Course Catalogue

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This course offers a timely reassessment of the practice of child acting in the early modern theatre. Exploring the output of companies such as the Children of the Chapel Royal alongside works by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton, it will question the repeated use of child and adolescent actors to portray female and sexually marginalised characters on stage; and situate the strategies attendant on boy playing in relation to embryonic queer art-forms such as drag and punning cant.

1x2hr seminar per week over 10 weeks as scheduled on MyCampus.

This is one of the Honours options in English Literature and may not run every year. The options that are running this session are available on MyCampus..

Successful completion of Junior Honours English Literature, and by arrangement to visiting students or students of other Honours programmes who qualify under the University's 25% regulation.

None.

None.

The standard assessments for this course are: 

■ Dramaturgical exercise (1500 words) - 25% 

■ Essay (2500 words) - 50%

■ Presentation (7 minutes) --15% 

■ Seminar contribution - 10% 

If required, for instance where a disability prevents a student from undertaking a specific method of assessment, the following alternatives are available: 

■ There are no alternatives to the Dramaturgical exercise, but flexible deadlines can be offered as reasonable adjustment (Students should follow the usual process for extensions). 

■ There are no alternatives to the Essay, but flexible deadlines can be offered as reasonable adjustment (Students should follow the usual process for extensions). 

■ Recorded presentation or one-to-one presentation / discussion/Q&A with staff (where presentation would normally be in class) as alternative to presentation.

■ Written self-evaluation reflecting on seminar contribution or written response to seminar material in advance or after seminar as alternative to seminar contribution.

Further reasonable adjustments may be provided where necessary. Students are encouraged to consult with the course convenor.  

This course aims to:

■ Study theatrical texts which employed boy players to create popular entertainment, and critically scrutinise the cultural function of plays featuring child and adolescent actors in a number of early modern contexts;

■ Engage with a range of early modern plays by canonical writers and less well-known playwrights;

■ Analyse the dramatic strategies associated with boy playing, particularly in relation to queer performance practices;

■ Explore the methodological overlaps between the disciplines of literary analysis and theatrical staging.

■ By the end of this course students will be able to: Understand and critically evaluate the contexts of boy playing and the stage-craft used to facilitate the performances of children and adolescents;

■ Critically engage with debates prompted by culture of boy playing;

■ Identify the aesthetic and dramaturgical techniques used by dramatists to represent female and sexually marginal characters designed to be played by children and adolescents on stage;

■ Critically assess overlaps between literary criticism and devised performance into critical practice when engaging with the effects generated by early modern dramatic texts;

■ Place the culture of boy playing in a recovered history of LGBT performance practices and contexts.

Communicate responses to the material studied on the course both orally and in written form through coherent and sustained argument