Performing Puberty: Fertile Complexions in Shakespeare’s Plays

I would there were no age between ten andthree-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out therest; for there is nothing in the between but gettingwenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing,fighting—Hark you now! Would any but these boiled-brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt thisweather?

—William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 3.3.58–64

The Old Shepherd’s words in The Winter’s Tale, which rehearse familiar ideas about youth, provide a pertinent starting point for an analysis of adolescence in early modern drama. Firstly, the shepherd describes behavioral characteristics that he suggests are typical of youth: begetting illegitimate children, disrespect for elders and authority, crime and violence. Such ideas fit with easily-performed traits of masculine “swaggering youth” that cross-dressed heroines regularly claim to adopt, in gestures to a stereotype that initially orientate the audience’s understanding of age and gender appropriate to a theatrical disguise.¹ By including the sexual ruin of “wenches,” moreover, the shepherd’s speech acknowledges that adolescence threatens disorderly implications for young women. This regrettable “age” is undergone by both sexes. Secondly, as realized in the shepherd’s derisory comment about “boiled brains,” the erratic youths’ behavior is understood to result from the humoral condition appropriate to age, which—within a life cycle that generally presented ageing as a process of cooling and drying out—framed youth as hot and dry, where adolescents became disassociated from the excessive moisture of childhood but still possessed the surplus heat that promoted such heat-fuelled acts as venery, argument, and violence. Thirdly, as words spoken by a father, the shepherd provides a parental response to youth, which—when seen to include hazardous behavior—is figured as a difficult time for parents, who might desire that “no age” existed between childhood and adulthood at all.

In these ways, the shepherd promptly takes us to some well-known approaches to adolescence in early modern culture, where youth has similarly been characterized as a precarious age that must be endured until the stability of adulthood is achieved. Coppélia Kahn’s infamous analysis of “Coming of Age” in Romeo and Juliet, for example, has considered the extremes of adolescent actions to reveal “rites of passage, phallic violence and adolescent motherhood, typical for youth in Verona” (20). According to Kahn, early modern adolescence appears to have been shaped by its entanglement with the patriarchal familial bonds against which Romeo and Juliet must try to define themselves. Similarly, for Ursula Potter, parental anxieties regarding adolescence are seen to lead to restrictive checks upon girls’ behavior and the diagnosis of puberty as a disease. Potter, like Helen King, observes that female puberty posed particular concerns, where sexual maturation could lead to greensickness, a condition that might be relieved through sexual intercourse, but where the “cure” heightened parental concern for, and control of, their daughters’ sexual development.

Concerned parents and adolescence as a problem age are, therefore, familiar ideas within early modern studies. The material for constructing youth in negative terms is certainly available, as Kahn, Potter, and King have shown. But is early modern youth really to be understood as solely bound to bodily changes that threatened physical harm and the destruction of families? The short answer is: no, within early modern culture adolescence was as much about expected and desired change as it was about self-destructive behavior and destabilizing existing family bonds. As some notable interventions regarding perceptions of adolescence have begun to tease out, constructions of adolescence in terms of social and gender relations realize positive formulations alongside the more familiar negative ones cited above. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos’s study of adolescence within the context of apprenticeships and other work-related relationships has situated youth beyond the structure of the family and helped highlight the considerable influence adolescent individuals had within early modern societies. Jennifer Higginbotham’s recent investigation into the discursive complexities surrounding girlhood, moreover, provides an important expansion of Ben-Amos’s positioning of age in relation to gender and class by adding the cultural prominence of “girls” to the early [End...