Here the Curtaines draw, there is discovered Iupiter dandling Ganimed upon his knee, and Mercury lying asleepe.

The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage, Christopher Marlowe

It would be a stretch to call the onstage doings of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater "sexually explicit", no matter who they involved. Adolescent actors did play women's parts in English renaissance drama alongside adult men; this did include the full range of dialogue suggesting sexual intercourse, incest, rape, pregnancy, infidelity, prostitution, venereal disease, and erectile dysfunction. The incongruity of seeing a teenager playing a grown woman wasn't lost to Shakespeare's contemporaries, even those who were friendly toward the theater, or to Shakespeare himself; in Antony & Cleopatra, Cleopatra recounts to one of her ladies-in-waiting the indignities awaiting them both:

The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us and present

Our Alexandrian revels. Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’ th’ posture of a whore.

"Posture" suggests sexually-suggestive physical blocking as well as a more abstract sense of position; this passage plays on the bitter incongruity of a mature and complex woman like Cleopatra being play-acted by a mere boy, even though that's exactly what Shakespeare's original audience is viewing at that very moment. In fact, Cleopatra's lines can be read as a potshot at a specific type of child performer. In Shakespeare's day, all-boy acting troupes were popular in their own right, albeit but with a stormy track record for reasons besides sex; boy-players in these all-boy companies skewed somewhat younger than their counterparts as they acted out storylines peopled with and geared toward grown adults. In playhouses as well as at court, these boys (older than ten but younger than fourteen) played not only romantic leads of either sex but also mature men and the elderly. Did the incongruity of such young people playing character types of which they had no firsthand experience neutralize the sting of adult sex and violence, rendering it comical, or did it amplify it? Shakespeare doesn't seem to have produced content for these all-boy troupes, and takes a couple more potshots at them in Hamlet, but a number of his contemporaries like John Webster and Ben Jonson did. One play that might have debuted with one of these companies was Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage -- which opens with Zeus dandling the "wanton boy" Ganymede on his knee and offering him his own wife's jewelry in exchange for embraces and pledges of love. This would hardly have been less scandalous to a society dead-set against sodomy if it were played out between grown men of the same age, but to encounter it as at least an occasional piece of stage fun for an all-boy theater seems deeply strange. Even if Zeus was also played by a boy, play-acting a grown man hugging and kissing another boy? Especially!

Shakespeare's boy-players were by physical necessity young, but not quite as young as their counterparts in all-boy playing companies like St. Paul's Boys or the Children of the Chapel. Their physical slightness and higher voices were assets -- think of Hamlet teasing the boy-actor about his latest growth spurt, By'r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine -- but they had to be old enough to learn their lines with self-possession, physically mature enough to double in the roles of young men, and eventually experienced enough to take on leading-lady roles before ultimately ageing into playing leading men. Boys apprenticed to mixed-age theater companies may have worked in tandem with an older actor to hone their craft -- boys in the progress of maturing into men, old enough for both marriage and business, with years to find their footing in the world of adults. They fit into roughly the same age range as their fellow apprentices in other trades -- generally between thirteen and twenty-one with the range of physical and emotional maturity one might expect in that range, when the process of puberty often began and ended later.

To many modern eyes (including mine) there's something super unsavory about the thought of an actor in their teens acting a love-scene opposite someone a decade their senior, even in pure dialogue -- let alone actually playing out the motions of kissing and caressing or straight-up intercourse. However, it's worth bearing in mind that sexual content on the Elizabethan stage existed much more in the realm of spoken dialogue and ribald suggestion than explicit descriptions of sex acts or onstage physical intimacy, simulated or unsimulated. Traditional oratory suggested the correct body language to pair with a certain speech (supplication and intercession, say, or romantic love) just as more naturalistic acting might have prompted improvisations to suggest romantic passion, but the great diversity of audience members in the Renaissance English theater (all ages, all genders, and all classes -- would you want to risk alienating your bread-and-butter audience with onstage business running wildly beyond contemporary standards of public decency?) and even edgy, atypical scenes like Zeus dandling Ganymede didn't extend to nudity, whether real or faked.

There's all kinds of material that made it to the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage that I wouldn't want to have to explain to a class of fourteen-year-olds -- from brother-sister incest (Tis Pity She's A Whore, The Duchess Of Malfi) to rape and torture (Titus Andronicus, Edward II) to characters freaking out about homosexuality, interracial sex, and interfaith marriage. I don't think that means that material is fundamentally unfit for classroom instruction or that it's obscene, but the ethics of performing that stuff even among grown adults is a hairy prospect, let alone in a workplace environment with about a half-dozen variables that'd send a modern director running screaming. There's been a fair bit of academic scrutiny of the idea that Shakespeare's boy-players may have been appreciated by some audience members for more than their elocution -- that boy-players served as thinly veiled eye candy to the audience members predisposed to seek out attractive young boys exchanging knowing sexual dialogue with men. I'm not sure how much I credit this conceit as a real historic explanation for the contemporary Elizabethan-Jacobean association between sodomites and the theater or as a way of reconciling scenes like Rosalind's epilogue at the end of As You Like It where for a moment the pretense that Rosalind's performer is a woman gets dropped to tease the audience directly about gender and desire:

I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you: and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women--as I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them--that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

Do we have documentary evidence of sexual liaisons between boy actors and their adult fans? No. But that theory exists, and it's out there. The English Renaissance theater was certainly a place where all kinds of sexual commerce took place, between audience members if not necessarily between audience and actors; the promiscuous mixing of identities onstage across lines of class, race, and gender might well have loosened up audience members for transgressions of sexual normalcy once the play was over.

Did Puritan cultural critics take issue with this bawdy intermingling of ages and genders? Did they ever. For a boy "to put one the attire, the gesture, the passions of a woman" (Stephen Gosson's Playes confuted in five actions) was at rock-bottom a lie, a noxious and dangerous lie, just like poor players dressing up in ermine and cloth-of-gold to play kings. At bare minimum all this play-pretend illustrated a fundamental disrespect for God's good order, but the conflation of boys and women lended itself all too easily to sexual sin and confusion. On top of all the other reasons for religious criticisms of the theater -- that they distract from sermons and church services, that they promote devil-worship -- the gestures onstage excite audience members sexually and prompt them into fornication:

[...] mark the flocking and running to theaters and curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. That these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to its mate, every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the sodomites, or worse.

(Phillip Stubbs' The Anatomie of Abuses)

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