liturgical drama Officium Pastorum at Rouen in the Middle Ages: ‘After the Te Deum five
canons or vicars, representing the shepherds, approached the great west door of the
choir. A boy in similitudinem angeli perched in excelsio sang them the “good tidings”, and
a number of others in voltis ecclesiae took up the Gloria in excelsis’ (41).
Choristers in less pure and saintly guise prefigured the parodic gifts of the children’s
companies through the Boy Bishop ceremonies of the medieval church. For twenty-four
hours, starting at Vespers on Holy Innocents’ Eve (27 December) choir boys or
schoolboys replaced their elders and conducted all the services, except perhaps Mass.
On Childermass Day (28 December) the boy chosen by his fellows to be Bishop preached
a sermon, and after dinner he and his fellows processed through the streets, receiving
gifts and offerings. This widespread custom is recorded at York as early as 1221, and
continued in many parts of England until it was suppressed by Henry VIII after the
Reformation.
The third strand of dramatic experience which made up the pattern of early children’s
drama was the belief of Renaissance teachers in the educational advantages of acting.
Regular performances of Latin comedies by Terence and Plautus were part of the
curriculum in many sixteenth-century English grammar schools, and similar scholastic
productions took place across Europe, notably in the Jesuit colleges which were founded
from the middle of the century onwards. The hopes and aims of modern drama teaching
were anticipated by these Tudor schoolmasters: they included not only cultural
experience, and training in Latin, but the development of eloquence, poise, good
movement and general self-confidence. One schoolmaster, Nicholas Udall, wrote the first
true English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, for performance by his pupils at Eton
(probably between 1534 and 1541), and theatrical performances by choristers and
schoolboys were a regular feature of life at court. No doubt all this drama incurred much
righteous disapproval, and in the Induction to his play The Staple of News, Ben Jonson
puts into the mouth of his gossips the selfsame public indignation which is now directed
at progressive education and ‘misuse of taxpayers’ money’.
They make all their scholars playboys! Is’t not a fine sight to see all our children
made interluders? Do we pay our money for this? We send them to learn their
grammar and their Terence and they learn their playbooks!... I hope...we shall have
good painful ministers to keep school and catechise our youth and not teach them
to speak plays, and act fables of false news, in this manner, to the supervexation of
town and country, with a wannion [with a vengeance]!
Jonson 1631/1975:106–107Alas, it was not to last. The brief heyday of the great children’s companies was, as we have
seen, the climax of much diverse activity over several centuries, but with their closure,
shortly followed by the Puritan ascendancy, children’s drama became marginalised for
the next two hundred years.
Even so, from the late eighteenth century onwards it is possible to find distinguished
forerunners of modern children’s theatre and creative dramatics. A key figure in the
birth of modern children’s drama was Stephanie, Comtesse de Genlis, whose plays for
children under the title Théâtre a l’Usage des Jeunes Personnes were first published in
210 DRAMA