Boy Player - Boys in Adult Companies

Boys in Adult Companies

In playing companies of adult actors, boys were the performers of female roles, in an age when it was considered unacceptable for women to act. Female roles were performed by boys from the beginnings of professional English theatre (in the 1560s) to the closure of the theatres in 1642. Upon the restoration of theatre in 1660, boys were initially utilized, but women were permitted to act on the stage beginning in December 1661.

There was no law against women on stage: English Renaissance audiences seem to have simply considered it unthinkable, since no one ever argued in favor of it in the period. The social assumptions and biases involved were so strong as to go unquestioned at the time. Pre-pubescent boys were used because their high-pitched voices sound more like women.

Boy actors in adult companies apparently served as apprentices, in ways comparable to the practices of other guilds and trades of the age, though for shorter terms — perhaps two or three years instead of the usual seven. (The companies of adult actors were, in Elizabethan legal terms, retainers in noble households, and thus not subject to the legal statutes governing apprentices.) They performed female roles (and, of course, roles of male children if required) alongside adult male actors playing men. In reference to Shakespeare's company, variously the Lord Chamberlain's Men (1594–1603) or the King's Men (1603 and after): Augustine Phillips left bequests to an apprentice, James Sands, and a former apprentice, Samuel Gilburne, in his will, read after his death in 1605; company members William Ostler, John Underwood, Nathan Field, and John Rice had all started their acting careers as Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars Theatre.

One question has persisted: did boys play all female roles in English Renaissance theatre, or were some roles, the most demanding ones, played by adult males? Some literary critics and some ordinary readers have found it incredible that the most formidable and complex female roles created by Shakespeare and Webster could have been played by "children." The available evidence is incomplete and occasionally ambiguous; however, the overall implication is that even the largest roles were played by boys or young men, not mature adults. In a recent detailed survey of the evidence for the ages of boy actors and their roles, scholar David Kathman concludes that "No significant evidence supports the idea that such roles were played by adult sharers but a wealth of specific evidence demonstrates that they were played by adolescent boys no older than about twenty-one". There are only two possible examples of adult actors playing female roles. The first appears in the cast list for John Fletcher's The Wild Goose Chase, in which the veteran comedian John Shank is listed; the entry reads "Petella, their waiting-woman. Their Servant Mr. Shanck." However, Kathman argues that this refers to two roles, not one: Shank did not play Petella, but a comic servant who appears later in the play. The second example is the cast list for Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, in which Anthony Turner apparently played the tiny role of a kitchen maid. Kathman suspects this is merely a misprint, but concludes that even if Turner did play this role, there remains no evidence for adults playing leading roles.

Many boy actors filled female roles for a few years, then switched to male roles. An example: John Honyman started playing female roles for the King's Men at the age of 13, in 1626, in Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor. He played females for the next three years, through the King's Men's productions of Lodowick Carlell's The Deserving Favourite and Massinger's The Picture (both in 1629). Yet in 1630, at the age of 17, Honyman switched to male roles and never returned to female roles. Other boy players with the King's Men, John Thompson and Richard Sharpe, appear to have played women for a decade or more, to the point at which they must have been "young men" rather than "boys." Theophilus Bird played a woman when he was in his early 20s; but then he too switched to male roles.

Audience members occasionally recorded positive impressions of the quality of the acting of boy players. When one Henry Jackson saw the King's Men perform Othello at Oxford in 1610, he wrote of the cast's Desdemona in his diary, "She always acted the matter very well, in her death moved us still more greatly; when lying in bed she implored the pity of those watching with her countenance alone." The mere fact that Jackson referred to the boy as "she," when he certainly knew better rationally, may in itself testify to the strength of the illusion.