Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England

ISBN-13: 9781107476059 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 308 str.

Richard Preiss (University of Utah); Toronto) Deanne Williams (York University

Opis

What did childhood mean in early modern England? To answer this question, this book examines two key contemporary institutions: the school and the stage. The rise of grammar schools and universities, and of the professional stage featuring boy actors, reflect the culture's massive investment in children. In this collection, an international group of well-respected scholars examines how the representation of children by major playwrights and poets reflected the period's educational and cultural values. This book contains chapters that range from Shakespeare and Ben Jonson to the contemporary plays of Tom Stoppard, and that explore childhood in relation to classical humanism, medicine, art, and psychology, revealing how early modern performance and educational practices produced attitudes to childhood that still resonate to this day.

Recenzje

'The essays in the volume are consistently excellent. Each is learned, meticulous, and original, making the volume as a whole a substantial contribution to scholarship, and individual essays offer valuable interventions in a range of fields including Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell studies, and the history of the theater. … scholars with many different preoccupations will find it repays their attention.' Elizabeth Hanson, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

Spis treści

Part I. Shakespearean Childhoods: 1. Hamlet's boyhood Seth Lerer; 2. The traffic in children: shipwrecked Shakespeare, precarious Pericles Joseph Campana; 3. Incapable and shallow innocents: mourning Shakespeare's children in Richard III and The Winter's Tale Charlotte Scott; Part II. Beyond the Boy Actor: 4. Speaking like a child: staging children's speech in early modern drama Lucy Munro; 5. Shakespeare versus Blackfriars: satiric comedy, domestic tragedy, and the boy actor in Othello Bart Van Es; 6. Cupid's metamorphosis: John Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis and the return of the children's playing companies Bastian Kuhl; Part III. Girls and Boys: 7. The further adventures of Ganymede Stephen Orgel; 8. Chastity, speech, and the girl masquer Deanne Williams; 9. Milton and female perspiration Douglas Trevor; Part IV. Afterlives: 10. 'Too green/yet for lust, but not for love': Andrew Marvell and the invention of children's literature Blaine Greteman; 11. All Macbeth's sons James J. Marino; 12. Modern retrospectives: childhood and education in Tom Stoppard's Shakespearean plays Elizabeth Pentland.