Tires and weeds

Use in the book

Dress participates in the transmission of fashion and social judgement. The courtiers who imitate rulers’ gestures also follow their “fashions in tires”; the examples make imitation an act of flattery. Cyrus’s “gay tyres” provide the more magnificent appearance that can win deference. Burton extends the privileges of wealth to those who merely seem rich, and follows with the spectator who mistakes fine clothing for high social standing.

Chariclea’s “beggers weeds” supply the opposite exterior. Her beauty is said to shine through impoverished dress like a jewel on a dungheap. Burton uses the example in a comparison of nature and art: he grants natural beauty’s persistent power, then judges deliberate enhancement more effective as it is actually used. The preceding paragraph joins clothing and ornaments with gestures and circumstances as enticements. The garments are literal clothing; the jewel supplies the simile.

Clothing is figurative in the “best attires Of youth and beauty”: nature dresses people in their own youth and beauty, rather than putting material garments on them. This unattributed English couplet follows the account of gestures and appearance and leads into Burton’s addition of art and deception to natural attraction. The natural adornment differs both from literal beggar’s clothes and from manufactured ornaments.

The clothing catalogue requires a narrower gloss for some tires. Placed beside coronets, they are headdresses, within an accumulation of precious stones, fabrics and accessories. The following attack on novel headwear and prolonged dressing brings appearance together with sound, movement and perfume. Yet Burton has just admitted becoming, customary clothing as appropriate to person and station. His English adaptation of Ovid adds the exotic headdress that wins the spectator, while the actual woman appears the smallest part of the display. Cornelia’s visitor likewise values her “head tire” above health; Burton’s speculative caricature is contrasted with Cornelia’s children as her jewels and followed by an appeal to decent, necessary use of wealth.

Tires can also be finery as a whole. In the reported Florentine wedding story, the husband judges his wife very differently in daylight “without her tires”. The hostile judgement belongs to that story’s husband, not the lexicon. The agent-noun appears when Venus acts as Aeneas’s “tire-woman”, dressing and adorning him for Dido; Burton then compares a Roman imperial display, with a family confusion noted by the edition. The same beggar’s clothing has a contrary rhetorical use when Burton asks the lover to imagine the beloved in “a base beggers weed”: a deliberately degrading thought experiment meant to undo admiration, followed by increasingly repulsive imagined conditions. This does not contradict the garment-sense, although it opposes Chariclea’s beauty shining through rags. Finally, “a mourning weed” supplies an austere exterior beneath which lust may hide in the attack on hypocrisy. Clothing neither guarantees inward worth nor invariably signifies seductive luxury.

Related entries

Habit and disposition: Habit can itself mean outward dress in the social examples.

Brave: Splendid appearance and clothing in brave and bravery.

Homely: Plain or unadorned appearance.

Art and artificial: The comparison of natural beauty and deliberate enhancement.

Glass: Mirrors and the practices of appearance.

Places to read

1. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 4Tires are dress in the courtly imitation catalogue.
2. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 5Continuation: social approval follows powerful opinion.
3. Subsection 6 Poverty and Want as Causes of Melancholy · paragraph 40Context: the social authority conferred by wealth.
4. Subsection 6 Poverty and Want as Causes of Melancholy · paragraph 41Cyrus’s gay tyres and judgement by the appearance of riches.
5. Subsection 6 Poverty and Want as Causes of Melancholy · paragraph 42Continuation: fine clothes can mislead about actual rank.
6. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 21Artificial enhancements supplement natural attraction; Bacon’s margin distinguishes features, colour and motion.
7. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 22Chariclea’s beggar’s weeds in the nature/art comparison; the precise Heliodorus passage remains uncollated.
8. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 50Gestures and outward appearance are presented as powerful enticements.
9. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 51Youth and beauty are nature’s figurative attires in an unattributed English couplet.
10. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 52Angerianus’s attributed line continues attraction through bodily features and movement.
11. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 53Art and deception are added to natural beauty in Burton’s argument.
12. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 4Qualification allowing becoming customary clothing.
13. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 5Tires specifically mean headdresses in the accessory catalogue.
14. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 6New-fashioned tires, costly grooming and trapping imagery.
15. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 7Continuation: sound, motion and scent in a fictional attraction.
16. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 18Ovid’s Latin on elaborate adornment precedes Burton’s verse.
17. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 19Strange tire as exotic headdress, added in the English expansion.
18. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 43Plainness and modesty preferred as ornaments.
19. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 44Head tire in the Cornelia anecdote and its speculative hostile portrait.
20. Artificial Attractions of Love and Incitements to Lust Gestures Clothes Dowry and So On · paragraph 45Continuation advocates decent dress and necessary uses of wealth.
21. Persistence and Opportunity of Time and Place; Meetings, Conversation, Singing, Dancing, Music, Amorous Tales and Sights, Kissing, Familiarity, Tokens, Gifts, Bribes, Promises, Declarations, Tears, and So On · paragraph 34Context: torchlight and concealment of imperfections.
22. Persistence and Opportunity of Time and Place; Meetings, Conversation, Singing, Dancing, Music, Amorous Tales and Sights, Kissing, Familiarity, Tokens, Gifts, Bribes, Promises, Declarations, Tears, and So On · paragraph 35Tires are the finery removed in the reported wedding anecdote.
23. Persistence and Opportunity of Time and Place; Meetings, Conversation, Singing, Dancing, Music, Amorous Tales and Sights, Kissing, Familiarity, Tokens, Gifts, Bribes, Promises, Declarations, Tears, and So On · paragraph 36Continuation generalizes courtship conditions and preserves divergent body/marginal versions.
24. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 9Venus prepares her son Aeneas to appear before Dido, supplying the referent of modern his.
25. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 10Virgil’s Venus adorns Aeneas before Dido.
26. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 11Tire-woman means dresser; the following imperial example confuses family relations.
27. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 12Continuation returns to lovers’ preparations through Polyphemus.
28. By Counsel and Persuasion, the Foulness of the Deed, the Faults of Men and Women, the Miseries of Marriage, the Consequences of Lust, and So Forth · paragraph 47Context: the lover is urged to question the senses and compare appearances.
29. By Counsel and Persuasion, the Foulness of the Deed, the Faults of Men and Women, the Miseries of Marriage, the Consequences of Lust, and So Forth · paragraph 48Beggar’s weed is imagined poor clothing in the degrading counter-attraction exercise.
30. By Counsel and Persuasion, the Foulness of the Deed, the Faults of Men and Women, the Miseries of Marriage, the Consequences of Lust, and So Forth · paragraph 49The imagined degradation continues through a reported purging episode.
31. By Counsel and Persuasion, the Foulness of the Deed, the Faults of Men and Women, the Miseries of Marriage, the Consequences of Lust, and So Forth · paragraph 50Further imagined conditions aim to undermine admiration.
32. Member 2 Subsection 1 Religious Melancholy From Deficiency: Those Affected—Epicures, Atheists, Hypocrites, the Worldly and Complacent, Carnalists, All Impious People, Impenitent Sinners, and Others · paragraph 15Outward beauty versus inward foulness.
33. Member 2 Subsection 1 Religious Melancholy From Deficiency: Those Affected—Epicures, Atheists, Hypocrites, the Worldly and Complacent, Carnalists, All Impious People, Impenitent Sinners, and Others · paragraph 16Mourning weed is sombre clothing in the hypocrisy argument.
34. Member 2 Subsection 1 Religious Melancholy From Deficiency: Those Affected—Epicures, Atheists, Hypocrites, the Worldly and Complacent, Carnalists, All Impious People, Impenitent Sinners, and Others · paragraph 17Continuation asks how inward hypocrisy can be judged.

In this edition

“Fashions in tires” becomes “fashions in dress”; “gay tyres” becomes “magnificent dress”; “beggers weeds” becomes “beggar’s clothes”. Gay supplies the splendour, while tyres supplies clothing. The two components should not be collapsed into a special definition of tyres.

The catalogue’s tires are “headdresses”, the “strange tire” is an “exotic headdress”, and “head tire” is “headdress”. The broader “without her tires” is “without her finery”. “Tire-woman” becomes “dresser”; “a base beggers weed” becomes “a poor beggar’s dress”; and “mourning weed” becomes “mourning dress”. The original Ovid quotation and Burton’s expanded English remain independent passages; the headdress added in his verse is not silently put into Ovid’s Latin.

“Their best attires Of youth and beauty” becomes “the finest clothes Of youth and beauty”: attires supplies clothes, best supplies finest, and the clothing is figurative. In the full tire-woman construction, “she was the tire-woman her self” becomes “she herself acted as his dresser”; his is supplied from the Aeneas context.

attire

Printed “attires” (English; lemma).

Clothes or adornments, here used figuratively.

Here: Youth and beauty are imagined as the finest clothing with which nature dresses people.

Context: An unattributed English couplet quoted in Burton’s argument personifies nature as the dresser; the following passage adds deliberate art and deception to natural beauty.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: their best attires Of youth and beauty

Modern rendering: the finest clothes Of youth and beauty

Alignment scope: Equal-scope noun phrase in the supplied original/modern pair.

Word and construction: Attires contributes clothes; best contributes finest. Youth and beauty identify the natural qualities figuratively worn, not material garments.

head tire

Printed “head tire” (English; phrase).

Adornment or dress for the head.

Here: The Campanian visitor’s supposed concern for her headdress contrasts with Cornelia’s children as jewels.

Context: Burton inserts a speculative hostile portrait into a reported anecdote; the supplied note distinguishes Seneca’s original male target from Burton’s female application.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: her head tire

Modern rendering: her headdress

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes adornment or dress for the head.

tire · tires · local use 1

Printed “tires” (English; lemma).

Dress or attire.

Here: Fashions are imitated along with gestures and conduct, with courtiers following rulers.

Context: Burton’s satire of social imitation, supported by historical anecdotes and a Juvenalian flatterer.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: fashions in tires

Modern rendering: fashions in dress

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes dress or attire.

Further local use

Printed “tyres” (English; lemma).

Here: Cyrus’s splendid exterior exemplifies valuation by clothing rather than known wealth or merit.

Context: Burton’s social satire extends the privileges of the rich to people who merely seem rich.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: his gay tyres

Modern rendering: his magnificent dress

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: Tyres contributes dress; gay supplies magnificent, not a judgement about sexuality.

Sense relation: A further local application of the same sense, with its own agency and phrase alignment.

tire · tires · local use 2

Printed “tires” (English; lemma).

A headdress or head-adornment.

Here: Tires appear beside coronets in a catalogue of ornaments and costly clothing.

Context: Burton’s interrogative attack on display follows his explicit acceptance of becoming ordinary dress.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: coronets and tires of several fashions

Modern rendering: coronets and headdresses of various fashions

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: Tires contributes headdresses; coronets remain a separate named head-adornment.

tire

Printed “tire” (English; lemma).

A headdress.

Here: The headdress helps make the adorned woman seem a small part of her elaborate appearance.

Context: Burton’s English verse expands the preceding Ovidian couplet, adding the headdress detail.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: with a strange tire we are won

Modern rendering: an exotic headdress wins us over

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes a headdress.

tire · tires · local use 3

Printed “tires” (English; lemma).

Ornaments or finery.

Here: The wife’s appearance without adornment in daylight disappoints the husband who had seen only torchlit display.

Context: Reported Gomesius anecdote; the judgement of ugliness belongs to the husband, and the source remains uncollated.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: without her tires

Modern rendering: without her finery

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes ornaments or finery.

tire-woman

Printed “tire-woman” (English; lemma).

A woman who dresses or adorns another person.

Here: Venus prepares Aeneas’s divine-looking appearance before Dido.

Context: Burton glosses the preceding Virgil quotation, then offers a confused imperial family example.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: she was the tire-woman her self

Modern rendering: she herself acted as his dresser

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: Tire-woman supplies dresser; she refers to Venus. His is supplied in the modern phrase from Aeneas, the person she adorns in the adjoining construction and preceding context.

Translator-supplied words: his: supplied possessive referring to Aeneas, whom Venus adorns

weed

Printed “weeds” (English; lemma).

Clothes or garments.

Here: Chariclea’s natural beauty remains visible under clothing associated with poverty.

Context: Burton’s Heliodorus example grants natural beauty’s force before saying artifice, as practised, has greater power.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: beggers weeds

Modern rendering: beggar’s clothes

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes clothes or garments.

Further local use

Printed “weed” (English; lemma).

Here: Imagined shabby clothing is proposed as a way to destroy the lover’s admiration.

Context: Burton expands advice associated with Ovid into a degrading thought experiment, followed by further imagined repulsive conditions; this is not a finding about the woman.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: a base beggers weed

Modern rendering: a poor beggar’s dress

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes clothes or a garment.

Sense relation: A further local application of the same sense, with its own agency and phrase alignment.

Further local use

Printed “weed” (English; lemma).

Here: Sombre outward dress may conceal lust and vice in the accusation against hypocrisy.

Context: Burton contrasts appearance with inward conduct; the Latin attribution to Jerome remains uncertain in the supplied apparatus.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: a mourning weed

Modern rendering: mourning dress

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes clothing or a garment.

Sense relation: A further local application of the same sense, with its own agency and phrase alignment.