The Children's Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509–1608: Pedagogue Playwrights, Playbooks, and Playboys by Jeanne H. McCarthy (review)

In 1584, when John Lyly's reputation as a writer was perhaps at its height, Barnabe Riche wrote that Lyly 'can Court it with the best, and Scholler it with the most, in whom I know not whether I should more commende his maners or his learnyng, the one is so exquisite, the other so generall'.¹ Riche's comments offer an appropriate frame for thinking not only about Lyly's dramatic work and the children's companies for which he wrote, but also the central arguments of Jeanne H. McCarthy's book, which similarly stresses the scholarly and courtly aspects of this part of the early modern theatrical landscape.

Scholars have long debated the relationship between companies composed entirely of boy actors, which emerged from the sixteenth-century grammar and choir schools, and those composed of men and boys, which operated under royal and noble patronage and performed on a more commercial basis. In recent decades, the idea that these were 'rival traditions', a term coined by Alfred Harbage, has been challenged.² Scholars such as Roslyn Lander Knutson have questioned the picture of 'cut-throat rivalry' presented by earlier accounts, instead stressing 'alternative strategies of competition such as imitation and cooperation'.³ In contrast, McCarthy returns to a binary model, contrasting what she variously terms a 'primarily oral', 'popular', and 'artisanal' performance tradition in the adult companies with a 'hyper-literate subculture' in the children's companies and schools.

The Children's Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater seeks to reshape our understanding of the development of drama in England during the sixteenth century by challenging standard critical narratives about the training and education of actors, and its relationship with the composition, style, and structures of their plays. It explores these central topics from a number of angles: chapter one questions the centrality of text in the adult company tradition; chapter two argues that important early sixteenth-century plays such as Mankind, Youth, Hick Scorner, Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece, and John Skelton's Magnificence were performed by children; chapters three and four explore playing and actor training in 'oral' and 'book-centered' practices; chapter five looks at patronage contexts and the role of Elizabeth I in promoting 'the literary drama'; chapter six argues that there were distinctive differences between the ways in which playwrights worked for the adult and children's companies; chapter seven focuses on Ben Jonson's late-Elizabethan plays, Cynthia's Revels and The Poetaster, as responses to children's company traditions; and an epilogue examines the decline of the children's companies under James I. Alongside its central argument about playing, actor-training, and the text, the book also engages with broader debates within the field, challenging two ideas in particular: that textually orientated drama is dry or untheatrical; and that the market and commercial competition shaped the development of theatre.

The book makes a series of important interventions. McCarthy rejects a critical tradition that has treated the children's companies as a marginal, at times even freakish, part of the theatrical landscape, and that has assumed that the impact of their performances was based only on novelty or the satiric disparity between actor and role. Instead, she makes a case for the centrality of children's company practices in the development of drama in the late sixteenth century, arguing that they were increasingly adopted by the adults. She questions the evidence on which our understanding of apprenticeship in the adult companies has been based and explores the techniques through which boy actors in the children's companies may have 'studied' their texts, contrasting the 'artisanal player … functioning within a culture of mixed levels of textual literacy' with the ' fully literate, text-centered performance practice' of 'the child player of schools and chapels' (22, original emphasis). Apprenticeship, in her view, involved 'training...