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Squeaking Cleopatras: The Elizabethan Boy Player

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Joy Leslie Gibson's Squeaking Cleopatras: The Elizabethan Boy Player is a helpful source on the subject and does offer some interesting background and insights on the history of boy actors during the Elizabethan / Shakespearean age.

Gibson does a good job of establishing the background, how boys would enter into apprenticeships with acting companies where they would learn their skills, and how they were much needed to play the female roles in plays as women were forbidden from performing on stage in any capacity. Gibson also goes into the existence of companies of boy players where all of the actors were boys, and into the history of the two best known of these, the Children of St. Paul's and the Children of the Revels.

One of the best things Squeaking Cleopatras has to offer is some very useful information on costuming and on the sumptuary laws of the time where one's social class was clearly defined (and publicly proclaimed) by the clothes one wore, a factor that Gibson points out played an important role in the plays of the day. The appendix laying out the sumptuary laws in great detail is particularly helpful in showing just how stratified Elizabethan society was by social class and how one could immediately know where someone fit on the social ladder by the clothes they wore (or weren't allowed to wear).

The weakest section of the book is where Gibson goes into, rather lengthy, conjecture making the points of how boy players could play the female parts and how the female parts were written with the limitations of boy players in mind, with emphasis on breathing spaces in their lines. The first point seems odd as I was unaware of the question of boys being able to play the parts ever being in doubt, and while the second point does have some potential merit, Gibson spends far too much time on it.

Gibson does however make an important point regarding boy actors playing the female roles, that in Elizabethan times boys' voices broke much later than they do today:

"Contenders who maintain that boys could not have portrayed women's parts cite the age of the young actors, assuming they were around twelve or thirteen. But boys' voices broke later than now, when thirteen is the average. The archives of Durham Cathedral in the 1560's state that boys' voices were breaking at around fifteen to sixteen, while at Chichester the voices broke at sixteen. The oral tradition at Winchester and Norwich is 'much later than now', while at Canterbury Thomas Bull and Alexander Henley stayed eight years in the choir, from 1561 to 1569, which, if we assume an age of eight when they arrived, then they would have been around sixteen when their voices broke. In the late fifteenth century, boys of Edward IV's choir were sent to university at eighteen _if_ their voices had broken: 'And when any of these children come to xviii years of age, and their voices change he cannot be preferred in this chapel.'
--Gustave Leonhardt, co-director of Telefunken's Bach cantata cycle, blames today's earlier breaking of voices on a high-protein diet. So, therefore, he argues, in an age where less protein was eaten, boys' voices broke later. A sixteenth-century legal definition of a boy also indicates they matured later than their modern counterparts: a woman could not divorce her husband for impotence until he had reached the age of eighteen for it was not considered likely that he would, in the delicate Elizabethan phrase, have enough ink in his pen until that age. Boys' voices may have been high until then too. It is, therefore, reasonable to state that the average boy player would not embark upon minor women's roles until he was thirteen and would play leads from the age of fifteen until he was seventeen or eighteen."

I would also note one particularly valuable contribution this book makes. It does have some illustrations, mainly of woodcuts and paintings from the period, but there is one modern one worth the proverbial thousand words: a photo of Laurence Olivier at the age of fourteen, costumed and made up as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew:

"If further confirmation that adolescent boys could play these parts convincingly is required, we have evidence from early in the last century. Laurence Oliveier started his acting career with a talented amateur company belonging to All Saints' Church, Margaret Street, London, where he had previously been a choirboy. Olivier played Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew in a company remarkable for the fact that boys acted with men, Olivier's Petruchio being the talented Father Geoffrey Heald. The Shrew was given in London and as the Birthday performance at the old theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, just a month before Llivier's fifteenth birthday in 1922. Ellen Terry, who saw one of the London performances, commented that she had never seen Kate played better by a woman except Ada Rehan. Dame Sybil Thorndike, another member of the audience, said that Olivier was never overshadowed by his Petruchio, and that he was really 'wonderful, the best Shrew I ever saw - a bad-tempered little bitch...' The actor Laurence Naismith, also in the cast, agrees, saying: 'Larry was born to act. He had the presence. What I remember about his Kate was his complete naturalness... He was a very unattractive boy, lean and bony, with very skinny legs. And yet the moment he put on those dresses his image and bearing changed completely. He really became a young girl.' Plivier was an actor of genius, but what he did -- that is really become a young girl in his own mind and in the mind of his audience -- is something, I submit, the boy players in Shakespeare's day could and did accomplish."

While I would not say that this is the definitive work on the subject and that the conjectural sections are of limited value, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject as it does offer valuable insights and does serve as a good starting point for further reading on the subject.

Joy Leslie Gibson's handsome book is a strange mixture of useful fact and wishful guess work. Her early chapters are terrific - she summarises in an accesable and interesting way the work of early scholars and extends it by examining the sumptuary laws and dress standards of Elizabethan England.

I feel she is on less steady earth when applying her assertion that the breathing patterns of Shakespeare's major speeches for women were written with boy actors in mind. As a foundation she asks the reader to accept that all punctuation in the plays is unrepresentative of the authors intentions - including the 1623 First Folio (ignoring the fact that the two editors were actors who had worked with the author since 1593!) and then arbitairily replaces it with an assumption that the thought patterns of the speeches can be understood without them and breath points established. Essentially she removes one set of punctuation that does not fit her thesis and replaces it with one that does - of her own making.

She also makes some doubtful assertions about the women's roles always being shorter than their male counterparts, ignoring roles of such depth, range AND length as Juliet and Rosalind.

Some great material let down by some questionable use of information.