Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England

Richard Preiss is the author of Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge, 2014) and editor of Shakespeare's The Tempest (2008). Deanne Williams is the author of Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (2014). Her first book, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), won the Roland Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

'Childhood, Education, and the Stage in Early Modern England, edited by Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams, was one of the best collections of essays I read this year, drawing on recent critical interest in children's literature, and in the cultural history of children more broadly, to write new chapters on the theatrical history of the period, to redirect attention to the place of education in early modern society, and in this way to illuminate the complex thematic place that children occupy in the dramatic imagination of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.' SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

• Part I. Shakespearean Childhoods: 1. Hamlet's boyhood Seth Lerer; 2. The traffic in children: shipwrecked Shakespeare, precarious Pericles Joseph Campana; 3. Incapable and shallow innocents: mourning Shakespeare's children in Richard III and The Winter's Tale Charlotte Scott; Part II. Beyond the Boy Actor: 4. Speaking like a child: staging children's speech in early modern drama Lucy Munro; 5. Shakespeare versus Blackfriars: satiric comedy, domestic tragedy, and the boy actor in Othello Bart Van Es; 6. Cupid's metamorphosis: John Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis and the return of the children's playing companies Bastian Kuhl; Part III. Girls and Boys: 7. The further adventures of Ganymede Stephen Orgel; 8. Chastity, speech, and the girl masquer Deanne Williams; 9. Milton and female perspiration Douglas Trevor; Part IV. Afterlives: 10. 'Too green/yet for lust, but not for love': Andrew Marvell and the invention of children's literature Blaine Greteman; 11. All Macbeth's sons James J. Marino; 12. Modern retrospectives: childhood and education in Tom Stoppard's Shakespearean plays Elizabeth Pentland.