Costumes in shakespeare plays

Answer 1

Wealthy nobles often paid their servants with their "old" clothes, which were made of rich fabrics. It was illegal for poor and lower class people to wear clothing made of certain fabrics such as satin, silk and velvet. Therefore, the servants sold the clothes to the acting companies to get money and the actors were allowed to wear the clothes on the stage because they were playing characters that were usually nobles and kings. If they were playing historical characters, such as Romans, they might have special costumes made that kind of looked Roman. There is a drawing, made in Shakespeare's time, that shows actors in the play "Titus Andronicus." Their costumes are a combination of Roman robes and Roman style helmets and Elizabethan clothing.

Answer 2

They have pretty consistently been clothes. In Shakespeare's day the costume collection was one of the company's most valuable assets, because clothes, especially the kind that a king or queen might be expected to wear, were extremely expensive. A drawing of a scene from Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus shows that the characters wore standard Elizabethan dress for the most part--only the actor playing Titus wears a sash to suggest he is an ancient Roman. This is the only image we have of the staging of a Shakespeare play in his day.

Answer 3

Shakespeare used costumes that other playwriters and poets would have used in their plays. Shakespeare was a rich man so he would have had very good clothing made with the latest most expensive materials.

Answer 4

He used big props such as beds and cannons which had to stay on stage the whole play. There were also smaller items which could be moved to the side of the stage: the stocks in King Lear for example. There were also a number of small props, particularly swords, daggers and other weapons, bottles for Juliet's potion, Romeo's poison, and witches' ingredients, a skull or three for Hamlet, a love-in-idleness flower for A Midsummer Night's Dream, rings for Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, flowers for Ophelia.

Costumes were usually everyday clothing, but much more splendid contemporary costumes for royalty and aristocrats. They must have had some kind of donkey head for Bottom and the fairies and spirits may have worn unusual costumes. From the only image we have of a Shakespeare play in performance at this time, they seem to have attempted some kind of Roman or Greek costume for some of the actors in the plays set in ancient times.

Answer 5

Everyday dress, or what was everyday dress at the time. Some of the costumes were castoffs from the nobility and were way more sumptuous than the actors would normally be allowed to wear. These costumes would be used for royalty and the like. Sometimes they had speciality costumes. The only surviving image of a contemporary production, a drawing of a scene from Titus Andronicus, shows most people in ordinary dress but Titus wears a sleeveless tunic and a sheet draped over and tied on the left shoulder. Perhaps this was to indicate in some abstract way that he was a Roman, although none of the other Romans wear similar costumes.

Since then, virtually every possible approach to costuming has been tried.

Answer 6

A theatrical company's costume collection was in Shakespeare's day, as it is now, one of their biggest assets. The costumes required to play the parts of kings and queens were expensive and could only be obtained as cast-offs from the nobility. An example of the costumes used in Shakespeare's play is a drawing of a scene from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the only contemporary image of a performance of a Shakespeare play. These show that even with a play set in ancient Rome, the costumes were mostly contemporary. See the related link for a copy of this drawing.

Answer 7

Costumes are always nice, although it is probably quite possible to stage one of Shakespeare's plays in a nudist colony with the entire cast stark naked. I don't know if it has been done.

What costumes you pick for your Shakespeare production are entirely up to you. Nazi uniforms (seen it), Hawaiian shirts (seen it), giant fur coats (seen it), Civil War gowns (seen it), Victorian dresses and suits (seen it), green paint (seen it), Italian clothes of the twenties (seen it), kimonos (seen it), space suits (not yet) are all possible.

Answer 8

Of course, otherwise they would be appearing onstage naked, and that was illegal. If you want to know what they looked like, check out the "Peacham Drawing", a drawing of a scene from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and the only drawing we have of a stage play from Shakespeare's day.

Answer 9

he used big props like beds, but a lot of little props like daggers and goblets. XD