Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity

Eleanor Rycroft is a lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Bristol. A theatre historian of early English and Scottish drama, her research often involves practical explorations of plays. Recent publications include a co-edited special edition of The Shakespeare Bulletin, as well as book chapters for Oxford University Press, Palgrave, and Ashgate. She has written on material cultures of the early modern stage, theatre at the court of Henry VIII, practice-as-research, and the historical performance of witchcraft.

A magisterial study of the importance of beards and tonsure to the representation of masculinities of all kinds on the Renaissance stage, and in wider early-modern society. In this copious, nuanced account of the ways in which often subtle variations and combinations of smoothness and hairiness, trimness and shagginess marked, yet simultaneously problematized prevailing early-modern conceptions of boyhood, youth, and manhood, Eleanor Rycroft makes a timely, compelling intervention in the fields of early-modern gender and theatre studies.-- Greg Walker, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh

• Introduction; 1. Youth: Beardless boys; 2. Liminal masculinity; 3. Maturity: Lovers and bearded manhood; 4. Old age: Greybeards and the decline of manliness; Afterword: The nest of beards