Shakespeare’s Boys: A Cultural History by Katie Knowles (review)

A comprehensive account of the cultural significance of boyhood in Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare’s Boys will be of interest to scholars in several fields, including childhood, character, and masculinity studies. Shakespeare’s Boys joins several recent book-length studies of children in Shakespeare, but provides a fuller account of boyhood in particular and reaches beyond the early modern period to address the plays’ performance history from the Restoration to the present. Knowles examines how Shakespeare’s boy characters relate to particular social types, such as the schoolboy, page, or noble heir. More broadly, she defines the boys in her study as “characters in flux” (3) in a double sense: first, boyhood represents a “fluid and transitional” (2) period between childhood and adulthood; second, the “fluctuating cultural constructions of boyhood” (3) throughout British history have shifted the function and significance of Shakespeare’s boy characters in performance. Knowles also explores how the contested meanings of boyhood in Shakespeare’s era were shaped by the ideologies and institutions that defined early modern masculinity.

The first half of the book, “Early Modern Boyhoods,” considers how thinking about succession, education, and militarism informs Shakespeare’s creation of boy characters; the second part, “Afterlives,” examines how later stage and film versions of the plays altered the portrayal of boys to suit culturally dominant conceptions about childhood. Each chapter highlights a “division, contradiction or ambiguity” in the cultural construction of boyhood (5). Knowles’s analyses of the plays are enriched by astute close readings. Citing primary sources such as Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster (1570) and the domestic advice book The Office of Christian Parents (1616), Knowles effectively demonstrates how Shakespeare’s plays engage early modern debates about schooling and child-rearing.

In chapter 1, which looks at the Henry VI plays, Richard III, King John, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, Knowles uses the term “noble imp” to epitomize Shakespeare’s contradictory depiction of elite boys: “imp” could mean the scion of a noble family or a mischievous little devil. Although these different connotations illuminate different qualities of boyhood, Knowles presses them into the service of a too-neat distinction between boys as objects and boys as subjects. When used to denote an heir, Knowles claims, “imp” reduces a boy to a “dynastic [object]”; when used to denote childish mischief, “imp” acknowledges a boy’s “individual nature” (14). But to be recognized as an heir does not necessarily constitute objectification, especially given the privilege that comes with that status. Likewise, to acknowledge a boy’s playful disposition does not constitute an attribution of individuality, particularly when we consider that the mischievous boy is also a type. Knowles’s commitment to this conceptual division leads to an overly schematic reading of Arthur in King John. Arguing that Arthur convinces Hubert to spare his life by appealing to their “personal relationship” (38), Knowles fails to acknowledge that Arthur also addresses Hubert as a loyal servant who has enjoyed intimacy with a “‘prince’” (39). If Knowles too easily separates personal and political identities, however, she does produce a convincing account of both the privilege and the burden of succession for noble boys in the histories and tragedies.

In chapter 2, Knowles explores Shakespeare’s representation in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus of the fraught transition from childhood to adulthood. The wartime setting of these plays pressures boys into violently proving their manhood too precipitously. Titus authorizes Young Lucius to adopt an aggressively male role during his father’s absence; Lucius’s reestablishment of patriarchal order requires the boy to revert to a typically childish tenderness. Coriolanus, having been “prematurely immersed in manhood” (84) as an adolescent warrior, finds his adulthood compromised by the lack of psychological and political skills that he never took the time to develop. More speculatively, Knowles suggests that Coriolanus and his young son served as a warning to the martially inclined Prince Henry, who also risked entering prematurely into manhood.

Chapter 3...