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From the medieval religious drama to the Stuart court masque, girls can be found on early English stages: in pageants and masques, entries, processions, and other dramatic entertainments.1 They appeared, in fact, almost everywhere except on the professional stage. In the Middle Ages, girls performed in religious drama, and they danced, sang, and played music in religious festivals and folk celebrations. in Tudor England, girls appeared in civic pageants and processions, as well as in royal entries, triumphs, and other entertainments. And in Stuart England, girls were an important part of the evolving genre of the court masque. Until very recently, however, historical accounts of children's performance in early modern England have focused on the more visible boy actor, who famously played on the public stage and in the children's companies.2 The ongoing scholarly process of recovering evidence of women's performance, moreover, focuses largely on adult performers, subsuming girls within the larger category of ''women.''3
This essay charts the history of the girl masquer-little girls as well as unmarried teenagers-on early English stages, defining her as a distinctive category of female performer, and locating her in a variety of contexts and venues. Meriting her own chapter in the histories of the child actor as well as women's performance, the girl masquer also makes a contribution to the professional stage. Besides providing evidence of girls as speakers in medieval religious drama, Tudor civic pageantry, Elizabethan entertainments, and Stuart court masques, what also matters about the girl masquer is her creation of an arresting spectacle through dance, music, and costume.4 This, I argue, is the legacy of the girl masquer: a distinct physical and visual code that was adopted, or translated, by the boy actors on Shakespeare's stage as they performed girl characters such as Juliet, Perdita, the ''airy spirit'' Ariel, and others. These Shakespearean girl characters provide an archive of, as well as a glimpse into, performances that were occasional and ephemeral, and seldom recorded for posterity. In different ways, they draw upon and preserve the tradition of the girl masquer that was enshrined in private, domestic, and courtly spaces, as well as in more public ceremonial contexts. The performance of these Shakespearean roles by boy actors developed from the lived experience of girls' performance, and...