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The Dictionary of Fabrics & Fashion Terms in Shakespeare

A Queer Feminist Perspective on Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, & The Winter's Tale
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Interactive Blog Space

Discussion Questions

December 11, 2019

Welcome to The Dictionary of Fabrics and Fashion Terms in Shakespeare’s Interactive Blog Space. Students are encouraged to perform their own research on a fabric of fashion term that is not yet mentioned on the site and contribute to this blog through the Contact page. Other potential contributions can include further research on an existing term, completed assignments from the Teaching Resources page, or new assignment ideas. We also welcome interviews, creative pieces, and relevant audio/video submissions.

If your class has a separate blog space where students respond to discussion questions, we have compiled a few potential discussion topics from different sources.

For Twelfth Night:

  1. Love and Play. Source: Reading Odyssey. In Act 1, Viola asks the Captain to disguise her as a man, so she can enter Olivia’s service: “Conceal me what I am, and be my aid / For such disguise as haply shall become / The form of my intent” (1.2.55-7). We never see “Viola” again; at the end of the play, she is still in her disguise, and she is not going to put on her woman’s weeds until her promised marriage to Orsino. What do you make of this? Many comedies are based on disguises and mistaken identities, and these typically end with unmaskings and a clearing up of confusion. In this play, we have a clearing up of confusion, but the unmasking is not complete. Why? We also don’t get to see a marriage, another conventional ending point for comedies. Viola is going to marry Orsino, and her brother is going to marry Olivia, but we aren’t invited to these celebrations. There IS one marriage in the play–Maria’s to Sir Toby–but it happens completely offstage. This “ending” has puzzled critics. What do you make of it?

For The WInter’s Tale:

  1. Comfort. Notice, in the opening stage direction of Act 4, Florizel's disguise as Doricles and Perdita's costume of Queen of the Feast. Are we surprised that Florizel and Perdita are together? Can you predict now how this friendship will help to resolve the other issues of the play? Finally, how comfortable is Perdita in her costume/role? Analyze.

For Measure for Measure:

  1. Disguises. What are the results of hiding behind a disguise to spy on people, and is doing so ethical? How are disguises used in this play, and what are their positive and negative results?

Have additional discussion questions to accompany these plays? Comment below!

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worth a listen: relevant podcasts

Think there were no women onstage in Shakespeare’s time? Think again. We talk to scholar Clare McManus about where and how women performed in early modern Europe: emerging from mechanical seashells in elaborate court masques, dancing across tightropes, and on the stages of the European Continent. Clare McManus is a professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton in London. She is the author of Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590-1619 and is working on a manuscript titled Early Modern Women’s Performance and the Dramatic Canon. McManus is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 12, 2019. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode, “She Can Spin for Her Living,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. We had technical helped from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Gareth Wood at The Sound Company studios in London.

In the 19th century, a new influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy arrived in the United States. Many of them settled in the Lower Manhattan. Reformers wondered how these new arrivals could be assimilated into American culture. Their solution? Give ‘em Shakespeare. But at the same time, these recent immigrants were staging Shakespeare’s plays themselves, in their own languages and adapted for their own cultures, sharing performance spaces and loaning one another costumes and props in a vibrant Lower East Side theater scene. We talk to Dr. Elisabeth Kinsley about her new book, Here in this Island We Arrived: Shakespeare and Belonging in Immigrant New York. In it, Kinsley, an associate Dean at Northwestern University, explores American national identity and cultural belonging through Shakespeare. Kinsley is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 15, 2019. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “We Being Strangers Here,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. We had technical help from Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Kayla Stoner and Kristin Samuelson of Northwestern University's Global Marketing and Communications Department.

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