Boy Player - Children's Companies

Children's Companies

In the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, troupes appeared that were composed entirely of boy players. They are famously mentioned in Shakespeare's Hamlet, in which a group of travelling actors has left the city due to rivalry with a troupe of "little eyases" (II, ii,339); the term "eyas" means an unfledged hawk.

The children's companies grew out of the choirs of boy singers that had been connected with cathedrals and similar institutions since the Middle Ages. (Similar boy choirs exist to this day.) Thus the choir attached to St. Paul's Cathedral in London since the 12th century was in the 16th century molded into a company of child actors, the Children of Paul's. Similar groups of boy actors were connected with other institutions, including Eton, the Merchant Taylors School, and the ecclesiastical college at Windsor.

The boys were generally in the range of 8–12 years old (prepubescent boys are chosen as choirboys precisely because their voices have not yet "broken" with puberty). They were musically talented, strictly disciplined, educated in the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), and sometimes fluent in Latin; add in a certain "cuteness factor," and the boys amounted to formidable competition for the companies of adult actors in Elizabethan England. Between 1558 and 1576 (the year James Burbage built The Theatre in London and the age of popular Elizabethan drama began), companies of boy actors performed 46 times at Court, versus only 32 times for companies of adult actors in the same period. The playwright John Lyly earned fame when his "Euphuistic" plays were acted at Court by the Children of Paul's in the 1580s.

The practice of children acting was never free of controversy, however (see Responses, below). In 1590 theatrical performances by the Children of Paul's were suppressed, largely due to Lyly's involvement in the Marprelate controversy. Companies of child actors went out of fashion, and did not return for a decade.

In 1600, however, the practice saw a resurgence: the Children of the Chapel performed at the private Blackfriars Theatre for much of the first decade of the 17th century. Their performances of the plays of Ben Jonson were especially popular, inspiring Shakespeare's lines about how the boys "carry it away...Hercules and his load too" in Hamlet, II, ii,360-2. (The Globe Theatre was decorated with a statue of Hercules, the playhouse's symbol.) The Children of Paul's were also acting publicly once again at this time.

The children probably attained their greatest notoriety during the Poetomachia or War of the Theatres (1599–1601). Two troupes were intimately involved on the competing sides: the Children of Paul's acted John Marston's Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600) and What You Will (1601) and Thomas Dekker's Satiromastix (1601), while the Children of the Chapel had Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (1600) and The Poetaster (1601).

The boys' troupes were strongly associated with the satirical comedy of Jonson, Marston, and Thomas Middleton, which has sometimes been described as a coterie drama for gentleman "wits," in contrast to the popular drama of writers like Shakespeare and Thomas Heywood that was performed at the Globe and the other large public theatres. Yet the boys also played serious tragedies and contemporary histories, notably the works of George Chapman — Bussy D'Ambois, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, and the double play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron. Modern readers and theatergoers can only wonder what these productions were like.

The brand of coterie drama practiced by Jonson and others was often controversial, however; the official displeasure that greeted the play Eastward Ho, which landed two of its authors in jail, also fell upon the boys who performed it. By 1606 the Children of Paul's had ceased performing, and the Children of the Chapel were no longer associated with the Royal Chapel and had lost royal patronage; they became merely the Children of the Blackfriars. The boys' troupes had ceased public dramatic performance and the fashion died out by about 1615. The Lady Elizabeth's Men was a new company granted a patent on April 27, 1615, under the patronage of King James' daughter Princess Elizabeth; it was composed, to some significant degree, of veterans of the children's companies, now grown to manhood.

While controversial in their time, the children's companies had been effective in funnelling talented, educated, and experienced young actors into the adult companies. To recapture this influence, Richard Gunnell attempted to start a children's company with 14 boys and several adults when he built the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1629. The enterprise was not a success, because of a long closure of the theatres due to plague soon after its inception; but it did produce Stephen Hammerton, who went on to act with the King's Men, and became an early matinee idol among young women in the audience for his romantic leads.

A limited renewal of the practice of children's companies came in 1637, when Christopher Beeston established, under royal warrant, the King and Queen's Young Company, colloquially called Beeston's Boys. The intent was in part to have a structure for training young actors — much as the choirs of the previous century had provided educated and capable talent (though the actors in Beeston's company tended to be older than the boys of the earlier troupes). After the elder Beeston's death in 1638, his son William Beeston continued the company, with uneven success, till the theatres closed in 1642; he even managed to re-form Beeston's Boys for a time once the theatres re-opened in the Restoration.