ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by interrogating the multiple registers, contexts, and systems in which the beardlessness of boys signalled socially, before turning to sustained readings of a number of plays that illustrate the dramatic function of smooth boyhood and suggest why boys constituted ideal vehicles for the culture's representations of female subordination. By prohibiting the display of beards among boy students, servants, apprenticesand equating appearance of facial hair with the privileges of mastery, early modern English regulatory ideals were fetishistically inscribed upon the palimpsestic body in order to materialize relative degree as a functional value that obtained in multiple registers. In the verbal semiotic, the subordination that beardlessness materializes as boy discloses its complex fetish value, which obtains in multiple, imbricative, and contradictory registers. Will Fisher suggests that boys may have constituted a third gender in early modern England, and while my claims here are sympathetic to Fisher's, his analysis does not explicitly consider gender as a value obtaining in multiple registers.
