of young people taking their first steps in show business. There are many popular
images of ‘making, performing and responding’ in modem children’s fiction.
There is also an informal theatre history. Through contemporary children’s books we
can track back children’s involvement in drama, as spectators but especially as
performers, across the centuries to the beginnings of modern theatre history. Frederick
Grice’s Aidan and the Strollers (1960) depicts a band of travelling actors in England in
1825, while another company of strolling players, this time in the eighteenth-century,
supplies the family background in Leon Garfield’s Devil-in-the-Fog (1966). The world of
eighteenth-century provincial theatres and of Drury Lane in Sheridan’s time is evoked
with documentary precision in Margaret Jowett’s Candidate for Fame (1955). In Lucy
Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (1954), the boy treble Alexander Oldknow sings
the part of Cupid in the masque Cupid and Death for Charles II in Restoration England.
Not surprisingly, the heady politics of Tudor England and the achievements of
Shakespeare’s theatre have proved most attractive of all for children’s writers, in such
books as Geoffrey Trease’s Cue for Treason (1940), Rosemary Sutcliff’s Brother Dusty-Feet
(1952), Margaret Jowett’s A Cry of Players (1961), and Antonia Forest’s The Player’s Boy
(1970). Surprisingly little has been made in stories of the children’s companies which
flourished in Tudor and early Stuart England, but a factual account appeared in Elfrida
Vipont’s A Child of the Chapel Royal (l967). Set even earlier in time, the mystery-play
cycles of medieval England provided the background for Dennis Hamley’s Pageants of
Despair (1974). And the very beginnings of Western drama are celebrated in the
Athenian dramatic contests and festivals of Geoffrey Trease’s The Crown of Violet (1952).
The child characters of these and many other stories are deeply involved in drama
centuries before a children’s dramatic literature came into being, and so were their
counterparts in life.
From the Beginnings to the Nineteenth CenturyThe beginnings of children’s drama, like the beginnings of modern European drama
itself, lie with the Roman Catholic Church. The dramatic content of Christian worship
became evident very early in church history: from the fourth century onwards the
central rite of Christian observance was the Mass, which is highly dramatic in
conception and form. As early as the tenth century there are European records of
solemn processions of children through the church in celebration of Holy Innocents’ Day
(28 December). Liturgical drama was a natural development in the Middle Ages from the
core observances of services and processions, and as it took shape so the drama moved
outside the church itself into the precincts and the churchyard, and eventually into the
neighbouring market places. E.K.Chambers, in The Medieval Stage (vol. 2, 1903), refers
to Palm Sunday processions, elaborations of the usual processions before Mass, going
round the churchyard carrying palms. ‘At the doors of the church’, he says, ‘the
procession was greeted by boys stationed upon the roof of the porch’ (5). Perhaps the
first recorded example in England of children’s participation, as audience, in a dramatic
event is a chronicle description of a ‘representation of the Lord’s resurrection’ in St John’s
Churchyard, Beverley, about 1220. Richard Axton, in European Drama of the Early
Middle Ages (1974), describes the event:
208 DRAMA