Abstract
Anna-Claire Simpson considers how early modern plays capitalized on their associations with children’s companies by exploring Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, written for and performed by Lady Elizabeth’s Men, in relation to Epicoene, written for and performed by the Children of the Blackfriars. By tracing the ways aesthetics in both plays focus and encourage a sensibility of age and specifically youth, and by locating shared conventions across these plays, the chapter seeks to identify a more robust connection between the role that children and childhood played in the writing, performance, and afterlife of the period’s tremendous contributions to literature and theater. The chapter’s framework features a brief discussion of child performers in early seventeenth century London and the “problem” of negotiating their legibility as such, alongside performance theory as a means to recognizing the complex work of bodies in the theater. Simpson proposes that theater could dependably instrumentalize its young actors to create and consolidate theater and troupe identities in this particular nascent moment of theater professionalization.
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Notes
- 1.
Margaret L. King even conceptualizes Puritan parents as early “helicopter parents.” Dame Purecraft’s fretful response to her daughter’s cravings—“remember that your education has been with the purest”—echoes such obsessive preoccupation with protective parenting and anxieties about how the child reflects on parenting itself (1.6.6–7). King, 393.
- 2.
Refining previous critiques on the grotesque and carnivalesque forces in Bartholomew Fair, Lori Schroeder Haslem points out that the ending, whereby authority fails and the materiality of the fair and its bodily pleasures and consumer-isms it indulges prevail, is ultimately a gendered triumph; that the “female grotesque” body, such as Win’s, is largely subdued and shamed. Haslem, 449.
- 3.
Robin Bernstein defines a “scriptive thing” as an “item of material culture that prompts meaningful bodily behaviors.” I think it can be usefully applied to the “set of prompts” issued by a site such as a fair, where individuals must navigate how they respond to prompts to interact with and consume what is sold (Bernstein, 71).
- 4.
Siobhan Keenan notes that, despite a somewhat limited surviving repertoire for Lady Elizabeth’s Men, “what we do know points to a company keen to distinguish itself and to capitalize on the traditions associated with the early seventeenth-century boy troupes from which its membership was partly drawn” and that the troupe’s “especially large casts of women was perhaps a way of taking advantage of the larger than usual number of youths in the troupe.” Keenan, 45.
- 5.
Erika Fischer-Lichte defines the whole theater experience in terms of the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators; each dependent on the presence and meaning-making of the other. Fischer-Lichte, 32, 76.
- 6.
For example, the inductions to John Marston’s comedies for the Children of Paul’s and the Children of Blackfriars might reference specific actors’ names or dramatize the boys putting on their costumes and discussing how they will perform their roles. See Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1599), What You Will (1600), and Antonio and Mellida (1602). Likewise, the induction John Webster added to Marston’s play The Malcontent (1604), a play originally written for the Children of the Chapel and then transferred to the King’s Men, advertises the identities of the adult actors while subtly referencing the Children of the Chapel through a printing metaphor: the men larger and therefore in “folio” and the children smaller in “decimo sexto.” Webster’s induction also references what the play loses in its passage to the men’s company: the musical interludes that the boys (as singers and musicians) supplied. Prologues and epilogues similarly crafted identities for the audience, either by appealing to particular elite figures (such as monarchs) or by consolidating the individual entity of the spectator into the collective “audience.” In Francis Beaumont’s induction for Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), boy players impersonate spectators who interrupt the “prologue,” join the gallants seated on stage, and continue “interrupting” until the play’s end.
- 7.
The Children of the Blackfriars shared players with the Children of Her Majesties Revels, the Children of the Whitefriars, and the Children of the Queen’s Revels. For this reason, some scholars consider these alternate names for the same group of boy players (Greteman, 25).
- 8.
Peter Hyland also uses the term “revelation” to describe moments when disguises are removed, whether or not the audience has been previously made aware of the disguise (Hyland).
- 9.
In his account of the prosthesis of gender on and off the early modern stage, Will Fisher argues that “when boy actors donned beards in order to play the parts of men, they would have been as much ‘in drag’ as when they played the parts of women” (84).
- 10.
Marah Gubar usefully coins the term “age transvestism” to name and explore the function of “children impersonating adults and vice versa” as “theatrical practice”, (411).
- 11.
While spectators would undoubtedly watch a performance knowing the actors were boys (or men), the question of their awareness of this fact during performances has been up for debate, in part due to the limited records of audience response. Anthony Dawson’s “simple answer” to this question as it pertains to boys playing women is that “the audience by convention simply ignored the gender of the actor, reading him as her.” I think this answer loses its viability when it comes to children’s companies and their plays, many of which contain numerous “reminders” about the juvenile status of their actors. Even John Lyly littered his plays for the Children of Paul’s with jokes about characters’ sizes, clearly establishing a pattern suggesting that audiences expected or wanted to be reminded or made aware of the childish status of the actors (Dawson, 40).
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Simpson, AC. (2019). The Child on Display in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. In: Miller, N.J., Purkiss, D. (eds) Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14211-7_8
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