Reluctant stars
Documentary-maker Archie Baron tells us why, in Tudor England, a career treading the boards could begin violently
Abducted: Elizabeth I’s Child Actors TV BBC Four Scheduled for the summer
On 13 December 1600, while walking to school, 13-year-old Thomas Clifton was kidnapped. Shocking as it may seem, this was hardly unusual in Elizabethan England, an era when the practice of impressment, forced recruitment into public service, was perfectly legal.
It was also an era when the definition of public service was broad enough to encompass the theatre, and when troupes of child actors were popular. Boys who were well educated were highly prized. “A remarkable aspect of this story is that all these children were highly literate,” says Archie Baron, executive producer of a documentary about Clifton presented by children’s writer and academic Katherine Rundell. “Clifton was a grammar-school boy – as would the others have been. There was no merit in kidnapping boy actors who couldn’t master long, complicated parts in sophisticated plays at short notice.”
We may never know how many children were taken in this way. Clifton’s case is unusual in that his well-connected father campaigned for his return, meaning there are legal documents. One of these lists a number of boys who were taken by Blackfriarsbased impresario Harry Evans.
“These names survive because they were swept up in an unusual court case investigating what was a commonplace practice,” says Baron. “Abducting child actors evolved out of the custom of impressing child choristers – we know of one earlier in the 16th century held in chains at Magdalen College, Oxford.”
Today, this seems barbaric, but what would those working in the theatre at the time have thought? “It’s usually true throughout history that things don’t seem outrageous until they’re called out by a later generation,” says Baron. “I imagine most people thought it normal. Shakespeare was an exception. His child actors, playing the female parts alongside adults playing the male parts, were formally apprenticed – and he took a swipe in Hamlet against the child actor companies stealing the limelight!”
The practice ended in the 17th century. “The child acting companies fell out of favour early in the reign of James VI & I,” says Baron. “He wasn’t amused [by child troupes], but this was because of the politics of the satires staged – not, as far as we know, because the children were exploited.”