ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the various meanings and values attributed to the male beard in early modern England, first by considering how facial hair came to signal both divine authority and patriarchal privilege, and then by assessing the extent to which those normative ideals are found in the culture's representations of bearded manhood more generally. The value of Midas's golden beard is contradictorily obtained simultaneously in both courtly and commercial economies. The chapter illustrates how the discontinuity of beard value facilitates the continuity of fetish by providing a sustained reading of a single play. The beard's value is thus immutable and unquestionable, and any doubt about its necessity, utility, or semiotic accuracy constitutes a blasphemous challenges to God's natural order. R. W. Dent lists playing with the beard among the cultures proverbial expressions and associates the phrases combative connotations with those of other idiomatic utterances in which pulling, tugging, or insulting the beard are invoked.
