The boy actor: body, costume and disguise

Abstract

As already noted in this study, there were laws against women performing in the professional English theatre and so all female roles were performed by so called ‘boy actors’, usually adolescent males. The children's companies, which were entirely composed of boy actors and which enjoyed particular success in London theatres at the turn of the seventeenth century and which can be associated with a particular kind of theatre repertoire and acting style, are the subject of Case study L. Here I want to concentrate on the specific phenomenon of the boy actors in the adult companies, the ways in which genre might have inflected their performances, and the significance of costume in their successful performance of the ‘woman's part’. To do this, we will perform a close reading of one particularly significantly placed speech: Rosalind's Epilogue to the audience at the end of Shakespeare's As You Like It (1600). Disguise was, as we have seen, a recurring feature of boy actors’ roles in early modern comedy: these plays persistently drew attention in their plotlines to boys dressed as girls dressed as boys (and sometimes even then re-performing the female role as in Rosalind's case in the forest ‘seminars’ on romantic love with Orlando in As You Like It ). This was a tradition that can, as Chapter 4 evidenced, be traced back to the courtly drama of John Lyly, and strongly inflected Shakespeare's comic experiments as well as the development of later tragicomedy (see Chapter 7). Tragedy and the related genre of the history play demanded a rather different skill-set from boy actors in the female roles. Except for Cleopatra, who, prior to her carefully stage-managed death in Shakespeare's c . 1606–7 tragedy Antony and Cleopatra , imagines how some ‘squeaking Cleopatra will boy my greatness / I’th’ posture of a whore’ (5.2.216–17), the female protagonists of tragedy tend not to draw attention to the body of the boy actor beneath the stage costume in the same way. In this respect we can see how generic categories made different demands on a performer and on audience response.