Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Performance and Pedagogy

Description

Deanne Williams offers the very first study of the medieval and early modern girl actor. Whereas previous histories of the actress begin with the Restoration, this book demonstrates that the girl is actually a well-documented category of performer and a key participant in the drama of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It explores evidence of the girl actor in archival records of payment, eyewitness accounts, stage directions, paintings, and in the plays and masques that were explicitly composed for girls, and, in some cases, by them. Contradicting previous scholarly assumptions about the early modern stage as male-dominated, this evidence reveals girls' participation in medieval religious drama, Tudor civic pageants and royal entries, Elizabethan country house entertainments, and Stuart court and household masques. This book situates its historical study of the girl actor within the wider contexts of 'girl culture', including girls as singers, translators and authors. By examining the impact of the girl actor on constructions of girlhood in the work of Shakespeare - whose girl characters register and evoke the power of the performing girl - Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance argues that girls' dramatic, musical and literary performances actively shaped medieval and early modern culture. It shows how the active presence and participation of girls shaped medieval and Renaissance culture, and it reveals how some of its best-known literary and dramatic texts address, represent, and reflect upon girl children, not as an imagined ideal, but as a lived reality.

Deanne Williams is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at York University, Canada. She is the author of The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2004), which won the Roland Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society, and Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (2014).

This brilliant and transformative study completely redefines the conventional accounts of medieval and early modern theatre by exploring the wide range of evidence (which has been almost completely ignored) for girls acting in plays, usually ones written specifically for them. From Germany and France to drama in the English court, schools, households and streets, Williams is a sure guide to a field of performance we had for so long managed to forget about. * Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA * Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is suffused with an affirmative spirit, revealing girlhood as a creative oasis in diverse medieval and early modern women's lives. With dazzling learning and linguistic dexterity, Williams illuminates dramatic writing and performance, religious devotion, visual art, song and book culture. The archival evidence she mobilizes establishes, irrefutably, "a whole new cultural tradition". * Sophie Tomlinson, University of Auckland, New Zealand * In a momentous departure from previous studies of both the advent of actress on the English stage as well as from critical work on women's writing, this pathbreaking book demonstrates that while female performers were indeed excluded from the public stage in Elizabeth and Jacobean England, girls rather than women nonetheless participated in a wide range of entertainments and enactments from the medieval to the early modern period. Girls of all ages were not just singers or bit-part players, but also writers and composers and were actively engaged in significant acts of performance and cultural production. Deanne Williams' startling insights into this girl culture are derived from a wealth of meticulous archival research and from acute critical assessment of both new and more familiar texts of the period. * Dympna C. Callaghan, Syracuse University, USA * By identifying "girl culture" as a richly multifaceted phenomenon and locating it at the heart of her study of pre-modern performance, Deanne Williams offers a transformative new perspective on both theatre history and the history of childhood. Transnational and multilingual in its scope, expansive in its chronological reach and methodologically capacious, this bold and ambitious book makes plain the remarkable and shaping role girls have played in the production of culture. * Kate Chedgzoy, Newcastle University, UK *