Playing With Boys On Middleton's Stage—and Ours

AbstractThis article sets aside Middleton's first boy players to think about his latest, offering a case study in performance that begins by remembering an experiment in boys becoming women, and then focuses on an ensemble of boys playing A Mad World, My Masters. It considers the attraction of Middleton for youth today: the way he rubs up their young lives; the friction he sets up between their adolescence and his works. Fed in school on a standard educational diet of William Shakespeare, boys messing around with Middleton – scurrilous punster, dirty joker – can gorge on toothsome junk food that satisfies appetites Shakespeare never reaches.