Cute Kids Sell Seats (and Ideas)

Having been onstage quite a bit as a young child, I can personally attest to the idea that audiences love seeing children perform.  It doesn't even matter if the children are good at performing or not.  There is something about a cute little kid prancing around onstage that causes audible, "awwwwww's" to be heard throughout a theatre.  Children have an ability to capture an audience's attention, unlike most adult actors.  Even when children make mistakes onstage and cause a ruckus, audiences think they are cute.  When adults make mistakes onstage, however, audiences don't know whether to laugh or hold their breath.  Clearly, children evoke different emotions in audiences than adults do.

What does this mean for the boys companies that would have performed KBP and Galatea?  Quite possibly, a cast of all boys could have helped the audiences of the time buy into the ideas of the plays.  Both plays are unconventional; Galatea presents rather radical ideas about gender and sexual expression, while KBP presents a play within a play that satirizes the way theatre was done at the time.  Both of these plays have the potential to turn off an audience, but perhaps the charming children who played the roes had the power to keep their audiences' attention long enough to get the playwrights' messages across.

In the case of Galatea, two boys playing girls who are dressed up as boys could have had an entire theatre roaring with laughter.  In KBP, the boys playing the citizen and his wife could have had the potential to start the play off in a riotously humorous way.  Imagine a young boy running through the audience, distracting the player onstage and yelling, "Hold your peace, goodman boy" (p56).  Such a scene could really catch an audience off guard.  The continued childish interruptions and the insertion of a boy dressed up like a knight with a burning pestle on his shield into the production could have added to the hilariousness of it all.  Perhaps Beaumont's purpose in having children do such ridiculous things onstage was to soften the audience so that he could get his point across.