This innovative study draws on theatre history and present-day performance to re-appraise the remarkable skills of early modern boy actors.

"In the Company of Boys" explores the life of the boy actor and the culture's affective and phenomenological responses to the boy on the early modern English stage. This study focuses on the actors' performances as boys and on the material practices that brought them into the theatrical economy. Reading dramatic representations of boys alongside archival evidence about the impressment and kidnappings of boy actors and cultural responses to the boy on stage, this project reveals that the figure of the boy actor began to function as a model for how to raise an English subject. Each chapter displays the boy actor in exemplary roles: the kidnapped boy, the little love god (Cupid), the diligent scholar, and the exotic or colonized boy. The first chapter analyzes the legal mechanism that allowed boy company masters to "take up" boys to be in the choir and to perform. It traces this process through dramatic representations in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Twelfth Night, and Philaster. The second chapter reads Cupid as an exemplary boy player whose posturing and animating power reveals how desire is figured in relation to boys on the early modern stage. The third chapter turns to the overlapping mimetic practices of the university and the theatre arguing that the boy actor is constructed through two categories of mimesis: emulation and impersonation. The production history of George Ruggle's play, Ignoramus, shows the contested nature of mimetic strategies in the school and on stage, and the play also figures importantly in the fourth chapter as an index of the relationships among a group of scholars and theatre practitioners who were integral to the colonization of Virginia. The figure of the boy actor motivates charitable educational efforts in the seventeenth century in the colonies and in England and is represented in this role in plays from The Tempest to John Fletcher's, The Nightwalker , or The Little Thief. Boy actors inhabited a range of subject positions, sometimes dominating and impudent, at others passive or alluring that allowed audiences to imagine a flexible sense of self.

This book investigates how the Children of Paul's (1599-1606) and the Children of the Queen's Revels (1600-13) defined their players as children and, via an analysis of their plays and theatrical practices, it examines early modern theatre as a site in which children have the opportunity to articulate their emerging selfhoods.

This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing and boy actors’ crossdressing, which have long held the spotlight in early modern gender studies. The author argues that MTF crossdressing episodes are especially rich sources for socially-oriented readings of queer gender—that crossdressers’ genders are constructed and represented in relation to romantic partners, communities, and broader social structures like marriage, economy, and sexuality. Further, she argues that these relational representations show that the crossdresser and his/her allies often benefit financially, socially, and erotically from his/her queer gender presentation, a corrective to the dominant idea that queer gender has always been associated with shame, containment, and correction. By attending to these relational and beneficial representations of MTF crossdressers in early modern literature, the volume helps to make a larger space for queer, genderqueer, male-bodied and queer-feminine representations in our conversations about early modern gender and sexuality.

Offers a new, interdisciplinary account of early modern drama through the lens of playing and playgoing.

The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

Voice in Motion explores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even failing, to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts—including anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid—Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as "unruly matter" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world. Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.