I read the other day
that when Mark Rylance, the brilliant British actor who is currently Thomas
Cromwell on the PBS series Wolf Hall,
ran London’s Globe Theatre, he always wore a hat to let people know when he was
functioning as artistic director and not as actor. The hat was a trilby. (I
also read, to my surprise, that Rylance grew up and graduated from high school
in Milwaukee—but that’s another story.)
A trilby is a small,
narrow-brimmed hat with a short, indented crown. It is worn with the brim
snapped down in front and turned up in back. In shape it is similar to the
Tyrolean hat. It is so named from the character Trilby O’Ferrall, who wore such
a hat in the first production of the stage version of George du Maurier’s 1894
novel Trilby.
Similar to a trilby is a
fedora, which is also named for a
character in a play. The fedora has a wider brim and a taller crown. It got its
name from the character of Princess Fédora, who wore such a hat when played by
Sarah Bernhardt in Victorien Sardou’s 1882 play Fédora.
Other hat names have
mostly non-theatrical sources. The bowler
was named for London hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler, who designed it for a
client in the 1820s. When it
crossed the Atlantic in the 1840s, it was called a derby because it was favored by the Earl of Derby, who regularly
wore it to horse races.
The homburg is a formal stiff hat with what is called a “gutter crown”
with a single dent running down the middle and a stiff brim. It was named for
the German spa Bad Homburg, where King Edward VII procured a hat of this type
and then popularized it in England.
The boater is a straw hat with a flat brim, which was fashionable at
the beginning of the twentieth century at sailing events. For some reason, it
was popular with FBI agents, almost as an unofficial uniform, in the 1910s and
1920s.
The Bard of Buffalo
Bayou wears a hat mostly for protection—to try to keep his head safe from the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
When
Rylance is doing his work as director,
He
knows he must move in the management sector,
And
prove by whatever he puts on his head
That
he is the top guy whom all others dread.
A
bowler or derby would just be a bummer,
And
people might think he was merely a mummer.
A
homburg is humbug and makes him look stuffy,
He’d
deplore a fedora, it’s so seedy and scruffy.
The
reason a boater would never apply
Is
that someone might think he was just F.B.I.
Mr.
Rylance’s headwear must be only a trilby,
To
show that he wants to be boss—and he will be.
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