e ages (Hillebrand 9). Watching the boy companies perform became her favored pastime during the first ten years of her reign. The majority of performances awarded by the queen were given by the boy companies; between 1558 and 1576 the queen awarded seventy-eight performances. Out of those seventy-eight performances forty-six went to boy companies and only 32 went to adult companies. Out of those forty-six performances, twenty-one of those were given by Elizabeth's favored boy company, the Children of Paul's. This was all do to the great leadership of Sebastian Westcott. Sebastian was made "master of the song school in 1560" (Chambers 12). Little is known of his earlier life, but throughout his tenure as director of Paul's Boys, they were to perform no less than twenty-seven times at court between 1560 and 1582. The boys' performances, though enjoyed by the queen, would come under great scrutiny from Puritan preachers. In a pamphlet attacking a specific boys, group the writer unknown stated: "plays will never be suppressed while her majesty's unfledged minions flaunt it in silks and satins... These pretty upstart youths profane the Lord's day by the Lascivious withering of their tender limbs and gorgeous decking of their apparel in feigning bawdy fables gathered from idolatrous heathen poets" (Pg 368 Somerset). These were sentiments shared by many Puritans but that was not to stop many of the court appearances. The Paul's Boys would go on to perform such pieces as The Bugbears (a translation from the Greek of Euripides, by Lady Lumley), Error, Titus and Gisippus, The Marriage of Mind and Measure, Scipio Africanus, and Cupid and Psyche. Westcott Died in 1582, which would start the downfall of the Paul's Boys. They would change masters three more times and give less and less performances at court. The next septennial period, 1583-90, would witness the extinction, for a decade or more, of the boy companies. It is stated that the "ultimate s...
