When I first started working on girlhood, I shared with other scholars the belief that, with one or two exceptions, young female children did not appear as characters in English Renaissance drama. Although I was arguing for a more expansive definition of who counted as a ‘girl’, I had a lingering sense of unease when other scholars would ask, ‘Are there any female children in Renaissance drama?’ As the preceding chapter makes clear, female infants were present in significant numbers, but people were asking me about a particular type of female child: the pre-adolescent girl who functions predominantly as a child, who walks and talks, receives an education and participates in social relations but whose role is not predominantly sexual or romantic. By and large, the young female characters in canonical plays from the period do not correspond to the modern notion of what counts as a girl. One of my initial goals, therefore, was to figure out why that was the case. After all, plenty of young boys traversed the early modern stage. Catherine Belsey's recent study of boy apprentices in the adult companies has illuminated the importance of these roles for training boys to take on larger, more advanced female leads like Rosalind and Cleopatra. Until Belsey called attention to them, these pages had gone largely unanalysed, and she provides a wonderfully material account of the function of these ‘incidental children’.