[DanBC]

Yes, there's a bunch of stuff that goes unnoticed by modern audiences. Such as wool caps.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/cZHd4yrC7DV2sdyndn3...

> If, for instance, a theatre director today put a middle-aged man on stage wearing low-slung jeans, everybody in the audience would know it was both inappropriate and funny. In 50 years time they probably won't understand it at all and the object I'm looking at now carries just such a social meaning, self-evident to an Elizabethan, hard for us to read today. It's an English woollen cap of the 16th century, a sort of flat chocolatey brown beret

[...]

> Our hat unlocks a whole language of social difference and a whole structure of social control, both expressed through clothes and sometimes enforced by law. A Parliamentary statute of 1571 stipulated that every male over the age of six had to wear a woollen cap like this one on Sundays and holidays. The law was a shrewd device for supporting the English wool industry, but it was also designed to reinforce social divisions by making them visible.

> It was not in fact every boy and man that had to wear a cap, noblemen and gentlemen wore hats instead. The 'capped' were the lower echelons of society and for them, not wearing the cap was breaking the law. Shakespeare's Uncle Henry, not quite grand enough to qualify as a gentleman, was fined for not wearing his woollen cap. Everybody in Shakespeare's audience took all this for granted and everybody in this society wore a hat as a badge of social identity. Not to, would suggest that something was seriously amiss.