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- [00:01]
A
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe. Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from historyhit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. So that Desdemona could plead her innocence or Cleopatra blaze across the stage in her burnished throne, teenage boys in Renaissance London were stepping into silk gowns to play them. In 16th century England, women did not perform professionally in the public theaters. Instead, female roles were taken by highly trained apprentices. Boy is bound to master actors in companies such as the King's Men, who learn their craft through rigorous rehearsal, vocal discipline, and close mentorship. Under figures like Richard Burbidge, they progressed from small parts to commanding tragic heroines, shaping some of the most powerful roles in Shakespearean drama. These boy actresses were not merely stopgaps. They were skilled professionals embedded in a sophisticated theatrical system. One standout was Richard Robinson, praised by contemporaries for his ability to embody aristocratic femininity both on stage and off. Yet their performances also provoked anxiety. Protestant moralists attacked cross dressing as immoral, while audiences marveled at the emotional force these young actors could summon. The boy actress became a lightning rod for debates about gender artistry and authority, debates that continue among scholars today. This episode was inspired by listener Phoebe Duran MacDonald from Maine in the United States, for whom our guest once served as a master's advisor. We're joined by Professor Roberta Barker of Dausie University to explore explore the remarkable world of Elizabethan boy actresses and to uncover how these apprentices helped define the golden age of English theatre. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from History hit. Professor Barcombe, welcome to the podcast.
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B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [03:08]
A
What a joy it is to get to talk to you about this most fun of subjects. I mean, we're using an interesting term, function as we go through this, aren't we, boy actress? So let's tackle that head on. What was a boy actress. And why did they exist in Elizabethan England? Why was there a culture or a law or a convention around women not being on the public stage?
- [03:33]
B
So the Elizabethans and Jacobeans would have called these actors playboys or simply boys. They were the apprentices of master actors, sharers in acting companies. They were in general aged between about 13 and 20 during their apprenticeships. And the term boy actress actually comes from the early 20th century, created by the director, actor, writer Harley Granville Barker in his prefaces to Shakespeare. And he used this term to try to evoke this, I think, oxymoron almost for later cultures of the idea of a young male identified actor creating female roles. They also played the roles of boys. They could sometimes play adult roles. But the boy actress, I think particularly is a term that describes this fascinating phenomenon of some of the most famous roles in the canon of English drama having been created by adolescent young men. You're right.
- [04:44]
A
And what's interesting there, actually, is that even boy is problematic, perhaps because, you know, by the age of 14, you've reached the age of consent, the age generally of adulthood in the 16th century world. And actually we're not talking about prepubescent boys, we're talking about pre bearded boys, I suppose, but actually young men.
- [05:05]
B
Yes, that's right. There's the famous line in Shakespeare, oh, let me not play a woman, I have a beard coming. Exactly right. I think the term boy actor or boy actress often evokes and people have the impression that these were little boys, that they were sort of 9, 10, they were boy sopranos, they were what we think of in, say, boy choirs, for instance, but they were very much young. Adolescent men, some we know of, were as old as 20, 21, while still playing women still. So definitely it looks different than perhaps our whole set of assumptions about what might be a convincing portrayal of a woman, if we imagine actors in our own time. And I think one of the really interesting questions is why was that an investment for early modern audiences, that they were clearly extremely invested in these actors. And as you asked, why were they not willing to watch women actors on the stage in a time when actually that was very common on the European continent? We had leading female identified actors in Spain, we had women actors in Italy. Very, very famous star women of the commedia dell', arte, like Isabella Andreini, and these names were known in England, People were very aware that there were women actors elsewhere. In fact, we have a wonderful source from an English writer from the early 17th century saying that he saw women acting In Sicily, women play women there and too naturally passionated, that they're too womanlike. And I think that the major. It was not a law. There was not a. There's nothing sort of on the books saying women can't appear on stage, but it was a cultural convention, I think, very focused on two things, one of them being ideas of morality around women, in the sense that for a woman to appear on the stage would be selling herself, selling her virtue, making a display of herself sexually. But the other was this business model of the master apprentice relationship, which structured so many ways of working, so many of the guilds, so many of the core processes of training in early modern culture, that it also shaped training on the stage.
- [07:21]
A
Yes. Now, I find that really fascinating because we're. I'm very familiar from some of the work I've done on French sources, but it applies also equally to other European places with this system of apprenticeship, the journeyman, the master, the career progression in artisanal trades, if you are a smith or a tailor, that sort of thing. It seems very interesting to me that we have the same thing going on in the theatre industry, the professionalization of these roles. So tell me about this apprenticeship system and how it shaped the training and careers of these young men, these boy actresses.
- [08:04]
B
It's a fascinating field of study and there's been so much discovery about this even in the last couple of decades. We know that they often were actually apprenticed within the guilds of. There was no guild for the actors. Many, many actors belonged to other guilds. So, for example, the grocer's guild, John Heming, one of Shakespeare's fellows in the King's Men, who took on a number of apprentices. We have documentation for some of those apprenticeships under the grocer's company. So they would come in officially as grocers and they were being trained to be grocers, which I love. And indeed we have the will of one of Hemings apprentices, Alexander Cook, which, among other things, asks Hemings, my master Hemings, for God's cause, to take this money that I'm leaving and take it to Grocer's hall and keep it there for the raising up of my poor orphans. So it's this sort of sense that they were very identified with the companies that their masters belonged to, but they would come into the. The acting companies. And we know from. There's a line in one of Ben Johnson's masks where a woman describes Master Burbage and old Master Hemmings going about and about with Me for my son sort of saying, oh, we want your boy. He, you know, he seems talented, he seems good looking. That they would bring young men into the company, whether from the community, whether sometimes from boys companies, children's companies, I think, where they were spotted sometimes from other companies, sometimes from choirs, and go through a training process with them, which seems to have been, from what we can tell, a very progressive. You can kind of see, I think, the markers of it in the. In early modern plays, where you'll usually, in most early modern plays, you'll have some really small women's roles, ladies in waiting, for example, who will just kind of come on and have a few lines. Often you'll also. You'll see a cluster of women's roles together, scenes with a number of women in the same scene, some with leading roles in sort of lots of lines and some with less. Like, for instance, Cleopatra and her ladies in Antony and Cleopatra. But you'll also see the women's roles paired with men's roles, often some major men's roles. So you can kind of see these moments where the masters actors are training the apprentices in a range of skills, whether that be elocution, you know, speaking from the stage, movement kind of queuing back and forth, building skills, tragedy, comedy, and even things like sword fighting. For example, in Beaumont and Fletcher's play the Maid's Tragedy, we actually have a scene where a female character dressed as a. As a boy, is dueling with the man that she loves and she's trying to get herself killed and. And she doesn't fight properly. And the male character actually comments on what she's doing and says, oh, you're. You're fighting Arai, you're missing, you know, etc. And it's almost as if you can hear the master actor coaching the boy. Okay, so this is what you're. You're going to do here. And of course, there you're developing a skill that's going to have to be major if you do go on from being an apprentice into being a member of the company, which is something that happened with a number of these boys.
- [11:18]
A
Well, that's one thing I wanted to ask about, actually, because, you know, it made me think of sort of boy sopranos and whether they could ever become great tenor or bass singers. You know, was it standard for these boys to progress from playing female roles to adult male roles within their companies, or did they fall away?
- [11:40]
B
It's a fascinating question and one that, wonderfully, we have all kinds of interesting evidence about that this was Very varied. In some cases, we see apprentices that are very identifiable in the company. For example, we have their apprenticeship papers or we can see them in certain cast lists, and then they totally disappear. And we can't always tell whether this is because they died, which of course happened quite frequently in plagues, etc. Or because they left to go into another profession or because they left for another company. And there's a very interesting example of a member of the King's Men, John Rice, who was a very successful boy actor with the King's Men, was actually featured in royal pageantry that we know about and paid for it. Who then, when he graduated from his apprenticeship, he almost immediately went over to another company, sort of a group of. Of younger men with an impresario, founded a new company. That company didn't succeed or didn't last very long. He came back to the King's Men. He was with the King's Men for a while. He does appear in the list of the actors in the Shakespeare First Folio. And then he went off and became the clerk of a parish in London, and so left behind the acting profession. All sorts of things happened to the boys, but I think in some ways, both for the company and for the apprentices, my guess is that the dream is that one of these apprentices will work out very well, and that you have somebody who then has an entire career with the company, who goes on, graduates from playing women's roles into playing smaller men's roles and then bigger men's roles, and perhaps has an entire full lifetime in a company. And we see definite examples of this, for example, in the King's Men, like the example of Richard Robinson, who starts, we think, as Richard Burbage's apprentice when he's about 13, and who dies in 1648 as still an active participant in that company, which by then the Civil War has started and the company is no longer able to perform. But when he's buried in 1648, he's described in the parish register of St. Anne's Blackfriars as Richard Robinson, a player. So that's his entire lifetime associated with that company.
- [14:03]
A
Yes, and I want to come back and talk a bit more about him in a little bit, actually. But tell me also something. Do we know much about the kind of social backgrounds of these young men? You know, where are they typically coming from? And how does this influence their theatrical roles?
- [14:23]
B
That's a really interesting question. So it seems that what we're speaking about, as much as we know about them, is that they are young men from pretty much the same background as if we think of the playwrights like Shakespeare and Marlowe and Webster, that they come from a sort of merchant class, artisanal craftsmen background. This, as far as we know. And they seem to be very much part of the same sort of milieu and processes as the young men who are being apprenticed to shoemakers or grocers or goldsmiths, etc. And I think what this means that's very important for their careers in acting is that they're generally, as far as we can tell, boys who would have had some grammar school education, who are able to read, who are literate, who have skills that they're kind of bringing into the company, who you're going to be able to Pass A Part 2 and say, take this, memorize it. You're going to be in big trouble if you don't have these lines memorized tomorrow. Know your cues. And indeed, who have probably come in with a certain amount of training of things such as engagement with classical depictions of women. And Carol Rutter, for example, has done some really interesting work on the ways in which we know that grammar school education engaged with things like the speeches of Ovid about classical heroines and would have boys memorizing these things. So that it's possible, for example, that these young actors came into the companies with certain ideas from their educations about, for example, these are the different kinds of women that one could play, for instance.
- [16:10]
A
So let's think about Richard Robinson, then, because he's such a prominent example of this. Tell me about him and how this sort of. How the kind of repertory training system shaped his career.
- [16:27]
B
So Robinson is somebody that we know about by name, which many of the boys, we know their names but not very much about them. But we know about him by name because he was remembered by many people, but especially by Ben Johnson, the playwright, who in his play the Devil Is an Ass, has an almost gratuitous speech. That play pays tribute to Robinson. It. It's a moment in the play when they're looking for a ma. A young man to pass himself off as a woman in order to get access to a very closeted wife. And the character engine says, oh, you know, get a player. For example, there's Dick Robinson, a very pretty fellow, and comes off into a gentleman's chamber of friends of mine. So he's remembered. And by this point when this play is written, he's in his 20s, but he's thought of still as being famous for his attractions as a woman. And we know that he appeared in plays by Middleton, by Shakespeare, by Webster, and by Johnson as a woman, for instance. And what I think we can sort of see over the period that's likely the period of his apprenticeship, he was almost certainly the apprentice of Richard Burbage. We, among other things, find him signing Burbage's will. He's one of the people who's present when burbage dies in 1619, and he then goes on to marry Burbage's widow, Winifred. So. So it seems as if he's very close to this family. And what we can see, I think, over time in the period that's likely to be the period of his apprenticeship, is a sequence of roles that if we plot our way from the roles that we know he likely played and look at this sequence of roles, we can see a strand of skills that kind of clusters around this role that seems to perhaps be telling us something about his possible skills. And one of these is being able to be very still. So we actually have a number of roles where someone is either lying dead on the stage for quite a long period of time, or to mention the great Shakespearean role that many of us think he probably originated, Hermione, in the Winter's Tale, who appears on stage as a statue for a long period of time. All of this stems from the fact that we know he played the role of the lady in a play by Middleton that's become known as the second Maiden's Tragedy, who sits on stage as a dead body for a long period of time. And this we know from a stage direction. What we can see there, I think, is a particular interesting skill that this young person had. Then if we sort of look at these roles clustered together, we also see the development of a whole lot of other skills, and he becomes very associated with a kind of noble, virtuous, but also strong and composed femininity. One of these roles describes the heroine that he's playing as having astonishing presence, which I think is a line you don't use if you're not describing an actor who actually has it. And I think what we can see in all of these roles, in terms of his training, is in many, many of them, these scenes with roles that we think Burbage, his master, played, where we can almost see the great tragic skills of Burbage, the most famous tragic actor of his age, you know, the creator of Hamlet, the creator of King Lear, being imparted to this. To this young actor, and a kind of back and forth between the two of them. Evolving a relationship on stage that I think lends itself to the development of this tragic, noble, aristocratic feminine Persona for this young man who probably came from the East End of London and from the merchant classes.
- [20:21]
A
Very interesting, isn't it? Do we have any evidence of how people like Richard Robinson lived outside the theatre? I'm sort of asking, is this a history of transsexuality?
- [20:36]
B
Fascinating question. So I think that for me, the key thing that's important to stress is that from everything we can tell, and we have very little evidence and we wish we had more. And I'm hoping, and I think many of us who work in this field are hoping that over time we'll find more and more. But these young people were as diverse and as complex in all kinds of ways, including gender and sexuality, as young people are today.
- [21:10]
A
Of course, yes.
- [21:11]
B
Although that they wouldn't have obviously spoken about gender and sexuality and other aspects of. Of identity in the same ways that we would have, or thought of as we do now, or thought of them in the same ways as we do now with Robinson. We have this fascinating speech from Johnson's play, Devil is an Ass, which describes him going to a dinner among, at what appears to be the Inns of Court among the lawyers of London, dressed as a lawyer's wife and passing as a woman in real life amongst cisgender women. And this is paid as a great tribute to him. This is how great he is as an actor. And I think this can be read in a whole lot of ways in the same way that we have some folks today who are very concerned about gender crossing. We had Protestant critics in that period who were saying, oh, no, people's these boys genders are going to be completely adulterated by appearing as women. And indeed we had some who said, and they'll also go out dressed as women in everyday life in order to seduce women. Like get in amongst women and seduce women, which is literally what happens in Devil is an Ass. So this may be the joke that actually Robinson is such a young man about town that he's using his skills in feminine impersonation to practice seduction. That's one possibility, but I think it's a very strong possibility as well that he's. He or they. Indeed we might, you know, we might think of. Of that fluid pronoun is somebody who lives quite comfortably for quite a long time across the gender spectrum. And indeed at around the period that Robinson graduates out of female roles into men's roles. And we don't know exactly when that happened in the company but there's this really interesting cluster of roles that are written right around this time that are the roles of young men who dress up as women, or indeed, in one case, who have been brought up as women and are more comfortable as women and don't want to have to be young men. So it almost looks in this period like there's a possibility that he's somebody who. It was a slow and complicated transition for him to go from playing women on the stage to playing men. And who knows, perhaps this is a marker that. That his own or their own gender identifications were more complex. We have some evidence of other young men who were, even during their apprenticeships, very, very sexually active, very clearly identified strongly as masculine and as strongly as very. As we would now say, heterosexual. We also have some fascinating evidence from texts like the Casebook of Simon Forman, the alchemist and astrologer. There's some of the boys, for example, another member of the King's Men, Nicholas Tooley, who seem to have gone through real health struggles in this period that could have been perceived as related to humoral issues that link into gender and gender struggles. So I think they had tremendous diversity in their lived experiences of gender, both on and off the stage.
- [24:47]
A
It must be almost impossible to get at their thoughts about their own identity. But perhaps there's more evidence about how early modern audiences perceived these boys performing female roles. These young men, were they seen more as women or were they seen as boys in disguise?
- [25:11]
B
Again, something that I love about this is the fact that we are not only able to glimpse at least little tiny pops of their diversity, but also the audience diversity comes across really clearly here, that the early modern audience was very diverse. And so we do have, for example, the Puritan, the radical Protestant critics, some of whom were extremely worried and extremely offended about this idea that, as one of them put it, for a boy to dress as a woman is to adulterate his own kind. That literally he was going to become something different, that the apparel, the dress associated with the gender is an important part of embodying being that gender. And to cross over clothing wise, is going to cause your actual being to change. But on the flip side, we have someone like the playwright Thomas Haywood in his Apology for actors of 1610, where he says, this is ridiculous. Nobody agrees with this. And he says, to see our youths on stage and attired in the habits of women, who knows not what their intents be, who cannot distinguish them by their names, assuredly knowing they are. But to represent such a lady at such a time Appointed. So he says, you know, come on, everybody knows. This is just. It's. We know Richard Robinson, he's playing a lady for this period of time, he's Hermione, and then he ceases to be Hermione and he goes back to being Dick Robinson, the apprentice of Richard Burbage, who. Stop worrying about it. Puritans. You guys are wing nuts. And I think that's the diversity there. And interestingly, the only person that we have surviving from the early modern period who said anything about the boys not being adequate. One of the things that I think is really important is that all of these early modern viewers that we know of seem to view the boys as very good. And we don't have people complaining, oh, who buys them as women? Indeed, we have someone like Henry Jackson, who sees Othello in Oxford in the early 17th century, describing the character of Desdemona and the actor who played her simply as using feminine versions of Latin words. So he says she always acted the part excellently, but at her death, even more so, she moved the audience to pity with her face alone. So he's describing the actor as she. He's forgetting, so to speak, the difference between the actor and the character, gender wise or the potential difference. The only person who doesn't do this is Lady Mary Roth in her Urania. She has two, not one, but two references to playboys, as she. As she tends to call them, basically using these references to criticize female characters in the Urania as phonies. So she'll say this woman was about as convincing as a playboy in a woman's role nobody could buy. You know, everyone knew it was phony what she was doing. So the only person that we have who finds them unconvincing, that has survived to us is, interestingly, a woman, and moreover, a woman who actually performed on stage in masks herself. So perhaps she has her own views of good performances of femininity.
- [28:33]
A
Well, that's so interesting because as you've made clear there at court, women could act or at least perform. And, you know, so there's a potential contrast, particularly for members of the nobility who might have seen both between women playing in court masks and these young men playing in the theater. And I wondered if it's possible to know how these various performers might have influenced each other's portrayals of femininity.
- [29:08]
B
I absolutely love this question. I think that it's such an underexplored area, the fact that these performers saw each other frequently. The playing companies, the professional playing companies, would be hired to come and appear in court masks doing the roles that had lines, while the women of the court, the aristocratic, the noble ladies of the court, and sometimes the queen, for instance, the case of Queen Anne of Denmark, for example, would be dancing and would be appearing in the roles of these glorious queens, for instance, or ideal feminine figures as dancers, unspeaking. So actually, the boys and the noble ladies took the stage at the same time and would have watched one another. And my guess, and again, we wish we had more evidence about this, we wish we had writing from both passages, is that there was observation going across in both ways and probably critique going across in both ways in the same way. We hear Lady Mary Roth in the Urania having her characters or her narrator being skeptical of performances of femininity that look a little bit phony and comparing them to the performances of the boys she's certainly seen. My guess is that we also had a degree of the professional players having critical remarks about the skills of ladies of the court on the stage. Could we have done that better? Should we try to do that like that? We know that, for example, costumes were used from the masks, that the. The players would take costumes from the masks as part of their payment in some cases and then put them on the stage. And I think it's very interesting to wonder whether they would also, for example, put dances on the stage, the public stage, that perhaps contained quotations from dances that they would have seen in royal masks and maybe even imitations of performances of noble ladies, the dancing that they would have seen done by noble ladies. When they rehearsed those dances, did they say, let's do it exactly like Princess Elizabeth did it, or did they say that was a bit sloppy? I think we could. We. We can do that better. We don't know. I. I wish we knew, but I think that certainly the idea that for. For both the noble ladies and the boys, something crucial is the idea that to do femininity well is a performance and is a skill, and it's something that one has to work very hard at. This is certainly true for noble ladies. We know how incredibly hard they worked to present an ideal femininity in a lot of situations. And I think that many of those same skills that they worked on were the skills that the boys would have worked on to try to present versions of femininity on the public stage.
- [31:55]
A
Gosh, it's so interesting. It's going to make me go away and consider how much I perform my own femininity.
- [32:01]
B
Yes, exactly.
- [32:04]
A
Can we think about criticisms we've Had Lady Mary Roth. But who else is criticizing and what are they saying? And to what extent are religious and cultural factors influencing the acceptance or otherwise of these players?
- [32:21]
B
Yes, I think from the evidence that we have, it is overwhelmingly in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Religious critics, and especially the more devout Protestants, especially the Calvinists, for example, who are critical of the presence. They're critical of actors in general. They're critical of the theater in general and the boys. The presence of young men wearing female dress on the stage is of particular concern to them. So, for example, in a play called the Overthrow of Stage plays in 1599, John Reynolds asks, quote, what sparkles of lust to that vice? The putting of women's attire on men may kindle in unclean affections. And there, when he speaks about that vice, he seems to be speaking of sodomy, a term that he uses to describe all kinds of sexual desire outside of marriage. So his concern seems to be especially that the boys are too sexy and that they're attractive to both men and women when they appear on stage in women's dress. So this kind of sense that I think almost the crossing of the gender spectrum is itself a sort of sexy act. And there is even some. There are even some jokes by people who aren't critical of the theater but saying, oh, well, you know actors, they actually forget they can't tell the difference anymore. They'll just pretty much flirt with anything. They'll mistake the boy for the woman and the woman for the boy. So this idea that a kind of crossing over of strict gender binaries and also strict sexual morality is what gets associated with the boys by their critics. And there's even a reference, again from a sympathetic observer to one of the children's companies as a nest of boys able to ravish a man. So this. This sense that they are, from the perspectives of at least some viewers, overwhelmingly attractive and that this is potentially morally dangerous in a range of ways is. Is I think, the major criticism that we get. Then again, on the flip side, it is Lady Mary Roth. She says, if you looked at that woman, it would be like looking at a playboy. You would know it was supposed to be a woman, but you wouldn't feel the attraction. So she actually, again, gives the opposite perspective where she says, nobody actually feels that.
- [35:14]
A
How do modern performances, and indeed modern scholarship deal with these things? How do you reinterpret and challenge some of the historical understandings of boy actresses? I mean, even the fact, as you said, the term itself is an early 20th century idea. How Are these things handled today? What are the sort of newest approaches?
- [35:35]
B
I think there's been such a range of work on early modern apprentice actors in the last 50 years even. It's always been a topic of fascination. For hundreds of years these figures have fascinated people. And for example, Oscar Wilde, you know, had a whole set of theories about Shakespeare's sexuality linked into ideas about, about boy actors, for instance. So it's been with us for a long time and I would say that we see it changing over time. So for example, there was a real period, especially in the sort of first half of the 20th century, where what you would often encounter with schol are saying, well, obviously Shakespeare would have preferred to write for women. Obviously these boys weren't really very good. How could we imagine, you know, a teenage boy playing Cleopatra? And in some cases we have scholars and also theater professionals who don't believe that some of these roles, the great roles, were really written for adolescent young men. And we'll say, although there must have been adult actors who played roles like Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra, we actually have no evidence that that's the case. But some modern viewers will simply find it very hard to imagine this theatrical culture and imagine how it could have worked. But on the other end of the scale, I think we have many scholars who are, who have been very interested in the whole question of gender and sexuality around the boys, around the apprentices. And for example, scholars like Stephen Orgel, for instance, in his book Impersonations, which had a lot of impact in the late 20th century, thinking about their links to cultures around sexuality and especially homoeroticism in early modern England and Europe more broadly. We have lines from, for example, Marlowe's Edward ii, a notably homoerotic play, in any case, talking about the sexiness of, of boys in women's dress on stage. So there is evidence for that, for that strand of culture. And I think we've had a lot of wonderful scholarship looking into questions of gender fluidity and questions of sexuality that may have been embodied by at least some of the boy actors. But I think one of the things that's been the most exciting recently, and I'm thinking here of the work of a wonderful emerging leader in the field. Harry McCarthy is work on the, what Evelyn Tribbles called the enskillment of the boys, the training of the boys, the idea that they are above all professionals and that they're part of a very rigorous, craft centered culture that, that we actually can really dig into even through the plays themselves, as well as through other manuals for example, relating to training, that we can think about how they gained their vocal skills, how they gained their physical skills, what these skills were, and think about them as examples of the professional lives of people in the early modern world, as well as examples of glimpses into cultures of gender and sexuality and other aspects of identity in the early modern period. So those are a few of the strands that I think are present, but they've really been windows into almost every aspect of early modern culture for contemporary scholars.
- [38:52]
A
And actually, I suppose it's very important, as with all our approaches to history, not to project contemporary ideas, in this case of gender and sexuality, uncritically onto the past, because otherwise you end up reshaping the past in your own image. And what we're trying to find out is about the otherness, the alienness of the past as much as anything else.
- [39:18]
B
I think that's right and I think that's been a huge challenge, that in a sense we often say, you know, two topics or three topics that are always very interesting to students when teaching about the early modern period witches, boy actors and the castrati of early modern opera. And that all of these are embodiments of questions that are still incredibly interesting to us around things like gender and sexuality. But also these are all figures who embody very, very different worlds and ideas about gender, sexuality, power, performance than our own ideas. And so I think often the boy actors of the early modern stage have been used in scholarship and also in performance. If we think about how they tend to appear in films like Shakespeare in Love, where, you know, the really good performance is going to be done by a woman, or in Upstart Crow, for example, where there's jokes made about this, that they appear in modern scholarship and performance, often as ways of enacting current ideas about performance and gender and sexuality. But I agree with you. I think that what is most fascinating about them is how they embody a whole way of thinking about performance, about good performance that is very much in and of its time, and also how we can, through them, learn about. And for me, this is one of the most moving and beautiful things that we can learn, for example, from their wills and other documents about the tight knit and very loving and also very complicated communities that grew up through masters and apprentices, through company structures, and that lasted through the whole lives of these people. The intimacies of the company, the training, the professional, but also the personal relationships of the company that again, are very specific to those moments in early modern London.
- [41:17]
A
Yes, that's so interesting. And I think it's very important to say that modern developments, contemporary questions and contemporary people and the questions they ask of the past are deeply important. And I think the new ways in which we live, the new kind of questions we're asking of ourselves and our identities are really relevant for approaching the past. You sort of have to hold this intention, the otherness of the past and the ways in which our own personal, subjective experience can make us ask new questions of the past. One thing I often say to up and coming people in history is the questions that you are going to be asking are unique to you. And that's what makes every, you know, there's potential for everybody here, there's space for everybody here, because each scholar comes with their own life experiences and the questions that they're asking in the past. One reason why it's so good that we're so honest these days about our subjectivity and our studies, because it allows us to ask those questions that weren't previously asked.
- [42:20]
B
Yes, completely. And I think, you know, just if I may, just to bring in one more piece of evidence from the early modern period here, I'm thinking of a little passage that I mentioned earlier, which is a passage from the casebook of Simon Forman about the visit to him of a 17 year old young man called Nicholas Tooley, which was the name of a member of Shakespeare's company in 1599, where he, he notes the humoral problems that this, this young man is having. He says he's, he's suffering from too much melancholy and cold phlegm, which are the humors that are very associated with femininity, the sort of colder, wetter, feminine body in this, in this period. And he talks, for example, about this young man being fearful and timorous, suffering from faintness arising up in his throat like he can't breathe. And for me, one of the things that's really interesting here is that I've shared this passage with, for example, a group of young LGBTQ actors in Halifax, where I live, and they responded to it in a very direct way. You know, people talking about experiences like panic, anxiety around performance, but also things like gender dysphoria and how there was a kind of identification across time with this young body and this young person going through, obviously, a physical and mental and emotional struggle at the time that he comes to see Forman. We can be, I think, pretty confident that the different ways that we would describe that experience are very, very different from how Nicholas Tooley or Simon Forman would have described that experience and what was causing it and what the problem was. And yet I think that moment for me, of identification across time with, for example, young actors who have gone through struggles today around questions of identity, identity, gender identification, presenting gender in public, sexuality, and indeed of just performing in everyday life, that moment of identification where they're like, I can feel that anxiety across time. I can feel that struggle across time. Time, I think, is an important moment of a sense of ancestry, a sense of a discussion going on across time between these young people who played such an incredibly important role in the making of theater history, and the young people who are coming back to these roles and these plays today and thinking what they might mean for us now.
- [44:56]
A
Finally, then, when did this practice of using young men to play women cease if it did? And how did the introduction of women on stage as we get into the Restoration, change theatrical practices?
- [45:14]
B
Fascinating question. So when the English theaters are closed in the 1640s, the straight line of masters and apprentices somewhat comes to an end. And I think that's part of it, that we have a kind of gap of well over a decade where that, that direct training that was happening pretty much on stage stops when the theaters start up again. With the restoration in the 1660s, we actually have some actors coming on the stage, Charles Hart being an example, who did have training relationships with the players in the 1640s, the last generation of early modern players. And indeed, in one important source from the Restoration, Hart is described as having been Robinson's boy. So we have this idea that there was sort of Burbage trained Robinson and Robinson trained Hart, and we have that straight line and we do have. We know of actors, Edward Kynaston being the most famous, who appeared male identified actors who appeared in female roles on the Restoration stage. But pretty rapidly we have the arrival of female identified actors, women players on the Restoration stage. The huge cause of this seems to have been influence from the continent, and especially Charles II himself's time on the continent, and engagement with European theatrical traditions, and indeed, rather notoriously, his interest in female identified performers. Very rapidly, this is the moment in the 1660s when we get for the first time people saying, often in actually prologues and other texts written to be said on the stage, well, who wants to see men as women? Nobody's going to find that convincing. Enter Giant in place of Desdemona. That doesn't look like Desdemona. And it's, I think, among other things, it's a moment in theatrical culture when the theater itself to market. This shift brings in the idea that the practice of having male identified actors appearing on stage in female identified roles is unconvincing and ridiculous. And it certainly changes theatrical culture in a range of ways. I think Restoration actresses, these absolutely remarkable women who transform the history of theatre in England, they experience tremendous sexualization. They are treated very overtly on a par with, with viewed as sex workers by a lot of audience members in a pretty direct way. And I would say that one of the things that's been important in scholarship into early actresses on the English stage and the comparison with the boys, is that it's certainly not the case that the first thing that happens is all of a sudden women's roles become much better, much bigger or much more complex rather. I think there's actually quite a negotiation around what it's going to look like to write women's roles for people who identify as women. And there's a long period of growth as those roles shift and change. But I think one of the things that is really interesting is that we see these women from very early on, the Restoration actresses taking on roles like Desdemona that were originally written for boys. So there is not a firm line between the two of them. Although male identified performers playing women becomes less and less of a mainstream practice in the theater in England, it never disappears. It remains very powerfully a part of, for instance, music hall culture, pantomime culture, and of course, drag culture. There's a vast compendium of different ways in which the legacy of the early modern stage and of the apprentice players remains a part of the theatrical tradition, and indeed in which there's a dialogue that goes on and on between performers of different gender identifications playing female roles. So I think there's both a shift and a real watershed there where we begin to get mockery of this practice and a kind of binarizing of gender on the stage that hadn't been there before. And also an ongoing dialogue and theatrical history that's still very much with us today.
- [49:43]
A
Well, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you, Professor Roberta Barker, for joining me and taking me through some of the really interesting, meaty questions that exist around this field of study. Thank you so much for your time.
- [50:00]
B
Thank you so much. Susanna,
- [50:04]
A
thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line. And not just the tutors but@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History. Hit.