Nay, I have known in our company this ridiculous sort of regret carried so far that the tragedian has thought himself injured when the comedian pretended to wear a fine coat." Powel, the tragedian, surveying the dress worn by Cibber as Lord Foppington, fairly lost his temper, and complained, in rude terms, that he had not so good a suit in which to play Caesar Borgia.

Then, again, when Betterton proposed to "mount" a tragedy, the comic actors were sure to murmur at the cost of it.

Dogget especially regarded with impatience "the costly trains and plumes of tragedy, in which, knowing himself to be useless, he thought they were all a vain extravagance." Tragedy, however, was certainly an expensive entertainment at this time.
Dryden's "All for Love" had been revived at a cost of nearly L600 for dresses--"a sum unheard of for many years before on a like occasion." It was, by-the-way, the production of this tragedy, in preference to his "adaptation" of Shakespeare's "Coriolanus," that so bitterly angered Dennis, the critic, and brought about his fierce enmity to Cibber.
To the hero of tragedy a feathered headdress was indispensable; the heroine demanded a long train borne by one or two pages.

Pope writes: Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep Howl to the roarings of the northern deep, Such is the shout, the long-applauded note, At Quin's high plume, or Oldfield's petticoat.
Hamlet speaks of a "forest of feathers" as part of an actor's professional qualification.

Addison, writing in "The Spectator" on the methods of aggrandising the persons in tragedy, denounces as ridiculous the endeavour to raise terror and pity in the audience by the dresses and decorations of the stage, and takes particular exception to the plumes of feathers worn by the conventional hero of tragedy, rising "so very high, that there is often a greater length from his chin to the top of his head than to the sole of his foot.