Thomas Belte, Elizabethan Boy Actor

“If I were a woman”: the performativity of gender in Shakespeare

“…39 The actor Thomas Belte, apprenticed to Heminges in 1594, who was the son of a musician and "may well have had the sort of early musical training that would have equipped him for an acting career," would have been 20 in 1600 and 21 in 1601, so the song may allude to (or originally have been sung by) him. 40 The "youth" of the song knows that his radiance will not last. When Orsino tells the enigmatic Cesario that women, like flowers, collapse at their height of their beauty, the boy playing Viola / Cesario responds with the lines "And so they are.…”

“…Cooke and a third apprentice, Nicholas Tooley (who would have been 17 in 1599) both became sharers in the King's Men. 51 27 Given the ages of these apprentices, it is perhaps not surprising that Shakespeare's texts register the experience of change from the mature boy actor's perspective. Although there may be no clock in the play forest of As You Like It, the text registers an inevitable chronological progression for the youth who played Rosalind: ripening from hour to hour and rotting whore-like as their womanly beauty fades.…”

Precision, Consistency and Completeness in Early-Modern Playbook Manuscripts: The Evidence from Thomas of Woodstock and John a Kent and John a Cumber

“…Kathman 2004. Two scholars have independently attempted to dismiss Kathman's crucial discovery that the Thomas Belt mentioned in the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins was apprenticed to the Chamberlain's man John Heminges on 12 November 1595, which Kathman took as proof that the plot post-dates this event (Gurr 2007, 82-84;Manley 2007). Since Belt was sixteen at the time of his apprenticeship--rather old for a boy to begin acting--they conclude that he probably was already taking small roles, as demanded of him in this plot, and hence the plot could date from the early 1590s.…”