Exploiting Exploitation

Children on stage are inherently exploitative. Not necessarily exploiting the children, but the audience. Child actors are an easy way to please the audience because they take advantage of the instinctual responses of the audience to children. This potential for syrupy sentimental reactions is so strong that it is easily exploited for mockery.

Beaumont makes full use of the amusing nature of child actors for satiric purposes in KBP. Just as Lyly’s Phillida and Galatea address each other as ‘boy’ in order to acknowledges the acceptance of boy actors playing girls on stage and therefore undermine conventions of gendered love, in Galatea, Beaumont uses the Wife’s reactions to acknowledge the audience’s enjoyment of child actors and challenge clichés of popular theatre. This is most evident when Rafe, who (even in the world of the play) is a boy playing an adult role, begins his part of the play with a lengthy monologue. We can imagine a lilting, disinterested child’s voice delivering the lines: “There are no such courteous and fair well-spoken knights in this age. They will call one ‘the son of a whore’ that Palmerin of England would have called ‘fair sir’; and one that Rosicleer would have called ‘right beauteous damsel’, they will call ‘damned bitch’ (1.244-248). The sweetness of a child reading these crass lines is too much for an audience to resist.

Kids swearing is an easy laugh, but it’s too easy. Of course the audience will enjoy seeing that, just like they’ll naturally love a historic saga about a knight defeating giants or a comedy about an apprentice getting his master’s daughter. These are the ready-mades of the theatre and Beaumont clubs the audience over the head with them, hoping they’ll realize how easy it is to play to their tastes and manipulate them.