International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

The Beverley play was performed by masked actors, as usual... The play at Beverley

was apparently ‘in the round’, since the crowd, gathered together, the writer says,

by delight or curiosity or devotion...formed a ring... Some boys climbed into the

church tower to get a good view of the costume, actions and dialogue.

Axton 1974:162–163

Although firm documentation of medieval drama before the fifteenth century is sparse, it
is generally believed that a gradual process of secularisation took place in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, culminating in the great mystery play cycles such as those at
York, Wakefield and Chester, which were performed annually at the recently established
feast of Corpus Christi. The descendants of those enthusiastic boy theatre-goers at
Beverley would have seen these plays each year, and not a few would have taken part in
them.
Boys as performers rather than spectators, however, had the greatest role in
furthering children’s drama. It was the boy choristers of medieval England whose
Elizabethan successors provided the most curious and remarkable achievement of
professional child theatre. For the first decade of the seventeenth century the theatre of
Shakespeare’s London was augmented by two fashionable and gifted children’s
companies, the Children of Paul’s, who were the boy choristers of St Paul’s Cathedral,
and the Children of the Chapel Royal, the choristers of the monarch’s private chapel.
Major dramatists wrote major plays for these boys, who were mostly aged between 10
and 15; their playwrights included Ben Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and
Beaumont and Fletcher. So successful were they that they seriously undermined the
economic prosperity of the adult companies, including Shakespeare’s own. These boys
are the ‘little eyases’, whom Rosencrantz describes to Hamlet in a famous scene:

there is, Sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question,

and are most tyrannically clapped for’t. These are now the fashion, and so berattle

the common stages—so they call them—that many wearing rapiers are afraid of

goose quills and dare scarce come thither.

Hamlet Act 2 scene 2

Hamlet asks, ‘What, are they children? Who maintains ‘em?’, to which the answer is
that some brilliantly entrepreneurial choirmasters maintained ‘em, to no little profit. ‘Do
the boys carry it away?’ asks the Prince. ‘Ay, that they do, my lord’, says Rosencrantz,
and ay, that they did. But the gifts that made possible their unique achievement—their
appearance of knowing innocence, their musical ability, their grammar school training,
their powers of iconoclastic parody directed at the adult world—can all be traced back to
earlier manifestations of child drama in medieval and Tudor England. The two great
children’s companies were only the final achievement of a very long history of child
theatre, and its quality should not be underestimated. Not for nothing were choristers so
prominent in this phase of children’s performance theatre. Drama and music, brought
together at the outset in liturgical plays, formed an inseparable theatrical union which
depended on the boys’ contribution, especially at the Christmas festival. Something of
their place in ecclesiastical music drama is conveyed by E.K.Chambers’s account of the

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