A Blue Velvet Cap

Do not look even remotely surprised when I tell you that Shakespeare in Love is one of my favorite movies. It's one of a few (along with Ever After, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, and Knight's Tale) that I refer to as my "Garb Movies" - movies I throw on in the background while I'm whiling away the hours working on garb projects.

Shakespeare in Love, however, is also a source of much dismay to me, because of one very stupid line which somehow became an obsession, during rehearsals when Fennyman says:

"I have a blue velvet cap that'll do well. I've seen just such a cap on an apothecary. Just so."

And now, dear reader, I will be damned if I don't want desperately to have a blue velvet cap for my apothecary's daughter persona. Now you're saying, "Wait, I thought your persona was the daughter of a painter and a midwife, what happened?" 

Nothing, it's just that before I decided he'd been a painter, I'd wanted him to be an apothecary, and I've already had that velvet in my stash for years.

At some point I was convinced that there had to be some historical significance to this- that surely apothecaries somewhere, at some point, wore caps of blue velvet. Or caps of velvet. Or caps of blue. SOMETHING. But I have found little, if nothing, to support this idea.

There's no question that apothecaries wore hats, as most people did. Below are two depictions of an Apothecary at work, and both are topped off.

 
On the right, the woodcut appears to be of an apothecary and his apprentice, and the apprentice appears to be wearing a fun twisted headband which may or may not have a fabric crown (thereby making it a hat, not just a band.)

As you can see below, velvet caps are no strangers to menswear of the 16th century...

However, you might have noticed by now that these are all men, in men's hats. Which, you know, that's fine. If anyone were to compliment my fine cap, I could say, "It was my father's! The cholera took him, God rest his soul."

My persona is Dutch, married to a German, and living in the former half of the 1500's. A Landsknecht look would not be remotely wrong for her, and neither would something of a somewhat Flemish origin. I admit to being delighted by the Landsknecht starfish hat, but don't have enough of the velvet in question to pull it off. Things to think about...