Innehåller bibliografiska referenser och index

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 ; 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 ; The metamorphoses of Cupid: John Lyly's Love's metamorphosis and the return of the children's playing companies / Bastian Kuhl ; The further adventures of Ganymede / Stephen Orgel ; Chastity, speech and the girl masquer / Deanne Williams ; Milton and female perspiration / Douglas Trevor ; "Too 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

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