Focusing on representations of beards in English Renaissance tradition, this research elucidates how fetish items validate ideological platforms of energy through materializing complicated price in a number of registers. supplying exact discussions of not just bearded males but in addition beardless boys, bearded girls, and half-bearded hermaphrodites, writer Mark Albert Johnston argues that attending heavily to early glossy English culture's therapy of the beard as a fetish item eventually exposes the contingency of different types like intercourse, gender, age, race, and sexuality.

Johnston mines a various cross-section of latest discourses—adult and children’s drama, narrative verse and prose, well known ballads, epigrams and proverbs, old debts, pamphlet literature, diaries, letters, wills, court docket files and criminal records, clinical and surgical manuals, lectures, sermons, almanacs, and calendars—in order to supply facts for his cultural claims. Johnston’s facts invokes a few of the period’s most renowned voices—William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Phillip Stubbes, John Marston, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Samuel Pepys, for example—but Johnston additionally introduces us to an array of lesser-known Renaissance authors and playwrights whose works aid the proposal that the beard was once a palimpsestic website of contested that means at which complicated and contradictory values conflict and converge.

Johnston’s interpreting of Marxist, Freudian, and anthropological theories of the fetish phenomenon recognizes their divergent emphases—erotic, monetary, racial and religious—while suggesting that the imbrication of various registers that fetish accomplishes allows its cultural and psychic naturalizing function.