Abstract
Abstract: This essay explores the constitutive role of a set of key objects—portrait, puppet, and tree—in conceiving ideas of the boy actor's body in the plays of John Lyly. Drawing on materialist theory, the essay argues that across Campaspe, The Woman in the Moon, Endymion , and Love's Metamorphosis , these three objects provide a particularly generative point of reference for Lyly's explorations of the relationship between his authorial control, the body of the boy actor, and the material resources of his playhouse. As I read these three moments in which the child actor and prop interact to create an ambiguous, unfixed object-body, I think through how the potentially rebellious nature of Lyly's materialist stage might serve as a catalyst for his meditations on the particular conditions of his own early modern authorship and his acts of authorial creation more broadly.
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