- Shakespeare in Children's Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital
I distinctly remember the period in graduate school when I abandoned Shakespeare as my field of study: despite a great affection for the subject, I felt there was no longer any "undiscovered country" in Shakespeare scholarship, not much new to say after nearly four centuries. How fortunate that scholars like Erica Hateley are not so easily discouraged by the vast sea of earlier spilt ink and, accordingly, chart new courses with fresh ideas and theoretical tools. Her book will be of considerable use in a number of fields—including children's literature, Shakespeare studies, cultural studies—and it should be read by serious practitioners of pedagogy, especially those teachers concerned with gender issues and the creation of future critical readers.
In Hateley's introduction she comments on recent studies of the intersections of Shakespeare and children's literature, taking into account Megan Isaac's Heirs to Shakespeare: Reinventing the Bard in Young Adult Literature (2000), Charles Frey's "A Brief History of Shakespeare as Children's Literature," published in New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship (2001), Naomi Miller's collection What's In a Name (2003), and Kate Chedgzoy et al. Shakespeare and Childhood (2007). Hateley's study differs in that she is applying Pierre Bourdieu's idea of cultural capital and its links to scholastic achievement and class, while extending his theories with her own ideas on gender:
It is my overarching contention that Shakespearian capital operates within a patriarchal model in contemporary children's fiction, and does so in order to privilege masculine cultural subjectivity and delimit feminine cultural subjectivity. Thus while Bourdieu is specifically interested in the extent to which the educational system is complicit in the circulation and transmission of hierarchical cultural capital, I am interested in the inscription of children as the gendered future-bearers of cultural capital within their literature rather than their classrooms.
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Using "Shakespeared" literature, always clearly differentiating between adaptations and appropriations, Hateley reveals how "'Shakespeare' has become the vehicle of naturalised, historicised and authorised discourses of normative gender, subjectivity and behaviour" (19). In order to work in depth through a wide variety of children's literature, Hateley has chosen three Shakespearean focus [End Page 396] texts: Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest, each of which has prompted much adaptation and appropriation. I pondered at some length why Romeo and Juliet, surely swotted over in the English classroom by many a fourteen year old while teachers proffered film adaptations and spin-off novels based on its romance plot as sweeteners of the task, was not a focus text. But Lady Macbeth and the Witches gave Hateley much more substantial grist for her feminist mill, and we can always put R&J through its paces using Hateley's critical stratagem on our own time.
Chapter 1, "Romantic Roots," begins with texts from the nineteenth century that served to introduce the child to Shakespeare—Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Mary Cowden Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1851), and Edith Nesbit's Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (1907), which Hateley gives short shrift, and rightly so. Choosing Macbeth for her focus because all three works look at the play, she shows how Charles Lamb (who wrote the adaptations for the tragedies) effectively silenced Lady Macbeth and, in some ways, his tragic sister-collaborator, while Cowden Clarke offers "The Thane's Daughter" as a victim of patriarchal treatment.
Chapter 2, "Author(is)ing the Child," discusses historical fictions in which William Shakespeare appears as a character, among them Geoffrey Trease's Cue for Treason (1940, Gary Blackwood's trilogy (1995–2003), Grace Tiffany's My Father Had a Daughter (2003), and Peter Hassinger's Shakespeare's Daughter (2004). Blending close reading of the novels with her theoretical modes, Hateley shows how male characters often move into a maturation that involves mastery of language and access to a new world (including a sort of "adoption" by Shakespeare himself) while female characters seem marginalized, excluded...