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  • Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children's Playing Companies (1599-1613)
  • Matt Omasta
Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children's Playing Companies (1599-1613). By Edel Lamb. Early Modern Literature in History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. xii + 189. $80.00 cloth.

In Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre, Edel Lamb sets out to explore how children's theatre companies of early modern England constructed popular notions of childhood. Lamb invokes the discourse of performativity—specifically Judith Butler—by questioning whether childhood and gender are performed similarly. Because she understands childhood as a socially constructed class, and argues that members of a dominant class (adults) construct and deploy conceptions of young performers, her book aligns with recent scholarship in childhood studies. Rather than investigating the performance of childhood broadly, however, Lamb analyzes the construction of the child player—that is, the children's playing company performer. Importantly, she notes that although many boys continued to perform with the companies well into their (biological) adulthoods, the companies insisted upon presenting them as "children." As such, the book's most significant contribution to the field is a [End Page 495] more nuanced understanding of the ways in which companies' managers carefully constructed and maintained a particular notion of the "essence" of the early modern child player.

The author proposes that the stage companies successfully posited a fixed notion of the child player as an infantile, eroticized, and malleable being, one in a state of perpetual "becoming" who is both less than and subservient to adults. Lamb derives her evidence principally from an analysis of playscripts, especially those with "induction" scenes in which child players performed "themselves" preparing for a show. Since these scenes present the players not as characters but as "actors," Lamb believes they reveal how playwrights presented particular notions of players' supposedly "natural" behaviors "out of role." At times, Lamb seems to assume verisimilitude in the scripts, which may detract from the credibility of her analysis. For example, in discussing Ben Jonson's Epicoene, Lamb notes that one actor (in the role of a female "spectator") looks upon another one of the actors and asks: "Did you ever see a prettier child?" Lamb extrapolates that such references "explicitly represent desire for the eroticized child player" (52). In another instance, two characters onstage may kiss (although it is unclear if the boys did in fact kiss in any given production); Lamb claims that this locates the child "explicitly within a homoerotic discourse," and that "the body of the [player] is thus put on display to the spectators and the kiss between the two boy players may act as an eroticized and teasing display of the boys' potential sexual identities" (53). Although some adult spectators may have viewed the players erotically, and although other scholars have opined similarly, the claim that these examples "explicitly" signify broad homoerotic interest in young performers seems untenable.

More persuasive are her analyses of how playing companies' material circumstances influenced perceptions of child players. Lamb notes that while boys who performed with adult companies (e.g., The King's Men) eventually became sharers in their companies, the young people impressed or apprenticed to children's companies never attained this status. Even once a player transcended biological childhood, companies still presented him as a child and apprentice—a child learning how to become an adult.

Building on this idea, Lamb's second chapter argues that company managers reduced child players to "material objects" functioning "only as a signifier of the identity, gain, and rights of his owner" (46). Citing legal documents listing the boy players as property akin to scripts or costumes, Lamb argues that children were simply elements of commercial trade between companies and paying spectators. Further, players themselves were replaceable, as "the material body of the boy actor is . . . not valuable in itself," but rather it is the deliberately constructed perception of boy players that makes them valuable to spectators. Although the legal relationship between the players and their companies evolved from one of impressed service to apprenticeship, Lamb contends that children always served as commodities exchanged between other parties: parents traded their children with companies...

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