Shakespeare's World | Style Is the Man: Manners, Dress, and Decorum
Sir Walter Raleigh's oft quoted dictum "Style is the man" confronts the cultural historian with an apparent paradox. What kind of style, let alone what kind of proper man, is compatible with those starched and showy Elizabethans who strutted and preened like so many self-satisfied peacocks, dressed in clothing that was not only vulgar, exhibitionistic, and hopelessly impractical but also condemned by almost everyone as un-English, immoral, and economically harmful to the kingdom? Raleigh himself was one of the worst examples of Tudor sartorial and theatrical ostentation, but when he spoke...
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