Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity

Eleanor Rycroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351265027
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

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.

1 Youth

Beardless boys

When describing ‘The differences of youth, and old age’ in his Historie of Life and Death, Francis Bacon outlines a physiological progression of the body from the uterus to the grave, writing

The Ladder of Mans Bodie, is this. To be Conceived; to be Quickned in the Wombe; to bee Borne; to Sucke; To be Weaned; To Feed upon Pap; to Put forth Teeth, the First time about the Second yeare of Age; to Begin to goe; To Begin to speake; To Put forth Teeth, the Second time, about seven years of Age; To come to Pubertie, about twelve or fourteene yeares of Age; To be Able for Generation, and the Flowing of the Menstrua; to have Haires about the Legges, and Arme-holes; to Put forth a Beard; And thus long, and sometimes later, to Grow in Stature; To come to full years of Strength and Agility; To grow Gray, and Bild; The Ceasing of the Menstrua, and Ability to Generation; to grow Decrepit, and a Monster with Three Legs; To Die.

(1638, pp. 369–70)

Bacon does not entirely ignore women’s bodies (as his passing references to menstruation confirm) but his focus is principally on the man’s body, a vital element of which is hair, and especially the beard. Like many other early modern writers, Bacon’s account of the movement from male childhood to adulthood attributes a pivotal role to facial hair, thereby demonstrating that a defining characteristic of boyhood during the early modern period was beardlessness. The Dutch physician, Levinus Lemnius, ascribes this fact to humoural complexion,¹ concurring with Bacon that at about the age of 14, hairs begin to burgeon and “shewe forth, lytle and weake” but that eventually the heating up of the humoural body leads “fumous exhalation [to] aboundeth in those parts of the bodye, which are apte to generate and produce hayre, as the Heade, Chinne, Arme pittes, & privities” (1576, sig. Fr–Fv). He continues to underscore the dichotomy between the ‘cold’ boy and the ‘hot’ man in his assertion

Therefore all those partes in mans body are most rough and hayrie, which abounde in most heate. For it attracteth the vaporous fumes that issue from the humors, and fashioneth the same into a hayrie nature. And for this cause, many Springhaldes [youths] have not in that Age anye beardes, neither any other partes of their bodies hayrie.

(sig. Fv)

The physiological differences between boyhood and manhood found in both Bacon and Lemnius’ accounts of male puberty bring to the fore a set of issues that I will examine in this chapter. My key concern is to explore the first phase of early modern manhood, beardless boyhood, to show that male children were not necessarily perceived as unformed men during the early modern era. While the gender identity of the male child was contingent upon the fact that the beard was synecdochal of mature masculinity, the movement from boyhood to manhood was nevertheless governed by discontiguity. Boys’ beardlessness may have connected them to discourses of adult male beardedness, but both boys’ masculinity and that of adult men was subject to distinct sets of assumptions, discursive constructions, and cultural values. Mark Albert Johnston has shown through his reading of John Lyly’s Midas that there was not even a guarantee that a boy would manifest a beard as he matured, writing that the text “leaves the matter to ‘chance,’ insinuating that the discovery of a boy’s beard was more a matter of fortune than natural causes, such as the onset of puberty” (2005, p. 92). In fact, in many ways, boys’ humoural make-up and the fact that they shared many perceived feminine anatomical features, such as small frames and high voices, makes them closer to women than to men in early modern conceptions of gender.

This does not mean that boys were, as Stephen Orgel has written “substitutes for women” (1996, p. 103) but rather that they formed their own category in early modern thought, a point that Will Fisher makes persuasively throughout his work on beards (2001, p. 175; 2006, p. 235). As a result, a study of boy players which focuses mainly on their staging of femininity, marginalises the ways in which they dislocate and reproduce categories of boyhood as well as womanhood on the early modern stage. By studying the words that cluster around the bodies of pre-pubescent and pubescent boys in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, I will show that their subjectivity is a discrete construction both culturally and theatrically, in line with Orgel’s contention that “Boys and women are not in competition in this system…they are antithetical not to each other, but to men” (1996, p. 103) – as is apparent when the pageboy of John Day’s Humour Out of Breath (1607; printed 1608) formulates his gender in the space between masculinity and femininity: “And I were man as/ am no woman” (sig. Cr). At the same time the earlier sixteenth-century English customs of boy playing and the unique effects wrought by boys within dramatic plots will be considered to show that, when boys later took to the commercial stage, a specific discourse was conjured that invoked certain expectations of dress, speech and behaviour, especially in terms of the boy’s interactions with male and female authority.

My analysis of boyhood is illuminated by Sinfield’s urging of critics not to look for a “continuous consciousness” within the characters of early modern casts (1992, p. 65), but to understand them rather as “simulated personages apparently possessing adequately continuous or developing subjectivities” (p. 78). Rather than searching for psychological interiority among early modern characters, Sinfield instead suggests that “the presentation of the dramatis personae must be traced to a textual organisation in which character is a strategy” (ibid.). For this reason, I will frequently use the term typology, in the sense of ‘symbolic significance, representation, or treatment’ (OED, ‘typology’, n. 1) when I refer to boy characters on the early modern stage, in order to signal that when a particular type of boy appears – whether innocent child, witty pageboy, or saucy wag – he is common to a range of drama rather than specific to an individual play. Boys had enormous commercial, material, and semantic value in civic pageants, courtly masques, and metropolitan drama, and this chapter will chart how boy typologies work strategically within the early modern plays that are peppered with their presence. Such an approach will necessarily have recourse to contemporaneous cultural views of male children, partly to contextualise them as theatrical subjects, and partly because the conditions of boy playing makes the relationship between the actor and the part difficult to disentangle for playwrights and audiences alike. By taking a broad chronological sweep across the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, I aim to trace the development of staged boyhood prior to the opening of regular, commercial playhouses, but I will also consider how boys function as a separate category from men and women in the plays in which they appear. In addition, my exploration of boys’ association with particular adult typologies on the stage will complicate how gender is to be read in particular plays – especially in relation to gallants and their page boys. A key argument, developed in relation to a case study of the Chester boy rider, will be that the word ‘trimming’ recurs across representations of manliness, whether based in boyhood or manhood, and that, while men may expect to be trimmed by their barbers, boys are frequently associated with other sorts of trimming, namely decorative aspects of costuming and other visual embellishments, which help to compensate for their lack of adult facial hair. In this way, an investigation of the relationship between materiality and personation when it comes to the boy actor will be brought to the fore.

1.1 The tradition of boy playing: the case of the Chester boy rider

Boy playing was already a well-established practice in both late medieval and the earliest early modern performance before the advent of commercial playing, mainly in the form of choristers and schoolboy players. The earliest reference to boy players is given as 1378 by Glynn Wickham in relation to miracle plays at St. Pauls:

These youngsters appear to have been employed as actors from very early days… It is in the street pageant theatres of civic welcomes that they are most frequently used. Juvenes and virgins are constantly mentioned in descriptions and accounts from the fourteenth century onwards.

(1980, p. 270)

From the medieval theatre onwards, therefore, boy players emerge in minor, usually female, often symbolic, and usually collective roles: it is rare to find mention of only one virgin, or one angel, for example. When Wickham speculates on the clothing worn by the boys performing roles of angels and virgins in civic pageantry, he suggests that the use of prosthetic hair is indicated: “[W]e may reckon on something after the fashion of a surplice, drawn in at the waist by a girdle and a wig of long golden hair surmounted with a fillet as the usual costume” (p. 106).

Male children are also found performing in disguisings, the private, secular entertainments mounted by the aristocracy in their own households. In the Richmond disguising of 1501 which celebrated the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, it is recorded that two mermaids were drawn into the hall on a throne accompanied by “a chylde of the chapel, syngyng right sweetly, and w(i)th g(rea)t armony” (cited Wickham, 1980, p. 271). Choristers remained a prevalent feature of maskings, mummings, pageants, and royal progressions throughout the 1500s. William Cornish directed the popular Children of the Chapel in various Henrician entertainments including the pageants at Greenwich for the Christmas revels such as ‘The Pavyllyon un the Plas Parlos’ (1514/5) and ‘The Garden of Esperance (1515/16). It is probable that the part of the Boy in The Play of The Weather (1533) – specified in the dramatis personae to be acted by ‘the lest that can play’ – was also drawn from this pool of performers, or even that the entire play was performed by the Chapel Children for Henry.² The dramatic pleasure that performing children provided to noble patrons and sixteenth-century monarchs helped to spur on the creation of boys’ acting companies towards the middle of the century, with singing remaining a standard feature of boy players’ performances in both boys’ and adult companies well into the Stuart era.

A notable expansion of boy playing in the sixteenth-century civic drama can be traced in productions of the Chester Cycle, as outlined by David Mills in Recycling the Cycle and Lawrence Clopper’s introduction to REED: Cheshire. The Cycle had been an annual event in the civic calendar since the 1300s, but at some point it had moved from a religious entertainment to one funded and performed by the craft guilds of the city. This movement precipitated an increased use of boys to present the professional companies of Chester, perhaps because the guilds had access to large numbers of apprentices. An early record of boys being used for dramatic effect – albeit as inanimate props rather than performers – is revealed in the order from the Mayor to the Painters’ Company in 1564 to prepare such “ornamentes” for the “wache” as “won unicorne won drombandarye, won Luce, won Camell, won Asse, won dragon, sixe hobby horses & sixteen naked boyes” (REED Cheshire, 1979, p. 72). David Mills has deduced that these figures of naked boys would have been “made of skins and provided with arrows”, but it is interesting that boys are placed alongside the fantastical beasts of unicorns and dragons as it speaks of their spectacular value. Moreover, from the mid-1500s a practice was instituted whereby a boy carrying the flag or “signe” of the guild would lead the procession of its members on horseback to their designated performance area. An important aspect of this development is that the boy rider gradually substitutes the more contentious characters who traditionally led the guild procession in pre-Reformation performances of the Cycle, such as the ‘devil in feathers’ of the Butcher’s Company, or the cross-dressed man used as part of the Innkeepers’ show.³ This became ever-more the case when the Mayor, John Savage, revived the Cycle following a hiatus due to its controversial nature, and was called before the Privy Council for doing so, with the Mayor’s List for 1575 recording that

this year the said John Savage caused the popish plaies of Chester to bee playd… in contempt of an Inhibition and the primates letters from yorke and from the Earle of Huntington, for which cause hee was served by a pursevant from yorke.

(REED Cheshire, 1979, p. 109)

The Catholic context for the Chester drama is reinforced by the association of Sir John Savage with, what Mary A. Blackstone terms the “cultural neighbourhood” of “Cheshire, Lancashire and south-western parts of Westmorland” or “‘Irish Sea’ province” (2003, p. 188). Blackstone notes in her contribution to Region, Religion and Patronage that the Irish Sea province was especially feared by the Elizabethan regime for its recusancy. In their introduction to the book, Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson outline the local networks of power in the North-West that exploited theatre as an “increasingly important mode of cultural exchange” (2003, p. 1), and quote an entry for 31 December–5 January 1588/9 from the Derby Household Book which shows that “S Jhon Savadge” stayed at Knowsley on the Tuesday to see a play (p. 8), the same Mayor called before the Privy Council in 1575. The interrelations between the North-West gentry and theatre become more complex when key figures in the Irish Sea province, the Earl of Derby and Lord Strange – both of whom patronised their own itinerant theatre troupes – were invited by the Mayor to Chester in 1577–8 for the only post-1575 revival of one of the most divisive parts of the Cycle, the Shepherd’s Play performed by the Painters’ Company (REED: Cheshire, 1979, pp. 124–5).⁴

The Chester religious controversy reveals a dialectic of power that exists between influential English regions such as the Irish Sea province and major cities such as London, and reminds us that developments in boy playing during the sixteenth century should be seen as subject to simultaneity across court, city, and country. Too often a London-centric approach is adopted in accounts of boy playing, but in fact material practices were developing in both metropolitan and non...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A note on the text
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Youth: Beardless boys
• 2. Liminal Masculinity
• 3. Maturity: Lovers and bearded manhood
• 4. Old age: Greybeards and the decline of manliness
• Afterword: The nest of beards
• Index