The History of English Podcast · Kevin Stroud

Episode 177: Dressed for Success

·1 hr 25 min·5 clips

Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech gave English ‘band of brothers’ and ‘household words.’

1. The History of English Podcast Episode 177, “Dressed for Success,” closes the 1500s by moving from Elizabethan England into the early 1600s. 2. Host Kevin Stroud, the show’s narrator, connects Shakespeare, the Globe Theatre, and historical linguistics as the episode’s central subjects. 3. The episode asks why Elizabethan costumes mattered so much and how clothing words such as habit, garb, custom, and costume changed meaning. 4. The Globe Theatre was completed in May 1599, and the Rose stood just down the street with surviving business records from Philip Henslow. 5. Excavations beginning in 1989 found both the Rose site and the Globe site, confirming that both venues were open-air playhouses with roofs over the stage. 6. The stage roof mattered because it protected expensive garments made of silk, velvet, gold, and lace rather than the actors themselves. 7. Henslow’s records show that costumes were among the most valuable assets in an acting company’s possession. 8. The records also mention penalties for actors who lost or damaged garments, including a contract involving Robert Dawes. 9. The Lord Admiral’s Men inventory from March 1598 lists clothing such as doublets, bodices, stomachers, jerkin, hose, gowns, coats, capes, Venetians, strassers, trossers, slops, drawers, and trues. 10. The episode explains that many of those garments were named in plural forms because they covered both legs or functioned as paired clothing. 11. The word costume is traced to custom, while habit moves from clothing to behavior, and garb begins as a word for manner or custom before later meaning dress. 12. Shakespeare is said to use habit in its modern sense of behavior, showing that the semantic shift was already underway in the late 1500s. 13. Henry V is dated to late 1598 or early 1599, and a 1600 quarto helps place its completion between Francis Meres’s 1598 list and the Globe’s opening. 14. The play’s chorus refers to the Globe as “this wooden O” and “this unworthy scaffold,” which scholars read as a direct nod to the new playhouse. 15. Act III includes Henry’s appeal to the troops at Harfleur, while the play also gives regional speech to Welsh, Irish, and Scottish captains. 16. Princess Catherine’s French-language lesson on English body parts turns into a bawdy joke, and the Dauphin later uses slang built around strassers. 17. The St. Crispin’s Day speech produces the phrases “band of brothers” and “household words,” and the episode pauses on the grammar of reflexive pronouns like “himself.” 18. Act V compares Henry’s return to a conquest by Julius Caesar and links the dating of the play to the 1599 Irish expedition under the Earl of Essex. 19. Listeners who like Shakespeare, word origins, and Elizabethan theater history will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners looking for light entertainment without grammar or etymology may skip it.

As heard by us

Shakespeare, costume, and word history come together in a patient account of Elizabethan English and dress.

The episode stays close to Shakespeare, Elizabethan dress, and the odd way English picked up clothing terms. It moves from Henry V and Julius Caesar into stage practice, then into what writers of the period said about dress onstage and in the street, before circling back to…

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Why you'd press play

If you like Shakespeare and word history, this one connects Elizabethan costume choices to how English picked up new speech terms.

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