ABSTRACT
In Act 3, scene 2 of Dekker, CheĴle and Haughton’s The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissill (1600), a curious prop is delivered to Gwenthyan, the shrewish wife of Welsh knight Sir Owen ap Meredith, by their servant Rice, who informs her: ‘Tannekin the Froe hath brought your Rebato, it comes to three pound’ (III. ii. 243-4).1 The play-text is quite specific in identifying the object in question and the subject from whom it is obtained: rebatoes were fashionable, starched, flat, standing collars made of linen and lace, propped up with wire supports, while the term ‘froe’ was a common and ‘Tannekin’ a proper name associated with Dutch women during the period. Although the rebato, as we shall see, stands at the centre of the scene’s ensuing action – Sir Owen and Gwenthyan nearly come to blows over it – Tannekin the Froe is only briefly mentioned and never appears onstage. Why, then, we might ask, do the playwrights insist on introducing her lexically into the scene as the manufacturer of the rebato? Both the fabrics and the fabrication-skills associated with rebatoes and ruffs, according to Edmund Howes’ augmented edition of Stow’s Annales (1615), were imported to England from the Netherlands and France during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, when as many as one hundred thousand refugees from the Low Countries are estimated to have seĴled in Western Europe, perhaps half of them in England.2 Viewed against this historical backdrop, the passing
reference to ‘Tannekin the Froe’ in Patient Grissill takes on broader significance, functioning as a kind of metonymic index that points to or stands in for the larger population of alien craĞswomen living in early modern London. It is precisely because ‘Dutch’ froes were so visible during the period that this moniker can so readily assume its referential function without any further explication, and Tannekin herself remain invisible as an offstage persona.3
