Shakespeare’s Pants

A peerless playwright needs pants.

I use pants in the North of England and American sense. Trousers, specifically, not underwear.

The first statue of Shakespeare – his funerary monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-Upon-Avon – has no pants at all. Sculptor Gerard Johnson simply opted to cease Shakespeare at the hips. I am not sure how Shakespeare would have felt about this. My guess is, not good.

As Shakespeare became more acclaimed and beloved by writers, and people with lots of money, he was finally accorded pants in Westminster Abbey, though William Kent, the designer of the 1740 monument commissionsed by Alexander Pope, Lord Burlington and a gaggle of other prominent admirers, chose simple, long breeches.

And now we must begin to speculate about the type of dresser Shakespeare was. Was he a fashion conscious chap? Because if he was, the evidence points to a very different set of pants…