Hamlet gets a bit rude

"God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another....."

                                                                                  Hamlet    (III, i)

Hamlet the Dane is feigning madness, and if that means excoriating his beloved Ophelia for no good reason, so be it. He urges her to go to a nunnery where she won't be "a breeder of sinners." He reads her the riot act over things women have been doing since time out of mind. Nature? Nurture? It's no matter to Hamlet: he's acting in a play of his own, and that's the thing.

Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a small English chest made c1610, of a type that might have been used in a lady's chamber to store a variety of feminine adornments. The chest was constructed probably no more than a decade after Shakespeare had written Hamlet, at a time when he was perhaps sharpening a few quills before beginning a tale set in those unexplored new lands beyond the sea: The Tempest.

This black chest, with silver and red detailing and a faux-lacquered finish, is indicative of the considerable interest shown by both the English and their Dutch sea-trading rivals with goods and furniture styles from the Far East. After all, a quicker sea route to that region of the world had been the Europeans' goal all along: the American land masses were just found to be getting in the way.

Imitative of the Oriental lacquered style, this chest illustrates a look referred to as "japanning."  European furniture-makers, including the English, had difficulty coming up with anything like a truly lacquered finish so well done in the Far East. Moreover, they often did not go so far as to include Oriental domestic scenes in their own homemade versions of this style. They frequently did use scenes they were familiar with: this chest has renderings of windmills, scrolling flowers, streams, soldiers, and hill-top beacons of the type used to spread the warning among the English of the approaching Spanish Armada back in 1588.

The chest is about 21 inches wide, 16 inches high, and a bit over 12 inches from front to back. The front doors that swing out on their hinges have painted scenes on their front and their inner sides. The handles of the chest are of brass. Whether jewelry or other items were contained in the drawers is open to conjecture (was valuable jewelry kept in a more secure or hidden place?).  But there can be no doubt that Ophelia would have found some use for such a chest, if Hamlet is to be believed.