Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value by Mark Albert Johnston (review)

Mark Johnston’s exploration of the beard as a fetish object is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the gender implications of the adornment and embellishment of the body in early modern English culture. Using a vast array of sources, including drama, poetry, popular ballads, portraiture, letters, wills, diaries, pamphlets, and medical, philosophical, religious, and historical writing, Johnston explores not so much the history of the beard but the complexities of values and meanings given to the beard by early modern English writers. By exploring the significance of the early modern beard (or lack thereof) through myriad registers of value – humoral, erotic, sexual, gendered, spiritual, legal, political, racial, and economic – Johnston meticulously reveals the ambivalent, unstable, complex, and contradictory meanings of the ways the beard was fetishised as a social construct in early modern England.

Johnston begins with a valuable discussion of the concepts associated with the term ‘fetish’ and the ambiguities and instabilities of the registers of value to which the beard was subjected. The slipperiness of fetish value and the ambiguous relationship between the beard and masculinity are themes developed throughout the book. Chapter 2, ‘Beard, Value and Manhood’, is particularly illuminating, showing how beards of various styles, colours, and other qualities, reflected the ‘varied and competing cultural meanings of manhood’ (p. 33). A wild, overgrown, bushy beard, for instance, could denote an absence of self-control, but could also represent a lack of pretension. Cutting, styling, and otherwise manipulating the beard, says Johnston, questions the beard’s reliability as a ‘natural index of value’ (p. 57). The absence of facial hair, discussed in Chapter 3, requires equally complex interpretation, especially as the smooth faces of apprentices and students were enforced through social regulation, signalling gender subordination and sexual inferiority of young men.

In Chapter 4, ‘Re-evaluating Bearded Women’, Johnston reveals the transition of values associated with female beards as bearded women were contained away from an unnatural, threatening, wild figure to one of domesticated inferiority. Johnston’s discussion of the spectacle of the bearded woman displayed as a natural wonder is particularly interesting. His argument about bearded witches, however, is not entirely convincing. While witches were indeed portrayed as monstrous, dangerous ‘others’, as old, infertile, insubordinate, and threatening women, the myth of the bearded witch was confined mostly to the early modern English stage, and does not appear in witchcraft pamphlets or court records. Consequently, Johnston’s claim that the bearded woman and the witch were synonymous in English drama warrants further discussion. Similarly, the notion that witches shaved or magically defoliated men in order to deprive them of masculinity is rare in English witchcraft, and Johnston’s reliance on European sources, such as the Malleus Maleficarum, leads him to draw questionable connections between beard removal and castration in English witchcraft beliefs.

The greatest strength of Johnston’s analysis is in his depictions of beards, their absence, simulation, management, and meaning on the early modern English stage. Detailed discussion of passages from William Shakespeare, John Lyly, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and other early modern dramatists provides insights that illuminate Johnston’s notable depiction of the dutifully submissive beardless boy–heroine, who parades herself as a pederastic boy in order to marry a bearded man to whom she has ‘managed to establish her erotic subordination’ (p. 157). The final chapter, ‘Devaluing the Beard: Half Beards and Hermaphrodites’, documents the transition of hermaphrodism from the mythic and spiritual registers of value in antiquity to the legal and medical value registers of the early modern period. By challenging the sex binary, the ambiguous figure of the hermaphrodite refuses to fit into any category, thus cleverly encapsulating Johnston’s argument about early modern beard fetish and the illusion of the fetish object.

Beard Fetish in Early Modern England has been written for...