Child's play: Children and childhood on the early modern English stage

In this project, I examine early modern theatrical depictions of children within the context of understandings of children as commodities. I argue that authors employed associations of children with property in their attempts to explore and comprehend newly emerging market structures, and the social changes that occur as a result of changing economies. Through representations of children, early modern playwrights attempted to resolve concerns about economic issues such as the increasing use of credit, class mobility, unemployment, and vagrancy. My dissertation examines representations of children found in plays by John Lyly, William Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Marston, Francis Beaumont, Ben Jonson, and others. I locate my discussion of the plays in the context of sermons, treatises, and laws of the period as well as historical work on the material circumstances of early modern childhood. In the chapters of this dissertation, I begin by examining the rhetoric that links children and commodities then turn my attention to a number of institutions centered around and benefiting from children: the apprentice system, schools and universities, and the children's companies of the private theaters. All of the plays I discuss in this dissertation depended on the labor of child actors. Thus, issues about children that appeared in the plays were not only topical but reflected concerns relevant to the companies performing them. Anxieties about conceptions of children as commodities as well as the shifting economies of early modern England found their way into theatrical productions. Children depicted on stage were a fiction that could be manipulated and controlled, a strong contrast to the disconcerting reality of actual children in the period.