The Clifton Star Chamber Case and Kidnapped Child Actors

In Early Modern England, there was a rash of abductions of boys, who were being forced to work as actors. Then a child was taken whose father was in a position to actually do something about it. 

Research:

• Soth, Amelia. “Her Majesty’s Kidnappers.” JSTOR Daily. 12/17/2020. https://daily.jstor.org/kidnapping-for-the-queens-choir/
• Early Modern London Theaters. “Viewing Event Record: Star Chamber, Clifton v Robinson et al: Clifton States His Case.” https://emlot.library.utoronto.ca/db/record/event/93/
• Reynolds, Patricia. “Kidnapped to order: child actors in Shakespeare’s day.” The National Archives. 5/12/2016. https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/kidnapped-order-child-actors-shakespeares-day/
• Map of Early London. “Blackfriars Theatre.” https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLAC6.htm
• Shapiro, Michael. “Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and Their Plays.” New York: Columbia University Press. 1977.
• Fleay, Frederick Gard. “A Chronicle History of the London Stage 1559-1642.” New York. G.E. Stechert & Co. 1909.
• Benet, William Rose. "Blackfriars." Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., Harper & Row, 1987, p. 103. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A18034327/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=fefb4932. Accessed 21 June 2023.
• Munro, Lucy. "Living by Others' Pleasure: Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, and Theatrical Profit." Early Theatre, vol. 23, no. 1, June 2020, pp. 109+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A638900245/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=ce5c9645. Accessed 21 June 2023.
• Dutton, Richard. “The Revels Office and the Boy Companies, 1600-1613: New Perspectives.” English Literary Renaissance , SPRING 2002, Vol. 32, No. 2. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43447637
• Wridgway, Neville. "Giles, Nathaniel (c. 1558–1634), choirmaster and composer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Date of access 22 Jun. 2023, https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-10724  
• Barrie, Robert. “Elizabethan Play-Boys in the Adult London Companies.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Spring, 2008, Vol. 48, No. 2. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40071333
• Mamujee, Shehzana. “'To serve us in that behalf when our pleasure is to call for them': performing boys in Renaissance England.” Renaissance Studies , NOVEMBER 2014, Vol. 28, No. 5. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24423452
• Jones, Roger T. “The Role of the Junior English Schools in the Development of the Drama.” A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Loyola University September, 1944.
• Bradbrook, M.C. “’Silk? Satin? Kersey? Rags?’ The Choristers' Theater under Elizabeth and James.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Spring, 1961. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/449339

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I was poking around J
Store Daily a while back, and while I was there,

(00:22):
I found this article called Her Majesty's Kidnappers. And this
article was about a couple of men who abducted boys
and forced them to work as actors in early modern England.
And I was like, well, I definitely have to find
out more about that. So I did, and here is
the episode that resulted. As it turned out, pressing boys

(00:46):
into service as performers really wasn't new, and it wasn't
isolated to these people that this article was about. What
led to legal action in this particular case was that
these guys abducted a kid who's his father was in
a position to actually do something about it. I did
want to note England is obviously not the only place

(01:08):
where children have been made to work as performers under
conditions that could be questionable at best. A lot of
the time. We're really not going to be talking about
or even touching on other historical examples or like all
the legal and ethical issues that surround child performers in
today's world. Like, those are all separate stories from that one,

(01:30):
with their own historical and social context. I'm sort of
imagining people listening to this and thinking, like, why aren't
they talking about Yes, but what about that one thing? Yeah?
And that like, because those are whole other things. Yeah.
The court case that we're talking about today was not
directly connected to William Shakespeare, but it did happen during
his lifetime while he was working as an actor and

(01:53):
a playwright. So as folks probably know, and we actually
alluded to it briefly during our vander Barbett episode. Women
were not allowed to perform on stage at this point
in British history, so in the plays of Shakespeare and
his contemporaries, the roles of women and girls were played
by young men and boys. But boys did not just
play female roles in productions that otherwise had a cast

(02:14):
of adult men. There were also entire troops of boys
who worked as performers, stretching back to before there were
established public theaters in England. The earliest British accounts of
boys as actors were actually in the role of female characters,
but these were not in Shakespearean comedies or tragedies. They

(02:36):
were in liturgical productions that were staged by churches and cathedrals,
and these might be performed at the church or on
church grounds, or in some other public space. There were
also churches and religious groups that put on touring productions
that sort of traveled among nearby towns, doing miracle plays
and mystery plays. In other words, they were depictions of

(03:00):
the lives of particular saints or stories from the Christian Bible.
Mentions of boys playing the roles of women in these
kinds of productions go back at least to the twelfth century.
Not long after that, boys choirs were established to perform
religious music at services. Boys had been included in choirs
before this point, but choirs only made up of boys

(03:23):
whose voices had not yet changed due to puberty came
a little bit later. The other place that boys were
pretty likely to perform during this era was school. Performance
was seen as a way for boys to practice their
poise and their diction and to learn to develop things
like public speaking skills. So school performances were usually of

(03:45):
religious or didactic works, or maybe classical pieces from Latin
or Greek literature. Sometimes schools did put on public performances,
but usually this was pretty controlled, so the audience was
limited to the student's family, as are other members of
the community, and it was really tightly supervised by the teachers.
While she was still a princess, the future Queen Elizabeth

(04:08):
the First often liked to visit schools and particularly enjoyed
being honored with a performance while she was there. Eventually,
boys performing troops were being invited to perform at court.
The first written reference to one of these court performances
dates back to fourteen eighty five. Boys performing companies became

(04:29):
an established part of court entertainment in Tudor England, especially
around the holidays, Saints feast Days and other celebrations. In
fifteen oh nine, King Henry the Eighth appointed William Cornish
as Master of the Chapel Royal, and underneath Cornish's direction,
the use of boys's actors and singers and other entertainers

(04:49):
at court increased dramatically. Queen Elizabeth was also a fan
of these companies, both before and after she ascended to
the throne. So in Tutor England, whoever was in charge
of court entertainment, or whoever was specifically in charge of
child entertainers, they often had the right to press people

(05:10):
into service. We more often talk about impressment in the
context of something like being forced to serve in the
Royal Navy, but anybody whose labor was seen as valuable
could be impressed, so that included artisans, skilled crafts people,
and performers, including child performers. Since the choirs were made

(05:33):
up of boys whose voices hadn't changed due to puberty,
these children were usually between the ages of about six
and fourteen. If there are any first person accounts from
any of these children about what life was like in
these troops, whether they were impressed, or whether they were
performing of their own free will, Tracy didn't find any
of them. We don't know that any exists, but it's

(05:54):
likely that the conditions that they were working in often
were not good. We do have first accounts from people
who encountered various children's troops who described those children as hungry, sick,
and exhausted after traveling to their performance. It is also
very likely that many of them were subjected to physical
or sexual abuse. In the early mid sixteenth century, these

(06:17):
troops started to evolve, and the material that they were
performing evolved as well. Rather than performing almost exclusively religious
or didactic work, or maybe classical literature and doing that
at a church or a school or at court, troops
started performing more comedic work for the public, including satirical

(06:39):
songs and sketches and plays. Some of those grew out
of the Protestant Reformation. Since Catholic dramas and Catholic religious
music were no longer permitted, performers had to find new material.
This wasn't entirely new. The earliest known English language secular
plays date back to about thirteen hundred, but more our

(07:00):
playwrights started writing these kinds of plays, and more people
started watching them. These troops also weren't performing at the
large purpose built theaters that might come to mind in
the context of Elizabethan or Shakespearean theater. So those three
story round structures that were open in the center, none
of those had been built yet when these troops started

(07:21):
performing publicly. The first of those, the Red Lion, was
erected in fifteen sixty seven, and James Burbage built England's
first permanent theater, which was just called the Theater, in
fifteen seventy six. So instead these boys troops were talking about,
were in much smaller, enclosed, repurposed spaces. Also, especially as

(07:43):
people moved away from staging plays that were explicitly religious
or didactic, performing in public was seen as really suspect.
There were plenty of small troops of entertainers of adults
who traveled around England putting on some kind of a show,
but they were often regarded as vagrants or criminals. It's
possible that the adults who were in charge of these

(08:05):
troops of children thought that their age would offer them
some protection from criticism or suspicion, and that really may
have been true, but that didn't necessarily apply to the
playwrights who were writing for children's troops. Some of these
playwrights were censured or even imprisoned over material that they
wrote that was then performed by children. One way the

(08:29):
people who managed these boys companies tried to get around
this kind of suspicion was to frame their performances as rehearsals. So,
after all, if you were going to perform before the monarch,
of course you had to practice. What was the harm
in selling a few tickets so that people could watch
the boys rehearse, and so the boys could get used
to having an audience. It's possible that this really did

(08:52):
start out with selling tickets to watch rehearsals, but soon
fully commercial professional troops of children were regularly performing for
a paying audience, just with their managers still describing it
as a rehearsal. In fifteen seventy two, the City Council
of London banned public performances due to an outbreak of plague,

(09:14):
and plays were banned altogether. Three years later. These boys
companies continued, though thanks in part to that claim that
they were just rehearsing ahead of their appearances at court,
but the boy's companies started to be dismantled as well.
After Richard Farrant, who was Master of the Children at
Winsor Chapel, rented a space in Blackfriars that he said

(09:38):
was going to be used for teaching and rehearsing, but
he really turned it into a working public theater. After
a lot of legal wrangling, in fifteen eighty four, Farrans
landlord Sir William Moore evicted him and the company. By
fifteen ninety most of the boys' companies that had been
established earlier in the sixteenth century had fallen up art

(10:00):
and no longer existed, but they were revived a few
years later, and we'll get into that after a sponsor break.
After a hiatus of about a decade, boys performing companies

(10:21):
were briefly re established in Britain. In fifteen ninety nine,
a new troupe of boy actors was established at Saint
Paul's Cathedral. This was known as the Children of Paul's
and then another, the Children of the Chapel Royal, was
established in sixteen hundred. The next part of this story
is mostly focused on the Children of the Chapel Royal,

(10:41):
but these two troops really had a lot of similarities
and sometimes they performed together. The Chapel Royal was the
monarch's personal chapel and the master of the Children of
the Chapel Royal was Nathaniel Giles, who was also organist
and master of the choristers at Saint George's Chapel. Windsor
Helles managed boys who sang for church services and a

(11:03):
troop of boy actors who were headquartered in Blackfriars in
central London. So a bit on Blackfriars. Back in the
thirteenth century, King Edward the First had given land to
the Dominican Order to build a monastery and a cathedral.
By the first decades of the sixteenth century, though this
order was becoming a lot smaller and less powerful, with

(11:24):
fewer monks actually living there, so the order started renting
out some of its buildings. In fifteen twenty nine, King
Henry the eighth also started using part of this site
as the office and storage space for the King's Rebels,
which was responsible for royal entertainments. This included storage for
things like props and costumes. In fifteen thirty six, after

(11:47):
Henry d eighth had cut ties with the Catholic Church,
he started dissolving England's monasteries. The Dominican Monastery in Blackfriars
was dissolved two years later in fifteen thirty eight, but
the area known as Blackfriars maintained its status as a liberty,
meaning that it had some autonomy from the City of
London Corporation that other parts of the city did not.

(12:09):
So as an important example for this story, if a
group of performers in Blackfriars did something that upset the
Lord Mayor of London, he did not have the authority
to shut it down. Various buildings and Blackfriars were sold
after the dissolution of the monasteries, and in fifteen fifty
part of this was granted to Sir Thomas Coworden, who

(12:31):
was Master of the Rebels. After Cowardon's death, the property
was eventually sold to Sir William Moore, looping back to
what we talked about before the break. More later rented
this to Richard Farrant, master of the Children at Windsor Chapel,
who used it as a theater for about a decade
starting in fifteen seventy six. Usually this theater is called

(12:53):
the First Blackfriars Theater, and as we mentioned earlier, More
evicted Farrant and his company from that space in fifteen
eighty four because it was not a rehearsal space an
actual functioning theater. James Burbage, father of famed Shakespearean actor
Richard Burbadge, built a second, larger theater in Blackfriars in

(13:14):
fifteen ninety six, which was used primarily by the Children's Troops,
and a lot of what we know about this theatre's
history comes from court records. The people involved with managing
this theater filed so many lawsuits against each other and
There were also lawsuits filed by people from outside the company,

(13:34):
including the one that we're going to be talking about shortly.
By the time Burbage opened the second Blackfriars Theater in
fifteen ninety six, multiple stand alone theaters had been built
in and around London. There was the one just called
the Theater built by Burbage, which we mentioned. There was
also the Curtain, the Rose, the Newington Butz Theater and

(13:58):
the Swan. So the second can't Blackfriars Theater was a
lot smaller than all of these. It was roofed like
it was an enclosed building rather than being open in
the center like all of those other theaters were. And
the Children of the Chapel Royal as a performing company
was also different from the companies of adult men who

(14:18):
were performing at these other larger public theaters. These adult
companies were often beholden to one or more patrons who
were funding their work, and the work itself was subject
to approval and censorship by the Master of the Revels.
During this period, the Master of the Rebels was Edmund Tilney,
whose role grew until he had near total control of

(14:39):
English theater like. Eventually he allowed only two performing companies
of men, and he had to personally approve every single
play before it could be performed, but the boys' companies
were not subject to any of that. It's often a
little unclear whose authority they were performing under, if anybody's.
They might be criticized for satirical works that insulted people

(15:02):
in power, but they weren't stopped from performing it in
the first place. Yeah, they were basically flying under the
radar of all of the censorship. That sort of kept
the other theaters in line. And then also the fact
that they were performing in Blackfriars meant they had this
other layer of protection. So we mentioned Nathaniel Giles, Master

(15:24):
of the Children of the Chapel Royal, earlier. In fifteen
ninety seven, Queen Elizabeth I granted him a patent authorizing
him to quote take so many children as he or
his sufficient deputy shall think meet in all cathedral, collegiate,
parish churches, chapels, or any place or places as well

(15:45):
within liberty as without this a realm of England, whatsoever
they may be. So the purpose of this patent was
to make sure that the most talented children in the
realm were available to sing for the Queen, but Giles
did not focus strictly on finding good singers for the
Queen's entertainments. He got into a partnership with Henry Evans,

(16:08):
who had apprenticed as a scrivener but had become a
theatrical producer. In sixteen hundred, Evans leased the Blackfriars Theater
from Cuthbert and Richard Burbadge, sons of James Burbage, with
the plan of establishing a company a boy performers there.
Evans envisioned turning this company into a highly profitable business venture,

(16:29):
which meant that Giles needed to use his patent to
recruit enough boys to fill an entire acting troupe. By
December of sixteen hundred, Giles and Evans were aggressively impressing
children to fill out their acting company. If parents complained,
sometimes they would offer them the option to buy out

(16:51):
the boy's contract, which was really not much different from
kidnapping children and then ransoming back to their parents, except
in this case, these kidnappers had royal permission to impress
children into performing, which meant most parents didn't think they
could complain about it. But then on December thirteenth, sixteen hundred,

(17:13):
James Robinson, acting on the order of Nathaniel Giles, abducted
thirteen year old Thomas Clifton as he was on his
way to school, and around the same time Robinson, Giles
and Evans also took a number of other boys. Nathan Field,
John Chapel and John Moderam were all in grammar school,
and Alvary Trussell, Philip Pickman, Thomas Grimes and Solomon Pavey

(17:37):
were all apprentices. Thomas's father, Henry, was a member of
the nobility, and he was well connected enough to get
his son back. After about a day and a half,
he went to his friend, Sir John Fordescu, who was
Chancellor of the Exchequer and a member of the Privy Council,
and he issued a warrant for Thomas's release, and then

(17:58):
after that Henry Clifton filed a complaint in the Court
of the Star Chamber. The Court of the Star Chamber
convened at Westminster. There are contradictory explanations for where the
name came from, but most agreed that the room were
it originally heard complaints was decorated with stars in some way,
either with the Star Spangled ceiling or with drapes. This

(18:21):
court had started out as a function of the Royal
Council in the early sixteenth century. The Council would take
on legal questions that, for one reason or another, couldn't
go through the regular court system. Eventually, this court evolved
into its own body. Although it still was made up
of Privy Councilors and it operated under the monarch's prerogative,

(18:42):
it was outside the bounds of the courts of common law.
A lot of the cases that were heard before the
Star Chamber had to do with rioting or other disturbances
of the peace, as well as defiance against royal proclamations.
In this case, Henry Clifton's basic argument was that Giles
was abusing a patent that had been granted to him

(19:04):
by the Queen, and we're going to get to all
the details after we pause for a sponsor break. Henry
Clifton's complaint was heard before the Court of the Star
Chamber on December fifteenth, sixteen oh one. This complaint outlines

(19:28):
his opinion that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth had granted letters
patents to Nathaniel Giles, quote for the better furnishing of
your Chapel Royal with well singing children, and this granted
him to take such children from places like parish churches
and chapels. But instead Giles had confederated himself with James Robinson,

(19:49):
Henry Evans and others to put these boys into a
quote company of leude and dissolute mercenary players. The language
used in this complaint is really repetitive, and it's kind
of circular, with just inordinately long sentences which I'll tend
to say the same thing. Yeah, I usually enjoy reading

(20:10):
historical documents like this, but I found this one in
particular kind of exhausting. So Tracy bless Her has edited
all of that to make it a bit more understandable.
And he basically accused them of quote endeavoring, conspiring and
complotting how to oppress diverse of your Majesty's humble and
faithful subjects, and thereby to make unto themselves an unlawful

(20:33):
gain and benefit. They conspired and concluded for their own
corrupt gain in lucre to erect, set up, furnish, and
maintain a playhouse or place in the Blackfriars within your
Majesty's City of London. To better furnish their plays and
interludes with children. They and the said Confederates, abusing the

(20:53):
authority and trust by your Highness, have most wrongfully, unduly
and unjustly taken diverse and several children from diverse and
sundry schools of learning and other places, and apprentices to
men of trade from their masters. Clifton also spelled out
that these children were being taken not for service as

(21:14):
part of the choir in the Chapel Royal, as had
been intended, but they were being quote employed in acting
and furnishing of the said plays and interludes. This was,
he said, quote against the wills of the said children,
their parents, tutors, masters and governors, and to the no
small grief and oppressions of Your Majesty's true and faithful subjects. Importantly,

(21:40):
Giles's patent empowered him to impress quote well singing children.
But the boys named in the complaint were quote no
way able or fit for singing, nor by any the
said confederates endeavored to be taught to sing. But by
them the said confederates abusively employed, as aforesaid, only in

(22:00):
plays and interludes. There's just a whole whole lot of
the said and the AfOR said in here more than
in the bits that we just read. So instead, Clifton's
son had been given lines to learned, and he was
threatened with being beaten if he did not learn them.

(22:21):
Clifton called this an abuse of Her Majesty's commission. Clifton
also described what had happened when he had gone to
the theater to get his son back. He had been
quote utterly and scornfully refused, and the perpetrators had basically
dared him to take them to court. Clinton argued that
it was quote not fit that a gentleman of his

(22:42):
sort should have his son and heir, and that his
only son to be so basely used. So to be clear,
Clifton was not arguing that no children should be impressed
as performers, but that it was not appropriate for his
son due to his station and the fact that these
children were being used as actors, not as singers and

(23:03):
religious services. It was, in his words, quote, an abuse
of the nobility of this your Highness's realm, and an
abuse of Your Majesty's said commission. Many of the records
relating to the Court of the Star Chamber have not
survived until today, so we don't have a lot of
detail about the decision. But in short, the court found

(23:24):
in Clifton's favor. Evans was censured for quote, taking up
of gentlemen's children against their wills and to employ them
for players. He had to resign from his work at
Blackfriar Theater and leave London, but in a lot of
ways this really didn't affect him. He transferred his interest
in the company to his son in law, Alexander Hawkins,

(23:46):
and Hawkins more or less ran things as Evans's proxy.
We know all of this from a letter that was
written later on by one of his associates, not from
any actual legal records about this arrangement. For Giles, so
the biggest consequence was that when he received a new
patent in sixteen oh six, it specified this quote. We

(24:08):
do straightly charge and command that none of the said
choristers or children of the chapel, so to be taken
by force of this commission, shall be used or employed
as comedians or stage players, or to be exercise or
act in any stage plays, interludes, comedies, or tragedies, for

(24:30):
that is not fit or decent, that such as should
sing the praises of God Almighty should be trained up
or employed in such lascivious and profane exercises. There's kind
of a gap though, between when this case was heard
in sixteen oh six, and we don't really know if
he kept impressing children as actors in that window between

(24:54):
when the court case was decided and when he was
issued this new patent. How it's like you can kidnap
them if they're gonna sing for the Queen only religious music,
but they're gonna sing if they're gonna sing church music,
kidnapping them as fine, just cool, cool, cool. And at
least two of the boys named in Clifton's complaint wound
up staying with the theater, Solomon Pavey and Nathan Field.

(25:19):
Pavey had been apprenticed to Edward Pearce, who was choir
master at Saint Paul's. He died at the age of thirteen,
but Field continued to act into adulthood, and he died
in sixteen twenty. After all this, a lot of theater
companies started, at least nominally apprenticing young boys as actors
rather than pressing them into service. But these apprenticeships were

(25:42):
a lot different from the guild apprenticeships that people might
be more familiar with. A guild apprenticeship was very lengthy
and formalized, and while conditions for apprentices could be very poor,
when the apprenticeship ended, the person was trained in a
craft or a trade, and they had also earned a
range of rights and privileges as a freedman. The boys

(26:06):
who apprenticed as actors were often younger than typical guild apprentices,
and based on the records that we have, most adult
performers had not apprenticed as actors when they were children,
so it was like if children were being quote apprenticed,
they weren't becoming actors using that training was when they

(26:26):
were adults. It was actually a lot more likely for
an actor who to have gone through an apprenticeship in
some other trade and then come to acting as an
adult and then conscripting children for performing as singers continued
for a lot longer. Once there were more permanent public
theaters in England with established companies of adult actors, children's

(26:48):
troops became increasingly controversial among performers and playwrights. There are
written references to them in some of the dramatic work
of the day. Shakespeare's Hamlet was written right around the
time that the Boys Companies were revived, and the first
folio version includes a conversation between Hamlet and Rosenkrantz in
which Rosenkrantz describes a theater troupe as quote an area

(27:11):
of children, little iases that cry out on the top
of question and are most tyrannically clapped for it. Hamlet answers, quote,
what are they children? Who maintains them? How are they
a scotted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than
they can sing? Will they not say afterwards if they
should grow themselves to common players, as it is most

(27:31):
like if their means are no better? Their writers do
them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession.
Ben Johnson's satire The Staple of News also includes a
character called Censure, who complains about these troops. Quote, they
make all their scholars playboys. Is not a fine sight

(27:52):
to see all our children made interluders? Do we pay
money for this? We send them to learn their grammar
and their terance, and they learned their playbooks. The Staple
of News was first performed in sixteen twenty five, and
at that point boys acting companies had once again faded out.
In England, Queen Elizabeth the First died in sixteen oh three,

(28:13):
and King James the sixth of Scotland and First of
England succeeded her. His consort and of Denmark issued a
new patent to the Children of the Royal Chapel and
they became the Children of the Queen's Revels. They were
disbanded about three years later after facing increasing criticism for
performing a range of material that satirized the government, the

(28:34):
nobility and the monarchs. The Children of Paul's was disbanded
in sixteen oh seven after the playhouse on the Cathedral
grounds was closed. London's theaters were closed down entirely in
sixteen oh eight and sixteen oh nine due to plague.
After the plague subsided, Richard Burbage evicted the remnants of
the Boy's Company from the Blackfriar Theater and it became

(28:57):
the winter home of William Shakespeare's company, The King's Men.
The Court of the Star Chamber also faced increasing opposition
from the courts of common law and from some members
of Parliament. It was abolished by the Long Parliament in
sixteen forty one. We haven't really touched on this, but
as a final note, there's a lot of literary criticism

(29:19):
and theatrical scholarship that looks at how these companies of
boy performers and the material they performed contributed to the
development of English language drama. Obviously, there were comedies and
tragedies long before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but a
lot of what was being written in England and in
English was either religious or didactic in nature. Playwrights writing

(29:44):
for boys companies, which were working outside the bounds of
official patronage and censorship, laid a lot of the foundations
for the English language dramatic tradition. Virtually all of England's
most prominent play rights during these decades wrote for children,
and I wrote material for children that broke away from
what was expected in terms of form and content. Yeah,

(30:07):
I read one paper that was sort of like, I'm
not gonna go so far as to say that without
these boys companies there would be no William Shakespeare, but like,
it really was a lot of playwrights kind of cutting
their teeth on writing different material that was then going
to be performed by children. It's a wild thought, it is,
and that also makes like such a hugely complicated moral

(30:34):
and like analytical set of criteria to look at everything
through where it's there. I like this play, but it's
grounded and enslavement of children and that's not good and
I don't know how we reconcile all of this. Yeah,
I of course I think most people who have ever

(30:56):
studied Shakespeare probably are aware about, you know, women's parts
being played by boys and young men. I was really
not aware until getting into this that there had been
whole companies of just child actors who are all either
boys in England specifically. I do have some listener mail

(31:18):
which is about a totally different subject. This is from Jen.
Jen wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I loved the tomatoes
episode and especially the Friday behind the scenes conversation. I
wanted to write to share my own history with disliking,
slash loving tomatoes. As a kid, I had the same
aversion to chunky tomato textures as Tracy. I enjoyed the flavor,
love tomato soup, non chunky tomato sauces, and ketchup, yes,

(31:42):
even the strange, colorful ketchups that Hinz introduced when I
was thirteen. Holly is making like excited excited gestures about
the colorful ketchups, but any semblance of actual tomato texture.
No thanks. My mom would roll her eyes when I
asked her to I mean jarred salsa, only to scrape

(32:02):
the tomato chunks off my tortilla chip with each dip,
so only a flavorful tomato juice coated it. Meanwhile, my
paternal grandpa had a garden filled with tomato plants that
he tended with care each summer. Those plants brought him
so much pride and happiness, and each time my parents
and I joined my grandparents for dinner, Grandpa would pick

(32:23):
a few tomatoes and serve them as a side dish,
sliced with a pinch of salt on top. He, grandma,
and my mom would devour them with praise for how
fresh and yummy they were. My dad and I would
abstain ew tomatoes, and Grandpa would reply, she she don't
know what you're missing. Flash forward to college, with a
buffet style cafeteria in my dorm and a city full

(32:44):
of diverse culinary experiences. By then, my grandpa was sick
and unable to take care of the garden. Still thinking
about what Grandpa said, and in line with Holly getting
swayed by beautiful words about tomatoes, it seemed like I
had been missing out on something. I started sneaking lice
tomatoes into my cafeteria sandwiches and eating entire chipfuls of

(33:04):
salsa without scraping off the tomato pieces. Little by little,
my taste buds started to accept fresh tomatoes as a
legitimately delicious food. My big realization of this change was
a few years later when I attended an EarthFest festival
on the Boston Esplanade and each one of the organic
grocery store tents was handing out fruit and vegetable samples.

(33:25):
I was offered an entire tomato, and I bit into
it as if it was an apple, savoring each bite.
My grandpa passed away soon after I finished college and
didn't get to witness my love of tomatoes. Still, every
time I smell a vine fresh tomato, I think of
him and smile. I now have a garden full of
my favorite cherry tomato plants and a big old tomato

(33:45):
tattoo on my arm and memory of my grandpa. I've
also attached a photo of my pup I think risa
is how we say this who also enjoys occasional ripe tomato.
Keep up the amazing work. I always look forward to
your episode, especially the food history ones. Take care and
have a relaxing and lovely summer. Jen, we have a

(34:05):
very cute dog and a great tomato tattoo. Yeah. I
wanted to read this in part because I love this story.
For one thing, it did occur to me after we
had that hole behind the scenes conversation that one thing
that I will eat that does include big pieces of
tomato is crazy salad because the combination of you know,

(34:31):
slices of tomato with the cheese and the olive oil
and the basil and like all that, like that I
actually find pretty good, but still just plain tomatoes, big
chunks of them by themselves, not usually my favorite. Last night,
I had a like, very basic store bought salad as

(34:52):
part of my dinner, and it had like four or
five little cherry tomatoes in there, and I ate none
of them, row of them. Listen, cherry tomatoes are a
gamble because sometimes they'll even look great and I don't
love them to begin with, but like a ripe flavorful
one can be good. But sometimes they look great and
they just taste like not good. Yeah that dog is Yeah,

(35:15):
weapons a great cube. By the way. Yes, during tomato season,
I will get like an heirloom tomato at the farmer's
market and cheese from the cheese vendor. Like we'll get
a bunch of farmer's market stuff and make like a
cuprazy salad or something, and that I do really enjoy
and I ate a million of it. When we were

(35:36):
in Italy, like every meal it was or just like
there would be some kind of fresh mozzarella appetizer. There
was a lot of a lot of that. So anyway,
thank you so much, Jen for this email and these pictures.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcasts, we're at History Podcasts that iHeartRadio

(35:56):
dot com. We're also all over social media ad Missed
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(36:19):
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