Staging Boys, 1690–1990 Available to Purchase

Chapter 6 revisits A Midsummer Night’s Dream with an eye on the Anglo-American staging history of the Indian boy within the historical context of (in)visible abducted boys. While the Indian boy was mostly rendered invisible since his first probable appearance on stage in 1692, he has at other times appeared on stage as a little boy, a girl, an adult man, an orientalized teen, an African American youth, and even a puppet. This chapter traces the Indian boy on stage and in the visual arts and finally focuses on the 1991 Shakespeare Santa Cruz production by putting into dialogue postcolonial, critical race, and queer analytics to exemplify a transhistorical intersectional lens. This approach demonstrates that the (in)visibility of the Indian boy on stage speaks of a sexual and racial history of interracial and intergenerational desire while marking erotic continuities and ruptures from the early modern period.