Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children's Playing Companies (1599-1613) (Early Modern Literature in History)

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. Titles include: Andrea Brady ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Laws in Mourning Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Dermot Cavanagh LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY Patrick Cheney MARLOWE’S REPUBLICAN AUTHORSHIP Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England David Coleman DRAMA AND THE SACRAMENTS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Indelible Characters Katharine A. Craik READING SENSATIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (editors) THE RELIGIONS OF THE BOOK Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 Tobias Döring PERFORMANCES OF MOURNING IN SHAKESPEAREAN THEATRE AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A Sullivan Jr (editors) ENVIRONMENT AND EMBODIMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer ENGLISH HISTORICAL DRAMA, 1500–1660 Forms Outside the Canon Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN William M. Hamlin TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND Elizabeth Heale AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE Chronicles of the Self Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors) THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE Claire Jowitt (editor) PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 1550–1650 Gregory Kneidel RETHINKING THE TURN TO RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE Edel Lamb PERFORMING CHILDHOOD IN THE EARLY MODERN THEATRE The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613) Jean-Christopher Mayer SHAKESPEARE’S HYBRID FAITH History, Religion and the Stage Scott L.Newstock QUOTING DEATH IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb Jennifer Richards (editor) EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES Marion Wynne-Davies WOMEN WRITERS AND FAMILIAL DISCOURSE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE Relative Values

The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading.

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Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613) Edel Lamb

© Edel Lamb 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN-13: 978-0-230-20261-0 ISBN-10: 0-230-20261-6

hardback hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lamb, Edel, 1979– Performing childhood in the early modern theatre : the children's playing companies (1599–1613) / Edel Lamb. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-20261-0 (alk. paper) 1. Child actors—England—History—17th century. 2. Theater— England—History—17th century. I. Title. PN2590.B6L36 2009 792.02⬘8092—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2008029991

For David, and for Martin and Ursula.

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Tables of the Children’s Playing Companies’ Repertories

x

Introduction: Defining Early Modern Childhoods

1

1

The Child as Trope: Performing Age and Gender on the Early Modern Children’s Stage

17

2

Evaluating Childhood: The Theatrical Trade in Children

43

3

Performing Court and Nation: The English Child Player

67

4

Playing Children: Education and Youth Culture in the Early Modern Theatre

92

5

Remembering Childhood: Nathan Field’s Theatrical Career

118

Notes

143

Bibliography

169

Index

182

vii

Acknowledgements I am indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council who funded the majority of the research for this book. Thanks are also due to the Huntington Library for a fellowship, to Queen’s University, Belfast, for travel grants, and to University College Dublin for additional funding. An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published in Ben Jonson Journal 15.2 (2008). I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint an amended version of that material. I am also grateful to the Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, for permission to reproduce an illustration from The Lamentation of a Bad Market (*EBB65H). Sincere thanks goes to Clare McManus, who supervised my research with enthusiasm and has been a constant source of encouragement. I would also like to thank Kate McLuskie and Adrian Streete for their detailed responses to my work. Thanks to Mark Burnett, Ramona Wray and Kate Chedgzoy for their constant encouragement and support. David Coleman and Naomi McAreavey offered advice and friendship at every stage – to them, many thanks. Many have generously offered feedback and encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Michael Witmore, and to Gina Bloom, Ewan Fernie, Gordon McMullan and Simon Palfrey. Special thanks are also due to Lucy Munro for kindly sharing her ideas and her work. I would also like to thank Mark Hutchings, Matt Dimmock and David Mateer for allowing me to read their work. I am grateful to Ashley Dunne, Karìn Lesnik-Oberstein, Joshua Philips, Jane Rickard and Doug Trevor for offering suggestions and to Andrew Carpenter, Danielle Clarke and Alan Fletcher for their support. I am also grateful to Cedric Brown and Andrew Hadfield for their enthusiasm for the book and to Paula Kennedy and Steven Hall at Palgrave Macmillan for their advice. Family and friends have been hugely supportive and tolerant. I would especially like to thank Eilís Devaney, Caítríona, Nigel and Jemima Edmead, and Ken Taylor for their hospitality and Louise Henry, Chris Lamb, David Lamb, Peter O’Hare and Damien Trainor viii

Acknowledgements ix

for listening, encouraging and never complaining. Thanks to Clare Boyle for her unending support and to Jack Lamb for his inspiration, which continues in his memory. Above all, I thank my parents, Martin and Ursula Lamb, and my husband, David McGarry, for their patience, support and confidence, and for much more.

Tables of the Children’s Playing Companies’ Repertories The Children of Paul’s (1599–1606) Date

Author, Title

1599 1600 1600 1600 c. 1600–1 1601 1601 1601 1601 1603 1603–4 1604 1604 c. 1604–6 c. 1604–6 1605 1605 1606 1606 1606 1606 1606

John Marston, Antonio and Mellida Marston, Jack Drum’s Entertainment Anon., The Wisdom of Dr Dodypoll John Lyly (?), The Maid’s Metamorphosis Marston, Antonio’s Revenge Thomas Middleton (?), Blurt Master Constable Marston, What You Will Thomas Dekker, Satiromastix Lyly, Love’s Metamorphosis George Chapman, The Old Joiner of Aldgate (lost) Middleton, The Phoenix Dekker and John Webster, Westward Ho Middleton, A Trick to Catch the Old One Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters Middleton, Michaelmas Term Dekker and Webster, Northward Ho Middleton, The Family of Love Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois Marston, Parasitaster; or, The Fawn Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Woman Hater Middleton, The Puritan Anon., Abuses (lost)

x

Tables of the Children’s Playing Companies’ Repertories xi

The Children of the Chapel / Queen’s Revels (1600–13) Date

Author, Title

1600 1600 1601 1601 c. 1601 c. 1601 c. 1602 c. 1602 c. 1603 c. 1603 c. 1604 c. 1604 c. 1604 1604–5 1604–5 1604–5 1604–5 1605 c. 1605 1605–6 c. 1605–8 1606 1606 1606 1606 (?) c. 1607 c. 1607 1607–8 1608 1608 1608 1608 c. 1608 1608–9 1609–10 c. 1610 c. 1610 c. 1610 1611 c. 1611

Lyly, Love’s Metamorphosis Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels Anon., The Contention Between Liberality and Prodigality Jonson, Poetaster Chapman, All Fools Chapman, May Day Chapman, Sir Giles Goosecap Chapman, The Gentleman Usher Thomas Kyd (?), ‘Jeronimo’ Marston, The Malcontent John Day, Law Tricks Marston, The Dutch Courtesan Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois Chapman, All Fools Marston, Parasitaster; or, The Fawn Samuel Daniel, Philotas Chapman, The Widow’s Tears Chapman, Jonson and Marston, Eastward Ho Chapman, Monsieur D’Olive Marston, Sophonisba Jonson, The Case is Altered Edward Sharpham, The Fleer Day, The Isle of Gulls Middleton, The Viper and her Brood (lost) Marston, The Dutch Courtesan (?) Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle Middleton, Your Five Gallants Beaumont and Fletcher, Cupid’s Revenge Beaumont and Fletcher, The Coxcomb Chapman, The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron Chapman, The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron Marston (?), ‘The Silver Mine’ (lost) Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess Middleton, A Trick to Catch the Old One Jonson, Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman Chapman, May Day Beaumont and Fletcher, The Scornful Lady Nathan Field, The Woman is a Weathercock Robert Daborne, A Christian Turn’d Turk Marston, William Barksted and Lewis Machin, The Insatiate Countess Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois

c. 1611 c. 1611

xii

Tables of the Children’s Playing Companies’ Repertories

c. 1611 1611–12 1612 1613 1613

Field, Amends for Ladies Chapman, The Widow’s Tears Beaumont and Fletcher, The Coxcomb Beaumont and Fletcher, Cupid’s Revenge Chapman, The Widow’s Tears

The Children of the King’s Revels (1607–8) Date

Author, Title

1607 1607 1607 1607 1607 1607–8 1607–8 1607–8 1607–8 1608

Day, Law Tricks Middleton, The Family of Love Machin, Everywoman in her Humour John Mason, The Turke Sharpham, Cupid’s Whirligig Robert Armin, The Two Maids of Moreclacke Lording Barry, Ram Alley Machin and Jervase Markham, The Dumb Knight Anon., Torrismount (lost) Day, Humour Out of Breath

Note: The list uses the information provided in W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Appendix 3, pp. 186–7; Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Appendices A–E, pp. 167–92; Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), Appendices B–C, pp. 257–68; Mary Susan Steele, Plays and Masques at Court During the Reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926); W. R. Streitberger, ed., Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts, Malone Society Collections, XIII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), and is supplemented by further research.

Introduction: Defining Early Modern Childhoods

Weep with me, all you that read This little story. And know, for whom a tear you shed Death’s self is sorry. ’Twas a child [ . . . ]1 In 1603 Ben Jonson memorialised the child player Salomon Pavy in his ‘Epitaph on S. P. a Child of Q. El Chappel’. Urging his readers to ‘Weep with me’ (l. 1) at the death of this player aged ‘scarse thirteen’ (l. 9), Jonson fixed Pavy in performance history as a skilled child who acted the parts of old men so ‘truely’ that the ‘Parcae’, or fates, ‘thought him one’ (ll. 15–16). Indeed, the poem has served as a source of information for theatre historians about the ages and talents of the youthful players of early modern London.2 However, ‘Epitaph on S. P.’ is as much fiction as reality.3 Jonson manipulates the relationship between Pavy’s early death and the parts that he may have played as a member of the Children of the Chapel, and previously as a member of the Children of Paul’s, as the central conceit of the poem. Furthermore, the fact that Pavy was 14 when he died in 1602 demonstrates the problems in interpreting this elegy as historical reality.4 Yet what is remarkable about the poem is the way in which it conceives of Pavy as a child. It conveys a heightened sense of loss by insisting that he ‘was a child’ (l. 5) and emphasising that the account offered is his ‘little storie’ (l. 2). Pavy’s status as child is crucial to his identity to the extent that even ‘Death’s selfe’ (l. 4) is sorry at having mistakenly taken him. 1

2

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

This representation draws on common motifs pertaining to children, particularly child death, in early modern culture.5 The idea that the child was protected by death, as he is ‘much too good for earth’ (l. 23), echoes Jonson’s sentiments expressed in his poems on the deaths of his own children, ‘On my First Daughter’ and ‘On my First Son’, that draw on the conventional belief that the child was the property of heaven and corrupted by time spent on earth. ‘Epitaph on S. P.’ presents a similar notion through its image of the strife between Heaven and Nature over ‘Which owned the creature’ (l. 8). However, the poem simultaneously challenges this idea. Remembering Pavy as the ‘stage’s jewel’ (l. 12), it foregrounds the sense of a material loss. Pavy did not only belong to Heaven, it suggests, he was also the property of the stage or the playing company. The epitaph thus combines an expression of the child as a distinct and recognizable category of identity through the evocative description of the little and vulnerable child with an emphasis on Pavy’s particular identity as a child player, the economic property and skilled actor of the Children of the Chapel. This book explores this concept of childhood. It investigates how the two major children’s playing companies of early modern London, the Children of Paul’s (1599–1606) and the company originally known as the Children of the Chapel, then subsequently as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, the Children of the Revels, the Children of Blackfriars and the Children of Whitefriars (1600–13), defined their youthful players as children.6 It argues that the construction of the player as a child is crucial to the companies’ performances, commercial strategies and to the onstage and offstage identities of the players. However, as Jonson’s poem demonstrates, while the representation of the child as a player is distinct, it is simultaneously located in wider social, cultural, political and emotional attitudes towards children in the period. This book explores how childhood was understood and experienced in this particular context. It examines how these child players are defined by the companies’ managers, playwrights, legal practices, staging methods and dramatic representations of childhood and the audience’s knowledge of this specific type of performer, and also what impact this had on the child players. It thus ultimately investigates how the subjectivities of these players were shaped by their experiences of playing and being defined by these companies as children.

Introduction

3

Defining childhood The players of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels were children or youths in the physical and biological understandings of these terms when these companies began playing in 1599 and 1600. The majority were prepubescent boys ranging from as young as six or seven years old to their early teenage years.7 Players at Paul’s in 1599, for instance, included the seven-year-old Thomas Ravenscroft and the 13-year-old John Tompkins, while in 1600 the grammar school students, John Chappell and John Motteram, the apprentices Thomas Grymes, Philip Pykman and Alvery Trussell, the 13-year-old Thomas Clifton, the 13-year-old Nathan Field and the ten-year-old Salomon Pavy were members of the Children of the Chapel.8 However, as the companies aged, so did the boys. An account of Paul’s performance of the lost play Abuses in 1606 hints at this aging, calling them the ‘youths of Paul’s, commonlye called the Children of Paul’s’.9 In the case of the Queen’s Revels, Robert Keysar, manager of the company from 1606 to 1610, claims that the players had been trained in the company for ten years, and indeed Nathan Field continued to be a member until 1613 when he was aged 26.10 So although the companies continued to recruit younger boys, this meant that in their later years they consisted of players ranging from young boys to youths in their twenties. However, the physical age of the players is, to an extent, incidental to the representation of them as children. What is most interesting is the way in which the two companies define the players as children regardless of their biological age. In the companies’ titles, playbooks and legal and financial documents, the players are sometimes referred to as boys and youths, but for the most part they are termed children. The early modern children’s playing companies thus produce a category of child players that is determined by a variety of factors within these theatrical institutions beyond that of physical age. This demonstrates a conceptualization of childhood that has been the principal topic of historical, sociological and literary studies following Philippe Ariès’s seminal text, L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale Sous l’Ancien Régime (1960), translated into English as Centuries of Childhood (1962).11 Ariès’s differentiation between the reality of children and childhood as a social and cultural idea offers an understanding of childhood as a multivalent and historically contingent concept that does necessarily apply to a person of a certain age. Therefore, as Kate Chedgzoy points

4

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

out, ‘Varying across time and place, childhoods are multiple and contingent, and they elude easy scrutiny and interpretation.’12 Children can be defined in relation to diverse issues. One way in which the early modern child is defined is in relationship to a parent, teacher or master.13 In other words, childhood is, in one sense, a status relative to these figures of authority in the contexts of domestic, education and work. The children’s companies shape the child in these terms through their hierarchical structures, as the players, in contrast to the boys of the adult playing companies, never become the sharers or masters in their companies. The children are initially impressed into the companies and post 1606 are bonded as apprentices to the Queen’s Revels, but they are always subject to the companies’ managers who function as their masters and educators. Maintained in this status, these players thus remain children no matter what their age. In the gerontocratic society of early modern England, this definition of childhood as a status of subservience in relation to authority seems, on the one hand, to offer a negative concept of childhood.14 Noting the fundamental differences between the behaviour of the child and of the adult, The Office of Christian Parents (1616) highlights the derogatory implications of this differential in citing the scriptural instruction that ‘In childhood we speake, understand and thinke as a child, and in manhood we put away childish things.’15 Using the term in a similar way in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Coxcomb, originally performed by the Queen’s Revels in 1608, Viola curses her ‘easy, foolish, childish love’.16 Hezekiah Woodward’s Childe’s Patrimony (1640) explicitly links the state of being young in years with this concept of childishness in its claim that ‘you may know by its Childishnesse, it is a boy still’.17 From the late medieval period ‘childishness’ defined, as it continues to do, behaviour suitable only for children and not befitting of mature age.18 Indeed, terms associated with infancy, childhood and youth, such as ‘childish’, ‘boy’ and ‘boyish’, are regularly used in early modern drama and literature to portray foolishness, vulnerability and shame. In Cleopatra’s often-cited speech, for example, the Egyptian Queen expresses her fear that she ‘shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’th’ posture of a whore’.19 The use of the term ‘boy’ is evidently particularly loaded in this self-conscious reference to the theatrical practice of boy players performing female parts. To be ‘boyed’ is to be humiliated in terms of age, class and gender.

Introduction

5

The term ‘boy’ serves a similar function for the male protagonist of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, as being named ‘thou boy of tears’ is his ultimate shaming, and one which he attempts to refute by thrice questioning the use of the term.20 To be a boy is to be less than adult, but also less than masculine. The term ‘child’, after all, also contained associations with the feminine through to the early modern period as it was often used specifically to refer to the female infant.21 John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, performed by Paul’s in c. 1600–1, forces the boy player himself to contemplate his ‘infant weakness’ when Pandulfo compares himself to ‘some boy that acts a tragedy’. Recognising his state as a child, he is shamed and ‘drops his eye’.22 Infancy, boyhood and childhood, therefore, can function in dramatic writing of the early modern period as metaphors for shame and are appropriated to express angst, weakness and the absence of an ability to take action and behave rationally. However, the children’s companies simultaneously produce a category of childhood that offers the players a distinct sense of being children and reclaims childhood in a positive light. Even while acknowledging that childhood is a lesser status than adulthood, the plays frequently present its apparent inadequacies through gentle comedy. The final lines of the ‘Prologue’ of Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, performed by Paul’s in 1599, excuse the faults of the play before it is performed by requesting that ‘if our slightness your large hope beguiles, / Check not with bended brow, but with dimpled smiles’.23 The play thus encourages a benevolent response to the children’s performance. Plays such as Thomas Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, performed by Paul’s in 1604 and the Queen’s Revels in 1608–9, and A Mad World My Masters, performed by Paul’s in c. 1604–6, celebrate childishness and youthfulness by presenting the follies and unruly behaviour of youth and allowing the young heroes to trick and mock their elders. These plays thus exploit the unique performance context and foreground the presence of the child who is at once both the character and the player. Indeed, many of the children’s plays repeatedly draw attention to the fact that they are being performed by children, through their references to size, childishness and their satires against authority figures and old age. Yet this representation of youth is evidently not limited to the children’s playing companies. Texts such as Francis Lenton’s The Young Man’s Whirligig (1629) also celebrate such differences. This tract

6

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

ostensibly claims to educate and protect youth by warning them against vice, yet in its light-hearted and satirical tone it revels in the exploits of ‘giddy youths’ and celebrates their carefree lifestyle.24 Providing a description of four life stages (infancy, childhood, youth and manhood), and dwelling most extensively on the exploits of youth, which include fencing, dancing, drinking, play-going and courting, it mocks the warnings given in conventional moral treatises in its representation of the ways in which their ‘prodigall expence’ impact on old age.25 This is also typical of another, perhaps the most dominant, image of childhood in the period. Central to Lenton’s text is the idea that behaviour in childhood impacts on the individual’s adult identity. He, therefore, not only indicates the differences between the child and adult, but simultaneously points to the links between the two states in the image of the child becoming the adult. Identity here is presented as being in the process of development and childhood and adulthood are on a continuum. This is a recurrent idea in the diverse range of texts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that offer descriptions of childhood. These include, alongside the literary and dramatic, medical, parenting, educational and courtesy manuals and tracts, the majority of which represent childhood as a vulnerable stage and the period in life during which adulthood is moulded and developed. For instance, Henry Cuffe’s The Differences of a Man’s Life (1607) discusses the Aristotelian model of the life cycle in which life consists of three stages – childhood, man-age and old age. In this model, childhood lasts up to the age of 25, incorporates the sub-stages of infancy, boyhood and youth, and is ‘the first part and age of a man’s life, wherein their generation and growth is perfected’.26 Childhood, here, is a category of identity referring more generally to the period during which adult, and in this case masculine, identity is forged. The Office of Christian Parents (1616) allocates a different age range to its definition of childhood, seven to 14, but it similarly characterizes it as a period of change and identity formation – the ‘age of stripling growing to manhood’.27 Thus while a child is still defined in many contexts as, Anna Davin points out, ‘someone at a certain stage in the life cycle’ that ‘stage is open to different definitions’.28 These early modern texts offer their own characterizations of the stage in the life cycle known as childhood. For T. Sheafe, childhood is the foundation for old age and thus is the

Introduction

7

‘tender and flexible age’.29 A common warning given in educational tracts is that children should be educated correctly from an early age because ‘children are softe of flesh, lythe and plyant of body, able and lyght to moving, witte to learne’.30 Bartholomew Batt also links the bodies and minds of the young, stating that ‘Even as the members of infants so soone as they be borne, be carefully tended, roled and swaddled, that they grow not crooked and deformed: so it is meete, that the manners of youth, be aptly framed and fashioned in the beginning’, and Thomas Wright claims, children ‘learne’ and ‘frame’ their behaviour on what they see and hear as this is imprinted in their ‘tender yeeres & weake soules’.31 Children are thus perceived to be impressionable and are commonly compared to fresh wax.32 The Institution of a Young Noble Man (1607) uses this widespread analogy, stating that ‘New waxe is best for sealing, as fresh claie is fittest for working: the woole of young lambs is aptest to receive the surest die, so youth is fittest for good impressions.’33 In these examples childhood is distinguished as a formative stage. This is not to suggest, as others have, that early modern children are perceived simply as mini-adults or are interesting merely for what they will become in their adulthood.34 Rather, what comes to characterize children in their literary representations, and particularly in the children’s playing companies, is not merely a sense of these youths as developing individuals but an original and vibrant concept of the child as exposing the processes of development, change and identity formation more generally. This understanding of age and childhood as cultural constructs, and not as biological states or temporal periods in the life span, builds on theoretical approaches to gender that have demonstrated the need to differentiate between an essentialist idea of the woman as determined by biological features and varying concepts of gender determined by the historically and culturally specific factors attached to the idea of being male or female.35 Furthermore, age is, as Keith Thomas points out, a crucial element in defining early modern subjectivity.36 An evaluation of this factor opens up new possibilities for the theorization of a range of identity categories. Judith Gardiner has demonstrated the benefits of theorizing age, arguing that because it is seen in changing, continuous and developmental terms rather than binary ones it can provide ‘useful analogies for thinking about gender more flexibly’ and point to ‘the rigidities in current [gender]

8

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

models that inadvertently reinforce the polarizations that most feminist theories seek to avoid’.37 Critical attention to the construct of age potentially revitalises considerations of identity in the early modern period, and indeed in any social and cultural context. The investigation of the cultural construct of childhood in this particular context of the children’s playing companies further attends to the issues raised by gender theorists, and most notably of Judith Butler’s articulation of the performativity of gender. My terminology in referring to childhood as a construct indicates my appropriation of Butler’s arguments in considering early modern childhood. Yet this book does not merely reiterate notions of performativity in relation to childhood identity, rather it considers what happens with the theory, to paraphrase Butler in her 1999 preface to Gender Trouble, when it tries to come to grips with childhood. It tests the relevance of this approach to an understanding of childhood, and also introduces this original element of age into this now commonly used approach. This book thus seeks to address the ways in which childhood is constructed in this context, and if childhood, to paraphrase Butler again, is constructed in the same way as gender.38 More specifically this book explores how childhood identity is produced through the early modern theatrical institution. It focuses on the construction of the child as player. Interestingly, parallels between childhood and playing are common in the period. In fact all stages of the life cycle are, to some extent, conceived of as performances or theatrical parts. Jacques’s description of ‘the one man’ who ‘in his time plays many parts / His acts being seven ages’ in As You Like It neatly encapsulates the recurring concept that age is a category of identity and, moreover, that it is a part to be played.39 In Edward Calver’s Passion and Discrimination, in Youth and Age (1641), the stages in the life cycle are similarly compared to theatrical parts as the narrator claims: ‘tis certain, if I live till age, I then must change my tyre upon the stage, And act the part of sorrow in despight Of all my former pleasure and delight.40 In these intersections between images of theatre and life, age is very clearly a performative concept. Ben Jonson also evokes an image of

Introduction

9

playing in relation to the stages of the life cycle, but he goes further in figuring the child as representative of the original performer who ‘imitate[s] the vices of Stammerers, so long, till at last they become such’.41 He thus implies a fundamental relationship between children and performance. In A Refutation of the Apology for Actors, I. G. also draws on such a correlation as he terms ancient Greece ‘the childhood and infancy of the world [ . . . ] For indeed, it was but their foolish thought, and childish opinion that Playes was the readiest way to plant understanding in the ignorant’.42 Theatre is thus figuratively defined as a realm of children in these examples. Moreover, Jonson’s formulation of the child effectively aligns discourses of childhood with the discourses of playing put forward by contemporary anti-theatricalists. He imagines the child transforming into the part that he plays – a feature of anti-theatrical tracts that has been explored in depth by critics such as Jonas Barish and, more recently, Laura Levine.43 Indeed as infamous examples, including William Rankins’s description of players ‘transform[ing] their bodies’ in A Mirrour for Monsters and William Prynne’s accounts of ‘Players metamorphosed into women on the Stage’ and ‘mens transfiguring of themselves’, indicate, the idea that the player becomes his part through theatrical impersonation is a prevalent concern among this particular cultural group.44 This bears remarkable similarities to an understanding of childhood as a period of process and transformation. Both the child and the player are imagined in early modern culture as mouldable and shifting entities; both are perceived to have the potential to become something else through acting that part. For the member of Paul’s or the Queen’s Revels, who is both a child and a player, this aspect of being is doubly charged, as Chapter 4 explores. The child player who is defined as such by the structures of the playing company and who repeatedly performs new parts on this stage is maintained in the status of constantly becoming. He is what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari term a ‘becoming-child’ – an entity always in process and transition.45 This book seeks to address how the child who is a player in the early modern children’s playing companies is perceived in relation to these processes of metamorphosis and how these processes figure in the child player’s subjectivity. It evaluates the discursive relationships between childhood and theatre and examines what it means to be a child in this theatre.

10

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

Performing children The complex and various implications of what it means to be a child in the early modern theatre have not yet been critically addressed. This is a significant gap in scholarship on a historical context that supported three children’s playing companies – the Children of Paul’s (1599–1606), the Children of the Queen’s Revels (1600–13) and the Children of the King’s Revels (1607–8). The revival of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel / Queen’s Revels at the beginning of the seventeenth century marked the formation of a distinct form of the children’s playing companies within a longer history of children’s performance. As substantial scholarly work on the background and practices of the companies has revealed, Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels evolved from troupes of children based at chorister and grammar schools who performed for educational purposes and occasionally at court from the early sixteenth century onwards and functioned as commercial companies for a brief period in the 1570s and 1580s.46 While the revived Paul’s, under the mastership of Edward Pearce, master of the choristers, and other sharers, such as Thomas Woodford, functioned as both a chorister group and playing company until its dissolution in 1606, the Queen’s Revels underwent significant structural changes during its lifespan. Nominal and practical links with the choristers of the Chapel Royal, which included the involvement of Nathaniel Giles who had a patent to impress boys as choristers, initially enabled the latter company to take up boys and train them as players. However, following the 1601 legal complaint of Henry Clifton, that his son and others were ‘abusively employed as aforesaid only in plays and interludes’, a proviso stating that no boys taken up as choristers would be ‘used or employed as Comedians or Stage players’ was added to Giles’ royal patent in 1606.47 It is likely that by this point the company had already severed its links with the chorister group, the management syndicate having altered in 1602, with Thomas Kendall, Martin Peerson and William Rastell joining Henry Evans and James Robinson. The strategies for recruiting players had also changed substantially by this date as the company moved from a model of impressments to apprenticeship, as Chapter 2 explores. The company also changed nominally, gaining the patronage of Queen Anna and becoming the Children of the Queen’s Revels following the accession of James I and

Introduction

11

losing it following a number of satirical representations of the new court, examined in Chapter 3.48 By 1606 it was known variously as the Children of the Revels and the Children of Blackfriars and in 1608 it was temporarily dissolved at the command of the King, its properties divided and its lease with the Blackfriars theatre surrendered. The company, however, reformed again in c. 1609 as the Children of the Whitefriars, the playhouse at which they were then based, and were managed by Robert Keysar, a goldsmith who had been involved in the earlier company between 1606 and 1608, and Philip Rosseter, a royal musician. In 1610 they were granted a new licence, once again naming them the Children of the Queen’s Revels.49 Richard Dutton has argued that this post-1610 company was a separate entity from that disbanded in 1608.50 Dismissing continuities, such as Keysar’s involvement with the company pre- and post 1608 and Nathan Field’s membership from 1600 to 1613, Dutton instead aligns the later Queen’s Revels company with the Children of the King’s Revels, a company established as a commercial enterprise with an apprenticeship structure at the Whitefriars playhouse in c. 1607 and performing until 1608 and at which William Barksted, a player with the post-1610 Queen’s Revels, began his career.51 Although the brief history of this company indicates that it did not bring the desired economic success, the example of the King’s Revels suggests that the concept of a ‘children’s’ playing company was a marketable commodity that was worth imitating. This is further suggested by another company who claimed to be the Children of the Queen’s Revels in order to play in Norwich in 1611, until it was discovered that the manager Ralph Reeve was pretending to be Rosseter.52 In fact, what is potentially most interesting about the post-1610 Queen’s Revels company at the Whitefriars is that, whatever its tangible links with earlier children’s companies, it too consciously constructs and markets itself as a continuation of the earlier Queen’s company, insisting that the players had been ‘trayned up in that service, in the raigne of the late Queene Elizabeth for Ten yeares togeathr’.53 It is because of this self-image, combined with the important continuities with the earlier Queen’s Revels / Blackfriars company, that this book follows the more established view of the Children of the Chapel / Queen’s Revels / Blackfriars / Whitefriars as effectively one company who performed from 1600 to 1613. However, it is evident

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Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

that despite how the company presented itself, it was a variable entity. Moreover, there are significant connections between all three main children’s companies. Players, sharers, managers, playwrights and even some plays moved between the companies.54 Such overlaps align, to a certain extent, the identities of the boy players of each company. This study proposes that there is an identity particular to the child player that is common to the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels, and that this identity is emulated through the establishment of the Children of the King’s Revels, and indeed through the formation of a number of companies claiming to be composed of children in the provinces during the first three decades of the seventeenth century. It explores the child, therefore, as a category of player in early modern theatrical culture. This category of player, however, cannot be considered in isolation from the wider culture of children’s performance of which he is a part. The fact that the child player was a phenomenon at the centre of early modern theatrical culture has not been fully explored nor have the ways in which theatrical practices produced the identity of the child, although recent studies on the varied contexts of children’s performance, including Mary Bly’s Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, Lucy Munro’s Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory, Michael Witmore’s Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance and Carol Chillington Rutter’s Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen, have begun to shed light on this figure.55 Children, both male and female, performed in a range of contexts and for a number of purposes throughout England. The most obvious example is the boy player of the professional adult playing companies, a figure that has been intensively analysed, particularly in critical interest in the representation of gender on this stage.56 Yet the player of the children’s companies is differentiated from this figure through the ways in which they insist upon their status as companies of children and on the player of this company as a child or youth. ‘Children’ are defined within this theatrical profession according to the economic and hierarchical structure of the playing companies and their professional identities within these companies. While the children’s companies consisted of players who generally were children and youths in terms of their age, they were defined as such not merely because of their age but because they were maintained under the authority of a group of masters,

Introduction

13

managers and sharers. In this sense the children’s companies differed significantly from the adult companies of the period, in which the sharers were the main players and a number of boys were apprenticed to these sharers, generally to perform the female or young male roles. Children also had a key role in the performance cultures associated with schools and the court. Schoolboys, like the chorister groups from which the Children of Paul’s and Children of the Queen’s Revels evolved, performed regularly as part of their education and for royal entertainment at the court. Girls also performed in these contexts in the seventeenth century, indicated by the performance of Robert White’s Cupid’s Banishment by the girls of the Ladies’ Hall at Deptford before Anna of Denmark at Greenwich in 1617. This performance served as a means of developing the girls’ skills in the dance and performance, required of the courtly lady, but also functioned as an opportunity to display these skills to the Queen and potentially to integrate the children into the court.57 Performance served this function for a range of children in the English courts, as even the royal children were integrated into their public roles through performance. Prince Henry’s performance in Samuel Daniel’s Tethy’s Festival at the age of 16 in June 1610, for example, marked his acceptance of the title of Prince of Wales. The 14-year-old Lady Elizabeth and ten-year-old Charles, Duke of York, also danced in this masque, as did ‘eight little ladies’, possibly beginning their courtly careers in a manner similar to the girls of the Ladies’ Hall.58 In these educational and courtly contexts the child performer is a figure who is being trained and integrated into other social contexts and an appropriate adult identity. The child performer was also a common figure in aristocratic household performance. In 1627, the 14-year-old Lady Rachel Fane wrote the May Masque and performed in it with her younger siblings and cousins at Apethorpe.59 The four- or five-year-old daughter of Sir John Egerton was possibly one of the speakers during the festivities preceding a masque at the Earl of Huntingdon’s estate at Ashby – an entertainment which juxtaposed this aristocratic girl performer with the professional boy players employed to perform the speaking roles in the masque.60 Children also performed in royal entertainments and civic pageants, such as the scholar of St Paul’s Grammar school who delivered a Latin oration to James I in Thomas Dekker’s and Ben Jonson’s Magnificent Entertainment in 1604 and the ‘very proper child, well spoken, being clothed like an Angel of gladness’ who performed

14

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

before the King at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall in 1607.61 In Anthony Munday’s 1609 pageant, Campbell, or The Ironmongers’ Faire Field, children delivered recitals, although according to complaints they ‘weare not instructed in their speeches’.62 In the same year, Nathan Field, William Ostler and Giles Cary, of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, were paid for their roles in Ben Jonson’s entertainment performed before the royal family to celebrate the opening of the royal exchange, Entertainment at Britain’s Burse – a rare example of children being paid directly for their efforts, as money was normally paid to the master to cover his expenses, and interesting evidence of how the players of the children’s companies also performed outside the structures of the playing company.63 The child performer was also a common figure in theatrical culture beyond England in this period. Boys performed at European courts as singers, musicians and players, and young English members of touring theatre companies also performed at these locations. Indeed, some of these boys may even have been left as players at these courts when their masters continued travelling, such as Anthony Jeffes, who was left at the court of Wolfenbüttel, Germany, in 1595 by Robert Browne, a travelling member of the Admiral’s Men. Browne, who became a patentee for the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1610 and thus had a 15-year-long career in training children as performers, was also given a patent at another German court by the Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Cassel to train up a company of local and foreign boys as comedians and musicians.64 The English concept of the boy performer and of the troupe was thus transported and appropriated into other European settings. Yet the figure of the child performer was not new to such contexts. Boys and girls performed in schools throughout Europe and royal and courtly children also danced, sang and acted as part of their courtly training throughout Europe, as they did in England.65 Boys also performed the parts of female roles in Spanish professional adult companies until the late sixteenth century.66 Furthermore, girls and boys were trained as players in early seventeenth-century France and in 1599, the same year as the re-establishment of the children’s companies in England, Valleran le Conte established a company of children in Paris, whom he apprenticed so that they might ‘learn the science of comedy’.67 This company is perhaps the only other theatrical context directly comparable to the English children’s companies.

Introduction

15

This international context indicates the significance of the child as a category of player throughout early modern performance cultures, but it also illuminates an exploration of the distinct identities of the early modern English children’s playing companies and their members. Indeed, this book explores a dual understanding of the earlyseventeenth-century London’s children’s playing companies as both paradigmatic of early modern children’s performance culture and as producing the category of child player in unique ways. It builds on Roslyn Knutson’s persuasive argument in Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (2001) that there is a network of connections between children and adult companies and that they worked together within the larger market of playing.68 This contradicts traditional scholarship that placed the children’s companies at the centre of a war of the theatres and interpreted the relationships between the early modern playing companies as competitive ones, with Paul’s rivalling the Queen’s Revels and the children’s companies opposing those of the adults.69 The children’s companies were not anomalies in early modern theatrical culture. They were an integral part of this realm and a crucial part of a wider culture of children’s performance. Yet this book simultaneously attends to the important distinctions between the individual children’s and adult playing companies and takes note from current repertory studies, which propose that ‘each company of note now needs to be studied in detail and with an eye for its own special characteristics’.70 In suggesting that each company has a distinctive identity, the repertory approach implies, by extension, that the players of each individual company have unique identities through their associations with, status within and experiences of performance in the particular company. As I have suggested already, the children’s playing companies are distinct in many aspects. The structuring of the companies under various managers, the legal and commercial processes, the staging methods, the ways in which the various playwrights relate to and write parts for the child players and for individual players in these companies, the writing of the plays for audiences familiar with this specific theatrical context, the responses of these audiences, and the experiences of the players themselves (their theatrical training, their performance styles and their agency as players) contribute to the fashioning of the particular identity of the child player in these institutions. This book examines the ways in

16

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

which these companies produce an institutional and cultural category of the child player. Each chapter explores a different aspect of this institutional identity. Chapters one to three explore the gendered, aged, commercial and national particularities of the children’s companies against a background of the performance practices in London and throughout Europe at the time. The ways in which they construct the entity of the child variously as markers of gender, of value, of class and of nationality will be the primary focus of these chapters. In spite of the changing players, playwrights, practices and cultural contexts of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels, the playing companies assert a sense of continuity, an unchanging sense of the communal identities of the groups and a fixed category of the child. The opening chapters, therefore, explore the ways in which the period of childhood is extended within this institution. The book then shifts to focus on the impact of these educational, professional and formative institutions on the child’s subjectivity. Chapters 4 and 5 evaluate the impact of being trained as a player, performing and being defined as a child by this institution on the individual’s selfdefinition. This book thus explores the material realities of early modern childhoods. It investigates the ways in which the children who were players with Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels are shaped by their experiences, but also manipulate these experiences and use them as an opportunity to articulate their emerging subjectivities. Through this medium of performance, early modern children have an element of agency not necessarily available to them in other contexts, and we have an opportunity to access and examine the history and experiences of early modern children.

1 The Child as Trope: Performing Age and Gender on the Early Modern Children’s Stage

‘ANTONIO’: I a voice to play a lady! I shall ne’er do it [ . . . ] Ay but when use hath taught me action to hit the right point of a lady’s part I shall grow ignorant, when I must turn young prince again, how but to truss my hose.1 DAUPHINE: Then here is your release, sir [He takes off Epicoene’s peruke] you have married a boy.2 These moments from the ‘Induction’ of John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and the final scene of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene foreground the modes of representation, and specifically those of gender representation, on the early modern stage. The insistence given by ‘Antonio’ that he cannot play a lady is at first surprising, given the common practice of boy actors playing female roles on the English stage. However, his concerns relate to particular aspects of this performance, which draw attention to the actor’s physiological state, his developing sexual maturity and the extent to which he can manipulate his body. Primarily this difficulty is located in the aural representation of femininity, in the control of the voice; but ultimately it relates to the difficulties of switching between and adequately simulating both the female and male part aurally and visually. In contrast, the shift from male to female part is represented as straightforward in Jonson’s Epicoene. The climactic moment in which the silent woman, Epicoene, is revealed to the other characters and to the audience to be a boy playing the part is dramatically achieved through 17

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Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

the removal of a wig in the play’s final scene. Yet both moments have been the subject of numerous critical analyses of the plays and of the practices of representing gender on this stage, particularly the role of the boy player in this theatrical culture.3 The parts of Antonio and Epicoene, however, are performed by a specific category of boy player in early modern London – the child player of the children’s playing companies. The former was performed in 1599 by a player of the Children of Paul’s, the latter ten years later, in 1609 or 1610, by a boy of the Children of the Queen’s Revels. This chapter argues that the child player is integral to both of these theatrical moments. It offers a fresh reading of these plays and, via an exploration of the recurring conventions and theatrical practices of these companies, plots a development in the understanding of the boy player between these two historical junctures. The child is crucial to the original performances in a material sense as the performer, yet is, I propose, also a dynamic image at the crux of the plays’ representations of gender and age. Through an investigation of the ways in which the child functions as an image and as an institutional category in the children’s theatres, I seek to uncover what the children’s repertoires impart about the early modern child.

Performing age John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, possibly the first performance given by the revived version of the Children of Paul’s in 1599, repeatedly draws attention to its child players.4 It opens with an ‘Induction’ that brings the players onstage ‘with parts in their hands, having cloaks cast over their apparel’ (‘Induction’, s.d. [italics original]) before the apparent fiction of the play begins for a discussion of how they will present their allocated roles. The play thus immediately, and selfconsciously, foregrounds the offstage identities of these actors and reflects on the modes of representation utilised on the early modern children’s stage. In response to the urgent questioning of ‘Are ye ready? Are you perfect’ (‘Induction’, l. 2) by the child who is to play the part of Galeazzo, the child who is to play the part of Piero, the Duke of Venice and villain of the play, demonstrates both the capabilities and concerns of these children as players. He confirms that ‘we can say our parts’ (‘Induction’, l. 3), indicating that they have been trained to learn and recite the lines contained in the scrolls in

Performing Age and Gender 19

their hands.5 The use of the word ‘part’, however, also raises other issues attendant on the performance of the various parts, or roles, by the boys. In order to adequately ‘personate’ (‘Induction’, l. 4) these characters, they are required to have skills beyond recitation. Being able to ‘say’ their ‘parts’ refers to a broader verbal performance and relates to characterisation through linguistic patterns, as the boy who will play the character of the flattering courtier, Forobosco, reveals later in the ‘Induction’. This actor claims to improvise his language, or ‘dispose my speech to suit the habit of my part’ (‘Induction’, l. 41). His statement of his ability to flatter and titillate the other characters, and by implication the spectators, with his speech, leads another of the boy actors to exclaim, ‘Thou promisest more than, I hope, any spectator gives faith of performance’ (‘Induction’, ll. 60–1). The latter’s ‘hope’ that they are not expected to provide such a convincing characterisation of these roles hints at an anxiety about the extent to which these players are capable of representing these characters and satisfying the expectations of the audience. Similar concerns underlie the insistence of the boy playing Piero that ‘we can say our parts’. His unease surrounding the abilities of the players of this company to wholly present the roles continues when he states: ‘But we are ignorant in what mould we must cast our actors’ (‘Induction’, l. 4). As with the concerns of the boy playing Antonio, this insists upon the significance of the actor’s physiological state in this performance. The terms ‘mould’ and ‘cast’ imply the shaping and manipulation of the actor’s body. This image of corporeality is extended when another boy player, who is to perform the role of Alberto, offers advice on how this can be achieved: Then thus frame your exterior shape To haughty form of elate majesty, As if you held the palsy-shaking head Of reeling chance under your fortune’s belt In strictest vassalage. Grow big in thought, As swoll’n with glory of successful arms. (‘Induction’, ll. 7–12) ‘Frame’, like ‘mould’ and ‘cast’, potentially refers to the wide range of techniques which may have been used to create the characters of the play. Used commonly in relation to the printing press, these terms

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Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

evoke the image of producing a copy.6 Furthermore, such words are also frequently used specifically in relation to the fashioning of the child’s personality and thus allude to the processes of shaping a character in the mind, while simultaneously hinting at the potential impact that this act of imagination may have had on the children playing these parts. Yet applied to the player’s ‘exterior shape’, as it is in this ‘Induction’, the material implications of the term are brought to the fore. This indicates the creation of a role through the manipulation of the bodies on stage. Tensions and intersections between the physical and bodily manifestation of the parts and the personation of a part via behaviour and action are revealed through the implicit limitations of the bodies of the child players at the centre of this discussion. The references to the actor’s ‘exterior shape’, his ‘form’ and to his size in these lines highlight the small stature of the child and problematise the performance of adult parts by children. The movement in this speech from an injunction to manipulate the body in performance to a manipulation of thought in line 11 wryly exposes the limitations of children’s performance. The physically small boy actor can evidently not grow in body for the performance of the part; he therefore must compensate in thought. The bawdy puns in this image also allude to the sexually underdeveloped body of the boy actor; the sexual innuendo of the term ‘swoll’n’ indicating another type of growing big in which the prepubescent boy is likely to fall short, and highlighting the performance of a specific sexual and masculine identity as a particular issue in this theatre. The speech manifests the disparity, in terms of age, gender and class, between the small child player and the part of the adult and masculine warrior and governor that he is required to perform. He must imagine the pride and successful arms of this character in order to stimulate his representation of the fully grown and sexually developed adult. Size, age and the correlation between child players and adult parts are crucial concerns on the stages of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel in the early years of their revivals. The disparity between the children and youths in their pre- and early teenage years that formed these companies in 1599 and 1600 and the adult parts they were required to perform would have been striking, particularly in the Blackfriars playhouse where some audience members sat on stage thus establishing a visual contrast between the bodies of the adult audience and children players.7 It is this singular

Performing Age and Gender 21

visual presence, physical state and the disparity between the child player and adult role that the ‘Induction’ of Antonio and Mellida foregrounds as both a source of humour for the knowing spectator and as a source of uneasiness for the player. Whether or not the spectators attended to this disparity has led to divided opinion in the critical work on these companies. Earlier scholars contended that the evident youthful identity of these players meant that they offered a parody of adult behaviour and acting styles, but more recently, it has been argued that child players, like the boys on the adult stage, were skilled actors able to perform characters of various ages, genders and social roles without a constant awareness on the part of the spectators that these roles were being performed by children – unless, of course, the play or player selfconsciously highlighted this fact.8 While Marston’s ‘Induction’ is exemplary of such self-consciousness or, to use Michael Shapiro’s term, ‘dual-consciousness’, it is likely that the child player, for the most part, was accepted as a theatrical convention and, in the same way that the performance of female roles on a predominantly all-male stage required a technique of representation that did not depend on the bodily and gendered identity of the player, the performance of adult identity on the all-boy stage was not wholly dependent on the player’s physiology.9 Instead, aged parts, like gendered roles, were performed using various staging properties, including costume, wigs, beards, through descriptions of behavioural traits and through language.10 The manuscript collection of William Percy’s Comoedyes and Pastoralls with their Songs (c. 1600–1) provides some evidence on how age may have been performed in its detailed staging directions and comments on costume, particularly in the theatres of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels as the collection includes a note ‘unto the children of the Revells and Powles’.11 The manuscript states that the characters of Arion and Talus in The Aphrodysial, who are to be disguised as Jupiter and Neptune, should appear bearded (fol. 20). As Will Fisher has persuasively argued, the beard was a crucial and simple means of representing both age and gender on this stage.12 In Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, for example, a play which was performed by the Children of Paul’s and in which the youthful Follywit uses a prosthetic beard to disguise himself as a courtier, the beardless youth is presented as both childish and effeminate when Sir Bounteous mocks Follywit’s youth by calling him ‘Imberbis juvenis

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Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

[beardless youth], his chin has no more prickles than a midwife’s’.13 Beardlessness may thus be evoked or staged to indicate a youthful and less-than-masculine identity. Conversely, the placing of a prosthetic beard on the face of a child player enables the performance of certain aged and masculine roles. However, the directions in Percy’s manuscript also contain a note stating that the characters should appear bearded when performed by actors, but ‘For Powles without’ (fol. 120), suggesting that the Children of Paul’s are different in some way from the other companies and did not use beards. Similar directions are given for Mahomet and his Heaven in which Mahomet is described as ‘without Mustache if for Powles and bare faced’ (fol. 32). While Reavley Gair interprets this as crucial evidence on the ways in which Paul’s staged age by arguing that they did not use beards, Will Fisher challenges this by pointing out numerous examples of the use of prosthetic beards on the children’s stage.14 Furthermore, even within Percy’s manuscript there are several other references to characters appearing bearded without alterations suggested. Beards, it seems, were one way in which age was represented on both the children’s and adult’s stages. Percy’s detailed stage directions also signal the way in which costume and wigs may have been another method used to symbolise age, and indeed class, on the early modern stage. The character of Livio in A Country Tragedye is described as ‘An old servant, in Black velvet, And in long-Thick-Short-White-Graye Hair’(fol. 92). In An Apology for Actors (1612), Thomas Heywood points to the classical theatre tradition of using colours to present character, particularly of dressing old men in white.15 Hence, age may have been presented on this stage through costume, by ‘cross-dressing’ the young actors as old characters through the use of white garments or white wigs – or to use Lucy Munro’s term through a type of ‘age-transvestism’.16 Indeed, in another play written for child players, John Lyly’s Love’s Metamorphosis, performed by an earlier version of the Children of Paul’s in the early 1590s, and then performed by the Children of the Chapel in 1600, and again by Paul’s in 1601, also demonstrates the representation of old age on this stage through a white hairpiece. In act four scene two, Protea’s desire to ‘take suddenly the shape of an old man’ in order to warn her lover, Petulius, against the siren is enacted by her sudden appearance onstage with white hair.17 This visual appearance is emphasised by Petulius’ dismissal of her advice

Performing Age and Gender 23

with the claim that the old man’s ‘silver hairs’ are ‘not so precious as her [the siren’s] golden locks’ (p. 306). A wig is again used to represent old age and gender. The ease with which age may be performed is further indicated by the fact that by the end of this scene Protea removes her disguise, presumably by simply removing the wig, as Petulius exclaims, ‘The old man is vanished, and here for him stands Protea’ (p. 306). This moment, similar to the climactic moment of Epicoene noted at the beginning of this chapter, suggests that both age and gender are easily performed on the children’s stage. As the speech which accompanies Protea’s use of the staging property of the wig indicates, language and imagery are further mediums through which age, like gender, may be represented. George Chapman’s May Day, performed by the Children of the Chapel in c. 1601, similarly evokes stereotypical imagery of old age, in this case winter and lust, to convey the ages of the characters. The play opens with a contrast between the youthful dancers who celebrate May Day, described in terms of youth and summer, and the older Lorenzo, who is described as ‘old father January’.18 The image of January ‘thrust(ing) his fore-head into the depth of Mayes fragrant bosome’ (1.1.7–8), is loaded with sexual implications and presents the older Lorenzo’s desire for the younger Francischina through conventional images of cold, winter and old age. Such imagery is used to represent, and to satirise, the desire of the older men for younger women throughout the play, as Gasparo’s desire for Aemilia is described as rotting ‘the greene yong plant’ (1.1.146). While this linguistic portrayal of old age may have been complemented by other staging devices such as costume and wigs, coloured to reinforce these images of winter, the play’s rhetoric sufficiently imagines and portrays these characters as old. However, while the staging of age is merely a theatrical convention, and is also required on the adult stage in order to depict certain characters as particularly young or old, it gains increased force when practised in the children’s theatres. When Gasparo is further described by the younger Lodovico as ‘an old saplesse trunke, fit to make touchwood of, hollow, and bald like a blasted Oke, on whose top Rauens sit and croke the portents of funerals’ (2.2.17–19), this humorous and degrading representation of old age is satirically charged because it is performed by the youthful players of the Children of the Chapel. Language and staging properties, therefore, create a fictional body in this theatre and the physical body of the player is not necessarily

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Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

significant. This is evident in the advice offered in the ‘Induction’ of Antonio and Mellida to the boy who must perform the role of Piero. The instructions given to him insist on the need to overcome the material limitations of the body by growing in thought or by framing the body. This linguistic act of describing the action of becoming this adult part on stage creates the character and produces an alternative imagined body. However, this moment simultaneously insists upon the presence of the child actor performing these roles through the references to the growing body. It establishes a tension between the material body present on stage and the fictional entity. The imagined growth of the child player into this part gestures towards the boy’s own developing identity from child to adult. It envisages the acceleration of this development and the growth of the child player into his part of adult masculinity, at least for the temporal space of the play. The distinct identity of the child is foregrounded in this speech that insists upon the presence of the child. The boy actor is involved in, as Anthony Dawson suggests, an ‘act of participation’, that incorporates both presence (the actor’s physical presence on stage) and representation (the actor’s creation and representation of character).19 The boy or child is thus a dynamic image on this stage. He provides multiple interpretative possibilities as character and presence. This deliberate metatheatrical device probably presented at the first performance, or at least at one of the early performances, of this newly revived company, therefore seems to function, as Adrian Weiss suggests, as a means of introducing the audience at Paul’s playhouse to the particular identities of this company, its players and to the theatrical practices they will employ.20 The ‘Induction’ of Antonio and Mellida, and indeed the entire play as self-conscious references to the theatrical context continue throughout, thus conceivably aim to introduce the spectators to ways of reading the performing child. The play is, after all, written by Marston specifically for this playing company; it is performed by child players who are explicitly introduced to the audience in this ‘Induction’; and it is performed before spectators who, according to contemporaneous accounts, such as Rosencrantz’s often-cited reference to the ‘little eyases’ who ‘so berattle the common Stages’, soon come to view the children’s playing companies of the early seventeenth century as a novel cultural phenomenon.21 The texts and performances of John Marston’s plays, the majority of which were performed by children’s playing companies,

Performing Age and Gender 25

repeatedly highlight the presence and significance of the actor. In his preface, ‘To the Equal Reader’, of the first printed edition of The Fawn (1606), which had been performed by the Queen’s Revels in c. 1604–5, Marston apologises for the publishing of a piece ‘whose life rests much in the actor’s voice’ and claims, ‘Comedies are writ to be spoken, not read: remember the life of these things consists in action.’22 This conventionally presents the humble persona of the author in an attempt to pre-empt any criticism of the text. Yet Marston’s insistence that the piece is only given ‘life’ through performance, particularly through speech and action, foregrounds the role of the actor in the production of meaning through the aural and visual elements of this theatre. He expresses similar concerns in the 1604 edition of The Malcontent, which was performed by the Children of the Chapel in 1603 stating that ‘only one thing afflicts me, to think that scenes invented merely to be spoken should be enforcively published to be read’.23 The insistence that the plays should be ‘spoken’ renders the actor essential to the transmission of the piece from a written text to the theatrical performance. Jack Drum’s Entertainment, performed by Paul’s in 1600, further allocates the players an active role in the presentation of the play and the production of meaning as it opens with one of the child actors appealing to the audience to pardon both ‘his [the author’s] defects and ours [the actors’]’.24 The boy claims that the author will not allow the players to begin the performance as the play is still ‘Wanting a Prologue, and our selves not perfect’ (sig. A2r). The visual and aural presence of the child player thus acts as a medium to convey the meaning, but in this process this body is also open to interpretation. In foregrounding and insisting upon the presence of the child player in this specific theatrical context, Marston’s plays explore the identity of the child. His drama thus begins to produce a concept of childhood on this stage.

Becoming masculine This concept of childhood is brought to the fore in Antonio and Mellida when questions of the characters’ gendered, sexual and aged identities are at stake. The advice to the child playing Piero that he should ‘Grow big in thought, / As swoll’n with glory of successful arms’ (‘Induction’, ll. 11–12) not only instructs the player on how to perform the part of this adult and governor, but specifically indicates

26

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

the need to perform the sexual and masculine identity of Piero. In act two scene one, childhood is also evoked in the representation of the two pages, Dildo and Cazzo. Presented arguing over food, using infantile linguistic patterns in the statement ‘No capon, no, not a bit, ye smooth bully. Capon’s no meat for Dildo. Milk, milk, ye glibbery urchin, is food for infants’ (2.1.5–6), they are humorously portrayed as children. Cazzo’s use of the term ‘infants’ highlights the status to which they are reduced; they are not represented as young or adolescent boys but as babies by this ridiculous, yet amusing, argument over food and name-calling. This portrayal of extended infancy is, however, juxtaposed with the overtly sexual naming of the two characters. The Italian names Cazzo and Dildo assert a phallic masculinity. Throughout the play these characters satisfy the expectations of these crude, comical names through their language which is loaded with sexual puns and innuendoes. Yet in this scene these soon-to-be sexually aware characters are infantilised through comedy which undermines their subsequent confident and developed masculinity. Consequently the sexually charged and bawdy games of courtship, in which the majority of characters in this play participate, are degraded and exposed as childish. However, the disparity between this image of childish humour and that of aggressive masculinity more specifically destabilises the masculine identity of these characters by drawing attention to the evidently sexually underdeveloped bodies of children. This is increased by the fact that these roles are played by prepubescent boys evidently lacking, like the boy foregrounded in the ‘Induction’, in the developed bodily masculine identity asserted by their names. This bodily inadequacy is highlighted by the subject of the argument. Capon is the meat of the castrated cock and from the late sixteenth century was used as a term for eunuchs and also came to emblematise an inability to manage the body in acts of sexual arousal and performance.25 This image of Cazzo and Dildo, although aesthetically humorous and childish, therefore may be deconstructed to reveal an underlying anxiety relating to the body and bodily lack, and more specifically genital lack.26 The naming of the characters exposes the disparity between their subsequent sexually developed masculine identities and the underdeveloped body of the boy, and particularly of the boy player, and exposes the gap between masculinities that Marston aims to represent and that which is empirically present on the stage.

Performing Age and Gender 27

A number of aged, sexual and gendered identities are present in this complex representation of Dildo and Cazzo as ‘infants’ (in the dramatic image), ‘adolescent boys’ (the players performing the roles) and ‘men’ (the sexually developed characters). The representation of these characters as simultaneously having elements of all three posits a relationship between these states. They are all stages that occur in the development of an adult identity, and, perhaps more significantly, they are stages in the process of achieving the developed and secure masculinity which their names assert. The need to assert a masculine state of being is further demonstrated by Felice’s exclamation later in the play: Fut! Methinks I am as like a man. Troth, I have a good head of hair, a cheek Not as yet waned, a leg, faith, in the full. O I ha’ not a red beard, take not tobacco much, And ‘slid! For other parts of manliness . . . (3.2.67–71) In this attempt to assert his manhood, Felice foregrounds the performing body. He characterises his masculine identity in terms of certain physical features; it is determined by the state of the body, his hair, cheek, leg and beard. As with the players who imagine the creation of their roles in the ‘Induction’, Felice’s speech creates his character as a man on this stage. The assertion of masculinity through the display of these bodily parts, however, is mitigated through his claim that he is ‘as like a man’ as Castilio, to whom he is asserting his manhood. Although Felice, and the boy players performing the parts of Felice and Castilio, may claim to be men and may imitate masculinity, by altering or substituting certain bodily features with make-up and staging properties in the theatre, this only means that they are ‘like’ men. The boy playing Felice thus highlights the similarities between boys and men and the potential to simulate manhood on this stage. He raises the possibility that through performing this part the boy player may become the man, teasing the player and the audience. Yet this simile also foregrounds the difference between the boy and the man that he imitates, but does not become. It thus highlights the singular identity of the boy.27 Felice falters at the description of the crucial ‘other

28

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

parts of manliness’. His unspoken statement may be intended to assert that he does indeed securely possess the ‘other parts’ but the ellipsis casts doubt on this. The sudden interjections of the curses, ‘fut’ and ‘’slid!’, in his speech, in itself a linguistic assertion of adulthood, and the breakdown in his language highlight the importance of this aspect of his self-definition, and function as a desperate insistence on his manliness. The allusion to the developing, but as yet underdeveloped, body beneath the costume and the attempt to compensate through language once again insist upon the presence of the child on stage and on the disparity between the boy and the adult masculinity he tries to represent.28 The desire to fulfil or achieve a specific masculine identity is common to several of the male characters of Antonio and Mellida who attempt to conform to a particular version of manhood defined by Rosaline. Before accepting any of these characters as her servants or lovers, Rosaline insists that they match a range of physiological and behavioural traits, which she details in act one scene one. These include having the correct leg, cheek, chin, forehead, lip and beard and not taking tobacco (1.1.107–12, 1.1.122–8, 1.1.130–41). Throughout the play the male characters expose their inability to fulfil this ideal or to adequately perform this masculine identity. Balurdo’s unfinished exclamations that Rosaline’s acceptance of him as one of her servants ‘would make me as a man should say . . . as a man should say . . .’ (2.1.67–8) and that ‘I think I am as elegant a courtier as . . .’ (3.2.132) satirise his evident inadequacies as both a man and a courtier. Rosaline’s required version of masculinity also incorporates a specific sexual identity. In act five scene two, she criticises the ‘high-stretched, minikin voice’ (5.2.10) of a page. This distinctive quality of the adolescent boy is constructed through her critique as being relative but inferior to a developed masculinity as Rosaline adapts her critique of the page’s voice to apply as a derogatory reference to his manhood, insisting that she would not like her ‘servant’ (5.2.9) to have such a voice as she ‘should fear extremely that he were an eunuch’ (5.2.12–13). Through the association between the boy’s voice and the eunuch, Rosaline implies that the boy, like the eunuch, is an incomplete male. The sexual development of the boy is thus again alluded to as a point of anxiety in the performance of masculine identity and differentiates the boy from the man.29 Yet, although comparable to the eunuch, the boy is different.

Performing Age and Gender 29

His body is not fashioned as that of the incomplete male; he may lack developed genitals, but he is implicated in a process of development. Similarly, in the differentiation of the boy player from the manhood that Felice claims, there is also the possibility of developing and becoming the part. Felice’s speech locates his character and his manliness as subject to change and temporal development. In outlining an ideal version of masculinity he points out that his cheek is ‘not as yet waned’. This suggests that his manliness is determined by this particular bodily state, which is one that will change again in time. Therefore as the play highlights the differences between the boys and the adult parts, it simultaneously indicates the potential development of the boys into these parts by evoking the changing and aging body. It locates identity, and particularly masculine identity, as something that may be developed and achieved through maturity. In Marston’s What You Will, performed by Paul’s in 1601, Laverdure offers a description of the gallant, similar to Felice’s outline of the man, including ‘a straight leg, a plump thigh, a full vein, a round cheek, and when it pleaseth the fertility of my chin to be delivered of a beard’.30 In Marston’s drama written for children the boy players imagine becoming men through an accelerated maturing process. Masculinity is thus defined through a variety of factors, one of which is age or development. As Diane Purkiss has argued, early modern representations of boys imply that masculinity was something that ‘had to be coaxed into formation’.31 Childhood is frequently figured in early modern tracts on age as the period during which masculine identity is developed. In his 1607 tract, The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life, discussed in this book’s introduction, Henry Cuffe details the ways in which man develops from one stage in the life cycle through to the next, through changes in his internal heat and moisture, defining each age as ‘a period and tearme of mans life, wherein his naturall complexion and temperature naturally and of its owne accord is evidently changed’.32 Although this offers a limited interpretation of childhood as pertaining to a stage in the life cycle and a particular biological identity, the model of identity posited by Cuffe and the way in which it interprets and describes the body is particularly interesting. Each stage of physiological development is represented in relation to ‘man-age’, that is, ‘the age in which ‘man is come to the highest degree of perfection’ (p. 119); each, therefore, is envisaged in

30

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

terms of its relation to this ideal state of being, childhood being the period during which this ‘generation and growth is perfected’ (p. 117). The evolution into man-age is presented as a natural process, and as a continuation of the process of development begun in childhood, illustrated clearly by the fact that the last stage of childhood and the first stage of man-age are both named ‘youth’. However, while Cuffe’s tract implies that this development occurs ‘naturally’ as the body develops of its ‘own accord’ (p. 113), other tracts suggest that this bodily development must be controlled and accompanied by development in behaviour so that the identity of the man may be satisfactorily achieved. The Office of Christian Parents (1616) advises that the boy should be kept at home so that he may be ‘traine[d . . . ] up like a gentleman, in honourable exercises and manly recreation’.33 The desired version of masculinity in these tracts is a status which can only be achieved in adulthood; it is achieved through age, the development of the body and the fashioning of suitable behaviour. This is evident in the gendering of childhood in early modern culture. Childhood and youth were often aligned with femininity, referred to in Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentleman (1630), for example, as ‘infant effeminacie, youthful delicacie’ and ‘her’.34 This pervaded the social practices in relation to children. All children, male and female, were dressed in skirts. At the age of seven boys were breeched, and a change from feminine to masculine clothing apparently marked an immediate perceptual transition from a feminine childhood to a masculine adulthood. This change in clothing accompanied the movement of the male child from the female community of mothers and nurses, on whom he was dependent in childhood, to a male community, such as an educational institution.35 Yet while these social practices indicate an instant and definite change in terms of gender at a particular age and constitute an attempt to maintain the differences between the masculine and the feminine and between childhood and adulthood, the bodily signifiers of adult-masculinity develop over a longer period. The growth of a beard, development of the genitals and deepening of the voice occur over time. The changing body of the boy cannot indicate a definitive gender identity; it is always in transition. As Germaine Greer claims, the period of life, now known as adolescence, ‘is not a moment but a process’.36 The boy, therefore, exposes the temporal processes of becoming adult and becoming masculine. Moreover, this cycle is commonly represented in the period as circular,

Performing Age and Gender 31

and old age is often imagined as a second childhood.37 Images of childhood thus signal the unstable nature of manhood through a variety of associations to gender, age, the body and temporality. The figure of the boy is evoked in the early modern theatre to interrogate definitions of masculinity beyond the children’s companies. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Viola’s disguise as the page Caesario is underscored by the interpretations of her apparently male body by the other characters. Orsino claims that ‘they shall yet belie thy happy years / That say thou art a man’ and Malvolio identifies Caesario as located in a state between boyhood and manhood, as ‘Not yet old enough for a man, nor yet young enough for a boy’, suggesting that s/he is somewhere ‘between boy and man’.38 Gender is determined by these characters solely in terms of age in relation to the boy.39 Masculine identity is again imagined in terms of temporality, age and physiology. The complexities of this gendered disguise are only fully exposed through the voice. The Duke insists that the boy Caesario is more like a woman as his ‘shrill and sound’ (1.4.33) voice suits the woman’s part, a reference to the fact that this is the disguised Viola but also a comment on the voice of the young male, both the pageboy she is disguised as and the boy player performing this role. This is extended when Malvolio notes the shrewish voice of this character, which implies, according to Malvolio, that ‘his mother’s milk were scarce out of him’ (1.5.143–4). Similarly, Portia describes her attempt to sound and appear manly when disguised as Balthasar in The Merchant of Venice as ‘speak[ing] between the change of man and boy’.40 The voice exposes the intersections of age and gender in these attempts to simulate masculinity.41 It is the articulation of gender identity through the voice that is at the centre of the concerns of the child player playing the part of Antonio in the ‘Induction’ of Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, cited at the beginning of this chapter. The boy’s insistence that he does not have ‘the voice to play a lady’ results from the demands of this part which is that of an hermaphrodite, two parts in one; my true person being Antonio, son to the Duke of Genoa, though for the love of Mellida, Piero’s daughter, I take this feigned presence of an Amazon, calling myself Florizell and I know not what. (‘Induction’, ll. 65–9)

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Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

He continues to articulate his concerns despite the reassurance offered by the actor playing Alberto that he does not have to perform the voice of a lady, but that of an Amazon, ‘virago-like’ (‘Induction’, l. 70). The player worries that once he has satisfactorily performed the lady’s part he will be ‘ignorant’ on how to ‘turn young prince again’ (‘Induction’, ll. 74–6). It is not the problems related to the performance of the male part or the female part that provoke Antonio’s comments, but the need to switch between them. His concerns relate on one level to the demands of the theatre: remembering to change his voice, the ability to alter his voice at will, which, as Bloom suggests, the adolescent boy whose voice is in the process of cracking may lack, and the time to change and re-fit his costume.42 However, this desperate insistence that he cannot adequately play a range of gendered roles, that of Antonio, the lady and/or the virago, and easily switch between them, perhaps also relates to the gendered identity of the boy player. The strong denial is perhaps indicative of an underlying anxiety, not about the boy’s capacity to perform these roles but a fear that his own identity is indeterminable in terms of gender and sex. His insistence that he cannot play a lady may be a slightly desperate insistence on his masculinity. The male child, such as the boy playing Piero or Felice, who is in the process of developing an adult masculinity, is already anxious about his capability to perform the adult male on this stage. Yet performing the part of a man affirms his potential adult masculinity. The demands made on the boy player who will take the role of Antonio, however, suggest that even having achieved adult masculinity the boy’s gender may continue to shift and change. The image of the child exposes a concept of identity, and specifically of masculine identity, as unstable and subject to change. Manhood is also represented as a developing and vulnerable state in the children’s performance of George Chapman’s May Day. When Aurelio throws himself to the ground in despair at his lover’s rejection, the act of falling prostrate is on one level represented as an intense, emotionally charged act through the accompanying words, ‘O stay and heare me speake or see me dye’ (1.1.170). Yet in bemoaning the breakdown in this scholar, who ‘likely in time [would] make a proper man’ (1.1174), Lodovico defines manliness as something that might have been acquired through time and education and critiques Aurelio’s decision to not take a ‘manly course’

Performing Age and Gender 33

(1.1.94), conveyed by the theatrical spectacle of the screaming child, whom Lodovico threatens to beat (1.1.184) and to ‘fetch thy father to thee’ (1.1.187). In calling him an ‘urchin’ (1.1.195), Lodovico degrades Aurelio further in terms of class, and he proceeds to call him a drunk and ‘loathsome creature’ (1.1.171) and a dog (1.1.223). The degradation from adult to child, from person to beast, and from gentleman to urchin are apparently disparate terms but are made similar through Lodovico’s construction of Aurelio’s identity in terms of an inadequate masculinity. Furthermore, the reduction of this character to an animal, with which the child is commonly aligned in early modern culture, deconstructs the binary models between adult and child and between human and animal.43 Although the child is represented as different from the adult, it is always part of the adult, and the reduction to both child and beast degrades Aurelio by exposing identity as a process of development from which these elements cannot be erased. The image of the child raises the possibility that even when adult masculinity has been achieved the male has the potential to return to this less than masculine state.

Conventions and plots of the children’s repertoires This representation of the boy’s gendered identity is a recurrent feature of the children’s plays and is particularly significant given the distinct theatrical practices of these companies. On the stage of the adult companies, in which the boy actors played female roles in their youth and then progressed to play male adult roles as adults, the distinction of gender according to age and physical identity would have been emphasised in the striking contrast between the boy players / women characters and the adult players / male characters.44 This distinction did not occur on the children’s stage. As Sukanya Senapti points out, this is an all-boy stage and the boy player may be called upon to act any part, male or female, throughout his career.45 This may have functioned as a source of humour, or even anxiety, as indicated by the self-conscious references to the players’ concerns over their ability to perform either the parts of men or the parts of women in Antonio and Mellida. Such moments incorporate multiple images of the child. It manipulates an awareness of the child’s transitional gendered state in early modern culture and also exploits the practices of the institution of the children’s theatre in which the child is equally

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Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

suited (or unsuited) to the performance of a range of aged, gendered and sexual identities. The plays written for these companies exploit this identity of the child player by incorporating complex layers of cross-gender disguise. Although cross-dressing and disguise were common themes on the Renaissance stage, this most often took the form of female characters disguising themselves as boys, and the disguise was normally known by the audience.46 In the plays performed by the children’s companies, this was often replaced or accompanied by the disguise of a male character as a female, such as Antonio’s disguise as an Amazon in Antonio and Mellida, and the plot of Epicoene which revolves around the disguise of Dauphine’s boy as the silent woman.47 George Chapman’s May Day offers multiple and complex examples of this cross-dressing motif. The male Lucretio is disguised as the female Lucretia, and Theagine, his betrothed, as the pageboy, Lionell; and neither of these disguises is revealed to the audience until the play is reaching a close. Theagine’s disguise is further complicated by the fact that when disguised as the pageboy she participates in Quintiliano’s theatricals as a boy player suited to a female role. The boy playing this part, therefore, plays a female who acts as a male who then acts another female role. The player is involved in multiple layers of gender impersonation and the audience are only made aware of these layers in the final act of the play. This complex and layered disguise forms part of this play’s wider parody of disguise on the early modern stage. These include Angelo’s insistence that Lorenzo must not disguise himself as a Friar as ‘that disguise is worne thread bare upon every stage’ (2.4.146–7) and his advice to disguise his face, in this case with the black soot of a chimney sweep, claiming, ‘if I see your face I am able to say that this is signior Lorenzo’ (2.4.155–6). This humorous comment on the adequacy of early modern staging techniques at disguising characters parodies the characters’ and spectators’ abilities to recognise a disguise. This parody is taken further when Quintiliano comments on his wife’s disguise as a boy as ‘a wench in man’s attire’ (4.5.106–7), but fails to recognise that it is his wife. May Day thus challenges the spectator to uncover and recognise the cross-gender disguise of Lucretio and Theagine which is at the centre of its subplot. Yet while these multiple layers of cross-dressing and disguise parody a common theatrical motif, the specific gendered

Performing Age and Gender 35

dimension to this disguise and the varying degrees of audience awareness exploit the distinct identities of the players of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels. In one sense these layers of gender disguise and the fact that this exists in the form of male cross-dressing as well as female cross-dressing may be merely a practical matter. The availability of young boys to perform both male and female roles makes possible the option of using boys to play male characters dressed as females; whereas in the adult companies the small number of boys available may have been needed to perform the female roles. However, this plot convention also reveals the extent to which gender was interchangeable and indeterminate on this stage. The boy player, aligned with the feminine and in the process of becoming masculine, could in fact play any part. While this thematic motif draws on the presence of only young and prepubescent boys on this stage in the early years of the revived children’s playing companies, this is not necessarily true of the plays performed by the companies in the later years of their existence. Actors such as Nathan Field, who is cited on the cast-lists for Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster, performed by the Children of the Chapel in 1600 and 1601 respectively, and is again named on the cast-list of Jonson’s Epicoene, performed in 1609/10, are evidence that at least some of the players had remained part of this company over this ten-year period.48 Field, who was aged approximately 22 by the time of the performance of Epicoene, challenges a concept of this company as one of children in terms of his age. The fact that this latter company adopted the structure of apprenticeship in c. 1606, when Abel Cooke was apprenticed as a player, rather than the original structure of impressing and maintaining the boys as children under the authority of master, raises further questions about the definition of this company as a children’s playing company.49 This apprentice structure aligns the Queen’s Revels with the adult playing companies – a similarity which is further implied by the fact that this company successfully merged with the adult playing company the Lady Elizabeth’s Men in 1613. Yet while the adult companies consisted of boys who were apprenticed to adult players and both masters/sharers and apprentices appeared on stage, the Queen’s Revels largely consisted of boys apprenticed to managers and sharers who were not players, and Nathan Field, for example, a leading player and playwright for the

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Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

children’s company, did not become a sharer or master in the company until it merged with the Lady Elizabeth’s men. Therefore, although the players of the Children of the Queen’s Revels may not have been children in terms of their age in the latter years of this company’s existence, they remained equal in terms of their social status, which Orgel claims was another crucial factor in the gendering of the child in this institution.50 The child as a trope for gender mutability and indeterminacy, therefore, continued to function on the stage of the children’s playing companies even when these players were no longer necessarily all young boys. The recurrence of the motif of the cross-dressed male across the repertoires of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels between 1599 and 1613, in plays such as Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho (1604), Marston’s What You Will (1601) and Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (c. 1604–6) in the repertoire of Paul’s; and Day’s Law Tricks (c. 1604) and The Isle of Gulls (1606) and Field’s Amends for Ladies (c. 1611) in the repertoire of the Queen’s Revels, illustrates the extent to which the child continued to function as a pervasive image in the institutions of the children’s playing companies. Day’s Law Tricks was also performed by the third children’s company of this period, the Children of the King’s Revels, in 1607. Established in this year in an apparent effort to capitalise on the successful phenomenon of the child player and structured in a manner similar to the adult companies, the King’s Revels differed substantially from the other two children’s companies. Yet it similarly exploits the concept of the gender established by the child player in the re-performance of this Queen’s Revels play. It also contained Robert Armin’s The Two Maids of Moreclack in its repertoire, another play which uses this cross-gender motif. The early performances by the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel, such as Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and Chapman’s May Day, therefore, exploit the presence of the young male body on stage to produce a concept of childhood. Through foregrounding the players’ identities as children, in terms of their age, physiology, gender and sexuality, such performances insist upon this presence and forge ways in which these bodies may be read by a knowing spectator. The particular identity of the child player gains a significance in the institutions of the children’s playing companies and may be invoked in the plays performed by any of the companies defined as ‘children’ between 1599 and 1613.

Performing Age and Gender 37

The child as trope This theatrical motif and unique status of the child player is crucial to the original performance of Jonson’s Epicoene by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in late 1609 or early 1610. In a manner similar to, but more memorable than, Chapman’s May Day, Epicoene manipulates and exploits the knowledge of the spectators through its plot, which revolves around, yet hides, the disguise of Dauphine’s boy, Epicoene, as a female. More importantly, the play repeatedly examines the identity of the boy player. It opens with the image of Clerimont’s boy describing his experience of being cross-dressed by the leading lady of the Collegiates. According to the boy, the lady ‘puts a peruke o’ my head and asks me an’ I will wear her gown’ (1.1.14–15). This moment self-consciously refers both to the acting of female roles on the early modern stage by boy players and to the representation of femininity in the play, which offers a satirical description of femininity constructed via ‘art’ and ‘good-dressing’ using make-up, wigs and clothing (1.1.99–121) and through the purchasing of teeth, eyebrows and hair in various parts of London (4.2.83–6).51 Parallel to the representation of ideal adult masculinity as the perfection of a range of bodily features in Antonio and Mellida, Epicoene sardonically imagines the woman’s manipulation of ‘good ears’, ‘good legs’ and a ‘good hand’ (1.1.103–5). Although, in contrast to Marston’s play, the performance of a feminine identity is the deliberate subject of mockery by the male characters as a means of critiquing women, it shares a common focal point with the earlier play: both interrogate the gendering of the boy. The boy is further aligned with the feminine in Epicoene and is revealed to embody a less than masculine identity, as the page recognises that he is ‘the welcom’st thing under a man’ (1.1.9) in the Collegiate’s room. This gendered state is confirmed by his dressing in feminine clothing, an act which forces him to imaginatively return to the state of the unbreeched child. In Jonson’s play the boy is thus immediately invoked to signify gender identity in flux. As mentioned at the opening of this chapter, the play ends with a similar moment. The revelation of Epicoene in the final scene dramatically presents a metamorphosis of gender. This metatheatrical moment is the climax of the representation of this character’s repeatedly changing identity. Through the course of the play Epicoene is

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transformed from an ideal version of femininity (the silent woman) to a ‘masculine and loud’ Amazon (4.1.8–9), as Morose condemns her as a ‘Penthesilea’ (3.4.51) when she begins to ‘speak out’ (3.4.51) following their marriage, to a boy player. The character of Epicoene thus exists as a variety of gendered and sexual identities. Furthermore, the character and the boy playing this role manifest the ability to move between these states. In contrast to Antonio and Mellida, this is not a point of anxiety and the boy player enacts this variety of gendered roles so convincingly that it dupes the characters and the audience. This representation of the boy actor is situated among a range of characters who appropriate various aged and gendered traits. The satirical representation of women reconstructing their visual appearance by applying make-up, wigs and numerous false body parts not only comments on the ways in which femininity is produced, but on how women attempt to recreate their youthful identities. Clerimont’s comments on Lady Haughty’s ‘autumnal face, her pieced beauty’ (1.1.81) and Truewit’s claim that ‘Women ought to repair the losses time and years have made i’ their features with dressings’ (4.1.31–3) directly link women’s cosmetic applications with desire to disguise the effects of age. The Collegiates, of course, also use other techniques to ‘maintain our youth and beauty’(4.4.54–5) including not having children. Yet while projecting an appearance of youth and femininity through this manipulation of their bodies, the Collegiates are simultaneously represented as being ‘most masculine or rather hermaphroditical’ (1.1.76–7) in their actions. Living independently of their husbands and ‘cry[ing] down or up what they like or dislike’ (1.1.75), they are represented as threatening, monstrous and prodigious creatures by the men in the play because of their independence and outspokenness. While the imagery of youth, the body and the voice intersect to produce these comic female characters that combine elements of both sexes in ways that threaten male authority, this authority is most effectively undermined by the ways in which these traits are explored in relation to the male characters. Although the women wish to retain youth, it is imagined as a vulnerable state for men. Tom Otter and Morose are both shamed by being forced to return to the status of dependents. Mistress Otter repeatedly reminds her husband that he is financially dependent on her, at one point

Performing Age and Gender 39

reprimanding him with ‘Go to, behave yourself distinctly, and with good morality, or I protest, I’ll take away your exhibition’ (3.1.52–4) and relegating him to the status of a chastised child. Morose is also reduced to a status of economic dependency in the play’s final scene when he gives Dauphine his whole estate and claims ‘I will become thy ward’ (5.4.161). Morose’s reversal from the position of independent and adult patriarch of the play to dependent ward demonstrates the precarious nature of adulthood and the potential to re-become the child at any moment. In act one scene one, Clerimont also indicates this potential as he represents old age as ‘grey heads and weak hams, moist eyes and shrunk members’ (1.1.41–2). In terms of physical features, old age is aligned with youth in this representation. In contrast to the proper legs and developed members required for the ideal version of masculinity, becoming physically old is similar to being the child who has not yet developed these attributes. Epicoene thus presents childhood as constantly threatening an ideal adult masculine identity. Morose’s return to childhood is, of course, the climax of the constant emasculation of this character through the play. In a play which ironically sets up silence as the ideal trait of femininity, the masculinity of Morose is immediately undermined by his hatred for noise and his refusal to speak. He instead creates a system of silent signs. This refusal to assert and control his own voice is amplified by his inability to control the voice of his wife. He is ultimately emasculated in his attempt to annul his marriage by claiming impotence. Once again the child is crucial to this moment. Morose bases this claim on the precedent that ‘a boy or child under years is not fit for marriage because he cannot reddere debitum (render what is required)’ (5.3.175–6) and further insists that ‘I am no man’ (5.4.41), thus becoming another ‘prodigious creature’ (5.4.45) of the play. The image of the boy or child is, therefore, at the centre of Epicoene’s interrogations of masculine and feminine identity and is defined in this moment according to a bodily and sexual state. This image of the boy or child is utilised here to again indicate the transition between gendered and sexual states, as Morose reverses the processes of bodily development and imagines returning to childhood. By evoking the bodily status of the child, Morose points to the player undertaking this role and implicates the boy player in this denial of manhood. However, as I have argued, the boy playing this part is

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not necessarily a child in the physical sense implied here. By 1610 at least some of the players of the Children of the Queen’s Revels were in their early twenties, and William Barksted, possibly the player who performed the role of Morose, was aged 21.52 The performance of this part by the 21-year-old Barksted disrupts any connection that may be made between Morose’s self-representation and the material body on stage. Yet his rhetorical construction of his body as that of a pre-sexual child in this highly self-conscious play points to the child player as an external point of reference for his identity and his claim. But this body does not provide proof. Interestingly, although the ladies offer to search his body for proof (5.4.51–2), this is denied, thus, the body beneath is imagined to provide proof but is not shown.53 The exposure of Epicoene’s identity similarly insists upon the embodiment of this role by the boy player. The removal of a wig again points to the body as a means of establishing the true identity of Epicoene. But only the wig is removed; the body is not fully exposed. The fact that this character is a boy in disguise is only determined by Dauphine’s accompanying statement of ‘you have married a boy’ (5.4.189). The concept of the body as truth, as the determining factor of identity, and particularly gendered identity, is gestured towards but a material body is never revealed. Therefore, while the boy player, both as the character who acts as Epicoene and as the player physically present on the stage is central to this moment, he is a rhetorical and theatrical construct. Whether or not the parts of Morose and Epicoene are played by young boys is not important. In this scene, Morose denies his masculinity and Epicoene throws off the disguise as a lady through claims that they are in fact boys and by emphasising the presence of the boy player. But the play does not depend on the presence of the child player on this stage, at least not in the physical sense. Instead it draws on the discursive presence of the child and the image of the ‘boy’ established by earlier performances of the children’s companies. On one hand this moment potentially functions to undermine the theatrical medium. In contrast to Marston’s emphasis on the importance of theatrical action above the literary text, Jonson favoured the literary qualities of his dramatic writing over the modes of staging, famously summed up in his ‘Expostulacion with Inigo Jones’ (1631).54 The different representations of the player onstage may therefore be explained by the two playwrights’ distinct approaches to theatre.

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However, even if this is the case, the ‘boy’ functions as a significant dramatic image in this theatre.

The institutional category of child The category of the boy, taking into account the physical identity of the male child, therefore, gains significance within this institution and no longer relies on the actual bodily identity of the boy player. Whether or not the child is a material presence on this stage, it continues to function as a dynamic image and a discursive presence in this theatre. This image depends upon the distinct concept of the child player and a theatrical trope of childhood established by the companies’ earlier performances. It is possible, therefore, that the revival of Chapman’s May Day in c. 1610 by the Queen’s Revels similarly drew on the memory of the earlier performances of this play in c. 1601 by this company, and that the dramatic imagery of youth and childishness retained their associations with the presence of the child player. Despite the altered composition of the children’s companies, they retain their nominal status as such. The players, therefore, retain their identities as ‘children’ or ‘boys’ within this context. The category of the ‘boy’ thus becomes an institutional identity rather than a physical one and the ‘boy’ or the ‘child’ becomes an identifiable and fixed category in the theatrical ethos of the children’s companies. This trope of childhood as a signifier of process and metamorphosis is paradoxically unchanging in this theatre. It is, to a certain extent, a space onto which the adult male playwrights project and explore their own vulnerable masculinities, and indeed this is what Gina Bloom suggests in her analysis of the representation of masculinity on the children’s stage.55 This is a common conclusion of analyses of the representation of children in literature, which claim that childhood is simply an adult fantasy.56 However, I propose that this trope of childhood reveals something about early modern childhood identity. This is not to return to an argument that there is an essential or real child to be recovered. Childhood is constructed; it is a discourse of identity. However, the boy player is a crucial and arresting medium for a consideration of this discourse. Through an interrogation of masculinity and age, the plays of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels constantly return to the child. By drawing attention to the specific experiences of the boys, they produce the identities of

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these players as children. Although articulated through male writers in their adulthood, this concept of childhood has tangible links with the child player. Therefore, while this trope explores issues of adult identity and the insecurities of being masculine, it equally represents the experiences of becoming masculine. It attends to the physical, social and cultural implications of what it means to be a child in the early modern period.

2 Evaluating Childhood: The Theatrical Trade in Children

Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players – as it is like most will, if their means are not better – their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession?1 In this well-known comment on the Children of the Queen’s Revels in c. 1606, Hamlet questions how the company will survive as it develops.2 Locating its appeal in its youthful players and their singing voices, as well as in the fashioning of their acting style in opposition to that of the adult or public playing companies, Hamlet implies that as the boys get older they will lose their merit. They will soon, he suggests, be unable to function as a playing troupe and will no longer be viable within the theatrical scene of early seventeenthcentury London. This is perceived to be a result of their growing older, and is possibly prompted by the fact that in 1606 many of the boys of the Queen’s Revels were already in their late teens.3 Juxtaposed with Hamlet’s concerns that the boy of the travelling playing troupe has diminished in value because his voice has ‘cracked within the ring’ (2.2.411), punning on the no-longer-current coin and the development of the teenage boy’s voice, the theatrical value of a boy player is situated primarily in his voice, whether as a chorister or as a player suited to performing female roles.4 Yet Hamlet’s prediction of the demise of the child players is more significantly located in the loss of their distinctive identity through their 43

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development away from their roles as choristers and as an acting company different from that of the common adult players. The child player is successful within the theatrical marketplace, this moment implies, because of his distinctiveness and the novelty of his company, or, as Rosencrantz terms them, the ‘late innovation’ (2.2.328). The Children of the Queen’s Revels, however, continued to perform until 1613, when they merged with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men. This company constantly evolved within the early seventeenthcentury theatrical marketplace. While young boys were impressed to be players in the company’s early years, the company began apprenticing boys to the various company managers following the shift from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean reign. This chapter traces the impact of the children’s playing companies’ varying practices of recruiting, marketing and maintaining players on the image produced of the child player by these companies and their plays. This investigation is positioned within critical approaches to the early modern theatre as a market and indicates the ways in which existing models might be reconsidered in light of the children’s practices.5 In particular, it draws on Roslyn Knutson’s proposed model of the early modern playing companies as business and commercial entities and her historicisation of the related terms and concepts, such as advertising, recruitment and marketing strategies, in order to examine the way in which the children’s companies ‘advertise’ and ‘sell’ their goods, including the boy players.6 The player is constructed variously as an eroticised commodity and skilled performer in legal documents and in representations of child-trading in plays such as Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term and Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle and he is marketed in diverse ways in terms of his youthful and inferior status and his talents as a player in the performative and commercial space. This chapter proposes that the ways in which the child players were valued by their managers and audiences altered as the practices of the playing companies evolved. It thus charts a development in the understanding of this figure and offers alternative suggestions for its dissolution. However, like Chapter 1, it simultaneously contends that there is a static definition of what it means to be a child in the context of the London theatres. Despite the changing legal, economic and social status of the players of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels, the players are ultimately marketed and

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valued as a company of children, which depends on a fixed institutional definition of childhood.

The child as commodity In 1601, Henry Clifton of Tostress, Norfolk, lodged a complaint against the managers of the Children of the Chapel. Their crime, according to Clifton, was ‘violentlie & unlawfully’ taking up his son, Thomas, as he walked home from school.7 As master of the chorister company of the same name, Nathaniel Giles was authorised by the Queen to ‘take such children as he or his said deputy should think meet’ for singing ‘in cathedral, collegiate, parishes and churches or chapels’.8 Yet Clifton objects on the grounds that his son was not taken to serve as a chorister, but was instead impressed so that Giles along with Henry Evans and James Robinson ‘might the better furnishe theire said playes and interludes with children whom they thought moste fittest to acte’ at the Blackfriars playhouse.9 This method, Clifton claims, was used to impress a number of other schoolboys and apprentices as players, thus ‘abusing the authority and truste’ of the Queen.10 This legal document from the Court of the Star Chamber is a crucial text in the study of the children’s playing companies of early seventeenth-century London. It not only provides factual details about the managers and actors of the Children of the Chapel and its material practices; it also indicates the gradual evolution of the Children of the Chapel away from the religious and courtly institution of the Chapel Royal towards the increasingly commercialised institution of playing and, utilising discourses of economics, class and property, it locates the child player within this process.11 Yet the child is not the focus of this document. In spite of the fact that Thomas was only held for ‘the space of about a day & a night until such tyme [ . . . ] he was sett at lyberty and freed from the same’, Henry Clifton demands punishment of the perpetrators a year later.12 This is a complaint about the affront to the father rather than the maltreatment of the child. Despite the description of the violent treatment of Thomas, who is forcibly hauled to the playhouse and threatened with whipping once there, Clifton is primarily concerned with how the loss of his son affects him and his name. Like other complaints against the unlawful taking of children, it is the impact on the guardians rather than the children themselves that is the key issue. Cases over wards,

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for example, such as The Case of Edward Williams (1698), demonstrate an overwhelming concern for the guardian’s economic loss.13 There was a flourishing illegal traffic in children in the seventeenth century, indicated by publications such as An Ordinance of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, for the Apprehending and Bringing to Condigne Punishment, All Such Lewd Persons as Shall Steale, Sell, Buy, Inveigle, Purloyne, Convey, or Receive Any Little Children (1645), which demonstrates a desire to control this trade but does not mention the welfare or fates of the stolen children at any point.14 Children were, of course, also exchanged or traded legally in a variety of contexts in early modern culture, ranging from the hiring out of children for service to the fostering of children among aristocratic families.15 Charles Gibbon’s 1591 manual for parents, Work Worth the Reading, even advocates the sale of children if it is an economic necessity, reminding his readers that in ‘the olde law, you shall finde that Parents might sell their Children to supplie their necessity’.16 Clifton’s concern is that his child was taken unlawfully and against his will. The children’s companies are exploiting the authorised exchange of children between parents and the sovereign as choristers, but in this instance this act has no benefit, either economic or in kind, to Clifton. In fact, it results in economic loss. The strong materialist connotations of Clifton’s language, as he refers to his child being taken to ‘furnish’ the choral or theatrical enterprise, reduce the child to the status of a material object. Thomas is imagined as a property, that is, a material artefact and a possession.17 The dispute over Thomas Clifton is in fact a debate over the theft of a property, and the child functions only as a signifier of the identity, gain and rights of his owner, whether this is the parent or the playhouse manager. It is, therefore, not only the loss of his son and heir that concerns Clifton, but the class and economic context of this loss. He further claims ‘that it was not fitt that a gentleman of his sorte should have his sonne & heire (and that his only sonne) to be so basely used’.18 The alleged actions of the playhouse managers threaten social hierarchies and Clifton’s own status as a ‘gentleman’ by the degrading of his son to this ‘base trade’.19 This representation of this child thus intersects with issues of class and legitimacy. While the taking of the child to furnish the chapel is authorised by royal command, warranted by law, and is expected in a culture in which the placing out of one’s child for training or service was common practice, in seizing children

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to furnish the stage, this class-inflected discourse of gift exchange between the gentleman and the sovereign is corrupted by the taking of Clifton’s possession, his son, for the ‘unlawful gain and benefit’ and ‘mercenary gayne and pryvat commodity’ of the playhouse managers.20 Thomas Clifton is not taken to serve the court, but ‘by force and violence’ is ‘detayne[d] and compel[ed] to exercise the base trade of a mercenary enterlude player to his utter losse of tyme ruine & disparagement’.21 Playing places a gentleman’s son ‘amongst a companie of lewd and dissolute mercenary players’.22 In this document Thomas Clifton, and the other named child players, are allocated a distinct role in terms of this exchange between fathers, or masters or teachers in the cases of the other boys, and playhouse managers. Despite the various backgrounds of the players, as apprentices, scholars and sons of gentlemen, their role within this economic and legal process reduces them to the status of commodities and designates them particular class and sexual identities. The rhetorical strategies utilised in Clifton’s legal document thus offer a particular insight into what the child signifies in this legal and class-inflected context. The plays performed by the children’s companies often appropriate similar discursive techniques and offer comparable understandings of the child, particularly in terms of what the child signifies for the companies. Captain Tucca’s act of bargaining with the player, Histrio, over the value of his pages as players in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, performed by the Children of the Chapel in the same year as Clifton’s legal complaint, represents the boys as saleable and marketable commodities within an explicit economic discourse. Asking ‘What wilt thou give me a week for my brace of beagles here, my little point trussers? You shall ha’ them act among ye’, this disbanded soldier imagines his servants or ‘point trussers’ – reduced further in this instance to the status of dogs, or ‘beagles’ – to be objects from which he can make a weekly income.23 This incident is located within the larger satire of Tucca’s many money-making schemes and forms part of the play’s humorous but debasing representation of playing as commerce. Playing is portrayed primarily as an economic pursuit, as the various characters associated with it, including Tucca and Histrio, are presented in a number of situations of hiring and selling, gaining riches, or simply making money for survival. In this instance, the boy is the means through which money can be made. As in the Clifton suit, the boy player in Poetaster is represented as a

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valuable property and the hiring out or sale of the boy constructs him as having a particular economic value for his master. The value of the boys to Tucca as saleable commodities, however, is dependent on their value to the playing company. The pages are sold to the player and represented as valuable in terms of their acting abilities in an audition-like moment, as Tucca demands that they display their skills and perform a variety of roles before Histrio. Tucca emphasises his pages’ abilities to play the part of a lady in a way that will make the spectator ‘eternally enamoured of him’ (3.4.228–9) and by claiming that in seeing them perform the part of a ghost ‘thou shall see that shall ravish thee’ (3.4.198). The boys’ value as players is therefore located specifically in their abilities to evoke an erotic response from the audience. This is constructed as a potential trade in sex when Tucca suddenly refuses to hire the boys to the player, exclaiming, ‘No you mangonizing slave, I will not part from ‘em; you’ll sell ‘em for ingles, you’ (3.4.240–1). The description of Histrio as a ‘slave’ again situates the player within a particular social stratum. Furthermore, the adjective ‘mangonizing’ refers to the practice of trafficking in slaves, in this case pageboys, and simultaneously implies pimping, as Tucca fears that they will be sold as ‘ingles’. The intersection of the trade in slaves and the trade in sex allocates the boys an identity which synthesises the sexual and the economic. Tucca’s fear of the further commodification and sale of the boys as slaves and prostitutes indicates the production of the child players’ identities through the practices of the playing company, which, he implies, are akin to those of slavery and prostitution. The identity of the boy player is developed further in these terms in act four scene five, as the play self-consciously presents the child player in performance when one of Tucca’s page-boys acts the part of Ganymede. This performance is described by Tucca: Sirrah, boy – catamite! Look you play Ganymede well now, you slave [ . . . ] you should have rubbed your face with whites of eggs, you rascal, till your brows had shone like our sooty brother’s here, as sleek as a horn book, or ha’ steeped your lips in wine, till you made ‘em so plump that Juno might have been jealous of ‘em. Punk, kiss me, punk. (4.5.83–9)

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This exotic description of the boy, loaded with sexual innuendos, again places this representation of the boy player in the context of a trade in slaves, in this case as exotic and sexually alluring commodities.24 Tucca imagines the boy as a distinct racial entity as he describes how the boy’s face might have ‘shone like our sooty brother’s here’ if he had enhanced his appearance using egg whites. Through this comparison to the ‘sooty brother’, referring to Albius’ disguise as Vulcan, whose face is blackened, and through the disclosure of the potential for enhancing the player’s whiteness, the racial identity of the boy is called into question.25 Blackness is perhaps evoked, as Kim Hall suggests, ‘to create a value for whiteness’ by making it visible.26 Furthermore, whiteness is a colour associated with children, perhaps signifying purity as it frequently did with women.27 In A Yorkshire Tragedy, for example, the young boy protests against his father’s threats by claiming ‘O, what will you do father? I am your white boy.’28 Perhaps the whiteness of the boy player in Poetaster is thus stressed to emphasise his status as a child. However, if it stresses childhood purity, the description that Tucca gives of the player is simultaneously an eroticised one. Whatever the particular effects of stressing the boy’s white face, the objectification through the list of a series of physical bodily parts reduces him to a material staging property – albeit a valuable one. He ‘furnishes’ the stage, as the Clifton suit suggests, for the gain of the playing company.29 The 1608 articles of agreement for the Children of the King’s Revels envisage the child players along similar lines when outlining the provisions to ensure that the children remain the property of the company. Although the King’s Revels boys are apprenticed to Martin Slater, they are perceived to be the property of the whole company, as they may only be discharged with ‘the special consent and full agreement of the residue of his fellow-sharers’.30 This document proceeds by describing the company’s other properties, including costumes, staging properties and play-texts. Although the players are mentioned first and thus prioritised slightly, the regulations governing their status within the company are similar to those governing these other material theatrical properties, and the boy player is perceived, to a certain extent, to be equivalent to them.31 In Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, performed by the Children of the Revels in c. 1607, the boy player is also represented in relation to the staging properties of the company.

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The Citizen’s claims that ‘the players would give all the shoes in their shop’ for the apprentice-player, Rafe, represent him as the possession of the company and as analogous to the other material possessions and determine his value accordingly.32 Yet here the player is also valued above these other properties on an economic level, as he is worth all of the company’s shoes. However, as Poetaster indicates, this value of the child player ultimately depends upon the spectator’s desire to view him on stage, and their willingness to pay for this pleasure. Through the focus on the material body, the intense description of the boy player’s physical attributes and the ways in which these may be further enhanced, Tucca’s speech also positions the boy in performance as an object to be gazed upon, and, implicitly, admired. The boy player in performance is, therefore, implicitly located within the crucial trade within this commercial institution – that between playing company and the paying spectator. As Douglas Bruster suggests, the commerce of theatre is itself predicated upon ‘its construction of spectacle as commodity’.33 The evocation of the boy player’s body as an exoticised and eroticised object in act four scene five perhaps serves to increase his value by positioning him as an unusual and desirable staging property, which were often displayed on the early modern stage, as Jonathan Gil Harris argues, ‘for the express purpose of commercial profit’ through luring audience members and their money to the theatres.34 However, the boy in Poetaster is not this exotic object, nor is he materially displayed as one through the use of make-up. Instead the play rhetorically imagines his potential identity, through this contrast with his ‘sooty brother’ and the possibility of increasing his whiteness. The player’s own whiteness and racial identity is evoked, but his whiteness is not materially intensified on stage, only imagined. Tucca’s description of how the boy should appear projects the master’s desires onto the boy, and invites the spectator to imagine him thus. This implies that the material body of the boy actor is, therefore, not valuable in itself; rather the perception of the boy, and the extent to which a particular conception of the boy’s potential identity might be realised and imagined by the spectator, renders the boy a valuable commodity on this stage. The child becomes merely a fantasy of the adult, of Tucca and of the spectator, and this fantasy is projected onto the material body of the boy actor displayed on stage. In her seminal study of the child in children’s literature, Jacqueline Rose suggests

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that the fictional child is often ‘what the adult desires’.35 The discursive child imagined and conveyed through the perspective of the adult in fiction and, I would argue, also on this stage, to a certain extent, is an adult fantasy or, in the words of Rose, ‘a form of investment by the adult in the child’.36 Rose insists that this is not necessarily a sexual fantasy or the intent to act upon a desire, but that the child is an image through which adults engage with concerns about the self. By extension, therefore, Rose’s argument implies that the child can potentially be whatever the adult wants it to be. In the case of early modern children’s performance, however, the child is often a focal point for erotic desire, and the physical manifestation of the child on stage is not entirely absent from this fantasy. The potential of the boy to be imagined thus is located in his youthful, sexual and inferior status, and the theatres emphasise certain aspects of this in order to construct and present the boy in this fashion. In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, for example, the citizen’s wife remembers the display of a ‘little child that was so fair grown about the members’ (3.275–6) as the prettiest of ‘all the sights that ever were in London since I was married’ (3.273–4). This extraordinary spectacle, which is again not presented on the children’s stage but the memory of which is evoked by the wife among her exclamations of admiration for the children who are present, depends on the abnormality of the sexual development of the child, and the corporeal and sexual identities of the children who perform the adult roles are subsequently foregrounded and imaginatively constructed.37 A more common instance of the emphasis on the child’s alternative gendered, sexual and social potential identities in performance occurs in the imagining of the boy in women’s clothing, and in the frequent implementation of this as a theatrical practice. George Chapman’s May Day, performed by the Children of the Chapel in c. 1601, comically represents the commercial impetus in employing boys, as Quintiliano hires Leonoro’s boy (who is in fact the female Theagine in disguise) as a player because the ‘pretty Ganymede’ is ‘a sweet fac’t child, me thinks he should show well in a woman’s attire’.38 As in Poetaster, the metatheatrical reference to the boy or child player foregrounds the playing context of a company of children. Hence the plays effectively advertise and display the young players as sexual, or as Mary Bly describes them, ‘erotic commodities’. Furthermore, this example specifically locates the boy in a homoerotic discourse.39 In Bruce Smith’s exploration of

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homoerotic desire in Renaissance England, he suggests that that such desire was normally directed towards the socially inferior boy and that relationships between males were often age-graded.40 In the children’s plays, the potential physical attributes of the boy and their status as servants or page boys are equally crucial to the representation of the boy as sexually desirable. Youth and status are central to the erotic representation of the boy, and the intersection of the discourses of age, social status, beauty and homoeroticism, which occurs in Quintiliano’s admiration for the ‘sweet’ physical attributes of the child, recur in the frequent images of childhood and youth throughout the children’s repertoires. In John Marston’s What You Will, performed by the Children of Paul’s in 1601, for example, Simplicius Faber’s admiration for Holofernes Pippo is predicated on an appreciation of his state as a ‘very pretty child’, with a ‘sweet voice’ and ‘sweet face’ as well as on the boy’s social status, as he takes him as his servant.41 The youthful and socially inferior boy, however, is not only represented as the desired object of the adult male, but also of the female.42 In Jonson’s Epicoene, in a moment similar to that in May Day, the cross-dressed boy is invoked as the desired object of the collegiate women.43 In Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the citizen’s wife refers to the boy actors as pretty and sweet and emphasises their status as youths and children, exclaiming ‘didst thou ever see a prettier child’ in act one (1.94) and commenting in act three on the ‘little youth’ and ‘child’ who ‘hath a sweet breath’ (3.303–4). In this play, in which the citizen’s wife and the citizen are members of the audience who repeatedly interrupt the play with comments on the performance and requests for the play to proceed in certain ways, the self-conscious depiction of the spectators explicitly represents both male and female desire for the eroticised child player. In her capacity as both mistress and spectator of the play, the citizen’s wife’s interactions with the boy actors are loaded with sexual innuendoes. In act one, her husband’s punning accusation that ‘if there were a thousand boys, thou wouldst spoil them all with taking their parts’ (1.383–4) implies that she desires a sexual relationship with the boys. Furthermore, in an incident that is potentially either maternal or sexual, the wife offers one of the boys a kiss (3.300–1), simultaneously constructing the boy as a son and a sexual partner. A possible encounter between the wife and the boy player is also implied when

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Rafe offers to replace her lost child, stating, ‘I’ll get you another as good’ (2.348). This invokes another trade in children, by representing them as replaceable and as an item which can be got, while simultaneously hinting at the relationship between Rafe and the wife that would enable this conceiving of children. The potential of the boy, envisaged by Tucca in Poetaster, invites the spectators to see the boy in this way, but locates it explicitly within a homoerotic discourse through the performance of the part of Ganymede, and through Tucca’s reference to his page as a catamite, and as an ingle earlier in the play.44 The boy’s potential as a sexually available entity is possibly further indicated in performance, as Tucca demands a kiss from his ‘punk’, or prostitute (4.5.89). This demand may be made to Chloe, the wife of Albius, who is on the stage at this point and who Tucca refers to as a ‘punk’ earlier in the play (4.3.43–4); but given the sensual description he has just offered of his page it seems probable that this kiss may be demanded of the boy, and may have been acted in the performance by the Children of the Chapel.45 The body of the page is thus put on display to the spectators and the kiss between the two boy players may act as an eroticised and teasing display of the boys’ potential sexual identities.46 The child, who is physically present on this stage, is constructed through the fantasy of the adult; of Tucca, of the implicit spectator, and even of the playing company who imagine, produce and market the child in this way. This trade in the sexual identity of the player of the Children of the Chapel is also implied in the advice to the gallant at the Blackfriars’ playhouse in Thomas Dekker’s 1609 text, The Guls Horne-Booke. Stating that ‘By sitting on the stage, you may (with small cost) purchase the deere acquaintance of the boyes’, this text implies that the boy, or, more specifically, a sexual engagement with the boy, can be bought and renders the display of the boy player on the children’s stage a form of prostitution.47 This is in effect what Poetaster advertises to the spectators in its representation of the trade of boys in the theatrical institution through the discourses of slavery, prostitution and homoeroticism. Tucca’s marketing of the potential of his boy discursively aligns him with slaves and prostitutes and playfully implies the purpose and possibilities of sale in the early modern playhouse. This representation of the youthful, socially inferior and eroticised player and the revelation of his potential as an object of the spectators’

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desires allocate the child player an economic value in this theatre without him necessarily being actually prostituted or enslaved. Of course, the representation of the player as sexually available and the associations between playing and prostitution are not unique to the child player or to this playing company. Prostitution was a common metaphor for theatre in early modern London, especially among its detractors, and the representations of the child player and playing in the Clifton suit and Jonson’s Poetaster draw on such antitheatrical discourse.48 In Stephen Gosson’s Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), playing is represented as prostitution in commercial terms, as the playhouse is constructed as the location of a trade in sex in his comparison between theatres and the royal exchange and his description of playhouses as ‘the very markets of bawdry’.49 Given its anti-theatrical nature, Gosson’s text has clear motivations in condemning the theatre both for its commercial tendencies and its sexual looseness. The representation of players and plays as lascivious and promiscuous is a common feature of such commentaries. Clifton utilises this critique of the theatre as ‘lewd’, dissolute’ and ‘corrupt’ in order to condemn the actions against his son and his social status, and to appeal to the authorities to ensure that the company managers are punished.50 Poetaster, on one level, engages in an extensive critique of the professional theatre via its participation in a similar anti-theatrical discourse. In Jonson’s play, playwrights, as well as players, are described as ingles (1.2.14). In act one scene two, Ovid Senior’s accusations against his son, that he is writing a tragedy for ‘common players’ (1.2.11), are backed up by Lupus, the tribune, who describes theatre as corrupting young gentry (1.2.36) and by Tucca, the theatre impresario himself, who claims that players are ‘licentious [ . . . ] rogues’ (1.2.49). Ovid Junior similarly partakes in the attack on the commerce of theatre through his insistence that he does not ‘traffic in their theatres’ (1.2.61) and his differentiation between writing for the theatre and the nobler act of writing poetry. Theatre is represented largely as a means of making money in Poetaster, and the various characters associated with it are portrayed as being driven by economic necessity. The play, therefore, critiques and satirises its own medium, a common feature of Jonsonian drama.51 Tucca’s representation of his page boys as players builds on this by revealing the intersection of the erotic and commercial in playing; however, this moment also challenges such anti-theatricality. It mocks

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the sale of the boy in the theatre, but it simultaneously functions as a marketing strategy. It sells the boy player physically present on this stage by seducing the audience and asking them to do exactly what the play criticises – to respond erotically to theatre. This depiction of the child in the theatre, therefore, is potentially, to use Laura Levine’s term, ‘anti-anti-theatrical’, as it appropriates common anti-theatrical discourse to market the child player.52

The trade in children The institutional structure of the Children of the Chapel, in conjunction with their drama, thus contributes to the distinct concept and value of the child player of this playing company. In Shakespeare Without Women, Dympna Callaghan suggests that the early modern children’s playing companies partake in a ‘traffic in children’ and their players are ‘made available for sexual titillation in an institutional configuration more akin to prostitution than indenture’.53 During the early years of its revival, this company, structured by the practices of impressment, does in many respects function imaginatively as an institution akin to prostitution and slavery, and the identity of the child player is fashioned within this distinct commercial space of theatre by the company’s material practices, and is presented as such to the spectators in the children’s theatres. However, the case of the children’s playing companies, particularly the Children of the Chapel / Queen’s Revels, is more complex than Callaghan implies. Her analysis applies only to the early years of the company. Roslyn Knutson’s recent study of playing as commerce, in contrast to Callaghan’s, compares the commercial practices of the early modern playing companies to models of indenture and argues that it is institutionally most similar to the guilds.54 Through an analysis of the relationships between actors, theatrical managers and playwrights and of the performance and economic practices of a range of playing companies, Knutson suggests that although the theatre did not officially share the legal status of other trades or have an actual guild alliance, it shared a similar hierarchy and sense of co-operation and developed commercial relations comparable to the guilds that gave the theatre some of its benefits. While Knutson’s conclusions, that both the adults’ and children’s playing companies’ business practices imitated the existing models of indenture and the guild, directly

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counter Callaghan’s argument, I would suggest that the two are not mutually exclusive. This is particularly relevant in the case of the Queen’s Revels, who moved from a model of impressing new players to apprenticing boys to the company’s managers. As Knutson points out, in order for the early modern London playing companies to develop and survive as institutions in the city, it was necessary to imitate and appropriate other legal structures, such as those of the guilds and the process of apprenticing youths to masters. Although it has been long recognised that the adult playing companies exploited the city guild structures, of which their players were members in their alternative roles such as merchants, grocers and haberdashers, the children’s playing companies are anomalies in this process. The Children of Paul’s did not follow this model and instead continued to take up boys as members into the playing and chorister company until they stopped performing in 1606, and the Queen’s Revels did not begin to apprentice boys until after the accession of James I to the English throne, and the consequent conferral of Queen Anna’s patronage on the company and the legal recognition of the company as the Children of the Queen’s Revels. The earliest evidence for this shift to apprenticeship is provided by the 1607 indenture reinstating Abel Cooke, a boy player, as an apprentice to Thomas Kendall, haberdasher and manager of the Children of the Revels. Cooke had been apprenticed to Kendall in November 1606 by his mother, Alice Cooke, but in May 1607 Kendall brought a lawsuit against Cooke’s mother for the forfeiture of the indenture, claiming the boy was truant. An agreement was reached and Cooke was reinstated as an apprentice by this 1607 indenture, ‘to be one of the said children of her majesty’s Revels, and to be practiced and exercised in the said quality of playing [ . . . ] for and during the term of three years’.55 This legal complaint diverges clearly from the earlier suit brought against the playing company by Clifton. In contrast to the legal proceedings led by a parent in 1601 against the theatrical managers for the unlawful impressment of the boy player, this 1607 suit asserts the legal rights of the theatrical manager over the boy who was apprenticed to him by the parent. Although the earlier impressment of boys into the playing company was in fact sanctioned by the sovereign’s commission granted to the master of the choristers, Clifton represents it as illegal by emphasising the misuse and corruption of this commission by the playhouse managers. The shift to apprenticeship formalised

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and significantly altered the trade in children between parents and theatrical managers, and over time, therefore, the trade of children as players itself shifted from the realms of the unauthorised to a desirable trade. The reasons for this substantial change may have been due to the dubious legality of the company’s practices. By late 1602, Nathaniel Giles, who held the commission to impress choristers, was no longer involved in the management of the playing company. Furthermore, the impressment of boys, even into the chorister group, was restricted in the Jacobean period, possibly as a response to Clifton’s complaint, and the 1606 commission to Giles specifies that none of the children ‘shall be used or employed as comedians or stage players’.56 Therefore, in order to continue and to develop as a playing company, the Queen’s Revels needed to establish an alternative method to recruit actors, and they followed the adult playing companies in appropriating the established practices of the guilds of London. However, the boys in the adult companies were apprenticed to managers or other players and were apprenticed for the usual term of seven years as trainees to the official trades of their masters.57 In contrast, the boys of the Queen’s Revels were apprenticed for a period of three years and they were bound in their capacity as players, so that they might be ‘practised and exercised in the said quality of playing’.58 Hence, the boys entered into this short-term apprenticeship specifically to be trained and used as players in the theatrical trade. The boy player of the Children of the Queen’s Revels thus had a distinct identity as an apprentice to the theatrical profession. Therefore, as the structure of the playing company changed, the status of the player of this company also altered significantly. Although both the impressed boy player and the apprenticed boy player were objects of trade between parents, masters, theatrical managers and audiences and were represented and used according to their value within the commercial playhouse, they were perceived differently. In contrast to Henry Clifton’s outrage at the ‘unlawful’ impressment of his son, Alice Cooke binds her son to the playing company, implying that the role of player is much more desirable in the later version of the playing company.59 These polarised attitudes may be attributed to the different class status of the boys and their parents; nevertheless, there is a substantial difference between the status of the player as an apprentice to a profession and the construction of the boy player as

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forced into employment in the Clifton suit and Jonson’s Poetaster. As Camille Slights points out in her analysis of slavery and subjectivity, the significant distinction between being enslaved and being apprenticed was being ‘embedded in a network of protective power’.60 The impressed boy player lacked this network of protection. Although the impressment was enabled by a royal commission, the apparent misuse of this commission by the playhouse managers placed the child actors beyond a regulated system of control. Apprenticeship, however, located the child players of the Children of the Queen’s Revels within a structure akin to the guilds and to other playing companies, and the status of the company as one patronised by the Queen further recommended the company as a legally and royally sanctioned location for the training of the child. This structure, therefore, provided the boy with training as a player and a recognised status. As the structures and practices of the children’s companies changed, the representative strategies used to market the boy player also altered.61 The rhetorical construction of the child as a slave and prostitute, like the practices of the company, was temporal, and as the Queen’s Revels moved from impressing to apprenticing boy players and was integrated into the professional world of early modern London theatre, the nature of the child’s value as a player was modified. Yet, while changes in practices evidently occurred at a particular historical juncture, albeit that remaining evidence makes it difficult to pinpoint this date, the changes in the drama’s representative strategies and the impact on how the child player was discursively shaped by the companies and their literature took place over a longer period and resist chronological categorisation. Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term, performed by Paul’s in c. 1604–6, for example, demonstrates the overlaps between marketing a child as an erotic object and as a skilled tradesperson in its representation of the female child as prostitute. Middleton’s play, like the Clifton document, presents the theft of a child, although in this case it is a girl, from a father by figures who exploit the child with mercenary and lewd intent. The prostitution of the child in Michaelmas Term is both a means of gaining riches and of signifying the wealth of the child’s master. The Country Wench is enticed away from her father, in an act of impressment comparable to the impressment of boys into the children’s companies, in order to become the possession and courtesan of Andrew Lethe, who, according to the play’s ‘Induction’, requires rich apparel, a page and

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a pander to signify his new-found wealth. The child again functions primarily in this act of trade, or theft, as a signifier of the status of the master, and the identity of the youth is initially negated in this process. The female child, like the boy player, is reduced to the status of a commodity in this business of stealing children and prostituting them. However, while Henry Clifton presents the impressment of children into the playing company as wholly detrimental, Michaelmas Term humorously represents impressment into prostitution as beneficial to the Country Wench. It thus attends to the experiences of the child and privileges her identity, at least momentarily, in this trade. These varying attitudes may again be explained by the different social backgrounds of the children, the different figures presenting these viewpoints, a father and a pander; by the different mediums of a legal document and theatre; and by the different sex of the children. Nevertheless the ways in which prostitution is represented as beneficial to the Country Wench are notable. Primarily, it offers ‘her better advancement’, in the form of the clothes and appearance of a gentlewoman.62 However, more significantly, it provides her with a trade. Claiming that ‘Virginity is no city trade, / You’re out o’th’freedom when you’re a maid’ (1.2.40–1), Hellgill offers her training as a prostitute as a means of integrating her into the city. The use of the language of the guild represents prostitution as akin to other city trades, as the Country Wench is offered a form of apprenticeship and training which will ultimately lead to citizen status. Thus, Hellgill rhetorically constructs a profession of prostitution based on models of the guild and apprenticeship, rather than impressment and exploitation, and the children’s theatres wryly imply the potential advantages of impressing and enslaving children. This image is developed further by the Country Wench later in the play when she defends her actions to her servant, who is in fact her father in disguise: Do not all trades live by their ware and yet called honest livers? Do they not thrive best when they utter most and make it away by the great? Is not wholesale the chiefest merchandise? (4.3.10–13) Prostitution is established as a trade based on commerce, as the Country Wench’s sexuality is established as her ware or goods for

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trade through loaded sexual puns. This representation of prostitution as a trade and the body as a good or product for sale was, according to John Twyning, part of an emerging urban identity in the early seventeenth century.63 Twyning argues that as well as being a means of making money in the city, prostitution was also a crude means of self-fashioning and functioned as a metaphor for anyone seeking a new role in the developing city of London.64 In Michaelmas Term, it is figured as a means of gaining a particular stable role within the city – that of citizen status and freedom of the guild. Prostitution is thus represented in this play as a form of apprenticeship itself and as a lawful trade. Hellgill’s claim that ‘Virginity is no city trade’, implies that, in contrast, prostitution is a sanctioned city trade. In a play that abounds with legal language and metaphors, the courtesan’s series of rhetorical questions defending her trade in act four scene three resembles a legal defence, similar to the mock defence of prostitution made by Freevill in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, performed by the Queen’s Revels in c. 1604. In the latter, Freevill also defends the trade satirically through a series of questions examining the right of a woman to practice her ‘trade’ or ‘occupation’ and so ‘sell’ her body as a necessary means of making a living.65 Both defences parody a legal defence as they assert the rights of the prostitute through this questioning, and in Marston’s play this parody is made explicit as Freevill concludes his speech by demanding his lawyer’s fee (1.1.127). Both construct a model of prostitution as a legally sanctioned trade, hence equating it with other trades and guilds, and moving it from the status of the illegal and from the marginal spaces of the city to that of a legally sanctioned trade, integral to the city space and city identity. The children’s plays thus raise the possibility, albeit sardonically, that the sale of the child through the trade of prostitution enables the child to forge their own position within the city. The construction of prostitution as a city trade utilising the structures of the guilds, even though satirical, problematises Callaghan’s evaluation of the children’s theatres as institutions more akin to prostitution than indenture. The use of the discourses of the guilds and legal system suggest that prostitution itself may function, or at least be imagined to function, as a sanctioned and recognised trade, incorporating the structures of apprenticeship. Hence, while Poetaster indicates the parallels between the structures of early modern children’s

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performance and slavery and prostitution, Michaelmas Term reveals the ways in which these practices may overlap with other apparently distinct institutions, such as that of the guild. Through the representation of the child as prostitute in Middleton’s plays, early modern trades in children and in sex are formalised within the commercial structures of London and sanctioned, at least within their literary representations.

Valuing the child as player The apprenticed boy player of the Jacobean Queen’s Revels, legally exchanged between parent and theatrical manager and offered a programme of training and the status, within urban discourses of trade, of the apprentice, was also valued by the company in different ways. Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, performed by the Children of the Revels in c. 1607 after the company’s shift to an apprentice structure, explores the ways in which the boy player is important to the company. Rafe, an apprentice grocer and player, is primarily valuable because he is an experienced player. The Citizen and his wife claim that all Rafe needs is ‘a suit of reparel’ (Induction, l. 62) in order to act the part of the grocer as ‘he hath played before’ (Induction, l. 82). The wife states: [H]e will act you sometimes at our house, that all the neighbours cry out on him. He will fetch you up a couraging part so in the garret, that we are all as feared [ . . . ] Hold up thy head, Rafe; show the gentlemen what thou canst do; speak a huffing part. (Induction, ll. 66–73) In order to convince the playing company to allow Rafe to perform, the wife stresses the fact that he has experience in acting and insists that he is skilled at it, although the reference to the neighbours cries may in fact be a satirical comment on Rafe’s lack of talent or the citizens’ tastes. She advertises his skills by recounting his past roles and by demanding that he perform a variety of parts to ‘show’ what he can do. She recommends her apprentice to the playing company by insisting on his value as a player through this impromptu performance. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, therefore, signals the multiple aspects of what is being sold at the children’s theatres and in what

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brings pleasure to the boys’ audiences. While Stephen Orgel suggests that the primary response to early modern performance was erotic and Ronald Huebert argues that pleasure in drama of the period is largely erotic pleasure, Michael Bristol points out that the spectators also desired to see the talents of the players.66 Emphasising the concept of a supply culture, the latter insists that the theatres must be seen as specialised markets for particular commodities, and that the player, and particularly the star or celebrity player in this professional performance industry, was one such commodity and claims that the theatres were ‘simply a specialised market environment for these living commodities’.67 The representation of Rafe in The Knight of the Burning Pestle suggests that individual players may increase in fame and celebrity through their performances, and subsequently increase in value as a theatrical commodity. The Citizen and his wife recognise that the audience enjoy Rafe’s performance and promise to allow them to ‘see him oft’ner’ (3.459) and even invite the gentlemen of the audience to come back to her house and give their opinions on Rafe’s performance, stating, ‘I hope you do like the youth’ (‘Epilogue’, l. 7). Rafe develops as a player and thus increases his theatrical value through performance. The advertisement of Rafe’s possible future performance constructs the player as potentially valuable in terms of his celebrity and acting skills, and it functions within this play as an invitation to the audience to return to the theatre of the Queen’s Revels. However, the player’s value in terms of his acting ability and previous acting experience and as an erotic commodity are not mutually exclusive. As I suggested earlier, The Knight of the Burning Pestle also emphasises the value of the child player as an object of the audience’s sexual desire, and, therefore, also implies that his value as a member of the children’s playing company is located in his youthful and potential erotic identity. On the other hand, even in the earliest years of the children’s performances, the playing company valued trained and skilled actors, demonstrated by the impressment of Salomon Pavy into the Children of the Chapel from the Children of Paul’s.68 In Jonson’s Poetaster, the boy is also represented as valuable to the playing company in terms of his acting skills, and he too is forced by his master to display his skills in another moment resembling an audition when Tucca demands that his pyrgi ‘pronounce’ and ‘speak’ (3.4.178) for Histrio so that their economic value may be

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determined. This value depends on the pyrgi’s skills as players, including their ability to pronounce well and adapt a number of parts, or styles of speech, such as a ‘doleful strain’ (3.4.178), an ‘amorous vein’ (3.4.185), and those of the fierce soldier, the ghost, the lady and the Moor. However, Histrio, the player, only requires that ‘one of them do a little of a lady’ (3.4.227), and Tucca claims that the boy ‘will make thee eternally enamoured of him’ (3.4.228–9) through this performance. It is the potential sexual identities of the boys that are stressed in this instance. The shift from the child player’s identity as an impressed player to an apprentice player and from member of an institution akin to prostitution to one akin to the guilds, therefore, did not necessarily mean that the player was valued and marketed in entirely different terms; rather the differing structures emphasised different aspects of the player’s identity and his value.

Marketing the playing company In the final years of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, the company managers continued to emphasise the skills of the players, and to locate the value of the company in this factor. In 1610, Robert Keysar, a manager since 1606, describes the Children of the Queen’s Revels as ‘a Companye of the most exparte and skillfull actors within the Realme of England [ . . . ] all or moste of them ‘trayned up in that service, in the raigne of the late Queene Elizabeth for Ten yeares together’.69 Praising both their training as actors and the fact that they have been trained and maintained together as a company over the period of ten years, Keysar builds on his practical demonstration of his belief in their value as a playing company, which involved maintaining the boys at his own expense during the company’s temporary dissolution from 1608 to late 1609. This indicates another way in which the players were valued – as members of this specific company. Although the company had been disbanded in 1608, Keysar deliberately constructs the latter as a continuation of the earlier Queen’s Revels by highlighting the length of time the players had been together. His insistence that his group of players is a continuation of this company presents the boy players as valuable primarily in their nominal identities as players of this company, and implies that it was the playing company as a group that was the valuable theatrical commodity.

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Therefore, the Children of the Queen’s Revels was potentially marketable in 1610 as a playing company because it retained its links with the earlier version of the company and continued to be termed a children’s playing company, even though some of the players were then aged in their twenties. As this chapter has shown, the child player was a saleable commodity in this theatre. His identity as a marketable player was produced through the discourses of sexuality, social hierarchy, economics, the guilds and age, and by the practices that shaped these playing companies, nominally if not actually, as groups of youths. The identity of the group, therefore, takes precedence over the identity of the individual child actor in the economic and commercial context of playing. The corporate identities of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels primarily shape the discursive identities of their players within this commercial context and this is exemplified by the marketing and maintenance of the latter company as it developed between 1600 and 1613. It is not only this final version of the Queen’s Revels, however, which attempted to continue or imitate the early success of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel. The organisation of other playing companies designated the title of ‘children’ also indicate that this concept was worth imitating. The instigation of a playing company called the Children of the King’s Revels, with no associations to either the Paul’s or the Queen’s Revels and structured in a manner similar to the adult playing companies, indicates the extent to which the concept of a company of children was perceived to be a valuable asset in early seventeenth-century England.70 This is further evidenced by the variety of companies who travelled throughout the provinces from 1611 to 1639 claiming to be the Children of the Revels and described as companies of ‘children’ or ‘youths’, including the company falsely claiming to be Philip Rosster’s Queen’s Revels company in Norwich in 1611.71 Another troupe named the Children of her Majesty’s Chamber was established in Bristol in 1615 under the mastership of John Daniel and authorised under the patronage of Queen Anna and continued to perform in the surrounding towns until 1624.72 The flourishing of companies of children outside London reveals a continued interest in this theatrical phenomenon, even when their popularity in the metropolis had dissipated. Moreover, it demonstrates the commercial viability and popularity of a playing company of children established by the

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repertoires of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels. The complaints lodged by the authorities against a company performing in Exeter in 1618, which claim that although the company patent states that the players were ‘children and youths’, the company in fact included only five youths and ‘the rest are men, some about 30 and 40 and 50 years’, imply that such imitative companies capitalised largely on the nominal identity of a playing company of children.73 The marketing of companies as groups of children suggests that the concept of a ‘children’s’ playing company was a marketable and financially rewarding commodity.

Preserving childhood The structures and commercial strategies of the children’s playing companies, therefore, contribute to the production of the category of the child player in early seventeenth-century theatrical culture in London. To be a child player is to be defined by the companies’ commercial strategies, which emphasise a range of features particular to the child and simultaneously define the player as a child through the naming of the company. The Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels, however, also go one step further in order to preserve their players in the status of children. This factor, I propose, contributes significantly to the distinct identity of the player of these companies, but it may also account for the ultimate failure of the children’s companies. Both the practices of impressment and apprenticeship utilised by these companies allocated the child player a particular status – that of servant or boy. Although I have suggested that the crucial difference between the impressed and the apprentice player is the element of training and the potential development into the role of master, which is implicit in the identity of the apprentice, the latter did not occur within the context of the children’s playing companies. While some of the boy actors become men or masters on leaving these companies and joining the adult troupes, as members of the children’s troupes they were retained in the roles of apprentices. For example, even though, Nathan Field was aged 26 and a player and a dramatist for the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1613, there is no evidence that he progressed from the role of apprentice player to the status of a master within the playing company. This advancement did not occur until the company merged

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with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men. Within this new company, Field fulfilled the role of master as well as player, standing as payee for the company for their performance of Bartholomew Fair before James I in 1615.74 Similarly, although William Ostler is described as master to Giles Cary in the receipts to the players for the performance of Ben Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse in April 1609, he did not take on this role within the structures of the Queen’s Revels.75 This entertainment was performed by three players associated with this company (Ostler, Cary and Field) and the description of Ostler as master to Cary raises the possibility, as McMillin points out, that Ostler may have become ‘an adult manager or instructor’ for this children’s company.76 Yet Ostler had joined the King’s Men in 1608 and therefore was no longer a member of the Children of the Revels at this time.77 In fact, the Queen’s Revels company was in effect dissolved at this time and the remaining players were under the control of Keysar. Hence, the children’s troupes retained their players in the status of youths by impressing or apprenticing boys to theatrical investors and playhouse managers and not permitting them to become the masters or sharers in this company. This position within the theatrical hierarchy is one of the major factors contributing to the construction of the players as boys or children rather than men or masters. However, in order to allocate all the players the roles of servants or apprentices, the playing company was dependent on the investment of theatrical entrepreneurs. Whereas the adult playing companies were maintained by the apprenticing of the boy players to the adult players, who were also sharers in the company, as well as other theatrical managers and investors, the children’s companies continued to depend on external investment to maintain the boy players. The maintenance of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels under their original structures was perhaps simply not a viable financial option.78 Despite the latter’s efforts to evolve its practices in order to develop as a commercial and professional company, it appears to have ultimately needed to adapt the practices of the other professional companies of the period, as in 1613 it merged with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men to form a new company utilising the practices common to the adult playing companies. The phenomenon of the children’s playing company, therefore, while marketable, was ultimately not sustainable as an entity within an evolving theatrical marketplace.

3 Performing Court and Nation: The English Child Player

Accompanying King James on his visit to Scotland in 1617, Sir Anthony Weldon refers to the ‘Children of the Chappell’ in his account of the royal progress in ‘A Description of Scotland’. He writes that the Scottish people holde their noses yf youe talke of beare-bayting; and they stop their eares yf you talke of a play [ . . . ] I am persuaded that yf God and his angels at the last day should come downe in their whitest garments, they would run away and cry, ‘The Children of the Chappell are come again to torment us; let us fly from the abomination of these boyes and hide ourselves in the mountaynes!’1 This satirical comment on Scottish attitudes towards spectacle and theatre forms part of this notorious English knight’s sketch of the social and religious practices witnessed on this tour. Yet, the specific representation of the Children of the Chapel is a remarkable one. On the one hand, describing the boys in their vestments, it refers explicitly to the chorister group. It is the climax of a series of brief descriptions of the fears that ‘papistry’ might re-enter Scotland, including a comment on James’s passion for religious music and bringing of ‘Singing-men with their papisticall vestments’ (p. 340) into the country. Mocking the extreme anti-Catholicism of the Scots, Weldon ironically describes their anguish at having to ‘[suffer] such idolatry to enter their Kingdom’ (p. 340). The imagined affliction of torment brought by children thus enhances the humour and empowers Weldon’s critique of the nation that he claims would mistake God 67

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and his angels for the children and would ‘fly from the abhomination of these boys’ (p. 342). It also has a particular relevance to the London-based Children of the Chapel who accompanied James on this visit and are named by Weldon as one of many followers from England whom the Scots do not welcome. The chorister children are thus a marker of the religious practices which come with James on his return to Scotland. Yet, the spectacular nature of the image of the children, combined with the reference to plays, also evokes the child players associated with the theatrical institution. This reference is not surprising given the wider associations between theatre and papistry in early modern anti-theatrical discourses, which converge in Weldon’s representation of the children; but it also has more specific connotations.2 Imagining that this group might drive the locals in terror into the mountains, Weldon presents the English child performer linked to the Jacobean court, albeit parodically, as an assault on Scottish national culture. Perhaps drawing on the memory of the earlier critiques of Scottishness staged by Children of Queen’s Revels in plays such as Eastward Ho, The Isle of Gulls and The Fleer, he appropriates the associations between this children’s troupe and the Jacobean London courts following James’s accession to the English throne in order to mock an unstable Scottish identity in 1617. What is most surprising, perhaps, is that while the earlier performances by the children in fact critiqued James’s Scottishness, the later image of them aligns them with James as he re-enters Scotland. This chapter examines the production of the image, which pervaded contemporary political and national culture, of the Children of the Chapel / Queen’s Revels as an English institution.

The critical context Following the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, the major London playing companies were reorganised under the patronage of the new royal family.3 This created tangible links between the court and a number of companies, including the Children of the Chapel who gained the patronage of Queen Anna of Denmark and the title of the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1604. This new status was accompanied by a restructuring of the children’s company and Samuel Daniel was appointed as their licenser at the request of

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the Queen, creating a unique licensing situation which may have enabled the company to bypass the censorship of the Master of the Revels to a limited extent.4 However, by 1606 Daniel had been removed as licenser and the company lost the patronage of the Queen as a result of their numerous satirical representations of authority and their critique of contemporary political affairs. A number of the plays performed by both the Children of the Queen’s Revels and the Children of Paul’s in the years following James’ accession, including Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer, performed by the former in 1606, and Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s Westward Ho and Northward Ho, performed by the latter in 1604 and 1605 respectively, interrogate a variety of European identities within London. Furthermore, other plays engaging in an examination of national identity and performed by the Queen’s Revels were the subject of local and international controversy. Samuel Daniel’s Philotas, performed in January 1605, attracted official attention and Daniel was reprimanded for presenting an allegory of the affairs of the Earl of Essex, which he denied.5 This was followed by the imprisonment of George Chapman and Ben Jonson for the company’s performance of Eastward Ho in 1605, which they co-authored with John Marston. The performance of John Day’s Isle of Gulls in 1606 resulted in the imprisonment of some of the company’s players, and by the time of the printing of this text later in the year, the Queen’s Revels had lost the patronage of the Queen. Despite these actions they continued to stage plays which provoked official reprimand. The performance of the no longer extant play about Scottish mines, which satirised some Scottish nobles, the King’s love of hunting and presented the King on stage drunk, and Chapman’s two plays based on recent events in France, The Conspiracy and The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, provoked the comments of French officials, including a letter written by the French Ambassador, Antoine de la Boderie, which linked the Queen’s Revels performances, the questionable authority of the new Scottish King and issues of French, Scottish and English identities, and led to James’s dissolution of the company in 1608. However, by the Christmas season of 1608/9 the company were again performing at court, and in 1610 they had regained the patronage of the Queen, and were noted to be ‘the best company in London’ by Prince Otto of Hesse-Cassel in 1611.6 This series of events and the documents and controversies surrounding the plays are among the most intensely analysed materials

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relating to the children’s playing companies in recent scholarship on the companies and on other topics, including licensing, censorship, the royal courts and patronage in the period.7 In most cases, the key question addressed has been why the company was permitted to stage such controversial plays, particularly ones which specifically attacked the new Scottish king. The majority of critics have endeavoured to account for this via an evaluation of the unique status of the company. In their studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean licensing and censorship, Richard Dutton and Janet Clare, for example, both argue that the multiple courts of James, Anna and Prince Henry and the patronage that each offered to the playing companies produced elaborate networks of protection and created niches in the system that enabled the temporary avoidance of the Master of the Revels, such as the appointment of Daniel as the company licenser.8 While Dutton stresses that Anna did not instigate or encourage this satire, although her court and patronage produced a system in which it could be performed, others, such as Barbara Lewalski, have interpreted her involvement with the Children of the Queen’s Revels as active political opposition to the court and authority of the King.9 Although Lewalski’s arguments relating to Anna’s opposition to James’s court through her other theatrical activities are persuasive, the impact of Anna on the actual performances by the Children of the Queen’s Revels is questionable. Other studies have focused instead on the children themselves. Drawing on Thomas Heywood’s suggestion at the end of An Apology for Actors (1612), that the company’s managers and playwrights took advantage of the status of the children, taking a ‘presumed liberty’ and ‘supposing their juniority to be a privilege for any railing’, theatre historians, such as Chambers, Gurr and Smith, have accounted for the performances by arguing that these junior figures could not be and were not held accountable for their actions.10 This analysis of the players’ juniority effectively reduces the child players to instruments through which playwrights might critique authority. However, the fact that some of the players were imprisoned for their involvement in The Isle of Gulls counters such a negation of the child’s agency. Performance, I would suggest, is the crucial issue in the controversies surrounding these plays. It is the children’s juniority, not in the sense that they are not accountable for their acts but as minor figures capable of mimicry and ridicule, that lends their representations, especially

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those of national identity, such remarkable force. The convergence of the unique licensing situation, the patronage of the Queen and the players’ status as children makes their critique more effective. The satirical force of these performances is further increased through the cumulative effect of such acts during the brief history of the company and through the developing concept of the child performer in Jacobean England. Focusing on the Children of the Queen’s Revels, this chapter analyses the children’s companies’ controversial performances and external accounts of these performances to uncover the increasing effect of these events and to explore the ways in which the child players functioned as markers of particular class and national behaviour.

Staging the French Queen and the Scottish King In a letter to the French Secretary of State, Marquis de Sillery, dated 8 April 1608, the French ambassador in London, Antoine de la Boderie, allocates the Children of the Revels a significant status on a political and national level. The subject of this letter is the performance of Chapman’s Byron plays, which the ambassador claims were performed during the King’s absence by ‘those very actors whom I had barred from playing the history of the Marshal de Biron’.11 Presenting an image of a monarch struggling to retain control over the dissident actions of the players, the French ambassador passes comment on the state of the English court via his reading of the performance of the child players and suggests that plays in the London city theatres warranted official and international intervention. He objects to two specific aspects of this performance. Firstly, that the playing company have exploited the absence of the court to continue to stage these plays, the original subject of which the ambassador evidently objected to, and secondly, and perhaps more significantly, because not only were those members of the troupe contravening the prohibition made against them but they were adding to it things not only more serious, but which had nothing to do with the Marshal de Biron, and furthermore were all false. (p. 276) The ambassador claims that in this second performance, the actors ‘introduced into it the Queen and Madame de Verneuil, the former

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treating the lady very ill verbally, and giving her a slap on the face’ (p. 276). The actors and their accountability for staging this moment are at the centre of this complaint. They defy a specific prohibition and it is implied that they are also responsible for adding this new scene representing Queen Marie de Médici and King Henri IV’s mistress, Madame D’Entragues, the Marquise de Verneuil. This scene is absent from the 1608 printed edition of the play, which, as John Gabel suggests, might indicate that the scene was added by the playing company to the performance as the French ambassador implies; or, its absence may perhaps be as convincingly explained by the censoring of the printed text.12 Indeed the text shows evidence of censorship and the only remaining textual evidence of this unacceptable representation of the Queen in the Byron plays is in act two of the Tragedy, which presents a masque, the moral of which draws extensively on a ‘jarre’, or a dispute, between Chastity and Liberality, performed by the Queen and Mistress D’Entragues.13 These two figures are presented as a model or a ‘tale / Of kinde and worthy emulation’ (2.13–14), which as Cupid, the speaker in the masque, informs the court ‘their Emulation / Begat a jarre which thus was reconcil’d’ (2.18–19). This representation of reconciliation presented to the French court in the play through the medium of performance, standing as a model for the reconciliation of Henri and Byron, would be more effective if the quarrel to which the French ambassador refers was staged prior to this masque, particularly as Henri himself states that the masque not only presents the fictional reconcilement between Chastity and Liberality but also ‘figures / The reconcilement of Queen and Mistress’ (2. 129–30).14 Whether or not the actors added this scene, the French ambassador presents them as accountable for this offence. Despite his statement that the ‘principal culprit, the author, escaped’ (p. 276) punishment, he notes that three of the players were imprisoned for performing this scene as a result of his complaints to the Earl of Salisbury and he emphasises the role of the players in this act. The performance of the play is, therefore, at the centre of this controversy, and the players imitating these figures play a significant part in attracting the comments of the French ambassador. It is the linguistic and physical representation of the Queen’s anger, as she assaults Madame de Verneuil verbally before slapping her on the face, that provokes the ambassador’s response. The physicality of the performer is thus brought to the fore and the performance of this part by a child player would have

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mimicked the alleged undignified behaviour of the Queen by reducing her to the status of an uncontrollable child. The ambassador’s concerns were perhaps intensified by the gendered aspect of the performance: it is not only a child mocking the current Queen of France but a boy – a fact accepted in English theatrical contexts but perhaps more unusual in French theatrical culture in which girls were trained up alongside boys for the theatre.15 The distinct identity of the English child player, therefore, enhances the satirical and offensive nature of this theatrical moment in this international context. Chapman’s interaction with the children’s playing companies for a number of controversial plays raises the possibility that there was something specific to troupes of children that rendered them a suitable medium for the playwright to offer his potentially subversive plays. Not only was he imprisoned following the performance of Eastward Ho by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1605, and the author of the plays which formed the subject of the French ambassador’s letter, he was also the author of the lost play The Old Joiner of Aldgate, which resulted in a court case being brought against him and Edward Pearce and Thomas Woodford, the managers of the Children of Paul’s, following the performance of the play by this company in 1603.16 However, Chapman claims in his defence that although he wrote The Old Joiner of Aldgate he sold ‘the saied Play unto Thomas Woodford and so made twentie marke benefytt by the same, But he this Def never sawe the same acted and plaied publiquely upon a stage’.17 Chapman disassociates himself from the playing company and the performance. Similarly in a letter, assumed to be from George Chapman to George Buc, the Master of the Revels, complaining of his refusal to grant a licence for the printing of the Byron plays, Chapman shifts responsibility to the actors, claiming ‘I see not myne own Plaies; nor carrie the Actors’ Tongues in my mouthe’.18 Although it is possible that Chapman may have exploited the status of the child players in an attempt to pass comment on these recent local and international events, he simultaneously points to the autonomous roles of the players and their potential for altering the plays by manipulating their language, voice and body in their performance. Hence, the juniority of the child players paradoxically renders them potential mouthpieces to be manipulated by playwrights and becomes the medium through which they can charge their performance with their own unique critique of these known figures.

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The French ambassador proceeds in his letter to link this representation of the French monarchy to other performances by these players, stating that [a] day or two before, they had slandered their King, his mine in Scotland and all his Favourites in a most pointed fashion; for having made him rail against heaven over the flight of a bird and have a gentleman beaten for calling off his dogs, they portrayed him as drunk at least once a day. (p. 276) This disruptive representation of James and his courtiers is associated with the undesirable representation of the French court both chronologically, as it took place one or two days before, and discursively in the associations made by the French ambassador. In a similar manner to the offensive nature of the representation of the French Queen, this performance of James depends on an undignified imitation of the King’s physical presence. He too is ‘slandered’ through the linguistic and bodily performance of the child player, as he is presented railing and drunk. These controversial performances are further linked in an earlier letter, dated 11 March 1608, from Sir Thomas Lake to Lord Salisbury, in which Lake mentions the ‘committing of the players that have offended in the matters of France’ and ‘the others who have offended in the matter of the mines and other lewd words, which is the Children of the Blackfriars’.19 The child player’s language is again noted as a point of contention in this representation, as Lake suggests that they have offended through ‘lewd words’, implying that there are sexual connotations to their representation of the King.20 This satirical representation also emphasises the known habits and specific policies of James, such as his love of hunting, which he beats a man for interrupting, and the mines in Scotland, referring to the silver mine discovered at Hilderston near Linlithgow in 1607, which did not bring the King much profit and, as Richard Dutton suggests, probably led to jokes about the money-minded Scots.21 While the French ambassador takes no action against the offences he sees, instead ‘leav[ing] it to the aforesaid King to take revenge in his own right’ (p. 277), Lake’s letter implies that James has taken definitive action over the children based at the Blackfriars theatre. He claims that ‘his Grace had vowed they should never play more, but

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should first beg their bread [ . . . ] my Lord Chamberlain by himself, or your Lordships at the table, should take order to dissolve them and punish the maker besides’.22 Indeed the company was temporarily dissolved and in July of this year their costumes and properties were divided and the lease to the Blackfriars theatre was surrendered.23 The company, it seems, was considered to be primarily responsible and punishable for this offence by both French and English officials, and the ‘maker’ or playwright was only punished ‘besides’. The French ambassador was not the first foreign visitor to read theatrical performances as a reflection of the English court. In June 1604 the former French ambassador, Beaumont, questions ‘what must be the state and condition of a prince, whom the preachers publicly assail, whom the comedians of the metropolis bring upon the stage, whose wife attends these representations in order to enjoy the laugh against her husband’ and in 1619 the Venetian ambassador writes that ‘the comedians have absolute liberty to say whatever they wish against any one soever, so the only demonstration against them will be the words spoken by the King’.24 Although these anecdotes are not necessarily a reliable source of information about James’s control over the theatre and the leniency, or otherwise, of Jacobean stage censorship, it indicates the way in which English players (and the King’s control over them) were perceived in an international context as a reflection on the court, and were thus interpreted as a comment on national and courtly identity.25 To an extent this was encouraged by English practices. The child players were often commissioned by the court to entertain foreign visitors. The performance of the no longer extant play Abuses by the Children of Paul’s before James and Christian IV, King of Denmark, in July 1606, ‘at which the Kinges seemed to take delight and be much pleased’, further indicates the function of the children’s playing companies as an assertion of the identity of the court.26 The Children of the Queen’s Revels may have also participated in the festivities for the Danish king, performing a play, possibly The Dutch Courtesan, on the previous night.27 As the Children of the Chapel, this company had also functioned as a signifier of Elizabethan courtly and national identity. On 18 September 1602 Duke Philip Julius of Stettin-Pomerania, Prussia, attended one of their performances at the Blackfriars playhouse as part of his European tour. His visit is recorded by his diarist, Frederic Gerschow, within a sequence of visits to other theatres and sights in London.

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However, while the other plays he attended, a play about Turks on 13 September and a tragedy of Samson on 14 September, are only mentioned briefly, the visit to the children’s theatre is commented on in detail. The performance of a play about a royal widow of England, possibly Chapman’s Sir Giles of Goosecap, by the children made a significant impression on the Duke and his diarist.28 They comment on the rich apparel, the large audience and the spectacular effect at the theatre and conclude with a memorable account on the musical performance offered by the children: For a whole hour preceding the play one listens to a delightful musical entertainment on organs, lutes, pandorins, mandolins, violins and flutes, as on the present occasion, indeed, when a boy cum voce tremula sang so charmingly to the accompaniment of a bass-viol that unless possibly the nuns at Milan may have excelled him, we had not heard his equal on our journey.29 It is potentially the quality or the novelty of this playing company that provoked Gerschow to write so extensively on this experience; but no matter what the reason, he records it as one of the cultural highlights of their European tour. Indeed, only a performance by Italian nuns was comparable. This comparison with European female performance in terms of vocal and musical talents situates the English boy player within a wider European context. It is possible that the nuns’ performance had further similarities to that of the boy players as performances by girls and women for the purposes of education and leisure and using extensive musical interludes, similar to those offered by the English children’s companies, occurred frequently in early modern Italian convents.30 The religious institution that frames the nuns’ performance points to further analogies between the contexts for these two diverse performances. Having developed from the chorister group of the Chapel Royal into a commercial and professional playing company, the Children of the Chapel had tangible links with a religious, musical and courtly institution. Gerschow’s comments on the vocal performance of the boy are also strikingly similar to those made on the singing of a boy in another religious institution, the Chapel of Windsor, by the diarist of Duke Frederick of Wittenberg during his visit to England in 1592, as he describes ‘a little boy who sang so sweetly amongst it all, and threw such a charm

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over the music with his little tongue, that it was really wonderful to listen to him’ and compares this religious practice to Catholic ceremonies.31 The representation of the voice of the English boy performer in both accounts is loaded with sexual connotations, as the boy charms his audience and the writers recording these performances seem almost enraptured by this experience.32 Although the actual links between the chorister group and playing company of the same name in 1602 are debatable, the interpretation of the playing company by Gerschow implies that significant perceptual overlaps between the two remain.33 He claims that the boys are maintained by the Queen to be trained in music, and ‘in order that they may practice courtly manners, it is required of them to act a play every week, for which purpose indeed the Queen has established for them a special theatre and has provided them with a superabundance of rich apparel’.34 Whether or not this is an accurate account of the maintenance of the company in 1602, it is significant that the company is perceived by this foreign visitor to be an institution of the court – one which impresses the Duke to the extent that by 1606 he had established a company of English players to be maintained at his court as a form of entertainment.35 The French ambassador’s comments in 1608 are, therefore, located in a tradition of turning to the child players to interpret the state of the English court. Just as the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania looks to the female performer in the Italian religious institution as a signifier of Italian culture, these foreign visitors look to the professional players, and frequently to the child performers aligned with the court, to evaluate English cultural practice.

Mimicking court and nation The interpretation of the Byron plays by the French ambassador and the players’ representation of France is also firmly located within the context of the repertoire of this company and specifically in their representations of the Scottish King of England and his court. The most controversial example of this prior to the performances mentioned in the ambassador’s letter is the performance of George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston’s Eastward Ho in 1605. The comedy of this play was potentially subversive as it offered a derisive critique of the Jacobean court, particularly the King, his policies and

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his national identity. Probably staged during James’s absence from London in the summer of 1605, the company appears to have exploited these conditions to comment on the newly established court.36 Eastward Ho mocks James’s policies by satirising the social mobility within his court, most evidently in the representation of Sir Petronel Flash who is criticised as being one of the ‘thirty-pound knights’ – a comment on James’s traffic in knighthoods and his knighting of the many Scots who followed him to England.37 The reference to the economic mode of gaining a position in court, combined with Sir Petronel’s evident poverty throughout the play, constructs royal favour as a transaction that results in a court of apparently inadequate nobles. Gertrude complains, ‘The knighthood nowadays are nothing like the knighthood of old time’ (5.1.37–8) and outlines the various inadequacies of the contemporary knights. Sir Petronel’s ineptitude as a knight is further exposed by his participation in the plot to steal from his new wife and flee. This mockery of the knight deconstructs courtly identity: it exposes it as a status that may be bought, and as Sir Petronel plots with Quicksilver he is revealed to be no better than this devious city apprentice. Furthermore, Gertrude, who critiques the new version of knighthood, is complicit in this social mobility as she exploits the new system and marries Sir Petronel for her own social advancement. In exposing both Sir Petronel and Gertrude as foolish and in the ultimate downfall of the two characters, who are forced to return to the city, the play not only mocks the policies of the new court but ridicules the London citizens who attempt to take advantage of it. The child player is again at the centre of this satirical representation of the Jacobean court. The most effective critique of both courtliness and Scottishness is made through the physical presence of the boy and his manipulation of his body and voice in the act of performance. The boy player mimics and parodies courtly identity in performing the part of Gertrude, who is associated with social ambition and a desire to ‘be a lady’ (1.2.21) throughout the play. Her changing status is defined through a variety of motifs such as money, marriage and behaviour, but is signified primarily through aspects of performance, including costume, posture, gesture and the voice.38 She initially simulates the courtly lady by removing her ‘city tire’ (1.2.13), refuting her sister’s ‘coif with a London licket’ (1.2.18) and being dressed by her tailor in clothing appropriate to a lady.

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The recurrent imagery of clothing in this scene (both in the language used by the sisters which defines city clothing in opposition to that of a lady and in the physical change of costume on stage) posits a link between costume, geographical location and social status. The change of clothing on stage functions as a metatheatrical moment that demonstrates the means by which the social identities associated with the city or the court are represented on the early modern stage. Furthermore, it foregrounds the importance of the costumed player in this manifestation of character types. The child player is implicated in this satire of what it means to be a lady of the court, when Gertrude’s physical and visual transformation, effected by the tailor who ‘supplied the defect’ (1.2.62–3) in her body, is taken further and she is instructed on how to behave in a lady-like fashion. This involves a rehearsal of courtly behaviour, as Gertrude practises how to hold and frame her body and imitate the movement of courtiers, and proceeds to trip about the stage in imitation of ‘the court amble’ (1.2.72). In the reduction of the elegant movement of the courtly lady to this grotesque dance on stage by the over-ambitious citizen, and, more significantly in this metatheatrical moment, by the boy player, courtly behaviour is mocked and degraded. This moment manifests courtliness on the city stage as a source of humour and ridicule. Gertrude further constructs her status as a lady through the use of the voice, as she alters her pronunciation and adopts an affected tone to insist that her knight takes her ‘to thy mercy out of this miserable chity’ (1.2.139–40). This dramatic representation of social transformation is highly self-conscious about the nature of theatre. The boy player is emphasised in this motif of performance and in the attention to the ways in which courtly identity can be constructed through costume, behaviour, movement and adapting the voice. Through this cross-gender and cross-class performance, the boy, effectively, mirrors the transformation of Gertrude and demystifies courtly identity by exposing the ways in which it may be easily performed, even by a boy, and presents it as ridiculous. It is thus through imitation in the actual performance of the play that the most amusing and effective satire is presented, and the players themselves are again implicated in this critique through the extent to which they adapt their physical and vocal behaviour to satirise courtliness. This has a mutual impact on the player, who reveals that he too can effectively perform, and become, the courtier.

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This satire against the new King’s policies and the state of courtliness under his reign becomes a personal attack on James in act four scene one when the reference to Sir Petronel’s bought knighthood is made by an unspecified gentleman who states ‘I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty pound knights’ (4.1.197–8). The use of ‘my’ and the mimicry of a Scottish dialect and accent produce a caricature of the King in performance. In a similar manner to the Scottish mines play, as outlined by the French ambassador in 1608, Eastward Ho engages in a highly charged satire against the King by impersonating recognisable vocal characteristics on stage. It is in this act of mimicry that the play offers its strongest and most direct critique of James, his court and his policies.39 Actorly practices, after all, cannot be censored prior to the performance; so although the theatrical authorities insisted that the play-text be submitted for scrutiny, censored and licensed before the play was performed, mimicry, gesture and costume were not.40 The imitation of the King is a dissident act, or is even, as Stephen Orgel suggests, ‘potentially revolutionary’, and the boy player is fundamental to this act in his manipulation of his accent.41 However, in contrast to the actions taken in 1608, there is no evidence to suggest that the players were reprimanded for their actions in Eastward Ho. Instead the playwrights were held accountable for the play, and Chapman and Jonson were imprisoned for their parts in writing it – although they were released soon after, perhaps as a result of their letters of appeal to a network of patrons, including the King.42 Although this lends force to Heywood’s suggestion that playwrights and masters exploited the ‘juniority’ of the players, by indicating that they were overlooked as a dissident force in this staging of the King, the players were both officially admonished soon after, following a similar act in the performance of John Day’s Isle of Gulls by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in early 1606.43 In February 1606, Sir Thomas Edmondes writes that there was much speech of a play at Blackfriars where in the ‘Isle of Gulls’, from the highest to the lowest, all men’s parts were acted of two diverse nations: as I understand sundry were committed to Bridewell.44 The imprisonment of some players following the performance of Scottish accents in this play, which also satirises the King and his

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court through this representation of nation and through the play’s gentle satirisation of the figure of the Duke, who like James loves hunting and has altered the location of his kingdom (from Arcadia to the Isle of Gulls), indicates their accountability for this performance. By 1606, it seems, the authorities recognised the impact of the boys’ mimicry of courtly, royal and national identity. Through the manipulation of the voice, in the use of the Scottish dialect and an affected accent, and of the body, by wearing the appropriate costume, accompanied by specific references to the practices of the King, the child players thus satirised courtly identity under James and even went as far as staging personal and humorous representations of the King, which ridiculed him and marked him as different in national terms.

Vocalising Englishness in the Jacobean Theatre As Eastward Ho and The Isle of Gulls indicate, parodying Scottishness is a feature of the Queen’s Revels’ plays between 1605 and 1608. AntiScottish sentiment is particularly strong in the former play; however, it does not only satirise the Scots.45 Rather a distinctly xenophobic discourse pervades the play, particularly act three scene three in which Seagull presents the impact of the Scots’ ‘over the face of the whole earth’ (3.3.45–6). Seagull further articulates a desire to expel the Scots from England, stating: And for my part, I would a hundred thousand of ‘em were there, for we are all one countrymen now, ye know; and we should find ten times more comfort of them there than we do here (3.3.48–52) Seagull’s comic expression, which insinuates that the only way that the London citizens will be able to co-exist with the Scots is if they are in a different country, implies a more serious and politically charged desire for the removal of the Scots from the city. His ambivalent expression ‘we are all one countrymen now’ (3.3.50) states the reality of contemporary England and addresses fears regarding the future of the nation under the reign of the new king and his desire to unify Britain.46 The performance of this city comedy in 1605 engages with the changing concept of national identity in London following the accession of a Scottish king and the changing demography that

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resulted from an influx of Scottish courtiers. Given the relevance of this satirisation to contemporary political and national affairs, it is unsurprising that the play attracted the attention of the authorities. Seagull’s comments were cancelled in the reprinting of the play in 1605, and only survive in two extant copies of the play, further indicating that it was the satire of Scottishness in the performance that provoked censorship of the play.47 However, although specific lines are removed, this interrogation of national identity pervades the play as the distinct concept of being English is repeatedly at risk.48 The implicit threat posed by the ‘industrious Scots’ (3.3.44), for example, is developed by the representation of French culture invading England in act four scene one. Here Sir Petronel and Security are cast ashore in England and are unable to recognise the country as their own. Clothing and language are again utilised in this scene to signify social, geographical and national characteristics, when on seeing two gentlemen Sir Petronel assumes that they are French and speaks in French. The comedy, of course, lies in the fact that these men are Scottish, indicated by their dialect. Yet, this comedy also raises more serious issues. It comments on the state of England: it is unrecognisable and has been corrupted by a range of alternative national cultures as gentlemen dress in French fashions and speak in Scottish dialects. Sir Petronel’s insistence of ‘dost thou think our Englishmen are so Frenchified that a man knows whether he be in France or in England when he sees ‘em?’ (4.1.172–4) humorously demonstrates the extent to which Englishness has assimilated with other nationalities in this new London, but also functions to further satirise Sir Petronel who claims to be ‘A poor knight of England’ (4.1.186) yet cannot recognise his own nation. The language of the nation is also presented as mutable, as the gentlemen demand of Petronel and Security ‘Why speak you this broken French, when y’are a whole Englishman?’ (4.1.187–8). The representations of Scottishness and Englishness in this play are thus located in a wider European, and even world-wide, context as Petronel and Security re-encounter Englishness having set off on a voyage to Virginia. Both Scottishness and Englishness are negotiated through an interrogation of the ways in which a range of national identities are constructed and defined. France, therefore, functions in this play, as Brian Gibbons suggests, as it does in Shakespeare’s Henry V, as an opportunity ‘for inspecting British national and personal

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issues’.49 Performance and the theatre are implicated in this metatheatrical representation, as language and costume are represented as manipulable elements that can be misinterpreted by the characters and appropriated by the child players to perform the national identities showcased in this play. Through this exploration of the performative aspects of national identity, Eastward Ho implies a loss of a distinct Englishness in the mingling of multinational cultures in seventeenthcentury London. Set in London, and even addressed specifically to London, as the prologue of Eastward Ho dedicates the play ‘to the City’ (Prologue, l. 14) and Touchstone concludes the play by addressing the audience as ‘London’ (5.5.219), the examination of various national figures in the city serves to examine the way in which English identity is produced and shifts in the international commercial city.50 The question of what it means to be English in a changing nation is a recurrent theme in the plays performed by this company in the early years of the Jacobean reign. Like Eastward Ho, Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer, performed in 1606, presents a London in which English cultural practices have been superseded by alternative, and specifically Scottish, practices. Women are presented throughout the play to be enamoured by all things Scottish. They ‘delight much in the Scottish Musicke’ (3.1.191–2), and giving ‘oten cake’, ‘a good Northern token’ (3.1.126–7), is suggested as an effective courting ritual.51 Oat cakes are also satirised in Weldon’s 1617 account of Scotland, when the reason given for the inclusion of the Children of the Chapel in James’s entourage is that they might ‘eate of them [the oat cakes] for the maintenance of their voices’.52 Scottish customs are thus parodied in The Fleer as the fads of women, but they simultaneously threaten to replace traditional English habits. The Fleer characterises Scottishness, Irishness and Welshness as foreign and strange concepts in an attempt to assert the durable characteristics of Englishness. The alien features of these alternative national types within Britain are stressed through the play’s representations of language and cultural practices. In the discussion of the gentleman usher’s talents in speaking foreign languages, for example, he is described as having ‘the Scottish tongue very perfectly, and ‘has some skill in the Irish tongue too’ (1.3.109–11). In this parody of the stereotype of the noble servant, the usher cannot speak French, but only this ‘wild speech’ (1.3.112) and his travels abroad are limited to a trip to Wales (1.3.114–15). The non-English within Britain are thus deliberately constructed as strange. The

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English courtier, Ruffel, however, accepts and tries to define his new Britishness. Discussing his altered national associations and his changed behaviour since he became British with the visiting Italians, Ruffel claims: I did pray oftener when I was an Englishman, but I have not prayed often, I must confess, since I was a Briton. But dost hear, Fleer? Canst tell me if an Englishman were in debt, whether a Briton must pay it or no? (2.1.284–8) This humorous account foregrounds the turbulent religious affairs that accompanied James’s accession and, like Weldon’s 1617 account of Scotland, differentiates between Englishness and Scottishness according to religious practices. The representation of Ruffel, who attempts to embrace his new national status, indicates that this change affects the nation through a decline in religious practice and the dismissal of debts – comically presented as being of great benefit to the individual, if not for the nation. Ruffel’s engagement with questions of what being British means thus mocks the concept of the new national identity that James I proposes. John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in c. 1604, also addresses questions of nationality in London through the representation of Scottishness.53 This play makes comic reference to Scottish identity when Cocledemoy, the witty man of the city, adopts the disguise of a Scottish barber and the name of ‘Andrew Shark’.54 This name, which, according to Jonathan Goldberg, ‘combines the patron saint of Scotland with Scottish rapacity’, implies that the figure which Cocledemoy imitates in order to outwit the vintner, Mulligrub, is particularly suited to this act of cheating and theft, and may have also caused offence and provoked trouble for the Children of the Queen’s Revels.55 In The Black Year (1606), Anthony Nixon refers to ‘bringing in the Dutch Curtezan to corrupt English conditions, and sent away Westward for carping both at Court, Cittie and countrie’.56 Janet Clare suggests that by linking The Dutch Courtesan to the other satirical plays of the repertoire of the Queen’s Revels, this implies that this play was also the subject of controversy, although it is unclear which aspect of it may have provoked this.57 It is possible that it was this further comment on the Scots, and

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the accumulation of representations of national identity which caused offence, as Nixon refers to the play in terms of national interests. Yet, if we do interpret Nixon’s mention of the Dutch Curtezan as referring to Marston’s play, it is interesting to note that he seems to suggest that it is the company’s satirical repertoire itself that corrupts Englishness. The Dutch Courtesan does interrogate the concept of a national identity. While the image of Andrew Shark humorously critiques the traits of the Scottish, Cocledemoy’s temporary appropriation of this nationality is only the first of a series of disguises that he adopts to carry out his tricks, which include that of a French pedlar, the servant of Master Burnish, the goldsmith, a bellman and a sergeant. This play does not ridicule Scottishness to the extent that Eastward Ho and the lost Scottish mines play do through the mimicking accents, language and characteristics. Indeed the prologue attempts to differentiate the play from a satirical repertoire, stating that ‘like others, rail we could’ but that ‘our study is not to offend’ (ll. 4–5). Instead this satirical reference to the Scots forms part of a larger examination of the performance of a range of national identities. Before adopting the disguise of the Scottish barber-surgeon, Cocledemoy debates how he will play this part in order to completely disguise himself. Having already borrowed the properties to define his trade as a barber from the barber’s boy, including a ‘basin, razor and apron’ (2.1.187), he realises: My scurvy tongue will discover me. Must dissemble, must disguise. For my beard, my false hair; for my tongue, Spanish, Dutch or Welsh? No a Northern barber; very good. (2.1.206–8) Cocledemoy recognises that although he can take the furniture of the barber and hide his face behind a beard, his ‘tongue’ might give him away. The vocal performance of this part is crucial to his disguise. Indeed, later in the play when Mulligrub hears him shout ‘Wahahowe’ off stage he recognises ‘It was his voice; ‘tis he’ (4.5.8–9). As in Eastward Ho, therefore, national characteristics are represented as performative, as, combined with the use of properties including a beard, it is through language and accent, that is, the ability to manipulate one’s ‘tongue’, that Cocledemoy disguises himself. Presumably he also mimics a Scottish accent in order to disguise his

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voice; however, this is not indicated in the text, in the way that Scottish dialects are transcribed in Eastward Ho and Scottish, Irish and Welsh dialects are portrayed through the text of Shakespeare’s Henry V.58 While in these plays dialects and accents are performed in a stereotypical fashion in order to immediately define the nationality of particular characters and to differentiate them from the norm, that is, their English counterparts, Cocledemoy self-consciously adopts the voice of the Scottish barber in order to disguise his identity. Scottish linguistic patterns are elements that he performs at will. As in The Fleer, Scottishness is presented as a foreign language and is equated with the other possible alternative nationalities of Spanish, Dutch or Welsh that Cocledemoy could evoke as disguise. It is one of numerous alternative languages accessible to the witty Londoner in a city which is represented as open to this influx of foreigners. Cocledemoy demonstrates his knowledge of a range of languages throughout the play and has the ability to perform numerous identities. When disguised as a Scottish barber he claims that he had previously been a pedlar in Germany (2.3.37) and his next disguise is that of the French pedlar. The extant text provides little indication of how this role was signified in performance. The only linguistic indication of this status is that he calls Mulligrub ‘Monsieur’ (3.2.21), which is perhaps enough to determine this identity along with his costume. He also uses Spanish phrases, for example, calling Franceschina, the Dutch courtesan, a ‘cacafuego’ (4.3.1), meaning spitfire, and, in this same scene, speaks a nonsensical version of Greek in order to impress her.59 Like the representation of Scottishness in Eastward Ho, therefore, Marston’s play locates Scottish identity within a wider European context and uses it as a starting point to explore the multiple nations converging in London in this period. Cocledemoy’s self-consciousness about his role playing foregrounds the child player performing this part, who, by extension, is also equipped to speak this variety of languages and perform these diverse parts. By appropriating the national and commercial diversity in London, which was a consequence as a result of increasing international trade and the accession of the Scottish king, in his performance of international tradesmen through language, accent and costume, the child player performing the part of Cocledemoy presents the possibilities of adopting a variety of international characteristics. However, as Jean Howard argues, while Cocledemoy presents

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one possible way of adapting to the hybrid and cosmopolitan city which London becomes in the early seventeenth century, the play offers other alternatives.60 The English tradesman, Mulligrub, also takes advantage of an international trade; yet his materialistic exploitation of the new opportunities of the city are presented in a more negative light. Cocledemoy accuses him of being ‘a great jumbler’ who has made us drink the juice of the Whore of Babylon; for whereas good ale, parries, braggets, ciders and metheglins was the true ancient British and Trojan drinks, you ha’ brought in Popish wines, Spanish wines, French wines, tam Marti quam Mercurio both muscadines and malmsey, to the subversion, staggering, and sometimes overthrow of many a good Christian. (5.3.102–9) While Cocledemoy takes advantage of the range of national identities available to him, he accuses Mulligrub of taking this further by corrupting traditional practices and losing any sense of a distinct national culture. A further contrast to Cocledemoy is Franceschina, who as a courtesan is also at the centre of international trade. As a commodity on this international market, she has been sold to an international clientele and made acquainted with the Spaniard, Don Skirtoll; with the Italian, Master Beieroane; with the Irish Lord, Sir Patrick; with the Dutch merchant, Hans Herkin Glukin Skellam Flapdragon; and especially with the greatest French; and now lastly with this English. (2.2.13–17) Franceschina’s status as this international commodity impacts upon her manifestation of her own national characteristics. She is required to be able to adopt a range of national characteristics on this international market, indicated by her statement ‘Mine body must turn Turk for twopence’ (2.2.38–9). However, unlike Cocledemoy’s manipulation and exploitation of a range of languages, Franceschina represents a dangerous feminized and foreign attempt to do this and becomes a hybrid figure of diverse but indistinguishable nationalities.61 She is unable to speak any one language correctly and instead speaks a mix

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of German, French, Italian and English. Her exclamation, ‘By me fait, dis bin very fine language’ (4.3.14), in response to Cocledemoy’s nonsensical Greek is only one example of the mix of languages she speaks, and further exposes her lack of control over language as she is unable to recognise the inaccuracy of his speech. Cocledemoy openly mocks her linguistic characteristics, imitating her in his comical ‘flumpum pumpum’ (4.3.6). Claiming that Franceschina is ‘as false, as prostituted, and adulterate as some translated manuscript’ (4.3.7–8), he represents her as an inaccurate copy, sold repeatedly, and consequently foregrounds the removal of Franceschina from her original national context. Franceschina offers an alternative concept of identity in the multinational city. Issues of gender, sexuality and nationality intersect in this representation. As a Dutch, female alternative to the figure of Cocledemoy, Franceschina poses a threat to national identity through her international trade in prostitution, gesturing towards a further mingling of nations, and her own hybrid national identity signifies the dangers of collapsing the boundaries of national identity and the movement between international locations. These two contrasting figures thus signify both the potential advantages and threats of the shifting national structures of London. This figure of the courtesan also evokes an international theatrical context, as Franceschina was a stock character in the Italian commedia dell’arte.62 Furthermore this specific representation of Franceschina as the scorned lover and the parody of her lack of control over many languages evoke a specific female performer from this context. Isabella Andreini, an actress with I Gelosi, was famed for her performance of a famous scene in 1589 recorded in Flaminio Scala’s La Pazzia d’Isabella (The Madness of Isabella), published in 1611.63 In this common mad scene of the commedia, Isabella who, like Marston’s Franceschina, has been betrayed by her lover, wanders the city: [S]peaking now in Spanish, now in Greek, now in Italian, and now in many other languages, but always quite without sense. Among other things she began to speak French, and also to sing songs in the French manner [ . . . ] Then she began to imitate the ways of speaking her fellow actors.64 The aim of this set piece is to display the actress’ skill and range, and Isabella Andreini did this ‘in such a natural manner, and with so many fine emphases, that no words can express the quality and skill

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of this woman’.65 While it is the character of Franceschina who evokes this context of a specific international female performer, it is Cocledemoy who displays this range and skill in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan. This character chooses from a number of European languages and, in act four scene three, he imitates the style of his fellow actor, through his mimicry of Franceschina’s gibberish. The boys’ company is thus aligned with an international context of female performance, as it was in 1602 by the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, and this context is again invoked to set off the talents of the English child players. However, the play also parodies this Italian actress, through Franceschina’s mingling of the range of languages and Cocledemoy’s mockery of her jumbled language. The performances of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, therefore, are sites in which issues of national identity and the concerns pertaining to the invasion of English culture by a range of European practices may be interrogated. It achieves this in part through this theatrical image and a parody of non-English, in this case Italian, theatrical practice.

The national identity of the child players The English male-child performer is integral to the interrogations of the changing status of the nation offered by these plays. He is foregrounded through the metatheatricality of the issues of language and performance and through the allusions to an international theatrical context. As The Dutch Courtesan suggests, the ability to understand and manipulate various languages and the associated ability to successfully perform and move between differing roles are perceived to be the domain of the English male. The boy player, trained in the language required to perform this range of nationalities and who parodies alternative theatrical contexts, is situated at a privileged vantage point from which, through his performance, he can comment on the state of London and English culture in the early years of the Jacobean reign. In doing so, the child player becomes an international figure and is interpreted by an international audience. The French ambassador’s reading of the children’s performances of Scottish and French identity within the space of a few days indicates the significance of this performance in London for a wider European audience. Although De La Boderie does not actually view their performance, but bases his comments on reports of it, he nevertheless reads the act of performance and foregrounds it in this international context. Furthermore,

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it is significant that he does not specify that these players are the child players of the Children of the Revels; he merely locates the performance of the Byron plays in the repertoire of the company who have previously been involved in controversy for their performance of these plays and the Scottish mines play.66 The French ambassador thus locates this performance within a repertoire and tradition of offensive representations of contemporary affairs and particularly of imitations of royal figures in terms of their national associations by these players. While it is probable that this is a result of the context of the letter, written to the Secretary of State in France who may not have been familiar or interested in the various London playing companies, it discursively constructs the Children of the Queen’s Revels as known for their performances of King and nation. The child players described in this letter do not only mimic the French Queen and the English and Scottish King; they are members of a company which repeatedly stages such figures and interrogates and exposes the instabilities of national identity. The Queen’s Revels thus pose a potential threat to contemporary national and courtly identity, and are particularly notable for their dissident representations of James and of Scottish identity. The children’s company patronised by Queen Anna and who regularly perform before King James I are constructed culturally and imaginatively through these performances and through the local and international commentaries on these performances as a national and courtly entity. To a certain extent, therefore, the impetus underlying the use of this troupe of players to examine the complex and shifting concepts of national identity in later performances, such as those of the Byron plays, build on the children’s reputation for this – as they become associated with such dissident representations of court and nation, they are rendered suitable for further acts. These early performances perhaps take advantage of the patronage of the Queen and the anomalous licensing situation, as Dutton and Clare suggest, but it is also possible that it is because of this proximity to the court that the children’s company is particularly significant for such performances. As the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania’s account indicates, the children’s company institutionally aligned with the court is perceived to signify courtly identity and Englishness. It is as a distinct English institution, therefore, that the Children of the Queen’s Revels is allocated a heightened significance in representing national culture.

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However, the players’ status as child performers also grants them a highly charged position from which to address questions of national identity. The boy players are not only expertly placed to offer an effective critique of court and nation in performance because of their junior status or their aptitude for mimicry; they are particularly suited to comment on these issues because of the function frequently undertaken by the child performer in the wider context of English performance culture. As noted in the introduction to this book, children regularly performed significant symbolic roles in court and civic pageantry in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland and England.67 In such performances, the child often operated as a symbol of the future – their own future or the future of the city, court or nation that they addressed at that moment. Barbara Ravelhofer has illuminated the symbolic potential of children who frequently performed in court masques, arguing that they are employed as both ‘messengers of the past’, representing all that they have inherited from their cultural and social background, also inviting a glance to the future as they give way to the adult generation.68 Michael Witmore and Carol Rutter have examined the use of children in Tudor civic pageantry, particularly in Elizabeth I’s coronation pageant, in which children deliver a political message and, according to Rutter, privilege the future.69 Children performed similar roles in Scottish pageantry, including at the entry of Anna of Denmark to Edinburgh in 1590 in which a child dressed as the king, and a pageant greeting James on his return to Scotland in 1617, when a the nine-year-old son of a schoolmaster delivered a speech in Hebrew.70 As Meradith McMunn points out, such pageants establish links between children and their culture as its ‘interpreters and heritors’.71 The child performer functions as a symbol of inheriting national culture, interpreting it for the present and thus indicating its promise for the future. The child players of the city playing company patronised by the Queen were located within this tradition and concept of children’s performance. Their performances were thus similarly symbolically empowered in the development of concepts of national identity. As these examples also indicate, it was common practice in English and Scottish culture for the child to represent the King. However, problems arise when the child player utilises this position to critique the King, as demonstrated by the performances of the English children’s playing companies and the international commentary on them.

4 Playing Children: Education and Youth Culture in the Early Modern Theatre

Peter Bruegel’s painting, Children’s Games (1560), famously depicts the diverse forms of play undertaken by early modern children in its representation of a range of activities, including the wearing of masks, dressing up and the imitation of bridal and baptismal processions. Play and recreation, particularly imitation as a form of play, were perceived to be important activities for children in the period. As Edward Snow has noted, such games may be interpreted either as carnivalesque acts that mock adult behaviour or as a serious education and rehearsal for adulthood.1 In other words, the imitation undertaken by children in their games may function as an assertion of their status as children in distinction from adults and simultaneously as an essential developmental activity. Furthermore, the dressing-up games of Bruegel’s children bear a remarkable similarity to the activities of the theatrical player. As discussed in the introduction to this book, theatre was aligned with the activities of children in a range of early modern contexts.2 In his Discoveries, Ben Jonson juxtaposes the child and the theatrical player as he draws on the image of the child as the imitator or mimic.3 Claiming that ‘our whole life is like a play’, he suggests that wee so insist in imitating others, as wee cannot (when it is necessary) returne to our selves: like Children, that imitate the vices of Stammerers, so long, till at last they become such.4 Various forms of imitation and play are implied in Jonson’s anecdote. The comparison between the professional activity of the theatres and 92

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the leisure of children and the correlation between the individual, the child and the player partake, on the one hand, in common early modern anti-theatrical discourse. By suggesting that through imitation one’s identity is transformed and by comparing this to what takes place in a play, Jonson assumes the prevalent accusation of this discourse – that through performance the actor mutates into his role. Yet the primary target of this jibe is neither the theatre nor the player; instead the player and the child are evoked in order to critique the common social practice of imitating others, which Jonson suggests is similar to that which regularly takes place on the stage and is a form of children’s play. The real danger in imitating others is the potential that it has to permanently alter the self. In choosing theatre and children’s mimicry to effectively convey this danger, Jonson depends on the perceptions of the child and the player as shapeable entities. While the player is represented in pro- and anti-theatrical commentaries as a protean figure that can potentially become anything, various late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century tracts on childhood, age and education describe children in a similar manner and represent childhood and youth as formative stages in the life cycle.5 Childhood and performance, therefore, intersect in early modern educational practices, the games of children and the theatre. The child who is a player, who regularly performs a range of parts on the stage and who is trained and brought up in the theatrical institution, might be particularly vulnerable to this repeated rhetorical reshaping. Yet, to an extent, this is limited to the realm of the imaginary. Of course, children performing the roles in this theatre do not actually become the adult parts that they play; but, through the training for and performing these roles, they acquire many of the skills necessary to behave as the character-type. Furthermore, as Kate Chedgzoy has argued, performance offers something more substantial: [T]he pure intrinsic pleasure of play – of performance as that which does not merely reiterate a particular social self, but offers temporary, provisional opportunity to inhabit another self in the act of pretending to be someone else, acting a theatrical role, thus expands the performer’s sense of the possibilities of selfhood.6 This chapter investigates the ways in which play and performance enable the boys of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels to explore such

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possibilities of selfhood. It considers playing in the theatre and as the activity of children as an educational tool, as a rite of passage and as a space in which children can articulate their distinct identities as youths. In the ritual of play and in the cultures of youth created by the children’s playing companies, early modern children are provided with an opportunity for self-representation and to negotiate their developing selfhoods.

Education and play The relationship which Ben Jonson posits between the child and the player in his Discoveries extends the exploration of the relationship between childhood and performance in his dramatic writing for the Queen’s Revels in its various formations from 1600 to 1610. Cynthia’s Revels, for example, performed by Children of the Chapel in 1600 includes an induction, which, like John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, draws attention to the children performing the play.7 Jonson’s induction brings three of the child players on stage with a voice reprimanding them as ‘Children’.8 The quarrels between the players as they discuss the play that is to come and the practices of their theatre reveal the methods of training the actors in their parts, with one child player insisting that he ‘studied’ (‘Induction’, l. 6) the part first and another claiming, ‘That’s all one, if the Author thinke I can speake it better’ (‘Induction’, ll. 7–8). In a manner similar to many of the children’s plays discussed in the previous chapters, it also passes comment on the players’ sexual identities as one boy claims, ‘I’lde crie, a rape, but that you are children’ (‘Induction’, ll. 102–3) and another describes them as the author’s ‘engles’ (‘Induction’, l. 166). Moreover, in a fascinating moment of self-referential performance the children even play themselves, as one boy takes on the part of the child player, claiming, ‘I step-forth like one of the children, and aske you, Would you have a stoole, sir?’ (‘Induction’, ll. 139–40) and another pretends to be the audience member partaking in this theatre’s common practice of sitting on the stage. This induction, like others written for the children’s companies, thus reveals much about the practices of preparing for performance, creating character and acting in this theatre. It suggests that the children are adequately practised in and capable of taking on any role – even the role of performing the self in this brief yet comic metatheatrical act. Significantly, the ways in which they are

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trained for, study and practise their performances are central to this representation. The training of youths to perform new roles is an issue that recurs in Cynthia’s Revels beyond the induction. The play centres on the training of the youthful Asotus, the orphaned son of a citizen, as a courtier by the more experienced Amorphus and concludes with the formal initiation of the former into Cynthia’s court. Asotus’s training is described in diverse ways through the course of the play. Primarily, it is figured as an imitation and as a theatrical performance as Mercury describes Asotus as Amorphus’s ‘Zani’ (2.3.102), claiming that he doth most of these trickes after him; sweates to imitate him in every thing (to a haire) except a beard, which is not yet extant [ . . . ] speakes as he speakes, lookes, walkes, goes so in clothes, and fashion: is in all as if he were moulded of him. (2.3.103–8) Asotus’s transformation from citizen’s son to courtier thus initially takes the form of an imitation of Amorphus’s speech, action, appearance and clothing. As in Jonson’s Discoveries, the individual who imitates others is imagined as a player, or more specifically in this instance as the foreign commedia dell’arte ‘Zani’.9 The implications of this comparison are clear. Firstly, imitation is a form of performance that produces a simulation, albeit a professional and convincing one. Secondly, courtly identity is parodied here as it is represented as something that can be easily performed. This critique is developed further when Crites, the scholar, describes courtliness as a ‘pageant’ (3.4.4) and the courtier as ‘Made all of clothes and face’ (3.4.23) and as ‘some subtle PROTEUS, one / can change and varie with all formes he sees’ (3.4.42–3). Crites thus dissolves the boundaries between the shifting performer and the shallow courtier in order to deride courtly behaviour. Yet, in doing so, he aligns the courtier and the actor. Both are characterised by the ability to perform a role and to shift between parts – a characteristic also suggested by the name Amorphus, which implies change and a lack of a definitive and stable identity. Humorously, a beard is the only aspect of Amorphus that Asotus cannot imitate, and it is in this that Asotus is established as a youthful mimic. While he can adequately perform other elements of courtliness, he remains a child. This portrayal of Asotus as child pervades

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the descriptions of his training and imitation. The depiction of the relationship between the two characters draws on early modern concepts of the relationship between parent and child, which envisage the child as an extension and reproduction of paternal identity.10 The terminology and imagery of printing, evoked here through the use of the term ‘mould’, is commonly used to define this relationship in early modern English culture, and is perhaps most frequently utilised as a metaphor for the relationship of the individual to literary works, in which the author presents himself as the father and the work is imagined to function as a child would, as a continuation of his name and image of the self.11 In the dedication to his father in Youth’s Instruction, William Martyn clarifies the analogies between children and books in relation to the father. He claims ‘Children are Bookes; and Bookes mens children are; / In them is stampt the Fathers character’.12 Books and children mirror the author-parent and provide a material continuation of him. The parallels between the relationship of Amorphus and Asotus and this familial one are evident from the first meeting of the two, when the former claims to see in the latter ‘another my-selfe in mine eye’ (1.4.136). The play thus imagines Asotus’s training within a familial context and aligns it with the parental control over a child. In educational and child-rearing manuals of the period, parents are also presented as being responsible for moulding their impressionable children not only as copies of themselves, but in order to assist the development of youths into appropriate adults. Hezekiah Woodward’s Childe’s Patrimony (1640), for example, refers to youth as a ‘flexible’ stage in life and claims that those in their young and tender years may be ‘bowed this way, or that way’.13 Comparing children to potter’s clay which ‘may readily be fashioned into any shape, and like softe waxe, which soone receives any print’, he characterises children according to their capacity to be fashioned.14 Francis Lenton’s The Young Man’s Whirligig (1629) also highlights the malleability of childhood, as he refers to the ‘softer mindes’ of youths which ‘Are apt to any faire impressions’.15 Through these images of wax and clay, of moulding and printing, the child is portrayed as a pliable entity which may potentially be fashioned into any form. Furthermore the impressions made on the youth during early life are represented as having a formative effect, at least according to these tracts. The function of this insistence on the child’s impressionability

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is to urge parents and teachers to accept responsibility for shaping children under their authority in appropriate ways. In his comparison of the child to ‘an emptie new vessell’ in The Education of Children in Learning (1588), William Kempe again implies that the child may be shaped in any way, but stresses that like this vessel the child is most ‘apt to receive that which is first taught, and that which is first taught, sticketh deepeth in memorie, whether it be good or bad’.16 The child’s future identity in adulthood, according to Kempe, is determined by the training and influences received during childhood. In a similar vein, The Court of Good Counsell (1607) warns that ‘these things are kept best in the memory, which are learned in youth’.17 As Stephen Greenblatt has recognised, the numerous books pertaining to children in the period, which include tracts on pregnancy and birth, parenthood, childrearing, education and manners, all insist on the need to mould identity during the periods of infancy, childhood and youth.18 While these tracts present idealised ideas that do not necessarily reflect actual practices of rearing children in the period, they are significant cultural documents which characterise childhood as the stage of life during which identity is formed. However, although during childhood the individual is malleable, the identity formed during these periods of life is construed as fixed and unchanging. This may be a result of the need to project order onto categories of identity in the early modern period, as it aligns any fluidity in identity with the child and then suggests that children can be influenced. While Greenblatt references such tracts as evidence of the culture’s desire to control the self and of the sense that identity was manipulable and could be fashioned, his analysis overlooks what effect such texts and discursive concepts of identity have on the child. As many scholars note, his focus is on the fashioning of a particular gendered, class, and racial adult identity.19 This recurrence of the language of moulding and fashioning in texts on childhood and youth, however, also imparts something about the early modern child. It produces a cultural construct of the malleability of identity as a characteristic specific to children and youths. A good education is, unsurprisingly, frequently cited in such texts as the key factor to suitably controlling youth. In The English Gentleman (1630), Richard Brathwait compares education to the binding of a baby after birth so that he may be ‘fashioned to the forme’ and emphasises the necessity of a good education in youth – an analogy

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also used in Bartholomew Batt’s earlier treatise, The Christian Man’s Closet (1581).20 This context of education is also evoked in the descriptions of Asotus’s training in Cynthia’s Revels. In order to become the courtier he must complete three stages of training described as ‘elementarie, practique, and theorique’ (2.3.38). The first, the elementary, itself a term referring to the early modern school system, is described in terms of children’s education. It is, according to Asotus, ‘one but newly enter’d, or as it were in the alphabet, or vt-re-mi-fa-sol-la of courtship’ (2.48–9). The trainee courtier is further described through the language of the grammar school syllabus when Amorphus compares the ‘young grammaticall courtier, as with your neophyte-player’ (3.1.3–4). The ‘neophyte-player’ on one level simply defines the player as a beginner, but also contains implications of being a convert to this institution, as the term originally meant a new convert, particularly to a religious order.21 Courtship is represented as something that must be learned and Asotus as someone who has newly embarked on the necessary educational process. The primary aim of the early modern education system, drawing on the ideals of Cicero and Quintilian, was, of course, to produce the perfect orator, that is, someone who could speak eloquently and persuasively, utilising the techniques of rhetoric.22 Training in the skills of rhetoric, in invention (the creation of ideas), disposition (the ordering of ideas), elocution (adequate expression of the idea in language), memory (committing the idea to mental record) and pronunciation (control of voice and gesture in presenting the idea), was given in grammar schools through the study of models such as those of Erasmus, Cicero, Quintilian, Horace and Ovid. These skills were further developed through practice in the daily classroom exercises used in teaching Latin grammar, in which the schoolboy, after learning the precepts of the subject, imitated these models in both writing and speech.23 This required and developed skills in memory and pronunciation. The orator was also required to effectively convey meaning and emotion not only through language and voice but also through the emphasis of the verbal meaning through action, that is, through bodily gesture. As the training of Asotus indicates, the courtier was also required to have these skills in oration, and similar training methods were used to cultivate them. Asotus’s training involves elements of both private and tutored study. He must repeat statements given to him by his teacher, and learn to ‘make use of any

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of these beginnings, or some other out of your owne invention’ (3.5.86–7). Amorphus’s instruction to either repeat his beginnings or construct his own reveals that it is the mode of delivery that is valued, not the ability to create an original speech. Indeed it is the manner of Asotus’s delivery that provokes greatest concern. He must learn how to memorise and repeat set speeches by ‘practis[ing] an houre at your lodging, some few formes that I have recall’d’ (3.1.21–2) as initially he is not ‘audacious inough’ (3.1.32). In order to overcome this Asotus must undergo a series a developments, such as practice ‘once or twice a day’ (3.5.137–8), gaining wit, and going to the court to gain the acquaintance of a waiting woman and then of a lady. By undertaking these various activities Asotus will in time be ‘imbolden(ed)’ (3.1.57) to further achievements. Boldness and audacity were crucial traits of the orator.24 Indeed audacity was a masculine trait, which in this educational system must be cultivated in every boy as part of his development. Acquiring the ability to deliver a speech with audacity is thus a rite of passage for the early modern boy.25 One of the methods used by a variety of early modern educators in schools and universities to provide the boys with audacity was performance.26 This trait, and the others required of the orator, were commonly developed through participation in school and courtly theatricals. James Whitelocke, a pupil at the Merchant Taylor’s school from 1575–88, under the mastership of Richard Mulcaster (headmaster from 1561–86), claimed that the scholars performed plays at court and ‘by that means [Mulcaster] taughte them good behaviour and audacitye’.27 In their defences of university theatricals, William Gager and Thomas Heywood also emphasise the benefits of performance for developing this trait in the students. Gager insists that the performance of plays at Christ Church in Oxford serve to ‘embolden owre pathe; to trye their [the students’] voices and confirme their memoryes; to frame their speeche; to conforme them to convenient action’ and thus argues that performance forms his scholars by emboldening them and developing their memories and their speech.28 In his 1612 defence of university theatre, An Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood continues this now clichéd argument that by performing in ‘tragedyes, comedyes, histories, pastorals and shewes, publikely acted’ the scholars are taught the abilities to construct and defend an argument. Performance, he claims is ‘necessary for the emboldening of their junior schollers to arme them with

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audacity against they come to bene imployed in any publike exercise’, and it also ‘teacheth audacity to the bashfull grammarian’.29 Heywood’s repeated emphasis on the training of the boy in audacity further demonstrates the benefits of performance. It is through performance that the youth is developed from the bashful schoolboy to the audacious man. For Asotus this desired emboldened and masculine identity is that of the courtier; it is developed by practising his newly learned speeches and performing his new role before other courtiers. Yet, Asotus, like the boys in the early modern education system, is not just trained and fashioned as a courtier or as an orator. The effect of using performance as an educational tool in the schools and in training Asotus to imitate and represent character in the play is that these boys are also trained as players. Asotus is equipped with the skills to represent a variety of roles, one of which is that of the courtier. He is also instructed in how to create a range of character types by imitating the ‘face of every your most noted species of persons, as your merchant, your scholer, your soldier, your lawyer, your courtier’ (2.3.17–18 – italics original). Any character, this training suggests, can be presented through the setting of the face. The representation of a particular type through such visual signifiers has notable similarities to the creation of characters on the early modern stage, and the imitation of these parts is explained in theatrical terms. Amorphus demands that Asotus ‘observe me, set your face and enter’ (2.3.68–9). This is an element of theatrical practice that is also parodied in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, when in act three scene two Rosaline and Balurdo both enter enacting the ‘setting of faces’ with the aid of mirrors held by their servants.30 Asotus thus becomes a player, entering his scene with the appropriate facial expression. In act three scene four, the actions of the ‘Neophyte’ courtier are further described utilising the language of the theatre by Crites (3.4.55–86). In the process of glazing his face, pruning his clothes and perfuming his hair, he is described as preparing for his performance of this courtly identity through the theatrical terminology of repeating his speech ‘Like an unperfect prologue’ (3.4.58) and taking action in ‘scenes’ and ‘acts’ incorporating entrances, exits and even a dumbshow. The identities of the trainee courtier, the schoolboy and the player are idiomatically aligned. Being trained to imitate is thus central to the representation of what it means to be a child, a player and a courtier in Cynthia’s Revels.

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Asotus’s identity is forged through the imagined structures of the school, the court and the theatre. These institutions intersect in his training and each is represented as enhancing the educative practices of another. Through training in rhetoric and the emboldening of boys, the establishments of the grammar school, university, court and theatre evoked in Cynthia’s Revels function as developmental institutions, fashioning the boy’s potential to be masculine.

Training the child player The player performing the part of Asotus must also complete such training in order to take on this role. The theatrical playing company is thus integral to the education and development of its youthful members. However, it fulfils this function in a much wider sense than simply preparing players to perform particular characters. While the school, court and theatre metaphorically overlap in Jonson’s play, these institutions intersect tangibly in the establishment of the children’s playing companies. The child players of the Children of the Chapel were, according to the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, simultaneously trained as schoolboys, courtly servants and players. In 1602 this visitor to the Blackfriars theatre claims that the boys of the Children of the Chapel were trained in ‘the art of singing, and to learn to perform on various sorts of musical instruments, also at the same time to carry on their studies’ at the request of the Queen.31 Their weekly performances at court, however, specifically developed their identities as members of this institution. These performances were given, the Duke suggests, ‘in order that they may practice courtly manners’.32 As Barbara Ravelhofer proposes in relation to the participation of the children of courtiers in masques, training for performance and participation in court theatricals served to fashion youths as courtiers and also functioned as the first stage of developing their own careers as members of the court.33 It is thus potentially through performances at the court that the child players were trained as courtly servants and initiated into this culture. Although the company was significantly altered by James I’s accession in 1603, this courtly training continued to be integral to the company’s status as they became servants of the court through their new identity as the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1604.

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Evolving from the chorister group of St Paul’s Cathedral, the primary role of the Children of Paul’s was to serve the church and their initial training was as choristers. However, the choristers received further training indicated in the instructions given by the Dean and Chapter to Thomas Giles, master of the choristers of St Paul’s from 1584 to 1591, that [w]hen the children shall be skilfull in musicke, that they shall be convenientlye to serve the Churche [ . . . ] Thomas shall suffer them to resorte to paules schole two howers in the forenone and one hower in the afternone [ . . . ] that they may learne the principles of gramer, and after as they shall be forwardes learne the catechisms in Laten which before they learned in Englishe and other good bookes taught in the [ . . . ] Schole.34 Once sufficiently trained in music, the boys, therefore, also received a more scholarly education through this limited participation in the lessons at St Paul’s Grammar School, which probably continued into the early seventeenth century.35 In 1598 Richard Smythe, the Cathedral’s verger, claims in the Visitation Report of Bishop Bancroft that the boys ‘are sufficientlie instructed their places as I have hard by those that have skill in musicke’; and in 1602, Edward Pearce, a manager in the playing company from 1599 to 1606, claims that he is ‘employed for the education’ of the children.36 Although Pearce tries to detach himself from the boys’ theatrical activities by insisting on his role as educator, he is later condemned in William Crashaw’s 1608 sermon at Paul’s cross, as he who ‘teacheth children to play [ . . . ] is not an instructor, but a [ . . . ] destroyer of children’.37 The training of the boys as choristers, therefore, may also have served as their training as actors. The children’s status as actors and possibly also as choristers and part-time grammar school scholars perhaps indicates that they were trained in at least some skills relevant to each of these roles. The institutions of the children’s playing companies thus functioned to a certain extent as substitute schools for the young boy players; that is, they were institutions in which youths were brought together for formal education and training. Through the training in music, grammar and rhetoric the boys were developed as skilled choristers, were educated in a condensed form of the grammar school

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syllabus and these skills were further displayed and developed through their participation in plays. While the extensive use of music, singing and dance throughout the play is not a feature that is exclusive to the children’s companies, and the genre of the play and audience tastes may determine the inclusion of these elements in the performance, it does illustrate the abilities of the children as players and offered an opportunity for them to display particular skills.38 Furthermore, plays such as John Marston’s What You Will, performed by the Children of Paul’s in 1601, draw attention to the children’s identities as schoolboys. Act two scene two of Marston’s play is set in a schoolroom and presents, in great detail, a master giving five young schoolboys a Latin lesson. The processes of learning Latin through memory and pronunciation, common in contemporary grammar schools, are depicted here when the schoolmaster instructs the boys to repeat their lesson without their books. The lesson presented is closely modelled on William Lily’s Latin Grammar, a standard textbook in English schools in the period.39 This explicit reference to the methods of educational training in English grammar schools perhaps appealed to the knowledge of the original audience at Paul’s playhouse; but it may also have operated as a highly self-conscious reference to the training and education of the child actors.40 It is an opportunity for the boys to display their learning. The representation of learning and recital further draws attention to the necessary preparation of the child actors for these parts, which they have learned and are now reciting in performance. This moment reveals the educational and theatrical training offered to the boys of the children’s playing companies and indicates the overlaps between these two methods of training. This scene indicates further links between the grammar school and the theatre and explores the unique practices of recruiting and training players in the children’s companies when the teacher claims he had been ‘solicited’ to grant Holifernes Pippo ‘leave to play the lady in comedies presented by children’ (2.2.797–8). The school is presented as a recruiting ground for actors, and the schoolboy consequently seems to be particularly suitable as a player. This is evident in the practices of the Children of the Chapel in the early years of its revival. Henry Clifton’s 1601 bill of complaint against the Chapel managers claims that not only was Clifton’s son, Thomas, taken on his way to school to become a player, but that other grammar scholars, including Nathan Field and John Motteram, had been impressed. The other boys

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impressed were apprentices, who would have at least had basic literacy skills, and Salomon Pavy, who may have been a player of Paul’s at this time.41 The managers of the Chapel company appear to have favoured children who had received some educational training, and particularly those who were already skilled players. Although the newly recruited players may have had at least some basic training in the skills required of the players, the theatres nevertheless functioned as educative spaces. Hamlet’s reference to the child actors as ‘little eyases’, an eyas being ‘a young hawk taken from the nest for the purpose of training, or one whose training is incomplete’ represents the institutions of the children’s playing companies as training institutions that provided an alternative space to the home in which youths may be trained up.42 The 1604 and 1610 patents for the Children of the Queen’s Revels specify that the managers must ‘trayne’ and ‘provyde and bring uppe’ the children.43 This contrasts with similar patents for the adult playing companies which do not aim to ‘bring up’ their players, but instead ‘exercise the art of playing’ to perform plays that ‘they have already studied or hereafter shall studie’.44 All theatres, however, are imaginatively aligned with schools in contemporary anti-theatrical discourse and condemned for the negative impact of their activities on the boys that they train. Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse (1579), for example, terms the theatre ‘the schoole, where so many abuses flourish’.45 The theatrical institution is a ‘nurserie of idleness to the Players’, adult and children, according to his Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), which claims that the plays are their study, rendering them liable to corruption, because ‘as his study is, such are his manners’.46 William Prynne’s later tract, Histriomastix (1633), also highlights the dangers of the school of the theatre and argues that youths are particularly vulnerable. He stresses the effect of this school on the players who are ‘trained up from their cradles’ and condemns parents who ‘consecrate’ their youths to the stage to be ‘trained up in the school of vice, the Play-house (as if their natures were not prone enough to sinne)’.47 Claiming that it is ‘no wonder if we discover a whole grove of these notorious acted sinnes and villanies budding forth continually in their ungodly lives’, Prynne represents early modern theatre as an establishment that trains and has a negative influence on its members.48 The training offered to the players in their youth in the theatrical institution forms and determines their future identities and actions. The children’s playing companies,

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however, are unique in their explicit statement of their function as establishments for training and bringing up youths. Yet as the Children of the Queen’s Revels developed away from the chorister company, it is unclear exactly what training was provided for the players. Henry Clifton insists that the boys impressed in 1600 were in ‘noe way able or fitt for singing, nor by anie of the sayd confederates endeavoured to be taught to singe’.49 His son is instead forced to learn by heart ‘a scroll of paper containing part of one of their said plays’.50 Instead of being primarily trained as choristers and scholars, there is a shift to training in techniques particular to the professional theatre, such as the handling of the scrolls on which the actor’s part was written. Some of the children may also have received individual assistance in the ‘study’ of their parts, either from the author, as Cynthia’s Revels implies, or from one of the company’s managers.51 It is also possible that some of the players may have been educated in a more private manner within the context of the playing company as Nathan Field seems to have received private tutoring with Jonson.52

Becoming the part This process of studying a part or a play indicates a further lexical overlap between the scholarly and theatrical institutions. The term refers to the educational processes of learning and the theatrical activity of memorising and exercising oneself in the rendering of a part in the early modern period.53 It evokes a dual sense of the child as student and actor and illustrates the similarity between the skills required of the boy in either of these roles. Yet, as the plays performed by these companies imply, studying the theatrical part is more complex than simply memorising and reciting lines; it refers to the creation of this part on stage. When Mercury and Cupid discuss their disguise as pageboys in Cynthia’s Revels they use this term, claiming, since wee are turn’d cracks, let’s studie to be like cracks; practise their language, and behaviours, and not with dead imitation: act freely, carelessly, and capriciously, as if our veines ran with quicksilver, and not utter a phrase, but what shall come forth steept in the verie brine of conceipt, and sparkle like salt in fire. (2.1.4–10)

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Mercury’s language functions on a metatheatrical level to indicate the parallels between the methods through which these characters disguise themselves and the methods used to create characters on this stage by the boy players performing gods disguised as boys. In order to appear as pages, the two gods embark on the process of acting and manipulate their language and imitate the behaviour of pages. Yet Mercury’s description of this performance indicates the level to which the characters must immerse themselves in their new roles in order ‘to be like cracks’. They must effectively become these parts in the eyes of their audience, the other characters, and they achieve this through studying the parts. In The Guls Hornbook (1609), Thomas Dekker implies that studying a part impacts on the player’s selfhood. Claiming that to study how to become a gallant is to ‘study to be an actor’, Dekker aligns the gallant and the actor in a manner similar to Jonson’s.54 Through the construction ‘studying to be’, he posits a fundamental connection between studying and identity and suggests that it enables a substantial transformation into the object of study. While the term refers specifically to the theatrical context in Cynthia’s Revels, it also reveals the potential for the player who studies a part in this theatre to be affected by this experience. The language of turning, being and being like in Mercury’s speech allocates the act of imitation a transformative power. The process of studying a part in the early modern theatre and the methods of character creation on this stage potentially enable a transformation of the self. However, the successful manifestation of a part on this stage depends on being externally recognised as such. In other words, the player is only successful in producing this theatrical identity if the audience recognise it and accept him to be such – at least for the space of the play. Mercury’s concern is that in order to be pages they must appear as such to their audience, that is, the other characters of the play. Cupid exploits the dependency on being perceived in a particular way by an audience, claiming that he will continue to be ‘blind CUPID to’ (2.1.19) Mercury, but before his mistress will be ‘page, boy and sirha’ (2.1.22). Therefore, although the individual’s studying and practising of a part enables a limited transformation in this play and on this stage, the successful creation of a new role ultimately depends on others.55 The relationship between childhood, imitation and transformation is further explored in the performance of John Marston’s What You

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Will by the Children of Paul’s. In this play, the reported drowning of a merchant, Albano, provides the opportunity for other characters to imitate him. His supposed widow, Celia, is due to marry Laverdure, a French knight, but her brothers, Randolfo and Adrian, join with Jacomo, who is in love with her, to prevent her remarriage by disguising Francisco, a perfumer, as the returned Albano. However, their plotting is overheard by Laverdure’s page, who warns the other characters of an impostor. This is the point at which Albano, who is in fact not drowned and has returned, makes himself known, which evidently results in multiple layers of mistaken identity and confusion. Laverdure is convinced that Albano is the perfumer in disguise; Randolfo, Adrian and Jacomo assume that someone else (a fiddler) is also disguised as Albano; and Albano is so overwhelmed by the insistence of others that he is not Albano that he begins to doubt himself. In this comic plot, Francisco’s impersonation of Albano has obvious parallels with the performance of a role on this stage. He is trained to impersonate the part of Albano when, in act three scene one, the brothers and Jacomo clothe him and instruct him how to adapt his action and language, to ‘grow proud’ and to ‘grow in heat and stut’, that is, imitate Albano’s recognisable trait of stuttering.56 This impersonation utilises the techniques of disguise, acting and theatrical training. Francisco learns his role through repeating and imitating Albano on his return (4.1.1651–6), evoking the image of the schoolboy learning his lesson, presented earlier in the same play, and of an actor imitating those of a higher social status. Moreover, Francisco’s actions resemble that of a player most strikingly in that his primary purpose is to convince others that he is Albano. Albano also embarks on the process of creating character and responding to the demands in the play; yet this is a more complex process for him as the other characters refuse to accept his performance. Having returned from nearly drowning, he must re-learn and re-create his identity. In his rejuvenated state in this moment of rebirth, which follows his alleged death, Albano returns to a state of childhood. Although he ‘was call’d Albano before I was drown’d’, he is no longer assured of his identity and claims ‘now after my resurrection I am I know not’ (4.1.1717–19). Through this resurrection and rebirth, Albano enters a state in which his identity is as yet unformed and unknown. Selfhood is imagined here as developing through time and through testing a range of parts. As in Shakespeare’s

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nominally similar play, Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, performed the year after Marston’s play at the Inns of Court, near-drowning enables a form of rebirth during which the individual can reshape their identity. Albano’s need to re-forge the self, however, is provoked by the refusal of others to recognise him as Albano. Their insistence that he is not Albano causes him to doubt himself, provoking his question ‘Who am I?’ (3.2.1237). He instead demonstrates the ability to assume whatever identity the other characters project unto him. Initially, therefore, he becomes Francisco. In order to ‘be’ Francisco he must learn a new way of speaking and of behaving: Francisco, that’s my name, ‘tis right, ay, ay. What do you lack? What is’t you lack? Right that’s my cry. (3.2.1264–5) Albano here recognises the language suitable to his new role as Francisco and learns his part accordingly. Imitating the stock cry of the perfumer he creates this new part for himself in a manner overlapping with the methods of characterisation in this theatre. However, when Albano’s sense of self is complicated further by Jacomo’s insistence that he is not Francisco, but must be a fiddler in disguise, he is again thrown into doubt: A fiddler, a scraper, a minikin-tickler, a pum, a pum, even now a perfumer, now a fiddler? I will be even what you will; do, do, do, k-k-k-kiss my wife be-be-be-before(4.1.1704–6) Albano is variously recognised as being all of these roles. He becomes the youth, the ‘empty vessel’ or the ‘potter’s clay’, onto which any identity can be imposed or shaped. Albano, however, is imagined and fashioned by the other characters in so many diverse ways that any stable knowledge of who he should be becomes wholly impossible. No longer able to assume the identities required of him, Albano loses his control over language. His speech breaks down as his stutter increases and he does not know how to speak or how to act.57 If, as the anecdote from Jonson’s Discoveries and Mercury’s speech in Cynthia’s Revels suggest, the self is manifested through speech, this lapse into stuttering indicates a complete loss of any sense of self.

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Like the actor, Albano is theoretically able to become any category of identity, but this results in the loss of any stable sense of identity. Similarly, through his performance, Francisco’s sense of self is diminished as he claims ‘I scarce know myself already’ (3.1.930). This conferral of identity by others ultimately impacts upon the individual’s selfhood. In Cynthia’s Revels Cupid, despite his protestations that he will retain his identity as Cupid, finds that as a page ‘I am no-body: I can doe nothing in this disguise’ (4.3.50–1). Through shifting and changing between roles, Albano also loses any sense of who he is. He can no longer imitate or perform any particular identity and thus becomes a completely blank and mouldable character, prepared to be ‘what you will’. This emphatic echoing of the play’s title places the power of identification onto the other rather than the self. Indeed Albano is required to be so many things throughout the play that he is thoroughly characterised by an inability to articulate any sense of self. He is a stutterer from the opening of the play, and it is this characteristic which Francisco imitates in order to represent Albano. It is, therefore, an inability to articulate selfhood which becomes Albano’s identifying characteristic.

Youth culture If theatrical character is created through study and imitation and these actions potentially impact destructively on the selfhood of the imitator, as implied by Jonson’s and Marston’s writings, how is the player affected by performance in the early modern theatre? This is a particularly relevant question for the child who is a player. As a vulnerable and mouldable entity, the child is, according to early modern educational theory and concepts of acting, particularly susceptible to the effects of being trained as a player and of the act of performance. As both children and players, the identities of the boys of the children’s playing companies are repeatedly reshaped through the theatrical process. They learn how to represent and, to an extent, become the parts that the playwrights write for them and are imagined onstage through the audiences’ interpretations of their performances. Through the constant re-imagining of their identities it is possible that the child players would be prohibited from articulating their selfhoods. Yet the children’s performances also permit an examination of

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what it means to be a youth. Youths are granted temporary authority and agency in moments such as the school scene in What You Will, which parodies the experiences of the schoolboys. Bawdy puns, such as the repetition of the Latin word for stones, lapides, mock school learning, rendering it a source of amusement for the boys and empowering them to ridicule the master. This climaxes in the comic statement of ‘all the syrup of my brain is run into my buttocks; and ye spill the juice of my wit, well – ha, sweet, ha, sweet honey Barbary sugar sweet master’ (2. 2. 776–7) from one of the schoolboys, Holifernes Pippo. Pippo’s excessive, crude and gleeful statement is offered in response to the master’s unsuccessful attempts to punish him and his ineffective shouts to another of the pupils to assist him with this and to ‘mount [Pippo], mount him’ (2.2.780). The performance of this subversion of the master’s authority through ridicule by the child actors operates as a moment of release for the boys, echoing, perhaps, the carnivalesque revels of educational institutions, such as the Boy Bishop ceremonies of the choir schools and the Lord of Misrule revels at the universities, in which authority is temporarily suspended and the students are allowed to gain control.58 It is a moment of play in the sense of a game or momentary release; it highlights the experiences of the children and simultaneously provides a space in which they have control in representing, parodying and subverting the system in which they are educated. This humorous mockery of the school lesson is only one element of a larger critique of academic and scholarly training, age and authority in the play. Learning is satirised through the staging of the figure of the scholar, Lampatho Doria. In Lampatho the common features of the dusty, cloistered and crabbed scholar are emphasised through comments on his ‘snarling’ speech (3.2.1115), his own resentment of the waste of lamp oil (2.2.855) and his mourning of the loss of his youth because of his learning of grammar. He claims: A company of old frenetici Did eat my youth, and when I crept abroad, Finding numbness in this nimble age, I fell a-railing; but now soft and slow, I know naught but I naught do know. What shall I do, what plot, what course pursue. (2.2.880–5)

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The reference to ‘railing’ perhaps refers to the common practice of university scholars of disputation. This stylised form of debate put into practice the training of the scholar as a rhetorician and orator, and participation in these exercises of disputation was a form of performance as the scholar became the orator conveying his argument through language, vocal control and bodily gesture before an audience. However, for Lampatho participation in this performance and in other scholarly activities is not beneficial. His description of his life as a scholar represents learning as destructive. The complete devastation of youth in the cannibalistic image of consumption offers a strong condemnation of over-education and charts his transition from youth to adulthood as an immediate lapse into old age through the image of creeping and slowness. For Lampatho, learning and knowledge result in indecision in how to proceed. In this play, the institutional training as a scholar is impractical and leads to the destruction of identity and to old age, interestingly positing a model of youth as the desired category of identity. Performed by the youthful players of the Children of Paul’s in 1601 this moment thus permits the youths to satirise their educational system, as well as assert and celebrate their youth. In the playful nature of this moment the boys of Paul’s are provided with an opportunity to examine and impart something about their experiences of being children. This is only one of a number of plays performed by Paul’s celebrating the distinctiveness of being a child and satirising old age, including Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters and A Trick to Catch an Old One.59 This representation of their own state of being in What You Will, however, is empowered by the fact that they are at this moment gathered together as a group, both fictionally in the play’s school scene and actually in the structure of the playing company. It is through their shared experiences and their entity as a group that they are able to reflect on their identities. Indeed it is perhaps in the forging of a youth group or culture that this moment of carnival and temporary release from authority is permitted, as Natalie Zemon-Davis suggests is the case for French youths gathered in abbeys during the early modern period.60 The school scene of What You Will is paralleled structurally and thematically by the gathering of the pages in act three scene three, which presents a second tableau of a culture of youths. Like the earlier scene this collection of youths creates a moment in which authority may be

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satirised. This is achieved by the pages’ parody of existing social structures as they come together in an imaginative space that is their own, and from which masters and authority figures are absent. The pages construct their own modes of authority as one is parodically designated the role of judge in the figure of ‘Honorificacuminos Bidet, Emperor of Cracks, Prince of Pages’ (3.3.1269–70). Presiding over this collection of youths, Bidet mocks his role as leader and insists upon his own status as a youth, claiming ‘Now let me stroke my beard and I had it, and speak wisely if I knew how’ (3.3.1273–4). He exposes the disparity between his youthful status and that of the seemingly wise adult men usually in authority, thus mocking the complacent wisdom of authority figures and celebrating his own juvenile state. This scene, therefore, presents the singular identities and experiences of youths. Furthermore, this mock court becomes a space in which they explicitly address their own interests and experiences as youths. The pages share their experiences of service and each gives an account of the abuses that they have suffered at the hands of their masters. While this further critiques authority, and particularly the gallant, courtier and fool as masters, it also forges a sense of community among the pages. These youths belong to a group that attends specifically to their experiences as young servants. Moreover, it is through the recognition and mocking of these authoritative adult roles that the boys articulate their sense of selfhood. The mimicking of adult roles, in this play and on the early modern stage, thus potentially functions as a moment in which the child begins to attend to his selfhood – not through becoming adult via imitation but through asserting his distinctiveness. Holifernes Pippo functions as a tangible link between the community of boys as scholars and the community of pageboys. Having been taken from the school to serve Simplicius Faber, the fool, this is Pippo’s first experience of the pages’ gathering. Before being accepted into this group, however, he must ‘perform a valorous, virtuous, and religious exploit first in desert of your order’ (3.3.1349–50). He must, in other words, prove himself worthy before being initiated into this alternative youth culture. Like Asotus in Cynthia’s Revels, his new identity may not be fully realised until he has been accepted into the new community through which he is fashioning this new self. This initiation ceremony is specific to this institution, as Pippo must actively contribute to this ridiculing of authority by disguising himself

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as a merchant’s wife in order to ‘Cozen thy master’ (3.3.1352), which he does successfully in act five scene one by gulling Simplicius and stealing his purse. This momentary subversion of authority also serves as an act of initiation for Pippo into his new role as servant. Interestingly it is an act of performance that functions as this induction, enabling a transition from one identity, associated with a particular institution, to another. Like the school scene which may be read in relation to carnivalesque practices of educational institutions, the behaviour of these pages parallels early modern apprentice culture. This temporary fantasy of subversion and dissolution of authority is comparable to the behaviour of apprentices on occasions such as Shrove Tuesday, during which authority was temporarily suspended and the apprentices participated in riots.61 The boy players performing these roles and staging figures such as Lampatho in a parodic and humorous manner are, therefore, engaging in a critique of authority and age. The stage of the child players is a carnivalesque space in which the players have the opportunity to temporarily subvert authority and explore their own distinct identities as children and youths.

Rites of passage Play, therefore, impacts on the children of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels in diverse ways. As an educational tool it emboldens them and teaches them audacity, hence stimulating their transition from boyhood to manhood. As players in a professional capacity they are further trained in the skills of performance which include the techniques of ‘study’ necessary for the creation of character on the early modern stage, and this provides the boys with the ability to explore new identities. As a moment of carnival and part of the leisure and games of youth, playing becomes an activity through which the child players may temporarily subvert authority and articulate their own senses of their distinct identities as children. Moreover, as the example of Pippo suggests, the act of playing or performing may also function as a ritual or rite of passage, stimulating and negotiating the development of the child. By extension it is possible that the performances of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels are the means through which these child players are initiated into a youth culture and begin to forge their selfhoods. Pippo’s initiation act as a

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pageboy simultaneously functions on a metatheatrical level as his initiation into the identity of a player. His potential as a player is initially noted in the schoolroom scene when the pedant reports, ‘I was solicited to grant him leave to play the lady in comedies presented by children, but I knew his voice was too small and his stature too low’ (2.2.797–9). He is originally unable to function as a player as he has not developed the necessary attributes for performance. Pippo reiterates his inability to perform the female role when allocated his task to disguise himself as the merchant’s wife, stating, ‘alas I am too little, speak too small, go too gingerly: by my troth I fear I shall look too fair’ (3.3.1378–80). However, by the close of the play he has performed this part successfully, to the extent that he fools his desired audience when his master perceives him to be the merchant’s wife. Through performing this role Pippo undertakes his first level of training as a player and is initiated into the theatrical culture of the children’s playing companies. It is possible that this mirrors and indeed communicates the experience of the boy player of Paul’s who took this role of Pippo. The players of the children’s companies are thus initiated into a performance culture through an act of performance, and their development into experienced players is achieved through their continuing theatrical activities.62 Rafe, the newly apprenticed player in Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, performed by the Children of the Revels in c. 1607, might also be read as representative of some of the experiences of the child players as he develops in his talents as a player during the play. While his mistress claims Rafe ‘hath played before’ at the house of the citizens, his professional training continues through his participation in this play and his ability as a player is ultimately developed through the range of parts that he plays on this stage.63 Yet within the fiction of the play, it is not only in his standing as a player that Rafe advances. He moves from the standing of apprentice, which is the status of his character before he joins the troupe of players, to master, as the first role he performs is that of a grocer. In act one Rafe expresses a desire for further social elevation: What brave spirit could be content to sit in his shop with a flappet of wood and a blue apron before him, selling mithridatum and dragon’s water to visited houses, that might pursue feats of arms,

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and through his noble achievements procure such a famous history to be written of his heroic prowess? (2.248–53) This speech, which is one of Rafe’s audition-like set pieces, sets out the narrative that he will enact during the play. Taking on a new role in this play involves adapting your language to suit the new part, as it did in Cynthia’s Revels and What You Will. In order to become a knight, Rafe claims, he needs to adapt his linguistic register and ‘call all forests and heaths “deserts”, and all horses “palfreys”’ (1.275–6). In act two he becomes this knight and speaks as if ‘he were an emperal’ (2.165); in act four he courts a princess, again adapting to a suitable register and behaviour; and in act five he leads a battle. In successfully performing these roles, Rafe gains experience in creating each of these character types – the knight, the lover and the soldier – and temporarily fulfils his desire for social elevation and realises his fantasy of becoming the hero. However, his social development is limited to fantasy; it is contained within the fiction of the fantastical plot of the play in which a grocer can be transformed into a knight. One of the other boy actors expresses concern at the acts carried out by Rafe. He states that ‘it will show ill favouredly to have a grocer’s prentice to court a king’s daughter’ (4.45–6). This concern operates on a number of levels. In terms of the play within the play, it expresses anxiety over the fact that the character of the grocer’s apprentice, which Rafe was hired to play, has risen to the ranks of courting princesses. It also pertains to the framing plot of that play which is that of Rafe, the apprentice of the Citizen, playing a part which enacts such social transition. Furthermore it raises anxieties pertinent to the actual performance conditions of early seventeenth-century London, in which apprentices perform a variety of parts. It insists upon the status of Rafe, and indeed of all the players performing these roles, as apprentice. Although Rafe imaginatively becomes the knight in the fiction of the play within the play, the other boy actor reaffirms that he is still only an apprentice beyond this world. However, the experience of performance impacts upon Rafe’s development in alternative ways. The Citizen is so impressed by his apprentice’s performance that he promises that he shall promote him in terms of the theatrical roles he performs. Claiming that ‘next year I’ll have him captain of the galley foist’ (5.161), the Citizen recognises

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Rafe the player’s ability for future performances and allocates him the role of captain in the Lord Mayor’s pageant. The play thus concludes by celebrating Rafe as an apprentice player. Furthermore, the final scene which sees Rafe still in character as a grocer-knight shows him calling ‘all the youths together in battleray’ (5.57–8) and bidding farewell to ‘all you good boys in merry London; / Ne’er shall we more upon Shrove Tuesday meet / And pluck down houses of iniquity’ (5.321–3). Thus even when in character as a knight, Rafe ultimately perceives himself as part of a group of apprentices, making reference to the apprentice riots, and celebrates their antics and camaraderie in his final mock-death speech. Therefore, whether or not the experience of performance actually transforms Rafe’s identity or advances his status, as a player or otherwise, his narrative celebrates being a youth in two ways. Like the school and court scenes of What You Will, he explores what it means to be a youth or apprentice. Secondly, playing enables this youth, Beaumont’s character and the player who performs this part in c. 1607, to experiment with a range of roles. According to Erik Erikson’s analysis of twentieth-century adolescents, role experimentation is a characteristic of the adolescent, who, Erikson claims, in the search for adult identity assumes and tries a number of roles and also often attempts to establish a subculture as the first stage in their identity formation.64 Steven Smith historicizes this theoretical approach to adolescent identity to argue that early modern apprentices undergo similar experiences in order to negotiate the transition from childhood and adulthood, even though ‘adolescence’ was not a recognised category and instead this period of life was termed ‘youth’.65 Building on this, I would argue that membership of one of the children’s playing companies also enables this transition for the child player. Playing, by its very nature, offers Rafe an opportunity for role experimentation, specifically a variety of increasingly elevated social roles. It also enables an engagement with shifting sexual identities, which Smith highlights as another aspect of adolescence, through removing the threat to his gendered and sexual identity in his victory over the fantastical representation of the barber-surgeon who has emasculated many knights with his ‘instrument’ (3.248).66 Rafe’s apprenticeship to the playing company thus enables the enactment of his development from a servile and feminised youth to a socially superior and masculine adulthood. Within the course of play Rafe potentially develops

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from boy to man, from apprentice to knight. Yet above all, he effectively evolves from amateur to apprentice professional player. The child player of the Queen’s Revels performing this part also partakes in this latter element. The plays of the children’s companies, therefore, not only conceptualise childhood as process and a period of identity formation, they celebrate what is distinctive about this category and are also the means through which the individual child player ‘expands [his] sense of the possibilities of selfhood’ and begins to assert his own sense of self.67

Repeating childhood While the structures of the theatrical institution, its gender and age dynamics, acting styles, training practices, marketing strategies and the local, national and international location of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels, produce distinct and arresting concepts of the early modern child and child player, performance in the early modern children’s theatre, therefore, also gives the boy players access to a number of class, sexual and gendered identities. By bringing the boys together as players in this establishment, a distinctive community is forged among the youths, producing a form of youth culture within the children’s playing companies, similar to that portrayed in What You Will. This shared culture and an initiation into this community locates the boys in a space in which they may address their own experiences and experiment with new roles that will enable their development from boyhood to manhood. Yet, as institutions which negotiate this transition but provide continuous and repetitive rites of passage, in the form of repeatedly playing new roles, the children’s playing companies, in this respect, simultaneously fix the boys in a perpetual state of childhood and youth.

5 Remembering Childhood: Nathan Field’s Theatrical Career

Nathan Field, remembered in various seventeenth-century tracts, and subsequently, as one of the greatest players of Shakespeare’s age, is an intriguing figure. His theatrical career stretched from his childhood to his adulthood and encompassed a variety of duties as a performer, writer and manager.1 He was a leading player of the Children of the Queen’s Revels from their revival in 1600 to their dissolution in 1613. As a pupil of St Paul’s Grammar School prior to his impressment into this playing company in 1600, Field may have already been experienced in playing, which was regularly practised at English grammar schools. In 1613, at the age of 26, he became a leading player and sharer of the newly formed Lady Elizabeth’s Men, which was a combined version of the adult company of this name and the Queen’s Revels, and he functioned as their representative in court and legal documents.2 In 1615 or 1616 he progressed to the role of sharer and player of the King’s Men, and he remained with this company until his death at the age of 32 in 1619. Field was also a dramatist for all three companies. His first play, A Woman is a Weathercock, was written for and performed by the Queen’s Revels in c. 1610, and in c. 1611 his Amends for Ladies was also performed by this company. As a player and playwright of the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, he collaborated with John Fletcher and Philip Massinger on The Honest Man’s Fortune, performed in 1613, and with Fletcher and Francis Beaumont on Four Plays in One, performed in c. 1613–15. He developed these collaborations further as a member of the King’s Men, writing The Fatal Dowry, performed in c. 1617–19, with Massinger; the no longer extant The Jeweller of Amsterdam, performed in c. 1617, The Queen of Corinth, 118

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performed in 1617, and The Knight of Malta, performed in 1618, with Massinger and Fletcher. Field’s advancements from boy player to sharer and adult player, from children’s company to the company patronised by the King, and from player to his simultaneous positions as player and playwright, indicate the integral role that the theatrical institution played in his life. He was brought up in the theatre and his career was determined by his childhood training. Moreover, a pervasive cultural image of Field as a child and as a player was produced within the theatre and continued to circulate in this context after his death. Field was a child of the early modern theatrical institution. One of the most interesting aspects of Field’s early career is the way in which he represented his own nascent professional identity. A self-consciousness about his status as a player, and more specifically as a child player, pervades his letters, his short prefaces to plays by Chapman, Fletcher and Jonson, his plays and their dedicatory verses. Field’s writings constitute important and rich textual sources for an investigation of early modern childhoods. In them, he embraces imagery of infancy, of childhood and of being a son in relation to the more mature and established playwrights he addresses and thus cultivates his reputation. This self-created image mutually intersects with a wider cultural representation of Field in contemporary plays and theatrical tracts, and in later seventeenth-century memorials. This chapter examines the intersections and differences between the accounts that Field gives of his career and the ways in which others imagine this child player. It evaluates the extent to which such representations draw on Field’s experiences as a child player and envisage him as a child and considers Field’s career as a paradigm for the development of the child players in the theatrical institution.

The careers of the child players Nathan Field is one of a number of players of the Children of Paul’s, Children of the Queen’s Revels and Children of the King’s Revels who were trained in the children’s theatres and continued to flourish as players, sharers and playwrights beyond their membership of these companies. Although numerous accounts of the children’s playing companies argue that Field was an exception and that the majority of children did not continue to work in the theatre, a brief

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survey of the careers of the child players indicates otherwise.3 Like Field, William Barksted, a member of the Children of the King’s Revels from the age of 17 in 1607 to 1609 and then a member of the Children of the Queen’s Revels from 1610, wrote plays in a professional capacity for the latter company. He collaborated with Lewis Machin on the revisions to The Insatiate Countess, possibly originally written by John Marston, for performance by the Queen’s Revels in c. 1611.4 Barksted also sustained his career as a player, remaining with the Queen’s Revels through its merging with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men in 1613 and through to its further collaboration with the Prince Charles’ Men for a number of performances between 1614 and 1616, after which he became a member of the latter company.5 Naming him as ‘one of the servants of his Maiesties Revels’, the 1611 title page of his poem, Hiren, exploits Barksted’s status as a child player and the reputation and fame that he had already achieved in an attempt to market the book and advance his literary career. The dedicatory verse further claims that this work is ‘the bashfull utterance of a maiden Muse’.6 Through this sexualised language and the image of an inexperienced and shy youth, Barksted embarks on a method of self-representation which attempts to arouse interest in his literary works by creating the persona of a youthful, childish and feminised author. Although Field and Barksted are perhaps exceptional in the acclaim they received, other members of the children’s playing companies followed similar careers as players. Hugh Attwell, who had been a member of the Children of the Queen’s Revels since at least the performance of Jonson’s Epicoene in1609/10, in which he played the part of Sir Amorous La Foole, also remained with the company through its various mergings and continued with the Prince Charles’s Men until his death in 1621.7 Like Field and Barksted, Attwell was also a well-known figure in London’s theatrical world and on his death was memorialised in an elegy by William Rowley.8 William Penn, another member of the Children of the Queen’s Revels from at least 1610, was also a member of Prince Charles’s Men by 1616, when he signed the agreement with Edward Alleyn and Jacob Meade alongside other members of this company.9 Perhaps he, like Barksted and Attwell, stayed with the playing company through its merging with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men in 1613, although there is no definite evidence to confirm this, and by 1629 he was a player with the King’s Men.10

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John Blaney, a player with the Queen’s Revels in 1609/10 and cited on the cast-list of Jonson’s Epicoene, became a player and sharer in Queen Anna’s adult playing company in 1616.11 Membership of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, it seems, was a common first step in becoming an adult player and sharer and provided access to a range of adult playing companies. While the boys joined these adult companies after the dissolution of the children’s playing companies, some left the Children of the Queen’s Revels at an earlier stage in order to advance their careers as players and sharers. In 1608, John Underwood and William Ostler, who were players of the Children of the Chapel from 1600 and 1601, respectively, progressed from this company to the King’s Men. Both became sharers in the playhouses of the latter company, the Blackfriars and the Globe, and Underwood also acquired shares in the Curtain.12 As lead players and sharers in this company, Ostler and Underwood continued to develop their training and experiences from their childhood in the Children of the Chapel and made playing and the associated occupation of being a shareholder their careers until their deaths in 1614 and 1624, respectively. Their decisions to leave the children’s company may have been prompted by the temporary dissolution of the company at the King’s command in March 1608, yet the fact that they moved on, when others such as Field remained with the Queen’s Revels, raises the possibility that they may have used this opportunity to develop their careers. Even from the first performance given by the revived children’s companies the child players are positioned within a wider theatrical milieu but are conscious of their novice status. When the player who will perform the part of Antonio in John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, performed by Paul’s in 1599, bemoans the company’s inability to present the play’s full range of roles adequately, he compares the actors to two more capable figures. The first is Proteus, the Greek god, and a signifier of versatile acting styles; the second is ‘Gew’, who, according to Reavley Gair, may have been the celebrated and skilled actor who was the subject of the eleventh epigram, ‘To Gue’, in Edward Guilpin’s Skialetheia (1598).13 Hence, even in the earliest stages of the revived children’s playing companies, the players are imagined in relation to other professional players. ‘Blind Gew’ who ‘would ha’ done it rarely’ is held up as the acting standard towards which the child players aim, but which they cannot achieve in 1599 due to their inexperience.14 However, if moving to the King’s Men was

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a career progression, this raises the question of why Field did not also leave the Queen’s Revels at this uncertain stage in its history. It is possible that the King’s Men did not desire him at this point, even though at the age of 21, Field had been a leading player of his company for eight years and was already a renowned player. It is, however, also possible that Field himself chose to remain with the Queen’s Revels. Perhaps, as a leading figure in this company, he envisaged the opportunity for further development, which his later years as a playwright for this company certainly provided. It is evident from these examples that a number of the boys did build on the training provided by the children’s playing companies and continued to develop as players and sharers in various companies. The extant evidence relating to the players’ careers, however, provides a limited indication of how the children proceeded upon leaving the boy troupes. The majority of the evidence relating to the boys, both when members of the children’s companies and subsequently, is found in legal documents, such as the companies’ patents, which name only the sharers, and agreements or disputes between sharers, in accounts of payments for plays, in cast-lists and dedicatory verses, which often only list or address major players. Consequently, it is often only these leading or shareholding players that can be traced. It is, therefore, difficult to determine the careers of a large number of the players of Paul’s, the Queen’s Revels and the King’s Revels. It may be that some of the other child players also held professional roles in the theatrical industry, perhaps as hired players or musicians. Furthermore a significant number of the child players made use of this early dramatic training in alternative performance contexts. John Chappell, for example, who was impressed into the Children of the Chapel from ‘Mr Spyke’s school near Cripplegate’ in 1600, aged ten, drew on both his scholarly and theatrical experiences as a child and both wrote and performed in Latin plays at Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1611 and 1615.15 Other boys capitalised on the training that they received as musicians and choristers in the early years of the revival of the companies to remain within religious and courtly institutions as musicians and choristers. Thomas Day, who performed in the Chapel’s productions of Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster in 1600 and 1601, was a member of the musical establishment of Prince Henry in 1612. In 1615, he became a servant of James’ court as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and he

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then assumed the role of organist and Master of the Choristers at Westminster in 1625, before returning to the Chapel Royal in 1633 to become the master of the chorister group of which he was originally part.16 Similarly, John Frost, who also performed in Cynthia’s Revels at the age of ten, later became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and performed as a singer in court entertainments, including the entertainments for the Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Elector Palatine in 1613 and James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace in 1634.17 Therefore, despite the separation of the chorister group from the playing group of the Chapel Royal, training as a player in this latter institution evidently provided the training necessary to both chorister and player and enabled the pursuit of an adult role in the royal musical establishments. Players at Paul’s, who received a more sustained musical training due to the more substantial overlaps between the chorister and playing groups, also pursued performance careers. While a chorister and player at Paul’s, Thomas Ravenscroft was also a child-composer and wrote ‘The Urchin’s Dance’, included in John Lyly’s The Maid’s Metamorphosis, performed by this company in 1600. He subsequently pursued a degree in music at Cambridge, which he achieved in 1607, aged 15, and then trained at Gresham College.18 Ravenscroft’s career and professional identity as a musician, or as a composer, arranger and lutenist, is evident in his 1614 publication, A Brief Discourse, which remembers Edward Pearce, his teacher at Paul’s, among his more recent acquaintances at the College in its dedications.19 Similarly John Tompkins, a chorister and player at Paul’s in 1599 at the age of 13, continued with the education and training he received as a member of the Children of Paul’s at King’s College, Cambridge, and was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Music there in 1608. Tompkins was also the organist at the college from 1606 to 1622, and then spent time as the organist at St Paul’s, before being sworn in as an Extraordinary Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1625 and gaining the position of organist in this institution on 3 November 1626.20 The children’s playing companies, therefore, were an integral part of the world of early modern professional theatre and of performance culture. They were not, as many scholars have suggested, unusual establishments who merely offered parodic imitations of the adult playing companies.21 The children’s companies were distinct entities with particular characteristics as companies of children, but, as this analysis of the experiences of the boys as professionals demonstrates,

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they were also implicated in a network of associations with the adult playing companies and other modes of performance and were comparable to these alternative contexts. The playing companies thus operated as a training ground for diverse types of performers. Yet, the children’s companies and the child players are excluded from G. E. Bentley’s seminal study of the early modern profession of playing, which he defends by claiming that they were not professionals because ‘they were not paid for their acting’, nor is there any evidence ‘that these boys ever had anything to with the administration of their activities, the selection of their plays, or any profit that might accrue from their endeavours’.22 In The Business of Playing, William Ingram also limits his definition of playing as a profession and the player as a professional to instances when it is a means of earning a living.23 While many of the children left the companies to become theatre professionals in this limited sense, I propose that the members of the Paul’s, the Queen’s Revels and the King’s Revels were also professional players. The OED defines a ‘profession’ as ‘the occupation which one professes to be skilled in and to follow’, and cites two interpretations of this concept in use from the mid to late sixteenth century as ‘a vocation in which a professed knowledge of some department of learning or science is used in its application to the affairs of others or in the practice of an art founded upon it’ and ‘any calling or occupation by which a person habitually earns his living’.24 Therefore, an early modern profession is any means through which one earns a living but also evokes the idea of being skilled or dedicated to a certain occupation. Roslyn Knutson interprets the early modern theatrical institution in this multivalent sense and, arguing that the theatre developed as a professional and commercial institution through a range of such personal and professional associations, her concept of playing as a profession incorporates the wider sense of a commitment to a trade and the interconnections between companies and individuals.25 In one sense, therefore, the boys’ companies were professional institutions. They trained children as performers and fed into the more expansive performance and theatrical cultures of early modern London. The movement of child players to the adult companies indicates the similarities between these children’s companies and later playing companies of children, the Children of the Revels (1629–35) and the Nursery playing companies of Restoration London, which were established as a means of training

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inexperienced actors to supply the other playing companies.26 Like the early seventeenth-century Children of the Queen’s Revels, the Children of the Revels of the 1620s and 1630s was authorised by a royal patent ‘to train and bring up certain boys in the quality of playing’ and ‘for solace and recreation’ of the sovereign and their subjects.27 However, the latter company, which was established under the management of Richard Gunnel, manager of the Fortune playhouse, and William Blagrave, deputy to the Master of the Revels, had a third function, which bridged the gap between the earlier children’s company and the Restoration Nurseries. It was also intended to create a ‘supply of able actors to Majesty’s servants of Blackfriars’; it was a training ground for the King’s Men.28 By naming the company as one of children, the Children of the Revels of the 1620s and 1630s evokes and develops an image of a certain type of player – an as yet untrained player, not suitable for the King’s company, but who can be trained to fulfil this role. The child player, therefore, also denotes an inexperienced player who is being trained in a professional capacity within the seventeenth-century theatrical institution. Although the early seventeenth-century children’s playing companies did not officially fulfil this function, the apprenticeship indenture of the child player Abel Cooke, which states that he is apprenticed to Thomas Kendall so that he might be ‘practised and exercised in the said quality of playing’ demonstrates the company’s training of children.29 This document bears notable similarities to the apprenticeship documents of the young children being trained as players in Valleran le Conte’s school for players in Paris, which consisted of young boys and girls apprenticed to be trained in ‘the science of comedy’ and ‘to represent on the stage and in public all comedies, tragicomedies and pastorals’.30 This troupe, established in 1599, also specifically supplied an adult playing company, in this case le Conte’s company, les Comediens du Roi.31 Whether or not the English children’s playing companies were intended at any stage to supply actors for the flourishing adult playing companies, they exist within this European context of training children as professional players. Robert Browne, named as a sharer on the 1610 patent for the Children of Queen’s Revels, was experienced in this tradition and his involvement in the English children’s company built on his 15-year-long career of training children as performers throughout Europe. This tangible link between London’s children’s playing companies and

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the training provided to children as professional performers in Europe further illuminates the role of the English children’s companies in the structured training of children as performers. Although these companies were not established specifically to provide players for the continuing development of the professional theatre, this training of young players locates them at the centre of theatrical culture in early seventeenth-century London.

Positioning the self in the theatrical community For the brief period during which they flourished, the Elizabethan and Jacobean children’s playing companies were, therefore, an integral element of London’s performance culture, and particularly of the developing institution of the professional theatre. The training of the boys as players provided them with opportunities for careers within the theatrical institution and benefited this institution through the provision of trained players. Within this context the child players developed a keen awareness of their own status within this theatrical culture. Nathan Field self-consciously advanced his own career as a player and playwright through constructing his reputation in contemporary culture, and, therefore, is exemplary of the agency available to children in the early modern theatre. He not only actively participated in the development of his own professional identity, in 1616, as an adult player, he made a significant contribution to the evolution of playing as a profession, through his ‘defence of my profession’, Remonstrance to a Preacher, written in response to accusations laid against players by Mr Sutton, a preacher at St Mary Overs.32 This builds on Field’s long-standing position in the theatre. He had been a member of this trade from the age of 13 and this institution functioned as family, school and work for most of his life. Hence, it was the medium through which he shaped his emerging adult and professional identity. At this late stage in his career, Field publicly claims this institution as his own. In doing so he deliberately refutes the anti-theatrical background of his biological family, particularly his father, John Field, a Puritan preacher who wholly condemned the theatre in his 1583 sermon A Godly Exhortation, and imagines himself instead to be part of the theatrical community.33 This combined familial and professional attachment to the theatre, however, is evident from an earlier stage in Field’s career. Even as a child player Field

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demonstrates a sensitive awareness of his position within a larger theatrical community. He is frequently figured as the child and son of the theatre and its members in his own writings and in those of others. In a dedicatory verse to Field’s first play, A Woman is a Weathercock, published in 1612, George Chapman describes Field as ‘his Loved Sonne’.34 Chapman, a playwright for the Children of the Queen’s Revels since 1601, had a long professional acquaintance with Field and this is reflected in his account of Field’s developing career. He admires ‘the many formes’ to which Field’s ‘Active Muse’(l. 2) has turned, thus implicitly praising Field’s playing as well as his new playwriting skills. Chapman’s familiarity with Field’s career becomes a vested interest and concern in how his play might be received. Expressing his hope that ‘as swift Fame / Growes as she goes, in Fame so thrive thy Play’ (ll. 7–8), Chapman’s conventional relaying of hopes for the reception of the piece is backed up with more personal fatherly advice on the trials of ‘this life’s rough seas’ (l. 5), as his adopted son enters the world of print. Field exploits the father–son relationship that he shares with various theatre professionals to seek favours and to present himself and his plays for advancement. As a new member of the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, he addresses a plea for money from Philip Henslowe in c. 1613 to ‘Father Hinchlow’ and signs the letter ‘yor loving son Nat: Field’.35 Field manipulates the semi-familial relationship between the two as a persuasive means of gaining an advance from the playing company manager. He positions himself in a similar hierarchical relationship to the more experienced playwrights of the Children of the Queen’s Revels. In a dedicatory verse to the 1607 edition of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Field represents himself as a ‘weake flame’ which ‘Can neither dimme, or light your full grow’n flame’.36 This technique of stressing one’s own inadequacy in order to elevate the subject of praise is not unusual; but instead of praising Jonson, his play or considering the reception it may have, as the other dedicatory verses of this play do, Field uses the majority of this poem to explore his lesser status. He does not simply adopt a position of humility and respect for the more established writer; he accepts the position of the child. He is weak in comparison to that which is ‘grow’n’ (l. 10) and he describes his move to write verses on Jonson’s play as a ‘saucy boldness’ (l. 8). In a dedicatory verse to John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess two years later, Field expresses his identity as a child more

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explicitly. He again humbles himself in a conventional protestation of his own inferior status and questions whether or not the approvement of his ‘unknowne name and muse (in swathing clowtes) / [ . . . ] not yet growne to strength, among these rankes’ is worth Fletcher’s thanks.37 Imagining his muse thus, Field represents his playwriting career in its infancy. Despite the fact that at this time Field is also a playwright for the same company, he insists on his lower status and welcomes his infant role. Perhaps this is a result of Field’s position as a novice playwright, whereas Fletcher had been with the company since the performance of this play in 1608. It may also arise from the fact that when Fletcher’s play was originally staged Field was probably one of the child players who performed in it, and continued to hold the position of a child player even as a playwright for the company. This image, however, also conveys Field’s position within the wider theatrical world. He is an infant ‘among these rankes’, that is, in his professional career as a playwright. This imagery of infancy and childhood not only excuses any faults and inadequacies, it also gestures towards growth and development. Field’s name and his muse are only ‘yet’ unknown and not yet ‘growne’, the word ‘yet’ insisting on the future development of his reputation and skills. Field thus exploits the image of the childhood as a signifier of process and development, which as this book has thus far argued, was frequently used in the drama of the children’s companies. It is through the imagery of childhood that he expresses a distinct sense of his potential development. As the poem progresses, Field clarifies and expands upon his desire to grow in these terms. While on the one hand he claims he is ‘happy but to stand so neere’ (l. 36) figures such as Fletcher, on the other he demonstrates his strong ambition. ‘My ambicion is’, he claims, ‘To live to perfect such a work as this’ (l. 10). In his dedication to his own play, A Woman is a Weathercock, published the next year, 1611, Field similarly represents his career. Arguing that he has not sought a patron as none will be interested in ‘so famelesse a pen as mine is yet’, he again points to the future development of his fame.38 This time, however, he does not only hint towards such advancement but outlines the means by which he is developing. He looks forward ‘till my next Play be printed’ (l. 11), that is, his Amends for Ladies, performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in c. 1611 and printed in 1618. In this dedication ‘To Any Woman that Hath Beene No Weathercock’ he thus offers a definite sense of his career progression. He further

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hints at a plan for his professional development in the second dedication attached to the play, ‘To the Reader’, as he implies that he will continue to be based with the Queen’s Revels for the next year or two but will move on after that, advising the reader ‘if thou hast any thing to say to me, thou know’st where to heare of me for a yeare or two, and no more I assure thee’.39 Field’s construction of his own career development presents this children’s playing company as a starting point for his professional life. His desire to move on raises the possibility that his roles as child player and playwright for children are perceived as lesser positions in this theatrical community. Yet, it is through his practical training in the Queen’s Revels that Field gains the skills and experiences which enable him to become a player and writer beyond the confines of this company. In 1609, he assisted in writing Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse, performed on 11 April for the opening ceremony of this institution, attended by King James.40 It is through collaborations with more experienced dramatists, such as Jonson, that Field gained his training as a writer. Indeed it is perhaps specifically through this relationship with Jonson that Field attempts to launch his own playwriting career. The relationship between the two began at an early stage in Field’s career, when Field became the ‘Schollar’ of the older dramatist. This education of Field in ‘the Satyres of Horace & some Epigrames of Martiall’, which probably began during Field’s membership of the Children of the Chapel, initiated a professional and personal relationship.41 Field potentially evokes this relationship in order to cultivate his own professional identity. While he appropriates the imagery of being a child in order to fashion an identity of humility which in itself is used to promote and gain fame for his emerging professional status, Field simultaneously creates a very different persona. In the dedication ‘To the Reader’ attached to A Woman is a Weathercock he states that his reason for writing a play is I have beene vexed with vile playes my selfe, a great while, hearing many, nowe I thought to be even with some, and they shoulde heare mine too. (ll. 14–17) He thus situates his play within a theatrical tradition and suggests that it is a response to his personal experiences in this tradition. It is

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an attempt to get ‘even’. While adopting the strategy of flattering his fellow dramatists and increasing his own status through his association with them in dedicatory verses on their plays, Field here engages in an act of self-promotion via aggression. This revenge-like act may be directed towards other playwrights in general. Field’s plays consistently make reference to previous and current plays, including Jonson’s The Case is Altered and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, both of which may have been performed in the early years of the Children of the Chapel.42 These references, however, lack the aggressive force which Field threatens in his dedication and instead they simply locate Field within this established history of professional theatre, and specifically of the company for which he had been a player and was now a playwright. Amends for Ladies, performed by the Queen’s Revels, however, also makes reference to plays being performed at that time by other playing companies. Moll Cutpurse, or Moll Frith, for example, whose life was being presented in the Fortune playhouse in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, makes a brief appearance in act two scene one of Field’s play. This moment perhaps functions as a moment of co-operative marketing strategies between the playing companies, as it advertises the performance by Prince Charles’ Men, yet it may simultaneously function to shift Field to the realm of plays written for and performed by the adult playing companies.43 Lord Feesimple’s desire to visit the Fortune theatre in Amends for Ladies further bridges the gap between the children’s and adults’ theatres, as this topical reference is offered to the audience watching the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Whitefriars.44 In cultivating his reputation as a playwright, Field, therefore, both exploits his distinct identity as a child player and rhetorically dissolves the differences between the theatres of children and of the adult playing companies. Field’s dramatic methods and motifs also engage with previous plays in a more complex manner. His detailed stage directions demonstrate a heightened awareness of the play as performance and the themes of his plays foreground a familiarity with theatrical techniques. In A Woman is a Weathercock, any element of disguise is highlighted in performance. The disguise of Nevill as the parson, for example, is shared with the audience in act two scene one, when Nevill describes his imitation of ‘the Character of [the] face and beard’ (2.1.6) of the

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parson and delineates his intended plot of performing the marriage between Bellafront and Count Fredericke, in order to assist his friend Scudmore who is in love with Bellafront. Field clarifies the play’s plot and the trickery of disguise for the audience by outlining the ways in which this disguise may be undertaken – through the imitation of facial expression and the addition of a false beard. Through this careful elucidation of what disguise is being undertaken, A Woman is a Weathercock shares its dramatic methods with the audience and forges a relationship with them. The final unmasking of these characters in the climax of the play, dramatically performed through the removal of costume, is, therefore, expected by the audience. This is obviously not a unique strategy and is commonly used on the early modern stage. As well-known Shakespearean examples such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It illustrate, the emphasis on disguise may increase the humour and may also serve to heighten the spectator’s pleasure by flattering their knowledge of the plays’ tricks. However, in the context of the repertoire of the Queen’s Revels, Field’s plot technique may be functioning on a much more specialised level. The performance of Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock follows the performance of Jonson’s Epicoene by this company, which, as I suggest in Chapter 1, develops the practices of cross-gender disguise distinct to the children’s companies, and plays with the concept of the boy player of these companies to the extent that it shocks the audience with the climactic revelation that the play’s silent woman is in fact a boy in disguise.45 In contrast to Jonson’s play, Field forges his own niche as a playwright for this company. Furthermore, Field’s stance of revenge may refer specifically to his relationship with Jonson. His expression of this motivation directly follows his countering of the audience’s expectation that a play should contain at least ‘a word of Latine’, which functions as a gentle satirisation of the convention of using Latin in plays.46 Jonson commonly did this, and the penultimate scene of Epicoene is one extreme example, as the humour of this scene depends on an understanding of the Latin terms through which Morose, with the help of others, attempts to escape from his marriage, claiming to have ‘manifestam frigiditatem’, that is, evident impotence and comparing himself to a boy who cannot ‘reddere debitum’, pay his debt.47 Field further engages with the themes of Epicoene, and indeed of a number of plays of the children’s playing companies, in his second

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and final play written for this company. The figure of the boy disguised as a woman, discussed in Chapter 1, recurs in his Amends for Ladies; but this disguise is again shared with the audience. The disguise of the page, Bould, as a waiting gentlewoman is immediately outlined in the staging directions in act one scene one, and becomes a point of flattering the audience’s knowledge as Bould puns on his disguise with a description of his ‘false disguise that hast been true to me, / And now be Bould, that thou mai’st welcome be’ (3.3.130–1). This moment, therefore, perhaps also functions to satirise the theatrical convention of the disguised cross-dressed male common in the children’s repertoires by making it obvious, implying, perhaps, that in 1611 this convention has become a bit outmoded. This example of cross-gender disguise is complemented by the disguise of a maid as an Irish-footboy and of Ingen’s brother Frank as a woman in act two scene three, and of Lord Feesimple masked as a Lady in act five scene two. These multiple layers of cross-gender disguise demonstrate Field’s knowledge of this specific company, their repertoire and the identity of the child player of this company. The revelation of Feesimple, or the bride, as a boy, for example, is potentially a direct appropriation of Jonson’s plot in Epicoene. Yet while exploiting the identity of the child players and the recurrent figure of the crossdressed boy and excessive disguise from the playing company’s repertoire, Field again rejects the element of disguise and instead clarifies the disguise for the audience. In imitating this trope of cross-gender disguise, Field self-consciously exposes it in a further acknowledgement of the audience’s, and his own, awareness of this convention in the repertoire of the Queen’s Revels. He thus positions himself within this repertoire and simultaneously forges a fresh position for himself as a new playwright. This does not in anyway undermine the close teacher–student, professional and personal relationship which apparently developed between Jonson and Field during the latter’s time as a child player. Field’s aggression is not real but rather is an imagined and rhetorical stance which enables him to position himself in relation to Jonson him in an attempt to forge and advance his own status as a playwright. This need to cultivate his own identity in relation to Jonson possibly results from Field’s position in the Queen’s Revels. Not only was he a principal player in Epicoene, Jonson’s final play for this company, he may also have gained the position of company playwright in his place. This close

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engagement with Jonsonian conventions and with the company’s repertoire is perhaps Field’s attempt to assert his position as a replacement for the established and respected playwright. Field’s plays, therefore, sustain substantial links with his experiences as a child player and his position within the children’s playing company. He locates himself in relation to the more senior associates and dramatists of this company in order to enable his transition from child player to playwright and adult within this institution; yet he simultaneously appropriates the image of the child and exploits his status as such in this company in order to legitimise his developing career. His dual identity as a long-standing player and playwright for this company offer him an insight into recurring tropes in the repertoire of the playing company and allocate him a unique and privileged location from which to appropriate, and perhaps even satirise, these conventions.

The child celebrity? Fame is also a recurrent issue in Field’s self-representation. Although he claims in his ‘Advice to the Reader’ of A Woman is a Weathercock that his ambition is to write as good a play as dramatists such as Fletcher and Jonson, it is ‘fame’ that preoccupies his verses. He highlights his as yet ‘unknowne name’ and ‘famelesse’ pen in his verses upon Fletcher’s and his own play, respectively.48 Similarly in Chapman’s verse on Field’s A Woman is as Weathercock, he addresses both aspects of the youth’s ambition. Admiring the ‘many formes, as well as many waies’ to which Field’s ‘Active Muse’ has turned, he evokes his skills as both player and playwright, but he also desires that ‘in fame so thrive thy Play’.49 Yet it is as a player that Field actually acquired the fame which he desired as a playwright. Through his career he played a range of roles, and from an early stage he was introduced to the audience.50 In Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, performed by the Children of the Revels in c. 1607, the Citizen’s Wife, and fictional audience member, suddenly asks the boy playing Humphrey, ‘were you never one of Master Monkester’s scholars’.51 In this highly self-conscious play, in which the fictional audience interrupt and influence the performance and the boy players step out of their roles and engage with this audience on numerous

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occasions, this functions as a comment on the offstage identity of the character playing Humphrey. It is probable that this boy player, recognised as one of ‘Mr Monkester’s’, or Richard Mulcaster’s, scholars is Nathan Field, as in Henry Clifton’s bill of complaint the recently impressed Field is described as previously being ‘a scholler of a grammar schole in London kepte by one mr monkaster’.52 The reference to Field as a scholar at St Paul’s grammar school under Richard Mulcaster, headmaster from 1596 to 1606, depends on the audience’s recognition of Field on stage and an awareness of his life offstage, as without such knowledge this self-conscious illustration of the player beneath the role has no relevance. This moment therefore serves to build Field’s reputation as a player and create his identity within the cultural imagination. It reminds the audience of Field’s offstage identity and shares this aspect of the player with them. It thus permits the audience a familiarity with the player and constructs Field’s fame by circulating facts about his life. This creation of an image of Field is particularly significant in a play which repeatedly represents the boy player through the perspective of the audience. In the ‘Induction’ the Citizen and his Wife, the fictional audience, interrupt the original play to demand a play more suited to their tastes and showcasing a player that they want to see, their apprentice, Rafe, who has performed before, ‘at our house’ (‘Induction’, l. 66). The representation of Rafe as satisfying the audience’s desires to see a particular player in The Knight of the Burning Pestle further suggests that the known, and possibly even celebrity, player was a common phenomenon in early modern theatrical culture. In Big Time Shakespeare, Michael Bristol suggests that the early theatrical industry produced and marketed such figures or star-players, who, when they became figures of ‘show business celebrity’, could capitalise on the fact of simply being themselves.53 The emphasis on Nathan Field’s performance in this play and the reference to his offstage life attempts to develop his celebrity, by drawing on the audience’s recognition of this figure and satisfying their desire to see him perform and share this knowledge about him. Like the appearance of the character of Moll Cutpurse, it may also function as an advertising technique, and using similar means to the Wife who publicises her boy, Rafe, the company highlights their own skilled and famed player. Through developing a relationship between the actor and the audience

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through this shared knowledge of his life, the play and the company encourage the audience to return to see more of this player. Field is also aware of this potential function of the theatre to cultivate the reputation of exceptional individuals. A Woman is a Weathercock concludes with Strange claiming: I consecrate my deed unto the Cittie, And hope to live my selfe, to see the day, It shall be shewne to people in a play. (5.2.231) Strange not only puts forth a model of playing as presenting real events, but as memorialising them. It was, therefore, as a frequent performer and known player on the stage of the Children of the Queen’s Revels that Field gained fame. He continued to be constructed via this means as a member of the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, yet even at this stage Field’s previous identity as a child player was crucial. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, performed by this company in 1614, offers a further insight into his status as a player. In act five scene three, a company of puppets, controlled by Littlewit and Leatherhead and represented in terms of a children’s playing company as ‘Pretty youths, sir, all children, both old and young’, are brought on stage as one of the fair’s attractions.54 Field is among the contemporary players, from both the adult and children’s playing companies, who are named to signify a particular type of player. When Leatherhead asks for clarification on Cokes’s question, ‘Which is your Burbage now?’ (5.3.73–4), Cokes elucidates and expands on this: ‘Your best actor. Your Field?’ (5.3.76). Field is thus aligned with Richard Burbage to represent the best actor; yet more specifically he provides an explanation that Cokes is enquiring who is the best child player of this company of youths. Although Field is now a leading player of the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, who originally perform this play, he continues to be associated with his position in the Children of the Queen’s Revels. The representation of Field as a leading or best player depends on a contemporary perception of him as this figure. Furthermore, this representation of Field draws on the audience’s memory of his previous roles in the theatre, as Leatherhead provides

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further detail on which of the puppets is the company’s Field. He claims that it is, he that acts young Leander, sir. He is extremely beloved of the womenkind, they do so affect his action, the green gamesters that come here. (5.3.78–80) This description of the puppet-player represents Field in the role of the romantic lead, likely drawing on Field’s experiences in playing the leading role of young gallant.55 This reference to Field, not long after the termination of his association with the Queen’s Revels, therefore, depends on the recognition of the roles that he performed in his childhood in order that it might function as a moment of metatheatrical humour. Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, performed in 1616 by the King’s Men, is an interesting example of this practice. In act one scene four of this play, the male character Wittipol speaks the part of Mrs Fitzdottrel and, in act four scene three, he is disguised as a Spanish Lady. The play cleverly draws on the audience’s awareness of the actor playing the part of Wittipol, Dick Robinson, and on their knowledge of the fact that as a boy and apprentice player with the King’s Men he had played the parts of female characters.56 This is demonstrated in act two scene eight when the characters debate who they should have act as the Spanish Lady and suggest Robinson for this part, commending his skill for such roles.57 Instead, they choose Wittipol, who is played by Dick Robinson, and proceed to complain that he is no longer suitable to play the female role, as he has grown too tall.58 The comedy in this metatheatrical moment depends on the audience’s recognition of the actor and their knowledge of his previous roles; it draws on a narrative of audience memory of the local theatre, the actors and their roles. It insists upon an awareness of the player’s identity as a boy, and inserts this into the forging of his professional identity as an adult player. The representation of Field playing the romantic lead in Bartholomew Fair may function in a similar manner to this moment in The Devil is an Ass. The methods used to develop the audience’s knowledge of Field may have further similarities to Jonson’s later play. As a player with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, Field was probably on stage at this moment, and may have performed either Littlewit or

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Cokes. If Field played the part of Cokes, Littlewit’s exclamation of ‘Good I’faith! You are even with me, sir’ (5.3.76) following the designation of the best actor status to Field may draw the audience’s attention to his presence on stage, as Littlewit suddenly recognises that the character is talking about his own skills as a player. Or, if Field played the part of Littlewit, it may have functioned as a moment of self-recognition, and also ensured that the audience recognised that it was Field playing this role. However, Littlewit, and indeed Field and the children’s playing company, are not presented in a flattering light in this scene. Not only are the child players represented as puppets, and Leatherhead ‘the mouth of ‘em all’ (5.3.69), Littlewit is the author of a puppet-show that is a simplified and debased version of Hero and Leander. Therefore, if Field does play the role of Littlewit, Nora Johnson suggests, this would identify Field ‘both as the romantic lead (Puppet Leander) and as the people’s author, a combination of roles that describes Field accurately but in comically unflattering terms’.59 This representation of Field as a member of the children’s puppet company, however, is already a reference back to a Field of the past. By this performance of 1614 the Children of the Queen’s Revels had already been dissolved for one year. Although this previous existence feeds into Field’s continuing professional status he had already moved on from being a child player. Indeed perhaps the satirical representation of the children’s company as an interesting but popular spectacle, controlled by managers and offering simplified versions of other literary works, is evoked as a signifier of Field’s past but insists on the need for all the players, playwrights and managers of this company to move on from this in order to advance their roles in this world of professional theatre. Littlewit’s exclamation, therefore, is potentially a humorous reference to the player performing the part and gentle mockery of Field’s inflated sense of his professional self, and possibly even a caricature of the audience’s perception of him. It engages with the audience’s knowledge of Field, of his career up to this point and of his selfrepresentational strategies. Comic anecdotes of the period suggest that audiences often engaged imaginatively with the players’ lives, both on and offstage. The ways in which the audience perceived players, and their relationships to the players, is the target of gentle satire by numerous other playgoers and playwrights. Young Lovelesse of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady, performed

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by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in c. 1610, offers an account of the maid Abigail’s belief that the players were the parts they performed, claiming, ‘She lov’d all the Players in the last Queenes time once over: She was strook when they acted lovers, and forsook some when they plaid murtherer.’60 This confusion of the players and the roles they played is taken one step further in the fantastical account given by John Manningham in 1602 of one female playgoer’s perception of a player. Manningham describes ‘a citizen grone soe farr in liking with’ Richard Burbage ‘that before shee went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto hir by the name of Richard the Third’.61 These comic accounts mock women’s interest in the theatre and their responses to it; but although this is an object of satire, it is this attitude to theatre which enables the production of a celebrity or famed player, at least in the accounts of these male writers. While the Leander reference in Bartholomew Fair suggests that Field is known for performing the roles of the romantic gallant, it is possible that Field, and indeed many players, desired to be perceived as such a figure offstage as well. Field achieved this reputation. In a letter of 1619, shortly before Field’s death, rumours are repeated that Earl of Argyll had paid for ‘the nourishing of a child wch the worlde sayes is Daughter to my lady and N. Field, the Player’.62 Field is described as a player and represented again as engaged in casual relationships with admiring women. He therefore gains a reputation as a loose young gallant through the multiple ways in which his identity is imagined in the theatrical culture during his lifetime. This identity is produced through the intersection of Field’s experiences as a child and adult player and the roles he played, his self-representation and desire for fame, references to him in plays such as The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Bartholomew Fair, and perhaps also his notorious activities offstage.63 These facts and representative strategies converge in the contemporary interest in Field as a celebrated player.

Remembering childhood Through the mutual intersection of Field’s self-representation in his literary works and his performances, the representation of Field by other dramatists such as Jonson which attend to his presence on this stage and the audience’s recognition of his name, and contemporary interest and gossip surrounding Field’s life, an image of this individual

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child player was created during Field’s lifetime. Field played an active role in creating this cultural image as his self-representation impacted upon the ways in which his contemporaries imagined his identity; yet contemporary playwrights and playgoers simultaneously represented Field in fresh and diverse ways. An image of Field continued to pervade seventeenth-century theatrical culture, as his contemporaries’ representations of him as a great player produced a trope in the cultural imagination which continued to be evoked throughout the century. In spite of Field’s awareness of his developing fame in relation to his work as a playwright, he was primarily remembered and alluded to, as William Peery points out, as a player rather than as a dramatist.64 In Richard Flecknoe’s A Short History of the English Stage (1664), he is remembered as an actor from the time when ‘Poets and Actors in their greatest flourish, Johnson and Shakespeare, with Beaumont and Fletcher their Poets, and Field and Burbidge their Actors’.65 Flecknoe, as Jonson did in 1614, couples Field with Burbage as the ‘docile and excellent Actors’ (p. 91), and then provides a detailed description of Burbage’s skills. Field is thus implicitly constructed alongside Burbage as different from the ‘common Actors’ (p. 92). Flecknoe claims that Burbage ‘was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part’ (p. 91) and praises his skills as an orator, utilising his voice, his looks and his gesture to perform his part, ultimately claiming that ‘those who do call him a Player, do him wrong’ (p. 92). This differentiation between the player and the truly skilled professional actor asserts acting as an elevated art form and constructs both Field and Burbage as skilled actors for whom ‘Play’ is their ‘Business’ (p. 92). In linking these two players in this way, Flecknoe continues the construction of Field’s identity through this association initiated in Bartholomew Fair. However, unlike accounts of Field provided during his lifetime, subsequent accounts do not always refer to the details of his life and character. Yet, interestingly, when details are remembered they specifically evoke Field’s identity as a child player. In the 1641 prologue to George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, he is remembered for his skill in performing the title role, which he probably played as a member of the Queen’s Revels in c. 1604.66 The prologue bemoans the fact that ‘Field is gone / Whose Action first did give it name’ and thus re-imagines him as a skilled and potentially irreplaceable player.67 This posthumous reference to Field’s career is quite unusual in identifying a player with one

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specific role.68 It implies his particular skills as a player and in performing this role, and simultaneously locates his life as a child player at the centre of his career and the cultural memory of this career. Other child players are remembered in various ways. Although Salomon Pavy, who died in c. 1603 at the age of 14 when a member of the Children of the Chapel, is memorialised as a child in Jonson’s ‘An Epitaph on S. P.’, with which this book began, this is most likely a result of his death in childhood. His early death and the immediacy of this memorial to him control this representation of the child player. Epitaphs to other members of the children’s playing companies make no reference to their early careers as child players. William Rowley’s elegy to Hugh Attwell, a member of the Children of the Queen’s Revels from at least 1609, following his death in 1621 does not provide any details of his professional affiliations or playing experiences other than his latest affiliation with Prince Charles Men, as it describes him as acting ‘’Mongst living Princes’.69 Similarly John Davies’s epigram upon William Ostler, a member of the Children of the Chapel from 1601 to 1608 and of the King’s Men until his death in 1614, included in The Scourge of Folly (1611) represents him as a great player, ‘the Roscius of these times’ and ‘Sole King of Actors’, making reference to his current status as a King’s Man.70 The identities and later fame of these players in their adulthood supersedes their status as child players. However, Ostler is noted in another account, the 1635 lawsuit included among the Blackfriars’ Sharers’ Papers, alongside John Underwood and Nathan Field as leaving the Children of the Revels for the King’s Men.71 Field and Underwood are again remembered for this professional development at the end of the seventeenth century in the description of the children’s playing companies in James Wright’s Historia Histrionica (1699), which notes that ‘Some of these Chappel Boys, when they grew Men, became Actors at the Blackfriers; such were Nathan Field, and John Underwood.’72 This account and memory of Field is notable because it gives a sense of his career as a player. It memorialises him, and John Underwood, as boys of the Children of the Chapel developing in their adulthoods into actors at the Blackfriars, that is with the King’s Men. It privileges their experiences as child players alongside their identities as players in their adulthood. It thus gestures towards a link between the players’ experiences in the two institutions, and conceptualises the institution of the Chapel boys as preparing the boys for this adult identity.

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The experiences of the child player are, therefore, significant in forging the player’s career and this culturally constructed professional identity. This identity is initially constructed within the children’s playing company through the education, apprenticeship and training that prepares these children as players and feeds into their subsequent identities as players in their adulthood, which are developed through their progressions to other theatrical institutions and professions. Furthermore, it is within the children’s playing company that these boy players begin to forge their status and fame within the professional theatre. This identity is remembered and developed by the further performances of the players in particular roles, the recognition of these players by contemporary audiences, metatheatrical representations and the publication of cast-lists. It is this range of experiences and representations, supplemented in the case of Nathan Field by his self-representation, which produce and merge in the trope of the player that enters cultural memory. This legend of the player may then continually evolve within cultural representations, as subsequent accounts are influenced by the pervasive image of these child, and adult, players in theatrical and cultural history. The children’s playing companies, therefore, not only produced a category and trope of the child player but also lasting tropes of individual players, such as Field. Yet what is even more significant about these accounts is the way in which they view the professional lives of the boys as a process of development. It is in this image that Field’s self-representation and others’ perception of him overlap. Field’s representation of his increasing skill and fame as a playwright and this account of movement between companies when the boys grew to be men both evoke a sense of growth and development. These child players perceive themselves and are perceived by others as entities in process. In these instances they are in the process of achieving professional adult status. As this book has argued throughout, it is a sense of process, of growth, of development and of becoming, which characterise early modern constructions of childhood. This concept of what it means to be a child is imposed upon the child players by the dramatists and audiences for their theatres and is continued in later representations of the child player. The boys of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels are imagined in this theatrical institution as beings in process. They are represented in these terms in

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diverse ways – as gender in process; as shifting aged, gendered and national entities; and as emerging adult identities. However, as the case of Nathan Field demonstrates, this concept of childhood is also appropriated by the child players. They exploit the ways in which they are perceived as children in order to produce and develop their professional identities as child players and as individuals in the onstage and offstage realms of the theatrical community of early modern London.

Notes Introduction 1. Ben Jonson, ‘Epitaph on S. P. a Child of Q. El. Chappel’, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), VIII (1947), p. 77, ll. 1–5. Further references are given in the text. 2. For example, Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 104; Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram, eds, English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 268. 3. See Claire Busse, ‘Pretty Fictions and Little Stories’, in Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800, ed. Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 75–102 (p. 75). 4. See David Kathman, ‘How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?’, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), 220–46 (p. 223). 5. See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1962), pp. 36–7. 6. For ease of reference I will generally refer to ‘the Children of the Queen’s Revels’, but I will use the title appropriate to a particular historical moment when discussing a specific event. 7. See Shapiro, Children of the Revels, p. 104; Shen Lin, “How Old were the Children of Paul’s?”, Theatre Notebook, 45 (1991), 121–31. 8. See Linda Austern, ‘Thomas Ravenscroft: Musical Chronicler of an Elizabethan Theatre Company’, Journal of American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 238–63; W. Reavley Gair, ‘Chorister-Actors at Paul’s’, Notes and Queries, 25 (1978), 440–1; Lin, p. 124; The National Archive (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) STAC 5/C46/39, Clifton v. Robinson, Evans and Others, 1601. 9. Cited in W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 154–5 [italics mine]. 10. Charles William Wallace, ‘Shakespeare and His London Associates as Revealed in Recently Discovered Documents’, University Studies, 10.4 (1910), 76–100 (p. 90); M. E. Williams, ‘Field, Nathan (bap. 1587, d. 1619/20)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9391. 11. See summary of responses to Ariès in Margaret King, ‘Concepts of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), 371–407. 143

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12. Kate Chedgzoy, ‘Introduction: “What, are they children?”’, in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Suzanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 15–31 (p. 17). 13. OED def 4, 6, 8. 14. See Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 62 (1976), 205–48, on the gerontocratic society of early modern England. 15. The Office of Christian Parents (London, 1616), p. 43 [italics original]. 16. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Coxcomb, ed. Irby B. Cathuen, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 11 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96), I (1966), pp. 263–366 (2.2.37). 17. Hezekiah Woodward, Childe’s Patrimony (London, 1640), p. 10. 18. OED, def. 2. 19. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), pp. 2619–708 (5.2.215–17). 20. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, in The Norton Shakespeare, pp. 2785–872 (5.6.103). 21. OED, def. 1.i. 22. John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 117–76 (4.2.70–4). 23. John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, pp. 1–56 (‘Prologue’, ll. 22–3). 24. Francis Lenton, The Young Man’s Whirligig (London, 1629), p. 2. 25. Lenton, p. 15. 26. Henry Cuffe, The Differences of Ages of Man’s Life (London, 1607), p. 117 [italics original]. 27. The Office of Christian Parents, p. 162. 28. Anna Davin, ‘What is a Child?’, in Childhood in Question, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 15–36 (p. 33). 29. T. Sheafe, Vindiciae Senectute (London, 1639), Bv. 30. Bartolomaeus Anglicus, Batman Upon Bartolome his Booke De proprietatibus rerum (London, 1582), p. 73. 31. Barthelemy Batt, De Oeconomia Christiana (London, 1581), p. 10; Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601), p. 297. 32. See Margreta de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 29–58. 33. James Cleland, The Institution of a Young Noble Man (London, 1607), p. 23. 34. For example, Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977). 35. See Karìn Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 29–36; Allison James,

Notes 145

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 146–7. Thomas, p. 205. Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Theorizing Age with Gender: Bly’s Boys, Feminism, and Maturity Masculinity’, in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 90–118 (p. 94). Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1999), p. xvi, raises the question of ‘what happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips with race’. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Norton Shakespeare, pp. 1591–1657 (2.7.141–65). Edward Calver, Passion and Discretion, in Youth and Age (London, 1641), p. 13. Ben Jonson, Timber; or, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, VIII (1947), pp. 555–649 (p. 597). I.G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (London, 1615), p. 16. Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 100–3; Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 10–16. William Rankins, A Mirrour of Monsters (London, 1587), bii; William Prynne, Histriomastix (London, 1649), pp. 171, 892. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), p. 294. Studies of the children’s playing companies include Charles Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597–1603 (New York: AMS Press, 1908); Harold Hillebrand, The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964); Gair, The Children of Paul’s; Shapiro, Children of the Revels; Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and, Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. In referring to James I’s wife as ‘Anna’ rather than ‘Anne’, I am following Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 1. ‘Patent for Children of Queen’s Revels, Jan 4 1610’, in Dramatic Records from the Patent Rolls, Malone Society Collections, III, ed. E. K. Chambers and W. W. Greg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), pp. 271–2. Richard Dutton, ‘The Revels Office and the Boy Companies, 1600–1613: New Perspectives’, English Literary Renaissance, 32.2 (2002), 324–51 (pp. 340–1). See Bly, pp. 1–27; Shapiro, Children of the Revels, pp. 23–4. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 363.

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53. Transcribed in Wallace, ‘Shakespeare and His London Associates’, p. 90. 54. For example, Edward Kirkham moved from the Queen’s Revels, who he had managed since 1602, to Paul’s in c. 1605/6, bringing with him Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois and Marston’s The Fawn. Between 1606 and 1608 he returned to the former company, bringing Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One. 55. Michael Witmore, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen (London: Routledge, 2007). 56. For example, Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Peter Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the Body Beneath: Speculating on the Boy Actor’, in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 64–83. 57. McManus, p. 190. 58. Samuel Daniel, Tethy’s Festival, in Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments 1605–1640, ed. David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 54–65 (l. 117). See Barbara Ravelhofer, ‘“Virgin Wax” and “Hairy Men Monsters”: Unstable Movement Codes in the Stuart Masque’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 244–72 (p. 256). 59. See Marion O’Connor, ‘Rachel Fane’s May Masque at Apethorpe 1627’, English Literary Renaissance, 36.1 (2006), 90–104. 60. John Marston, The Entertainment of the Dowager-Countess of Darby, in The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), pp. 189–207. 61. Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson, The Magnificent Entertainment, in Jacobean Civic Pageants, ed. Richard Dutton (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995), pp. 19–115 (p. 85); John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James I, 4 vols (London, 1828), II, pp. 136–7. 62. Tracey Hill, Anthony Munday and Civic Culture: History, Power and Representation in Early Modern London, 1580–1633 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 164. 63. See James Knowles, ‘Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’, in Representing Ben Jonson, ed. Martin Butler (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 114–51; Scott McMillin, ‘Jonson’s Early Entertainments: New Information from Hatfield House’, Renaissance Drama, 1 (1968), 153–66. 64. Willem Schrickx, Foreign Envoys and Travelling Players in the Age of Shakespeare and Jonson (Wetteren: Universa, 1986), pp. 123–8; Erik Wikland, Elizabethan Players in Sweden, 1591–1592 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1962), p. 48; Edwin Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors and of

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65.

66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England Before 1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 60–3. See Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); W. L. Wiley, The Early Public Theatre in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 235–9. Sidney Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama and the Crisis of Masculinity (London: Associated University Presses, 2003), pp. 57, 67–72; Orgel, Impersonations, p. 2. Wiley, pp. 92–4. Roslyn Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 74 For example, Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1952), esp. pp. 55, 90. Scott McMillin, and Sally Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. xii. See also Scott McMillin, Lawrence Manley, Roslyn Knutson and Mark Bayer, ‘Reading the Elizabethan Acting Companies’, Early Theatre, 4 (2001), 111–48; Lucy Munro, ‘Early Modern Drama and the Repertory Approach’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 42 (2003), 1–33.

1 The Child as Trope: Performing Age and Gender on the Early Modern Children’s Stage 1. John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 1–56 (‘Induction’, ll. 69–76). Further references are given in the text. 2. Ben Jonson, Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, ed. Roger Holdsworth (London A & C Black, 1979, repr. 2005), 5.4.188–9. Further references are given in the text. 3. On Epicoene, see Richmond Barbour, ‘“When I Acted Young Antonius”: Boy Actors and the Erotics of Jonsonian Theatre’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 110.5 (1995), 1006–22 (p. 1016); Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 105–9; Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 73–88; Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 100–2. On Antonio and Mellida, see Gina Bloom, ‘“Thy Voice Squeaks”: Listening for Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama, 29 (1998), 39–71; Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 49–74. 4. W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 118. 5. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) STAC 5/C46/39, Clifton v. Robinson, Evans and Others, 1601, indicates that boys were trained in the reading of parts, as Clifton claims that his son was given

148

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

Notes

‘a scroll of paper containing part of one of their said playes or interludes’ and ‘comaunded to learne the same by hearte’. See Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1, on this theatrical method. See Aaron Kitsch, ‘Bastards and Broadsides in The Winter’s Tale’, Renaissance Drama, 30 (2001), 43–71. On players’ ages, see introduction, p. 3. Scholars assuming a constant awareness of the disparity between player and role include: Anthony Caputi, John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), p. 113; R. A. Foakes, ‘John Marston’s Fantastical Plays: Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge’, Philological Quarterly, 41.1 (1962), 229–39. Scholars arguing that this disparity was accepted as a theatrical convention, except when deliberately alluded to, include Ann Blake, ‘“The Humor of Children”: John Marston’s Plays in the Private Theatres’, Review of English Studies, 38 (1987), 471–82; Gair, The Children of Paul’s; Shapiro, Children of the Revels; Ejner Jensen, ‘The Boy Actors: Plays and Playing’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 18 (1975), 5–11; Kathleen McLuskie, ‘The Act, the Role, and the Actor: Boy Actresses on the Elizabethan Stage’, New Theatre Quarterly, 3 (1987), 120–30; Peter Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the Body Beneath: Speculating on the Boy Actor’, in Susan Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 64–83. Shapiro, Children of the Revels, pp. 104–12. See Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, eds, Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All Male Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), which challenges the contention that the early modern stage was all-male. See Will Fisher, ‘Staging the Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern Culture in Early Modern English Culture’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 230–57; Howard, pp. 93–128; Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 18, 103; Stallybrass, pp. 64–83. William Percy, Comoedyes and Pastoralls with their Songs, Huntington Library, MS HM 4, fol. 5. Further references are given in the text. On the debates surrounding performance, see Matthew Dimmock, William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven: A Critical Edition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 52–7. Fisher, pp. 235, 238. Thomas Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters, in ‘A Mad World, My Masters’ and Other Plays, ed. Michael Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 1–66 (2.1.127–8). Gair, The Children of Paul’s, p. 61; Fisher, p. 241. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, ed. J. P. Collier (London, 1841), p. 49. Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 2.

Notes 149

17. John Lyly, Love’s Metamorphosis, in The Plays of John Lyly, ed. Carter Daniel (London: Associated University Presses, 1988), pp. 287–336 (p. 305). Further references are given in the text. 18. George Chapman, May Day, ed. Robert F. Walsh, in The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies, gen. ed. Allan Holaday (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 311–96 (1.1.7–8). Further references are given in the text. 19. Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 26–7. 20. Adrian Weiss, ‘A Pill to Purge Parody: Marston’s Manipulation of the Paul’s Environment in the Antonio Plays’, in The Theatrical Space, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 81–98. 21. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), pp. 1659–759 (2.2.325–46). 22. John Marston, ‘To the Equal Reader,’ in Parasitaster, or The Fawn, ed. David A. Blostein (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), ll. 20, 65–6. 23. John Marston, ‘To the Reader’, The Malcontent, in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, pp. 117–76 (ll. 24–6). 24. John Marston, Jack Drum’s Entertainment (London: Tudor Facsimile Texts, 1912), sig. A2r. Further references are given in the text. 25. OED, def. 2. See Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 77. 26. On anxieties about masculinity and bodily lack, see Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 1–34; pp. 150–74. 27. On likeness, see Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures in Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 17–23, 125. 28. See Stallybrass, pp. 64–83. 29. See Gina Bloom, ‘“Thy Voice Squeaks”: Listening for Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama, 29 (1998), 39–71 (esp. p. 44) on the anxiety resulting from the vocal exposure of the liminal state of the boy’s body. 30. John Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1980), 3.2.1105–7. 31. Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 16. On the formative nature of masculinity, see also Fisher, pp. 231, 242; Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 1, 17; Ruth Karras, From Boys to Men: Formation of Masculinity in late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 32. Henry Cuffe, The Differences of Ages of Man’s Life (London, 1607), p. 113 [italics in original]. Further references are given in the text.

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33. The Office of Christian Parents (Cambridge, 1616), p. 162. 34. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman (New Jersey: Walter J. Johnson Inc., 1975), p. 4. 35. See Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. See also Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 51; Orgel, Impersonations, p. 15. 36. Germaine Greer, The Boy (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), p. 21. See also C. John Sommerville, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 15. 37. See ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–16. 38. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, in The Norton Shakespeare, 1.4.29–30; 1.5.139–40; 1.5.141–2. Further references are given in the text. 39. See Keir Elam, ‘The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, Early Modern Intercourse and the Fruits of Castration’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47.1 (1996), 1–36 (p. 33). 40. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in The Norton Shakespeare, 3.4.66. 41. Bloom, pp. 40–4. 42. Bloom, p. 61. 43. See Erica Fudge, ‘Calling Creatures by their True Names: Bacon, the New Science and the Beast in Man’, in Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman, eds, At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 91–109. 44. See David Kathman, ‘How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?’, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), 220–39. 45. Sukanya B. Senapti, ‘“Two Parts in One”: Marston and Masculinity’, in The Drama of John Marston, ed. T. F. Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 124–44 (p. 126). 46. See Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 34–7. 47. Victor Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915), pp. 101–20. 48. Cast-lists are cited in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), IV (1932), pp. 184, 325; V (1937), p. 271. 49. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) KB 27/1357/ 582, Cooke Indenture, 1607; Shen Lin, ‘How Old were the Children of Paul’s?’, Theatre Notebook, 45 (1991), 121–31 (p. 127). 50. Orgel, Impersonations, pp. 68–9. 51. See Howard, p. 106; Levine, pp. 73–4; McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, p. 102; Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 129–44. 52. J. A. Riddell, ‘Some Actors in Ben Jonson’s Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 285–98 (pp. 285, 295).

Notes 151

53. See Katherine Eisamann Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 128–57. 54. See Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 195–6. 55. Bloom, pp. 63–4. 56. See, for example, Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). See also Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London: Virago Press, 1995), on the child as an emblem of the adult human condition.

2 Evaluating Childhood: The Theatrical Trade in Children 1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), pp. 1659–759 (2.2.332–6). Further references are given in the text. 2. On the evidence that this passage refers to the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars (c. 1606–8), see Roslyn Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 103–26. See also James Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 225–56. 3. Knutson, p. 119. 4. See Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 21–65. 5. See, for example, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and Theatre in Anglo-American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 6. See Knutson, esp. pp. 35, 37, 47, 76. 7. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) STAC 5/C46/39, Clifton v. Robinson, Evans and Others, 1601. Extracts from this document are printed in Irwin Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse (London: Peter Owen, 1966), pp. 484–6; Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram, eds, English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 264–7, 510. 8. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. See also The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) C82/1608/16, Commission to Nathaniel Giles, 1597. Similar commissions were also granted to the masters of the choristers of Paul’s, for example, the 1585 commission granted to Thomas Giles, printed in Wickham, Berry and Ingram, pp. 262–3. 9. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. 10. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. 11. Scholars who cite this legal suit as a source of factual information about the Children of the Chapel include Harold H. Hillebrand, The Child

152

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

Notes

Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), pp. 160–3; Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 347–8; Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 37–8; Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 24–5; Smith, pp. 182–5; Charles William Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597–1603 (New York: AMS Press, 1908), pp. 71, 76. Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 68–9, reads it as possible evidence of the violent abuse of the child players. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. The Case of Edward Williams (London, 1698). It is interesting to note that the 13-year-old Paul Pindar is referred to as an ‘infant’ throughout this document – perhaps another example indicating that this term refers to status, in this case being a ward, rather than age. An Ordinance of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, for the Apprehending and Bringing to Condigne Punishment, All Such Lewd Persons as Shall Steale, Sell, Buy, Inveigle, Purloyne, Convey, or Receive Any Little Children (London, 1645). See Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 14, 41; Claire Busse, ‘Profitable Children: Children as Commodities in Early Modern England’, in Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England, ed. Kari Boyd McBride (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), pp. 209–43; David Cheal, The Gift Economy (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 2–3, 9–16; Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 29–66. Charles Gibbon, Work Worth the Reading (London, 1591), pp. 7–8. See Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 207, on ‘property’. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. Ben Jonson, Poetaster; or, The Arraignment, in The Devil is an Ass’ and Other Plays, ed. Margaret Kidnie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–102 (3.4.176–7). Further references are given in the text. Tucca refers to the boys as slaves in 1.2.151, 3.4.14, 4.3.106, 5.3.94. See Callaghan, pp. 84–5. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 10, 20.

Notes 153

27. See Hall, pp. 62–122. 28. A Yorkshire Tragedy, ed. A. C. Cawley and Barry Gaines (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 4.97. The editors suggest that ‘white boy’ is a term for pet or darling (p. 78). 29. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. 30. Cited in Wickham, Berry and Ingram, p. 270. 31. See Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, ‘Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–34 (pp. 1–2). 32. Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 11 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96), I (1966), pp. 1–110 (2.280). Further references are given in the text. 33. Bruster, p. 64. 34. Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama’, in Staged Properties, pp. 47–8. See also Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 1–7, 11, 18–19. 35. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 1. See also James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 5. 36. Rose, p. 3. 37. See Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 181, who reads this as a reference to boys performing adults in the children’s theatres. 38. George Chapman, May Day, ed. Robert F. Walsh, in The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies, gen. ed. Allan Holaday (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 311–96 (3.3.202–6). 39. Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 6. 40. Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 49–53, 197. See also Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop, 29 (1990), 1–19 (esp. pp. 3–4, 8–10); Mario DiGangi, ‘Asses and Wits: The Homoerotics of Mastery in Satiric Comedy’, English Literary Renaissance, 25.2 (1995), 179–208 (p.183); Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 58. 41. John Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1980), 2.2.802; 2.2.800; 2.2.812. 42. Orgel, Impersonations, p. 70. 43. Ben Jonson, Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, ed. Roger Holdsworth (London A & C Black, 1979, repr. 2005), 1.1.12–17.

154

Notes

44. On the homoerotic connotations of these terms, see Orgel, Impersonations, p. 43; Jean Howard, ‘Sex and Social Conflict: The Erotics of The Roaring Girl’, in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 170–90 (p. 177). 45. Alan Sinfield, ‘Poetaster, the Author and the Perils of Cultural Production’, in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 75–89 (p.87). 46. On the erotic potential of the boy player, see Susan Zimmerman, ‘Disruptive Desire: Artifice and Indeterminacy in Jacobean Comedy’, in Erotic Politics, pp. 39–63 (p. 47); Howard, p. 175. 47. Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-Booke (London, 1609), p. 29. While I have not come across any evidence for or against a trade in child players as prostitutes, there is no doubt that early modern children were subject to sexual exploitation and abuse. See Martin Ingram, ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Early Modern England’, in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 63–84; Jessica Warner and Robin Griller, ‘“My Pappa is out, and my Mamma is asleep”: Minors, Their Routine Activities and Interpersonal Violence in an Early Modern Town, 1653–1781’, Journal of Social History, 36.3 (2003), 561–84. 48. See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 54–5; Joseph Lenz, ‘Base Trade: Theatre as Prostitution’, English Literary History, 60 (1993), 833–55; Orgel, Impersonations, pp. 37–8. 49. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), sig. E4v. 50. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. 51. See Jonas A. Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 182–4. 52. See Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization: 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 3. 53. Callaghan, pp. 67, 70. 54. Knutson, pp. 10, 20–47. 55. The National Archives (TNA): Public Records Office (PRO) KB 27/1357/582, Cooke Indenture, 1607. 56. The National Archives (TNA): Public Records Office (PRO) C66/1708/8, Commission to Nathaniel Giles, 1606. 57. G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 6, 118–19; Orgel, Impersonations, pp. 64–6. 58. TNA: PRO KB 27/1357/582. 59. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. 60. Camille Wells Slights, ‘Slaves and Subjects in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48.4 (1997), 377–90 (p. 383). 61. See Kathleen McLuskie, ‘Figuring the Consumer for Early Modern Drama’, in Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the

Notes 155

62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Early Modern English Stage, ed. Bryan Reynolds and William N. West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 186–206 (p. 202), on the need to differentiate between the dramatic representation of the consumer and the historical consumer who attended the theatre. Thomas Middleton, Michaelmas Term, in ‘A Mad World, My Masters’ and Other Plays, ed. Michael Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 66–136 (1.2.4). Further references are given in the text. John Twyning, London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 55–7. See also Susan Wells, ‘Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City’, English Literary History, 48 (1981), 37–60. Twyning, p. 57. John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 177–240 (1.1.95–127). Further references are given in the text. Stephen Orgel, ‘Nobody’s Perfect; or, Why did the English Stage take Boys for Women?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), 7–29 (p. 17); Ronald Huebert, The Performance of Pleasure in English Renaissance Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 1; Michael Bristol, Big Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 33–5. Bristol, p. 35. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39 describes Pavy as having been an ‘apprentice to one Peerce’, possibly Edward Pearce, the Master of the Children of Paul’s from 1599 to 1612. See W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 64. The theft of trained child players was not unprecedented. A player was also ‘stolen and conveyed’ from Sebastian Westcott, master of the Children of Paul’s in 1575. See Wickham, Berry and Ingram, p. 309. Cited in Charles William Wallace, ‘Shakespeare and His London Associates as Revealed in Recently Discovered Documents,’ University Studies of the University of Nebraska, 10 (1910), 76–100 (p. 90). Shapiro, pp. 23–4, also argues that the Children of the King’s Revels was a purely commercial venture. See Gurr, pp. 363–4 and the introduction to this book, p. 11. See Siobhan Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 150. Wickham, Berry and Ingram, eds, p. 273. W. R. Streitberger, ed., Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts, Malone Society Collections, XIII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 70. On the records of this performance, see James Knowles, ‘Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’, in Representing Ben Jonson, ed. Martin Butler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 114–17; Scott McMillin, ‘Jonson’s Early Entertainments: New Information from Hatfield House’, Renaissance Drama, 1 (1968), 153–66. See also Munro, p. 39, who suggests that this indicates the general practice of the Children of the Queen’s Revels in their later years.

156

Notes

76. McMillin, p. 162. 77. See Richard Dutton, ‘The Revels Office and the Boy Companies, 1600–1613: New Perspectives’, English Literary Renaissance, 32.2 (2002), 324–51 (p. 340). 78. See Dutton, p. 343.

3 Performing Court and Nation: The English Child Player 1. Anthony Weldon, ‘A Description of Scotland’, in The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James I, ed. John Nichols, 4 vols (London, 1828), IV, pp. 341–2. Further references will be given in the text. 2. See Jonas A. Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 155–90. 3. See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 114; Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram, eds, English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 90. 4. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) SP 38/7, Patent for the Children of the Queen’s Revels, Jan 31 1604. 5. Laurence Michel, ‘The Essex Affair’, in The Tragedy of Philotas, ed. Laurence Michel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 35–66 (p. 36). 6. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), II, p. 369. 7. For analysis in studies of licensing and censorship, see Janet Clare, ‘Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 101–40; Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 73; Richard Dutton, ‘Ben Jonson and the Master of the Revels’, in Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 57–86; Richard Dutton, ‘“Licensed by Authority”: Ben Jonson and the Politics of Early Stuart Theatre’, English Literary History, 54.3 (1987), 529–60; Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 164–93; Philip J. Finkelpearl, ‘“The Comedians’ Liberty”: Censorship of the Jacobean Stage Reconsidered’, English Literary Renaissance, 16.1 (1986), 123–38. For analysis in studies of the Jacobean courts and patronage, see J. Q. Adams, ‘Eastward Ho and Satire against the Scots’, Studies in Philology, 28 (1931), 689–701; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 15–44; Albert H. Tricomi, Anti-Court Drama in England, 1603–1642 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989),

Notes 157

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

pp. 25–9. For analysis in scholarship of the children’s companies, see Chambers, II, p. 50; Gurr, pp. 343–53; Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 146. Clare, p. 101; Dutton, Licensing Censorship, pp. 9–10; Dutton, Mastering the Revels, p. 190. Dutton, Mastering the Revels, p. 190; Lewalski, p. 24. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, ed. J. P. Collier (London, 1841), p. 61; Chambers, II, p. 50; Gurr, pp. 345–53; Irwin Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and Its Design (London: Peter Owen, 1966), p. 191. Translated by John Margeson, ‘Appendix II A,’ in The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, ed. John Margeson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 276–7. Further references are given in the text. John Gabel, ‘The Original Version of Chapman’s Tragedy of Byron’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 63 (1964), 433–40 (p. 440). Margeson, ‘Introduction’, p. 10. George Chapman, The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, in The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, pp. 167–270 (2.19). Further references are given in the text. Margeson, ‘Introduction’, p. 10. W. L. Wiley, The Early Public Theatre in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 94. The details of this play and the ensuing legal proceedings are outlined in The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) STAC 8/8/2, Attorney General v. Joanes and Others, 1603–1625. See summary of these documents in C. J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 12–79. TNA: PRO STAC 8/8/2, sheet 8. Margeson, ‘Appendix II B’, in The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, pp. 278–9. The National Archives (TNA): Public Records Office (PRO) SP 14/31/73, Letter from Sir Thomas Lake to Lord Salisbury, 11 Mar 1608, transcribed in Wickham, Berry and Ingram, pp. 514–15. Although Lake implies that two different companies performed the plays, the French Ambassador states that the same played both. See Dutton, Mastering the Revels, p. 188. Dutton, Mastering the Revels, p. 188. TNA: PRO SP 14/31/73. Richard Dutton, ‘The Revels Office and the Boy Companies, 1600–1613: New Perspectives’, English Literary Renaissance, 32.2 (2002), 324–51 (pp. 338–43); Gurr, pp. 354–6; T. B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 135–8. Clare, p. 117; Mary Susan Steele, Plays and Masques at Court During the Reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 205.

158

Notes

25. On the debates surrounding James’s censorship of the stage, see Dutton, Mastering the Revels, p. 178; Finkelpearl, ‘The Comedians’ Liberty’, pp. 123–38. 26. Steele, p. 152. 27. David Cook and F. P. Wilson, eds, Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, 1558–1642, Malone Society Collections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 45, note a payment to ‘Thomas Keysar [ . . . ] for two playes presented before his matie the 29th Julye and 1st Januarye’ made on 30 March 1607’. They suggest that this is probably an error for Robert Keysar, the manager of the Children of the Queen’s Revels and the reason that the company is not named is a result of the ambiguous status of the children’s company at this date. See also J. W. Binns and H. N. Davies, ‘Christian IV and The Dutch Courtesan’, Theatre Notebook, 44. 3 (1990), 118–23. 28. Albert H. Tricomi, ‘The Dates of the Plays of George Chapman’, English Literary Renaissance, 12 (1982), 242–70 (pp. 246–7). 29. Cited in Charles William Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597–1603 (New York: AMS Press, 1908), p. 107. 30. See Elissa B. Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 49–95, especially pp. 73–5 on the use of music in these performances. 31. Cited in W. B. Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James (London, 1865), pp. 15–16. 32. On the associations between music and sensuality, see Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘“Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie”: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England’, Music and Letters, 74.3 (1993), 349–51; Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1992), pp.155–61. 33. See Michael Shapiro, ‘Patronage and the Companies of Boy Actors’, in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 272–94 (p. 289). 34. Wallace, The Children of the Chapel, p. 107. 35. Wallace, The Children of the Chapel, pp. 109–11. 36. See R. W. Van Fossen, ‘Introduction’, in Eastward Ho, ed. R. W. Van Fossen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 1–58 (pp. 5–7). 37. George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho, 4.1.197–8. Further references are given in the text. 38. See Munro, p. 43, on the performance of social status in this play. 39. See Van Fossen, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–6, for a summary of the critical debate on whether it is the performance or publication of the play that provokes contemporary intervention. 40. See Clare, pp. 212–13. 41. Stephen Orgel, ‘Making Greatness Familiar’, Genre, 15.2–3 (1982), 41–8 (p. 45). 42. The letters are reproduced in ‘Appendix Two’, in Eastward Ho, pp. 218–25.

Notes 159

43. Heywood, p. 61. 44. Cited in Clare, p. 126. 45. See Adams who emphasises the anti-Scottish elements of this satire as crucial to the ensuing controversy. See also Dutton, Mastering the Revels, pp. 174–6, who downplays this aspect. 46. See Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 138. 47. Van Fossen, ‘Introduction’, pp. 45–6. 48. See Christopher Ivic, ‘Mapping British Identities: Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine’, in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, ed. David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 135–58 (p. 135). 49. See Brian Gibbons, ‘The Wrong End of the Telescope’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 141–59 (p. 150). 50. Jean Howard argues that the genre of city comedy develops after 1603 as a means of address the hybridized city through the discourses of national identity and commercial activity in ‘Mastering Difference in The Dutch Courtesan’, Shakespeare Studies, 24 (1996), 105–17 (p. 107). See also A. J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), p. 108, who argues that the ‘foreign element’ in city comedies after 1603 functions to ‘set off the native qualities’. 51. Edward Sharpham, The Fleer, ed. Lucy Munro (London: Nick Hern Books, 2006), 3.1.191–2; 3.1.126–7. Further references will be given in the text. 52. Weldon, p. 339. 53. Chambers, III, p. 430, suggests a performance date of 1603–4. Anthony Caputi, John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), pp. 219–20, argues for early 1605. It was definitely performed sometime before 26 July 1605, when it was entered in the Stationers’ Register as ‘latelie presented at the Blackeffryers’. It was also re-performed before James by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men in 1613 and 1614. See W. R. Streitberger, ed., Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts, 1603–1642, Malone Society Collections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 55, 62. 54. John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 177–240 (2.3.14). Further references are given in the text. 55. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and their Contemporaries (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 23. 56. Anthony Nixon, The Blacke Yeare (London, 1606), sig. B2r. 57. Clare, p. 118. 58. See William Shakespeare, Henry V, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), pp. 1445–523, (especially 3.3). See also Patricia Parker, ‘Uncertain Unions: Welsh Leeks in Henry V’, in British Identities and English Renaissance

160

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

70.

71.

Notes

Literature, pp. 81–100, on the function of the Welsh rhetoric and accent in destabilising the concept of Britishness in the play. See ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, p. 368. Howard, pp. 115–16. See Howard, pp. 109–12. See Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 19. On the familiarity of English writers with the performances of Isabella Andreini on English drama, see Julie Campbell, ‘“Merry, nimble, stirring spirit[s]”: Academic, Salon and Commedia dell’arte Influence on the Innamorate in Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, ed. Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 145–70; Kenneth Richards, and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 262–3. Translated from Giuseppe Pavoni, Diario Descritto de Giuseppe Pavoni (1589) in Richards and Richards, p. 76. Richards and Richards, pp. 75–6. See Henke, p. 101, on the purpose of the mad scene. The letter from Sir Thomas Lake to Lord Salisbury (TNA: PRO SP 14/31/73) and the title page of the 1608 quarto of the Byron plays place these plays in the repertoire of the Children of the Revels. See introduction, pp. 13–14. Barbara Ravelhofer, ‘“Virgin Wax” and “Hairy Men Monsters”: Unstable Movement Codes in the Stuart Masque’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 244–72 (p. 262; see also pp. 256–67). Michael Witmore, Pretty Fictions: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 58–94; Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 1–6. See Meradith T. McMunn, ‘Children as Actors and Audience for Early Scottish Drama and Ceremony’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 10.1 (1985), 22–4 (p. 22). McMunn, p. 22.

4 Performing Court and Nation: The English Child Player 1. Edward Snow, Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in ‘Children’s Games’ (New York: North Point Press, 1997), p. 18. 2. See introduction, pp. 8–9. 3. On theatre as childish, see David Pascoe, ‘Marston’s Childishness’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 9 (1997), 92–111 (p. 102). 4. Ben Jonson, Timber; or, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), VIII (1947), pp. 555–649 (p. 597).

Notes 161

5. For example, Richard Burbage is described as a ‘delightful Proteus’ in Richard Flecknoe, Love’s Kingdom, With a Short Treatise of the English Stage (London, 1664), pp. 91–2. Examples of the anti-theatrical view of the transformative power of theatre include William Rankins, A Mirrour of Monsters (London, 1587), sig. B2v; William Prynne, Histriomastix (London, 1649), p. 893. See Introduction of this book, pp.1–16. 6. Kate Chedgzoy, ‘Shakespeare in the Company of Boys’, in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Suzanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 184–200 (p. 190). 7. For further links between these plays, see Michael Witmore’s reading of Jonson’s and Marston’s plays in the context of children’s performance in Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 95–136. 8. Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, in Ben Jonson, IV (1932), pp. 1–184 (Induction, l. 11). Further references are given in the text. 9. See Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 12–23; Kathleen Lea, Italian Popular Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), pp. 54–65. 10. Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images’, in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 3–32. 11. On mould as a term used in print technology, see Aaron Kitsch, ‘Bastards and Broadsides in The Winter’s Tale’, Renaissance Drama, 30 (2001), 43–71. See, for example, William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 11’, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), p. 1927, in which the speaker advises the young man to have children, stating ‘thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die’ (ll. 13–14). See also Douglas Brooks, ‘Introduction’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern, ed. Douglas Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 1–29 (p. 2). 12. William Martyn, Youth’s Instruction (London, 1612), n.p. 13. Hezekiah Woodward, Childes Patrimony (London, 1640), n.p. 14. Woodward, n.p. 15. Francis Lenton, The Young Man’s Whirligig (London, 1629), n.p. 16. William Kempe, The Education of Children in Learning (London, 1588), sig. E4r. 17. The Court of Good Counsell (London, 1607), sig. F4v. 18. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), p. 2. 19. See Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Family in Shakespeare Studies’, Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), 707–42 (p. 730). 20. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman (1630; New Jersey: Walter J. Johnson, 1975), pp. 97, 93. Barthelemy Batt, De Oeconomia Christiana: The Christian Man’s Closet (London, 1581), p. 10. See introduction to this book, pp. 6–7.

162

Notes

21. OED, def. 1. 22. Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 14–16. 23. On early modern education, see Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1965), pp. 89–130; Helen M. Jewell, Education in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 93–102; Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society, 1500–1800 (London: Longman, 1982), pp. 11–47. 24. See Rhodes, pp. 7–8. 25. On early modern rites of passage, see Walter Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies in Philology, 56 (1959), 103–24; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 1–22. 26. On performance in educational institutions, see F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914); Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); T. H. Motter, The School Drama in England (London: Longman, 1929); Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 3–4. 27. Cited in Edwin Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors and of Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England Before 1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), p. 390. 28. Cited in Boas, pp. 235–6. 29. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, ed. J. P. Collier (London, 1841), p. 28. 30. John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 1–56 (3.2.116, s.d). 31. Cited in Charles William Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597–1603 (New York: AMS Press, 1908), p. 107. 32. Wallace, p. 107. 33. See Barbara Ravelhofer, ‘“Virgin Wax” and “Hairy Men Monsters”: Unstable Movement Codes in the Stuart Masque’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 244–72 (pp. 259–61, 265–7). 34. Cited in W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 39. 35. See Linda Phyllis Austern, Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1992), p. 7. 36. Guildhall Library London, MS 9537/9, Visitation Report of Bishop Robert Bancroft, 1598, fol. 48; The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) STAC 8/8/2, Attorney-General v. Joanes and others, 1603–25, fol. 1. 37. William Crashaw, The Sermon Preached at the Crosse (London, 1608), p. 171. 38. See Austern, p. 32. 39. See Jewell, pp. 101–2.

Notes 163

40. On the audiences, see Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London: 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 68–110; Shapiro, pp. 67–101. 41. See Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 14. 42. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, pp. 1659–759 (2.2.325); William Miller, ‘Little Eyases’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 28.1 (1977), 86–8; Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 3. 43. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) SP 38/7, Patent for the Children of the Queen’s Revels, Jan 31 1604; The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) C 66/1614, Part 8, ms.31, Patent for the Children of the Queen’s Revels, Feb 1604; ‘Patent for Children of Queen’s Revels, Jan 4 1610’, in Dramatic Records from the Patent Rolls: Company Licences, ed. E. K. Chambers and W. W. Greg, Malone Society Collections, III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), pp. 271–2. 44. See, for example, the patent for the Lady Elizabeth’s Men granted in 1611, transcribed in Dramatic Records from the Patent Rolls, pp. 274–5. 45. Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (London, 1868), p. 24. 46. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), sig. E5v, C8v. 47. Prynne, pp. 142, 171–2. 48. Prynne, p. 908. 49. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) STAC 5/C46/39, Clifton v. Robinson, Evans and Others, 1601. 50. TNA: PRO STAC 5/C46/39. 51. See Tiffany Stern, Rehearsals from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 10–11. 52. William Drummond records Jonson’s claim that ‘Nid Field was his Schollar and he had him read the Satyres of Horace and some Epigrames of Martiall’ in ‘Conversations with Drummond’, in Ben Jonson, I (1925), pp. 128–78 (p. 137). 53. OED, def. 1c, 9b. 54. Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-Booke (London, 1609), p. 21. 55. See Edward Burns, Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 1–2. 56. John Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1980), 3.1.961; 3.1.971. Further references are given in the text. 57. See Sukanya B. Senapti, ‘“Two Parts in One”: Marston and Masculinity’, in The Drama of John Marston, ed. T. F. Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 124–44 (p. 132). 58. See Motter, pp. 12–13; Shapiro, pp. 8–9. 59. Plays exploring youth in contrast to old age are evidently not limited to the children’s theatres. See, for example, Thomas Middleton and William

164

60. 61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

Notes

Rowley, The Old Law, ed. Catherine Shaw (New York: Garland Publishers, 1982). Natalie Zemon-Davis, ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France’, Past and Present, 50 (1997), 41–75 (p. 55). See Burnett, p. 15; Steven R. Smith, ‘The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents’, Past and Present, 61 (1973), 149–61 (p. 157). On the training of the boys of the adult companies through performance, see Catherine Belsey, ‘Shakespeare’s Little Boys: Theatrical Apprenticeship and the Construction of Childhood’, in Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Bryan Reynolds and William N. West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 53–72. Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 11 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96), I (1966), pp. 1–110 (‘Induction’, l. 82). Further references are given in the text. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (London: Paladin Grafton, 1987), pp. 262–3; Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (London: Faber, 1968), pp. 156–7. Smith, pp. 157–8. Smith, p. 160. See also Burnett, p. 38. Chedgzoy, p. 190.

5 Remembering Childhood: Nathan Field’s Theatrical Career 1. On Field’s biography, see G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–68), II (1941), pp. 434–6; E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) II, pp. 316–18; Edwin Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors and of Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England Before 1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 135–41; M. E. Williams, ‘Field, Nathan (bap. 1587, d. 1619/20)’, H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9391. 2. Field represented the company in the agreement between them and Philip Henslowe and Jacob Meade in c. 1613 and was the payee for the company’s performance of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair at court in 1615. See W. W. Greg, ed., Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary (London: A.H. Bullen, 1907), pp. 23–5; David Cook and F. P. Wilson, eds, Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, 1558–1642, Malone Society Collections, VI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 60.

Notes 165

3. See, for example, G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. xiii. 4. See Giorgio Melchiori, ‘Introduction’, in The Insatiate Countess, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 1–49. 5. On William Barksted, see Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (1941), pp. 357–8; Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 121–7; Chambers, II, p. 301; Nungezer, p. 28. 6. Bly, p. 90. 7. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (1941), p. 351; Chambers, II, p. 30; Mark Eccles, ‘Elizabethan Actors I: A–D’, Notes and Queries, 236.1 (1991), 38–49 (p. 39); Andrew Gurr, ‘Attwell, Hugh (c. 1597–1621)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/880; Nungezer, p. 23; J. A. Riddell, ‘Some Actors in Ben Jonson’s Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 285–98 (pp. 295–6). 8. See Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (1941), p. 352. 9. Greg, ed., Henslowe Papers, pp. 23–5. 10. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (1941), p. 523; Chambers, II, p.332; Nungezer, pp. 271–2. 11. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (1941), pp. 381–2; Chambers, II, p. 303; Nungezer, pp. 50–1. 12. On Ostler, see Herbert Berry, ‘Ostler, William (d. 1614)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 20908; Chambers, II, p. 331; E. A. J. Honigmann, and Susan Brook, eds, Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 230–1; Nungezer, pp. 230–1. On Underwood, see Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (1941), pp. 610–11; Chambers, II, p. 348; Honigmann and Brook, p. 143; Nungezer, pp. 384–5. 13. W. Reavley Gair, ed., Antonio and Mellida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 69, footnote 139. 14. John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ‘Induction’, l. 125. 15. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) STAC 5/C46/39. On Chappell, see Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, III (1956), p. 158; Chambers, II, p. 310; Nungezer, p. 90. 16. On Day, see Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (1941), p. 422; Chambers, II, p. 313; Nungezer, p. 115; Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 176. 17. Chambers, II, p. 318; Nungezer, p. 146; Walls, pp. 39, 176. 18. Linda Phyllis Austern, Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1992), p. 20; Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘Thomas Ravenscroft: Musical Chronicler of an Elizabethan Theatre Company’, Journal of American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 238–63; W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of A Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),

166

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

Notes

pp. 167–8; W. Reavley Gair, ‘Chorister Actors at Paul’s’, Notes and Queries, 25 (1978), 440–1; Shen Lin, ‘How Old were the Children of Paul’s?’, Theatre Notebook, 45 (1991), 121–31 (p. 124); David Mateer, ‘Ravenscroft, Thomas (b. 1591/2)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23172. Thomas Ravenscroft, A Brief Discourse (London, 1614), sig. A2r-v. Austern, Music in English Children’s Drama, p. 20; Lin, p. 124; Nungezer, p. 373. For example, Anthony Caputi, John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), p. 113; R. A. Foakes, ‘John Marston’s Fantastical Plays: Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge’, Philological Quarterly, 41.1 (1962), 229–39. Bentley, The Profession of Player, p. xii. William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of Adult Professional Theatre in Elizabethan London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 13. OED, def. III. 6. Roslyn Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 10–47. See Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), pp. 167–96. G. E. Bentley, ‘The Theatres and the Actors’, in G. E. Bentley, Kathleen McLuskie and Lois Potter, eds, The Revels History of Drama in English, IV (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 105–8. Bentley, ‘The Theatres and the Actors’, p. 105. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) KB 27/1357/582, Cooke Indenture, 1607. W. L. Wiley, The Early Public Theatre in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 93–4. See Wiley, pp. 92–112. Nathan Field, Remonstrance to a Preacher in Southwark who has been Arraigning the Players of the Globe Theatre in 1616, ed. J. O. Halliwell (London, 1865), p. 10. See Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 59. George Chapman, ‘To his Loved Sonne, Nat. Field, and his WeatherCocke Woman’, in A Woman is a Weathercocke, by Nathan Field (London, 1612), sig. A3v. Further references are given in the text. Greg, ed., Henslowe Papers, p. 67. Nathan Field, ‘To the Worthiest Master Jonson’, in Ben Jonson, XI (1952), pp. 322–3 (ll. 3–4). Further references are given in the text. Nathan Field, ‘To my Lov’d Friend M. John Fletcher, on his Pastorall’, in The Faithfull Shepheardesse, by John Fletcher (London, 1610), n. p. (ll. 2–3). Further references are given in the text. Nathan Field, ‘To Any Woman that Hath Beene No Weathercocke’, in A Woman is a Weathercocke, sig. A3r (l. 4) [italics original]. Further references are given in the text.

Notes 167

39. Nathan Field, ‘To the Reader’, in A Woman is a Weathercocke, sig. A3v (ll. 18–20). Further references are given in the text. 40. One of the payment receipts for this entertainment records money paid to ‘feld that satt up all night [writing] the speeches songes and inscriptions’. See Scott McMillin, ‘Jonson’s Early Entertainments: New Information from Hatfield House’, Renaissance Drama, 1 (1968), 153–66 (p. 161); James Knowles, ‘Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’, in Representing Ben Jonson, ed. Martin Butler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 114–51. 41. William Drummond, ‘Certain Informations and Maners of Ben Jonsons to W. Drumond’, in Ben Jonson, I (1925), p. 137. 42. Nathan Field, A Woman is a Weathercock, in The Plays of Nathan Field, ed. William Peery (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1950), 1.1.45, 1.2.342, 5.1.70. Further references are given in the text. See Roberta Florence Brinkley, Nathan Field, the Actor-Playwright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), pp. 56–7, for a list of the allusions to plays and theatre in Field’s drama. 43. Knutson, pp. 10–47. 44. Nathan Field, Amends for Ladies, in The Plays of Nathan Field, 2.1.152–3. Further references are given in the text. 45. See chapter 1, pp. 33–41. 46. Field, ‘To the Reader’, l. 14. 47. Ben Jonson, Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, ed. Roger Holdsworth (London A & C Black, 1979, repr. 2005), 5.3.156, 5.3.158. 48. Field, ‘To my Lov’d Friend M. John Fletcher’, l. 2; Field ‘To any Woman that Hath Beene No Weathercock’, l. 4 [italics original]. 49. Chapman, ‘To His Loved Sonne’, ll. 1–2, 8. [italics original]. 50. Field’s definite roles include leading roles in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels, Poetaster and Epicoene, and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb, performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels; Voltore in Jonson’s Volpone; Face in Jonson’s The Alchemist; significant roles in Field, Fletcher and Massinger’s The Queen of Corinth and The Knight of Malta and in John Fletcher’s The Mad Lover and The Loyal Subject. He is also listed in Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (1623) as one of principal actors. See Nungezer, pp. 135–41; Riddell, pp. 293–4. 51. Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 11 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–96), I (1966), pp. 1–110 (1.96–7). Further references are given in the text. 52. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) STAC 5/C46/39, Clifton v. Robinson, Evans and Others, 1601. 53. Michael Bristol, Big Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 35. 54. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in ‘The Alchemist’ and Other Plays, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 327–443 (5.3.46–7). Further references are given in the text. 55. T. W. Baldwin, The Organisation and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), pp. 204–5; Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (1941), pp. 434–6.

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Notes

56. Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 228. 57. Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass, in ‘The Devil is an Ass’ and other Plays, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 223–330 (2.8.64–70). 58. Jonson, The Devil is an Ass, 3.4.11–13. 59. Johnson, p. 62. 60. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Scornful Lady, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, II (1941), pp. 449–566 (1.1.46–8). 61. Cited in Nungezer, p. 72. 62. Cited in Brinkley, p. 42. 63. On the relationship between the facts of a player’s life and the cultural legend, see Ingram, pp. 45–7; Peter Thomson, ‘The True Physiognomy of a Man: Richard Tarlton and his Legend’, in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Performance, ed. Edward Esche (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 191–210 (p. 203). 64. William Peery, ‘General Introduction’, in The Plays of Nathan Field, p. 23. 65. Richard Flecknoe, A Short History of the English Stage, Love’s Kingdom (London, 1664), p. 88. Further references are given in the text. 66. See Nicholas Brooke, ‘Introduction’, in George Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois, ed. N. S. Brooke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 147–8. 67. ‘Appendix A’, in Bussy D’Ambois, pp. 147–8. 68. See Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 30–4. 69. Cited in Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (1941), p. 352. 70. John Davies, The Scourge of Folly (London, 1611), p. 91. 71. Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram, eds, English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 226. 72. James Wright, Historia Histrionica (London, 1699), p. 15–16.

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Index Note: literary works can be found under authors’ names. A Abuses, 3, 75 age, definitions of, 7–8 old, 5, 23, 111 theatrical representation of, 21–3, 38–9, 111 Alleyn, Edward, 120 Andreini, Isabella, 88–9 Anna of Denmark, Queen of England, 145 (n. 48) patronage of Children of Queen’s Revels, 10, 56, 64, 68–70, 90 performances for, 13, 70, 91 anti-theatricality, 9, 54–5, 93 Apethorpe, 13 apprentices, 55–61, 113, 114–17 see also child actors, apprenticeship of; Shrove Tuesday riots Argyll, Earl of, 138 Ariès, Philippe, 3 Armin, Robert, The Two Maids of Moreclack, 36 Ashby, 13 Attwell, Hugh, 120, 140 B Bancroft, Bishop, 102 Barish, Jonas, 9 Barksted, William, 11, 40, 120 see also Marston, John, and William Barksted Batt, Bartholomew, The Christian Man’s Closet, 7, 98 beards, 21–2, 95, 131 Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, 139: The Coxcomb, 4, 167 (n. 50); The Scornful Lady, 137–8

Knight of the Burning Pestle, The, 49–50, 51, 52–3, 61–3, 114–17, 133 see also Field, Nathan, and John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont Bentley, Gerald Eades, 124 Blackfriars, 20, 74–5, 80, 101, 121, 125, 140 Blagrave, William, 125 Blaney, John, 121 Bloom, Gina, 32, 41 Bly, Mary, 12, 51 boy, actors: in adult companies, 12, 33; see also child actors definitions of, 4 school, 98–100, 103 Boy Bishop ceremony, 110 Brathwait, Richard, The English Gentleman, 30, 97 Bristol, Michael, 62, 134 Browne, Robert, 14, 125 Bruegel, Peter, Children’s Games, 92 Bruster, Douglas, 50 Burbage, Richard, 138, 139, 161 (n. 5) Butler, Judith, 8, 145 (n. 38) C Callaghan, Dympna, 55–6, 60 Calver, Edward, Passion and Discrimination, in Youth and Age, 8 carnival, 92, 110–11, 113 Cary, Giles, 14, 66 Case of Edward Williams, The, 46 censorship, of performance, 80 of play-text, 72, 80 182

Index 183

Chapel Royal, Children of, see Children of the Queen’s Revels Gentlemen of, 123 Chapman, George, Bussy D’Ambois, 139, 146 (n. 54) Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, The, 69, 71–7, 90, 160 (n. 66) and Nathan Field, 119, 127, 133 imprisonment of, 80 and Ben Jonson and John Marston: Eastward Ho, 68, 69, 77–83 May Day, 23, 32–3, 34–6, 51: revival of, 41 Old Joiner of Aldgate, The, 73 Sir Giles of Goosecap, 76 Chappell, John, 3, 122 Charles I, King of England, as child performer, 13 Chedgzoy, Kate, 3–4, 93 child actors, ages of, 3, 35, 40, 120–3 and adult fantasy, 41, 50, 53 in adult playing companies, 12, 33 apprenticeship of, 4, 35–6, 56–8, 65–6, 125 in aristocratic household performance, 13 bodies of, 19–31, 38–42, 48–53, 72–3, 78–9 careers of, 119–23 on cast lists, 35, 121 and celebrity, 62, 133–8 in civic pageantry, 13–14, 66, 91 and class, 46–7, 57, 79, 101, 114–15 and cross-dressing, 17, 22–3, 31–40, 73, 113, 114, 132 and differences from adult players, 43–4 in France, 14, 73, 125 gendering of, 25–42 in Germany, 14 impressment of, 4, 10, 44–7, 55–7, 65, 103

imprisonment of, 70, 72 in Italy, 76 juniority of, 70–1, 73, 80 payment of, 14 in royal entertainments, 13, 91 in schools, 13, 103–4 sexual identity of, 20, 28–9, 48–55, 94 in Spain, 14 as spectacle, 49–50 trade in, 55–61, 154 (n. 47) training of, 18–19, 94–5, 101–5, 122–6, 147–8 (n. 5) use of beards, 21–2, 131 use of make-up, 49 use of wigs, 22–3 violent treatment of, 45 voices of, 17, 28, 31–2, 43, 76, 80–1, 85–6, 114 see also Attwell, Hugh; Blaney, John; Cary, Giles; Chappell, John; Clifton, Thomas; Cooke, Abel; Day, Thomas; Field, Nathan; Frost, John; Grymes, Thomas; Jeffes, Anthony; Motteram, John; Ostler, William; Pavy, Salomon; Penn, William; Pykman, Philip; Ravenscroft, Thomas; Tompkins, John; Trussell, Alvery; Underwood, John childhood, construction of, 3–4, 8 definitions of, 3–7, 12 gendering of, 5, 30 as process, 6–7, 9, 30, 41, 97, 141 as stage in life cycle, 6–7, 29–31, 93, 97 studies of, 3–4 and theatre, 8–9, 92 childishness, 4 children, books of, 103 death of, 1–2, 140 education of, 96–105 fostering of, 46 games of, 82

184

Index

children (cont.) as image of parent, 96 and imitation, 92–3, 112 as impressionable, 7, 93, 96–7, 104, 108, 109 and play, 92–4, 113 and printing, 19–20, 96 rearing of, 96–8 in relation to adults, 4, 92 in relation to animals, 33 in relation to players, 8–9, 93–4, 109 and rites of passage, 94, 99, 113–17 royal, 13, 70, 122, 123 and selfhood, 93–4, 106–114 status of, 4, 52 theft of, 46 trade in, 46, 55–61 writing by, 119, 127–8 Children of Blackfriars, see Children of the Queen’s Revels Children of Paul’s, actors of, 3, see also child actors history of, 10 lawsuits of, 73 links to Cathedral school, 10, 102 managers of, 10, see also Kirkham, Edward; Pearce, Edward; Woodford, Thomas and musical training, 123 playhouse of, 24 repertoire of, xi see also children’s playing companies Children of the King’s Revels, 11–12, 36, 64, 119 legal documents, 49 managers of, 49, see also Slater, Martin repertoire of, xiii, 36 Children of her Majesty’s Chamber, Bristol, 64 Children of the Queen’s Revels, also known as Children of Blackfriars, Children of the

Chapel Royal, Children of the Revels, Children of Whitefriars actors of, 3, see also child actors cast-lists of, 35 commercial strategies of, 58, 63–5 history of, 10–12 and Lady Elizabeth’s Men, 35, 36, 65–6, 118, 120 legal documents of, 10, 45–7, 56–7, 63, 104, 118, 125 licensing of, 68–70 links to Chapel Royal, 10, 45, 67–8, 76–7, 101, 123 managers of, 3, 10–11, see also Browne, Robert; Evans, Henry; Giles, Nathaniel; Kendall, Thomas; Keysar, Robert; Kirkham, Edward; Peerson, Martin; Rastell, William; Robinson, James; Rosseter, Philip. naming of, 2, 10–11, 68–9, 143 (n. 6) patronage of, 10, 56, 64, 68–70, 77, 90 playhouse of, see Blackfriars; Whitefriars repertoire of, xii–xiii temporary dissolution of, 11, 63, 69, 75, 121 touring versions of, 11, 64–5 see also children’s playing companies Children of the Revels, Jacobean, see Children of the Queen’s Revels Caroline, 124–5 Children of Whitefriars, see Children of the Queen’s Revels children’s playing companies, audiences of, 20, 94 history of, 10–11 links between, 11–12 studies of, 12, 21, 70, 145 (n. 46), 148 (n. 8), 151–2 (n. 11)

Index 185

see also Children of Paul’s; Children of the King’s Revels; Children of the Queen’s Revels Christian IV, King of Denmark, 75 Cicero, 98 Clare, Janet, 69, 86, 90 Clifton, Henry, 10, 45–7, 56–8, 59, 103, 105, 133, 147 (n. 5) Clifton, Thomas, 3, 45–7, 103 Comediens du Roi, 125 commedia dell’arte, 88–9, 95 Cooke, Abel, 35, 56–7, 125 Cooke, Alice, 56–7 Court of Good Counsell, The, 97 Court of Star Chamber, 45 Crashaw, William, 102 cross-dressing, see child actors and cross-dressing Cuffe, Henry, The Differences of Ages of a Man’s Life, 6, 29–30 Curtain, 121 D Daniel, John, 64 Daniel, Samuel, licenser for the Children of the Queen’s Revels, 68–9 Philotas, 69 Tethy’s Festival¸ 13 Davies, John, The Scourge of Folly, 140 Davin, Anna, 6 Dawson, Anthony, 24 Day, John, Isle of Gulls, The, 36, 68, 70, 80–1 Law Tricks, 36 Day, Thomas, 122 D’Entragues, Madame, Marquise de Verneuil, 71–3 Dekker, Thomas, Guls Horne-Booke, The, 53, 106 and Ben Jonson, The Magnificent Entertainment, 13 and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl, 130 and John Webster: Northward Ho, 69; Westward Ho, 36, 69

De la Boderie, Antoine, French Ambassador, 69, 71–5, 89–90, 157 (n. 19) Deleuze, Gilles, 9 De Sillery, Marquis, French Secretary of State, 71, 90 Drummond, William, 163 (n. 52) Dutton, Richard, 11, 69, 90 E education, 96–105 early modern tracts on, 6–7, 96–8 Edmondes, Sir Thomas, 80 Egerton, Sir John, 13 Elizabeth, Lady, Princess of Bohemia, as child performer, 13 marriage of, 123 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 76–7, 91, 101 Erasmus, 98 Erikson, Erik, 116 Evans, Henry, 10, 45 F Fane, Lady Rachel, May Masque, 13 femininity, 37 Field, John, 126 Field, Nathan, 118–142 age of, 3, 35, 65, 118, 122 Amends for Ladies, 36, 118, 128–9, 130–3 and Bussy D’Ambois, 139 and Ben Jonson, 119, 127–33, 163 (n. 52) education of, 118, 133–4 and George Chapman, 119, 127, 133 and his father, 126 impressment of, 103, 118 and John Fletcher 119, 127–8: and Francis Beaumont, Four Plays in One, 118: and Philip Massinger: The Honest Man’s Fortune, 118; The Jeweller of Amsterdam, 118; The Knight of Malta, 118, 167 (n. 50); The Queen of Corinth, 119, 167 (n. 50)

186

Index

Field, Nathan (cont.) and Philip Henslowe, 127 and King’s Men, 118–19 and Lady Elizabeth’s Men, 118 and Philip Massinger, The Fatal Dowry, 118: see also Field, Nathan, and John Fletcher and Philip Massinger performances of, 14, 35, 66, 118, 133–4, 136, 139, 167 (n. 50) as playhouse sharer, 36, 65–6, 118–19, 164 (n. 2) as playwright, 118–19, 122, 127–9 Remonstrance to a Preacher, A, 126 representations of, 119, 126–30, 133–42 and rumour, 138 theatrical training of, 14, 105, 118, 129 Woman is a Weathercock, A, 118, 127, 128, 129–31, 133 Fisher, Will, 21 Flecknoe, Richard, A Short History of the English Stage, 139 Fletcher, John, and Nathan Field, 119, 127–8 Loyal Subject, The, 167 (n. 50) Mad Lover, The, 167 (n. 50) see also Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher; Field, Nathan, and John Fletcher Fortune, 125 Frith, Moll, 130 Frost, John, 123 G G., I., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors, 9 Gabel, John, 72 Gager, William, 99 Gair, W. Reavley, 22, 121 Gardiner, Judith, 7 Gelosi, i, 88 Gerschow, Frederic, diarist to Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, 75–7, 89, 90, 101

Gibbon, Charles, Work Worth the Reading, 46 Gibbons, Brian, 82 Giles, Nathaniel, 10, 45, 57 Giles, Thomas, 102 girl performers, 13, 14 Globe, 121 Goldberg, Jonathan, 84 Gosson, Stephen, Playes Confuted in Five Actions, 54, 104 School of Abuse, The, 104 Greenblatt, Stephen, 97 Greenwich, 13 Greer, Germaine, 30 Grymes, Thomas, 3 Guilpin, Edward, Skialetheia, 121 Gunnel, Richard, 125 Guttari, Felix, 9 H Hall, Kim, 49 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 50 Henri IV, King of France, 71–3 Henry, Prince of Wales, 70, 122 as child performer, 13 Henslowe, Philip, 127, 164 (n. 2) Heywood, Thomas, An Apology for Actors, 22, 70, 80, 99–100 Hoenselaars, A. J., 159 (n. 50) Horace, 98 Howard, Jean, 86–7, 159 (n. 50) Huebert, Ronald, 62 I Ingram, William, 124 Institution of a Young Noble Man, The, 7 J James VI and I, King of Scotland and England, 10, 56, 67–8, 84, 86, 101, 121, 122 control over theatre, 74–5

Index 187

performances for, 13–14, 66, 75, 90, 91, 129, 158 (n. 27) representation of, 69, 74, 77–81 Jeffes, Anthony, 14 Johnson, Nora, 137 Jonson, Ben, 105, 139 Alchemist, The, 167 (n. 50) Bartholomew Fair, 66, 135–8 Case is Altered, The, 130 ‘Conversations with Drummond’, 129 Cynthia’s Revels, 35, 94–6, 98–102, 105–6, 108–9, 112, 122, 123, 167 (n. 50) Devil is an Ass, The, 136 Discoveries, 8–9, 92–3, 94, 108 Entertainment at Britain’s Burse, 14, 66, 129 Epicoene, 17–18, 34, 35, 36–41, 52, 131–2, 167 (n. 50) ‘Epitaph on S. P.’, 1–2, 140 ‘Expostulacion with Inigo Jones’, 40 and Nathan Field, 119, 127–33, 163 (n. 52) imprisonment of, 80 ‘On my First Daughter’, 2 ‘On my First Son’, 2 Poetaster, 35, 44, 47–50, 53–5, 58, 60–1, 62–3, 122, 167 (n. 50) Volpone, 127, 167 (n. 50) see also Chapman, George, and Ben Jonson and John Marston; Dekker, Thomas, and Ben Jonson K Kempe, William, The Education of Children in Learning, 97 Kendall, Thomas, 10, 56, 125 Keysar, Robert, 11, 63, 66, 158 (n. 27) King’s Men, 118–19, 120, 121, 125, 136, 140 Kirkham, Edward, 146 (n. 54) Knutson, Roslyn, 14, 44, 55–6, 123

Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy, 130 L Ladies’ Hall at Deptford, 13 Lady Elizabeth’s Men, 127, 135 amalgamation with Children of Queen’s Revels, 35, 36, 65–6, 118, 120 Lake, Sir Thomas, 74, 157 (n. 19), 160 (n. 66) Le Conte, Valleran, 14, 125 Lenton, Francis, The Young Man’s Whirligig, 5–6, 96 Levine, Laura, 9, 55 Lewalski, Barbara, 70 Lily, William, 103 Lyly, John, Love’s Metamorphosis, 22 Maid’s Metamorphosis, 123 M Machin, Lewis, see Marston, John, and William Barksted and Lewis Machin Manningham, John, 138 Marie de Médici, Queen of France, 71–3 Marlowe, Christopher, Hero and Leander, 137 Marston, John, 40 Antonio and Mellida, 5, 17–41, 94, 100, 121 Antonio’s Revenge, 5 and William Barksted and Lewis Machin, The Insatiate Countess, 120 Dutch Courtesan, The, 60, 75, 84–9, 158 (n. 27), 159 (n. 53) Entertainment of the DowagerCountess of Darby, The, 13 Fawn, The, 25, 146 (n. 54) Jack Drum’s Entertainment, 25 Malcontent, The, 25 What You Will, 29, 36, 52, 103, 106–14, 116, 117

188

Index

Marston, John (cont.) see also Chapman, George, and Ben Jonson and John Marston Martyn, William, Youth’s Instruction, 96 masculinity, 25–33 Massinger, Philip, see Field, Nathan, and John Fletcher and Philip Massinger; Field, Nathan, and Philip Massinger Master of the Revels, 69, 125 Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, 14 McMillin, Scott, 66 McMunn, Meradith, 91 Meade, Jacob, 120, 164 (n. 2) Merchant Taylor’s School, 99 Middleton, Thomas, Mad World, My Masters, A, 5, 21–2, 36, 111 Michaelmas Term, 44, 58–61 and William Rowley, The Old Law, 163–4 (n. 59) Trick to Catch an Old One, A, 5, 111, 146 (n. 54) see also Dekker, Thomas, and John Middleton Motteram, John, 3, 103 Mulcaster, Richard, 99, 134 Munday, Anthony, Campbell, or The Ironmongers’ Faire Field, 14 Munro, Lucy, 12, 22

Otto of Hesse-Cassel, Prince, 69 Ovid, 98

N Nixon, Anthony, The Black Year, 84–5 Nursery playing companies, 124–5

R Rankins, William, A Mirrour for Monsters, 9 Rastell, William, 10 Ravelhofer, Barbara, 91, 101 Ravenscroft, Thomas, 3, 123 Reeve, Ralph, 11 Robinson, James, 10, 45 Robinson, Richard, 136 Rose, Jacqueline, 50–1 Rosseter, Philip, 11 Rowley, William, 120, 140 Rutter, Carol Chillington, 12, 91

O Office of Christian Parents, The, 4, 6, 30 oration, 98–100 Ordinance of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, An, 46 Orgel, Stephen, 36, 62, 80 Ostler, William, 14, 66, 121, 140

P Palatine, Elector, 123 Pavy, Salomon, 1–2, 3, 62, 104, 140, 155 (n. 68) Pearce, Edward, 10, 73, 102, 123, 155 (n. 68) Peerson, Martin, 10 Peery, William, 139 Penn, William, 120 Percy, William, 21 Aphrodysial, The, 21 Country Tragedye, A, 21 Mahomet and his Heaven, 22 playhouses, see Blackfriars, Curtain, Globe, Fortune, Whitefriars playing companies, see Children of Paul’s; Children of the King’s Revels; Children of the Queen’s Revels; King’s Men; Lady Elizabeth’s Men; Prince Charles’ Men Prince Charles’ Men, 120, 130, 140 prostitution, 53–5, 154 (n. 47) Prynne, William, Histriomastix, 9, 104 Purkiss, Diane, 29 Pykman, Philip, 3 Q Quintillian, 98

Index 189

S Saint Paul’s Grammar School, 13, 102, 118, 134 Salisbury, Earl of, 72, 74, 157 (n. 19), 160 (n. 66) Scala, Flaminio, La Pazzia d’Isabella, 88 Scottish mines play, 69, 74, 160 (n. 66) Senapti, Sukanya, 33 Shakespeare, William, 139 Antony and Cleopatra, 4 As You Like It, 8, 131 Coriolanus, 5 Hamlet, 24, 43–4, 104 Henry V, 82, 86 Merchant of Venice, The, 31 Sonnets, 161 (n. 11) Twelfth Night, 31, 107–8, 131 Shapiro, Michael, 21 Sharpham, Edward, The Fleer, 68, 83–4 Sheafe, T., Vindiciae Senectute; or, A Plea for Old Age, 6 Shirley, James, The Triumph of the Peace, 123 Shrove Tuesday riots, 113, 116 Slater, Martin, 49 slavery, 48, 58 Slights, Camille, 58 Smith, Bruce, 51–2 Smith, Steven, 116 Smythe, Richard, 102 Snow, Edward, 92 Stettin-Pomerania, Duke Philip Julius of, 75–7, 89, 90, 101 Sutton, preacher at St Mary Overs, 126 T theatre, and commerce, 47–66 and pleasure, 62 and prostitution, 54–6 responses to, 138 as school, 104

Thomas, Keith, 7 Tompkins, John, 3, 123 Trussell, Alvery, 3 Twyning, John, 60 U Underwood, John, 121, 140 university, of Cambridge, 122, 123 disputation at, 111 Lord of Misrule revels at, 110 of Oxford, 99 performance at, 99, 122 V Venetian ambassador, 75 W wards, 45–6, 152 (n. 13) Webster, John, see Dekker, Thomas, and John Webster Weiss, Adrian, 24 Weldon, Sir Anthony, 67–8, 84 Westcott, Sebastian, 155 (n. 68) Westminster, 123 White, Robert, Cupid’s Banishment, 13 Whitefriars, 130 Whitelocke, James, 99 Windsor Chapel, 76 Witmore, Michael, 12, 91 Wittenberg, Duke of, 76 Wolfenbüttel, court at, 14 Woodford, Thomas, 10, 73 Woodward, Hezekiah, Childe’s Patrimony, 4, 96 Wright, James, Historia Histrionica, 140 Wright, Thomas, 7 Y Yorkshire Tragedy, The, 49 youth culture, 111–13, 117 Z Zemon-Davis, Natalie, 111