The Early Boy Companies: Westminster, Merchant Taylors’, and Eton Schools; Windsor Chapel, the Chapel Royal Children, and the First Paul’s Chapel Children

Abstract

AbstractWhen the boy companies first started playing professionally for money in the 1570s, they had a long pedigree to support them. Choristers and boys from the grammar schools were used to staging plays as part of the educational tradition that exploited playing to improve speech and body language, the art of the orator manifest in ‘pronunciation and gesture’. Boys in the choir schools at St Paul’s, Westminster, and the Chapel Royal in Windsor were the main stage players, backed intermittently by the non-singing schools such as Paul’s and the Merchant Taylors’. These early groups, or rather their teachers and choirmasters, maintained with varying degrees of truth the claim that their play-acting was part of the educational curriculum. This chapter looks at the history of the early boy playing companies of London, their performances, the plays they performed, and the playhouses where they performed.