Two newly published essay collections, Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England and Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture, contribute to theatre and drama's intersection with the growing field of early modern English childhood studies, building on recent historical research and cultural analyses by Jennifer Higginbotham, Katie Knowles, and Lucy Munro, to name a few.
Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams's Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England examines education in relation to performances of and by children and asks what childhood meant to early modern people. The essays in this volume weave together “theatrical and social history with literary criticism” (3) in an effort to argue that “childhood in early modern England was inherently and imaginatively involved in school and playing” (11). Part I, “Shakespearean Childhoods,” examines themes of childhood as seen in Shakespeare's canon and, more broadly, the early modern cultural imagination. In this section contributors explore the performative qualities of grammar-school training as seen in Hamlet, the economics of trafficking in child labor during the early modern period, and thematic childhood innocence in both The Winter's Tale and Richard III. Of special note is Joseph Campana's essay, “The Traffic in Children: Shipwrecked Shakespeare, Precarious Pericles,” which expands considerations of child trafficking in early modern England beyond questions of kidnapping and sex abuse (detailed in Bart van Es's Shakespeare in Company, 2013). Campana shows how an emergent capitalist system profited from the exploitation of vulnerable child actors and demonstrates how that economic precarity extended into the boys’ adulthood. In so doing, Campana convincingly argues that child performers were part of an entangled web of trafficked human labor in early modern London.
Part II, “Beyond the Boy Actor,” broadens the collection's scope by delving into works by Shakespeare's contemporaries and theatre history outside of the public playhouses. This section considers the boys of London's children's companies and their cultural significance in early modern England. For example, Lucy Munro's “Speaking Like a Child: Staging Children's Speech in Early Modern Drama” draws “heavily on educational and dramatic works” as well as “a range of allusions to children's speech” in the early modern period (82). Focusing her attention on childhood speech in dramatic texts, Munro reveals how the language of children was conventionalized via monosyllables and simple sentence structures. She then reveals how playwrights undermined these conventions when young actors played adults in the children's companies, or when boy actors were tasked with linguistic precocity in the adult companies.
In Part III, “Girls and Boys,” Stephen Orgel, Deanne Williams, and Douglas Trevor examine the education and sexualization of young boys and girls on—and through—the early modern stage. In what is perhaps the most illuminating and provocative chapter of the collection, Deanne Williams's “Chastity, Speech, and the Girl Masquer” explores the tradition of girl performers in Tudor and Stuart court masques. Williams convincingly demonstrates that girl performers were a long-standing tradition in Western theatre and performance history, thereby challenging the myth of “a watershed moment of female first-ness” on English stages (163). Moreover, Williams argues for a reconsideration of the relationship between girls, girlhood, chastity, and education in early modern England, suggesting a connection between performance, education, and delayed marriage for young women.
Finally, Part IV, “Afterlives,” revisits and revises criticism that has been overlooked or misunderstood by early modern scholars and cultural historians. For example, in a revisionist analysis of psychoanalytic readings of Macbeth, James Marino examines the Scottish king not as an Oedipus, as Freud suggests, but as a Laius figure. Through this lens, Marino asks us to reconsider the loss of futurity by way of child mortality in Macbeth and convincingly argues for a rereading of Freud's analysis.
By yoking together discussions of childhood, performance, and education, the essays in this volume contribute significantly to the “cresting wave of publication on the nature of children and childhood” (47). Although the plays of Shakespeare are certainly an anchor for the collection, the book's contributors successfully expand the lens beyond Shakespeare in order to examine comparative treatments of children, childhood, and education, as well as the performance of childhood and education in the work of other early modern English authors. The result is a sweeping volume that is equally suitable for scholars of theatre history, childhood studies, and dramatic criticism.
Whereas Childhood, Education and the Stage presents an array of approaches to early modern childhood studies, Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Albert Johnston's Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture focuses its attention on the “discursive and dramatic constructions” of queerness, children, and childhood in early modern England (4). The volume's contributors consider “why we read early modern children and childhood as queer” by employing the work of Kathryn Bond Stockton and Lee Edelman, two scholars whose work focuses on questions of childhood and futurity (2). As a result, the collection feels uniquely cohesive in its approach to queer children and the queering of childhood in early modern English culture.
The volume opens with Simone Chess's essay, “Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature,” which argues for a consideration of queer chastity in drama and literature. Chess draws on current theories of queer time as that which runs counter to heteronormative reproductive practices. Similarly, Melissa Welshans's essay, “Queer Time and ‘Sideways Growth’ in The Roaring Girl,” demonstrates how Dekker and Middleton's Moll Cutpurse represents the Stocktonian “queer child,” an individual who “grows sideways, relishing in adolescent delay” (92), not unlike Chess's analysis of asexuality in Venus and Adonis.
In conversation with Welshans's analysis of queer girlhood, Jennifer Higginbotham's chapter on female boyhood, “Playing the Early Modern Tomboy,” reveals anxieties about masculinity as “something that a woman (or a man or a girl or a boy) might play” (108). Higginbotham concludes her analysis of early modern gender trouble with a call to action, exhorting scholars to “discuss crossdressing on the stage in a way that acknowledges our collective convictions that the genitals don't make the man, woman, boy, or girl” (113). Answering Higginbotham's call, Lucy Munro demonstrates that “the boy actor, thoroughly and productively queer, demonstrates the arbitrary relationship between gender and the body” (234). In “Queering Gender, Age, and Status in Early Modern Children's Drama,” Munro studies anxieties produced by boy bodies in their performances of age and masculinity. Munro highlights how, in a number of boy company plays, “aspects of costume, gesture, and voice that would traditionally signal masculinity or femininity are rendered uncertain,” thereby unsettling relationships between sex and gender in boy companies (216).
Mark Albert Johnston's “Queer Apprenticeship in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus” similarly engages onstage transformations in early modern drama. Johnston studies what he calls “queer apprentice[ship]” (119) and “queer labors” (119; original emphasis) in Shakespeare's revenge tragedy. Drawing on historical records of apprentices in early modern England, Johnston reveals that apprenticeships were a kind of prolonged childhood wherein boys and girls underwent “queer periods of sideways growth, stagnation, or regression in order to achieve what the culture construed as … adulthood” (125). Similarly, M. Tyler Sasser's “Moth and the Pedagogical Ideal in Love's Labor's Lost” looks to formations of manhood in the early modern all-male classroom, arguing that the play's boy servant, Moth, queers pedagogical processes by manipulating language and disrupting expectations of performed masculinity.
Gemma Miller, Bethany Packard, and Rachel Prusko's essays continue to think through queered performances of boyhood and the role of precocious speech onstage. Miller and Packard address the blurred boundaries between adulthood and childhood in Richard III and The White Devil, respectively. Similarly, Prusko analyzes Prince Edward in Marlowe's Edward II, suggesting that the character's “queerness inheres not in his sexuality, but rather in Marlowe's unstable portrayal of the prince's age” (196). In this way, Prusko's analysis speaks directly to Packard, Munro, and Sasser, a testament to this volume's overall theoretical consistency.
Although this edited collection attempts an intersectional approach and is remarkably cohesive, Urvashi Chakravarty's essay stands apart. As Chakravarty demonstrates in “‘I Had Peopled Else’: Shakespeare's Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race,” futurity in Shakespeare's plays is imagined as white and male. Any challenges or resistance to racial homogeneity are marked by fears of excessive fecundity and a queer absence of children of color. In other words, Chakravarty's intersectional analysis of early modern queerness and race points toward a fear of futurity with respect to nonwhite and “othered” bodies. As such, she is the only scholar to address questions of race alongside queerness and constructions of childhood, although the volume nevertheless makes a valuable contribution to studies of early modern theatre, culture, and history.
In her afterword, Kate Chedgzoy suggests that we might consider what it is not only to “queer childhood,” but also to “child queerness … to generate new ways of understanding the queer and the child, as cultural category and social subject” (258). This is precisely the effect of reading these two collections in tandem. Together, the editors and contributors for both of these volumes not only have shed new light on the concepts of “child” and “childhood” as social constructions in the early modern period, but also have opened new pathways for theatre historians, queer theorists, early modernists, and scholars of childhood studies.
