ABSTRACT
A curious anomaly on the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical scene was the existence of two apparently professional companies of boy players. Known now for little more than some acid remarks about them in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, they grew from the grammar schools and choir schools of the previous century, where an important part of the curriculum concerned rhetoric and public speaking, besides, for the choirboys, training their singing voices. The boys were invited to practise in public, at great houses and even at court. Though these were essentially academic exercises, they grew into full-scale productions of some of the more significant plays of the period: the Chapel Royal boys publicly presented Cornwall’s Troilus and Pandar in 1516, Rastell’s Love and Riches in 1527 and Edwards’s Damon and Pythias in 1564, and the St Paul’s boys had a similar record: they presented Heywood’s Play of the Weather around 1530, Redford’s Wit and Science ten years later and Patient Grissell in about 1560.
