Introduction: Children and Theatre

Thinking back on any children’s literature courses you have ever taken, taught, or heard about, can you recall the inclusion of even a single children’s play? I am happy to use myself as a (bad) example: despite my own extensive involvement as a child in various kinds of theatrical productions, I have never assigned a play in any of my courses—except Peter Pan (1904), that eternal exception to the rule, which I taught once in a graduate seminar before deciding that I preferred teaching the novella. Barrie’s sly, self-revealing narrative voice furnishes so much dirt for interpreters to dig into, I reasoned to myself, whereas the dramatic version—despite its amusingly prolix stage directions—reads like a stripped-down blueprint in comparison. I missed what wasn’t there, and reverted to my old playless ways.

Until recently, nothing in the scholarship suggested that omitting any mention of theatre or performance from a children’s literature survey course would be a problematic choice. Scholarly histories, handbooks, and companions to children’s literature spent almost no time discussing drama, even as theorists attempting to define what children’s literature is excluded it from their discussion on the grounds that “the literature contains little drama, whether in prose or verse, worth serious attention” (Fadiman 17).¹ As the appearance of this special issue on “Children and Theatre” indicates, however, we have arrived at an exciting moment when a critical mass of scholars interested in children’s literature and childhood studies are turning to theatre history and performance studies in ways that can and should transform not just how we teach our courses, but also how we historicize and theorize about children’s literature and indeed childhood itself.

In their stimulating new accounts of the history of children’s literature, for instance, Penny Brown and Seth Lerer characterize their subject as “full of theatre” (Lerer 5). This is because, unlike many of their predecessors, they refuse to sever the history of children’s literature from the history of education and rhetoric. Whereas earlier scholars such as F. J. Harvey Darton limited their surveys to “printed works produced ostensibly to give children pleasure, and not primarily to teach them” (1), Brown and Lerer consider texts written or adapted for children to perform in the classroom, church, and home as an early form of children’s literature. Because memorization and recitation lay at the core of literacy instruction from classical antiquity onward, they observe, school colloquies and plays proliferated alongside catechisms, dramatic dialogues and proverbs. English examples of school dramas include Ralph Roister Doister (c.1552) and A New Interlude for Children to Play Named Jack Juggler, both Witty and Very Pleasant (c.1558); as Jonathan Levy notes, drama became such a central part of the educational system “that Ben Jonson was prompted to rail against schoolmasters ‘who make all their scholars play-boys’” (2).

In order to honor the fact that “some of the earliest works written especially for the young—other than textbooks—were plays” (Brown 23), those of us who teach children’s literature survey courses might open with a unit on “Dialogic Didacticism.” In the Anglo-American context, such a unit could begin with an excerpt from a catechism such as John Cotton’s hilariously named Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes . . . Drawn Out of the Breasts of Both Testaments (1646)—one of the first children’s books published in the United States—or a poetic colloquy such as the New England Primer’s version of “A Dialogue between Christ, Youth, and the Devil” (c. 1727). In order to acknowledge the internationalism of the eighteenth-century children’s book market, such a unit could also include a short play from Madame de Genlis’s Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes (1779–80) or Arnaud Berquin’s L’ Ami des enfans (1782–83), both of which were quickly translated into English as The Theatre of Education (1781) and The Children’s Friend (1786) and reprinted many times in the United Kingdom and the United States. Their popularity inspired children’s writers such as Hannah More, Charles Stearns, William...