The Boy Companies 1599–1613

Bly, Mary

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697861.013.0009

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Theatrical companies featuring only boy actors introduced a new satirical, learned and selfconsciously theatrical style of play in the period 1599-1613 [22]. We include a variable for play type, referring to the category of theatrical company the play was first associated with, being boys' professional companies, adult professional companies, and a third, miscellaneous category of amateur companies and plays not associated with any company, plays written to be read and not performed.…”

Section: Other Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in the length of speeches in the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries: A mixed models approach

2023

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Since 2007 a number of investigators have compiled statistics on the length in words of speeches in plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on a change to shorter speeches around 1600. In this article we take account of several potentially confounding factors in the variation of speech lengths in these works and present a model of this variation in the period 1538–1642 through Linear Mixed Models. We confirm that the mode of speech lengths in English plays changed from nine words to four words around 1600, and that Shakespeare’s plays fit this wider pattern closely. We establish for the first time: that this change is independent of authorship, dramatic genre, theatrical company, and the proportion of verse in a play’s dialogue; that the chosen time span can be segmented into pre-1597 plays (with high modes), 1597–1602 plays (with mixed high and low modes), and post-1602 plays (with low modes); that some additional secondary modes are evident in speech lengths, at 16 and 24 words, suggesting that the length of a standard blank verse line (around 8 words) is an underlying unit in speech length; and that the general change to short speeches also holds true when the data is viewed through the perspective of the median and the mean. The change in speech lengths is part of a collective drift in the plays towards liveliness and verisimilitude and is evidence of a hitherto hidden constraint on the playwrights: whether or not they were aware of the fact, playwrights as a group were conforming to a structure for the distribution of speech lengths peculiar to the era they were writing in. The authors hope that the full modelling of this variation in the article will help bring this change to the attention of scholars of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

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Section: Other Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in the length of speeches in the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries: A mixed models approach

2023

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“…Previous research (see Bentley 1956, 363-66;Hoy 1961;Williams 1976) established Love's Cure as a play for a children's company rather than for adult players, as John Fletcher's playwrighting included many plays meant for children's companies -such as the Children of the Queen's Revels and the Children of Paul's -often written in collaboration with Francis Beaumont. The plays performed by these companies 6 heavily relied on metatheatre and often required the audience "to be impressed by the complex parts the boy actor c[ould] perform" (Crow 2014, 181); these included not only fantastical or supernatural creatures (e.g., nymphs or fairies), but also characters of different age and gender from that of the actors, all further layered and made more titillating by plots that often featured cross-dressing male and female characters and by an extensive use of sexual jokes and (homo)erotic material (see Zimmerman 2005;Bly 2009;Hyland 2011). The obvious artificiality of such performances involved the audiences in a metatheatrical play that constantly required a detached and critical attitude, more so than was the case for adult companies (Foakes 2003, 27).…”

Section: Fletcher's Production: Metatheatre Transgression Gender and ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most of his plays -either written solo or together with his collaborators, such as Beaumont, Massinger and Shakespeare -show metatheatrical features, such as: 6 Recent criticism has also highlighted that repertoires of individual companies varied according to various factors (e.g., performance space, age of the actors) as was the case for the adult companies. For an overview of relevant studies and findings, see Munro 2005;Bly 2009 Even tragicomedy, whose introduction to and popularity on the English stage has been attributed to Fletcher and his collaborators (see Foster 2016), is coherent with this metatheatrical preoccupation. The tragicomedy in Fletcher's production is often a test of the audience's expectations and puts under pressure the flexibility of the theatrical textum itself.…”

Section: Fletcher's Production: Metatheatre Transgression Gender and ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Particularly in comedy, despite the expected heteronormative conclusion, there is a conscious use of sexual innuendo targeting the androgynous or male body, which often relied on cross-dressing situations (Bly 2000). Fletcher's use of cross-dressing plots is undoubtedly extensive even in his production for the adult companies, "exploiting the dramatic potential of the cross-dressed male actor as a female impersonator" (Pérez Díez 2022, 1).…”

Section: Fletcher's Production: Metatheatre Transgression Gender and ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The topic is too broad to be discussed here. For an overview of the main studies on the matter, seeBly 2009; Crow 2014, 186, n. 12;Shapiro 2017. …”

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“All this is but forgery”. Gender and Performative Concerns in Fletcher and Massinger’s Love’s Cure (1615)

Bassan

2023

bsfm-lea

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The instability of the medical definition of human sex and gender in early modern times was such that “male” and “female” became a matter of performance rather than pure biology. This paper aims to show that the Jacobean play Love’s Cure (1615) exposes how not only gender, but also society and its codified behaviours (e.g., honour) are artificial, conventional constructions. The analysis of the text will rely on metatheatrical references and dynamics in the play, but also on early modern medical theories and cultural phenomena such as clothing and the carnivalesque-like exceptionality of theatre.

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The Malcontent and the Hamlet Aftermath

Cordner¹

2013

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Long before W. S. Gilbert's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1891), Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), or Lee Blessing's Fortinbras (1991), early modern playwrights wove their own variations on Shakespeare's masterpiece. Unlike their successors, however, they did not annex Hamlet's characters for appearances in revisionist narratives of their own. Instead, deploying different characters, they echoed aural and visual details from Shakespeare's script in ways which significantly inflected the experiences their own plays offered their audiences. This article focuses on one such play: John Marston's The Malcontent (c.1603), written for the Children of the Queen's Revels, and later performed by the King's Men, with Richard Burbage (Shakespeare's original Hamlet) in the lead role. In a departure from the cautious cataloguing of Hamlet's abundant presence in Marston's dialogue by the play's editors, this essay seeks to reposition The Malcontent as a play distinctively different in its central design from the conventional image of it: an image of a play first acted in a monochromatically parodic style of performance by the children's company, and later with less success by Shakespeare's adult troupe. Drawing on personal experiences of directing the play at the University of York in 2008, the essay blends rehearsal and performance experience with close textual analysis in order to draw attention to Marston's stylistic oscillations and his radical reinvention of revenge plotting, with a view to offering a revitalized impression of The Malcontent's distinctive energies in performance.

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The Boy Companies 1599–1613

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Changes in the length of speeches in the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries: A mixed models approach

Changes in the length of speeches in the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries: A mixed models approach

“All this is but forgery”. Gender and Performative Concerns in Fletcher and Massinger’s Love’s Cure (1615)

The Malcontent and the Hamlet Aftermath

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