About face: Performing the beard in Renaissance drama, 1552--1614 (Nicholas Udall, Mr. S, John Lyly, Ben Jonson)

This thesis examines dramatic representations of the beard in selected Mid-Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean drama. In particular, it considers the ways in which the beard performatively functions as a visual signifier of male status. Each of the plays that this thesis considers is investigated for its use of the beard as a visual signifier; various nondramatic texts are employed in order to provide the reader with a study of the changing cultural function and significance of the beard.; Three chapters comprise the body of the thesis: they address the significance of the beard's presence or conspicuous absence in Nicholas Udall's Roister Doister (1552), Mr. S's Gammar Gurton's Needle (1553), the anonymous Jacob and Esau (1554), John Lyly's Midas (1589), and Ben Jonson's Bartholmew Fair (1614). Each chapter addresses the ways in which the beard is invested with signifying power within its dramatic context, and suggests the ideological implications of that significance. The three Mid-Tudor plays demonstrate a nascent connection between representations of the beard and the rhetoric of patriarchy, a connection that must be weighed against a number of missed opportunities to assert an ideological significance for the beard; Lyly's play articulates the beard's imagined stability as a signifier of masculine power and authority; Jonson's play demonstrates the beard's instability as a site of reference, and acknowledges its subversive potential as license.; The thesis also considers the beard's proximity to the patriarchal economy by investigating the different political climates in which the selected plays were written, while recognizing that the beard's significance must change in order to accommodate the specific interests of the monarchy that it ostensibly supports.