Abstract
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 seventeenth-century 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 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).
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
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Notes
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), pp. 1659–759 (2.2.332–6). Further references are given in the text.
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.
James Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 225–56.
See Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 21–65.
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).
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.
Scholars who cite this legal suit as a source of factual information about the Children of the Chapel include Harold H. Hillebrand, The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History (New York: Russell and 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.
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’.
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.
Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 10, 20.
See Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, ‘Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties’, in Staged Properties in Early Modem English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–34 (pp. 1–2).
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.
Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modem Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 1–7, 11, 18–19.
Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 1.
James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 5.
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.
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).
Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 6.
Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 49–53, 197.
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.
John Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1980), 2.2.802; 2.2.800; 2.2.812.
Ben Jonson, Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, ed. Roger Holdsworth (London A and C Black, 1979, repr. 2005), 1.1.12–17.
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).
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).
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.
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.
Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), sig. E4.
See Jonas A. Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 182–4.
See Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization: 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 3.
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.
Camille Wells Slights, ‘Slaves and Subjects in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48.4 (1997), 377–90 (p. 383).
See Kathleen McLuskie, ‘Figuring the Consumer for Early Modern Drama’, in Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and 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.
Susan Wells, ‘Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City’, English Literary History, 48 (1981), 37–60.
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.
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).
See Siobhan Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 150.
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.
See Richard Dutton, ‘The Revels Office and the Boy Companies, 1600–1613: New Perspectives’, English Literary Renaissance, 32.2 (2002), 324–51 (p. 340).
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© 2009 Edel Lamb
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Lamb, E. (2009). Evaluating Childhood: The Theatrical Trade in Children. In: Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594739_3
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