiffened farthingale, then petticoats, then kirtle, then gown was preserved, but the bodices became more rigidly shaped—the shape supplied by an interior scaffolding of wood or steel—and sleeves became tight and straight, ending in wrist-ruffs. The farthingale, which could stand alone on its whalebone or cane hoops, ballooned out until in its English version it surpassed its French original, which by law could be no more than four feet wide.

In 1564—a year of deliverance for hundreds of overworked laundrymaids and chamber servants—Mistress Dinghen Vanderplasse came to England and taught the English how to make starch. The huge ruffs that were coming into fashion, made of yards and yards of cambric or lawn, were fragile constructions held out from the face by hundreds of sticks of bone or wood, all carefully put in place one after the other by frustrated servants. They could be worn only once; in order to be re-used ruffs had to be laboriously washed and ironed and folded and re-shaped, the tiny wooden stays inserted afresh. With Mistress Vanderplasse's formal instruction in starching and starch-making the laundry and chamber staff were able to save days of tedious work.

Starched, the great ruffs stood out from the face on their own (or over a wire framework); if treated with care, they could be worn several times at least if freshened with a hot "poking stick" inserted between the folds. Of course, they were still vulnerable. The wearer had to keep away from walls and hangings and other people's ruffs; a slight jostling could disarrange his neckwear fatally. And, of course, he had to avoid candles and torches —and wet weather. Great ruffs, in the rain, were said to "strike sail and flutter like dish-clouts."

Preoccupation with dress and personal adornment, far from being an incidental oddity of life at Elizabeth's court, was in the mid-i56os becoming central to that court's affect and mental outlook. The lust for ever costlier fabrics and ever more conspicuous fashions, the willingness, even eagerness, of the courtiers to be squeezed and stuffed and strapped into rigid and confining garments that forced them to move with stiff awkwardness while holding their heads "monstrous steady," the perverse determination with which women pulled their hair into labyrinthine knots which gave them headaches and men sweated and strained before their tailors until they fainted from exhaustion—all these were symptoms of a characteristic

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