Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England

Cambridge University Press, 5/2/2017
EAN 9781107094185, ISBN10: 1107094186

Hardcover, 308 pages, 23.5 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm
Language: English

What did childhood mean in early modern England? To answer this question, this book examines two key contemporary institutions: the school and the stage. The rise of grammar schools and universities, and of the professional stage featuring boy actors, reflect the culture's massive investment in children. In this collection, an international group of well-respected scholars examines how the representation of children by major playwrights and poets reflected the period's educational and cultural values. This book contains chapters that range from Shakespeare and Ben Jonson to the contemporary plays of Tom Stoppard, and that explore childhood in relation to classical humanism, medicine, art, and psychology, revealing how early modern performance and educational practices produced attitudes to childhood that still resonate to this day.

Part I. Shakespearean Childhoods
1. Hamlet's boyhood Seth Lerer
2. The traffic in children
shipwrecked Shakespeare, precarious Pericles Joseph Campana
3. Incapable and shallow innocents
mourning Shakespeare's children in Richard III and The Winter's Tale Charlotte Scott
Part II. Beyond the Boy Actor
4. Speaking like a child
staging children's speech in early modern drama Lucy Munro
5. Shakespeare versus Blackfriars
satiric comedy, domestic tragedy, and the boy actor in Othello Bart Van Es
6. Cupid's metamorphosis
John Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis and the return of the children's playing companies Bastian Kuhl
Part III. Girls and Boys
7. The further adventures of Ganymede Stephen Orgel
8. Chastity, speech, and the girl masquer Deanne Williams
9. Milton and female perspiration Douglas Trevor
Part IV. Afterlives
10. 'Too green/yet for lust, but not for love'
Andrew Marvell and the invention of children's literature Blaine Greteman
11. All Macbeth's sons James J. Marino
12. Modern retrospectives
childhood and education in Tom Stoppard's Shakespearean plays Elizabeth Pentland.