Focusing on representations of beards in English Renaissance
culture, this study elucidates how fetish objects validate
ideological systems of power by materializing complex value in
multiple registers. Providing detailed discussions of not only
bearded men but also beardless boys, bearded women, and
half-bearded hermaphrodites, author Mark Albert Johnston argues
that attending closely to early modern English culture's treatment
of the beard as a fetish object ultimately exposes the contingency
of categories like sex, gender, age, race, and sexuality. Johnston
mines a diverse cross-section of contemporary discourses -- adult
and children's drama, narrative verse and prose, popular ballads,
epigrams and proverbs, historical accounts, pamphlet literature,
diaries, letters, wills, court records and legal documents, medical
and surgical manuals, lectures, sermons, almanacs, and calendars --
in order to provide proof for his cultural claims. Johnston's
evidence invokes some of the period's most famous voices -- William
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Phillip Stubbes, John Marston,
George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Samuel Pepys,
for example -- but Johnston also introduces us to an array of
lesser-known Renaissance authors and playwrights whose works
support the notion that the beard was a palimpsestic site of
contested meaning at which complex and contradictory values clash
and converge. Johnston's reading of Marxist, Freudian, and
anthropological theories of the fetish phenomenon acknowledges
their divergent emphases -- erotic, economic, racial and religious
-- while suggesting that the imbrication of diverse registers that
fetish accomplishes facilitates its cultural and psychic
naturalizing function.
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