Abstract/Summary

The repertoire of the boys’ companies in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is characterised, in part, by experiments with a burlesque style and an aggressive mode of intertextuality that testifies to a sustained dialogue with the performance culture of the Inns of Court revels. A subgenre of serio ludere, serious play, the revels are a hybrid form that freely mixes ceremonial structures with bawdy farce and the rites of violence. By entering into a conversation with the Inns of Court revels, the boys’ companies advertised their shared pedagogic performance culture at a time when their own educational links were becoming increasingly attenuated. Borrowing jests from the revels therefore provided a means of claiming shared educational capital. The mode of fraternity promoted within these all-male pedagogic institutions relied on rites of violence, which incorporated satire and burlesque, to assert institutional privilege and to fashion elite corporate identities.