ABSTRACT
Beards swarm the Renaissance stage in a way which endorsed the ideology of bearded masculinity but, within contexts such as boy playing, showed that ideology to be in perpetual crisis. The lived dilemmas of early modern men were mapped onto staged manhoods in ways that revealed who and what was excluded from patriarchal authority. Despite being central to the ideological production of early modern masculinity, beards are typified by plurality, non-resemblance, and dissimulation in the Tudor and Stuart theatre. Their prosthetic nature enabled boys to usurp masculine authority, while youthful masculinity was often materialised in terms of liminality, in-betweenness, and misrepresentation. Uses of beards by beardless boy players and adult actors explored – and partly masked – an anxiety predicated upon the fact that masculinity was itself a gendered construction that had to be performed and recognised in order to be registered, and whose developmental phases needed to be socially marked.
