It is no wonder the Puritans closed the theaters. As Amanda Bailey's Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England ably demonstrates, the theater in Elizabethan and early Stuart England often challenged elite culture (and not only Puritans) by offering its audience (predominantly young, “masterless” men) an alternative aesthetic of masculinity, one defined not by the deference and sartorial moderation expected of them, but by irreverence and excess. On the basis of a reading of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, and Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour, Bailey shows how “the playhouse provided an alternative site of sumptuous display” (19), one which, she argues, fostered “the birth of a subcultural capital” (22; London) bent on subverting normative masculinity.

The theater, by definition a venue based on the manipulation of fictive and eye-catching appearances, often had an ambivalent attitude toward the dominant culture's worries about excessive display, and in the three plays Bailey examines, that ambivalence spills over into a playful embrace of disorderly excess. Bailey shows how The Taming of the Shrew was centrally concerned with the place not only of women in the household but of servants as well, and that servants who played a decorative role in the household could be as much a source of disorder and social confusion as they were a confirmation of their masters’ authority. In Marlowe's Edward II, “sexual and stylistic excess are linked” (78), with the play remaining ambivalent about their moral value: on the one hand, Edward II demonstrates the hazards of sartorial excess, yet it also depends on the allure of that excess for the play's dramatic success. Likewise, in the chaotic drama Every Man Out of His Humor, Jonson includes “ample mocking of its characters” and their ostentation (106), yet those same young, ostentatious characters remained central to the play's visual appeal. The theater, almost by its very nature, relied on a demonstration of style and a flaunting of sartorial splendor that often challenged dominant definitions of elite masculinity and spurred its audience to want to consume more. “The longer we gaze, the more we crave,” the antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson sighed (116).

For Bailey, the theater's performances continued offstage as well. As Bailey argues, the theater played a central role in creating the image of an urbane subculture defined by their defiance of elite constraints on their consumption. The largest group of playgoers were young men who worked or studied in London (36), and the theater was a place where these same youths mirrored the action on the stage by “braving,” flaunting their independence by performing extravagant identities in public, theatrically displaying their sense of style. “The activity of playgoing,” Bailey asserts, “endorsed social dependents as ‘self-reliant consumers’ who could participate in a market freed from the restrictions” of traditional society (42). The theater functioned to turn young men into conspicuously subversive consumers—to the dismay of elites.

Yet here is where Flaunting displays its weakness. Certainly the theater was a place where one could envision the world constructed differently, as Bailey's deft analysis of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson demonstrates. But she is less able to demonstrate that playgoers and other Elizabethans embraced that theatrical vision and created a subculture based on a “bold rejection” (48) of elite definitions of moderate masculinity. The allegedly central actors in her drama (fashionable young men) remain conspicuously offstage, alluded to only in the passive voice as “certain young men” (45) who “were seen as” (50) or “known to be” (105) part of an alternative subculture. Using as her primary sources the sermons, advice manuals, sumptuary laws, and other published tracts of the era, Bailey relies almost exclusively on the testimony of normative elites themselves—gone are the days when men dressed according to their station, so the rhetoric ran, and lived simply on their country estates—and too quickly adopts that rhetoric to describe a newly burgeoning commercial culture that gave birth to a consumer subculture. (Consumer society seems to have midwives in every era.)

One cannot doubt that there is vast evidence of flaunters in Elizabethan culture: indeed, the foil figure of the gallant/fop/dandy has long played a role in the theater, in sermons, in conduct literature, and in conservative rhetoric, from the Elizabethan age to the present. And perhaps some men in Renaissance England used that rhetoric as a form of Foucauldian “reverse discourse,” using the deprecatory terms of elite culture to defiantly define themselves. Yet we should not mistake the pervasiveness of that foppish figure, nor the widespread use of a rhetoric that condemned excess, for existence of that excess itself. While it is tempting to find alternative subcultures, oppositional dressers, and those who defied hegemonic masculinity in any period, direct evidence for a “subculture of style” (135) in Elizabethan England remains as elusive as ever.