False Facial Hair and Early Modern Boy Actors: A Correction

Rebecca Yearling

doi:10.1093/notesj/gji232

The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England*

Renaissance Quarterly ◽

10.2307/1262223 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 54 (1) ◽

pp. 155-187 ◽

Cited By ~ 35

Author(s):

Will Fisher

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Theoretical Work ◽

Early Modern England ◽

Sexual Differences ◽

Facial Hair ◽

Recent Theoretical Work ◽

Wide Range ◽

Important Means ◽

Medical Treatises ◽

Boy Actors

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.

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Gender Trouble and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/386118 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 35 (4) ◽

pp. 438-465 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

David Cressy

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Real Life ◽

English Revolution ◽

Renaissance England ◽

Cross Dressing ◽

Dramatic Practice ◽

Gender Trouble ◽

Boy Actors ◽

Materialist Feminist ◽

Gender System

A celebrated article in Shakespeare Quarterly opens with the question, “how many people cross-dressed in Renaissance England?” Jean Howard, who posed this intriguing question, suggests that disruption of the semiotics of dress, gender, and identity during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods points to “a sex-gender system under pressure” and a patriarchal culture disturbed by profound anxieties and contradictions. Even if the answer to her question turns out to be “very few,” the discourse surrounding the practice reveals an area of critical and problematic unease. Female transvestism on the streets of London, male transvestism on the stage, and vituperative attacks on cross-dressing by Protestant reformers are among the symptoms that indicate that “the subversive or transgressive potential of this practice could be and was recuperated in a number of ways.” Dressing boy actors for female roles, for example, was not simply “an unremarkable convention within Renaissance dramatic practice,” as some scholars have suggested, but rather a scandalous “source of homoerotic attraction” arousing “deep-seated fears” of an “unstable and monstrous” and feminized self. Whether in real life or in literature, by this account, cross-dressing involved struggle, resistance, and subversion, as well as modification, recuperation, and containment of the system of gendered patriarchal domination. Renaissance cross-dressing involved ideological work of a complex kind that ultimately, in Howard's materialist feminist analysis, “participated in the historical process eventuating in the English Revolution.” This is a claim that may make English historians gasp, but it is one that they cannot ignore.

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