This chapter demonstrates that girls were active participants in early English dramatic cultures. It reveals girls performing everything from medieval religious plays to Tudor civic pageants to the Stuart court masques. Challenging long-held assumptions about when girls took to the stage, it surveys the evidence of the girl player, including payment for girl performers, eye-witness accounts of girl performers, stage directions that call for girls, paintings that depict girls performing, and plays and masques explicitly composed for girls. It charts the specific history of girls performing in plays about the Virgin Mary in England and in France, and finally turns to Romeo and Juliet, revealing how Shakespeare consistently draws on Marian themes in his characterization Juliet, engaging with as well as memorializing a longstanding dramatic tradition of the girl player that had recently been suppressed by the Reformation.

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare fashions the dramatic role of his early tragic heroine in relationship to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and especially in relationship to his erotic elegies as they are mediated by the charismatic figure of Christopher Marlowe. This chapter explores the difference to the 1597 and 1599 quartos of the play that Ovid makes. There is no particular relationship between the part of Juliet to Ovid in the first quarto, whereas there is an intense and transformative relationship between Shakespeare’s Juliet and the version of Ovid that Marlowe brought to the Elizabethan stage. The final argument of this chapter is that Shakespeare remembers, honors, and radically adapts Marlowe by transferring the bold speech of the Ovidian erotic elegist from the tragic hero to the part of girl, performed by a boy.