ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a summary of each of the manifestations of childhood in early modern drama and highlight some of the key questions raised by them. It summarizes some central issues, giving concise examples where possible, and point the reader towards critical material which explores these subjects in greater depth. Playwrights of the early modern era exploited the flexible nature of the child actor’s identity to foreground indeterminacy and metamorphosis in drama. Early modern drama reveals its children, at every turn, to be ambiguous figures in plays which revel in ‘having it both ways’: the child characters are both loved individuals and valuable dynastic objects. Children appear in Shakespeare’s plays fairly frequently, there has been a critical squeamishness about examining them seriously. The situation for the boys of the children’s acting companies was somewhat different. As the playing companies became all but nominally independent from the choirs, the status of the boy actors changed.
