When Shakespeare rendered England's highly fraught political history into drama on the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage, he featured and manipulated theatrical apparel to fashion – literally ‒ gender and power in performance. The actors who performed in the early modern English playhouses were all male, and they were all commoners. Although no law prohibited women in England from performing before 1660, it was the accepted and expected norm that only men and boys would act on the professional stages. Some of these actors became wealthy enough to consider themselves gentlemen and a few even became squires (the great tragedian Edward Alleyn became Squire of the Bears), but none ever achieved a title or a place among England's nobility. And yet, these male commoners regularly played female aristocratic characters and assumed the roles of ladies, duchesses, and queens. One of the primary ways that they assumed these identities in performance was through the costumes they wore onstage. Considering the importance of costume as a marker of elite identity extends the function of clothing, fabrics, and jewellery from simple coverings to embodiments of gender and rank which, when worn, carried with them assumptions about power and privilege that were immediately recognisable to the early modern English public. While this essay focusses on dress within the performance of Shakespeare's plays on the early modern stage, its wider relevance to the essays of this volume is to reveal costume as a tool of performance offstage as well as on.