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  • Child Actors on the London Stage, Circa 1600: Their Education, Recruitment and Theatrical Success by Julie Ackroyd
  • Edel Lamb
Julie Ackroyd. Child Actors on the London Stage, Circa 1600: Their Education, Recruitment and Theatrical Success. Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2017. Pp viii, 231. Hardback £55.00. ISBN: 9781845198480.

Renewed interest in early modern child actors has resulted in a number of recent monographs on the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English children's playing companies. This work has built on twentieth-century theatre history to re-evaluate the children's repertoires, their acting styles, and the status of these companies in early modern theatrical culture. Julie Ackroyd's Child Actors on the London Stage, Circa 1600 makes a fresh contribution to this body of work through its distinct focus on the education and employment conditions of child actors in the early seventeenth century. By reassessing the specific training and acting styles of child players in the context of wider histories of education, child employment, and performance, Ackroyd persuasively argues that understanding the education of these children is crucial to a consideration of their theatrical presentations.

Ackroyd begins with close attention to one of the few extant extra-dramatic documents pertaining to the child players: the 'Clifton vs Robinson' Star Chamber case ca 1600. This legal complaint brought by Henry Clifton over the impressment of his son, Thomas, who was allegedly seized and detained to begin 'the base trade of a mercynary enterlude player' (2), has become a widely recognized source in the history of early modern children's performance. Yet Ackroyd urges paying renewed attention to it. Child Actors begins with a detailed evaluation of what this case reveals about the boys taken as players, their educational backgrounds, and the training the playing company provided to them. By situating this in chapter 1 within new research into the history of impressment and of child employment and original examinations of the connections of the other boys named in the document to educational and religious institutions, Ackroyd poses two crucial questions. Firstly, were the methods outlined in the Clifton case typical or atypical of the modes of recruiting child actors in the early seventeenth century? Secondly, were boys being targeted for their skills? While Ackroyd acknowledges that the answer to the first question is difficult to ascertain, she considers this document's potential as both exemplary of recruitment processes and as uncommon through a careful analysis of the complaint itself and evidence of the changing employment practices of children's companies. Her suggestion that this impressment may [End Page 165] have been a particular response to the need to recruit in haste in order to facilitate the development of the newly formed Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars is an intriguing one. The second fascinating question frames the rest of this comprehensive study, paving the way for an in-depth examination of the conditions of children's performance at both Paul's and Blackfriars in the period.

This examination takes the form of five further chapters on different dimensions of children's training and performance. Chapter 2 considers the training of boys provided by early modern grammar schools. It evaluates humanist educational programs as ideal training for the child actor. Focusing particularly on education in pronunciation, memorization, gesture, rhetoric, and oration, and on the grammar school boy's exposure to Ovid, Plautus, and Terence as well as the practice of participating in dramatic performance in the school, it makes a strong case that grammar school education facilitated 'easy transfer onto the commercial stage for the boys' (23). Chapter 3 develops the contention that the grammar school use of Ovid to personate female characters meant school boys already had the basic training for performing female roles, and Ackroyd examines the techniques used by the children's companies to portray women on stage, arguing for the suitability of boys for this task due to both their training and their own indeterminate gendered state. Chapter 4 extends this discussion of gender and performance to address the particular challenges for boys in representing male adulthood. Both of these chapters productively explore intersections between gender and age. Through attention to acting styles, the body...

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