The King’s Revels agreement also specified a “tirewoman.” It may be questionable whether tirewomen were ever on the weekly payroll of any of the adult companies, but it is certain that they used their services from time to time. The term broadly denotes a dressmaker, but would extend to someone who helped ladies (and boys dressing as ladies) to dress, and also more specifically to someone skilled in the making and attaching of the elaborate head‐tires which were fashionable for high‐born women in Shakespeare’s day. Ben Jonson glances at them in his masque, Love Restored(1612), when he has Robin Goodfellow say that this was one of the disguises he adopted to try to get into court: “Then I took another figure, of an old tirewoman, but tired under that too, for none of the masquers would take note of me” (Jonson 2012l, lines 73–5). Part of the joke may well be that in this small‐scale and rather ad hoc entertainment by Jonson there were no lady masquers who would require her services to get dressed, though such persons would certainly be needed in the normal run of things for such masques as those commissioned by Queen Anne for herself and her ladies.
We know with unusual certainty that Shakespeare himself was acquainted with a tirewoman, because in 1604 he lodged in Silver Street, Cripplegate, with a Huguenot family, the Mountjoys, and that was the trade of the lady of the house, Marie Mountjoy. This circumstance has been explored at some length by Charles Nicholl in his The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, to which I am indebted here. Marie and her husband, Christopher, seem to have been at the high end of this profession, creating elaborate head‐tires – complex hairpieces – for fashionable ladies, and plausibly for use on the stage also. Marie twice appears in the household accounts for Queen Anne in 1604, perhaps not coincidentally the year of her first court masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. For the 1606 wedding masque of Hymenaei the Countess of Rutland’s accounts record her paying “To the tire woman for a coronet, £6” – and this was only one among many items which she acquired for this lavish entertainment (Nicholl, 158; we recall yet again that £10 was a comfortable annual income for the lower orders). Head‐tires involved expensive commodities: gold and silver wire and thread, silver‐coated wire to form the base of the structure, and human hair, very possibly from corpses. They could normally only be afforded by the moneyed classes, but when it came to clothing of all kinds those would include the leading acting companies, who spent prodigious amounts on impressive costumes and accessories. A 1598 inventory of the Admiral’s Men lists “6 head‐tires” and Henslowe twice mentions a Mrs Goosen in 1601; on each occasion she is paid 12 shillings “for a head tire” (318, 185, 198). On New Year’s Day 1603 a Mrs Calle received 10 shillings “for two coronets for head tires for the court” – one of several instances where it is clear that the company would lay out money especially to shine at court, though doubtless the items eventually found their way onto the public stage. The boy actor, John Rice, wore what was evidently an elaborate head tire (“a coronet of pearl and cockle‐shells on her head”) for a public entertainment staged to honor Prince Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales in 1610 (see p. 187).
Shakespeare several times brings tires into his dialogue. As early as Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590/92) Silvia laments “I think / If I had such a tire, this face of mine / Were full as lovely as this of hers” (4.4.183–5) and in Much Ado (circa 1598) the maidservant Margaret is critical of the new tire that Hero will wear for her wedding: “I like this new tire within excellently, if the hair were a thought browner” (3.4.12–13). Evidently the color of the tire does not exactly match that of Hero’s natural hair – a foreshadowing of the misfortune which will befall the wedding. But it is in Merry Wives that tires figure most prominently, as Falstaff tries to woo Mrs Ford with flattery: “Thou hast the right arched beauty of the brow that becomes the ship‐tire, the tire valiant, or any tire of Venetian admittance” (3.3.47–51). That is, her brow is arched in such a way that it will show to advantage a tire shaped like a ship, or one perhaps of daunting (“valiant”) proportions, or indeed any tire that would pass for fashionable in Venice – a city of sophisticated tastes in headware as much as sexual behavior. Mrs Ford easily deflates him: “A plain kerchief, Sir John. My brows become nothing else, nor that well neither” (52–3). In the horribly confused text at the end of the folio version of the play Fenton tells us that Anne Page shall represent the Fairy Queen and “That quaint in green she shall be loose enrobed, / With ribbons pendent, flaring ’bout her head” (4.6.41–2). In the outcome it may be Mistress Quickly who plays the Fairy Queen – but the point is surely that whoever played it would be wearing a tire of sorts, befitting fairy royalty. There are no other specific clues about which characters wore these headpieces, but it makes sense that female deities might be so distinguished, such as “proud Titania” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Diana in Pericles. We might well imagine Juno descending in The Tempest, wearing a head‐tire – mimicking the appearance of an aristocratic lady masquer in one of Queen Anne’s court masques – while Hecate in Macbeth may have worn some malevolent antimasque equivalent.