Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture, 1st ed. 2018

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.

Jennifer Higginbotham is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, USA. Her book, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence, was published in 2013. Her scholarly articles on early modern girlhood, drama, and women’s writing have appeared in the journals Modern Philology, Reformation, Literature Compass, and Sixteenth-Century Journal as well as the collections The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays (2014) and The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (2017).

Mark Albert Johnston is Associate Professor of English at the University of Windsor, CA. His book, Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value was published in 2011 and again in 2016. His essays have appeared in English Literary History, Studies in English Literature, English Literary Renaissance, and Modern Philology, and in the collections Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice: London 1550-1650 (Palgrave, 2010), and Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (2010). 

Brings together queer theory and childhood studies to illuminate our understanding of early modern drama and its various cultural contexts

Encourages new interactions with historical and political debates over the role and significance of children in queer history, and the place of queerness in children’s history

Insists on the centrality of queer theory to an understanding of early modern childhood