Bearded Women in Early Modern England
By Mark Albert Johnston
Studies in English Literature, Vol.47:1 (2007)
Introduction: “An old man, whose beard was all ouer-growne with gray haires, ask’d a Foole how he might do to become yong again: The Fool answered: Goe to the Barber: But how if that will not serue (said the old man) how then? The Foole reply’d: Then bind your selfe Prentise to some body for a 100. years.”
As this passage from Anthony Copley’s late-sixteenth-century collection of witticisms succinctly demonstrates, there was a pervasive association between male beard growth and economic social status in early modern England. The old man in Copley’s anecdote who asks a fool how to attain youth is told that he should either visit the barber, ostensibly in order to have his beard removed, or else bind himself apprentice to a master in perpetuity; according to the fool’s rhetoric, the two acts are equivalent. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, in fact, the one signaled the other: the presence of a beard advertised the completion of apprenticeship and the acquisition of freeman status. So, the fool’s logic correctly assumes that maturity and youth are primarily economic constructions that are constituted by the (regulated) presence or absence of facial hair.
Furthermore, since English boys who had not yet completed the terms of their apprenticeships were not permitted to marry, the presence of a beard heralded both the socioeconomic and sexual viability of its host to the early modern English imagination, mapping sexual prerogative over economic privilege.
Click here to read/download this article (PDF file)
Related posts:
- Women, performance, and the household in early modern England, 1580-1660
- Numme Feete: Meter in Early Modern England
- Women (Authors) on Top
- Good Turns and the Art of Merchandizing: Conceptualizing Exchange in Early Modern England
- “Upon the Suddaine View”: State, Civil Society and Surveillance in Early Modern England