Introduction

Summary

The Introduction takes as its starting point the desire expressed in James Wright's Historia Histrionica (1699) to 'guess at the action' of early modern players, arguing that the 'action' of boy performers is partially recoverable from the texts that have come down to us provided that we are willing to read with physical skill in mind. It surveys the past century's critical fascination with boy actors, suggesting that a great deal of pre-existing work has neglected the embodied stagecraft required of these young performers. It additionally makes a case for the value of practice-based research in the study of early modern drama's corporeal dynamics, and maps out the book's integration of this method into its analysis of a wide range of plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Introduction ends with an outline of the book's structure, which explains how the chapters cumulatively build a more physically and theatrically sensitive picture of the work of boy actors in this period.

I wish they had Printed in the last Age (so I call the times before the Rebellion) the Actors Names over against the Parts they Acted, as they have done since the Restauration. And thus one might have guest at the Action of the Men, by the Parts which we now Read in the Old Plays.

James Wright, Historia Histrionica: An Historical Account of the English Stage

Guessing at the Action: Recovering Performance and the Early Modern Boy Actors

The young playgoer Lovewit, one of the two speakers in James Wright’s nostalgic 1699 pamphlet Historia Histrionica: An Historical Account of the English Stage, expresses a frustration likely felt by many twenty-first-century historians of the early modern theatre. At a three centuries greater remove than Lovewit and his interlocutor – the older Cavalier and theatrical aficionado, Truman – it is all the more difficult for us to ‘guess at the Action’ of early modern players – including, if not especially, the fascinating yet elusive boy actors who repeatedly appear throughout Wright’s pamphlet. Yet it is the contention of this book that ‘the Parts which we now Read in the Old Plays’ nevertheless have much to tell us about the ‘Action’ of this particular class of performer. ‘Old Plays’, Truman states in the pamphlet, ‘will be always Read by the Curious, if it were only to discover the Manners and behaviour of several Ages … For Plays are exactly like Portraits Drawn in the Garb and Fashion of the time when Painted.’¹ The ‘Old Plays’ performed between the 1580s and 1630s on which this book focuses, that is to say, offer a window onto the ‘Manners and behaviour’ that shaped their performances, including the performances of boys charged with playing the parts of women, boys, and youths – and, in the case of the all-boy companies who performed in the 1580s, 1600s, and 1630s, portraying men of all ages, too. Reading early modern playtexts which have come down to us with an eye trained on the ‘Action of the Men’ – or, in this case, the Boys – is, I suggest, essential to enhancing our understanding of not only the parts these boys performed, but how and why they were written for them in the first place.

Though, as I demonstrate in Chapter 2 of this book, it is occasionally possible to map a boy actor’s name onto particular ‘Action’ in particular plays, an intimate knowledge of who played who is not always necessary in recovering the skills and performances of these players. This is not to suggest that, where their identities and parts are still known, the names of individual boy actors are not worthy of mention or consideration. The sheer presence of boy actors’ names peppered throughout Historia Histrionica signals that, for this Restoration commentator at least, they were an integral and memorable part of early modern performance culture. Wright’s comments on actors are doubtless shaped by the textual evidence available to him in the form of surviving cast lists in pre-Civil War plays and playbook title pages. However, throughout the pamphlet he makes frequent appeals to audience memory that extend beyond merely assigning roles to actors, instead dwelling upon individual performers’ characteristics and reputations.

The numerous mentions of individual boy performers – often only by their last names, assuming a certain degree of familiarity in the late seventeenth-century reader – are perhaps surprising given that, at the time Wright was preparing his ‘Historical Account’, women had routinely appeared on London’s stages for four decades. Wright’s speakers have very little to say about these women, referring only to ‘several excellent Actresses, justly famed as well for Beauty, as perfect good Action’.² By contrast, boy actors appear to have left an indelible mark on post-Restoration theatrical memory. Where no ‘excellent Actresses’ are recorded by name, Wright provides the names of a number of boy performers from the pre-Restoration period, most or all of whom now exist on the margins of critical work on early modern theatre: Nicholas Burt (b. 1614), William Cartwright (1608–1686), Walter Clun (d. 1664), Nathan Field (1587–1619/20), Alexander Gough (1614–1655), Stephen Hammerton (fl. 1629–1647), Charles Hart (1625–1683), Michael Mohun (c.1616–1684), Salomon Pavy (c.1588–1602), Robert Shatterell (1616–1684), John Underwood (c.1588–1624), and William Wintershall (d. 1679). Elsewhere, he additionally namechecks leading adult actors who began their careers as boys: though Wright does not mention it, the Richard Perkins (c.1579–1650) he records as ‘of principal Note at the Cockpit’ was apprenticed to the leading Admiral’s Men actor Edward Alleyn in 1596.³ The ‘Robinson’ Wright references as having acting apprentices of his own could either be William Robins (fl. 1616–1645), who was also known as ‘Robinson’,⁴ or perhaps more plausibly Richard Robinson (c.1595–1648), who was himself an apprentice with the King’s Men from 1611, playing the Lady in Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy and likely originating and reviving leading Shakespearean roles in the same period.⁵ Likewise, the Caroline King’s Men’s comic actor, Thomas Pollard (1597–c.1650), began as an apprentice actor with Palsgrave’s Men before 1616,⁶ while ‘eminent Actor’ Theophilus Bird (c.1608–1663) was a performer of female roles for Palsgrave’s and Queen Henrietta’s Men before eventually joining the King’s company.⁷ As the cases of Pollard and Bird indicate, several of these boy actors forged long and wide-ranging careers across the early modern theatre industry: as I have written elsewhere, Bird, Burt, Cartwright, Field, Hammerton, Pavy, Perkins, Pollard, Underwood, and possibly Robinson, all moved between companies, cutting across all-boy companies and mixed troupes composed of men and boys.⁸ Others, including Hart, Mohun, Shatterell, and Wintershall, resumed playing after the Restoration, and their performances as adult men in newly written and revived plays likely remained in the memories of many of Wright’s first readers.⁹

Despite this transferability and longevity, the performers Wright cites are just as likely to be remembered in terms of their boyhood as they are for the professional feats they achieved as adults. Even relatively recent performers such as Hart and Clun are remembered first and foremost as having been ‘bred up Boys at the Blackfriers’, where they ‘Acted Womens Parts’ – including, for Hart, ‘the Dutches in [James] Shirley’s the Tragedy of the Cardinal, which was the first Part that gave him Reputation’.¹⁰ Gough and Hammerton are described as ‘the Woman Actor at Black-friers’ and ‘a most noted and beautiful Woman Actor’, respectively,¹¹ while Burt ‘was a Boy first under [John] Shank at the Black-friers, then under [Christopher] Beeston at the Cockpit’, where he ‘used to Play the principal Women’s Parts, in particular Clariana in [Shirley’s] Loves Cruelty’.¹² Connecting Cartwright, Wintershall, Mohun, and Shatterell to ‘private Houses’ such as the Salisbury Court and Cockpit playhouses also alludes to their boy performer status, as companies comprised entirely of boy actors were in residence at those theatres when these actors began their careers.¹³ Reaching back a hundred years before his pamphlet was printed, Wright also describes how

Since the Reformation, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, Plays were frequently acted by Quiristers and Singing Boys; and several of our old Comedies have printed in the Title Page, Acted by the Children of Paul’s, (not the School, but the Church) others, By the Children of Her Majesty’s Chappel; in particular, [Ben Jonson’s] Cinthias Revels, and the Poetaster were play’d by them; who were at that time famous for good Action.¹⁴

Of these ‘Chappel Boys’, Wright singles out Field and Underwood – who ‘when they grew Men, became Actors at the Black-friers’ – and Pavy, reprinting Jonson’s ‘Epitaph on S. P.’, written on the occasion of Pavy’s death in 1602.¹⁵

The boy players who populate Wright’s text – whether known from other sources to have begun as boys or explicitly named by Wright as ‘boys’ or ‘women actors’ – thus account for a broad sweep of English theatre history, taking in the adult companies of the 1590s, the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean children’s companies, the Jacobean King’s Men, Caroline adult companies such as Queen Henrietta’s and Palsgrave’s Men, and late Caroline revivals of the boy company tradition like the King’s Revels and Beeston’s Boys. Though these individual names, and even many of the plays in which they appeared, are now largely unfamiliar to us, boy actors are absolutely central to our understanding of early modern drama. Plays such as the highly ornate and literary Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster, performed by the Children of the Chapel (later the Children of the Queen’s Revels) in 1600 and 1601 with Field, Pavy, and Underwood leading the cast, are not often associated with ‘good Action’ by today’s critics. Nevertheless, as I argue in Chapter 2, focusing our attention on the physical action that pervades these plays allows us to read them – and their original performers – rather differently.

That Wright should recall certain performances and displays of ‘Action’ is unsurprising when it comes to the boy actors he frequently invokes. Even the most cursory survey of the often casual demands for action in printed stage directions, comprehensively recorded in Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s Dictionary of Stage Directions, offers a staggeringly diverse array of explicitly called-for activity.¹⁶ Playwrights and the companies for whom they wrote could expect their boy actors to bear props ranging from the small – such as the ‘sword and buckler’ borne by Falstaff’s page in William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV (LCM, 1597) (Q sig. B1^r; 1.2.0 SD) – to the considerably heavy, as with the coffin brought on by two boys in Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (CQR, 1607) (sig. H4^r; 4.224 SD). Management of props is often more complex than this: playtexts dictate that boys be ‘charging a Pistoll’, ‘busie about [the] head’ of another character, ‘Tak[e] Tobacco’, ‘truss’and ‘untruss’ both themselves and others, ‘throw pots and stooles’, and, memorably, ‘tak[e] the staffe in her mouth, and guid[e] it with her stumps and writ[e]’.¹⁷ Directions exist for boys to enter ‘embracing and kissing’, and ‘to ‘bin[d]’, ‘heave’, ‘kick’, ‘tri[p]’, or ‘combate’, ‘bustle’, and ‘scuffle’ with either one another or their adult acting fellows.¹⁸ Choreographed movement of a less violent nature ranges from calls merely to ‘tri[p] about the stage’ to curtsies and congees to complex routines including antics, capers, corantos, ‘drunken rounds’, galliards, or group dances ‘in divers complementall offers of Courtship’.¹⁹ In a more spectacular vein, and more famously, it was not unheard of for a character represented by a boy to ‘ru[n] against the Cage and brai[ne] her selfe’.²⁰ Occasionally, and as I explore in Chapter 3, early modern plays showcase the physical virtuosity of their boy actors yet more overtly, bringing full-scale sports matches onto the stage.

Boy Actors in Early Modern England argues that we miss something crucial about early modern culture and the drama it produced if we take these physical demands for granted when we read the plays. Throughout the book, I offer a sustained consideration of the physical demands made of boy actors in the early modern period and how those demands were realised and responded to on the early modern stage. Though essential to our understanding of these young performers, early modern boy actors’ capacity for the ‘action’ that Truman fondly recalls, that Lovewit craves to recover, and that this broad range of plays so casually calls for has receded from view in the vast majority of critical discussion. This book builds upon the sustained critical interest in boy actors that has held sway for almost a hundred years, at least since the publication of Charles William Wallace’s The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars in 1908 and The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare in 1912,²¹ much of which has been usefully sketched in a 2009 article on the ‘boy-actress’ by Roberta Barker.²² In her deliberately archaic use of the term first coined by Harley Granville-Barker, Barker usefully points up how ‘boy-actress’s’ ‘oxymoronic nature works to remind modern readers of the boundaries potentially crossed when a young male actor assumes “the woman’s part”’.²³ However, while she rightly suggests that the ‘boy-actress’s’ gender crossings have been ‘one of the most hotly debated topics in Shakespearean and early modern studies’,²⁴ the boy actor’s physical craft has not been quite so ‘hot’ a topic.

As Barker observes, ‘Efforts to fix the boy-actress’ meaning generally reject important strands of his own period’s testimony in order to emphasize a single perspective that appeals to our own’ – an approach which ‘may have more to teach us about the pressures and desires of our own era than about the realities of the Shakespearean stage’.²⁵ This holds particularly true of one of the most dominant approaches to the study of early modern boy actors that gained traction in the 1980s and 1990s: the exploration of stage (homo)eroticism. Influential works by Dympna Callaghan, Lisa Jardine, Stephen Orgel, and Susan Zimmerman, among others, significantly complicated the critical picture of the English boy actor tradition by attending to the early modern stage’s potential – particularly in the performance of cross-dressed Shakespearean comedy – to provoke illicit and often morally troubling forms of desire.²⁶ Identifying the early modern stage as a site in which ‘the object of attention is the potentially rapeable boy’ and where plays performed are marked by a ‘pederastic gloss’,²⁷ these works sit among the body of scholarship of Renaissance same-sex relations and desire by Alan Bray, Mario DiGangi, Jonathan Goldberg, and Bruce R. Smith that was gaining traction at precisely the same time.²⁸ Yet the notions of sexual availability, promiscuity, and exploitability – what Callaghan refers to as the ‘spectre of brutality and ostracism’²⁹ – often loom large both in more recent discussions of the early modern boy company stage by scholars such as Shehzana Mamujee and Bart van Es, and in popular depictions of these actors.³⁰ Scholarship focused on boy actors’ (homo)erotic availability and passivity has given rise to a seemingly irresistible urge to scandalise these historical performance practices. In Nicholas Wright’s 2000 play, Cressida, which offers a fictionalised account of the boy actors of the Caroline King’s Men, the boy actors’ sexual relations with male spectators are a recurring theme. At one point in the play, the veteran actor, John Shank, who is responsible for the boy actors’ theatrical training, recalls his own early days as a boy performer to his colleague, Jhon, in uncompromising terms:

JHON … boys are bumboys.

SHANK Not in my house they aren’t. My boys are decent. I was a bumboy.

JHON I don’t remember that.

SHANK You were too busy to notice, chum. Don’t get me started. I was a red-hot bumboy. Toast of the town. Some old looney wrote a pamphlet about me. They used to hand it out in the street. ‘The playhouse youth with wild, lascivious limbs doth Satan’s task perform.’ Best fucking write-up I ever had.³¹

Like the work of scholars such as Jardine, Wright’s play colourfully suggests that the attraction early modern boy actors held for their audiences lay in their sexually appealing – and endlessly penetrable – bodies.

A corollary to the large body of scholarship on boy actors’ (homo)erotic valences is the important exploration of gender indeterminacy on the early modern stage, in which the cross-dressed boy actor quite naturally plays a starring role. Critics such as Laura Levine, Orgel, and Michael Shapiro laid early ground in attending to the theatrical power of cross-dressed boy actors to destabilise binary notions of gender,³² depicting the figure of the boy performer as ‘the ideal repository’ for cultural gender anxieties who embodies ‘all that is frightening about the self’.³³ This approach has more recently been productively applied in the fields of early modern queer and trans studies by scholars such as Simone Chess, Jennifer Higginbotham, and Mark Albert Johnston, whose work serves as a timely reminder of the endlessly productive value in seeking queer and non-normative identities in the early modern dramatic canon.³⁴ It would be naïve to undermine the sensitive and productive readings of early modern drama such work has enabled; however, I suggest that it does not provide the full picture. Markedly absent from these discussions is a consideration of boy actors’ physical performances, which were arguably what gave rise to the kinds of responses – erotic, queer, or otherwise – on which much scholarship has tended to focus. While I remain mindful of much of this work throughout the book, then, the discussion that follows is far more concerned with the processes – specifically, the physical theatrical practices – necessary in the moment-to-moment context of performance to initiate the kinds of readings and responses on which previous critics have focused. It is my contention that until we attend more fully to the performance demands and physical dynamics of roles that boy actors performed, our understanding of responses such as those suggested by these critics is not as rounded as it might be.

Boy Actors in Early Modern England therefore forms part of a recovery of what Henry S. Turner has termed ‘the specifically theatrical history of drama’ which, as approaches such as those outlined have held sway, has paradoxically ‘faded from view’, leaving ‘more to be said about how the theatrical fictions of the period actually came to life’.³⁵ The physical performances of boy actors, I argue, were an influential facet of what Turner calls ‘the reiterated, enduring conventions for representing actions, objects, and ideas on stage, conventions that are necessary to any individual performance but that exceed any particular occasion’.³⁶ These performances and their physical conventions have, however, been typically neglected: as Barker puts it, ‘Even critics who celebrate the theatrical and social possibilities of the boy-actress’ art often centre their theories on his perceived defects.’³⁷ The notion of boy actors as an inhibiting influence on the creation of canonical roles such as Shakespeare’s female leads, which pervaded much twentieth-century work on these performers,³⁸ has made its way into contemporary performances, with major motion pictures like John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Richard Eyre’s Stage Beauty (2004) presenting the mannered and high-voiced female impersonations by boys and men as something to be rejected in favour of gritty performances by real women. It is important to stress, however, that this deficit-led approach to boy performance is often marked by an oversimplification of what precisely an early modern ‘boy’ actor was. A recent article by Johnston offers a useful summary of the remarkably flexible nature of early modern boyhood:

Despite current scientific, legal, and religious assurances to the contrary, boyhood is a vague, abstract, variable, heterogeneous, indeterminate, and historically and culturally contingent conceptual category, the boundaries of which are not fixed temporally, physiologically or via any other supposedly stable criteria but indexed indirectly, through a nexus of historically and culturally discontinuous value that only tendentiously approximates what it purportedly delineates.³⁹

Johnston’s attention to the flexibility and contingent nature of boyhood is worth bearing in mind with regard to boy players. On the early modern stage, the variation of ages among company members appears to have been equally wide-ranging: Shen Lin has demonstrated that all-boy companies such as the Children of Paul’s, who resurfaced in 1599, had boys as young as six and seven among their ranks, while Lucy Munro, in her comprehensive account of the contemporaneous Children of the Queen’s Revels, establishes that as the company evolved it retained members well into their twenties.⁴⁰ As David Kathman’s meticulous archival work has revealed, in adult companies such as the Lord Chamberlain’s (later King’s) Men, boy players apprenticed to adult actors ranged in age from twelve to twenty-two, ‘with a median of around sixteen or seventeen’.⁴¹ Rather than conceive of boy actors as exclusively diminutive figures with limited performance ability, then, it is important to bear in mind the remarkable flexibility with which terms such as ‘child’ and ‘boy’ were applied to them. Indeed, as Robin Bernstein has argued, ‘childhood’ can be performed in much the same way as gender, irrespective of supposedly stable visual markers of maturity – a notion Edel Lamb has productively explored in relation to the early modern children’s companies.⁴² Throughout this book, my definition of a ‘boy’ player is therefore not supposed to conjure a particular set of images relating to inexperience and diminution; rather, it functions as an umbrella term for all young male actors retained by all-boy companies, as well as any young actor who could conceivably take on a female, childish, or youthful role in companies composed of men and boys. In this, I mean not to homogenise boy players, but rather to argue for a shared understanding of the role of boy actors as viewed by theatrical and wider culture. As I argue in the revisionist account of boyhood and physical capacity in Chapter 1, this shared understanding of boyhood and youth does not appear to have been marked by notions of inadequacy or deficiency. Early modern attitudes to what precisely boys and youths could physically do in this period are thus a neglected and important context for considering boy actors’ performances.

In the attention it pays to historically situated theatrical skills, this book builds on work by John H. Astington, Scott McMillin, and, most recently and influentially, Evelyn B. Tribble, all of whom have strengthened the argument for boy actors’ theatrical proficiency through increased attention to the material conditions of early modern performance.⁴³ Like Tribble’s Cognition in the Globe (2011) and Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre (2017), Boy Actors in Early Modern England challenges the dominant Foucauldian model which understands the body only as a site of cultural inscription without taking into account its simultaneous potential actively to produce meaning.⁴⁴ Throughout, I follow Tribble in attending closely to the evidence of physical skill display which dwells in the ‘interstices’ of early modern playtexts – ‘in stage directions and implied action’.⁴⁵ At the same time, Boy Actors in Early Modern England moves away from the gradually enskilled novice players on whom Tribble’s work has exclusively focused – the young boys who played minor roles in Christopher Marlowe’s plays, for instance⁴⁶ – to consider a wider range of more accomplished and physically virtuosic performers who were invaluable to the companies in which they performed.

This wide-ranging approach, which cuts across different historical moments and a large number of acting companies and performance venues, is at once indebted to the developing field of early modern ‘repertory studies’ and a significant departure from it. Individual book-length studies of companies including the Children of the King’s Revels, the Children of Paul’s, Queen Anna’s Men, the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, the Admiral’s Men, Lord Strange’s Men, the Queen’s Men, and the Children of the Queen’s Revels have made a more substantial contribution to rounding out the picture of the early modern theatrical landscape than is possible with traditional author-based approaches, demonstrating the shaping influence a range of agents, including actors, had on the plays produced in this period.⁴⁷ Such studies are, however, of necessity limited in scope in their focus on specific sets of actors at particular moments in early modern theatrical culture’s development. In this, they cannot offer a more general impression of what it meant and took to work as a boy actor in this period – an impression that is arguably crucial to furthering understanding of how these performers were imagined, employed, and received by audiences. Boy actors, after all, differ from their adult counterparts in that they were common currency across all the companies operating from the opening of the first public playhouses to the closing of the theatres at the outset of the Civil War. Boy Actors in Early Modern England therefore challenges the critical orthodoxy which has tended to separate out all-boy and mixed company playing, even in works such as Jeanne H. McCarthy’s The Children’s Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509–1608, which seek to trace influences between traditions only to end up re-inscribing divisions between their modes of performance.⁴⁸ Here, I provide an account of boy performances that is cross-repertorial in scope and, covering a wide chronological sweep of plays, which pays particular attention to non-canonical (and especially non-Shakespearean) drama. Throughout, I am committed to the idea that the study of an element as universal to early modern acting companies as boy actors and their physical stagecraft needs to look beyond the scope of one performance tradition in order to develop a more rounded sense of such actors’ contribution to early modern theatre at large. Though not diachronic in its approach, the book ranges across plays performed from the 1580s to the 1630s, incorporating the repertories of the waning boy companies at the end of the 1580s, the more conventionally studied late Elizabethan and Jacobean boy and adult companies, and comparatively more neglected troupes composed of men and boys or boys alone more or less right up to the closing of the theatres. This approach, and the eclectic selection of plays it necessitates, allows for both specificity and continuity to be traced in and across company repertories and generations of playing, opening up the dual possibility of an impressionistic sense of the wider theatrical culture and minutely focused readings of the theatrical workings of particular plays. Though the work of particular contemporaneous playwrights – namely Jonson, John Marston, and Shakespeare, who wrote during the longest stable period of boy and adult companies operating simultaneously – remains an important touchstone, plays running the gamut of the generous date span are brought in by means of comparison throughout the book in order to develop a more concrete sense of the period’s shared understanding of what boy players could do and how that could theatrically be achieved. The plays I discuss are not always co-opted into like-for-like direct comparisons, but their shared presence throughout the book is intended to suggest a continuum of physically minded boy actor performances.

This approach implicitly challenges the Shakespeare-centric conception of boy players that has substantially dominated much of the scholarship to date. Throughout Boy Actors in Early Modern England, lesser-known plays are examined and discussed on equal terms with critical mainstays such as Antony and Cleopatra (KM, 1606), evincing the value of looking at early modern drama from a corporeal perspective that does not endorse critical value judgements and instead accepts that each extant play has something to tell us about boy actors’ performances. As long as Shakespeare is the standard against which this dramaturgy – all dramaturgy, in fact – is judged, certain critical avenues will be closed off. Shakespeare, after all, did not invent the boy actor; nor was he the only one to write for this class of performer. In fact, as Chapter 4 demonstrates, even the most ambitious of his boy roles can be set in productive dialogue with a long and continuing tradition of virtuosic boy performance.

Embodying the Action: The Case for Practice-Based Research

Throughout this book, I pursue a corporeally minded reading of plays from across the early modern dramatic canon, establishing a wide-ranging cultural backdrop of physical expectation and activity which provides an impetus for re-examining early modern plays through the lens of their latent physical expectation and the evidence they provide of boy actors realising such demands on stage. Those demands, I further suggest, can be all the better understood through the turn to present-day performance practice. Testing the scope and limits of physical opportunities for boy actors’ performances in a twenty-first-century setting can, I suggest, provide an alternative way to read these roles, opening up research opportunities and prompting questions that would otherwise remain unasked. Chapters 3 and 4 of the book therefore make substantial recourse to present-day performance-based experiments with staging particular scenes and elements of stagecraft from a number of critically neglected early modern plays. As boy actor performances are among the most evasive facets of early modern theatrical culture, this approach, which permits accounting for actors’ experiences grappling not only with particular roles but also specific physical staging demands, allows for a fuller comprehension and sharper sense of what questions to ask of these plays than reading alone allows.

As Stephen Purcell argues, practice-based research facilitates ‘a particular kind of “theatrical close reading”, one that seeks plurality rather than fixity, possibility rather than fact’.⁴⁹ As it is applied in this book, performance practice is complementary to, and not separate from, the more traditional literary-critical and theatre-historical methods traditionally applied to studies of early modern boy performers, opening up a range of interpretative possibilities and staging challenges that these methods have typically neglected. In this, my discussion of staging workshops focused on particular moments of stage action constitutes an attempt to straddle the divide M. J. Kidnie draws between ‘the activity of interpreting actors’ bodies and gestures, costumes, sets and lighting, theatrical space, all the elements, in short, that inform one’s experience of performance’ and ‘the activities either of transforming a script into performance, with the sorts of choices that involves, or of reading dramatic literature’.⁵⁰ In short, a research methodology which ranges across textual analysis, the physical processes involved in performing an early modern play, and subsequent analysis of such activity helps the approaches Kidnie separates to cohere.

In recent years, scholars of early modern performance have begun to acknowledge the meaning- and knowledge-making value of practical exploration of these plays⁵¹ – a development that has run parallel to large-scale engagements with the performance practices of the past at cultural institutions such as the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe and Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (SWP) in London (the latter of which I discuss in Chapter 3) and the reconstructed Blackfriars at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia.⁵² Given that the convention of boy performers taking female roles has typically been one of the hardest elements of early modern theatrical culture for today’s audiences to grasp, it is unsurprising that such projects have often incorporated boy actors and the all-male stage into their purview, particularly within the sub-sector of what has come to be known as ‘Original Practices’ (OP). As I have written elsewhere,⁵³ these productions – including the fifteen authentically scored and costumed Shakespeare productions staged at the Globe under the artistic directorship of Mark Rylance until 2005⁵⁴ – are often highly selective in nature, prioritising particular material aspects of early modern performance (stage architecture, costumes, music) in order to create a shared understanding, in Rob Conkie’s words, that ‘“this is how and where it was done”’.⁵⁵ Such performances thus run the risk of endorsing what Alan C. Dessen has influentially termed ‘theatrical essentialism’, which suggests false continuities between the materials of the past and the performance resonances of the present.⁵⁶ The risk is particularly pressing in the case of all-male casting and boy performers, a performance dynamic which is always, to some degree, irrecoverable: not least on a legal level, it is no longer possible to apprentice teenaged boys to older actors or to kidnap them in order to form juvenile troupes. It was presumably for this reason that Rylance’s early Globe experiments with all-male performance predominantly cast men in their forties and fifties in female roles, with Rylance himself most memorably taking the role of Cleopatra.⁵⁷ Judith Rose, drawing on Globe actor testimonies and direct observation of these productions, has extensively described the effects of wearing period costume and makeup on male actors’ performance of female roles and their reception by audiences, ultimately arguing that such experiments lead one to question ‘that Shakespeare’s audience “didn’t think twice” about the male performance of femininity’.⁵⁸ Relying solely on fully adult actors largely unused to seeing, let alone wearing, early modern dress has its limitations, however, and Rose’s post-Butlerian observations of gender performativity are made with distinctly twenty-first-century eyes.

It is an inescapable fact that readings of audience response to cross-dressed performance will always to some extent be preconditioned to current attitudes to gender and sexuality – a fact that seriously undermines the project of reconstructing what was ‘seen’ by an Elizabethan audience when a boy actor portrayed a woman. Indeed, as James C. Bulman writes, ‘ironically, the use of cross-dressing in contemporary productions of Shakespeare may speak more forcefully to us than it ever did to Elizabethan audiences’.⁵⁹ This book is therefore less interested in audience response – gender-inflected or otherwise – to the staging experiments it discusses and more in interrogating the specific expectations placed on boy actors when they performed early modern plays. The staging experiments with boy actors’ stagecraft documented in Chapters 3 and 4 of this book are therefore not an attempt at authentic re-creation of this facet of early modern performance, nor even an attempt to secure zero-sum interpretative clarity with regard to particular scenes or plays. Rather, they focus on what Purcell describes as ‘the here-and-now of embodied practice’, consistently attuned to factors, easily overlooked in reading, that might have affected, challenged, or enhanced a boy actor’s performance.⁶⁰ Providing a more extensive consideration of particular staging moments than literary-critical and textual scholarship has typically tended to do, these accounts consider the processes by which a boy actor may have come to perform precise aspects of dramaturgy while keeping the historical factors that shaped such dramaturgy in mind, offering new perspectives on the dramatic possibilities afforded to the first and youngest interpreters of early modern plays.

Despite their departure from ‘authentic’ materials and the archaeological impulses that drove early ventures into OP at venues such as the Globe, however, these staging exercises are not altogether separate from archaeology as contemporary theorists conceptualise it. An instructive model for this work is that of ‘interpretive archaeology’ developed by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, a model centred on the interpretative and processual which constitutes

a set of approaches to the ruined material past which foreground interpretation, the ongoing process of making sense of what never was firm or certain. This archaeology entertains no final and definitive account of the past as it was, but fosters multivocal and multiple accounts: a creative but none the less critical attention and response to the interests, needs and desires of different constituencies (those people, groups or communities who have or express interest in the material past).⁶¹

In this light, archaeology is not a matter of digging up and showcasing the remains of the past, but is instead ‘a contemporary material practice which works on and with the traces of the past and within which the archaeologist is implicated as an active agent of interpretation. What archaeologists do is work with material traces, with evidence, in order to create something – a meaning, a narrative, an image – which stands for the past in the present’.⁶² Presenting an actor today with the same playtext grappled with by an actor 400 years ago is one such attempt to ‘take up and make something of the past’,⁶³ subjecting the traces that constitute the early modern playtext to embodied action and practical decision-making which can help reconstruct the processes involved in performing it. Performance choices made by actors working with these texts under particular performance conditions – a process Gilli Bush-Bailey and Jacky Bratton describe as ‘revival’, which ‘acknowledges the present and works to reawaken that which can be brought into use again’⁶⁴ – can provide valuable insight into the requirements made of actors working under similar conditions in the early modern theatre. In the staging workshops I document at key points in this book, actors entered into what performance theorist Rebecca Schneider powerfully terms ‘gestic negotiation’ with the theatrical past, in which the early modern playtext is ‘replay[ed] … back across the body’.⁶⁵ Taking place in ‘the syncopated time of re-enactment, where then and now punctuate each other’,⁶⁶ workshops such as those I document in this book allow actors and researchers to come face to face with opportunities and demands for physical action invited in the interstices of the early modern playtext. The value of these workshops to our understanding of early modern boy performance therefore lies in their exposure of the challenging, the negotiable, and the performable, seeking not solutions but prompts for physical re-imagining.

(Candle)Lights, Boys, Action: Boy Actors in Early Modern England

The aim of this book is twofold: to re-contextualise the value and dramaturgical centrality of boy actors to the plays in which they performed through emphasis on the physical work of performance, and to emphasise the value of present-day performance practice in refining our understanding of this corporeal aspect of their craft. Taking boy actors as a distinct category of performer which cuts across companies, repertories, and historical moments – as other scholars have done for theatrical figures such as the clown⁶⁷ – I provide a detailed picture of how and why the physical skills of these young actors infused and animated the plays performed throughout the early modern period. I argue that positioning early modern boy actors as a distinct type of performer and using close textual work and performance practice to re-imagine what it meant, and took, to train, perform, and forge a career as one allows us critically to re-imagine this important and unique facet of early modern English theatrical culture.

In a discussion of early modern acting and the relationship of performance to print, Paul Menzer suggests that ‘If we begin with the bodies of the actors rather than with bodies of type, we may be able to think anew about playing in the period.’⁶⁸ Boy Actors in Early Modern England marks one such attempt to ‘think anew’ about early modern boy playing by beginning with boys’ performing bodies as they are trained, exercised, and displayed across London’s stages. I begin by assessing how early modern cultural understandings of boys shaped their roles and performances by attending to a wide range of sources – many of them untheatrical – pertaining to physical expectations of boys’ capacities and skills in this period. Chapter 1 offers less an intellectual and more a corporeal history of early modern boyhood by looking to neglected contexts where youthful physicality is discussed and promoted. The chapter places a more active emphasis on boys’ bodies than scholars of early modern culture, literature, and theatre have typically tended to do, providing an extensive picture of how boys’ physical capacities were understood, improved, and manipulated by surveying a range of historical sources, including religious writings and sermons, conduct books and advice to parents, memoirs which reflect on physical training and experiences of boyhood, apprenticeship manuals, and educational tracts written by the age’s leading pedagogical thinkers. Examining the ways in which boys and their bodies are situated in these works – often with an emphasis on physical labour and potential for activity – I argue for a shared culture of expectation around the bodies of early modern boys in which physical movement and productivity is at the forefront.

Chapter 2 moves to consider how the high physical standards to which early modern boys were held by wider culture were expressed on the stage. Drawing together stage appearances of boy actors playing boy actors in the works of multiple playwrights – chief among them Jonson, Marston, and Shakespeare, each amply experienced in writing for boy actors in so-called ‘adult’ companies (Shakespeare), boy companies (Marston), or both (Jonson) – I argue for a theatre directly influenced by and representative of early modern culture’s investment in boys’ moving, working bodies. Supported by extant eye-witness accounts and literary depictions of boy actors in performance, and the appearance of ‘real’ boy actors in metatheatrical formats, I emphasise the pervasive fascination not with the cross-gender performances (successful or otherwise) on which criticism has tended to focus, but with boy actors’ moving bodies and capacity for stage action. I argue that this fascination is also discernible in the careers and reputations of particular boy actors insofar as they can be reconstructed today, calling attention to the highly physical nature of particular roles played by celebrated boy actors such as Nathan Field and Richard Robinson – both of whom appear in the late seventeenth-century pamphlet with which this Introduction began – and demonstrating how audiences and playwrights celebrated and commemorated the corporeal nature of their performances.

Chapter 3 moves from explicitly metatheatrical showcase to a more focused discussion of how the overlapping practices of sport and theatre contributed to boy actors’ performances in this period. Here I focus my attention exclusively on the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean boy companies, whose actors’ physical skill sets have been subject to particular neglect by critics. Building on existing scholarship which highlights the various physical displays which ran alongside literary drama in early modern performance culture, I argue that sport and exercise formed a crucial part of boy actors’ training for the professional stage, taking as my focus the educational writings and theatrical activity of Richard Mulcaster and their influence on the repertories of the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels. This chapter is the first in the book to incorporate a sustained discussion of present-day performance practice into its analysis of two of the most sustained sporting scenes in the boy company repertory, drawing on my own experience of staging these scenes as part of a Research in Action workshop at the reconstructed SWP.

Chapter 4 considers how the kinds of isolated display of sport and physical skill discussed in Chapter 3 were more widely transferrable to some of the most challenging – and dazzling – boy actor roles in the early modern dramatic canon – chiefly, though by no means exclusively, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. The chapter offers an in-depth, physically minded reading of the role, turning again to practice-based examinations of particular moments of Cleopatra’s stagecraft which echo throughout the early modern repertory as well as setting her against a wide backdrop of similarly agile theatrical women, from Marlowe and Thomas Nashe’s Dido and the mercurial Pandora of John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon (both 1588), through the highly physical roles of Lucretia in Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1607) and Marston’s Sophonisba (1605), to the heroic women of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s plays for the King’s Men in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. These cross-repertorial readings further extend the concept of early modern theatrical culture’s shared investment in boy actors’ corporeal performances, suggesting that reading roles such as Cleopatra through the lens of physical skill and corporeally dynamic performance re-imagines them as prominent nodes in a system of theatrical exchange centred on boy actors’ theatrical physicality, helping to demystify their often forbidding complexity on the page.

Boy Actors in Early Modern England suggests that, pace James Wright’s Lovewit, it is not necessarily the names of actors that can help us to access the performances of the past. Rounding out our understanding of the bodies of early modern boy performers – what culture expected of those bodies, how they developed skill, how they were put to use on stage, and how those performances can be re-encountered in present-day practice – can provide an equally enriching means to capture something of their theatrical craft. Beginning with a re-assessment of how early moderns imagined and described the performing bodies of boys and applying these contexts to our readings and performances of the plays, it is through close attention to physical skill that we can better ‘guess at the Action’ of early modern England’s youngest players.