Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children's Playing Companies (1599-1613)

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre explores the phenomenon of the child player at the centre of early modern theatrical culture. Drawing together the fields of Renaissance, theatre and childhood studies, it raises crucial questions about the role of the child in this culture and about how childhood was experienced and understood. It investigates how the two major children's playing companies, the Children of Paul's (1599-1606) and the Children of the Queen's Revels (1600-1613), defined their players as children. Analysing their plays, commercial and legal practices and staging methods, it introduces theorisations of age and childhood into studies of performance, gender and nationality and investigates theatre as a site in which children have the opportunity to articulate their emerging selfhoods. It also offers new readings of plays by George Chapman, Nathan Field, Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton by locating them in the context of the children's repertories.