| Although largely ignored in critical discussions of early modern drama, the children's playing companies that performed from 1558 to 1613 contributed to the iconography of queenship, the evolving notion of individual dramatic authorship in the early modern period, and the subsequent decline of the "sharer" company model. Far from being an inconsequential fad, boy companies flourished throughout Elizabeth I's reign and fell into decline shortly after her death, in both cases, specifically because of her patronage. Indeed, while resisting the scope and scale of the courtier-enacted masque, Elizabeth promoted the children's companies' miniaturized court drama of Peele and Lyly to suggest an equation between the male courtier and the powerless child, symbolically subordinating the male subject to her maternal authority, a ploy that eventually incited a Jacobean reaction. Having become so thoroughly identified with the politics of queenship---and the self-promoting ambitions of their authors---the companies were the targets of a king's retaliatory attack when James I restored the grand, "masculine" masque as the preferred court entertainment and patronized adult companies instead. Boy companies were not only disposable pawns of monarchs gendering their authority, however; their master-child dynamics also encouraged authors to assume similar positions of mastery and authority over their puppet-like child actors, while the authors' books became controlling instruments that demanded rote recitations of the text. Such attitudes, articulated most clearly in Jonson's Poetaster and Cynthia's Revels, written during his tenure with the Children of the Chapel, also surface in the author-actor struggles depicted in plays written for the adult companies, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. By contrast, as one of the few authors in the period to write exclusively for the adult companies, where the author was often a partner or sharer and his book a somewhat malleable instrument in service of the actors' performance, Shakespeare resisted an aesthetics that promoted the erasure of the adult actor-sharer's role in the creation of plays. Indeed, his rejection of such author-centered aesthetics and of Elizabeth's infantilizing maternal rhetoric is increasingly evident in his metatheatrical court plays, Love's Labor's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and The Tempest. |
