Boy player

Boy player is a common term for the adolescent males employed by Medieval and English Renaissance playing companies. Some boy players worked for the mainstream companies and performed the female roles, as women did not perform on the English stage in this period. Others worked for "children's companies," in which all roles, not just the female ones, were played by boys. [Chambers, Vol. 2, pp. 1-76.] [Halliday, pp. 35, 71, 98-101.]

Boys in Adult Companies

In playing companies of adult actors, boys were the performers of female roles, in an age when it was considered unacceptable for women to act. Female roles were performed by boys from the beginnings of professional English theatre (in the 1560s) to the closure of the theatres in 1642. Upon the restoration of theatre in 1660, boys were initially utilized, but women were permitted to act on the stage beginning in December 1661.

There was no law against women on stage: English Renaissance audiences seem to have simply considered it unthinkable, since no one ever argued in favor of it in the period. The social assumptions and biases involved were so strong as to go unquestioned at the time. Pre-pubescent boys were used because their high-pitched voices sound more like women.

Boy actors in adult companies apparently served as apprentices, in ways comparable to the practices of other guilds and trades of the age, though for shorter terms — perhaps two or three years instead of the usual seven. (The companies of adult actors were, in Elizabethan legal terms, retainers in noble households, and thus not subject to the legal statutes governing apprentices.) [Individual actors sometimes maintained membership in guilds, precisely for the legal right to maintain apprentices. John Heminges was a member of the grocer's guild throughout his life, and Ben Jonson renewed his membership in the bricklayer's guild in 1599...but probably not because they were enthusiastic about greengrocering and bricklaying. Andrew Cane, however, was an active goldsmith and a member of the Goldsmith's Company as well as the leading clown of Prince Charles's Men in the 1630s; and he turned his goldsmith's apprentices John Wright Arthur Savill into boy players with the company. Both appeared in Shackerley Marmion's "Holland's Leaguer" in December 1631.] They performed female roles (and, of course, roles of male children if required) alongside adult male actors playing men. In reference to Shakespeare's company, variously the Lord Chamberlain's Men (1594–1603) or the King's Men (1603 and after): Augustine Phillips left bequests to an apprentice, James Sands, and a former apprentice, Samuel Gilburne, in his will, read after his death in 1605; company members William Ostler, John Underwood, Nathan Field, and John Rice had all started their acting careers as Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars Theatre.

One question has persisted: did boys play "all" female roles in English Renaissance theatre, or were some roles, the most demanding ones, played by adult males? Some literary critics and some ordinary readers have found it incredible that the most formidable and complex female roles created by Shakespeare and Webster could have been played by "children." The available evidence is maddeningly incomplete and occasionally ambiguous; yet the overall implication is that women were played by boys or young men, not mature adults. [ [http://www.shaksper.net/archives/1998/0450.html Shaksper.net] ] Many boy actors filled female roles for a few years, then switched to male roles. An example: John Honyman started playing female roles for the King's Men at the age of 13, in 1626, in Philip Massinger's "The Roman Actor". He played females for the next three years, through the King's Men's productions of Lodowick Carlell's "The Deserving Favourite" and Massinger's "The Picture" (both in 1629). Yet in 1630, at the age of 17, Honyman switched to male roles and never returned to female roles. Other boy players with the King's Men, John Thompson and Richard Sharpe, appear to have played women for a decade or more, to the point at which they must have been "young men" rather than "boys." Theophilus Bird played a woman when he was in his early 20s; but then he too switched to male roles.

Audience members occasionally recorded positive impressions of the quality of the acting of boy players. When one Henry Jackson saw the King's Men perform "Othello" at Oxford in 1610, he wrote of the cast's Desdemona in his diary, "She [sic] always acted the matter very well, in her death moved us still more greatly; when lying in bed she implored the pity of those watching with her countenance alone." [Translated from the original Latin; Michael Shapiro, "The Introduction of Actresses in England: Delay or Defensiveness?," in Comensoli and Russell, p. 185.] The mere fact that Jackson referred to the boy as "she," when he certainly knew better rationally, may in itself testify to the strength of the illusion.

The best answer to this question, "boys or men in female roles?," may be, both or either, depending upon the actor and the role. A mature actor could have played roles of older women — but not Juliet, or Ophelia, or Desdemona. (In the King's Men's 1632 revival of Fletcher's "The Wild Goose Chase," veteran comedian John Shank played the role of the female servant Petella. In the same year, adult actor Anthony Turner played a kitchen maid when Queen Henrietta's Men performed Heywood's "The Fair Maid of the West" at Hampton Court.) Could a child have played Shakespeare's Cleopatra or Webster's Vittoria Corombona? That would depend on the child; Ellen Terry called Laurence Olivier "already a great actor"...when he was twelve years old.

Children's Companies

In the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, troupes appeared that were composed entirely of boy players. They are famously mentioned in Shakespeare's "Hamlet", in which a group of travelling actors has left the city due to rivalry with a troupe of "little eyases" (II, ii,339); the term "eyas" means an unfledged hawk. [G. Blakemore Evans, ed., "The Riverside Shakespeare," Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1974; p. 1156 n. 339.]

The children's companies grew out of the choirs of boy singers that had been connected with cathedrals and similar institutions since the Middle Ages. (Similar boy choirs exist to this day.) Thus the choir attached to St. Paul's Cathedral in London since the 12th century was in the 16th century molded into a company of child actors, the Children of Paul's. [Chambers, Vol. 2, pp. 8-22.] Similar groups of boy actors were connected with other institutions, including Eton, the Merchant Taylors School, and the ecclesiastical college at Windsor. [Chambers, Vol. 2, pp. 68-76.]

The boys were generally in the range of 8-12 years old (prepubescent boys are chosen as choirboys precisely because their voices have not yet "broken" with puberty). They were musically talented, strictly disciplined, educated in the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), and sometimes fluent in Latin; add in a certain "cuteness factor," and the boys amounted to formidable competition for the companies of adult actors in Elizabethan England. Between 1558 and 1576 (the year James Burbage built The Theatre in London and the age of popular Elizabethan drama began), companies of boy actors performed 46 times at Court, versus only 32 times for companies of adult actors in the same period. The playwright John Lyly earned fame when his "Euphuistic" plays were acted at Court by the Children of Paul's in the 1580s.

The practice of children acting was never free of controversy, however (see Responses, below). In 1590 theatrical performances by the Children of Paul's were suppressed, largely due to Lyly's involvement in the Marprelate controversy. Companies of child actors went out of fashion, and did not return for a decade.

In 1600, however, the practice saw a resurgence: the Children of the Chapel performed at the private Blackfriars Theatre for much of the first decade of the 17th century. [Chambers, Vol. 2, pp. 23-60.] Their performances of the plays of Ben Jonson were especially popular, inspiring Shakespeare's lines about how the boys "carry it away...Hercules and his load too" in "Hamlet," II, ii,360-2. (The Globe Theatre was decorated with a statue of Hercules, the playhouse's symbol.) The Children of Paul's were also acting publicly once again at this time.

The children probably attained their greatest notoriety during the "Poetomachia" or War of the Theatres (1599–1601). Two troupes were intimately involved on the competing sides: the Children of Paul's acted John Marston's "Jack Drum's Entertainment" (1600) and "What You Will" (1601) and Thomas Dekker's "Satiromastix" (1601), while the Children of the Chapel had Jonson's "Cynthia's Revels" (1600) and "The Poetaster" (1601).

The boys' troupes were strongly associated with the satirical comedy of Jonson, Marston, and Thomas Middleton, which has sometimes been described as a coterie drama for gentleman "wits," in contrast to the popular drama of writers like Shakespeare and Thomas Heywood that was performed at the Globe and the other large public theatres. Yet the boys also played serious tragedies and contemporary histories, notably the works of George Chapman — "Bussy D'Ambois," "The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois", and the double play "The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron". Modern readers and theatergoers can only wonder what these productions were like.

The brand of coterie drama practiced by Jonson and others was often controversial, however; the official displeasure that greeted the play "Eastward Ho", which landed two of its authors in jail, also fell upon the boys who performed it. By 1606 the Children of Paul's had ceased performing, and the Children of the Chapel were no longer associated with the Royal Chapel and had lost royal patronage; they became merely the Children of the Blackfriars. The boys' troupes had ceased public dramatic performance and the fashion died out by about 1615. The Lady Elizabeth's Men was a new company granted a patent on April 27, 1615, under the patronage of King James' daughter Princess Elizabeth; it was composed, to some significant degree, of veterans of the children's companies, now grown to manhood. [Chambers, Vol. 2, pp. 246-60.]

While controversial in their time, the children's companies had been effective in funnelling talented, educated, and experienced young actors into the adult companies. To recapture this influence, Richard Gunnell attempted to start a children's company with 14 boys and several adults when he built the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1629. The enterprise was not a success, because of a long closure of the theatres due to plague soon after its inception; but it did produce Stephen Hammerton, who went on to act with the King's Men, and became an early matinee idol among young women in the audience for his romantic leads. [Andrew Gurr, "The Shakespearean Stage," pp. 63-4]

A limited renewal of the practice of children's companies came in 1637, when Christopher Beeston established, under royal warrant, the King and Queen's Young Company, colloquially called Beeston's Boys. The intent was in part to have a structure for training young actors — much as the choirs of the previous century had provided educated and capable talent (though the actors in Beeston's company tended to be older than the boys of the earlier troupes). After the elder Beeston's death in 1638, his son William Beeston continued the company, with uneven success, till the theatres closed in 1642; he even managed to re-form Beeston's Boys for a time once the theatres re-opened in the Restoration.

Responses

Many Puritan preachers, who hated the theatre in general, were outraged by the use of boy players, which they believed to encourage homosexual lust. In 1583, Philip Stubbes complained that plays were full of "such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches...such kissing and bussing" that playgoers would go home together "very friendly...and play the sodomites, or worse." [Philip Stubbes, "The Anatomy of Abuses" (1583), quoted in Bruce R. Smith, ed. "Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts" (New York: Bedford St Martin's, 2001), p. 275.] John Rainolds warned of the "filthy sparkles of lust to that vice the putting of women's attire on men may kindle in unclean affections." [John Rainolds, "The Overthrow of Stage Playes" (1599), quoted in Smith, "Twelfth Night", p. 276]

In response to such comments, the actor-playwright Thomas Heywood protested that audiences were capable of distancing themselves: "To see our youths attired in the habit of women, who knows not what their intents be? Who cannot distinguish them by their names, assuredly knowing they are but to represent such a lady, at such a time appointed?" [Thomas Heywood, "An Apology for Actors" (1612), quoted in Smith, "Twelfth Night", p. 276]

Famous boy players

*Christopher Beeston was perhaps the greatest success story among the child actors (at least in worldly terms). He continued his acting career into his maturity, became a theatre manager, and by the 1620s and '30s was arguably the most influential man in the world of London theatre.
*Nathan Field was another success story of the children's companies. In "Bartholomew Fair", Jonson hailed him as the "best" of the young actors ("Which is your best actor, your Field?"). As an adult, Field acted with the King's Men, and wrote creditable plays as well.
*Solomon Pavy became one of the Children of the Chapel in 1600, at the age of ten. He acted in Jonson's "Cynthia's Revels" and "The Poetaster." When he died prematurely in 1603, Jonson wrote an epitaph for him, praising Pavy's talent for playing old men.
*Alexander Cooke was the boy who is thought to have created many of Shakespeare's heroines on stage. He remained with the King's Men as an adult actor.
*Joseph Taylor graduated from the Children of the Chapel, via Lady Elizabeth's Men and the Duke of York's/Prince Charles' Men, to replace the late Richard Burbage as the leading man of the King's Men. He played Hamlet, Othello, and all the major Shakespearean roles.
*Stephen Hammerton was a prominent boy actor with the King's Men in the last decade of English Renaissance theatre, 1632–42.
*Hugh Clark was a noted boy player in the 1625–30 period.
*Charles Hart started out as a boy player with the King's Men, earning fame for his portrayal of the Duchess in Shirley's "The Cardinal" (1641). He became a leading man and a star of the stage during the Restoration.
*Theophilus Bird started as a boy player; like Hart he resumed his career as an adult actor when the theatres re-opened in 1660.
*Edward Kynaston was the last prominent boy actor; he worked during the Restoration.

In film, literature and theatre

The boy player has been a popular subject in literary, theatrical and cinematic representations of the Elizabethan theatre.
*The film "Shakespeare in Love" features a boy player (played by Daniel Brocklebank) who performs Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet" before being ousted by Gwyneth Paltrow's character (who is disguised as a man).
*Nicholas Wright's play "Cressida" is set in the 1630s and depicts the friendship between an elderly former boy player and the historical boy player Stephen Hammerton.
*The play and film "Stage Beauty" are about the Restoration boy player Edward Kynaston and the transition to female acting.
*Anthony Burgess's novel about Christopher Marlowe, "A Dead Man in Deptford", is narrated by a boy player.
*Tom Stoppard's film of "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" features a scene in which the eponymous duo are briefly convinced of the femininity of a boy player.
*Susan Cooper's novel "King of Shadows" deals with boy actors including Nathan Field.

Notes

References

* Comensoli, Viviana, and Anne Russell, eds. "Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage." Champaigne, IL, University of Illinois Press, 1998.
* Chambers, E. K. "The Elizabethan Stage." 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
* Forse, James. "Art Imitates Business: Commercial and Political Influences in Elizabethan Theatre." Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
* Gurr, Andrew. "The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642." Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
* Halliday, F. E. "A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964." Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.

External links

[http://www.geocities.com/yskretz/elizamccarthy.html Children's companies in Elizabeth's reign.]