| Partaking in a widespread cultural representation of children as wise, the English Renaissance theatre used child characters to articulate ideas about the very nature of knowing. Renaissance criticism carefully has considered the day-to-day life of child actors, and the phenomenon of male children playing the roles of women on stage. I turn critical attention to the significance of child characters as children, opposing a social historical trend to portray children in the period as culturally negligible. My work argues that the child was a crucial staging ground for the theatre to grapple with its culture's unstable perceptions about what, exactly, knowledge meant. |
