Abstract
This chapter makes particular reference to sixteenth-century English portraiture, especially miniatures and their connections with contemporary culture and behaviour, but also suggests the applicability of distinctions derived from twentieth-century anthropology and sociology. The focus is on the early modern head, principally the hair and the beard. It is suggested that, contrary to most approaches, masculinity is not the best organising principle for beards in history, because it is insufficiently broad to encompass the full range of early modern beard phenomena and beard behaviour. We need to raise issues of communication, fashion and control as well as sexuality. Evidence can be drawn from drama and satire as well as portraiture, all sources using extreme degrees of artifice in order to convey their messages.
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Notes
- 1.
The most influential work of Jakob Burckhardt (1818–1897), Swiss historian and art critic, is Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860). See John Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4–12 and passim.
- 2.
For a concise overview see Peter Burke, “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 17–28. From a very large literature see also Caroline Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980): 1–17; Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance , ed. Karl Enenkel, Betsy de Jong-Crane, and Peter Liebregts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998); Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism.
- 3.
See Christopher Oldstone-Moore ’s overview in this volume for a helpful endorsement of aspects of the approach taken here, especially the critical use of the social sciences, stress on forms of communication and the feasibility of combining universals with historical specificities. He adds useful detail on several of the twentieth-century figures referred to below.
- 4.
On clothing, see exemplary studies by Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme/Past and Present Publications, 1996); Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, ed. Catherine Richardson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 5.
Giles Constable, “Introduction on Beards in the Middle Ages ,” in Burchard of Bellevaux, Apologia de barbis, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum, vol. 62 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 47–150; Robert Bartlett, “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages ,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 4 (1994): 43–60; Pauline Stafford, “The Meanings of Hair in the Anglo-Norman World: Masculinity , Reform, and National Identity ,” in Saints, Scholars and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies, ed. Mathilde van Dijk and Renée Nip (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 153–71; Laura Clark, “Fashionable Beards and Beards as Fashion : Beard Coats in Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur,” Parergon 31 (2014): 95–109. But see Will Fisher , “The Renaissance Beard : Masculinity in Early Modern England ,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 155–87; Christopher Oldstone-Moore , Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015).
- 6.
Much impetus has come from anthropologists and older cultural historians, who emphasised the human head as the site of honour and the senses. See for example Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. John Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), 21–77 at 25; Folke Henschen, The Human Skull: A Cultural History, trans. Stanley Thomas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966). Subsequent discussions include Samuel Edgerton, Jr., “Maniera and the Mannaia: Decorum and Decapitation in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Meaning of Mannerism, ed. Franklin Robinson and Stephen Nichols, Jr. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1972), 67–103; Angus Clarke, “Metoposcopy: An Art to Find the Mind’s Construction in the Forehead,” in Astrology, Science and Society: Historical Essays, ed. Patrick Curry (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987), 171–95; Karl Hulton, The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987); Lorna Clymer, “Cromwell’s Head and Milton’s Hair: Corpse Theory in Spectacular Bodies of the Interregnum,” The Eighteenth Century 40 (1999): 91–112; Margaret Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005).
- 7.
See for example Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London: Reaktion Books, 1990); Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); Gail Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds., Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Owens, Stages of Dismemberment. For a wide-ranging reassessment, see Caroline Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 1–33. See also Kevin Stagg, “The Body,” in Writing Early Modern History, ed. Garthine Walker (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), 205–26.
- 8.
See note 5; Penelope Corfield, “Dress for Deference and Dissent: Hats and the Decline of Hat Honour,” Costume 23 (1989): 64–79. From antiquity systems of medical treatment were organised from head (the noblest part) to toe: Luke Demaitre, Medieval Medicine: The Art of Healing, from Head to Toe (Santa Barbara and Oxford: Praeger, 2013); Anon., Another Collection of Philosophical Conferences of the French Virtuosi, trans. G. Havers and J. Davies (London, 1665), Conference CXLIX, ‘Of hair’. However the heart, the ‘throne of majesty’, had a rival claim: [Robert Underwood], The Little World. Or, a Lively Description of All the Partes and Properties of Man (London, 1612), 8, where the body is likened to a house. See Scott Stevens, “Sacred Heart and Secular Brain,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 263–82.
- 9.
For the major texts, see Paul Archambault, “The Analogy of the ‘Body’ in Renaissance Political Literature,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance 29 (1967): 21–53; see also David Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), esp. Chapter 4; Jonathan Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Writers frequently used a triploid analogy of head, prince and physician.
- 10.
Othello , act I, scene iii, line 80: Arden edn, ed. M. R. Ridley (1958; repr. London: Methuen, 1985), 25. The play was first performed in 1604 (p. xv). On Othello ’s racial characteristics as evidenced in the play, see pp. l–liv. The issue of race in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is hotly debated. See for example Peter Erickson, “The Moment of Race in Renaissance Studies,” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 27–36, and more generally, Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
- 11.
C. B. Goodhart, “The Evolutionary Significance of Human Hair Patterns and Skin Colouring,” Advancement of Science 17 (1960): 53–59; Rodney Dawber, ed., Diseases of the Hair and Scalp, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 68–71; Raymond Firth , “Hair as Private Asset and Public Symbol,” in Symbols: Public and Private, ed. Raymond Firth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 262–98 at 263. On contemporary opinion and prejudice, see Eleanor Rycroft ’s valuable chapter in this volume; similarly, on evolutionary notions to do with hair, see the chapter by Sharon Twickler .
- 12.
The Merchant of Venice , act I, scene iii, line 112; I, ii, lines 169–70; act III, scene ii, lines 120–23: Arden edn, ed. J. Russell Brown (1955; repr. London: Methuen, 1984), 28, 14, 83–84. The play was written in the later 1590s and first printed in 1600 (pp. xxi–xxvii). The figure of Shylock has also been much contested: John Gross, Shylock : Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992). On the gendered connotations of webs and spinning, see Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass , Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Pt II.
- 13.
Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter , An Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment: Fashion and Anti-Fashion (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978).
- 14.
John Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930); Ernest Jones, [Obituary of Flugel], International Journal of Psychoanalysis 37 (1956): 193–97; Georg Simmel , “Fashion ,” International Quarterly 10 (October 1904): 130–55, repr. in Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 294–323; Donald Levine, Ellwood Carter, and Eleanor Gorman, “Simmel’s Influence on American Sociology ,” Pts I & II, American Journal of Sociology 81 (1976): 813–45, 1112–32. For later commentary on the distinction, see Fritz Redlich, “A Needed Distinction in Fashion Study,” Business History Review 37 (1963): 3–4; Fred Davis, Fashion , Culture and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Valerie Steele, “Anti-Fashion : The 1970s,” Fashion Theory 1 (1997): 279–95.
- 15.
On fashion as currently understood, see for example Davis, Fashion , Culture, and Identity ; Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion : Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge, 1994); Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender and Identity in Clothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
- 16.
See for example Wendy Cooper , Hair: Sex, Society, Symbolism (London: Aldus Books, 1971), which includes the physical characteristics of hair; Paul Hershman, “Hair, Sex and Dirt,” Man 9 (1974): 274–98, an illuminating study of Sikh and Hindu Punjabis which includes women ’s hair; and Neil Hertz, “Medusa ’s Head: Male Hysteria Under Political Pressure,” Representations 4 (1983): 27–54, which dwells less convincingly on castration symbols, sexual difference and history as physiognomy .
- 17.
Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993); Charles Berg , The Unconscious Significance of Hair (London: Allen and Unwin, 1951); and most relevantly, Mark Johnston, Beard Fetish in Early Modern England : Sex, Gender and Registers of Value (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
- 18.
Christopher Hallpike , “Social Hair ,” in Social Aspects of the Human Body, ed. Ted Polhemus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 134–46 at 140–41, repr. with revisions from Man, n.s. 4 (1969): 256–64. Cf. Edmund Leach , “Magical Hair,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 88 (1958): 147–64.
- 19.
Firth, while accepting Hallpike’s theories as plausible, questions their ethnographic range: “Hair as Private Asset,” 290–91, 297–98. See also Hershman, “Hair, Sex and Dirt,” 291. That is less of a consideration here.
- 20.
Hallpike, “Social Hair ,” 142–43; Genesis 27.
- 21.
Philip Stubbes , The Second Part of the Anatomie of Abuses, Conteining the Display of Corruptions (London, 1583), sig. H1 verso.
- 22.
Recent work has tended to focus on Italy: see Catherine Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
- 23.
See Wilfrid Hooper, “The Tudor Sumptuary Laws ,” English Historical Review 30 (1915): 433–49; Negley Harte, “State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-industrial England,” in Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-industrial England, ed. Donald Coleman and Arthur John (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), 132–65; Valerie Cumming, “‘Great Vanity and Excessse [sic] in Apparell’: Some Clothing and Furs of Tudor and Stuart Royalty,” in The Late King’s Goods: Collections … of Charles I , ed. Arthur MacGregor (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press and Alistair McAlpine, 1989), 322–50. Cf. Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
- 24.
See for example Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 100–133; Christian Liddy and Christian Steer, “John Lord Lumley and the Creation and Commemoration of Lineage in Early Modern England ,” Archaeological Journal 167 (2010): 197–227.
- 25.
See below. Cf. Firth who, with reference to Peter the Great’s personal edicts on beards , equates this with sumptuary law: “Hair as Private Asset,” 266.
- 26.
[Owen Ruffhead], The Statutes at Large, 8 vols (London: for Mark Basket, 1768–1770), vol. iii, 150, 151, 158 (1660); Thomas Heywood, The English Traveller (London: 1633), act 4, sig. [I2 verso].
- 27.
Using a rare source, Groebner is able to link portraiture and styles of clothing, but stresses self-description and transformation (fashion ?), rather than enforced stability: Valentin Groebner, “Inside Out: Clothes , Dissimulation, and the Arts of Accounting in the Autobiography of Matthaüs Schwarz, 1496–1574,” Representations 66 (1999): 100–21. See also Enenkel, de Jong-Crane, and Liebregts, eds., Modelling the Individual.
- 28.
For one example, see Jones and Stallybrass, eds., Renaissance Clothing, 38. On jewellery and miniatures, see Susan James, The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 101–9.
- 29.
Roy Strong , The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London: Routledge, 1969). But see Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (1975; Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993). For a judicious early warning against dating any portrait from the style of the beard, see John Repton, Some Account of the Beard and the Moustachio, Chiefly from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: J. B. Nichols & Son, 1839), 3.
- 30.
Roy Strong , Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, 2 vols (London: HMSO, 1969), vol. i, p. ix. On the role of the sitter in determining the ‘psychology’ of a portrait, see Harry Berger, Jr, “Fictions of the Face: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture ,” Representations 46 (1994): 87–120. See also Jones and Stallybrass, eds., Renaissance Clothing, Pt I; Enenkel, de Jong-Crane and Liebregts, eds., Modelling the Individual. On images of Elizabeth I , see Roy Strong with V. J. Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered 1520–1620 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983), 117–32.
- 31.
As stressed by James, The Feminine Dynamic, pp. 141ff.
- 32.
In general on miniature painting, see Nicholas Hilliard , A treatise concerning the arte of limning … together with A more compendious discourse concerning ye art of liming [sic] by Edward Norgate, ed. Thomas Cain and Robert Thornton (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992); Graham Reynolds, English Portrait Miniatures, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Torben Colding, Aspects of Miniature Painting: Its Origins and Development (Copenhagen and Edinburgh: E. Munksgaard and Thomas Nelson, 1953); Roy Strong , The English Renaissance Miniature (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983); Richard Walker, Miniatures: 300 Years of the English Miniature (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1998); James, The Feminine Dynamic. At least one (later) barber was also a miniaturist: Hilary Evans and Mary Evans, John Kay of Edinburgh: Barber, Miniaturist and Social Commentator 1742–1826 (Aberdeen: Impulse Publications, 1973). For stress on miniatures as private love tokens, see Patricia Fumerton, “‘Secret’ Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets,” Representations 15 (1986): 57–97.
- 33.
See esp. Colding, Aspects of Miniature Painting.
- 34.
On the hands as ‘negligibly individualised’ by fifteenth and sixteenth-century Northern portraitists as compared with the face, see Stephan Kemperdick, The Early Portrait: From the Collections of the Prince of Leichtenstein and the Kunstmuseum Basel (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 20.
- 35.
Jones and Stallybrass, eds., Renaissance Clothing, Chapter 2.
- 36.
Margaret Pelling , “Appearance and Reality: Barber-Surgeons , the Body and Disease,” in London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. Lee Beier and Roger Finlay (London: Longman, 1986), 82–112 at 89–95.
- 37.
On rare occasions in portraits the (heroic) male body could be portrayed as partly naked for allegorical reasons: see images of Sir John Luttrell and Captain Thomas Lee as discussed by Maurice Howard, The Tudor Image (London: Tate Publishing, 1995), 42–44, Figs. 31 and 32. On the Lee portrait, see also Jones and Stallybrass, eds., Renaissance Clothing, 50–52.
- 38.
Michel de Montaigne , The [Complete] Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Screech (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1991), 1198 (‘On Physiognomy ’), 254 (‘On the Custom of Wearing Clothing’). See also on sumptuary laws 300–2. Montaigne was first translated into English in 1603. He is usually seen as a pioneer in the Renaissance discovery of the self, but see Carol Clark, “Talking About Souls: Montaigne on Human Psychology,” in Montaigne: Essays in Memory of Richard Sayce, ed. Ian McFarlane and Ian Maclean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 57–76, which stresses the traditional injunction to self-knowledge.
- 39.
The Eworth portrait (1563) is of the Catholic Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, and the soft, half-open mouth may simply be unusually realistic: Howard, The Tudor Image, 38 and Fig. 27. It was similarly very rare for subjects to be depicted as smiling or laughing: Karen Hearn, Marcus Gheeraerts II: Elizabethan Artist (London: Tate Publishing, 2002), 46; Kemperdick, The Early Portrait, 21. Although Kemperdick suggests bridal portraits may be a rare exception, it is not surprising that the closed mouth was particularly prescribed for female subjects: Peter Stallybrass , “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance : The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 126–29. For the ‘unprecedented’ Oliver portrait, of an ‘unknown melancholy young man’ in almost Counter-Reformation style, see Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, 108–9, cat. 161.
- 40.
Montaigne, Complete Essays, 1198–201.
- 41.
As summarised by Juan Huarte, Examen de ingenios: The examination of mens wits (1594), trans. Richard Carew, facs. edn (Gainsville: Scholars Facsimiles, 1959), 24.
- 42.
Hence the necessity for steel helmets in battle or jousting to protect ‘the most hye & principal membre’: Ramon Lull, The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry, trans. William Caxton, ed. A. T. P. Byles, Early English Text Soc. 168 (1926), 78.
- 43.
See Carroll Camden, “The Mind’s Construction in the Face,” Philological Quarterly 20 (1941): 400–12; Peter Meller, “Physiognomical Theory in Renaissance Heroic Portraits,” The Renaissance and Mannerism, Acts of the 20th International Congress of the History of Art, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 53–69; Clarke, “Metoposcopy”.
- 44.
Stubbes, The Second Part of the Anatomie, sig. G4 verso.
- 45.
Lewis Mumford , The Culture of Cities (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997 [1938]), 110.
- 46.
James Shirley, The Royall Master (London: 1638), act I, scene i.
- 47.
See Pauline Croft, “Brussels and London: The Archdukes, Robert Cecil, and James I,” in Albert and Isabella 1598–1621: Essays, ed. Werner Thomas and Luc Duerloo (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 79–86, which stresses the influence of the representatives of the Spanish Netherlands; Gustav Ungerer, “Juan Pantoja de la Cruz and the Circulation of Gifts between the English and Spanish Courts in 1604/5,” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 145–86. See also Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, vol. i, pp. 351–53 and vol. ii, plate 680; Karen Hearn, Talking Peace 1604: The Somerset House Conference Paintings, Exhibition Catalogue (London: Somerset House, 2004). Ungerer endorses Pantoja as the author of this painting, which survives in two versions. He deduces that it was based not on sittings but on standard portrait types with the heads worked up from Pantoja ’s London drawings (172). Note also his references to miniatures as part of gift exchanges.
- 48.
On the surroundings, see Hearn, Talking Peace. See in general James, The Feminine Dynamic, 87–98.
- 49.
Cecil would allow use of only one image of himself: Hearn, Talking Peace; Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, vol. i, p. ix.
- 50.
On the influence of Spanish styles, including reference to portraits, see Brian Reade, The Dominance of Spain , 1550–1660, Vol. 4 of Costume of the Western World, ed. James Laver (London: G. G. Harrap, 1951).
- 51.
Robert Greene , A quip for an upstart courtier … Wherein is plainely set downe the disorders in all estates and trades (London: 1592), sigs [C3 verso]–[C4]. Note that Greene is already referring to ‘beastly and counterfeit Perriwigs’ (sig. [A4 verso]).
- 52.
See Corfield, “Dress for Deference”; Hilda Amphlett, Hats : A History of Fashion in Headwear (Chalfont St Giles, Bucks: Richard Sadler, 1974).
- 53.
For an attempt to flatter the beard of ‘King Harry’, see Anon., “A Commendation and Censure of Beards ,” in Benjamin Rudyerd, Le Prince d’amour … with a collection of several ingenious poems and songs by the wits of the age (London: For William Leake, 1660), 128. On Henry VIII’s portraiture , see Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, vol. i, 152–61; James, The Feminine Dynamic, 270–79. For a rejection of the clichés said to attach to Henry’s portraiture , see Tatiana String, “Henry VIII and Holbein: Patterns and Conventions in Early Modern Writing about Artists,” in Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 131–41.
- 54.
John Stow, The Chronicles of England (London: For Ralphe Newberie, 1580), 1004; Sidney Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (1890; repr., New York: AMS, 1978), 96–97; Frances Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926), 146, 162.
- 55.
Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, vol. i, 175–80, esp. 178. For disparagement of a thin beard, along with a thin lip, a ‘gandered’ neck and dwindled legs, see the speech given to Rossaline in Antonio and Mellida , act I, scene i (published 1602): The Selected Plays of John Marston , ed. Macdonald Jackson and Michael Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986), 25.
- 56.
Early modern men were rarely clean-shaven on a daily basis. Before Samuel Pepys was able to buy his own razor in 1664, his barber gave him a close shave on Sundays, before church; during the week Pepys reduced his stubble with a pumice stone: The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. X, Companion, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: Bell and Hyman, 1983), 101.
- 57.
See Susan Foister, “Foreigners at Court: Holbein, Van Dyck and the Painter-Stainers Company,” in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts, ed. David Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 32–50; Morgan Ainsworth, “‘Paternes for Phiosioneamyes’: Holbein’s Portraiture Reconsidered,” Burlington Magazine 132 (1990): 173–86 at 180, heads ; 182, hands ; Oskar Bӓtschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). Notable here is Holbein’s painting commemorating the union of the barbers and the surgeons of London in 1540: Henry has a short, ‘fringe’ beard and moustache, while most (but not all) of those present are clean-shaven, including his physicians and his apothecary: Young, Annals of the Barber-Surgeons , 80–94.
- 58.
Or should be: William Harrison exclaimed at the fact that ‘many old men do wear no beards at all’: Description of Elizabethan England (Hoboken, NJ: Bibliobytes, [199–?], e-book), “Of Our Apparel and Attire,” 42.
- 59.
See Huarte, Examen de ingenios, 213; Thomas Cash, “Losing Hair, Losing Points? The Effects of Male Pattern Baldness on Social Impression Formation,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 20 (1990): 154–67; Frank Muscarella and Michael Cunningham, “The Evolutionary Significance and Social Perception of Male Pattern Baldness and Facial Hair,” Ethology and Sociobiology 17 (1996): 99–117; Dawber, Diseases of the Hair, 101–22. Elizabethan portraits of hatless bald men are rare, but several bald or balding courtiers are portrayed in ‘Eliza triumphans’, c. 1600, attributed to Robert Peake: see Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, pp. 21–22, Fig. xvii, 127–28, cat. 204. On the trauma for both men and women associated with hair loss, see Elizabeth Steel, Coping with Sudden Hair Loss (Wellingborough: Thorsons, 1988).
- 60.
On the Henrician public health crisis, see Charles Webster, “Thomas Linacre and the Foundation of the College of Physicians,” in Linacre Studies: Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas Linacre c. 1460–1524, ed. Francis Maddison, Margaret Pelling , and Charles Webster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 198–222 at 207–9.
- 61.
Pepys was concerned that his new wig might be made of the hair of plague victims: Diary of Samuel Pepys, Companion, ed. Latham and Matthews, 100. On animals, see Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 45, 47; Mark Jenner, “The Great Dog Massacre,” in Fear in Early Modern Society, ed. William Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 44–61 at 55–56.
- 62.
There is no modern equivalent of this Middle English term for a skin disease, which also occurs in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It connotes phlegm and saltiness, and examples of it tend to come in recipes for curing the condition.
- 63.
———Barnes, The treatyse answerynge the boke of berdes (London: R. Wyer, 1541(?)), sigs A2 recto-verso. This small book, dedicated to ‘Barnarde barber dwellynge in Banbery’, was a riposte to a now-lost work against beards by the ex-monk, physician and writer Andrew Boorde, whom Barnes accused of coming to dislike beards because he vomited into his own through drunkenness.
- 64.
Quoted in the entry on More by John Blatchly, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OxDNB). More’s preaching was such that it had a chastening effect on Robert Greene : ibid. See also ‘The Bishops breast/A beard doth invest/With milk-white spreading hair’: Anon., “A Commendation,” 128.
- 65.
On various sixteenth-century clerical beards see Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–18.
- 66.
See the portrait of Laud by Anthony Van Dyck, 1630s, reproduced in the entry by Anthony Milton in the OxDNB.
- 67.
See for example Meller, “Physiognomical theory”.
- 68.
On beards as a ‘shelter from the cold’, see Anon., “A Commendation,” 126.
- 69.
Robert Blencowe, “Paxhill and Its Neighbourhood; with Extracts from the Manuscripts of the Wilson Family,” Sussex Archaeological Collections 11 (1859): 1–49 at 22. See Anon., Another Collection, 195, stating, on the basis of classical sources, that the hair had been ‘chiefly design’d’ for the preservation of the brain from external injuries, but that men should wear short or long hair according to the constitution of their brains.
- 70.
See the entry by Paul Hammer in the OxDNB and reproductions of the portraits by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger and Isaac Oliver in Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, 105–7, cats. 154, 155. Strong states that both ‘must have been designed for mass production’, 105. On other uses of images of Essex, see Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 202, 205, 221.
- 71.
Strong, English Icon, 38; Thomas Whythorne , Autobiography, ed. James Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 20, 133–35 and App. V; Katharine Hodgkin, “Thomas Whythorne and the Problems of Mastery,” History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 20–41. For Donne in effigy and in miniature, see Piper, The English Face, 69.
- 72.
John Earle , Microcosmography (1628), repr. of Bliss edn, ed. S. T. Irwin (Bristol: W. Crofton Hemmons & Simpkin Marshall, 1897).
- 73.
See for example Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), esp. 73–101; Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964); Bridget Gellert, “The Iconography of Melancholy in the Graveyard Scene of Hamlet,” Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 57–66; “Melancholy and Material Unity of Man, 17th–18th Centuries,” ed. Claire Crignon-De Oliveira and Mariana Saad, Special Issue of Gesnerus 63 (2006).
- 74.
Roy Strong , “The Elizabethan Malady: Melancholy in Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture ,” Apollo 79 (1964): 264–69 (268 for Donne). The Newbattle Abbey or Lothian portrait, c. 1595, by an unknown English artist, was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. Donne’s portraiture is much debated: for references see David Colclough, ed., John Donne ’s Professional Lives (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 122–23.
- 75.
For a convincing development of this point about adolescent potential, see Victoria Sparey, “Performing Puberty: Fertile Complexions in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Shakespeare Bulletin 33 (2015): 441–67. See also the Chapter by Victoria Alonso Cabezas in this volume.
- 76.
In general, see Eleanor Rycroft , “Facial Hair and the Performance of Adult Masculinity on the Early Modern English Stage,” in Locating the Queen’s Men 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing, ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Syme, and Andrew Griffin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 217–28.
- 77.
Antonio and Mellida , act V, scene i, in Jackson and Neill, eds., Selected Plays of John Marston , 82.
- 78.
Hélène Cazes, “Apples and Moustaches : Montaigne’s Grin in the Face of Infection,” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire Carlin (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 79–93 at 86.
- 79.
See Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, 81–82, cat. 96; Piper, The English Face, 73–74.
- 80.
For a female portrait of similar date approximating to this style, see Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, 24, Fig. xxiv. For a more ‘manly’ version of the lovelock, combined with beard and moustache, see ibid. 82, cat. 97 (John Molle, by Hilliard, c. 1595).
- 81.
William Prynne , The Unlovelinesse, of Love-Lockes (London, 1628), Dedication ‘To the Christian reader’, and pp. 2–5. Prynne traced the ‘sinister’ (i.e. left-handed as well as evil) lovelock to the devil-god of the ‘idolatrous Virginians’ or native Americans (4). See also Eleanor Rycroft ’s chapter in this volume.
- 82.
Robert Bolton, Mr. Boltons Last and Learned Worke of the Foure Last Things, Death, Judgement, Hell, and Heaven (London: by E. B., 1632), 40.
- 83.
For an early study positing a generational divide and a ‘group mind’ among ambitious and frustrated young men of this period, see Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966); also Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). For a slightly later period, see Joan Thirsk, “Younger Sons in the Seventeenth Century,” History 54 (1969): 358–77. See in general Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994), esp. Chapter 6.
- 84.
See Steven Shapin, “‘The Mind Is Its Own Place’: Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England,” Science in Context 4 (1991): 191–218 at 198–200. Shapin does not deal with portraiture but stresses the symbolic nature of such locations and that ‘solitude’ was often an ‘intensely public pose’ (195). Zera Fink, “Jaques and the Malcontent Traveller,” Philological Quarterly 14 (1935): 237–52, first argued for Italian and French influence on English depictions of melancholy. See also Strong, “The Elizabethan Malady”.
- 85.
See Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Robert Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy,” in Idem, Renaissance Essays (London: Fontana, 1986), 239–74 at 257–58; Strong, “The Elizabethan Malady,” 264–65.
- 86.
See Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, frontispiece and 158–59, cat. 266 (Percy); Fig. xxiii, 164–65, cat. 273 (Herbert). Strong describes the Percy portrait as ‘one of the most abstruse of all Hilliard’s miniatures’. For another example from the 1590s by Oliver, of an unknown melancholy man in a woodland setting just beyond a formal garden, see ibid., cover and 161–62, cat. 268. This young man, as in the Newbattle Abbey portrait of Donne , has abundant hair under a large hat and a mere shadowing of moustache and beard.
- 87.
John B[ulwer], Anthropometamorphosis : man transform’d: or, the artificiall changling (London, 1653), Introduction, sig. [B2 verso]. The first 16 of Bulwer’s 24 ‘scenes’ or chapters are devoted to the head and neck. On this author see H. J. Norman, “John Bulwer and his Anthropometamorphosis ,” in Science Medicine and History, 2 vols, ed. E. A. Underwood (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), vol. ii, 82–99; Justin Smith, “‘A Corporall Philosophy’: Language and ‘Body-Making’ in the Work of John Bulwer (1606–1656),” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge, ed. Charles Wolfe and Ofer Gal (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 169–83.
- 88.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 11, 27–28, 60–83, 167; Reynolds, English Portrait Miniatures , 40, 47, 66.
- 89.
Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis , 15–16; Huarte, Examen de ingenios, 25; [William Prynne ], A gagge for long-hair’d rattle-heads who revile all civill round-heads [London: 1646], all of whom draw heavily on classical sources. But compare the satirical attack on bald, periwig-wearing and fashionable ‘roundheads’: Anon., The Soundheads Description of the Roundhead (London: I. B., 1652).
- 90.
Bulwer saw this proximity as increasing, owing to man’s degeneracy: Anthropometamorphosis , sigs B3 recto-verso. On attitudes to apes and monkeys see Edward Topsell, The historie of foure-footed beastes (London, 1607), 2–20; Susan Wiseman, “Monstrous Perfectibility: Ape–Human Transformations in Hobbes, Bulwer, Tyson,” in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), 215–38; James Knowles, “‘Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?’: Apes and Others on the Early Modern Stage ,” in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans and other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 138–63.
- 91.
Huarte, Examen de ingenios, 188; Firth, “Hair as Private Asset,” 270.
- 92.
For two examples of ‘fiery’ portraits, both by Isaac Oliver of unknown men, see Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, Fig. xxv, 109–10, cat. 163 (c. 1600); 112, cat. 171 (c. 1610). Strong favours amatory interpretations of the flaming backgrounds.
- 93.
See note 50.
- 94.
Prynne, Unlovelinesse of Lovelockes, sig. [A4 recto].
- 95.
See for example Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician, 167. The meagre inventory, dated 1632, of William Turner, barber of Wymondham, near Norwich, included ‘kirlinirons’: Wymondham Inventories 1590–1641, ed. John Wilson (Norwich: Centre of East Anglian Studies with Norfolk and Norwich Branch of the Historical Association, 1983), 35. A more prosperous barber, Robert Blome senior of Norwich, possessed curling irons as well as casting bottles at his death in 1608: Norfolk Record Office, NCC, Inv. 22/75 (1608).
- 96.
This style is especially characteristic of Hilliard’s miniatures, including his self-portrait: Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, 59, cat. 49 (1577); 60, cat. 50 (Sir Thomas Bodley, 1598); p. 82, cat. 97 (John Molle, c. 1595); Walker, Miniatures, 20–21, cats. 5 & 6 (Sir Walter Raleigh , c. 1585, and Sir Francis Drake , 1581). As with the lovelock, a similar effect is visible in women ’s portraits.
- 97.
Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis , pp. 212–13; A Midsummer Night’s Dream , act I, scene ii, lines 83–91: Arden edn, ed. H. F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1984, rev. and repr.), 24. Looking youthful and beardless was seen as a disadvantage for physicians: Giovanni Loredano, Academical Discourses. Upon Several Choice and Pleasant Subjects, trans. J. B. (London: for John Playfere, 1664), Chapter. VIII, ‘Wherefore Physitians Affect to Weare Great Beards ’.
- 98.
Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, vol. i, 286–87, vol. ii, plate 557 (George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury); vol. ii, plate 558 (Duke of Portland). See also the unusually sleek, modern-looking style with side-parting of one of the ‘fiery’ portraits: Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, 112, cat. 171.
- 99.
Harrison, Description of England, 42.
- 100.
Pelling, “Appearance and Reality,” 89–95.
- 101.
For example Anon., Another Collection, 193 (on Francis I setting hair and beard fashions via his need to cover up scars); Diary of Samuel Pepys, Companion, ed. Latham and Matthews, 100 (fashionable wigs in imitation of Louis XIII’s concealing his baldness).
- 102.
See for example Cecil Cunnington and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Sixteenth Century, rev. ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1970); idem, Handbook of English Costume in the Seventeenth Century, 3rd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1971); Frances Dolan, “Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature , and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England ,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108 (1993): 224–39 at 229–36.
- 103.
William Lamont, Marginal Prynne 1600–1669 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), viii, 33, 39–40, and plate 1.
- 104.
Anne Laurence, “Women , Godliness and Personal Appearance in Seventeenth-Century England,” Women ’s History Review 15 (2006): 69–81, rightly stresses the gender imbalance inherent in these themes, but male appearance and effeminacy were also major concerns.
- 105.
For attempts at hair and beard control, see Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London: Methuen, 1985), 116–17; Royal College of Physicians of London, Annals, 5 April 1633; The Records of the Honorable [sic] Society of Lincoln’s Inn: The Black Books, ed. J. Douglas Walker and William Baildon, vol. 1, 1422–1586 (London: The Society, 1897), 259 (1542, no beards at ‘repasts’), 312 (1555, fine for overmuch speaking in defence of beards ; no beards to be older than 3 weeks), 320–21 (1557, regulations for apparel and none under the degree of knight to wear beards older than 3 weeks); 328 (1559, no beards older than two weeks), 329 (1559, all beards orders repealed) and passim. Dates and the reference to repasts are both suggestive of health concerns.
- 106.
Stagg, “The Body,” 207, 219, 221.
- 107.
Ruth Spalding, ed., The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605–1675, British Academy Records series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 89–93; Ruth Spalding, The Improbable Puritan: A Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605–1675 (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 45 (portrait), 54, 59–63. I am grateful to Mark Jenner for first pointing me to this source.
Acknowledgements
This chapter was first given as a paper in Durham in 1993. Institutional circumstances then prevented its publication, but it was subsequently aired with little alteration in Oxford, Manchester, Leicester, Lausanne, Warwick, Sussex and as a keynote at the ‘Framing the Face’ workshop in London in November 2015. I am grateful to all these audiences for their comments, references and enthusiastic engagement. I owe special thanks also to both editors of this volume, to Robert Bartlett, Peter Burke, Karen Hearn, Don Herzog, Rob Iliffe, Mark Jenner, Lauren Kassell, Martin Porter, Gervase Rosser, John Stewart, Charles Webster, Helen Weinstein and all those whom I pestered about spheres and circles.
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Pelling, M. (2018). ‘The Very Head and Front of My Offending’: Beards, Portraiture and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England. In: Evans, J., Withey, A. (eds) New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73497-2_3
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