‘Our Children Made Enterluders’: Choristers, Actors, and Students in St Paul’s Cathedral Precinct

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between theatre and neighbourhood in early modern England with a focus on St Paul’s Cathedral precinct, demonstrating that the boys who performed as the Children of Paul’s were necessarily shaped by their time there in multiple ways. The seemingly discrete places of the cathedral that the boys inhabited, such as their singing school, the residence hall, the cathedral choir, the churchyard, and the grammar school, were as porous as the activities that took place there. We cannot, then, disentangle the boys’ lives as actors from their lives as denizens of Paul’s.