Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture

Description

This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children. 1 Introduction: Queer(ing) Children and Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture.-2 Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature .-3 "I Had Peopled Else": Shakespeare's Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race 57 Urvashi Chakravarty.-4 Queer Time and "Sideways Growth" in The Roaring Girl 79 Melissa Welshans.-5 Playing the Early Modern Tomboy 99 Jennifer Higginbotham -- 6 Queer Apprenticeship in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.-Mark Albert Johnston.-7 Moth and the Pedagogical Ideal in Love's Labor's Lost M. Tyler Sasser.-8 The Queerness of Precocious Play in John Webster's, -The White Devil Bethany Packard.-9 "A Prince so Young as I": Agequeerness and Marlowe's Boy King 195 Rachel Prusko -- 10 Queering Gender, Age, and Status in Early Modern Children's Drama Lucy Munro.-11 The Future-Killing Queer and the Future-Negating Child: Camping It Up and Destabilizing Boundaries in Sam Mendes's Richard III (1992) Gemma Miller Afterword Kate Chedgzoy.-Index.