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= The Performance of Female Characters in Renaissance England =

In the English Renaissance, it was normal practice to cast boy players in the roles of female characters in public theatre.

One question has persisted: did boys play all female roles in English Renaissance theatre, or were some roles, the most demanding ones, played by adult males? Some literary critics and some ordinary readers have found it incredible that the most formidable and complex female roles created by Shakespeare and Webster could have been played by "children." The available evidence is incomplete and occasionally ambiguous; however, the overall implication is that even the largest roles were played by boys or young men, not mature adults. In a recent detailed survey of the evidence for the ages of boy actors and their roles, scholar David Kathman concludes that "No significant evidence supports the idea that such roles were played by adult sharers but a wealth of specific evidence demonstrates that they were played by adolescent boys no older than about twenty-one". There are only two possible examples of adult actors playing female roles. The first appears in the cast list for John Fletcher's The Wild Goose Chase, in which the veteran comedian John Shank is listed; the entry reads "Petella, their waiting-woman. Their Servant Mr. Shanck." However, Kathman argues that this refers to two roles, not one: Shank did not play Petella, but a comic servant who appears later in the play. The second example is the cast list for Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, in which Anthony Turner apparently played the tiny role of a kitchen maid. Kathman suspects this is merely a misprint, but concludes that even if Turner did play this role, there remains no evidence for adults playing leading roles.

Societal origins
Public theatre companies in Renaissance England circa 1600 sometimes recruited its boy players through illegal means: kidnapping kids on the streets, sometimes on the way to school, forcibly away from their families, if they did not legitimately recruit its boy actors via apprenticeship. According to a document dating May 9, 1644, An Ordinance of the Lordes and Commons Assembled in Parliament, for the Apprehending and Bringing to Condigne Punishment, All Such Lewd Persons as Shall Steale, Sell, Buy, Inveigle, Purloyne, Convey, or Receive Any Little Children, this practice was widespread. However, given the tone of the document, the Crown was more concerned with keeping its future workforce, e.g. those children abducted onto ships to go abroad, at home than it was with children taken into custody of theatre companies or parish church choirs and other domestic employment, so there is scant legal documentation from the time that addresses those taken from their families to work in England.

Even if children were recruited through apprenticeship rather than abduction, it wasn't until 1607/8 that they were seen as being legally "on par with other trades," but even then they couldn't become freeman of London once their time with the company ended. Apprenticed children were a "lucrative asset," treated more like commodities than human beings, to any theatre company then, "worth forty pounds each" then, valued "only marginally above other company properties such as costumes and play texts."

Though theatre companies made use of all its recruits, whether apprenticed or otherwise, in some form or another, those with a grammar school education were best suited to play female roles on the stage. Ovid's Heroides was taught at nearly all the grammar schools in London, so that the boys would learn oratory as well as "the ideal use and manipulation of the couplet in poetic form." Moreover, in the Heroides, the boys of the personal stories of the peripheral characters, who were mostly female, from other texts on the syllabus, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Through the Heroides, boys were taught to see female characters as "rhetoricians . . . capable of presenting a complex argument, and reasoning within a formal and socially acceptable classical framework." Ovid, particularly, is cited with having provided male writers the vocabulary, a "transgender ventriloquism," a term coined by scholar Lynn Enterline, with which they could portray the "dramatized concerns" of female characters. Through cogitation, boys were taught to "think deeply about a woman's motivation and contemplate their moral stance." Thus, the Heroides provided students destined to be boy players with an understanding of the feminine perspective on things once relegated to men in literature, e.g. "war, death, and desolation," that would help them later on in their careers.

English theatre companies vs. continental European theatre companies (in the use of actresses)
Since the country was geographically separated from the continent of Europe, boys played the female roles in English theatre troupes of the early modern period. In Italy, popular playing companies did not introduce actresses onto the professional stage until the 1560s. Thus, the Italians were the first to do so. These Italian and other continental companies visited England so infrequently, there is record of only one French company appearing with actresses outside of court in 1629. Scholar Michael Shapiro conjectures that since these visits were scant, no competition from the continent was so overt to force English companies to adopt actresses into their leagues.

Stephen Orgel argues that English theatre companies lagged behind the rest of Europe in allowing women (as actresses) on stage in because of a "generalized fear of female sexuality and tolerance for male homoeroticism." However, Shapiro disagrees, arguing that "for political, linguistic, and geographical reasons" Italian companies and their affections (such as actresses) did not influence England as it did the continent. Even the Puritans' antitheatrical tirades weren't as uniquely English a nuisance as they seem, since other European religious authorities were just as likely to object to women in theatre companies, he reasons.

However, laws, geographic location, and prevailing religious beliefs may not be the only reasons England so lagged in accepting actresses on the professional stage. Early modern English cultural norms towards gender seem to have also played a role. Prepubescent males were treated as neuter "children," who were not seen as being of the male identity until the public ritual of breeching. In this ritual, a male child, generally around age 7, discards the neutral skirts of childhood, and adopts the male-identifying qualifier of "boy," donning his breeches. Therefore, particularly in children's companies, the child actor, even if he is technically a boy now, is seen as a "gender-free canvas." So, the decision to cast a boy in a female role may not have been as gendered as it may seem, even in an adult company.

Notable players in female roles
Many boy actors filled female roles for a few years, then switched to male roles once they were around 17 to 21 years old. John Honyman, for example, started playing female roles for the King's Men at the age of 13, in 1626, in Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor. He played females for the next three years, through the King's Men's productions of Lodowick Carlell's The Deserving Favourite and Massinger's The Picture (both in 1629). Yet in 1630, at the age of 17, Honyman switched to male roles and never returned to female roles. Other boy players with the King's Men, John Thompson and Richard Sharpe, appear to have played women for a decade or more, to the point at which they must have been "young men" rather than "boys." Theophilus Bird played a woman when he was in his early 20s, but then he too switched to male roles.

Audience reactions
Audience members occasionally recorded positive impressions of the quality of the acting of boy players. When one Henry Jackson saw the King's Men perform Othello at Oxford in 1610, he wrote of the cast's Desdemona in his diary, "She [sic] always acted the matter very well, in her death moved us still more greatly; when lying in bed she implored the pity of those watching with her countenance alone." The mere fact that Jackson referred to the boy as "she," when he certainly knew better rationally, may in itself testify to the strength of the illusion. Yet not all audience members appreciated this illusion. The audience of another Oxford production, where the boy players of the troupe dressed in the female clothing of the day and sat among the women attending the performance before dancing onstage, disdained having been deceived even for a brief moment by this play.

The usage of the audience's "dual consciousness" of the fact that character onstage is in fact an actor has always been a matter left up to the playwright to decide, whether he wants to accentuate or minimize this knowledge and to what effect. This logic extends to boy actors playing female characters as well.

Women on stage
Despite popular misconception, women, those who were in fact biologically female, not just cross-dressing boy players, were actually involved in theatre in early Renaissance England, just not nearly as much public or even private theatre. However, prior to 1660, all-male playhouses were the exception, not the norm, "in a sea of mixed sex theatricals and entertainments." In one particular instance of female theatrical performance, on August 23, 1584, one Lupold von Wedel witnessed at the Bear Garden, a bear-baiting performance, which included (biologically female) women. Stagings such as these have not received as much critical attention as those by professional public theatre companies, so the inclusion of women in these seemingly less important theatricals has been missing from scholarship.

Women performers were never considered on par with their male counterparts, considered actors, as actresses in Renaissance England. Women were certainly included in theatricals more akin to professional theatre such as masques, however, female characters with speaking roles were relegated to boy players.

At the time, there was no concept of the English 'actress' as we know it today in playhouses. The notion of the foreign actress entering the English Renaissance stage, which has traditionally been considered to be made up of all-male and therefore all English performers, often vilified playgoers of the time.

= Notes =

= References =
 * Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
 * Shapiro, Michael. Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines & Female Pages. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1994.
 * Ackroyd, Julie. Child Actors on the London Stage, circa 1600: Their Education, Recruitment, and Theatrical Success. Eastbourne, Sussex Academic Press, 2017.
 * Shapiro, Michael. Children of the Revels. New York, Columbia University Press, 1938.
 * Comensoli, Viviana, and Anne Russell, eds. Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage. Champaigne, IL, University of Illinois Press, 1998.
 * Barker, Roberta. "The “Play-Boy,” the Female Performer, and the Art of Portraying a Lady." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 33, no. 1, 2015, p. 83-97. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/576465. Accessed 7 December 2019.
 * McManus, Clare. "Women and English Renaissance Drama: Making and Unmaking 'The All-Male Stage.'" Literature Compass 4/3, 2007.
 * Kathman, David. "How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?" in Shakespeare Survey 58, 2006.