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While a beard can signal masculine identity, that clear signal fades both in slang usage and in theatrical practice. The word "beard" may become a slang synecdoche for an identity as a man, but it may also be used as slang for female pubic hair and serve as a synecdoche for an identity as a woman. This complication-that a beard is a claim about gender identity, but we cannot be quite sure what the nature of that claim is-helps account for Banquo's remark about the witches in Macbeth:
You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so. (1.3.45-7)1
The original actors playing the witches were men, but were understood to represent women; their masculine beards rendered their sexual identity as women uncertain, uncanny. A beard means differently in Much Ado about Nothing. When the character Benedick decides to be in love with Beatrice, he shaves, or rather the actor playing Benedick removes a false beard, so that the actors playing Don Pedro and Claudio may comment on his changed appearance:
D. PEDRO. Hath any man seen him at the barber's?
CLAUD. No, but the barber's man hath been seen with him, and the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuff'd tennis-balls. (3.2.43-47)
In this instance, the character's move away from the homosocial soldier's world and into a heterosexual relationship is signaled by the actor's removal of part of his costume, a false beard. Thus the early modern drama enacts the mixture of meaning found in late modern slang usage. In Shakespeare's theater and in today's world, a beard may serve not only to establish one sort of identity, but also to disguise or complicate identity.2
Twentieth-century American musicals use Shakespeare as a sort of beard, covering up anxiety about race and sexuality. By beginning with the term "beard," I want to establish a theoretical position for regarding the American musical as a queer form, one that does not fit normative assumptions that academics make about drama.3 The complications of that cultural identity mean that critics may well misread (or perhaps under-read) musical comedy appropriations of Shakespeare. One recent Shakespeare musical Play On! used Shakespeare to serve as a beard for some of what it had to say...