Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Tanya Pollard

Committee Members

Mario DiGangi

Wayne Koestenbaum

Subject Categories

Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory | Literature in English, British Isles | Performance Studies | Theatre History

Keywords

William Shakespeare, boy actors, clowns, theatrical labor

Abstract

This dissertation takes up two highly specialized kinds of early modern player—the boy actor and the clown—and reads them for their particularly complicated and contingent places within theater’s economic and legal structures of labor, compensation, ownership, and inheritance. It argues that the material written for boys and clowns by William Shakespeare and his clown company-mate Robert Armin is shaped by the conditions of physical non-normativity, labor contingency, and intergenerational insecurity shared by the boy and clown actors who played these roles. In my introduction, I read Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist as an allegory for theatrical labor that establishes both the inherent precarity of the player’s position and the differing ratios of precarity to profits experienced by various members of the company, from leading men to company clowns to apprenticed boys. My first two chapters turn to Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, arguing that the marriage plots of As You Like It and Twelfth Night present their young, female protagonists as key players in a system of wealth management via reproductive futurity. By contrast, these plays insistently cut their clown characters out of any imagined marital futures. Despite these divergent trajectories, however, the plays’ pairs of boy heroines and clown comic relief are insistently foiled and share remarkably similar performance modes. In my third chapter, I turn to a play in which these parallel boy and clown performance modes cross-contaminate in the iconic style of its heroine: Cleopatra. I argue that in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra’s contentious style of playing reflects the precarity of her apprentice boy actor’s labor, and, further, that her diva antics are undertaken as resistance to inevitable theatrical marginalization and modeled on similarly obstructionist performances by stage clowns. In my fourth and final chapter, I read Robert Armin’s under-studied play The Two Maids of More-Clack as his own attempt to both stabilize his precarious position as a theater worker and answer the question of who reaps what profits from theatrical labor. Despite his fame and security as a sharer in the company, Armin’s attempt to author a play that makes use of King’s Men literary and theatrical properties shows him to be outside of the company’s authorial line of succession. Through readings of dramatic texts and theatrical history, this dissertation articulates the governing role played by inequitable systems of labor and inheritance in the formation of the early modern dramatic canon.

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