Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England ed. by Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams (review)

OVER THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, there has been an explosion of work on childhood and its representations in early modern England. This collection illuminates early modern childhood further by discussing it in relation to practices in education and in the theater, with contributions from several influential authors in the field as well as new voices.

Several of the essays combine the two institutions in the collection's title by analyzing theatrical representations of or allusions to education. In his contribution, "Hamlet's Boyhood," Seth Lerer draws on the contrast between the representations of Hamlet in the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), on the one hand, and those in the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604) and the First Folio (F, 1623), on the other. He argues that in the now standard version of the play, a combination of Q2 and F, Hamlet is a "superannuated boy actor" (21) whose interactions with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern recall boys' sixteenth-century rhetorical education. In the shorter Q1, Hamlet seems like more an impatient university student (26). Lerer shows how childhood is evoked in Hamlet's address to Yorick's skull by suggesting Aesop's fable of a wolf discovering an actor's mask—Aesop's fables were popular as literature for children—and he argues that Hamlet's speech to the skull also recalls Queen Margaret's use of children's games to mock the Duke of York in Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI, written so early in his career that Lerer associates it with Shakespeare's "theatrical youth long gone" (29).

Joseph Campana's essay, "The Traffic in Children: Shipwrecked Shakespeare, Precarious Pericles," begins with the suggestion that in Pericles, Marina saves herself from being trafficked by virtue of her education: she knows and can teach music, dance, and needlework. However, Campana complicates the issue by pointing out that she gives her profits to the Bawd, and so is still involved in trafficking. He broadens the discussion of trafficking to include early modern impressment of children for the theater as well as systems of apprenticeship, fosterage, and slavery. His ultimate argument depends on a distinction between precariousness, the vulnerability of all human life, and precarity, the greater vulnerability of those in certain social categories, including the sort in which Marina is embedded.

In her contribution, "Speaking Like a Child: Staging Children's Speech in Early Modern Drama," Lucy Munro analyzes the child William's language lesson in Merry Wives of Windsor in order to consider more broadly the question of what it means to speak like a child in early modern drama. As she explains, prose writers describe children's speech as "wavering, uncertain, repetitive, and imitative" (84). In general, children in plays are represented as speaking in "monosyllables, simple sentence structures, [with] deference to adult authority, and [with] an impression of naïveté" (89). This scene shows the frequent worry about teachers' possible bad influence on children, although that worry is deflated here because the sexual meanings Mistress Quickly finds in the words of the lesson come from her own imagination and ignorance. Children such as Merry Wives' Robin and Henry V's Boy are wittier and can use to their own advantage conventions such as the idea that children speak the truth. The children's theater companies, which produced different plays than the adult ones, played with the contrast between child actor and adult character, and also presented precocious children, most often, but not always, boys, as all the actors were. (It is important to recall that on the public stage in England, whether in children's or adult companies, all roles were played by males.)

Children's theater companies are discussed in detail in two other essays. In "Shakespeare versus Blackfriars: Satiric Comedy, Domestic Tragedy, and the Boy Actor in Othello," Bart van Es makes a fascinating comparison between the Blackfriars' boys' company's May Day (by Chapman) and Othello. The plays have many similar character types, except that...