Shakespeare's Pants

6. Beauty and Hair

June 03, 2021 Anjna Chouhan
Shakespeare's Pants
6. Beauty and Hair
Show Notes Transcript

This episode is all about the world of beauty in early modern England. What counted as beautiful in the period, and how did people keep themselves looking fabulous? I also discuss hair, beards and how all of this manifests itself in Shakespeare's plays. Absolutely packed with insight from Dr. Edith Snook, Dr. Eleanor Rycroft, Dr. Alun Withy, Esme Wise and the glorious voices of Rich Bunn, Tim Atkinson, Sarah Horner, Donald Craigie, Neil Hancock, Will Harrison-Wallace, and Jonathan McGarrity. 

Get thee to Twitter, anon: @ShakespearesPa2

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Anjna: Welcome to Shakespeare's Pants, the podcast that explores the ins and outs of English domestic activity during the life and times of William Shakespeare. My name is Anjna and I'm a Shakespearean, which is a strange thing to do with one's life, but in my attempt to be useful for a change, I'm using my otherwise pointless superpower to make history and literature come together for you, my lovely listeners. Without further ado, here is my podcast, Shakespeare's Pants.

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Narrator: Shakespeare's Pants.

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Anjna: It's well-known that Shakespeare was never kind about women who wore make-up, associating them with deceit and promiscuity. In actual fact, women and men used all kinds of recipes and cosmetics to beautify themselves. In this episode, I'll be asking what was considered beautiful and how that was actually achieved. I'll also be exploring early modern understandings of and attitudes towards hair, how to look after it, and how men's facial hair in particular was a complex cultural coding of both masculinity and beauty. Let's do it with episode six, Beauty and Hair.

Physical beauty, male and female, was connected to health. The various standards for looking aesthetically compelling can be logically tied to things like hygiene, grooming, and general wellness. Household and health manuals from the period sometimes contained sections dedicated to cosmetics or beautifying recipes, something that Dr. Sarah Reed mentioned back in episode one. To explain the connection between beauty and physique in more detail, let's turn to Professor Edith Snook from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada.

Prof. Snook: A lot of the texts that we have related to women's knowledge of beauty practices are in fact medical texts. One of the main resources that I've used in my own research is domestic recipe collections. The cosmetic recipes that you find in those kinds of texts are really not so much about the things that we think of as cosmetics now like foundation, and blush, and mascara, and that kind of thing. [chuckles] It's more things that make your skin appear in a particular way.

The goals of these were often both medical and aesthetic. They wanted to have skin that was fair, was the word that was used a lot, and to have fair skin meant to have white skin, but also to have skin that didn't have blemishes. The kinds of blemishes that they were particularly concerned about were freckles, as well as pimples, as well as diseases that produce redness in the skin, or flaky whiteness like dry skin.

Anjna: In the mid-16th century Italian book The Secrets of Alexis, published in English in 1615, cosmetic recipes cover everything from pimples to perfume. The books that Edith mentions were, indeed, numerous and incredibly popular. Hugh Platt, courtier and noted gardener created a short book named Delights for Ladies from 1602, which was so sought after that it was revived in 16 different editions during the 17th century.

Actor: Delightes for ladies: to adorn their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories with beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters.

Anjna: Pale, unblemished skin was surely the most obvious beauty ideal, signifying health, cleanliness, and a non-working life sheltered from the sun. Any deviation from this norm tended to be pointed out by Shakespeare either comically or as a sign of some kind of abnormality. Take, for instance, Nell, the kitchen wench in The Comedy of Errors whose complexion is--

Actor: Swart like my shoe, but her face nothing half so clean kept. For why? She sweats. A man may go over shoes in the grime of it.

Anjna: A phrase that you might have encountered in writing from the period is "beautifying physique". I asked Edith to unpack this a bit for us.

Prof. Snook: There was a few early modern texts that used that phrase in particular, and what I think they're doing is distinguishing themselves from people who write about cosmetics of the painting kind, so the kind that cover your skin to make it white. There was a lot of anxiety around that. Polemicists railed against such practices, calling women who painted their faces liars and cheats, and prostitutes or things like that, calling their virtue into question.

By using the phrase "the beautifying part of physique" I think it was meant to distinguish particular physical practices from those unnatural ones related to painting.

Actor: I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp, you nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on it. It hath made me mad.

Anjna: Painting referred to make-up and beautifying to what we call skincare.

Prof. Snook: Queen Elizabeth probably is the most famous face painter. I think there's quite good evidence that she did do that. When I was doing research on early modern beauty practices, I certainly thought that I would find more recipes for paint. I read many, many recipe books, and I did not find hardly any recipes for paint. Does that mean that women weren't painting? Or does it mean that they weren't making these paints at home using recipes but maybe it was a consumer product? I don't know, but I guess I am just cautious about extending a practice that Queen Elizabeth used. Also, it must have been used in the theater. I haven't had a lot of evidence of early women who were painting their face as part of their beauty practice.

Anjna: Shakespeare's characters rarely applaud the use of make-up, and such attitudes help to explain why beauty and the practice of beautifying were connected to health or physique, disconnecting such practices from associations of vanity, of duplicitousness. In actual fact, taking care of one's skin was a sign of one's morality.

Prof. Snook: They say it's good and proper, and good Christians take care of their skin because God gave you this body and you have to take care of it. Having good health or trying to encourage good health is a component of being a good Christian person.

Anjna: It is important to emphasize that neither painting nor beautifying physique was solely a woman's domain. It was just as vital for men to be seen as fair as it was for women, although there was a little more wiggle room for men.

Prof. Snook: When it comes to men, I think the question is a little bit more difficult because I feel like men weren't required to be so pale in order to be regarded as handsome. A little more color was allowed to men. Nevertheless, they did want to have unblemished skin.

Anjna: Shakespeare's young men are often described in terms not unlike those one might apply to a pretty woman. The mortal Adonis is the very paragon of beauty in the eyes of Venus and for the palate of nature itself.

 

Actor:

Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase.

Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.

Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,

and, like a bold-faced suitor, gins to woo him.

"Thrice fairer than myself," thus she began,

The field's chief flower, sweet above compare,

Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,

More white and red than doves or roses are,

Nature that made thee, with herself at strife,

Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.

Anjna: Manhood was also something that went hand in hand with being beautiful or at the very least something pleasing to behold. This is how Pandarus describes Troilus to his niece Cressida.

Actor: Do you know what a man is? Is not both beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness virtue, youth, liberality, and such like the spice and salt that season a man?

Anjna: It stands to reason that men also indulged in a bit of painting, particularly in the 17th century, and like women, they did not escape censure. This is physician John Bulwer, in 1653.

Actor: Painting is bad both in a foul and fair woman, but worst of all in a man.

Anjna: Recipe books also contained advice about how to maintain white, clean linen so as to appear respectable as we discovered in episode two; but also as a way of showing off the skin and complexion to its best advantage. The crucial message here is that beautifying and cosmetic recipes were accessible but of course, there were different options based on the resources you had available.

Prof. Snook: Wealthy people just have different options when it comes to cosmetics. Being able to get more expensive ingredients often means that you can get ingredients coming from Asia, from India and China from the Middle East, and then increasingly, from the Americas as well. I think just because of the expense of such ingredients, wealthy people had more access to those kinds of ingredients.

I think wealthy people also perhaps had more extensive social networks so that they could get ingredients from Europe or recipes and concoctions from Europe. Lady Seville can get a recipe from Italy, for example. That isn't very accessible to a middle-class woman in London necessarily unless that recipe happens to be printed in a printed recipe collection.

Anjna: One way you might want to keep your skin clear was by removing unwanted hair.

Prof. Snook: The two mentions of tweezing that I can remember was tweezing the armpits and the hairline on your head, but there was also a certain aesthetic around eyebrows too. I can't think of anyone particularly mentioning tweezing the eyebrows but people were concerned that your eyebrows not be too bushy. There were depilatory recipes. There's also recipes involving dung, putting various kinds of animal dung on your hairy spot where you want to remove the hair from, and it was somehow thought that this substance would take the hair off. Nevertheless, there's various kinds of concoctions created to remove hair.

Anjna: Hair removal and neatening was essential grooming. This brings us to hair more specifically. Let's begin with the head. I'm very interested in the practicalities of actually looking after your hair. As we know washing the hair was an irregular activity. Instead, the idea was to comb it through and to cleanse the scalp with rubbing and brushing. Let's hear a little more about combs. This is Dr. Hannah Lilley from the University of Birmingham.

Dr. Hannah Lilley: 82 nit combs were found on the Mary Rose during its excavation. Although one ivory and one elder wood example were found on board, the rest were made of boxwood and they varied only really in their size. This seemed to be quite an essential object to have onboard the ship. I'm sure lice and head lice would have made life very uncomfortable for those on board.

I think these items were certainly used on board as well because there is some evidence of nits still being inside the teeth of the nit combs, which is lovely. When you look at these images, you'll be able to see small nits still in between the teeth.

Anjna: This is an extract from a book of dialogues in which a rather demanding lady of upper middling sorts instructs her servants about dealing with her hair.

Actor: Come dress my head. Set the table further from the fire, it is too near. Why do you not set my great looking glass on the table? It is too high. Set the support lower. Undo my night attire. I do not call the page to warm the rubbers. Let him be cold. [unintelligible 00:14:34] warm that and take heed you burn it not. [unintelligible 00:14:37] rub very well my head for it is very full of dandruff.

My comb's in the case. Where is my ivory comb? Comb me with a boxwood comb. Give me first my combing cloth otherwise you will fill me full of hairs, the hairs will fall upon my clothes. Comb backwards. Oh God, you're combing too hard, you scratch me. You pull out my hairs. Can you not untangle them softly with your hands before you put the comb to it?

Anjna: Linen strips were used to rub the scalp to keep it clean and to remove dandruff. Esme Wise is a living history guide at Palmer's Farm and Mary Arden's house, who represents a young woman from the labouring sort. Esme explained to me her routine for grooming one's hair.

Esme: I am holding a very long piece of linen tape and a very large blunt needle. What you do is you put your hair into two plats that start about your ears, and then you'd wind them around the back of your head. The way you would do that is you would plant the linen tape in with it. When you've put your plats around the back of your head, you would then sow your hair in. It's not a crown on top of your head, but imagine a crown at the back of your head.

That is your foundational piece for your headgear, your coif then fits you and sits properly. You've got something there to anchor all of these various hairpieces that they wore. Your French hood, your Gable hood, your coif, all of that is being secured with these plats, but it's left you this lovely bit at the front free, which you can show potentially if you're a bit risque or posh or Queen Elizabeth. Most of it is art safe.

Because it's platted and out the way it won't get tangled, it will be kept cleaner that way and you would have your hair showing sometimes. There were occasions you were allowed to show your hair, your wedding day obviously, before only your husband had the privilege of being able to see it, and pre-marriage. On certain festivals like Mayday and Midsummer day, you would show your hair as a signal that you were young, available, looking for a man. Aren't I sexy with my long hair?

Anjna: Let's turn to the cultural signification of hair with Dr. Eleanor Rycroft from Bristol University.

Dr. Eleanor Rycroft: Hair is seen as the ornament of the body. Long hair is seen as the ornament of femininity and a beard is seen as the ornament of manhood. It has this kind of decorative function, but also identifying function in terms of gender. The thing about hair is that it needs to be groomed in order to maintain its appearance. It can very quickly become wild or excessive or out of control.

You get this idea, this assumption that overly hairy people, for instance, are on the cusp of civility and they're outside civil boundaries. You often come across versions of the wild man figure, which is a very, very ancient idea in the cultural imaginary, in folklore and literature and drama. He recurs as a figure for the excessively hairy man.

Sometimes, for instance, you'll get identities like a soldier will get associated with the wild man figure because of course, when you're fighting in a war, you don't have access to the tools of grooming as easily. Or travelers, people who've gone abroad and come back sometimes they're problematically hairy and they can be seen on part of that spectrum. There's lots of assumptions around how hair constitutes your gendered identity, your occupational identity, your social status, your age. It's a really important marker.

Anjna: Wild hair in both men and women is a sign of madness across Shakespeare's works. The visual signifier of a woman who is suffering mentally is loose hair. Constance in King John, for example, laments the kidnapping of her son, Arthur in a scene where the cardinal and the king of France keep reminding her to-

Actor: Bind up your hairs.

Anjna: In King Lear, the banished Edgar adopts the guise of madness in his plan to lay low in the kingdom of Britain.

Actor: My face I'll grime with filth, blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots.

Anjna: Having knotted loose or wild hair was, as Eleanor reminds us, a sign of deviance, which circles us back to Edith's observation about bushy eyebrows being problematic. Grooming and neatening one's hair on any part of the body was essential for societal and spiritual harmony. This is why it was also necessary to groom one's beard.

Actor: I must to the barber's, mounsieur, for me thinks I am marvelous hairy about the face, and I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me I must scratch.

Anjna: It's important to understand what early modern conceptualisations of beard hair really were. This is Dr. Alun Withey, senior lecturer in History at the University of Exeter.

Dr. Alun Withey: In the humoral understanding of the body, remember this is a time when the four humours are believed to be the mixture in everybody's body that either causes illness or keeps them well, under the humoral system of understanding the body, it's believed to emanate deep within a man's body in the area they call the reins, somewhere down in the liver towards the genital area.

Facial hair is seen as a sort of exhaust gas left over from the production of sperm so it's all about heat generated deep in a man's body. It's even referred to as a sort of excrement. The idea was that these gases rise up through a man's body, heat rises and they break out on the face and they coagulate to form beard hair. To remove beard hair is essentially to cleanse the body and to remove what they would call a common tegument of the body, so along the lines of sweat, saliva, fingernails. It's in that category.

Anjna: To maintain such a thing you had to visit the barber. The reason for that is that the equipment required to shave a beard was just too expensive and impractical to do it oneself.

Dr. Alun Withey: 17th century, early modern razors need a lot of care and attention. They need to be sharpened, stropped with a piece of leather, honed, in other words, ground. I found a few scattered references to people sending their razors away to be re-ground, but only really again elites and middling sorts do and very scattered references. You need a receptacle for the hot water. You need to buy the soap and you need some means of making the lather, which takes time and you need the mirror.

Now, mirrors are very rare. Lower-class households, less than 10% and probably even much less again than that have got anything resembling a mirror. More often they were a piece of reflective metal or even sometimes a shard of broken mirror that people had found. It's unlikely that "ordinary men" would have shaved themselves. The barber is involved with the micro-tasks of the body. The barber will obviously cut your hair and shave you, but they'll lance boils, they'll pick the earwax out of your ears, they'll scrape the rubbish off your teeth. They have this very cosmetic role.

Anjna: The cosmetic associations of being barbered are prominent in this description of Mark Antony upon his first meeting with Cleopatra.

Actor: Upon her landing, Antony sent to her, Invited her to supper. She replied it should be better he became her guest, which she entreated. Our courteous Antony, whom ne'er the word of "no" woman heard speak, being barbered ten times o'er, goes to the feast, and for his ordinary, pays his heart for what his eyes eat only.

Anjna: Alun explains that very wealthy men would employ their own barber, but more often than not men usually visited a barber between one to three times a week depending on cash flow and invariably on Saturdays so as to be fit and groomed for church on Sundays. Like most things, your experience at the hands of a barber would depend on your sort.

Dr. Alun Withey: A good barber can easily shave a face in 60 seconds. It's worth remembering an early modern barbershop is a real social hub. People go in there not just to have things done but almost to just hang out. It's a quirk of the barbers actually that they have a lot of little side things going on. One of them is cheap booze, so no wonder the guys want to all go and hang out there. A lot of Wiltshire barbershops were selling butter, cheese, dairy products and sometimes bread.

Barbershops, the more high-end they are, will sometimes have even more quirky things. They're well known for having musical instruments in the shop. Long before the barber's choir, I've seen one with a guitar, sitting in the shop inventory. Occasionally, I've seen a birdcage. There might be something exotic in there. I hesitate to draw an anachronism here but it's almost about creating an experience.

Anjna: One weekend in 1662, Samuel Pepys wrote:

Actor: I did also in a suddaine fit, cut off all my beard, which I had been a great while bringing up only that I may with my pumice-stone do my whole face, as I now do my chin, and to save time, which I find a very easy way and gentile.

Anjna: Whether or not it's really ‘easy’ and ‘gentle’, I'm not sure that pumicing one's chin is a compelling way of dealing with facial hair. Shakespeare often mentions different types of beards across his works so I'm interested in what different beard fashions actually were.

Actor: What beard were I best to play it in? I will discharge it either in your straw-colour beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grained beard or your French-crown-color beard, your perfect yellow.

Dr. Alun Withey: Beginning of the 17th century, late 16th, full beards are quite popular. You have the remains of all those lovely Tudor styles like the spade beard, this lovely big square thing sitting on the chin, but generally they're quite bushy. As we go forward in the 17th century this shrinks and you start getting clean-- especially by the time we get to the civil wars, mid 17th century, it's more pointy mustaches and pointy beards and then out goes Charles I. Charles II comes in, the beard's gone entirely. It's just the mustache. Really by the last decades of the 17th century, we're completely out of facial hair across Europe all through the 18th century until really the mid 19th in.

Anjna: In his poem, The Whip of Pride from 1621, John Taylor wrote-

John Taylor: Now a Hew lines to paper I will put,

Of men's beards strange, and variable cut,

Some seem, as they were starched stiff and fine,

Like to the bristles of some angry swine;

And some to set their love's desire on edge,

Are cut and prun'd like a quickset hedge;

Some like a spade, some like a fork, some square,

Some round, some mow'd like stubble, some stark bare;

Some sharp, stiletto fashion, dagger-like,

That may with whisp'ring, a man's eyes outpike;

Some with the hammer cut, or roman T,

Their Beards extravagant, reform'd must be;

Some with the quadrate, some triangle fashion,

Some circular, some oval in translation;

Some perpendicular in longitude;

Some like a thicket for their crassitude;

That heights, depths, breadths, triform, square, oval,

round, And rules geometrical in Beards are found.

Anjna: In Marlowe's history play, Edward II, the disgraced king is captured and forced to shave with puddle water. It's unmistakably humiliating.

Actor: Here's channel water, as our charge is given. Sit down, we'll be barbers to Your Grace.

Anjna: The king's fortunes in true tragic style are utterly reversed in this horrific scene. Marlowe's sole stage direction is:

Actor: They wash him with puddle water and shave his beard away.

Anjna: The connotations of shaving another man's beard away against his will are fairly self-evident, but the early modern associations of handling someone else's facial hair were a bit more nuanced. Henry V talks about his future offspring taking the Turk by the beard, and in Henry IV, Part 1, the Earl of Douglas says:

Actor: No man so potent breathes upon the ground but I will beard him.

Anjna: I asked Eleanor Rycroft what all of this means.

Dr. Eleanor: This is a literal process where you tweak or pull another man's beard to insult him. You have to be social equals in order to do that. A young man can't just go and pull an old man's beard because it's unfair. It's not a fair match. In a way that's quite interesting that Henry V picks the Turk as his equal because that's quite a fearsome masculine figure in early modern thinkings, but he still sees that he can overcome him.

Don Armado, when he talks about the excrement of his facial hair, he says to the king in Love's Labour's Lost, "It will please his grace, by the world, sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder, and with his royal finger, thus, dally with my excrement, with my mustachio," which is obviously eschatological joke but also in a way the king is bidding Don Armado there. He shouldn't be just playing with his beard. That's an insult to his masculinity.

Anjna: If beard hair was thought to be the excrement of manhood, that is dependent on how hot the body was, and remember that the younger the body, the hotter it was thought to be, I asked Eleanor why so many of Shakespeare's young men don't seem to have much facial hair, and if they do, like Benedick, in Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, why they choose to remove it.

Dr. Eleanor: It's a strange phase because the thing that will prove your manhood signified through the beard are having a wife, a household, servants, so becoming a master. In order to attract the wife, in the first place, again, is this idea that you have to become slightly effeminate in the courtship process because you're not the master, you're not in control of what's happening. The woman is often posited as being the dominant person in the courtship process and the man has to take a subordinate role in order to ultimately master his woman, his wife. Again, it's a cusp. It's a liminal phase of masculinity, where he's moving from beardless boyhood into bearded manhood, but he's not quite there yet.

It's quite interesting that in the Seven Ages of Man's speech, the masculinity is often signified or signaled by a lack of hair and then moving into different types of beardedness. Jaques doesn't mention the lover's hair. He says that he makes a ballad or something to his mistress's eyebrow. He mentioned her hair. It's a very precarious state of manhood. If he doesn't get the woman, what does that mean for his manhood? Is he going to be in the realm of boyhood forever?

Actor: Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part.

Anjna: It turns out that hair was the kind of socio-cultural marker, signifying things like virility, femininity, status naturally, and age, in much the same way that unblemished pale skin was the absolute epitome of beauty. It's the entire antithesis to sonnet 130, in which the mistress is categorically none of these things. Her lips are not red, her hairs are black wires, her breasts are brown, but I can't help wondering whether standards of beauty for men were a hell of a lot more complicated and possibly even more confusing than I, at least, previously appreciated.

So be sure to save your pet dung for any hair removal, grab a pumice for your chin exfoliation, and don't forget to pack the cheese and beer for your next trip to the barbers. That's the end of this episode of Shakespeare's Pants. Join me next time as I find out about food and drink in the early modern period and discover whether or not our 17th-century counterparts did my favorite pastime: snacking!

In this episode, you heard from Dr. Edith Snook, Esme Wise, Dr. Hannah Lilley, Dr. Eleanor Rycroft, Dr. Alun Withey, and me, Dr. Anjna Chouhan. You also heard the voices of Rich Bunn, Sara Horner, Tim Atkinson, Will Harrison-Wallace, Neil Hancock, Donald Craigie, and Jonathan McGarity. Thank you ever so for listening. Adieu!

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Narrator: Shakespeare's Pants.

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