Shakespeare and Child's Play

Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen

Carol Chillington Rutter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415365185
• eBook ISBN: 9781134216680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare wrote more than fifty parts for children, amounting to the first comprehensive portrait of childhood in the English theatre. Focusing mostly on boys, he put sons against fathers, servants against masters, innocence against experience, testing the notion of masculinity, manners, morals, and the limits of patriarchal power. He explored the nature of relationships and ideas about parenting in terms of nature and nurture, permissiveness and discipline, innocence and evil. He wrote about education, adolescent rebellion, delinquency, fostering, and child-killing, as well as the idea of the redemptive child who 'cures' diseased adult imaginations.

'Childness' – the essential nature of being a child – remains a vital critical issue for us today. In Shakespeare and Child's-Play Carol Rutter shows how recent performances on stage and film have used the range of Shakespeare's insights in order to re-examine and re-think these issues in terms of today's society and culture.

Chapter 1
‘Behold the Child’ or Parts for Children

Good luck, an’t be thy will! What have we here? Mercy on’s, a barne! A very pretty barne. A boy or a child, I wonder?

The Winter’s Tale (3.3.67–9)

Children, as Peter Laslett has observed, were everywhere.

Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, 1982

Some people observed children very closely.

Keith Thomas, ‘Children in Early Modern England’, 1989

A city progress

Beginning with a desire to glimpse those early modern English children whom Laslett knows ‘were everywhere’, I start not with material traces, family portraits of the elite or funerary monuments, or woodcuts depicting the Elizabethan classroom or children’s games, but with what Clifford Geertz would call an ‘acted document’, a performance staged on the streets of London, indeed, the ‘original’ Elizabethan public performance, a performance recorded by Richard Mulcaster and incorporated into Raphael Holinshed’s monumental Chronicles.¹

On Saturday, 14 January 1559, Elizabeth I, proclaimed Queen of England two months earlier at the death of her sister Mary, left the Tower where she’d spent the night to begin her progress through the City of London to Westminster, a civic display, showing the monarch to the people in advance of her coronation the following day.² She was ‘richely furnished’ and ‘most honorably accompanied’ and, entering the City, ‘she was of the people receiued marueylous entierly’ with ‘prayers, wishes, welcomminges, cryes, tender words, and all other signes’ that ‘argue a wonderful earnest loue of most obedient subiectes towarde theyr soueraigne’. For her part, she showed ‘her most gracious loue’, not just ‘toward the people in generall’, but also ‘priuately’, to ‘the baser personages’, stopping to hear their words and to accept their humble gifts when they ‘offred her grace … flowres’. At the end of the day, the branch of rosemary an old woman had handed her still remained (it was said) in her chariot. It was as if, wrote Richard Mulcaster, the City had been transformed into a vast theatre, and the citizens into spectators on this royal performance. London that day was ‘a stage, wherin was shewed the wonderfull spectacle, of a noble hearted princesse toward her most louing people, & the peoples exceding comfort in beholding so worthy a soueraigne.’

But if Elizabeth played a ‘wonderfull spectacle’ to the City, the City played its own spectacles back to the queen. Five times along the route her progress was halted by performance. Near Fenchurch ‘was erected a scaffold richely furnished, whereon stode a noyse of instrumentes, and a chylde in costly apparell’ who was ‘appoynted to welcome the queenes maiestie in the hole cities behalfe’. Elizabeth ordered her chariot ‘stayde’ and the noise ‘appeased’ so that the child’s oration ‘in Englishe meter’ could be heard. Further on, at Gracechurch Street, a massive stage had been raised: battlements containing three arches, above them, smaller stages in degrees, and installed in these spaces, a living ‘show’ of the queen’s right to the throne she claimed from her grandfather. At the lowest level, Henry Tudor (heir to the house of Lancaster) sat alongside Elizabeth York, a red rose springing from his arch, a white rose from hers, twining upwards into a single branch enclosing, on the platform above, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and hence upwards to ‘one representyng’ their daughter Elizabeth, ‘now our most dradde soueraigne Ladie, crowned and apparrelled’ as herself. All of these ‘personages’ were played by children – and it was a child who ‘declared’ to the queen the ‘hole meaning’ of the pageant, Elizabeth not only ordering silence from the murmuring crowd so that she could hear the child’s oration but ‘caus[ing] her chariot to be remoued back’ so that ‘she could see’ the children in the recesses set ‘farthest in’. At the conduit at Cornhill, she encountered herself again: ‘a chylde representing her maiesties person’, ‘placed in a seate of gouernement’ supported by ‘certayne vertues’ – Pure Religion, Love of Subjects, Wisdom, Justice – who suppressed ‘their contrarie vyces vnder their feete’. Again, a ‘chylde’ was placed to ‘interprete and applye’ the tableau vivant, and the queen again ordered her chariot ‘drawen nyghe’ so that she ‘myght heare the chylds oration’. Moving on to Soper Lane she saw ‘a pageant’ presenting, this time, ‘eight children’ ‘appointed & apparrelled’ to represent the ‘eight beatitudes’. At the Little Conduit in Cheapside, a child appeared ‘all cladde in whyte silke’; ‘hir name’ – ‘Veritas’, ‘Trueth’ – was ‘written on her brest’, and ‘Temporis filia, the daughter of Tyme’ was set in a cartouche above her head. This child named ‘Trueth’ handed the queen a ‘booke … vpon the which was written verbum veritatis, the word of truth’. It was the Bible, in English.³

All of these pageants – including the last, a ‘show’ of Deborah governing Israel – were ‘interpreted’ by children. At every venue, children delivered orations in English and Latin. So, too, at ‘Paules scole’ and ‘S. Dunstones church’ where the ‘children of thospitall’ were ‘appointed to stand with their gouernours’. Seeing the hospitallers put the queen in mind of what, she signalled, she must, ‘in the middest of my royaltie’, ‘nedes remembre’: the poor. Finally then, at Temple Bar, she encountered ‘a noyse of singing children’ and ‘one child richely attyred as a Poet’ who gave ‘the queens maiestie her fare well in the name of the hole citie’, Elizabeth answering, ‘Amen’ as she exited.

Passing through London, everywhere she looked, Elizabeth saw children, her populous city made into a visual performance text crowded with her ‘minor subjects’. Momentarily, indeed, she was recalled to her own childhood – when she overheard someone in the crowd call out, ‘Remember old king Henry theyght’. As Mulcaster recorded, at ‘the very remembraunce of her fathers name’ she acted the part of a ‘naturall’ child – and ‘smiled’.

How very different had been her sister’s coronation entry, five years earlier. Then, the pageants were made not by Mary’s loving subjects, certainly not by children, but by foreigners, the City overrun by strangers, ‘the Genowaies’, ‘the Easterlings’, ‘the Florentins’ – and a Dutchman ‘that stood on the weathercocke of Paules steeple’.⁴ By contrast, it was noted, Elizabeth’s London ‘without anie forreyne persone, of it selfe beawtifyed it selfe’. But why, overwhelming this civic performance text, the children?

No doubt political tact played a part. A child playing the queen to the queen’s face, ‘boy’ to her ‘greatness’, could hardly be taken for anything more than ‘cipher’ to her ‘great accompt’, no contest. But more explicitly, perhaps the City’s meaning was ‘interpreted’ three days later, at the opening of Parliament. The ‘common house’ entered a motion for ‘accesse vnto hir graces presence’ to ‘declare vnto hir matter of great importance’ to ‘hir … realme’. The ‘matter’? ‘To mooue hir grace to marriage’ so that, said the speaker, ‘we might injoie … the roiall issue of hir bodie to reigne ouer vs.’ No rhetorical beating about the bush, then. The City, the Commons wanted children, royal issue, to secure the succession of a reign not yet three months old. Those children in the coronation pageants: if they weren’t aphrodisiac (exactly) then perhaps they were aides memoire.⁵

From their point of view, the Commons and City were right to look anxiously for children. Simply, England had suffered turbulent times because the Tudors, as breeders, had been disastrous. Elizabeth’s little brother, Edward VI, a child ‘untimely ripp’d’ from his dying mother’s womb, had inherited as a nine-year-old in 1547, reigned for only six years, died issueless (with appalling consequences for England’s Protestant Reformation), and left behind a succession crisis, the nine-day ‘reign’ of Lady Jane Grey that ended with multiple executions.⁶ Elizabeth’s older sister, Mary, was thirty-seven and unmarried when she was proclaimed queen – and immediately set about restoring Catholicism to England, a project that would depend ultimately on dynastic continuity, on children. And it looked as if her plans would thrive. Within weeks of her marriage to Philip of Spain in July 1553 it was announced that the queen was ‘quicke with child’. Public prayers were ordered to acknowledge the ‘good hope of certeine succession in the crowne … giuen vnto vs’; there was ‘busie preparation and much adoo’, ‘especiallie among such as seemed in England to carrie Spanish hearts in English bodies’. ‘Midwiues, rockers, nurses, with the cradle and all’ were organised for the ‘yoong maister’ whose birth was confidently announced across England and Europe with bells and bonfires the following June, one clergyman in London even describing in detail the person of the newborn – but for all that, the child refused to come.⁷ Phantom pregnancy followed phantom pregnancy: ‘neuer worse successe had anie woman, than had she in hir childbirth’.⁸ Mary died of complications arising from dysmenorrhoea in 1558. Again, childlessness instanced radical regime change: Catholic restoration as crown policy died with Mary.⁹

Elizabeth herself was not exempt from this history. It was partly her father’s inability to produce a (legitimate) male heir that prompted the divorce crisis of 1532. Elizabeth’s birth the following year deprived sixteen-year-old Mary not just of succession but lavish paternal favour. (As a child, Mary’s household had been allocated 18 per cent of the total outlay of the whole royal household.) These were reversals Elizabeth perhaps pondered later, growing up, when paternal favour was, in her turn, withdrawn: when she was declared illegitimate, the child of adultery (indeed, according to some, the child of incest); her mother executed for slandering not just the succession but her child by ‘offend[ing] in incontinency’.¹⁰ Progressing royally through London in January 1559, Elizabeth may have reflected ironically on the whirligig of Time coming full circle. She had been here before: Anne Boleyn had been nearly six months pregnant with Elizabeth when she’d followed the same route toward her coronation in May 1533.

Setting children so conspicuously before the new queen’s eyes, the City was alluding to, recasting this history, using children to elicit the hopes and fears of the nation, to figure real political arrangements allegorically and to voice messages her adult subjects wanted heard in public, the children carrying a burden of representation that evoked adult fantasy, adult memory – and served to focus cultural anxieties. The City (as explanatory ‘sentences’ attached to each of the pageants informed spectators) wanted ‘quietnes’, ‘unitie’, ‘all dissention displaced’; it wanted ‘the seate of gouernaunce’ upheld ‘by vertue’ and the queen to ‘continue in her goodnesse as she had entered’, both distributing and receiving blessings; it wanted her to remember ‘the state of the common weale’, to hold fast to ‘Truth’, and to reign as the new Deborah. It saw Elizabeth as the ‘heire to agreement’, hearing in her name a memory of the grandmother who, by marriage, ‘ioyned those houses’ that ‘had ben th’occasyon’ of ‘ciuil warre within thys realm’, civil wars that were only seventy years in the nation’s past. The City was framing an entire ideological and aspirational programme of relationship between the monarchy and the people, representing it in ‘speaking pictures’, in dumb shows, and ‘opening’ it out to understanding in written texts on illustrative tablets and in spoken texts, orations. Presenting the City’s policy, the pageant children were its conduits, messengers exempt from the message, speaking ‘wiser’ than they could possibly have been ‘ware’, who nevertheless ‘stood in’ for that policy, embodied it.

But what of the children themselves? Who were they? Who trained them? The young Latin orators: were they grammar school boys from Paul’s or Christ’s Hospital? What about the choristers? Or the children who played the queen? Were they girls? Or cross-dressed boys? On holiday? On duty? Fearless? Or rigid with terror? Were they miniature versions of those ‘great clerks’ Shakespeare’s Theseus describes who, ‘purposèd’ to greet greatness ‘with premeditated welcomes’, ‘in their fears’ ‘dumbly … broke off’, too frightened to speak (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1. 93–4, 97–8)? I can answer none of these questions, for the children’s history is, like Cesario’s (fictional) ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 ‘Behold the Child’ or Parts for Children
• Chapter 2 The Alphabet of Memory in Titus Andronicus
• Chapter 3 Curing Thought in The Winter’s Tale
• Chapter 4 Precious Motives, Seeds of Time
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index