Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:00:56.158Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Will Fisher
Will Fisher*
Affiliation:
Lehman College, Cuny
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay builds on Judith Butler's recent theoretical work in Bodies that Matter by suggesting that the sexual differences that “mattered” in early modern England are not exactly the same as those that “matter” today. In particular, it suggests that facial hair often conferred masculinity during the Renaissance: the beard made the man. The centrality of the beard is powerfully demonstrated by both portraits and theatrical practices. Indeed, virtually all men in portraits painted between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth century have some sort official hair. Beards were also quite common on the Renaissance stage, and the essay goes on to analyze the use of false beards as theatrical props. These are not, however, the only “texts “from the period that equate being a man with having a beard. Similar formulations appear in a wide range of sources: medical treatises, physiognomy books, poetical works, and tracts on gender. In many of these texts, moreover, facial hair is not simply imagined as a means of constructing sexual differences between men and women; it is also a means of constructing distinctions between men and boys. Thus, it would appear that boys were considered to be a different gender from men during the Renaissance. This division had important ramifications for theater practice. It meant, for example, that boy actors would have been as much “in drag” when playing the parts of men as when playing the parts of women. Finally, we need to bear in mind that if facial hair thus served as an important means of materializing masculinity in early modern England, it was also crucially malleable and prosthetic. As a result, we can say that both masculinity and the beard had to be constantly made (to) matter.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , Spring 2001 , pp. 155 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bacon, Francis. 1965. Francis Bacon: A Selection of his Works. Ed. Sidney Warhaft. New York.Google Scholar
Berger, Maurice, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson, eds. 1995. Constructing Masculinity. New York.Google Scholar
Beze, Theodore de. 1580. hones. Geneva. The Book of Sir Thomas More. 1911. Ed. W. W. Greg. London.Google Scholar
Breitenberg, Mark. 1996. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. New York.Google Scholar
Bulwer, John. 1654. Anthropometamorphosis. London.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex. “ New York.Google Scholar
Cartwright, William. 1951. The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Madison.Google Scholar
Codes, Bartholomeus. 1556. A brief and most pleasaufnjt epitomye of the whole art ofphisiognomie. London.Google Scholar
Corson, Richard. 1965. Fashions in Hair: The First Five Thousand Years. New York.Google Scholar
Crompton, Hugh. 1652. The Glory of Women … first written in Latine by Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Knight. London.Google Scholar
Crooke, Helkiah. 1631. A description of the body of man. The second edition corrected and enlarged. London.Google Scholar
Documents relating to the Office of the Revels - in the time of Queen Elizabeth. 1908. Ed. Albert Feuillerat. Louvain.Google Scholar
Doyle, Charles Clay. 1981. “The Hair and Beard of Thomas More,” Moreana: XV, 5-14.Google Scholar
Dulaure, Jacques Antoine. 1786. Pogonologia, or a Philosophical and Historical Essay on Beards. Exeter.Google Scholar
Epstein, Julia. 1990. “Either/Or - Neither/ Both: Sexual Ambiguity and the Ideology of Gender.” Genders 7: 39–142.Google Scholar
Forse, James. 1993. Art Imitates Business: Commercial and Political Influences on the Elizabethan Theater. Bowling Green, OH.Google Scholar
Gair, Reavley. 1982. The Children of Paul's: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553-1608. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Garber, Marjorie. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Jonathan. 1992. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Palo Alto.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. 1988. “Fiction and Friction.” In Shakespearean Negotiations, 66-93. Berkeley.Google Scholar
Gurr, Andrew. 1970. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Haec Vir. 1985. In Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640, eds. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, 277-89. Urbana.Google Scholar
Hall, Thomas. 1653. The Loathsomeness of Longe Haire. London.Google Scholar
Harrison, William. 1968. The Description of England. Ed. Georges Edelen. Ithaca.Google Scholar
Hearn, Karen. 1996. Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530-1630. New York.Google Scholar
Hill, Thomas. 1571. The contemplation of mankinde, contayning a singuler discourse ofphisioqnomie. London.Google Scholar
Holme, Randal. 1688. The Academy of Armory. Chester.Google Scholar
Jardine, Lisa. 1992. “Twins and travesties: gender, dependency, and sexual availability in Twelfth Night.” In Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman, 27-38. New York.Google Scholar
Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Stallybrass, Peter. Unpublished ms. “Fashion and Fetishism in Early Modern England and Europe.“Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. 1966. Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. Ed. L.A. Beaurline. Lincoln.Google Scholar
King, T. J. 1992. Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and their Roles, 1590-1642. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Korda, Natasha. 1996. “Household Property / Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker.” Theatre Journal: 48:2, 185-95.Google Scholar
Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Maclntyre, Jean. 1992. Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theaters. Edmonton.Google Scholar
Madelaine, R. E. R. 1983. “Boys’ Beards and Balurdo.” Notes and Queries: 228, 148-50.Google Scholar
Malone Society Collections. 1909. Notes by E S. Boas. Oxford.Google Scholar
Massinger, Phillip. 1976. The Plays and Poems of Phillip Massinger. Ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson. Oxford.Google Scholar
Middleton, Thomas. 1885. The Works of Thomas Middleton. Ed. A.H. Bullen. London.Google Scholar
Moller, Herbert. 1987. “The Accelerated Development of Youth: Beard Growth as a Biological Marker.” Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History: 29, 754-55.Google Scholar
Montaigne, Michel de. 1929. The Diary of Montaigne's Journey to Italy in 1580 and 1581. Trans, and intro. E.J. Trechmann. New York.Google Scholar
Orgel, Stephen. 1996. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Park, Katherine, and Robert A. Nye. 1991. “Destiny is Anatomy.” The New Republic, 18 Feb., 53-57.Google Scholar
Parker, Patricia. 1993. “Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain.” Critical Inquiry: 337-64.Google Scholar
Percy Society. 1849. Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of Middle Ages. London.Google Scholar
Perper, T. 1985. Sex Signals: The Biology of Love. Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Records of Early English Drama. 1989. Ed. Alan H. Nelson. Toronto.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Reginald. 1950. Beards. London. Severn, Bill. 1972. The Long and the Short of It: Five Thousand Years of Fun and Fury over Hair. New York.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston.Google Scholar
Sidney, Sir Philip. 1970. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Intro. Carl Dennis. Kent, OH.Google Scholar
Steinberg, Leo. 1983. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. New York.Google Scholar
Streett, J. B. 1973. “The Durabiliry of Boy Actors,” Notes and Queries: 218, 464.Google Scholar
Strong, Roy C. 1969. Tudor & Jacobean Portraits. London.Google Scholar
Taylor, John. 1621. Superbiae Flagellum, or, the whip of pride. London.Google Scholar
Tilley, Morris Palmer. 1950. Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Ann Arbor.Google Scholar
Ulmus, Marcus Antonius. 1602. Physiologia barbae humanae. Rome.Google Scholar
Valerian, Johan. 1533. A Treatise which is Intitled in Latin Pro Sacerdotum Barbis. London.Google Scholar