Beeston's Boys was the popular and colloquial name of The King and Queen's Young Company, a troupe of boy actors of the Caroline period, active mainly in the years 1637–1642.
The troupe was formed in early 1637, under a royal warrant, by the theatre manager and impresario Christopher Beeston, during a time of disorder and reorganisation in the theatre profession; the London playhouses had been closed since the summer of 1636 because of bubonic plague. The creation of a company of boy actors was a return to a practice of the early 17th century, the era of companies like the Children of Paul's and the Children of the Chapel. Those companies, while controversial in their time, had been effective at developing and educating young talent, to the eventual benefit of the adult companies and the theatrical profession as a whole. Beeston's formation of the Young Company was an attempt to recover that training function – as well as to provide effective drama while paying relatively less in actors' salaries.
(A similar attempt to form a boy's company had been made eight years previously, in 1629, by Richard Gunnell, who built the Salisbury Court Theatre. But it was not a success, because of a long theatre closure due to plague.)
The King and Queen's Young Company was onstage in early 1637, and was a hit; they and their reputation quickly entered public consciousness under their popular nickname. Yet the theatrical profession, in a time of plague and looming revolution, remained challenging; when Christopher Beeston died in 1638, his control of acting troupes and theatres (the Cockpit and the Red Bull) passed to his son and successor William Beeston, who was notably less successful than his father. (This period of crisis would likely have been difficult to navigate, even for a very resourceful individual.) William Beeston inherited the Phoenix theatre from his father and everything that went with it, which included the young company Beeston’s Boys. While Beeston had none of the experience that his father had, he still took on the mantle of managing the company since he had “a one-twelfth interest in the King and Queen’s young company”