Playing with the beard: Courtly and commercial economies in Richard Edwards's Damon and Pithias and John Lyly's Midas

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 72, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 79-103

  Johnston, Mark Albert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

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EID: 60949566637     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2005.0006     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. John Stow, The annales of England: faithfully collected out of the most autenticall authors, records, and other monuments of antiquitie, lately corrected, encreased, and continued, from the first inhabitation vntill this present yeere 1600 (London: Eliot's Court Press and F. Kingston for Ralfe Newbury, 1600), 962-63.
2. See Francis Hackett, Henry the Eighth (1929; repr., New York: Country Life Press, 1931), 112.
3. Also see Elliott Horowitz, "The New World and the Changing Face of Europe," Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 1181-1201, especially 1196- 98.
4. As Coburn Freer notes in "John Donne and Elizabethan Economic Theory," Criticism 38 (1996): 497-521, the view that "the debasement of coinage came to describe the decaying quality of life" and that the dilution of the precious metal in the currency made it necessary to spend more in order to obtain the same goods, was in competition with an older view, which was that the currency itself had no intrinsic value, but only the value that the monarch gave to it. . . . Thus the king's very image on the coin gave it monetary value. (499) Henry's debasement of the 1544 coins, then, can be seen as intentionally capitalizing on the latter, and more traditionally courtly, of these two views.
5. For Henry's 1520 portrait and the commentary of the Venetian ambassador see Jane Ashelford, A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century (New York: Drama Books, 1983), 24-25.
6. For the mintings of 1526 and 1544, see Peter Seaby, The Story of English Coinage (London: Seaby, 1952), 48-53.
7. Will Fisher, "The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England," Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 155.
8. Fisher recognizes that one such ostensible marker, procreative capacity, was insistently mapped onto beard growth "as facial hair was conceptualized as a kind of seminal excrement" (176). Corollary signals of gender difference between men and boys, Fisher notes, "might include the voice, swords, testicles, skin, and armor" (176 n. 30), but each of these, with the exception of the voice, was imaginatively represented in the beard. Vocal pitch, beard growth, genital development, and skin texture were being employed by medical men like Paré and Montaigne as criteria with which to sex hermaphrodites in the period. See, for example, Ambroise Paré's Des Monstres, Des Prodiges, Des Voyages (1573), ed. Patrice Boucelle (Paris: Livre Club, 1964), especially 193-97.
9. For an English version of Paré's text, see Janice L. Pallister's translation, On Monsters and Marvels (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 26-33.
10. Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 70, 109.
11. Orgel says of the analogy between boys and women that "both are treated as a medium of exchange within the patriarchal structure" (103).
12. Orgel, 103-4.
13. My notion of the fetish here takes into account the significance of the concept in psychoanalytic and gender terms as well as in economic ones. For a good synopsis of Freud's and Marx's theories on the fetish and the potential for an "alchemical link between the two" (8), see Laura Mulvey's "Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture," October 65 (1993): 3-20.
14. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Reniassance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 217.
15. For a fascinating analysis of the history of the fetish and its impact on early modern England, see especially their "Introduction: Fashion, Fetishism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Europe" in Rennaissance Clothing ( 1-14) and their article, "Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe" in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 80-111.
16. In the latter essay, Jones and Stallybrass note that the early modern hermaphrodite "articulates gender itself as fetish. But in the Renaissance it is a fetish which plays with its own fetishistic nature, producing sexual identity through fixation upon specific 'parts'" (106).
17. A sudden profusion of this heat, usually caused by excessive physical activity, is considered by some early modern medical writers (like Paré and Montaigne) to be an explanation for cases of women metamorphosing into men. See Patricia Parker's enlightening account of the unidirectional tendency of the phenomenon in "Gender, Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain," Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 337-64.
18. Also see Orgel's Impersonations, especially 18-30.
19. Orgel, like Parker, maintains that "the frightening part of the teleology for the Renaissance mind . . . is the fantasy of its reversal . . . The conviction that men can turn into - or be turned into - women; or perhaps more exactly, can be turned back into women, losing the strength ["heat"] that enabled the male potential to be realized in the first place. In this version of the medical literature we all start as women, and the culture confirmed this by dressing all children in skirts until the age of seven or so" (25).
20. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), Judith Butler remarks that the ontology of gender as a binary is "itself a ruse for the monolithic elaboration of the masculine" (23).
21. Orgel comments in Impersonations that "the difference in degree of perfection becomes in practical terms a powerful difference in kind, and the homological arguments are used to justify the whole range of male domination over women. Subjectivity, in this line of reasoning, is always masculine" (25).
22. As Anna, the countess's servant, observes in The Insatiate Countess (John Marston and others for the Queen's Revels, 1610), "my office still is under: yet in time / Ushers prove masters, degrees makes us climb" (3.4.114-15).
23. Guido shortly thereafter tells her that "Ushers should have much wit, but little hair; thou hast of both sufficient" (3.4.171-72).
24. See the Revels edition of The Insatiate Countess, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984).
25. R. Warwick Bond, in The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. Bond, 3 vols. (Clarendon: Oxford, 1902), 2:238.
26. Paul Deane, for example, cites the likenesses and differences between the plays' barbering scenes in order to support the view that "Edwardes stands to Lyly as Lyly was to stand to Shakespeare" (Deane, "Edwardes's Damon and Pithias and Lyly's Midas" Notes and Queries 30 [1983]: 133).
27. G. K. Hunter remarks in passing that "the baiting of the older man by the darting wit of the pages is here strongly reminiscent of the sub-plot episode of the pages and Grim the Collier of Croyden in Edwardes' Damon and Pithias" (Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier [London: Routledge, 1962], 237).
28. Anne Begor Lancashire is tentative in her inference that Lyly's subplot is indebted "perhaps . . . [to] Richard Edwards' Damon and Pithias for shaving terms and wordplay" (Lancashire, intro. to Galathea and Midas [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969], xx).
29. David Bevington and Hunter remark in their introduction, Midas is not unlike Richard Edwards' Damon and Pithias . . . with its seriously humanistic exploration of the dangers besetting those who conscientiously undertake to offer frank counsel to a tyrant, and with a raucous comic mirroring of this serious action in a subplot devoted to the antics of ordinary countrymen. Bevington and Hunter, intro. to Midas in Galatea and Midas, ed. Bevington and Hunter (New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000), 121; hereafter abbreviated M and cited parenthetically. The editors' introduction is cited by page number, and Lyly's text is cited by act, scene, and line.
30. D. Jerry White, intro. to Richard Edwards' Damon and Pithias: A Critical Old-Spelling Edition (New York: Garland, 1980), 13;
31. Edwards's text and White's notes thereto are hereafter abbreviated D and cited parenthetically by line number. Bevington and Hunter, 113. The distinction between these acting companies may be specious in this period since the death of Farrant in 1580 brought about the mergers that made Oxford into the patron of the former boys of Paul's and the two Chapels, and put Lyly into place as their playwright and manager. How long this merger persisted is not entirely clear. The court records variously name Oxford's Boys, the Chapel and Paul's for the next decade. It was really the one company, operating an almost exclusively commercial programme and keeping no allegiance to its former chorister and schooling pretensions. (Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Playing Companies [Oxford: Clarendon, 1996], 223.)
32. Reavley Gair, however, has asserted that "Gyles' confirmation as master (on 22 May 1584) also marks the separation of the Paul's children from the Children of the Chapel. The joint company broke up, never to be re-formed." If Gair is correct, then Lyly's Midas would have been staged exclusively by Paul's boys (Gair, The Children of Paul's: The Story of a Theatre Company 1553-1608 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982], 104).
33. Dent registers the phrase, to play with one's beard, as proverbial and figuratively equates it with shaking or pulling the same. See R. W. Dent, Proverbial Language in English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare, 1495-1616: An Index (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 196.
34. For the multiple (and somewhat contradictory) verbal meanings of "beard," see the entry for that word in the OED.
35. The general dread with which barbers were commonly regarded in the early modern English imagination may in part be due to the fact that barbers untrained in surgery were not officially bound from performing surgical procedures until 1583; despite this regulation, prosecutions against cases of barbers practicing surgery, often with horrendous results, are documented well into the eighteenth century. See Sidney Young, Annals of the Barber Surgeons of London (1890; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1978), 320, 349. Early modern wordplay, which often alludes to the beard in phallic terms (like Petulus's reference to his poinado), figures the act of shaving as castration.
36. Fisher, 185.
37. The word "case" (according to Gordon Williams's A Glossary of Shakespeare's Sexual Language [London: Athlone, 1997], 66) here is a bawdy pun on Grimme's penis which, according to his own admission, "now Standes." Edwards's Ciceronian source has Dionisius training his daughters to tend his beard from an early age, but taking away their razors once they are grown: "Quin etiam, ne tonsori Collum committeret, tondere filias suas docuit: ita sordido atque ancillari artificio regiae virgines ut tonstriculae tondebant barbam et capillum patris; et tarnen ab his ipsis, cum iam essent adultae, ferrum removit instituitque ut candentibus iuglandium putaminibus barbam sibi et capillum adurerent" (Cicero, "Tusculan Disputations V.58" in Cicero: Tusculan Disputations II & V, ed. A. E. Douglas [Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990], 110-11).
38. While "tonstriculae" enables a reading of the king's daughters as "little (feminine) barbers," it also informs Wyll's and Jacke's equiva-lently effeminate roles in the collier's fantasy. Cicero's text, furthermore, asserts that Dionisius "haberet etiam more Graeciae quosdam adolescentes amore coniunctos," a more overtly homosexual reading than Edwards allows, but one that informs the homoerotic overtones in Damon and Pithias.
39. The word "Debenters" likely connotes credit notes or "vouchers for the coal delivered to the Royal Household." See White's note to line 1237 and "debenture" in the OED.
40. Jacke's imitation of the barbering practices of the period is worth noting here, for before shaving Grimme, Jacke bathes the collier's face and refers to "costly perfumes" (D, 1274) and "ungentum of Daucus Maucus, that is very costly" (D, 1288). White comments in his note to this line that "this may simply be a meaningless nonce expression, but it may also support Hazlitt's contention that the 'water' [1269 s.d.] is wine." White goes on to associate the words "Daucus Maucus" with their nearest Greek equivalents, which translate as "carrot" and "length," and notes that "phallic and excratory humor may well be intended" (D, 1288 n).
41. White's observations suggest that the "water" is neither water nor wine but possibly urine. When Jacke asks, "Is not this trimm water?" Grimme remarks that it "may be holsome, but it is a vengeaunce sower" (D, 1292-93).
42. The possibility that Grimme is shaved in "puddle water," then, turns his fantasy of his being shaved like a king into a rather disgusting parody of that process. Jacke has already promised the collier, "What man I wyll use you like a prince" (D, 1271)
43. and further insists that "I geve not this washinge ball to every body" (D, 1289), in order to encourage Grimme's fantasy not only of being shaved but of being shaved like a king.
44. Andrew James Hartley, "The Color of 'Honesty': Ethics and Courtly Pragmatism in Damon and Pithias," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 11 (1999): 88-113.
45. Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: the Boy Companies of Shakespeare's Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1977), 152.
46. See Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1914), especially chapter five: "Queen Elizabeth at Cambridge (1564) and at Oxford (1566)," 89-108.
47. See Boas, 157-58.
48. For an account of the Privy Council's ban and Lyly's subsequent decline, see Gurr, 22.
49. Bevington and Hunter's notes to these lines in their edition of the text also note Lyly's avoidance of implicating Elizabeth in his translation.
50. This disparagement of gold is a common theme in the play; Eristus comments that "gold is but the guts of the earth" (M, 1.1.100), while Sophronia suggests that "Mellacrites, with thy greediness of gold" be thrust "to the utmost parts of the west, where all the guts of the earth are gold" (M, 2.1.113-15), a clear reference to mining endeavours by the Spanish in the New World. Freer notes that "the infusion of massive supplies of gold from Spain and the New World" had a catastrophic effect on the English economy, making "goods cost more simply because there was more gold that could be paid for them." In Freer's estimation, the rising inflation (or "the dirge") in England was due to the fact that "money itself had become a commodity" (500-1). By comparison, the beard was also paradoxically regarded as excremental in the period; as Fisher notes, "in the Renaissance, all hair was thought to be an 'excremental' residue left by the 'fumosities' as they passed out of the pores of the body" (174).
51. It is worth noting that the removal of Midas's beard, which is revealed in retrospect in Act 3, scene 2, reads like explication of what the audience must have already known from the first scene of Act 3: that the king was now beardless. That scene is structured as a repentance, with Midas confessing his folly and bathing in the river Pactolus in order to be relieved of the gift/curse, and it seems fitting that Midas would have had his beard removed as a sign of his contrition, an alteration in his appearance that would prepare him (and the audience) for his release by Bacchus. Since the actor taking the part of Midas was almost certainly a boy, the removal of his prosthesis and revelation of his childish face would have had considerable and multiple resonances, particularly since critics have often noted that Midas seems to be a thinly veiled caricature of Philip II of Spain. Bevington has noted that the allegorical associations between Midas and Philip are particularly profuse in the first scene of Act 1, and that "the rhetoric of Midas's confession speech plainly invites application" of what the audience knew of Philip (134).
52. Not only is Midas's speech public admission of Philip's guilt, in this reading, it is also a visual humiliation: without his beard, the actor playing Midas would look like a boy, and Midas's hubristic admission that he once considered himself to be "heir apparent to the world" (M, 3.1.46-47), sounding as it does like hair apparent (a common early modern play on words), would have presented viewers with a visual as well as verbal pun. The king's shaven state in this scene, then, operates as a signal of Midas's (and Philip's) military (and economic) defeat, effeminacy, and humiliation. Lyly's treatment of Philip, in this light, seems less forgiving than some critics have argued. See, for example, Bevington and Hunter, 111-47.
53. Sandra K. Fischer glosses the term "pawn" in her Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985) as "to risk, to stake in hope of some profit. . . . An item offered as security for a loan or other venture. A pledge or surety" (101).
54. The verbal sense of "coin," according to Fischer, is "to produce or mint money, to legitimize, to turn into something valuable. To counterfeit" (57).
55. See Jones and Stallybrass for a discussion of clothing as currency, the pawnbroker's social role in general, and Philip Henslowe as pawnbroker and/or second-hand clothes dealer in particular (26-32, 181-95).
56. Jones and Stallybrass's contention that "the pawnbroker lived on the social cusp between the world of material memories and the intermittent but persistent need for ready cash" (32) could also be applied to Motto in particular and the early modern barber in general if Motto's fetishization of the beard as a commodity is any indication of the barber's role in supplying Elizabethan London with products derived from the raw material that hair provided.
57. See Young, 261.
58. See also Herbert Moller's "The Accelerated Development of Youth: Beard Growth as a Biological Marker," Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (1987): 748-62. Moller presumes a physiological basis for belated beard growth in early modern males.
59. See Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy, revised 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1990).
60. The image of the barber as a thief may in part be attributed to the dramatic elevation of barbers and barber-surgeons in class, prestige, and professional and economic circumstance as a result of the efforts of Henry VIII to unite "the unincorporated Guild of Surgeons with their more accredited fellow-craftsmen, the incorporated Company of Barbers" in 1540 (Young, 78).
61. In 1531, the barbers continued in their position as the twenty-eighth company; by 1532, however, a petition was granted to allot the company a ranking of seventeenth (Young, 240). Henry is named on several occasions in the company records as patron, and he commissioned a Hans Holbein painting of himself presiding in fatherly fashion over the united company. The depiction, ostensibly created to commemorate the union of the Barber's Company with the Guild of Surgeons by Act of Parliament, was subsequently given to the joint company as a rather lavish gift. This unprecedented rise in favor and fortune may have been the source of more than a little jealousy by rival London companies. While initially the union would have granted official status to the surgeons, the rise of the medical profession as a whole in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have afforded the barbers a substantial increase in wealth and mobility. For the rise in the fortunes of early modern medical workers, see Elizabeth Lane Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (New York: Univ. of Rochester Press, 2002).
62. Tennis balls were made of hair in the early modern period. In this light, the Dauphin's gift to Henry in William Shakespeare's Henry V of a tun of tennis balls would have presented a rather blatant image of severed manhood. Gary Taylor also recognizes the image as "probably . . . punning on 'testicles'" in his edition of Shakespeare's Henry V (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 1.2.282 n.
63. As I mentioned earlier, the blatantly prosthetic beard is also conspicuously absent in performance of the play. While Midas's golden beard operates as a central image in the text, it never appears on stage after being removed from Midas's face, despite its undergoing a dizzying exchange of ownership.
64. While Michael Best takes Lyly's prologue to be an apologetic indication that Midas is the result of a conflation of two separate plays about Midas, Robert Weimann reads the same prologue as an indication of "a drama unlike any of the Continental burgess, neoclassical, courtly, and pastoral genres, but one in which the varying types of dramatic discourse had themselves entered such a state of interplay and interdependence that, only a few years later, the new drama might be defined as 'tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene indivisable, or poem unlimited"' (Weimann, "History and the Issue of Authority in Representation: The Elizabethan Theatre and the Reformation," New Literary History 17 [1986]: 469).
65. What Best takes as a signal of a clumsy attempt at revision, Weimann takes as a self-conscious nod at "a more complex national language of drama" in which a change is registered in "the kind of representativity which the theatre is said to encompass." See Best, "A Theory of the Literary Genesis of Lyly's Midas" in The Review of English Studies 17 (1966): 133-40.
66. See Weimann, 438.
67. The concept of memorial inhabitation has been adopted here from Jones and Stallybrass's concept of early modern clothing as memorially inhabited.
68. Following this line of reasoning, the boy actors and their Masters can also be seen as figures of the barber/thief, since the bearded gold they collect from the audience members attending these plays is metaphorically shaved at the door. The audience, then, is tacitly implicated in the economic exchanges occurring on stage.
69. The dramatic connection between the beard and primogeniture/rightful inheritance is perhaps most obvious in Jacob and Esau (Nicholas Udall?), which was first licensed for printing in 1557. Bevington surmises that "the play is too early for Elizabeth's reign and too protestant for Mary's. Most probably it dates from Edward VI" (Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968], 109).
70. The play, which roughly follows the biblical story, has Jacob donning animal hair in order to imitate his elder brother and thereby to fool their blind father Isaac into giving Jacob Esau's birthright and blessing. The boys' mother, Rebecca, who prefers Jacob over Esau, brings Jacob "a coller of roughe kiddes heare, / Fast vnto the skinne round about [Jacob's] necke to weare." Jacob, by means of a prosthetic beard, then, manages to rob his brother of his wealth; once Isaac discovers his error and tells Esau of Jacob's treachery, Esau cries out, "that worde is to me sharper than a rasers blade," acknowledging the fact that he has been economically shaved (Jacob and Esau, lines 1245-46, 1475).
71. See The History of Iacob and Esau, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York and London: Garland, 1992).