This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.

Jennifer Higginbotham is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, USA. Her book,The Girlhood of Shakespeares Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence, was published in 2013. Her scholarly articles on early modern girlhood, drama, and womens writing have appeared in the journalsModern Philology,Reformation,Literature Compass, andSixteenth-Century Journal as well as the collectionsThe Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays (2014) andThe Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (2017).

Mark Albert Johnston is Associate Professor of English at the University of Windsor, CA. His book,Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value was published in 2011 and again in 2016. His essays have appeared inEnglish Literary History,Studies in English Literature,English Literary Renaissance, andModern Philology, and in the collectionsMasculinity and the Metropolis of Vice: London 1550-1650 (Palgrave, 2010), andThunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (2010). 

1 Introduction: Queer(ing) Children and Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture.-2 Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature .-3 I Had Peopled Else: Shakespeares Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race 57 Urvashi Chakravarty.-4 Queer Time and Sideways Growth in The Roaring Girl 79 Melissa Welshans.-5 Playing the Early Modern Tomboy 99 Jennifer Higginbotham.- 6 Queer Apprenticeship in Shakespeares Titus Andronicus.-Mark Albert Johnston.-7 Moth and the Pedagogical Ideal in Loves Labors Lost M. Tyler Sasser.-8 The Queerness of Precocious Play in John Websters,-The White Devil Bethany Packard.-9 A Prince so Young as I: Agequeerness and Marlowes Boy King 195 Rachel Prusko.- 10 Queering Gender, Age, and Status in Early Modern Childrens Drama Lucy Munro.-11 The Future-Killing Queer and the Future-Negating Child: Camping It Up and Destabilizing Boundaries in SamMendess Richard III (1992) Gemma Miller Afterword Kate Chedgzoy.-Index