Early modern England, Robert Lublin points out, ‘was a highly stratified society’, and one ‘well versed in the apparel that marked an individual's place in the social hierarchy’ (p. 1). Early modern playgoers, he suggests, would therefore have been particularly adept at decoding specific types of dress; a character on the stage, for such playgoers, was full of meaning before they even spoke. This is an important point, and one often insufficiently attended to by text-focused scholars of early modern drama; Lublin is fully justified in asserting that thinking carefully about costume can help us better understand how early modern plays produced meaning in their original performances.

After opening with some useful detail on different kinds of dress worn by men and women in early modern culture, Costuming the Shakespearean Stage moves through chapters on gender, class, nationality and religion, before concluding with an analysis of the role of costume in Middleton's A Game at Chess. Along the way, it makes some valuable points regarding the role of dress in establishing meaning and character. For example, in reminding us that stage Turks and stage Moors would have worn very different kinds of headwear, Lublin usefully foregrounds the importance of visual signifiers in racial representation: Shakespeare's text may, as several scholars have argued, suggest that Othello ‘turns Turk’ during the course of his tragedy; but in his headwear Othello remains, unambiguously, a Moor (pp. 98–9). Elsewhere, though, Lublin overplays his hand in assessing the balance of power between costume and speech. For example, it is surely something of a stretch to suggest that the organizational principle of The Duchess of Malfi is its obligation to punish Antonio's sartorial transgression in marrying a woman whose costume indicates her social superiority. As Lublin partially concedes in a rather defensive footnote, this is to oversimplify the play's deeply complex meditation on social and cosmic structures (p. 73). Frequently, Lublin's study would have benefited from being a little more modest in its claims – it is good at showing how costume shapes plays’ meanings, but it is less convincing when it suggests that they govern its meanings. In emphasizing the role of costume in meaning-making, Lublin's analysis renders these plays deeply conservative in their attitudes towards, in particular, gender and class; as a result his book offers a rather reductive vision of a dramatic corpus that frequently sought to probe, rather than simply to reinforce, social codes and forms.

Rather disappointingly, the final chapter, which had previously been published in Theatre Survey, rehearses a discussion of beards and masculinity (p. 179) that was been encountered in the first chapter (p. 25). Lublin's book takes on an interesting topic, makes some valuable arguments, and addresses a good range of drama; it will certainly be of use to scholars of early modern theatre. But as a piece of scholarship it has certain weaknesses.