Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicality fostered in boy performers across the early modern repertory shaped not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Harry R. McCarthy's ground-breaking approach to boy performance draws on detailed analysis of a wide range of plays, thorough interrogation of the cultural contexts in which they were written and performed, and present-day practice-based research, offering a critical reimagining of this important and unique facet of early modern theatrical culture.
Author(s): Harry R. McCarthy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 261
City: Cambridge
Copyright_page
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Textual Note
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 ‘All Feats of Activitie, and Motions’
2 Staging Skill
3 ‘The Bettering of the Body’
4 ‘Sport Indeede’
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
