ABSTRACT
Before assuming adult masculinity in early modern society, a man must first grow a beard. However the period of beard growth itself was connected with social disorder. Plays that represent youths on the journey towards manhood consider the processes by which boys become men, and investigate when youths relinquish socially disruptive activities in favour of civil order. The issue is made manifest in Prince Hal who we witness on a trajectory from a drunken gadabout to ‘the mirror of Christian princes’. This chapter considers how the space of the battlefield is connected in the literary imagination with transformations from boy to man. It is often the soldier in foreign lands who explores the transition from bachelor to patriarch in the theatre. Forays away from home functioned as points in the life cycle where rebellion could be replaced with responsibility, but the tensions in this phase were pointed up though it association with hyperbolic hairiness, linking the soldier to the figure of the wild man. Returning home did not necessarily mean that a man had pared back the intemperance signified by his unkempt beard, however, and the chapter analyses those liminal males who deliberately failed to groom their facial hair in order to remain in the margins of masculinity.
