Freaks, Prodigies, and Marvellous Mimicry: Child Actors of Shakespeare on the Nineteenth-century Stage

Abstract

Two cultural icons of the nineteenth century—Shakespeare and childhood—came together on the nineteenth-century stage in performances of Shakespearean roles by children. The short-lived craze for Master Betty at the start of the century was succeeded by the convention of casting young girls to play boys in Shakespeare, and by the fashion for showcasing very young children in adult Shakespearean roles. The ways in which spectators responded to such performances were often both ambivalent and ambiguous: while there was clearly an erotic element for some, others found them ridiculous or improper, while critics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge questioned how far a child actor of Shakespeare was an epitome of Romantic idealizations of Nature, or fundamentally unnatural. In the case of the girls who played boys, such as Marie Wilton and Ellen Terry, their precociousness as highly trained professional actors may have invited a response in which idealization of pre-pubescent girlhood and physical awareness were equally at play. The Batemans’ performances, on the other hand, appear to have been received as a form of freak-show, which called into question how far they could be considered children at all. All these examples reveal a wide spectrum of responses to child actor's “mimicry” of both adulthood and childhood in Shakespearean contexts. The history of Shakespearean performance by children has much to reveal about the shifting and sometimes contradictory perceptions of childhood in the nineteenth century.