LUCETTA        You must needs have them with a codpiece, madam.

JULIA  Out, out, Lucetta! That will be ill-favoured.

LUCETTA A round hose, madam, now’s not worth a pin

Unless you have a codpiece to stick pins on.

JULIA Lucetta, as thou lov’st me let me have

What thou think’st meet and is most mannerly.

But tell me, wench, how will the world repute me

For undertaking so unstaid a journey?

I fear me it will make me scandalized.

LUCETTA If you think so, then stay at home and go not. (2.7.53-62)

Lucetta presses on, on the subject of breeches: you must needs have them with a codpiece, madam. Really prominent codpieces were rapidly falling out of fashion by the last decade of the sixteenth century—breeches were fuller, and the alarming padded structures seen in Tudor portraits were long gone—so this is mostly here for the joke, to make Julia blush (she knows that codpieces are unfashionable: that will be ill-favoured, she says, ugly as well as unseemly) and, perhaps, to draw erotic attention, briefly, to the absent-present phallus of the boy actor. Lucetta persists, again for the sake of the joke: a round hose, madam, now’s not worth a pin unless you have a codpiece to stick pins on. If you’re going to wear the fashionable round hose—tight almost to the hips, or at least to the upper thigh—think Young Man Among the Roses—and now the erotic imagining is not simply of the boy’s legs but of the fictive Julia’s—then you have to have a codpiece, at least to stick pins in. (To be not worth a pin is to be worthless: if you don’t wear a codpiece with your round hose the whole look will be ruined.) Codpieces were not unlike pincushions and could in fact be decorated with pins, but here the joke is probably that—without anything else to put in it—you might as well stick pins in the codpiece, with pin suggesting pintle, a common term for the phallus. (Pins are also little pricks…)

Julia isn’t going to join in this increasingly ribald chat, a sign of her modesty (but also her naivety?): Lucetta, as thou lov’st me let me have what thou think’st meet and is most mannerly. Look, I trust you to sort me out whatever’s going to be most appropriate and seemly for me to wear. OK? Please? The slightly vulgar turn has given her pause, though, it seems: but tell me, wench, how will the world repute me for undertaking so unstaid a journey? Give me your honest opinion, am I ruining myself in the eyes of polite society by going after Proteus like this? Is it reckless, ill-advised? I fear it will make me scandalized: will it completely wreck my reputation? Lucetta points out the obvious, well, if that’s what’s worrying you, then if you think so, stay at home and go not, don’t take the risk. It’s your choice.