Peter Holland

How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?

Female roles on the pre-Restoration English stage were played not by women but by boys dressed as women. This well-known fact has occasioned much comment in recent years by critics interested in the gender implications of boys playing women who sometimes disguised themselves as boys. Many such critics have implicitly assumed that the ‘boys’ in question were pre-adolescent children, perhaps eight to twelve years old, whose ability to play the complex female roles of Shakespeare or Webster would be questionable. They have thus suggested that such roles must have been played by adult sharers, much as in modern all-male productions at Shakespeare’s Globe and elsewhere. From a psychosexual perspective, it makes an obvious difference whether Cleopatra was played by a ten-year-old child, a thirty-year-old man, or by a ‘boy’ of some intermediate age, such as seventeen. Such discussions have tended to be short on hard evidence, often relying on subjective notions of what would or would not have been plausible for an Elizabethan playing company. It is often assumed that little or no documentary evidence survives about these boys, and that we must rely mostly on guesswork and speculation. In fact, a substantial amount of documentary evidence does survive about pre-Restoration boy players, but much of it has remained buried in archives or scattered across various books and articles. When gathered and analysed, this evidence points to a consistent conclusion: until the early 1660s, female roles on the English stage (including the most demanding, complex parts) were played by adolescent boys, no younger than twelve and no older than twenty-one or twenty-two, with a median of around sixteen or seventeen.

Writing About Motive: Isabella, the Duke and Moral Authority

What more disruptive theatrical figure is it possible to conceive than a heroine with no interest in romance? In Measure for Measure Isabella’s refusal to be bartered and, perhaps more importantly, her absolute refusal to treat men as if they are the most important thing in the world, is so outrageously radical that every means available has been employed to deflect, reduce, neutralize or trivialize the threat she poses. When Penny Gay discerns, in Barry Kyle’s production, ‘the force majeure which declares that men’s experience is important and meaningful, women’s merely the product of hysteria and ignorance about the real world’, her observation is applicable far beyond this single example, and could be summing up the majority of interpretations of Isabella, both critical and performative. It has been argued that this quality is inherent in the text: ‘Isabella, for all her importance in the play, is defined theatrically by the men around her for the men in the audience.’ At some level this may be inevitable, given that Isabella is not a woman, but rather a fictitious construct from a male-dominated literary period. She exists, however, in some sublimely rich and eloquent exchanges of language that pose difficult ethical questions, and productions can choose to use these in a way that curtails her more challenging aspects or in a way that celebrates them.

Having Our Will: Imagination in Recent Shakespeare Biographies

‘The biographer begins, of course, with the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, where Mr. Shakspere was born and died, giving a lengthy, nostalgic description of Stratford in Shakespeare’s time, refulgent with the glow of small-town boyhood.’1 As Joseph Sobran sarcastically indicates, there is indeed something ‘almost comically formulaic’ about Shakespeare biographies. Of course, this is equally true of other biographies; what the Renaissance would call copia is perhaps inevitable in Shakespeare’s case, when there are so many books and so few facts. Since Sobran is an Oxfordian, he naturally makes a distinction between the ‘Shakspere’ of Stratford and the ‘Shakespeare’ who wrote the plays. He is right about this too: there is a gap between the biographical and the literary figure, though not, I think, because they were two different people. After two decades of writing about Shakespeare’s life, Sir Sidney Lee concluded that ‘The literary history of the world proves the hopelessness of seeking in biographical data, or in the fields of everyday business, the secret springs of poetic inspiration.’2 This view, famously insisted on by T. S. Eliot, was once taken for granted in literary criticism. It is now largely superseded, on the one hand, by cultural materialism, which wants to know all it can about those ‘fields of everyday business’, and, on the other, by the postmodern taste for indeterminacy, which has readmitted legendary and anecdotal evidence in order to play with alternative life stories. And so Stephen Greenblatt argues, in his recent contribution to the biographical tradition, ‘to understand how Shakespeare used his imagination to transform his life into art, it is important to use our own imagination’.3 Certainly, a depiction that appeals to the imagination may well stimulate a new reader of the plays and poems more than any amount of accurate documentation. It is becoming common for writers on Shakespeare to refer at some point to Shakespeare in Love, not because they believe its deliberately fantastic version of events but because it is the only one they can expect their readers to know. My own favourites among fictitional Shakespeares are the actor briefly sketched in one chapter of John Arden’s Books of Bale, the enigmatic figure, possibly a spy, in Peter Whelan’s play The School of Night, and the hard-working writer – whose notes for Twelfth Night we get to read – in Grace Tiffany’s My Father had a Daughter. The question is how much imagination a book can contain and still be taken seriously as a biography. To my mind, Gary O’Connor’s Shakespeare: A Popular Life (2000) falls on the wrong side of the borderline. Russell Fraser’s two-volume critical biography (1988 and 1992) allows itself a mixture of fictionalizing, or imagining, alongside detailed factual information and very full, sometimes frankly

The Return of Prospero’s Wife: Mother Figures in The Tempest’s Afterlife

Fresh as a rose in spring. And laid out in my coffin. He had built it himself, my husband. Yes, he did. Always had a gift for shaping things. Couldnt have been a more stylish coffin in the country. Handle bars in silver, and the lining of silk from end to end. Hed prepare my body himself; white veil and the lace nightgown in black. Wouldnt have any other shade but black. Transparent, so that I showed all through. God, how frightened I would be sometimes. The way he watched over me; watched over his corpse. After he had made me ready for burial, he would wait by his coffin, and watch over me. The only pleasure he would have of me. The Tempest has exerted a consistently strong influence on readers and audiences. Plays once well known and admired, such as King John and Henry VIII , are now seldom performed, whereas others, such as Titus Andronicus , were little appreciated until the twentieth century. But The Tempest s high status within the corpus has never seriously been questioned, and this prominence is reflected in the large body of creative works - novels, poems, plays and films - where its influence is strongly felt. If we trace the plays creative afterlife it soon becomes clear that critics recent preoccupation with issues of race, sexuality and gender have long been anticipated. In particular the plays two absent mothers - Sycorax and Prosperos wife - can be identified as surprisingly potent presences, not simply in recent novels such as Marina Warners Indigo and Gloria Naylors Mama Day , but in two of the very first creative responses to the play, Jonsons The New Inn and Fletchers The Sea Voyage .