Boy Player - in Film, Literature and Theatre

In Film, Literature and Theatre

The boy player has been a popular subject in literary, theatrical and cinematic representations of the Elizabethan theatre.

  • The film Shakespeare in Love features a boy player (played by Daniel Brocklebank) who performs Juliet in Romeo and Juliet before being ousted by Gwyneth Paltrow's character (who is disguised as a man).
  • Nicholas Wright's play Cressida is set in the 1630s and depicts the friendship between an elderly former boy player and the historical boy player Stephen Hammerton.
  • The play and film Stage Beauty are about the Restoration boy player Edward Kynaston and the transition to female acting.
  • Anthony Burgess's novel about Christopher Marlowe, A Dead Man in Deptford, is narrated by a boy player.
  • Tom Stoppard's film of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead features a scene in which the eponymous duo are briefly convinced of the femininity of a boy player.
  • Susan Cooper's novel King of Shadows deals with boy actors including Nathan Field.

Read more about this topic:  Boy Player

Famous quotes containing the words literature and/or theatre:

    A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.
    Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)

    Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
    John Berger (b. 1926)