Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England

Bailey then returns to a comfortable New Historicist insistence that the theater not only produced an awareness that clothes make the man, but also that the theater "encouraged sartorial irreverence among those with little discretionary income and no social authority, and in doing so created the conditions for a subculture of style" (5). According to Bailey, past interpretations of these plays have been negatively affected because they ignore the presence and particularized behavior of this subversive minority in the plays. What is essential about Gaveston's presentation of himself is the Italianate nature of his clothing and comportment (79), a concern that existed more potently in Elizabeth Tudor' s court than in Edward Plantagenet's. Because of their low birth, Gaveston and Edward's other favorites infect the English court with another version of flaunting, the Italian vice of artifiziozo (a distortion of the venerated sprezzatura).