ABSTRACT
The past 20 years have witnessed a boom in early modern studies of gender and performance. Scholars have written extensively on boy-actors, male players, and adult actresses, and in doing so have transformed how we think about the production of gendered identities, and especially the transition from boyhood to manhood, in the period.1 The girl, however, has remained an outlier to these studies and, as a result, comparably innovative theories of how girls-and specifically early modern girlhood-were imagined have not emerged. This critical lacuna exists for a few reasons: women did not appear on the English public stage until the Restoration; and the performing girl is difficult to find given the privileged attention by scholars of theater history to professional staged productions. While some excellent collections recently have exploded the narrow definitions of theatrical space and performance this traditional scholarship has underwritten, the early modern girl still remains an elusive subject, making only brief appearances in studies of the Jacobean and Stuart court masques.2
