ABSTRACT
Actors in seventeenth-century France were not (save in a possible early instance) apprenticed, the normal means by which a craft was learned. A parent might place a likely boy as apprentice to a maître joueur d’instruments, and an adult might engage the same musician to teach him the violin, or act as his maître de danse. No Parisian bourgeois would seek to train a child in a profession which was socially dubious, and proscribed by the church. On the other hand, seventeenth-century education in general favoured accomplishments that might be developed and refined for the theatre, the very least of which was the ability to read.
