TRINCULO [Sees the clothes.] O King Stephano! O peer! O worthy Stephano! Look what a wardrobe here is for thee!
CALIBAN Let it alone, thou fool; it is but trash.
TRINCULO O ho, monster; we know what belongs to a frippery! O King Stephano! [Puts on a garment.]
STEPHANO Put off that gown, Trinculo. By this hand, I’ll have that gown.
TRINCULO Thy grace shall have it.
CALIBAN The dropsy drown this fool! What do you mean
To dote thus on such luggage? Let’t alone
And do the murder first. If he awake,
From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches,
Make us strange stuff. (4.1.222-235)
Shiny things! What comes through increasingly is Trinculo’s neediness, his dependence on Stephano for approval, and his sense that Caliban has perhaps edged him out. So this is partly about Trinculo getting Stephano’s attention and flattering him as King Stephano! There’s more to this moment than clowns being distracted by copper lace, however. Trinculo knows that a king needs an appropriate wardrobe, that power inheres in clothes. (Prospero will, shortly, ask that Ariel bring him his hat and rapier so that he can appear as duke before his brother Antonio, the king, and the rest of the Neapolitans.) In the theatre, costume makes identity, dukes and kings and clowns and mariners (and spirits, goddesses, and women). And the same is true out of it. Sumptuary legislation had been repealed in 1604 (do not get me started on sumptuary regulation; there’s much more to it than this excellent introduction suggestions) but there was still a keen awareness of the ways in which particular kinds of clothing were appropriate or not to those of particular social status, as well as of the massive financial investment which could be made in clothes; clothes and their material were a form of capital throughout this period, a means of storing wealth. If these are gorgeous garments, then Caliban’s dismissing of them as trash suggests either that he does not understand those codes and principles or, more subversively, that he both recognises and rejects them. If they are threadbare, faded, obviously refurbished on the cheap (copper lace…) then Trinculo comes off worse when he says that no, we know what belongs to a frippery, that is, to a second-hand clothes dealer, a fripper; these are the genuine article. (There was a massive trade in second-hand clothes in early modern London, which overlapped with the business of pawnbrokers, and on which the theatres depended for a significant part of their costume stocks.) So Trinculo puts on a gown, a long garment, open down the front (it could be sleeveless, or have hanging sleeves, or ordinary sleeves), associated with high status. Like a monkey or a toddler, Stephano wants most of all what someone else has: put off that gown, Trinculo. By this hand, I’ll have that gown. And Trinculo assents, flatteringly: Thy grace shall have it. Caliban can’t believe these idiots, cursing them (in a fairly perfunctory way, by Caliban’s standards) with dropsy. Why are you being so distracted by this luggage, this stuff, this rubbish? Leave it, and do the murder first. If Prospero wakes up, we’ll be in trouble; he’ll do magic, make us strange stuff, and (Caliban’s old, anxious refrain) fill our skins with pinches, all over.
