How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?

Kathman, David

doi:10.1017/ccol0521850746.021

Cited by 23 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The short answer is: from the blended space rather than from either input space. Even given the then-current understanding of acting troupes, presumably based on the Elizabethan playing company (Kathman, 2005), we would not wish to claim that "acting" belonged to readers' frame-semantic conception of boy. But blending can promote the salience of participant roles that are not core members of the source nominal's frame.…”

Section: Stanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbing and Linguistic Innovation

Michaelis

Hsiao

2021

Front. Commun.

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Denominal verbs are produced by a syntactic category shift, conversion, in which the word’s inflectional and combinatory potential change while its internal composition does not (Valera, 2015: 322). Perhaps no language owes as many of its verbs to the conversion strategy as English (Koutsoukos, 2021), the majority being denominal (noun-derived) verbs, e.g., Widespread seedless cultivars typically fruit twice yearly in the Caribbean. Denominal conversion has been the predominant method of verb creation since the 13th century (Gottfurcht, 2008), with the result that denominal verbs present a continuum of conventionality ranging from conventional verb-phrase replacements like paint, trash, pocket, mother to evanescent innovations like adulting and criming. Language users must rely on certain inferential strategies to figure out what novel denominal verbs mean, combining information from multiple sources, including salient properties of the source noun’s denotatum, the event structure of the clause in which that noun serves as a predicator, and socio-cultural knowledge. How exactly does this work? Our answer recalls the major lessons of Clark and Clark’s seminal 1979 paper “When Nouns Surface as Verbs”: denominal verbs have context-dependent rather than fixed meanings, and their interpretations rely on cooperation between speaker and hearer. These are lessons seemingly forgotten by proponents of recent, influential derivation-based accounts, which leverage the formal similarity between denominal verbs and noun-incorporating verbs like backstab and manspread. While, as discussed here, syntacticized approaches to semantic representation fail to account for the interpretive latitude that denominal verbs actually display, there are reasons to reject a strong view of context dependence as well. For Clark and Clark, interpretations of innovative denominal verbs either directly reflect criterial features of their source nouns or are ad hoc, derived from “moment-to-moment cooperation,” including gestures, allusions, and “other momentarily relevant facts about the conversation” (1979: 783). We argue that denominal interpretations are more tightly regulated, and involve reconciling the results of four distinct interpretive strategies: nominal frame computation, verb-construction integration, co-composition and, finally, conceptual blending. To describe these interpretive strategies, we bring to bear a suite of analytic tools developed to model everyday language understanding: Construction Grammar (Michaelis, 2004; Goldberg, 2006; Michaelis, 2011), enriched composition (Pustejovsky, 1998; Pustejovsky, 2012), Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2004), and Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 2006; Andor, 2010). In line with Clark and Clark’s (1979) convention for the interpretation of innovative denominal verbs, we argue that nouns used in innovative denominal formations are chosen based on relational properties of entities denoted by those nouns, whether common or proper (e.g., shape, behavior, composition, use, provenance). At the same time, the descriptive framework that we propose leaves fewer interpretive factors to vagaries of context.

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Section: Stanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbing and Linguistic Innovation

Michaelis

Hsiao

2021

Front. Commun.

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“…3. Más información sobre los niños actores en las compañías de teatro de la Inglaterra de Shakespeare en Belsey, 2005;Brown, 2017;Kathman, 2005. Cabe señalar que la 'prohibición' (más cultural que estrictamente legal) de las actrices profesionales en Inglaterra se aplicaba únicamente a las actuaciones comerciales en teatros públicos y no a otras formas de actuación como espectáculos en la corte o el teatro callejero.…”

Section: Análisis De Las Dinámicas De Género En La Comedia Española U...unclassified

Explorando la presencia de personajes femeninos en la comedia en tiempos de Lope de Vega desde las Humanidades Digitales

Amelang¹

2023

Hipogrifo

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Resumen. Este artículo visibiliza el uso que se le puede dar a una serie de proyectos de Humanidades Digitales, como son las bases de datos de Rolecall, DICAT y CATCOM o la biblioteca digital EMOTHE, a la hora de analizar las dinámicas escenográficas en el teatro español de finales del siglo XVI y principios del siglo XVII, coincidiendo con las décadas en activo del máximo representante de la comedia nueva, Lope de Vega. En particular este estudio se centra en la presencia y el protagonismo de los personajes femeninos, e indaga en los múltiples factores que pueden haber influenciado en las dinámicas de género representadas sobre los tablados españoles y europeos de la edad moderna.

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“…16 Most recently, David Kathman's forthcoming research into the ages of early modern boy actors raises important questions for the study of the children's companies. 17 However, in the absence of a comprehensive new survey, the work of Wallace, Chamber and, especially, Hillebrand remains central to historical accounts of children's performance.…”

Section: Criticism: Harbage and Beyondmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Humour of Children: Performance, Gender, and the Early Modern Children's Companies

Munro

2005

Literature Compass

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This article focuses on the professional and semi-professional children's companies of early modern England. I first provide a brief overview of the children's companies, suggesting that criticism needs to provide fuller accounts of both early sixteenth-century and mid-seventeenth-century experiments with children's performance. In the second section, I explore recent criticism of the children's companies and children's performance. In doing so, I suggest that one advantage of recent criticism has been its movement away from the traditional characterisation of adults' and children's drama as 'rival traditions'. Although there is a tradition of children's performance, it is not a monolithic, singular entity: children's performance could take on different meanings and associations at different times, and the composition and character of the children's companies was also unstable. Recent gender-orientated criticism also suggests ways in which the juvenile performers in children's companies can be considered separately from the boy actresses of the adult companies. Finally, the article provides re-readings of some children's company plays in relation to issues such as performance and gender, paying particular attention to the important but often-overlooked question of age.

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How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?

Cited by 23 publications

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Verbing and Linguistic Innovation

Verbing and Linguistic Innovation

Explorando la presencia de personajes femeninos en la comedia en tiempos de Lope de Vega desde las Humanidades Digitales

The Humour of Children: Performance, Gender, and the Early Modern Children's Companies

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