Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (13 page)

Since ancient times, Europeans had imagined barbarians in far-off lands to be wild, strange, and hairy. When they discovered and conquered new worlds in America and Asia, there were indeed hairy men about, but they were the Europeans themselves rather than the relatively smooth natives. The discovery that “savages” were mostly hairless encouraged Europeans to see their own hair in a more positive light. The beard filled European conquerors with pride, and it gave them another reason to believe themselves superior to non-Europeans. It was Native Americans, who often plucked out their generally thinner beards, who encountered the wild hairy man, and it must have been a shock. Though Columbus arrived in America before the beard movement began, shaving discipline had broken down on his ships, and the Americans were frightened, according to Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, by the Spaniards’ whiteness, their clothes, and their facial hair. The Americans “ran their hands over [the Spaniards’] beards, marvelling at them because they had none, and carefully inspecting the whiteness of their hands and faces.”
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Las Casas assumed, like most Europeans, that the Americans were overawed by the superior manliness of the bearded invader.
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It is more likely they were repulsed. An Indian in Canada is recorded to have said after meeting a Frenchman, “Oh, the bearded man! Oh, how ugly he is!”
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Throughout the long and tragic incursion of Europeans into America, the beard was a defining feature of the conquerors. Aztecs, Incas, and other peoples found their greatest enemies to be men riding huge animals, carrying terrible weapons, and growing unsightly masses of hair from their chins. In America the biblical tale of Esau and Jacob was reversed, and the hairy man stole the patrimony of the smooth man.

There can be no question that Europeans were gaining a self-conscious pride in their hair by the 1530s. Prominent men of the proudly independent Swiss city of Basel even founded a club called Zur Haaren (To hairiness!), incorporating the image of a hairy wild man into their emblem.
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It was history’s first bearded men’s club, pioneering an idea that has found new life in our own times.

By the mid-1500s the greatest beard movement since the Roman Empire was marching from victory to victory. Poets sang of wonders to behold as Europeans explored new possibilities of self-expression. Before long, different cuts became associated with different sorts of men. An anonymous English poem, the
Ballad of the Beard
, spelled out some of these affiliations in verse:

There was almost always a mixture of seriousness and mirth in beard poetry. The sexual innuendo of the lines about the pointed stiletto beard betrays the twinkle in the poet’s eye, and it is unlikely that soldiers wore spade beards to suggest a grave. On the other hand, it is true that soldiers were often associated with thick beards. Shakespeare’s character Jaques, in
As You Like It
, described the typical soldier as “bearded like the pard” (leopard).
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A writer named Robert Greene, in 1592, also referred to the soldiers’ spade-beard, and suggested a young lover would prefer a short, pointed beard, again alluding to what was in his “sheath.” But Greene also considered the class differences apparent in facial hair. In a witty commentary on the inequalities of his society, he contrasted the lives of two men, the wealthy “Velveteen-breeches” and the commoner “Cloth-breeches.” One of the differences in their lives is in the way the barber treats them. The well-cut pointed beard, carefully shaped spade beard, or curled mustachios were only for the man of means, who could afford to pay for their upkeep. So too were the oils, perfumes, and dyes that placed the wealthy unmistakably above other men. The care that a great beard required must have dissuaded many poorer men from attempting one at all. Cloth-breeches could afford only the basics, namely a plain round cut “like the half of a Holland cheese.”
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For true believers like a German writing under the pseudonym Johannes Barbatium (“John the Bearded”), who describing himself in 1614 as a “lover of beards,” a full, unstyled beard was the best to be hoped for. He commended the “beautiful words” of the Roman poet Ovid:

What mattered to Barbatium was not the beard’s shape but its natural flourish and grandeur. Like other humanists of that era, he viewed the modern growth of hair as a true response to ancient wisdom. Conveniently ignoring evidence of four hundred years of shaving in classical times, and the fact that Ovid’s praise for beards represented the boast of the hairy, one-eyed monster, Cyclops, he declared that all ancients had agreed that beards were nature’s way of affirming the dignity of natural manliness.

To the extent that his plays reflect the thinking and predispositions of his times, one can find in Shakespeare’s works valuable insight into the part facial hair played in masculine identity during the Renaissance. Beards often appeared in his plays as a metaphor for men and masculine honor. His comedy
Much Ado about Nothing
is a notable example. Its central characters are Benedick and Beatrice, comedic opposites of the tragic Romeo and Juliet. Unlike the star-crossed lovers of Verona, the scornful Benedick and Beatrice are determined to have nothing to do with romance or with each other. For Romeo and Juliet, it is love at first sight; for Benedick and Beatrice, disdain at first glance. “I will live a bachelor,” Benedick declares.
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For her part Beatrice insists to her uncle Leonato that she wants no husband:

In this exchange, Beatrice makes her case against men: real men have beards, but like their woolly beards, they are rough and unpleasant.

To overcome their aversion, Benedick and Beatrice’s friends trick them into believing that each secretly loves the other, and they obediently respond to love’s call. Transformed by romantic passion, Benedick abandons his soldierly garb and sarcastic demeanor and appears fastidiously washed, sweetly perfumed, and freshly shaved. Leonato notes that “indeed he looks younger than he did, by the loss of a beard,” and Benedick’s associates have no trouble diagnosing him as a victim of lovesickness.
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Without his beard, Benedick mournfully complains of a toothache, apparently to cover the sweet sorrow of his romantic longing, but as we know from Valeriano’s treatise, shaving and toothaches were routinely linked in the Renaissance mind. Shakespeare’s audiences would recognize this pain as the price Benedick paid for his desire to smooth out the roughness of his manhood for Beatrice’s sake. His friends do not condemn him for reducing himself in this way, but they pity him the ravages of love.

By the end of the play, Benedick must prove himself to Beatrice in more substantial ways than primping and preening. Beatrice demands that he fight for the honor of her cousin Hero, who has been defamed by one of Benedick’s friends, and Benedick agrees to do so, denouncing his erstwhile comrade as “Lord Lack-beard”—though there is no reason to think he lacks a beard, whereas Benedick is actually beardless.
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The beard, that is, has become a metaphor for manly honor. Fortunately, the play is a comedy, and misunderstandings are eventually cleared up. “Lord Lack-beard” mends his ways, and all turns out well. Benedick is able to preserve his manly honor without a duel, and Beatrice gets what she seems to have wanted all along, a man who has the figurative beard of manly honor and courage, but not the scratchy real thing.

The way in which Shakespeare casts beards as a double for manhood in these passages was typical of him and his era. When giving a role to beards in his plays, Shakespeare could draw on long-standing associations, particularly those from the Bible. His audiences would have recognized two common themes: that beards denoted the manly virtues of courage and wisdom, and that an assault on the beard was an affront to honor. Both notions are prominent in
King Lear.
In this tragedy, two of Lear’s daughters, Regan and Goneril, despise their doddering father
and plan his overthrow. At one stage he pleads with them for respect, asking, “Art not asham’d to look upon this beard?”
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He is saying in effect, “Have you lost all respect for your father and king?” Indeed they have, and they proceed to force him from the throne. When a loyal courtier, the Earl of Gloucester, helps Lear escape the clutches of his ungrateful daughters, he suffers Regan’s wrath as a result. Captured and bound, he has his beard plucked:

Gloucester is warning Regan that she dishonors herself by dishonoring him, and that this act will have its own revenge. When, in spite of Gloucester’s efforts, Lear’s downfall is complete, the former king reflects on his own weaknesses, identifying pride as his primary failure. He remembers that when he was king, “They flatter’d me like a dog, and told me I had white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say ‘ay’ and ‘no’ to everything I said!”
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Lear was told, in other words, that he had the wisdom of an older man before he was even fully grown. His advisors’ flattery and lies tempted him to errors of judgment, which led ultimately to the rebellion against him. Too late he realizes that he has foolishly acted against both nature and truth, including the evidence of his own beard. He would have done better to pay more attention to the signs of nature.

The link between nature and truth was a central concern for Shakespeare, and for Renaissance Europe more generally. The “truth” of bearded manhood was part of this thinking. As a natural feature of manhood, the beard was seen as integral to the masculine personality. What happened to the beard happened to the man, and what happened to the man happened to the beard. This equation is apparent in one of Shakespeare’s most famous passages, when the wistful and skeptical
courtier Jaques in
As You Like It
declares, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players . . .”
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Like a playwright, Jaques then sketches the life of a typical nobleman in seven stages, from childhood to old age and death. The peak stages are identified with particular beards. As a soldier, the young man is “full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard.” Later, as a justice of the peace, he appears “in fair round belly . . . with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances.”
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There is a natural link between the man and his costume, even if our lives are at some level just an act.
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Sometimes, this costume became part of the joke. In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
the buffoonish amateur actor Bottom is given the role of Pyramus, described by the director Quince as a “most lovely gentleman-like man”:

Shallow-minded Bottom—definitely not a method actor—is obsessed with the sensationalism of fake beards rather than with the inner character of his role. In his enthusiasm for wearing an impressive beard, he makes a mockery of manly honor, and of himself. In making fun of Bottom’s fixation, Shakespeare did not mean to mock beards themselves, or to undermine their function as an appendage of masculinity. On the contrary, comic fools like Bottom reinforced the message of Shakespeare’s more serious plays, namely, that there is a natural social order that assigns men their roles and their hair. Secure in the knowledge of this order, one can laugh at lesser men or boys playing dress-up with silly fake beards and absurd dialogues.

The bearded bard of Stratford perceived at an intuitive level the part that facial hair played in the performance of manliness. Other Renaissance men sought to understand this matter logically and scientifically. The leading universities in Shakespeare’s day, particularly in medicine, were to be found in Italy. It was there that physiologists first fixed their attention on the natural puzzle of facial hair.