Abstract
Recent scholarship on the early modern body has shown that features such as hair are repositories of cultural meaning, with beards, particularly, emerging as powerful tools of self-fashioning. However, this research is rarely applied to studies of colonialism and nationhood which continue to privilege skin colour as the marker of difference, despite the fact that hair and beards were a key way through which travellers imagined their dissimilarity from other cultures. The author considers representations of English/non-English bodies to demonstrate that defining the ‘other’ was an unstable project, especially when difference was located in facial hair, a malleable and mutable substance. The fashioning of English manhood through hair was therefore a beleaguered task, meaning that the writing of foreignness frequently collapses in on itself to problematise the Englishness it fantasises as stable.
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Notes
- 1.
Margaret Pelling, “‘The Very Head and Front of my Offending’: Beards, Portraiture, and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England”, in this volume.
- 2.
Will Fisher , “The Renaissance Beard,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2001): 155–87; Mark Albert Johnston , “Playing with the Beard: Courtly and Commercial Economies in Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pithias and John Lyly’s Midas,” English Literary History 72, no. 1 (2005): 79–103; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass , Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Farah Karim-Cooper , Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).
- 3.
Alan Sinfield , Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality : Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 4.
- 4.
Kim F. Hall , Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 25.
- 5.
Stephen Greenblatt , Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3–4.
- 6.
Elliot Horowitz , “The New World and the Changing Face of Europe,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28, no. 4 (1997): 1181–201.
- 7.
Rebecca Herzig , Plucked : A History of Hair Removal (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 19–34.
- 8.
Mark Albert Johnston , Beard Fetish in Early Modern England : Sex, Gender , and Registers of Value (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). His work also importantly considers the issue of bearded women and relates the masculine ideology of beardedness to hermaphroditism in a critically stimulating way, 159–212.
- 9.
Fisher, “The Renaissance Beard,” 173–75, 177–78.
- 10.
John Bulwer , Anthropometamorphosis (London, 1650), 131.
- 11.
Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis , 131.
- 12.
Mary Douglas , Natural Symbols (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1970), viii.
- 13.
Richard Knolles , The Generall Historie of the Turkes (London: Adam Islip, 1603), sig. A4v, sig. A5r.
- 14.
Richard Knolles , The Generall Historie of the Turkes (London: Adam Islip, 1610), 1297.
- 15.
Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis , 125–26.
- 16.
See Nabil I. Matar , Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 71–82. In Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005) Matar further argues that such events reorganised gender roles back in Britain with women being “forced to fend for themselves and their children”, 76.
- 17.
Peter Heylyn , Cosmographie in Four Books: Containing the Chorographie and Historie of the Whole World, and all the Principal Kingdoms, Provinces, Seas and Isles Thereof (London: Anne Seile, 1669), 282, 291.
- 18.
Cited in Andrew Hadfield, Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 92.
- 19.
Richard Hakluyt , Hakluyt’s Voyages, ed. Richard David (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), 141. The un-Christians nature of the event foreshadows the fact that Sonnings later turns Turk to avoid execution when the ship is plundered and the crew taken captive by Moors .
- 20.
“House of Commons Journal Volume 1: 25 February 1607,” Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 1: 1547–1629 (1802): 340–42, accessed 28 February 2011, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=5759&strquery=hair. While Europeans may behave in ways that were destructive to English manhood, foreign Christians can also be perceived as distorted and inverted, as when Fynes Moryson uses tropes of sexual and social disorder to describe the “warlike” women of the Georgian sect in Jerusalem, whose men are then linked with the incivility of poor grooming as well as papistry: ‘The men weare long haire on their heads and beards , save that they are all shaven like Clerkes upon the Crowne of the head.’ Fynes Moryson , An Itinerary … Containing his Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Dominions (London: Printed by John Beale, 1617), Part 1, 232.
- 21.
Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, 58.
- 22.
Claire Jowitt , “The uses of ‘Piracy ’: Discourses of Mercantilism and Empire in Hakluyt’s The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake ,” in New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period, ed. Chloe Houston (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 115–35, at 134. The phrase is taken from Richard Helgerson’s exploration of trade and nationalism in the works of Hakluyt in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writings of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 187.
- 23.
Hakluyt, Hakluyt’s Voyages, 146.
- 24.
Jonathan Goldberg , Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 19–20.
- 25.
Hakluyt, Hakluyt’s Voyages, 149.
- 26.
Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis , 125.
- 27.
John Leo Africanus , A geographical historie of Africa, trans. John Pory (London: Georg. Bishop, 1600), 130.
- 28.
Fisher, “The Renaissance Beard,” 134.
- 29.
Fisher, “The Renaissance Beard,” 134.
- 30.
Patricia Parker , “Barbers and Barbary: Early Modern Cultural Semantics,” Renaissance Drama 33 (2004): 201–44, at 214.
- 31.
Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis , 131–32. Parker illuminates the semantics of the term ‘Bardasses’: ‘In its variable orthography in early modern English, “bardash” itself (frequently traced to Arabic bardaj or slave) appeared in forms that suggested the shaven, depilated, or “bared” ass of the pathic or beardless youth. “Bardasses” or “bardassoes” were part of an early modern set of associations that included shaving or barbering of all kinds’, 217.
- 32.
Parker, “Barbers and Barbary,” 205.
- 33.
Parker, “Barbers and Barbary,” 228.
- 34.
See Margaret Pelling , The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (New York: Addison Welsey Longman, 1998), 203–30.
- 35.
Horowitz, “The New World ,” 1186.
- 36.
Horowitz, “The New World ,” 1181.
- 37.
Margaret Hogden , Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 9.
- 38.
J. H. Elliott, The Old World and The New 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Stephen Greenblatt , Marvellous Possessions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Jeffrey Knapp , An Empire Nowhere: England, America , and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (California and London: University of California Press, 1992).
- 39.
Chloe Houston , “Introduction,” New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 1–14.
- 40.
Cited in Hadfield, Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels, 247.
- 41.
Hadfield, Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels, 248.
- 42.
Hakluyt, Hakluyt’s Voyages, 373.
- 43.
Thomas Hariot , A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia of the commodities and of the nature and manners of the naturall inhabitants … (1590), sig. Br. The attendant text clarifies the synthetic practice of hair removal : ‘The yonnge men suffer noe hairr at all to growe uppon their faces but assoone as they growe they put them away, but when thy [sic] are come to yeeres they suffer them to growe although to say truthe they come opp verye thinne.’
- 44.
How early colonialists represent Native American beardlessness accords with Oldstone-Moore’s observation in this volume that transhistorically, “facial hair has been associated for thousands of years with nature , autonomy and self-reliance, while shaving has been linked with constructions of manliness grounded on commitments to authorities beyond the self”; Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “Social Science, Gender Theory and the History of Hair”, in this volume. Positioning indigenous peoples as beardless anticipates the oppression that ‘autonomous’ Europeans will enforce upon them.
- 45.
Goldberg, Sodometries, 180.
- 46.
Cited in Goldberg, Sodometries, 193.
- 47.
William Strachey , The Historie of Travel into Virginia Britania, ed. Louis. B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 71.
- 48.
Hakluyt, Hakluyt’s Voyages, 448.
- 49.
Hakluyt, Hakluyt’s Voyages, 408.
- 50.
Hakluyt, Hakluyt’s Voyages, 408.
- 51.
Cited in Hadfield, Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels, 196, 197.
- 52.
Hadfield, Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels, 197. In fact, in the milieu of the East Indies , it is the Europeans who can seem the ‘smooth fac’d strangers’ (4.1.33)—the term used for the Portuguese by the Governour in John Fletcher ’s play The Island Princess (c.1619–21) because of their concealed economic and sexual motives. John Fletcher , “The Island Princess ,” Beaumont and Fletcher Dramatic Works, ed. F. T. Bowers, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
- 53.
Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis , 1653, 57–58.
- 54.
Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis , 1653, 60.
- 55.
William Prynne , The Unlovelinesse of Love-lockes (London, 1628), 5.
- 56.
Hakluyt, Hakluyt’s Voyages, 448.
- 57.
Prynne, The Unlovelinesse of Love-lockes, 4. The actual prevalence of the lovelock among the English is unclear, although a late sixteenth-century miniature of the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, depicts his hair as longer on the left than the right.
- 58.
Hakluyt, Hakluyt’s Voyages, 389. Indeed it is interesting that Master Velvet-Breeches ’s barber, as cited by Pelling, attributes the lovelock to French fashion , asking his foppish customer, ‘will you bee Frenchefied with a love locke downe to your shoulders?’. Margaret Pelling ‘“The Head and Front of My Offending”: Beards , Portraiture , and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England ’.
- 59.
Hakluyt, The Unlovelinesse of Love-lockes, 155.
- 60.
Pelling, “The Very Head and Front of My Offending”, in this volume.
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Rycroft, E. (2018). Hair, Beards and the Fashioning of English Manhood in Early Modern Travel Texts. In: Evans, J., Withey, A. (eds) New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73497-2_4
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