On the early modern public stage two types of characters were literally inhuman: infants and live animals. What they had in common was that no actors performed their parts. Infants were represented by bundles of blankets or dolls rather than live children, and in the absence of a body beneath the bearing cloth, the only markers of the fictional infant's human status were the actions and words of the players. Without them, the infants would have remained in a thing-like state, suspended somewhere between prop and character.

Infants on stage had to be personified and imagined as human beings because the absence of infants, like the absence of women, was one of the material conditions of Shakespeare's stage. Infants then as now could not be relied upon to remain silent as needed, and they could easily have disrupted a performance, as we know from several Victorian-era productions that were spoiled by the untimely crying of their smallest cast members. Given the non-realist mode of the early modern theatre, audiences would have been less likely than Victorian viewers to regard the substitution of dolls for ‘real live’ infants as ‘absurdities’, making the necessity of taking the risk less worthwhile. Moreover, live babies would have required a caretaker, since the Victorian practice of using one of the actress's children would not have been an option with an allmale cast.