Ruffs Ruffs Author Carly Hoeppner Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globablink Research Internship

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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By Carly Hoeppner, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

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 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Clothing Social Order Gender Gendered Clothing Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best 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.

 Leah Hamby 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.

 Carly Hoeppner Carly Hoeppner

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

 Navarra Houldin 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.

 Kate McPherson 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.

 Melissa Walter 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.

 LEMDO Team 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 https://www.uvic.ca/
Ruffs as Essential Fashion

Starting 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

Preparing 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

In 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 inupon pain of forfeiture of the same and of imprisonment and fine at the Queen's Highness's pleasure for every such offense.

The 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, madeof 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

Stubbes 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

As 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 <soCalled>Shakespearean</soCalled> 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 <q>Middling Sort</q>. 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 <title level="m">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.