Separated by almost three hundred years and by significant developments in the construction of childhood as an identity distinct from adulthood, the early seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries stand out as periods of intense and popular activity by child actors, and specifically by companies of child actors who played adult roles and deliberately juxtaposed the age categories of performer and character. While much excellent period-specific work has been accomplished during the last twenty years on early modern boy actors and on the ‘infant phenomena’ of the Victorian stage, there has as yet been no attempt to compare children’s professional performance during these two periods. This article contrasts the repertoire of the boy companies of Jacobean London with that of the children’s opera companies who toured the UK and Ireland throughout the 1880s performing comic operas such as H.M.S. Pinafore and Les Cloches de Corneville. It also explores what it meant for children to perform as adults during these two periods, and what the latter reveals about the historical construction and policing of age categories.

This article examines how French vaudeville tunes circulated in England through both theatrical performances and French-language textbooks (or ‘grammars’). My central concern is to consider how audiences in London – who had little exposure to the rich satirical and cultural connotations that these tunes had acquired over years of performance in Paris – might have been able to grasp their significance within staged works performed by visiting Parisian troupes between the years 1718 and 1735. I suggest that in tracing the transmission of tunes from France to England, scholars should consider a wider range of print sources, since vaudevilles had a social life extending beyond the plays in which they were performed. To this end, I focus on analysing vaudevilles found in French ‘grammars’. The pedagogical nature of these sources explicitly puts on display how French culture was translated for an English readership. By comparing the tunes found in grammars with plays that used the same tunes, I reveal both how Londoners could have become acquainted with the Parisian understanding of French tunes and how the grammar books could have shifted the meanings of these tunes for English readers and audiences. Ultimately, the circulation of French tunes abroad through grammars directs our attention to the material and cultural practices undergirding the mobility of eighteenth-century musical culture.