Abstract
This chapter explores the “queerness” of children’s performance, focusing on the capacity of plays originally performed by early modern boys’ playing companies to render social and behavioral conventions malleable and ambiguous. Exploring three plays dealing with sexual transformation, The Maid’s Metamorphosis, George Chapman’s May Day and Thomas Randolph’s Amyntas, it argues that children’s drama presents both femininity and masculinity as contingent and subject to malfunction or glitch. Moreover, the unstable gender identities of individual characters spill out into broader aspects of social life, such as age and class. These plays may indulge in fantasies of bodily integrity, but the ubiquitous presence of the boy actor means that they also demonstrate the arbitrary relationship between gendered and sexed bodies, subverting and complicating normative hierarchies and structures.
I graunt thy wish, thou art become a man.
(The Maid’s Metamorphosis)
[S]he prou’d a man.
(George Chapman, May Day)
I alwaies thought I was borne to be a Queene.
(Thomas Randolph, Amyntas)
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- 2.
The Maid’s Metamorphosis was entered in the Stationers’ Register on July 24, 1600, and issued that year “As it hath bene sundrie times Acted by the Children of Powles.” May Day was published in 1611 as “A vvitty Comedie, diuers times acted at the Blacke Fryers”; references to Shakespeare ’s Hamlet and the similarity of Quintiliano to Shakespeare ’s Pistol suggest a performance date around 1600–1, although possible references to Measure for Measure and Dekker’s The Gull’s Hornbook may suggest later revision. Amyntas was licensed by Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on November 26, 1630 for performance by the Children of the Revels . See Bawcutt (1996, 171).
- 3.
To my knowledge, a narrative of sexual transformation appears in only one other pre-Restoration play, the second part of Thomas Killigrew’s The Wanderer, originally written as a closet play in the 1650s. John Lyly ’s Gallathea (c. 1584) ends with the prospect of a change of sex, but the transformation of one of the lovers into a man does not occur on stage.
- 4.
- 5.
The Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel had disappeared by 1590; they were re-established in 1599 and 1600 respectively, after around a decade during which no commercial children’s companies were in operation in London . The Children of the Revels were established in 1629, at which point children’s companies had been absent from London since 1613, when the last surviving Jacobean troupe , the Children of the Queen ’s Revels, merged with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men.
- 6.
See Kathman (2005).
- 7.
We have no information about the casting of figures such as the witches in Macbeth , who were played by adult men in the Restoration and beyond, but all of the extensive information compiled by Kathman argues that female roles were conventionally played by boys and young men.
- 8.
For a valuable discussion of the “fictional” body of the boy actor , see also Lamb (2009), 23–24.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
For an account of the narrative and dramaturgical functions of these scenes see Haslem (1994).
- 12.
- 13.
See also Fudge (2006).
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Acknowledgments
This chapter has benefitted hugely from the editorial help and advice of Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Johnston and an anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan. I would also like to thank Robin Craig and Gemma Miller for valuable conversations about early modern queerness and the queer child that have helped to shape it. Very early versions of this material were delivered at the Renaissance Society of America annual conference in Miami (2007) and the University of Manchester (2009); many thanks to Sarah Beckwith, Daniela Caselli, and everyone who attended those papers and offered comments and suggestions.
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Munro, L. (2018). Queering Gender, Age, and Status in Early Modern Children’s Drama. In: Higginbotham, J., Johnston, M. (eds) Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_10
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