Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity; First Edition

__Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity__ is the first full-length critical study to analyse the importance of beards in terms of the theatrical performance of masculinity. According to medical, cultural, and literary discourses of early modern era in England, facial hair marked adult manliness while beardlessness indicated boyhood. Beards were therefore a passport to cultural prerogatives. This book explores this in relation to the early modern stage, a space in which the processes of gender formation in early modern society were writ large, and how the uses of facial hair in the theatre illuminate the operations of power and politics in society more widely. Written for scholars of Early Modern Theatre and Theatre History, this volume anatomises the role of beards in the construction of onstage masculinity, acknowledging the challenges offered to the dominant ideology of manliness by boys and men who misrepresented or failed to fulfil bearded masculine ideals. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Page 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Dedication 6 Table of Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 A note on the text 13 Abbreviations 14 Introduction 16 Frameworks 17 The early modern beard 22 The early modern beard in performance 29 1. Youth: Beardless boys 38 1.1 The tradition of boy playing: the case of the Chester boy rider 40 1.2 The discourse of erotic boyhood in drama 45 1.3 Disguise, distrust, and puberty 55 1.4. Smooth gallants 67 Conclusion 72 2. Liminal masculinity 80 2.1 ‘Bearded like the pard’: Martial masculinity in early modern drama and poetry 84 2.2 Soldiers and ideological resistance 94 2.3 Beards, theatrical disguise, and masculine dissimulation 102 Conclusion 107 3. Maturity: Lovers and bearded manhood 112 3.1 The problem of marriage 118 3.2 Masculinity that matters: the dissolution of subjectivity in Macbeth 125 3.3 Hairs, heirs, and airs in Hamlet 137 3.4 Boys to men...to boys: manliness in Coriolanus 143 Conclusion 146 4. Old age: Greybeards and the decline of manliness 153 4.1 Greybeards and governance 154 4.2 Wise counsellors or doting fools? Staged conflicts of youth and age 165 4.3 ‘Unseasonable letchers’ and unsuitable suitors: greybearded sexuality 174 4.4 Disenfranchised old age 182 Conclusion 183 Afterword: The nest of beards 191 Index 193