A growing area of scholarship on the 16th and 17th centuries in recent years has been to quote one

historian a surprising burst in beard studies. In a key article, Wilfischer studied two large

collections of chewed a portraiture to conclude that between 1540 and 1640, or thereabouts,

around 90% of male subjects were depicted with some sort of facial hair, and the beardless were

generally clerics or very young men. Only four of Shakespeare's plays don't mention facial hair,

think of a mid-summer night stream, bottoms first question, having been cast as Pyramus,

what beard were I best to play it in? And his own reply,

I will discharge it in either your straw color beard, your orange tawny beard,

your purple ingrained beard, or your French crown colored beard, your perfect yellow.

And the English strike on the Spanish fleet, Cadiz, in 1597, was described as

sinching the king of Spain's beard. Finally, there's John Boer in his anthropometamorphosis of

1650, who noted,

A beard is the sign of a man by which he may appear as a man, shaving the chin is justly to be

accounted for a femininity, woman by nature is smooth and delicate, and if she have many hairs,

she is a monster. So it seems that bids, for men at least, were in, and joining me to discuss why

is Dr. Eleanor Reichrofft, a lecturer at the University of Bristol and the author of

facial hair and the performance of early modern masculinity published in 2020.

Beyond her suit, her particular expertise is the early modern theatre. And what

Eleanor is working on at the moment is walking and gender and walking and performative walking

and walking in the theatre and all sorts of interesting things. So clearly coming back to her

another time to talk about that. But for now, we're going to talk about bids.

Ely, it is such a joy to see you and lovely to have a chance to talk about this.

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