Child’s Play: Boys’ Companies and Audience Enjoyment

Pieter Bruegel, Children's Games 1560

Our last post was all about complicating the reception of KBP as “anti-bourgeois” by seeking out affectionate, even celebratory, portrayals of community pride. This week’s mission is to sift the affective cues regarding the figure of the child. That is, your object is to recover the moods, feelings, and attitudes that the play evokes by putting the child onstage.

Boys' Company performance of Jonson’s Poetaster

Let’s take as our jumping-off point Osbourne’s claim that Nell (the Citizen's wife) regards Rafe as a child:

“Indeed, the most noticeable aspect of Nell’s behavior towards Rafe is that she treats him as a child and frequently associates him with her children.” (500)

There are a number of textual indications that Nell takes particular pleasure from the fact that the performance is really a spectacle of children at play (and to get an early modern sense of what such a spectacle could look like, see the Breughel painting). My question to you is, what is the nature of her enjoyment? How does Beaumont play up or even exploit the fact that children play his roles?

To help you to reach some conclusions, consider the following child performances:






In your post, please take up one episode from the play and discuss how it works in relation to the child’s body in performance. What sensibilities are being evoked? Cuteness? Cloyingness? Professionalism? Amateurism? Innocence? Knowingness? Take your cues from the text, then speculate to the best of your ability. Extra credit to those of you who acknowledge Lyly’s Gallatea too.