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Elizabeth I's "picture in little":Boy Company Representations of a Queen's Authority Jeanne H. McCarthy Hamlet: Do the boys carry it away? Rosencrantz: Ay, that they do my lord -Hercules and his load too. Hamlet: It is not very strange; for my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mows at him while my father lived give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little. 'Sblood there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.1 Deemed an unnatural ruler by virtue of her sex, Elizabeth I struggled throughout her life with the overwhelming weight of a tradition that associated monarchy and power with masculinity, a tradition so entrenched by 1558 (despite or because of the brief reign of her sister Mary) that, as Louis A. Montrose has observed, "the political nation, which was wholly a nation of men, seems at times to have found it frustrating or degrading to serve a female prince."2 The queen's "[less] than natural" reign aroused anxiety, so much so that in order to assuage fears that she might threaten established masculinist notions of kingship [End Page 425] and to legitimate her claim to authority, she attempted to shape her "performance or construction of herself" as queen by "engag[ing] and restructur[ing] the discourses current in her culture that naturalized gender identity."3 Such efforts, as Susan Frye contends, are part of a continually evolving contest with other forces in the culture that were simultaneously trying to inscribe her within more traditional iconography for womanhood, such as "wife" or "marriageable maiden." The sense echoed here by both Montrose and Frye is that Elizabeth's actions and utterances are best understood in the context of a conversation with her powerful court, that is, as participating in "the competition for representation," the terms used in the title of the latter's work. That conversation, despite a critical tradition asserting her supposed passivity and parsimonious reluctance to spend, extended into the theater, where the embattled queen also attempted to shape the discourse on her rule by selectively promoting and resisting representations of her politics on stage. In particular, she asserted her prerogative of patronage to bring companies of boy actors into cultural prominence and then used those companies, in turn, as rhetorical instruments furthering her efforts to legitimate her political authority. These children's companies and their offerings of diminutive portrayals of adult courtiers, after all, enjoyed such popularity with Elizabeth's court that, according to E. K. Chambers, while the traditional court interluders disappeared and the court masque fell into relative disuse "during the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign, the drama [was] under the domination of the boy companies."4 Although the significance of the relationship between Elizabeth and the boy companies has long been discounted by theater historians and critics alike, including the formidable Chambers, who claimed that she had no "personal" interest in the events shaping the drama during her reign, the boy company performances merit closer scrutiny since they appear to voice the queen's response to the conventional linking of authority with adult masculinity expressed in traditionally male-centered entertainments and masques. More specifically, while courtier-sponsored royal entertainments tended either to encourage romance and marriage or to threaten the queen with unpleasant consequences if she failed to name a consort, and thus imposed upon her a disempowering role, as we shall see, Elizabeth's boy company [End Page 426] entertainments tended to define her in more flattering and empowering terms. Elizabeth and the Boy Company Tradition Very little evidence of court drama by the children's troupes prior to Elizabeth's succession exists. Even though the earliest recorded performance by children at court appears in 1515-16, when William Cornish's play Troilus and Pandor was performed by both the Gentlemen of the Chapel and the Chapel Children, the practice, and the effect, of using only children onstage had not yet acquired the status of a convention.5 Neither does an early anti-Luther play performed before Henry VIII appear to have established a precedent for such entertainments, since for many years afterwards there...
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