Abstracts
Abstract
This article analyzes overlooked evidence concerning the conscription of boys by early modern English choirs and theatre companies, arguing that legal and cultural representations depicted these abductions as benevolent while violating consent. It further speculates that points of contact between the theatrical economy and the Virginia Company may have prompted authorities to use a parallel mode of impressment to take Powhatan children to populate Henrico College. I argue that the practices of coercion and abduction on the English stage can provide a useful framework for understanding the rhetoric of benign subservience that the English authorities cultivated in an Atlantic context.
Keywords:
- Boy actors,
- all boy theatre companies,
- kidnapping/impressment,
- letters patent,
- Virginia Company,
- Knight of the Burning Pestle,
- Henrico College,
- early American colonization and education,
- race and cultivation,
- consent,
- all-boy choirs
