The Humour of Children: Performance, Gender, and the Early Modern Children's Companies

This article focuses on the professional and semi-professional children's companies of early modern England. I first provide a brief overview of the children's companies, suggesting that criticism needs to provide fuller accounts of both early sixteenth-century and mid-seventeenth-century experiments with children's performance. In the second section, I explore recent criticism of the children's companies and children's performance. In doing so, I suggest that one advantage of recent criticism has been its movement away from the traditional characterisation of adults’ and children's drama as ‘rival traditions’. Although there is a tradition of children's performance, it is not a monolithic, singular entity: children's performance could take on different meanings and associations at different times, and the composition and character of the children's companies was also unstable. Recent gender-orientated criticism also suggests ways in which the juvenile performers in children's companies can be considered separately from the boy actresses of the adult companies. Finally, the article provides re-readings of some children's company plays in relation to issues such as performance and gender, paying particular attention to the important but often-overlooked question of age.