Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen, and: Shakespeare and Childhood (review)

The two books under review speak to a facet of Shakespeare’s work that has been strangely invisible—until now. Both provide lists of the children who figure in the plays, one in a substantial appendix (Shakespeare and Childhood), the other woven into Carol Chillington Rutter’s arresting early pages; these lists come as a revelation. We all know about Shakespeare’s almost obsessive interest in family; but I (and I suspect I am not alone) have not thought much about the children who people the plays, nor had I thought there were so many. Most of us would, if asked, mention Mamillius; the young princes murdered in the tower; Macduff’s tough provocative son; perhaps young Martius, with his penchant for mammocking butterflies; or young Lucius, his counterpart in Titus Andronicus, just as robust but more sensitive. But there are so many more: Moth/Mote in Love’s Labor’s Lost; William and Robin in The Merry Wives of Windsor; the many lost sons in the Henry VI plays; Clarence’s children in Richard III; Arthur in King John; Fleance in Macbeth; another Lucius in Julius Caesar; the page Bartholomew in The Taming of the Shrew; Falstaff’s witty boy in Henry IV who is slaughtered in Henry V; Benedick’s, Brutus’s, Mariana’s, and Troilus’s boys; the musical pages in As You Like It; a host of other pages, including the illiterate lad in Timon of Athens who appears with letters; and maybe too, depending on the performance, the changeling child in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then there are the figures who straddle boyhood and adulthood: Francis Flute (who has “a beard coming” [Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.2.47–48]), Francis the drawer, the Player Queen, the “cream-faced loon” in Macbeth (5.3.2)¹. And babies, some born, some yet to be born: Aaron’s sturdy “black slave” in Titus Andronicus (4.2.120), Perdita, Marina, and Princess Elizabeth; the baby that “groaning Juliet” carries in Measure for Measure (2.2.15) and the young one that Helena feels kick. There is also a group of notional or symbolic children, evocatively conjured by Rutter, although absent from the more businesslike catalogue in Shakespeare and Childhood: Lady Macbeth’s missing nursling, Cleopatra’s viperous infant at her breast, the apparitions in Macbeth, the two sets of twins clinging to either end of the mast in The Comedy of Errors. Just to review the long list is to realize the importance of children in the plays, as, apparently, in the world out of which they grew.

So these books work to establish a subfield in Shakespeare studies. Both want to examine not only how Shakespeare’s portrayals of children arise out of and speak to their early modern context but also how some subsequent places and times (Britain and North America exclusively, the 20th and 21st centuries, mainly) have fashioned Shakespeare’s children in new ways. Both regard representations of children as, in Rutter’s words, “constitutive of adult projects” (xiv), and both are interested in how children signify in the texts and outside them. The anthology’s range is necessarily wider than Rutter’s, covering a variety of reimaginings, including nineteenth-century children’s periodicals and drama, Ellen Terry’s memoirs, film, novels for young people, twenty-first-century educational practices, and ’tween television shows. Rutter’s focus on textual and theatrical representation is narrower but richer, since she is able to go into a depth not achievable in the collection.

Shakespeare and Childhood is divided into two parts, the first devoted to “Shakespeare’s Children” in their Elizabethan contexts, the second to “Children’s Shakespeares” in later appropriations. The first section offers...