Fear in Shakespearean Childhood

Fear in Shakespearean Childhood Morriss Henry Partee University of Utah rioth Shakespeare's extensive references to childhood and his actual portrayal ofyoung people on stage suggest that the playwright thought anxiety permeated the life ofchildren. The pervasive fear which Wilson (Essential 16) sees throughout Shakespeare's restricted cosmos originates in infancy. Parental insecurity would begin with the primitive medicine which made infant and maternal mortality extremely high. Although Shakespeare echoes the common identification of sleeping infants with innocence, he also typically associates babies with tears and crying. Often incompetent, nurses rather than parents usually provide whatever sympathetic infant care exists. Despite the importance ofprogeny, almost all signs of autonomy are anathema to parents. Since Elizabethan parents frequently viewed their children as possessions (Macfarlane 51; Dreher 21), disobedience could instantly convert an apparently deep affection into an even more violent rage. Arbitrary, often irrational, parental demands suppress the natural vigor Shakespeare occasionally attributes to children in the presence of only their peers. This fear may manifest itself in the child internally as sadness, externally as humility. Shakespeare reflects the changing attitude toward the family during the Elizabethan period. Following the pioneering work ofAries, Stone has shown that between 1500 and 1700 the English family structure increasingly depended on the nuclear core instead of the extended family ("Rise" 13). The Puritan movement contributed significantly to this evolution. "Their emphasis on the needs and capacities of individual children, even as it contributed to the eventual cultural triumph ofbourgeois child-centeredness, helped seal the demise ofthe medieval collectivism regretted by nostalgic seventeenth-century Anglicans" (Marcus 43). Stress inevitably accompanied this transition. Although deMause exaggerates the universality of brutality toward children in the past, we must still be careful not to sentimentalize the Elizabethan period. Primitive medicine and harsh parental discipline could "make childhood a prolonged nightmare" (Slater 127). The exploitation of Elizabethan children shows that this period "was no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance, or of loving kindness" (Laslett 4). Most adults demonstrate at best an amused indifference (Stone, Family 160-61). More typically they felt a casual disdain. "To 69 70Rocky Mountain Review Elizabethans, childhood was not a particularly attractive period; it was an unavoidable but trying experience, and the sooner done with the better for everybody" (Thompson 287-88). The Tudors maintained an ambivalent social policy toward children which often intermingled "benevolence and harshness, even ferocity" (Pinchbeck 273). Such official attitudes would offer little extra-familial support for the genuine love which individual parents at this time might feel toward their offspring (Pollock 98), an ambivalence which extends at least through the Victorian period (Macfarlane 53). Shakespeare and the Critics Most critics have overlooked Shakespeare's attitude toward the earlier stages of human life. Literary historians like Coveney (ix), Scudder (104), and MacDonald (6) have pointed out that earlier literature pays little attention to children, while Harbage (256), McMunn (21), and Byrne (196) note that Shakespeare specifically regards young people only as small adults. Such critical simplification has littlejustification. Although Shakespeare creates only about thirty child characters out of a corpus of about one thousand (Pendleton 40), the number of allusions to childhood in the plays testifies to the playwright's enduring interest in children. Encouraged by recent gender criticism, scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance offamily dynamics in Shakespeare. "Shakespeare's art is distinguished by the intensity ofits investment in the human family, and especially in the continuity of the family across generations" (Barber 188). Interpretation of Shakespeare's child characters has polarized the scholars who have attended to the issue. Earlier readers in particular glorified the sentimentality that they saw in the approximately thirteen significant roles for children (Swinburne 75; Barr 4; Terry 27; Hudson 2: 30-31; Bradley 332; Whitehouse 29). On the other hand, readers especially aware of the more naturalistic portrayals of youth during the past two centuries may see the children in Shakespeare's drama as unnaturally idealistic or mature. For instance, Sommerville links Shakespeare with the painter Raphael: "The child characters in Shakespeare's plays have this same sweetness, too loving and brave to be quite real" (82; see also Wagenknecht 87; Kellett 80; Janney 14; Pattison 47). Even more strongly, Garber asserts...