"Sham" is the keynote to an understanding of Elizabethan society; the Virgin Queen herself, with all her undoubted worth and abilities, was the embodiment of the vanity and pretence of her age. Young unmarried women loved "to show coyness in gestures, mince in words and speeches, gingerliness in tripping on toes like young goats, demure nicety and babyishness," and when they went out, they had silk scarfs "cast about their faces, fluttering in the wind, or riding in their velvet visors, with two holes cut for the eyes." The visors here mentioned bring to mind Hamlet's "God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another; you jig, you amble, you lisp, you nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance." The general use of masks in public places toward the close of Elizabeth's reign did not improve the moral status of the higher classes. The pretentiousness and the superficiality of the times are laid bare by Harrington, the favorite godson of the queen, whose arraignment is in unsparing terms: "We go brave in apparel that we may be taken for better men than we be; we use much bombastings and quiltings to seem better framed, better shouldered, smaller waisted, and fuller thighed than we are; we barb and shave oft to seem younger than we are; we use perfumes, both inward and outward, to seem sweeter, wear corked shoes to seem taller, use courteous salutations to seem kinder, lowly obeisance to seem humbler, and grave and godly communication to seem wiser and devouter than we be."
The dress of the women of the Elizabethan era shows the same extravagance that is apparent in all the exaggerated social phases of the time. Philip Stubbs, who wrote at the close of the sixteenth century a book entitled _The Anatomy of Abuses_, appears to have been a choleric and gloomy observer of current manners, but, with due allowance for the spirit in which he writes, a very clear picture can be gotten of the style and excesses of dress of the several classes of society. He affirms that no people in the world were so hungry after new-fangled styles as were those of his country. After having dilated on the large amounts spent for dress, he digresses in order to moralize, and adds that the fashionable attire of the day is unsuited to the actual needs of the wearers' bodies and "maketh them weak, tender, and infirm, not able to abide such blustering storms and sharp showers as many other people abroad do daily bear." It is curious to find him harking back to the old days of which he had heard his father and other sages speak, when all the clothes for the household were made by the busy housewife, and coats were of the same color as the wool when it was on the sheep's back. In the abandonment of the household woollen industry and the excessive use of imported fabrics, he sees the reason for the many thousands in England who were reduced to the necessity of begging bread. Starch, which is now such a homely and universally helpful laundry assistant, and to the expert use of which so much of the freshness and smartness of women's attire is due, was then first introduced. "There is a certain liquid matter which they call starch," says this censorious critic of current customs, "wherein the devil hath learned them to wash and dive their ruffs; which, being dry, will then stand stiff and inflexible about their necks." The ladies of his day must have been more expert in the use of starch than are their sisters to-day, as they introduced into it coloring matter, so that it temporarily dyed the fabrics red, blue, purple, and other colors, of which yellow seems to have been the most esteemed.