From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore, the

Folgers director. Since the early 1990s, the academic genre known as Girlhood Studies has explored

the world of female pre-adolescence, using the methods of sociology and anthropology, as well as literary and cultural studies.

During its first decade, Girlhood Studies looked primarily at contemporary issues and trends,

but since the early 2000s, the field has begun to look back into the past.

2014 saw one of the first books published looking at early modern girlhood.

Perhaps because it was written by a Shakespeare scholar, Deanne Williams of York University in Toronto,

the book focuses on how Shakespeare portrayed girls and girlhood in his plays and what those portrayals tell us about life in Elizabethan and Jacoby in England.

The book is called Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood,

and Diane came to Washington recently to discuss it with us.

We call this podcast, Why, Here's a Girl.

Deanne is interviewed by Neba Grant.

At the time Shakespeare was writing, the very

word girl was dynamic, wasn't it? It was a fluid word. Right. During Shakespeare's time in the

16th century, the word for a girl was very much still in flux. It was just beginning to solidify around the definition that we

have for it today, which is female child or young woman. But in the middle ages, the word girl was

something that was a word that was used for a child of either sex. William Langland in Pierce Plowman

talks of a grammar for girls.

And we know that in the middle ages, only boys attended grammar schools.

So he was talking about boys when he was using the word girl.

And did that reflect, at least as far as the middle ages were concerned, did that reflect

how actual boys and girls were thought of, which is sort of just smaller versions of adults and their gender was sort of irrelevant?

...