How a play is produced/The Wardrobe Men and Women
The Wardrobe Men and Women
THEY live either in the tailors’ shops and the unending wardrobes, or in the actors’ dressing-rooms.
From such a wardrobe you might clothe the entire garrison of Prague, of course in a somewhat heterogeneous fashion. There hang thirty Roman senators, a dozen monks, four cardinals, one pope, fifty Roman legionaries complete with helmets and swords, twenty men from Chodsko,[1] seven bailiffs, two or three headsmen, a few Onegins, knights of velvet and silk, and Spanish knights with pumpkin breeches, further whole bushels of shepherds’ and musketeers’ broad-brimmed hats, scores of tall pointed caps and shakos, lambskin caps and Boyars’ fur caps, heaps of pointed shoes, riding-boots, turn-down boots, sandals, tall boots and Spanish boots, swords, sabres, cutlasses, rapiers, and daggers, belts and straps, harness, ruffs, epaulettes and scarves,,_illustration_by_Josef_%C4%8Capek,_pg_168.png)
armour and shields, tights, hides, furs and brocades, leathern breeches, shirts and dominos, Atillas and Bohemian jackets; an immeasurable and worthless collection, in which there is everything, but never what is required. In days gone by, the articles in this collection used to be sewn of good, valuable materials; now they are fabricated from paper, lining-material, or sacking, daubed and sprinkled with colours, and there you are. My word, how they look at close quarters!
The wardrobe men, too, bear their own special relation to the play. “That’s nothing of a piece,” they will say, “there are no changes of clothes in it!”
- ↑ Historical district in Bohemia.