Ruffs

Ruffs as Essential Fashion

Para1Starting in the 1560s, ruffled collars of the linen or cotton shirts Englishmen wore beneath their doublets or jerkins grew taller and more elaborate. Separate ruffs of starched fabric soon became the norm for fashion from the 1570s to about 1615. By the 1580s, the enormous cartwheel ruffs were worn by anyone who wished to be seen as fashionable, from skilled tradesmen and their families all the way up to the royal court. A 2013 exhibition at the National Gallery in London called Elizabeth I and Her People features formal portraits of men practicing trades such as preacher, soldier, butcher, merchant, physician, artist and publisher—most of them adorned with these fashionable ruffs.

Creating and Maintaining a Ruff

Para2Preparing and caring for a ruff was a true craft. Using six to eighteen yards of finely textured fabric like lace or cambric, hundreds of pleats had to be folded, ironed, and either pinned or wired with a poking stick to achieve the convoluted shape. Ruffs were further stiffened with small sticks of bone, ivory, or wood. Layers of starch would be applied to create a stiffness and occasionally a color. Blue startch was the most commonly used colored version because it emphasized the pale skin of the wearer, which was also fashionable at the time. Ruffs were tied onto the wearer’s neck or secured to their clothing with many straight pins.

Ruffs as Controversial

Para3In 1562, responding the increasing size of ruffs, the government of Elizabeth I issued Statute of Apparel that limited ruffs for commoners, commanding that
neither with any shirts having double ruffs either at the collar or sleeves, which ruffs shall not be worn otherwise than single, and the singleness to be used in a due and mean sort, as was orderly and comely used before the coming in of the outrageous double ruffs which now of late are crept in […] upon pain of forfeiture of the same and of imprisonment and fine at the Queen's Highness's pleasure for every such offense.
Para4The Crown’s attempt apparently did not succeed, since twenty years later the Puritan preacher Philip Stubbes again attacked the fashion. Stubbes is well known for his loathing of the theater from his 1583 pamphlet The Anatomy of Abuses pamphlet, but he also expresses his distaste for ruffs in the same text:
They have great and monstrous ruffes, made […] of some other the finest cloth that can be got for money, whereof some be a quarter of a yard deep, yea, some more, very few lesse; So that they stand a full quarter of a yarde (and more) from their necks, dangling over their shoulder poynts, instead of a vaile... The devil, as he in the fulnes of his malice, first invented these great ruffes […]
Para5Stubbes attacks the foolish devices that people decorate ruffs with, decrying the, golde, silver, or silk lace of stately price, wrought all over with needle work, speckled and sparkled heer and there with the sonne, the moone, the starres, and many other antiquities. Stubbes clearly objects to the excess of luxury that ruffs display.

Ruffs and Identity

Para6As it is today, clothing was one of the most important status symbols throughout the early modern era. Ella Hawkins explores how the ruff has become firmly established as an expression of Shakespeare’s identity, as well as a sartorial manifestation of the sense of tradition, prestige, and stuffiness often associated with the playwright and his works (191), even though most artists of the time were not painted wearing a ruff.

Key Print Sources

Arnold, Janet et al. Patterns of Fashion 4: The Cut and Construction of Linen Shirts, Smocks, Neckwear, Headwear and Accessories for Men and Women c.1540–1660. Macmillan, 2008.
Hawkins, Ella. The Shakespearean Ruff. Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 2, Summer 2021, pp. 1–24.
Lennox, Patricia, and Bella Mirabella. Shakespeare and Costume. The Arden Shakespeare, 2015.
North, Susan. What the Elizabethans Wore: Evidence from Wills and Inventories of the “Middling Sort”. Elizabeth I & Her People, National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2013, pp. 34–41.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. Ruffs and Hairstyles. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/stage/costumes/ruffs.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2024.
Elizabeth I and Her People. Curated by Tarnya Cooper et al. National Portrait Gallery. 10 Oct. 2013–5 Jan. 2014, https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2013/elizabeth-i-her-people.
Leed, Drea. Stubbes On Fashion: Excerpes from Phillip Stubbes’s 1583 Anatomie of Abuses. ElizabethanCostume.net, http://www.elizabethancostume.net/stubbes.html#ruffs. Acessed 31 Jan. 2024.
Lyon, Karen. Clothing and Fashions in Elizabethan England: How to Look the Part. Shakespeare & Beyond, Folger Shakespeare Library, 8 Sept. 2017, https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2017/09/05/renaissance-fashion-elizabethan-clothing/.
Elizabethan Ruffs. Historical Britain, 22 July 2013, https://historicalbritain.org/2013/07/22/elizabethan-ruffs/.
Worsley, Lucy. A Bit of Ruff: Meet the Middle-Class Elizabethans. Lucyworsley.com, 28 Oct. 2013. https://butlercc.libguides.com/mla/databases. Accessed 1 Feb. 2024.

Prosopography

Carly Hoeppner

Carly Hoeppner was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Ruffs
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series
Source
By Carly Hoeppner, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globablink Research Internship
License/availability
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