In Competition No. 2447 you were invited to supply an imaginary extract from one of three real book titles: The Philosophy of Beards, Five Years of Hell in a Country Parish, Unmentionable Cuisine. The first title, by Thomas S. Gowing, was published in Ipswich by J. Haddock c. 1850; the second, by the Revd Edward Fitzgerald Synnott, published in 1920, describes the torments of a vicar in the parish of Rusper in West Sussex which end in his being acquitted of charges of impropriety; the third, by Calvin W. Schwabe, contains, among others, recipes for silkworm omelette and red ant chutney. The second title failed to elicit much entertainment from you, with the honourable exception of Bill Greenwell, so I have confined the prizewinning entries, printed below, to the two other titles. The winners get £25 each, and the bonus fiver flutters down to Keith Norman.
Imagine, if you will, the photographic depiction of four bearded men. Let us call them A, B, C and D. A discarded his razor in student days and has been hirsute ever since. The others are actors: B has grown his beard for a film role; C is shown as King Lear, the beard being part of his stage make-up; and D has been snapped wearing an exact replica of the beard he has removed for a clean-shaven role. Two beards are self-grown, two applied externally; in each pair, one belongs to the man, one to an imaginary character. Which, if any, can be called ‘real’? Professor Flett’s anecdote (The Semiotics of Facial Hair, p. 913) in which an actor dramatically tears off the beard his character has been using as disguise and reveals his own almost identical beard beneath, though amusing, cannot but further muddy already cloudy waters.
Keith Norman
The mediaeval scholastic debate about beards began as part of a larger discussion of the place of human hair in nature.
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