Work on early modern childhoods entered a new phase over a decade ago with lively investigations into the diverse connections between childhood and early modern performance cultures. This area of scholarship has continued to flourish with publications on the educational, emotional, religious, and material worlds of early modern children. As Deanne Williams highlights in her introduction to Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England, “a picture has emerged of what it meant to be a child in early modern England—yet less so of what childhood meant in and to this culture, of the evolution of childhood as a category of identity, and of its place in larger discursive formations” (3). Preiss and Williams’s wonderful edited collection brings together three major discourses—childhood, education, and theater—to demonstrate how these concepts “‘grew up’ together in the early modern period” (3) and to provide a “new view of the literary and the social meaning of the young in early modern England” (4).

This collection successfully achieves this through twelve chapters in four sections: “Shakespearean Childhoods,” “Beyond the Boy Actor,” “Girls and Boys,” and “Afterlives.” Returning to common themes in recent scholarship, including Shakespeare’s child characters, the children’s playing companies, the sexual dynamics of Renaissance pedagogy and theater, and the emergence of children’s literature, each chapter carefully positions itself in relation to existing debates and usefully moves them forward. Chapters in section 1 by Seth Lerer, Joseph Campana, and Charlotte Scott explore the Renaissance schoolroom, the early modern “traffic in children” (39), and concepts of innocence to offer fascinating readings of Hamlet’s boyhood, the connections between children, liquidity, and information exchange in Pericles, and the idea of childhood as conditioned by “loss, grief and hindsight” (67) in The Winter’s Tale and Richard III. These chapters illuminate familiar themes (time, memory, education, exchange) in new ways, foregrounding the extent to which early modern childhood informed and was informed by larger discourses. The chapters in section 2 advance scholarship on the children’s playing companies. Bastian Kuhl’s evaluation of the Children of the Chapel’s reperformance of John Lyly’s Love’s Metamorphosis sheds new light on the extent to which the companies fashioned the players’ particular identities as children. Lucy Munro reveals how children’s performance manipulated adult assumptions about childhood in an excellent chapter that explores what it meant to “speak like a child” (81) in religious and educational discourses, in adult company plays, and in the plays of the children’s companies. Bart van Es also brings together the repertoires of the children’s and adult companies in an illuminating examination of the connections between Chapman’s May Day and Shakespeare’s Othello, which culminates in a reading of Desdemona becoming “ever more childlike” (115).

Section 3 interrogates the gendered and sexual dimensions of childhood through a fresh examination of the Ganymede myth in a chapter by Stephen Orgel and on discourses of chastity in Milton’s Comus in chapters by Deanne Williams and Douglas Trevor. Girls are prominent here, notably in Williams’s superb chapter that rereads the masque within a longer history of girls’ performance. The common theme in these chapters, and across the collection, is the liminal gendered, sexual, and aged status of children and how this functions in early modern literature as a site for interrogating a range of discourses. This is exemplified by Blaine Greteman’s excellent chapter, the first on “Afterlives,” on the imagery of childhood, particularly girlhood, in Andrew Marvell’s poetry. Reading Marvell’s poetry within the context of the emergence of children’s literature, Greteman insists, persuasively, that early modern childhood was political. Two final essays on the subsequent critical and theatrical reimaginings of early modern childhood—James Marino’s chapter on Freudian readings of Macbeth and Elizabeth Pentland’s analysis of the treatment of childhood and education in Tom Stoppard’s drama—confirm the ongoing importance of the connections between early modern childhoods, education, and the stage. Preiss and Williams set out to produce a “volume of provocations” (11), and their collection is undoubtedly that. These new approaches to early modern childhood confirm early modern literature’s “abiding fascination with the nature of the child” (11). They also reveal the ongoing importance of this figure to critical and imaginative thinking about the period.