Abstract
This thesis explores how boy actors of the early modern commercial stage were professionally trained in the art of playing. Drawing on plays staged by a range of companies from the 1570s to the 1640s, I provide an extensive analysis of actor training, making three key interventions. First, I make a case for the development of acting as a trained profession during this period. Second, I move away from the previous understanding of actor training as a practice grounded in a close-knit dynamic between a boy and a single master, contending that the responsibility for a boy’s theatrical training was shared within and across playing companies as a collective. Third, I argue that the boy actor himself was an active, conscious participant in his own enskillment, focusing on his acquisition of a number of necessary skills, including fencing, dancing, and singing. Combining theatre history, childhood studies, cultural history and close textual analysis, I bring together plays, legal documents and educational treatises to argue for the existence of a consistent pedagogical practice in the development of cognitive and physical skills. I map these practices onto a theatrical landscape, drawing on plays performed by both all-boy and adult companies to illuminate the consistency and longevity of the methods used to facilitate the training of actors in this period.Through a comparison of the apprenticeship system and choir schools, Chapter One explores the networks used to facilitate the training and employment of boys in acting, tracking the gradual development of playing as a profession across a period of seventy years. Chapter Two contextualises child and female roles within this system, expanding on Evelyn Tribble’s suggestion that playwrights embedded plays with structures that supported actors. The remaining chapters map these in-text supports onto several physical skills, emphasising the individual and collaborative work underpinning actors’ enskillment. Chapter Three demonstrates that a boy’s ability to sing was developed gradually through active performance, a technique that presented him with opportunities for moments of virtuosic presentation.
Chapter Four explores the skills and education needed to perform a dance, focusing on the role of company dynamics in the process of nurturing and passing on a skill. Chapter Five focuses on swordplay, exploring the ways in which roles could facilitate learning and develop to accommodate a boy as his skills developed. The combined work of this thesis demonstrates that boy actors were trained using a specifically tailored apprenticeship system that developed over a fifty-year period and both nurtured a player’s skills through collaborative work and emphasised his role as an active participant in his enskillment.
| Date of Award | 1 Sept 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Lucy Munro (Supervisor) & Sarah Lewis (Supervisor) |