Hamlet speaks of a “forest of feathers” as part of an actor’s professional qualification.  Addison, writing in “The Spectator” on the methods of aggrandising the persons in tragedy, denounces as ridiculous the endeavour to raise terror and pity in the audience by the dresses and decorations of the stage, and takes particular exception to the plumes of feathers worn by the conventional hero of tragedy, rising “so very high, that there is often a greater length from his chin to the top of his head than to the sole of his foot.  One would believe that we thought a great man and a tall man the same thing.”  Then he describes the embarrassment of the actor, forced to hold his neck extremely stiff and steady all the time he speaks, when, “notwithstanding any anxieties which he pretends for his mistress, his country, or his friends, one may see by his action that his greatest care and concern is to keep the plume of feathers from falling off his head.”  The hero’s “superfluous ornaments” having been discussed, the means by which the heroine is invested with grandeur are next considered:  “The broad sweeping train that follows her in all her motions, finds constant employment for a boy who stands behind her, to open and spread it to advantage.  I do not know how others are affected at this sight, but I must confess my eyes are wholly taken up with the page’s part; and as for the queen, I am not so attentive to anything she speaks, as to the right adjusting of her train, lest it should chance to trip up her heels, or incommode her as she walks to and fro upon the stage.  It is, in my opinion, a very odd spectacle to see a queen venting her passion in a disordered motion, and a little boy taking care all the while that they do not ruffle the tail of her gown.  The parts that the two persons act on the stage at the same time are very different; the princess is afraid that she should incur the displeasure of the king, her father, or lose the hero, her lover, whilst her attendant is only concerned lest she should entangle her feet in her petticoat.”  In the same way Tate Wilkinson, writing in 1790 of the customs of the stage, as he had known it forty years before, describes the ladies as wearing large hoops and velvet petticoats, heavily embossed and extremely inconvenient and troublesome, with “always a page behind to hear the lovers’ secrets, and keep the train in graceful decorum.  If two princesses,” he continues, “meet on the stage, with the frequent stage-crossings then practised, it would now seem truly entertaining to behold a page dangling at the tail of each heroine.”  The same writer, referring to the wardrobe he possessed as manager of the York and Hull theatres, describes the dresses as broadly seamed with gold and silver lace, after a bygone fashion that earned for them the contempt of London performers.  “Yet,” he proceeds, “those despicable clothes had, at different periods of time, bedecked real lords and dukes,” and were of considerable value, if only to strip of their decorations and take to pieces.  He laments the general decline in splendour of dress, and declares that thirty years before not a Templar, or decently-dressed young man, but wore a rich gold-laced hat and scarlet waistcoat, with a broad gold lace, also laced frocks for morning dress.