How Social Customs Have Changed!

Did it ever occur to you, dear reader, that Macbeth (d. 1057) and Rashi (1040-1105) were contemporaries? And although the great King of Scotland  urged his horse across a blasted heath while Rashi, the great man of Hebrew letters, basked in the gentle climate of central France, the customs of their times have interesting points of contact.

Accordingly, today we can clear up a mystery in Macbeth. After Macbeth murders Duncan, the stage fills with agitated actors, poor Lady Mac swoons, and Banquo says everyone should go away and come back to investigate the crime. “And when we have our naked frailties hid / That suffer in exposure, let us meet / And question this most bloody piece of work.”

Whose Ideas Was Pajamas, Anyway?

The term “naked frailties” has occasioned many a snigger, and many a student has been told to imagine that these medieval Scottish nobles wore something like pajamas beneath a vaguely tartan dressing gown.

In fact, not so. “Since ancient times,” says Eileen Harris in her little book Going to Bed, speaking with the prim authority of the Victoria and Albert Museum, “it has been commonplace to sleep clothed. Only in the Middle Ages, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, was nudity the rule, and it was a rule included, for example, in a thirteenth-century marriage contract that a wife should not sleep in a chemise without her husband’s consent” (p. 64).

How much more enlightened was medieval Jewry, who ruled the husband must release his wife, with a settlement, if he wanted to sleep clothed.

Rashi notes that under normal circumstances, people sleep naked (B.T.Shabbat 13a אין דרך לישן אלא בקירוב בשר); he refers to B.T.Ketuvot 48a, where R. Huna rules that a man who doesn’t want to be naked for sexual relations has to grant his wife a divorce and pay the settlement. Of course, this custom is not universal; there’s a reference to Persians–presumably, deplorably effete Easterners–who actually wear clothes when busy in bed.

A State of Proper Undress

Now let the student imagination roam. If Shakespeare knew that beneath the kilt was bare skin (well testified in our own day by the famous story of Bridal Dress Skidmarks), then surely he intended his equally knowing audience to suspend their disbelief if they thought the characters rousted from their beds were clothed.

For decades I labored under the misconception that Lady Mac fainted in order to draw attention away from her husband’s lame excuse about killing the witnesses. (O ye who are addicted to puns, say ye that her faint was a feint?)

In fact, I now know that she faints at the sight of a host of naked frailties jiggling before her tender eyes–“What, in our house?” she cries in shock. When the death of Duncan is exposed, to the horror of his loyal subjects, the audience may legitimately imagine some additional exposure.

A Thought to Carry Away

Now, dear reader, you may be surprised to consider the subject of night-clothing, and perhaps a little uncomfortable. But please remember that many of our own customs are not universal, and people whose dress or speech or thought or looks differ from ours are not necessarily stupid, ornery or evil. Let us be slow to judge others, at least until we know ourselves and our own heritage of nighttime nudity!