Nearly Human Children in Theatrical Works of Jonson and Brome

In early modern culture, children were often viewed as nearly human, or not yet human in certain respects-though they possess the potential to mature into adult humans. The clergyman John Moore asked, "What is an infant but a bruit beast in the shape of a man?" (43) while Francis Bacon used the term "adult" as a synonym for "human" in his "New Science" writings (Fudge 91-109).

However, even within emerging post humanist scholarship on early modern texts by critics such as Herbrechter and Campana, the exclusion of children from discussions of humanity remains overlooked. While Witmore examines the early modern conceptual association between childhood and fiction and MacLeod analyses animals and boy actors in Jonson's Poetaster (131-143), there is no full-length study on the dubious human status of children.

Building on a renewed attention to perceptions and experiences of children in early modern performances (Lamb; McCarthy; Munro), I will study the way Ben Jonson and Richard Brome theatricalise early modern children's intermediate and fluid status on the continuum of "humanness". These two authors have been chosen for their sustained interest in human behaviours and their extensive works in which child players and characters were portrayed.

I will investigate: How were early modern children included in or excluded from the human concept in various aspects? What political, religious and ontological resonance did on-stage children in nearly human roles provoke? How did performances engage with the early modern debate of humanity through their presentation of childhood?

This historicist project will use cultural and theatrical evidence to support a post humanist and ethological analysis of childhood in early modern performances. For example, while a few scholars (Gurr; Butler; Smuts) have researched Jonson's part of James I's coronation procession, the naked, bearded River Thames embodied by a boy actor in the show has yet to receive attention.

I will argue that the boy's unusual beard might represent nature's longevity and superiority, transcending human life cycles. Meanwhile, his nakedness, in line with the English pageantry tradition of depicting naked boys engaging with monsters, might indicate his uncivilness and dangerousness. With the child's body itself being a meaning-making entity, this complex portrayal reflects early modern society's understanding of humanity and nature.

This project will shed new light on the roles played by child actors beyond the female roles and significantly expand our sense of the range of cultural and theatrical effects generated by child performances. Moreover, early modern thinkers occasionally experienced "a crisis of [human-animal] distinctions" (Boehrer 10), and new science, in its attempt to establish the concept of human, "wrenched apart the continuum from childhood [to adulthood]" (Marcus93).

The metamorphic children in performances analysed in this project, like boys turned into dogs and back in Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches, were theatre's responses to these early modern debates of humanity. Ultimately, this research will reshape our understanding of early modern childhood and humanity and it willcontribute to the long and sustaining efforts of feminism, Marxism, and postcolonialism in decentralising anddeconstructing the idea of "Man".