Childhood, education and the stage in early modern England / edited by Richard Preiss, University of Utah ; Deanne Williams, York University.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Preiss, Richard, editor.

Williams, Deanne, editor.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation.

Shakespeare, William.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.

Criticism and interpretation.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Characters--Children.

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600--History and criticism.

English drama.

Children in literature.

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xii, 296 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction / by Deanne Williams

Shakespearean childhoods. Hamlet's boyhood / Seth Lerer

The traffic in children: shipwrecked Shakespeare, precarious Pericles / Joseph Campana

Incapable and shallow innocents: mourning Shakespeare's children in Richard III and The winter's tale / Charlotte Scott

Beyond the boy actor. Speaking like a child: staging children's speech in early modern drama / Lucy Munro

Shakespeare versus Blackfriars: satiric comedy, domestic tragedy, and the boy actor in Othello / Bart Van Es

Cupid's metamorphosis: John Lyly's Love's metamorphosis and the return of the children's playing companies / Bastian Kuhl

Girls and boys. The further adventures of Ganymede / Stephen Orgel

Chastity, speech, and the girl masquer / Deanne Williams

Milton and female perspiration / Douglas Trevor

Afterlives. "To green/ yet for lust, but not for love": Andrew Marvell and the invention of children's literature / Blaine Greteman

All Macbeth's sons / James J. Marino

Modern retrospectives: childhood and education in Tom Stoppard's Shakespearean plays / Elizabeth Pentland.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9781107094185

1107094186

OCLC:

963914668