Boy player

Boy player was an adolescent male employed by Medieval and English Renaissance playing companies. Some boy players worked for the mainstream companies and performed the female roles, as women did not perform on the English stage in this period. Others worked for "children's companies", in which all roles, not just the female ones, were played by boys.

In playing companies of adult actors, boys were initially given the female parts, but women were permitted to act on the stage from December 1661. A law against women on stage was implemented in England until that time. Pre-pubescent boys were used for their unbroken voices, an accepted practice.

Boy actors in adult companies apparently served as apprentices, in ways comparable to the practices of other guilds and trades of the age, though for shorter terms — perhaps two or three years instead of the usual seven. (The companies of adult actors were, in Elizabethan legal terms, retainers in noble households, and thus not subject to the legal statutes governing apprentices.) They performed female roles (and, of course, roles of male children if required) alongside adult male actors playing men. In reference to Shakespeare's company, variously the Lord Chamberlain's Men (1594–1603) or the King's Men (1603 and after): Augustine Phillips left bequests to an apprentice, James Sands, and a former apprentice, Samuel Gilburne, in his will, read after his death in 1605; company members William Ostler, John Underwood, Nathan Field, and John Rice had all started their acting careers as Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars Theatre.

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