Abstract
In 1603 Ben Jonson memorialised the child player Salomon Pavy in his ‘Epitaph on S. P. a Child of Q. El Chappel’. Urging his readers to ‘Weep with me’ (1. 1) at the death of this player aged ‘scarse thirteen’ (1. 9), Jonson fixed Pavy in performance history as a skilled child who acted the parts of old men so ‘truely’ that the ‘Parcae’, or fates, ‘thought him one’ (11. 15–16). Indeed, the poem has served as a source of information for theatre historians about the ages and talents of the youthful players of early modern London.2 However, ‘Epitaph on S. P.’ is as much fiction as reality.3 Jonson manipulates the relationship between Pavy’s early death and the parts that he may have played as a member of the Children of the Chapel, and previously as a member of the Children of Paul’s, as the central conceit of the poem. Furthermore, the fact that Pavy was 14 when he died in 1602 demonstrates the problems in interpreting this elegy as historical reality.4 Yet what is remarkable about the poem is the way in which it conceives of Pavy as a child. It conveys a heightened sense of loss by insisting that he ‘was a child’ (1. 5) and emphasising that the account offered is his ‘little storie’ (1. 2). Pavy’s status as child is crucial to his identity to the extent that even ‘Death’s selfe’ (1. 4) is sorry at having mistakenly taken him.
Weep with me, all you that read This little story.
And know, for whom a tear you shed Death’s self is sorry. ’Twas a child […]1
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Notes
Ben Jonson, ‘Epitaph on S. P. a Child of Q. El. Chappel’, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), VIII (1947), p. 77, li. 1–5. Further references are given in the text.
For example, Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 104
Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram, eds, English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 268.
See Claire Busse, ‘Pretty Fictions and Little Stories’, in Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800, ed. Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 75–102 (p. 75).
See David Kathman, ‘How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?’, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), 220–46 (p. 223).
See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1962), pp. 36–7.
Shen Lin, “How Old were the Children of Paul’s?”, Theatre Notebook, 45 (1991), 121–31.
See Linda Austern, ‘Thomas Ravenscroft: Musical Chronicler of an Elizabethan Theatre Company’, Journal of American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 238–63
W. Reavley Gair, ‘Chorister-Actors at Paul’s’, Notes and Queries, 25 (1978), 440–1; Lin, p. 124; The National Archive (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) STAC 5/C46/39, Clifton v. Robinson, Evans and Others, 1601.
Cited in W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 154–5 [italics mine].
Charles William Wallace, ‘Shakespeare and His London Associates as Revealed in Recently Discovered Documents’, University Studies, 10.4 (1910), 76–100 (p. 90)
M. E. Williams, ‘Field, Nathan (bap. 1587, d. 1619/20)’, in Oxford Dictionary o fNational Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9391.
See summary of responses to Ariès in Margaret King, ‘Concepts of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), 371–407.
Kate Chedgzoy, ‘Introduction: “What, are they children?”’, in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Suzanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 15–31 (p. 17).
See Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 62 (1976), 205–48, on the gerontocratic society of early modern England.
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Coxcomb, ed. Irby B. Cathuen, 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. 263–366 (2.2.37).
Hezekiah Woodward, Childe’s Patrimony (London, 1640), p. 10.
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), pp. 2619–708 (5.2.215–17).
John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, in ’The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 117–76 (4.2.70–4).
Francis Lenton, The Young Man’s Whirligig (London, 1629), p. 2.
Henry Cuffe, The Differences of Ages of Man’s Life (London, 1607), p. 117 [italics original].
Anna Davin, ‘What is a Child?’, in Childhood in Question, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 15–36 (p. 33).
T. Sheafe, Vindiciae Senectute (London, 1639), By.
Bartolomaeus Anglicus, Batman Upon Bartolome his Booke De proprietatibus rerum (London, 1582), p. 73.
Barthelemy Batt, De Oeconomia Christiana (London, 1581), p. 10
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601), p. 297.
See Margreta de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modem England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 29–58.
James Cleland, The Institution of a Young Noble Man (London, 1607), p. 23.
For example, Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).
See Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 29–36
Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 146–7.
Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Theorizing Age with Gender: Bly’s Boys, Feminism, and Maturity Masculinity’, in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 90–118 (p. 94).
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1999), p. xvi, raises the question of ‘what happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips with race’.
Edward Calver, Passion and Discretion, in Youth and Age (London, 1641), p. 13.
Ben Jonson, Timber; or, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, VIII (1947), pp. 555–649 (p. 597).
Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 100–3
Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 10–16.
William Rankins, A Mirrour of Monsters (London, 1587), bii
William Prynne, Histriomastix (London, 1649), pp. 171, 892.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), p. 294.
Studies of the children’s playing companies include Charles Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597–1603 (New York: AMS Press, 1908)
Harold Hillebrand, The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964)
Gair, The Children of Paul’s; Shapiro, Children of the Revels; Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Richard Dutton, ‘The Revels Office and the Boy Companies, 1600–1613: New Perspectives’, English Literary Renaissance, 32.2 (2002), 324–51 (pp. 340–1).
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 363.
Michael Witmore, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)
Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen (London: Routledge, 2007).
For example, Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994)
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the Body Beneath: Speculating on the Boy Actor’, in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 64–83.
Samuel Daniel, Tethy’s Festival, in Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments 1605–1640, ed. David Lindley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 54–65 (1. 117).
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 (p. 256).
See Marion O’Connor, ‘Rachel Fane’s May Masque at Apethorpe 1627’, English Literary Renaissance, 36.1 (2006), 90–104.
John Marston, The Entertainment of the Dowager-Countess of Darby, in The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), pp. 189–207.
Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson, The Magnificent Entertainment, in Jacobean Civic Pageants, ed. Richard Dutton (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995), pp. 19–115 (p. 85)
John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James I, 4 vols (London, 1828), II, pp. 136–7.
Tracey Hill, Anthony Munday and Civic Culture: History, Power and Representation in Early Modern London, 1580–1633 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 164.
See James Knowles, ‘Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’, in Representing Ben Jonson, ed. Martin Butler (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 114–51
Scott McMillin, ‘Jonson’s Early Entertainments: New Information from Hatfield House’, Renaissance Drama, 1 (1968), 153–66.
Willem Schrickx, Foreign Envoys and Travelling Players in the Age of Shakespeare and Jonson (Wetteren: Universa, 1986), pp. 123–8
Erik Wikland, Elizabethan Players in Sweden, 1591–1592 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1962), p. 48
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), pp. 60–3.
See Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
W. L. Wiley, The Early Public Theatre in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 235–9.
Sidney Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama and the Crisis of Masculinity (London: Associated University Presses, 2003), pp. 57, 67–72; Orgel, Impersonations, p. 2.
Roslyn Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 74
For example, Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1952), esp. pp. 55, 90.
Scott McMillin, and Sally Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. xii.
McMillin, Lawrence Manley, Roslyn Knutson and Mark Bayer, ‘Reading the Elizabethan Acting Companies’, Early Theatre, 4 (2001), 111–48
Lucy Munro, ‘Early Modern Drama and the Repertory Approach’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 42 (2003), 1–33.
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© 2009 Edel Lamb
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Lamb, E. (2009). Introduction: Defining Early Modern Childhoods. In: Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594739_1
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