2. "The Necessity of Hanging," The Praise and Virtue of a Jail and Jailers, by John Taylor (1623)

[The circulation of clothing among differing social classes and for multiple purposes constituted an important facet of early modern English material culture in England. Employers often gave used clothing to their servants or bequeathed it to them in their wills. However, due to sumptuary laws regulating who was allowed to wear clothes of given colors and fabrics, the clothing's recipients often could not legally wear the clothes, in which case the servants would tend to sell the clothes, either to a shop or to a theater company to be used for costumes. Sometimes, clothes were purchased specifically for a new role, but access to a new costume might also motivate the company's playwrights to create a new class of character in order to exploit the costly material assets.

In Cymbeline, characters occasionally refer to this circulation of material: Imogen compares herself to disused clothing that would, "out of fashion," need to be dismantled in order that the valuable fabric could be used for a new purpose, for instance (3.4.43-45); Clotten's demand that Pisanio give him Posthumus's garments in 3.5 reflects the great symbolic value of clothing as well its transferability. Posthumus's scene with the Jailer does not explicitly mention any exchange of clothing, but the fact that prisoners condemned to death traditionally left their clothing to the executioner is reminiscent of this practice, which can also be seen in the excerpt below from John Taylor's The Praise and Virtue of a Jail and Jailers (1623).]

I oft have seen good garments for men's wearing
Have very thriftily been hanged to airing,
And I have seen those garments (like good fellows{friends})
Hang kindly with their master at the gallows
And then into the hangman's wardrobe drop;
Have been again hanged in a broker's shop,
Which after by a cutpurse bought might be
And make another journey to the tree{gallows},
Twixt which and twixt the broker, it might go{walk}
Or ride some twelve or thirteen times or mo{more}.
Thus th'hangman's harvest and the broker's grow:
They reap the crop which sin and shame doth sow.