Stages of Girlhood in Early Modern England

FAIN: FT-55161-07

Caroline Bicks
Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3800)

This project is the first book-length study of girls on stage in early modern England. The past 20 years have witnessed a boom in early modern studies of gender and performance. Scholars have written extensively on boys, men, and (to a lesser degree) women actors. In so doing, they have transformed how we think about the production of gender and especially the ideological transition from boyhood to manhood in the period. The girl, however, has remained an outlier to these studies; as a result, innovative theories about how girls—and specifically early modern girlhood-were imagined have not emerged. “Stages of Girlhood” seeks to address this critical absence by examining representations and actual examples of English girls taking the stage.