Abstract
Peter Bruegel’s painting, Children’s Games (1560), famously depicts the diverse forms of play undertaken by early modern children in its representation of a range of activities, including the wearing of masks, dressing up and the imitation of bridal and baptismal processions. Play and recreation, particularly imitation as a form of play, were perceived to be important activities for children in the period. As Edward Snow has noted, such games may be interpreted either as carnivalesque acts that mock adult behaviour or as a serious education and rehearsal for adulthood.1 In other words, the imitation undertaken by children in their games may function as an assertion of their status as children in distinction from adults and simultaneously as an essential developmental activity. Furthermore, the dressing-up games of Bruegel’s children bear a remarkable similarity to the activities of the theatrical player. As discussed in the introduction to this book, theatre was aligned with the activities of children in a range of early modern contexts.2 In his Discoveries, Ben Jonson juxtaposes the child and the theatrical player as he draws on the image of the child as the imitator or mimic 3 Claiming that ‘our whole life is like a play’, he suggests that
wee so insist in imitating others, as wee cannot (when it is necessary) returne to our selves: like Children, that imitate the vices of Stammerers, so long, till at last they become such.4
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Notes
Edward Snow, Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in ‘Children’s Games’ (New York: North Point Press, 1997), p. 18.
On theatre as childish, see David Pascoe, ‘Marston’s Childishness’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 9 (1997), 92–111 (p. 102).
Ben Jonson, Timber; or, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), VIII (1947), pp. 555–649 (p. 597).
For example, Richard Burbage is described as a ‘delightful Proteus’ in Richard Flecknoe, Love’s Kingdom, With a Short Treatise of the English Stage (London, 1664), pp. 91–2.
William Rankins, A Mirrour of Monsters (London, 1587), sig. B2.
William Prynne, Histriomastix (London, 1649), p. 893. See Introduction of this book, pp.1–16.
Kate Chedgzoy, ‘Shakespeare in the Company of Boys’, in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Suzanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 184–200 (p. 190).
For further links between these plays, see Michael Witmore’s reading of Jonson’s and Marston’s plays in the context of children’s performance in Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 95–136.
Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, in Ben Jonson, IV (1932), pp. 1–184 (Induction, 1. 11). Further references are given in the text.
See Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 12–23
Kathleen Lea, Italian Popular Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), pp. 54–65.
Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images’, in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 3–32.
On mould as a term used in print technology, see Aaron Kitsch, ‘Bastards and Broadsides in The Winter’s Tale’, Renaissance Drama, 30 (2001), 43–71.
William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 11’, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), p. 1927
Douglas Brooks, ‘Introduction’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern, ed. Douglas Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 1–29 (p. 2).
William Martyn, Youth’s Instruction (London, 1612), n.p.
Hezekiah Woodward, Childes Patrimony (London, 1640), n.p.
Francis Lenton, The Young Man’s Whirligig (London, 1629), n.p.
William Kempe, The Education of Children in Learning (London, 1588), sig. ELY.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), p. 2.
See Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Family in Shakespeare Studies’, Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), 707–42 (p. 730).
Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman (1630; New Jersey: Walter J. Johnson, 1975), pp. 97, 93.
Barthelemy Batt, De Oeconomia Christiana: The Christian Man’s Closet (London, 1581), p. 10. See introduction to this book, pp. 6–7.
Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 14–16.
On early modern education, see Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1965), pp. 89–130
Helen M. Jewell, Education in Early Modem England (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 93–102
Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society, 1500–1800 (London: Longman, 1982), pp. 11–47.
On early modern rites of passage, see Walter Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies in Philology, 56 (1959), 103–24
Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 1–22.
On performance in educational institutions, see F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914)
Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969)
T. H. Motter, The School Drama in England (London: Longman, 1929)
Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 3–4.
Cited in Edwin Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors and of Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England Before 1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), p. 390.
Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, ed. J. P. Collier (London, 1841), p. 28.
John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, in ’The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 1–56 (3.2.116, s.d).
Cited in Charles William Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597–1603 (New York: AMS Press, 1908), p. 107.
See Barbara Ravelhofer, “’Virgin Wax” and “Hairy Men Monsters”: Unstable Movement Codes in the Stuart Masque’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 244–72 (pp. 259–61, 265–7).
Cited in W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 39.
See Linda Phyllis Austern, Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1992), p. 7.
William Crashaw, The Sermon Preached at the Crosse (London, 1608), p. 171.
On the audiences, see Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London: 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 68–110; Shapiro, pp. 67–101.
See Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 14.
William Miller, ‘Little Eyases’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 28.1 (1977), 86–8
Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 3.
Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (London, 1868), p. 24.
Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), sig. E5°, C8.
See Tiffany Stern, Rehearsals from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 10–11.
Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-Booke (London, 1609), p. 21.
See Edward Burns, Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 1–2.
John Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1980), 3.1.961; 3.1.971. Further references are given in the text.
See Sukanya B. Senapti, “Two Parts in One”: Marston and Masculinity’, in The Drama of John Marston, ed. T. E Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 124–44 (p. 132).
Plays exploring youth in contrast to old age are evidently not limited to the children’s theatres. See, for example, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Old Law, ed. Catherine Shaw (New York: Garland Publishers, 1982).
Natalie Zemon-Davis, ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France’, Past and Present, 50 (1997), 41–75 (p. 55).
See Burnett, p. 15; Steven R. Smith, ‘The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents’, Past and Present, 61 (1973), 149–61 (p. 157).
On the training of the boys of the adult companies through performance, see Catherine Belsey, ‘Shakespeare’s Little Boys: Theatrical Apprenticeship and the Construction of Childhood’, in Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Bryan Reynolds and William N. West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 53–72.
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 (’Induction’, 1. 82). Further references are given in the text.
Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (London: Paladin Grafton, 1987), pp. 262–3
Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (London: Faber, 1968), pp. 156–7.
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© 2009 Edel Lamb
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Lamb, E. (2009). Playing Children: Education and Youth Culture in the Early Modern Theatre. In: Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594739_5
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