How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
As layers of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The Beards of Hercules and frowning Mars,
Who, inward searched, have livers white as milk:
And these assume but valour’s excrement
To make themselves redoubted.”[[29]]
The witty Robert Green, published in 1592, a curious dialogue,[[30]] from which we get a glimpse into a Barber’s shop of Queen Elizabeth’s time. Cloth-breeches complains of the Barber’s attention to Velvet-breeches in these terms. “His head being once dressed, which requires in combing and brushing some two hours; then being curiously washed with no worse than a camphor ball, you descend as low as his Beard, and ask whether he please to be shaven or no? whether he will have his peake cut short and sharp, amiable like an innamorato, or broad pendant like a spade, or le terrible, like a warrior or soldado? whether he will have his crates cut low like a juniper bush, or his subercles taken away with a razor? If it be his pleasure to have his appendices pruned, or his moustaches fostered to turn about his ears like the branches of a vine, or cut down to the lip with the Italian lash, to make him look like a half-faced bauby in brass. These quaint terms Master Barber, you greet Master Velvet-breeches withal, and at every word a snap with your scissors and a cringe with your knee; whereas, when you come to poor Cloth-breeches, you either cut his Beard at your own pleasure, or else in disdain ask him if he will be trimmed with Christ’s cut, round like the half of a Holland cheese, mocking both Christ and us.”[[31]]
In the reign of James the 1st, Beards continued in fashion, and I extract two out of many passages from Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays; the first being, not excepting even that of Butler’s Hudibras, the most humourous description of a Beard in the language. A banished prince in disguise, having been elected “King of the Beggars” on account of his Beard; Higgen the Orator of the Troop proceeds in this fashion:—
“I then presaged thou shortly wouldst be king,
And now thou art so. But what need presage