Staging the children of early modern English drama.

摘要

By investigating the connections between theatrical practices and sociopolitical concerns regarding the young, my dissertation reveals the dramatic significance and cultural weight of early modern child figures whose placement and potential uses evoke topics of societal consequence. Chapter One establishes the necessity of approaching dramatic children as flexible constructions that may engage with a varied range of early modern ideas about childhood. Chapter Two investigates ways that early modern dramatic constructions of birth and infancy may have functioned to illuminate, trouble, or obscure topics such as legitimacy, inheritance, deformity, abandonment, and infanticide. Chapter Three deals primarily with the child figures in plays which present the young as unfortunate casualties of political expedience. Chapter Four, which explores the implications of age and patronage in the context of When You See Me, You Know Me's initial performance, also marks a shift in focus from noble children to children in service. Emphasizing vocal and physical characteristics attributable to age, Chapter Five questions the variables that shape discourses of childhood and youthful service across economic, erotic, and age boundaries while briefly examining several roles for singing pages. The dynamics of youthful service are further explored in Chapter Six's argument that dramatic tension over what will become of Falstaff's page in 2 Henry IV and Henry V would have been shaped largely by societal anxieties about youthful poverty and vagrancy in early modern England. Links between Falstaff's page in the histories and his counterpart Robin, whose presence in Merry Wives of Windsor is crucial in shaping the play's treatment of cuckoldry anxiety, establish a point of transition to Chapter Seven's view of Moth as a dramatic fulcrum in Love's Labour's Lost for balancing considerations of the relation between fictional children and real children. The multidisciplinary approach that I bring to bear on these children operates at the conjunctions of early modern theater history and cultural and performance studies to produce new perspectives on dramatic representations of children.