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  • The Child in ShakespeareLetters and Comments to the Editor by Shakespeareans

Boys in Shakespeare

. . . I found myself at the recent meeting of the Shakespeare Association talking about boys in Shakespeare. My presumable subject was Shakespeare's women, but I found I could not discuss the one subject without touching on the other, especially since Shakespeare's women were boys after all; and children, especially male children, still were for him as in the Hellenistic world, available sexual subjects. Thinking of the offstage boy who causes all the trouble in A Midsummer Night's Dream together with Hermione, brought to my mind Blake's little poem:

It was the Greek's love of warTurned Love into a boy,And woman into a statue of stoneAnd away flew every joy.

—Leslie A. Fiedler (Author of The Stranger in Shakespeare)

In Praise of Herod

The children in Shakespeare's plays are a rum lot: but they would not have seemed so strange in the sixteenth century when boys were dressed, and treated, as little adults. The young princes in Richard III, emblems of innocence, seem in their horrible pertness almost to deserve the fate in store for them. The laments of Constance, prolonged as they are, are thought to have been inspired by the early death of the poet's only son; but Arthur indulge s in frigid conceits. Macduff's son is redeemed by his bravery. The boy Marcius is a savage. Perhaps the only child a modern parent would not be ashamed to own is Mamillius, though the schoolboy in The Merry Wives of Windsor is natural and lively. Apart from him the children are introduced, as Dickens introduces most of his, so that they can be liquidated as innocent victims. One suspects that they were played more naturally by the sons of Shakespeare's fellows than by the well-drilled child-actors of today who make one sympathize with King Herod.

—Kenneth Muir (Editor of Shakespeare Survey)

Regarding Shakespeare's use and depiction of children: to my mind what is interesting is the number of them that appear in the plays in comparison with other Elizabethan dramas. I mean authentic young children too, not adolescents like Juliet, Perdita, Marina and Miranda, or Guiderius and Arviragus, those young adults. Casual reflection brings to mind the following characters: The royal princes in Richard III, Lady Macduff's children (I exclude Fleance, his age [End Page 209] being unclear), little Caius Marcius in Coriplanus, young Mamillius in The Winter's Tale, and his baby sister, and possibly Lucius in Julius Caesar. In addition, there are references to Cleopatra's children by Antony and by Julius Caesar, and there is the little "changeling boy" in Midsummer Night's Dream.

The number here accounted for would, I hope, scarcely make for a catalog of the blessed; but it is not completely negligible either. The dramatic role of children in Shakespeare may not be a commanding one; but their symbolic role is in some cases of striking importance. Witness the murder of the princes in Richard III, or the destruction of Lady Macduff and her children. Note further the "banishment" of Perdita and the death of Mamillius. In each of these instances, violence done to youthful innocence is an indicator of the deepest perversion of the hero's human sensibility, and the signal of "Nature" and conscience to turn against him, manifest the power of the universe, and shift the tide of events—for worse, as in the two former illustrations, and, miraculously, for the better in the last.

In Shakespeare, children mean human possibility, and in this sense their role is often symbolically crucial.

—Matthew N. Proser (Author, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies)

Shakespeare's Children

Shakespeare's children are far too articulate for their own good. Though we can accept a stage convention of blank verse and heightened prose from adults, and children in real life use language very much as their parents do, we still seem to feel that children must proclaim their innocence by some well-rehearsed lisping and stumbling.

Shakespeare's children (every one male) are all within the convention of competence in speech, yet they...

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