Shakespeare and Childhood (review)

As an enthusiastic consumer and critic of children’s texts that use Shakespeare in any way, I felt genuine excitement at learning of a new collection of essays seeking to examine just such cultural moments and examples. I was ultimately both pleased and disappointed with Chedgzoy, Greenhalgh, and Shaughnessy’s Shakespeare and Childhood when I discovered the volume is strong on Shakespeare, but lacks strength in its accounts of children’s literature and culture.

The year 2007 marked the bicentenary of the first prose adaptations of Shakespeare for children in English. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare offered narratives based on twenty of Shakespeare’s plays, and in doing so, established both a long-lasting template for ways and means of offering Shakespeare to young readers, and a range of implicit anxieties about the legitimacy of doing so. The Lambs seem to express no doubt that children should read Shakespeare, but nonetheless, “it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length” (Lamb and Lamb, Tales 17). Not only did the Lambs initiate Shakespeare for children, but they also consciously intervened in contemporary debates about children’s literature, its ideal content, and its ideal mode. Charles Lamb’s well-known epistolary outburst about “the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights & Blasts of all that is Human in man & child” (Lamb and Lamb, Letters 81–82) can be seen impacting on his and his sister’s own attempts at producing “enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue” (Lamb and Lamb, Tales 17). The extent to which 1807 stands as an originary date for children’s Shakespeare is emphasized by the first appearance of a Bowdlerized Shakespeare, produced by Henrietta Bowdler but published anonymously. In the 2007 Penguin Classics edition of the Tales, Marina Warner notes that the “book has never been out of print, and editions still follow one another briskly, with illustrators inventively continuing the work of imagination which the Lambs began” (xxi). Given both the cultural import of Shakespeare and the developments of children’s literary criticism, it is unsurprising that 2007 saw the publication of Shakespeare and Childhood, a collection of fourteen essays seeking to intervene in precisely the kinds of debates initiated by the Lambs.

The volume claims to be “the first definitive study of a surprisingly underdeveloped area of scholarly investigation, namely the relationship between Shakespeare, children and childhood from Shakespeare’s time to the present” (cover blurb). Unfortunately, children’s literature specialists are unlikely to see the work as definitive or decisive so far as children’s literature is concerned. Despite excellent essays on child characters in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as on children in Shakespeare’s era, the book contains only one introductory essay and three scholarly essays dedicated to contemporary children’s texts. Perhaps my greatest concern with the volume is that, despite Greenhalgh’s important observation that “concepts of childhood, as well as of Shakespeare, are intrinsically bound up with questions of ideology, especially with issues of class, and economic and cultural privilege” (118), such questions are rarely addressed by the contributors, most of whom seem to have a fundamental faith in the value of “Shakespeare” and therefore are unlikely to question the circulation of the man or his works in children’s culture.

Those interested in the uses to which Shakespeare has been put in children’s literature are perhaps better directed toward the two volumes on Shakespeare and children’s literature that predate this text, Megan Lynn Isaac’s Heirs to Shakespeare: Reinventing the Bard in Young Adult Literature (2000) and Naomi J. Miller’s Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults (2003). Isaac’s text is useful for teachers interested in broadening their Shakespearean curriculum, and Miller’s volume includes essays from critics, children’s authors, and pedagogy specialists. Of course, neither of these books addresses in any depth the presence and functions of children or childhood in Shakespeare’s playtexts; such discussions are...