Jonathan Beckman
Self-Fashioning
Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe
By Ulinka Rublack
Oxford University Press 354pp £30 order from our bookshop
Towards the beginning of Hamlet, Gertrude, in an attempt to encourage her tetchy son to end the ostentatious mourning for his father’s death, gently urges, ‘Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off’. He snaps back: ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,/Nor customary suits of solemn black … That can denote me truly’. Hamlet was dressed in the traditional colour of mourning – but, as Ulinka Rublack explains in Dressing Up, students in Wittenberg, where Hamlet was enrolled at the university, also dressed entirely in black. As the play unfurls, Hamlet the grieving son, who ought to avenge his father’s murder, is constantly thwarted by Hamlet the thoughtful and sceptical scholar. Though at first glance his uniform denotes him exclusively as a mourner, it expresses a divided personality.
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