Shakespeare's Boys

A Cultural History

K. Knowles

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349434725, 9781137005366
• eBook ISBN: 9781137005373
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's Boys: A Cultural History offers the first extensive exploration of boy characters in Shakespeare's plays, examining a range of characters from across the Shakespearean canon in their original early modern contexts and surveying their subsequent performance histories on stage and screen from the Restoration until the present day.

Part I

Early Modern Boyhoods

‘As a squash is before ’tis a peascod or a codling when ’tis almost an apple: ’tis with him in standing water, between boy and man.’

Malvolio, Twelfth Night (1.5.115–17)

1

Noble Imps: Doomed Heirs

In her 1990 essay ‘The Noble Imp: The Upper-Class Child in English Renaissance Art and Literature’, Jean Wilson examines the tomb of Lord Denbigh, son of Robert, Earl of Leicester, who died in 1584, aged about four, and argues that it captures something peculiarly double about the identity of this boy, and the nature of his parents’ mourning:

This epitaph reads, at first view, as yet another affirmation by the parvenu Dudleys of their right to a place among the greatest in the land. The tracing of the pedigree back to the remote connection with Richard Beauchamp [ ... ] the loyal celebration of the Queen, designed, presumably to associate the family with her, all place this tomb as a celebration of a now-doomed family, rather than the commemoration of a beloved dead child [ ... ]. The wonderfully realized little effigy is more ambiguous in its mixture of family pride and individual tenderness. The child wears a circlet to suggest his rank [ ... ] but also the skirts which indicate how little he had advanced beyond toddlerhood [ ... ].¹

Wilson concludes that this little boy’s tomb presents a mixture of ‘family pride and interest’ and ‘natural affection’, ‘celebrating the child’s rank and his childishness, his barony and his babyhood’.² The epitaph describes the boy as ‘a noble impe’ and, in fact, the term ‘imp’ adds to the ambiguity of his identity: at the time of little Lord Denbigh’s death, in 1584, it was still commonly used to describe the offspring of a noble family, but also carried with it connotations of its other meaning: ‘a little devil or demon’.³ The modern, affectionate use of the word for ‘a mischievous child’ is not recorded until 1642,⁴ but it is likely that it was in use in speech earlier. Lord Denbigh’s tomb, then, captures the word ‘imp’ in its transition from denoting nobility of birth to expressing playful, childish mischief; its transition from describing the boy’s familial status to describing his individual nature.

Catherine Belsey, like Wilson, looks to funerary sculpture as evidence of a transformation in how early modern families presented their relationships to the world: what she calls ‘the changing meanings of the family in its various ideal forms’.⁵ In the gradual shift, between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, from stiff and formalised figures to naturalistic representations of affectionate family groupings on tombs, she reads a shift of emphasis from dynasty to personal relationships and, crucially, a shift in the representation of children which highlights their individuality, their difference from adults and their emotional attachment to their parents, rather than depicting them as objects of purely patrilineal value.⁶ However, she remarks on the scarcity of such family groupings in Shakespeare’s plays – citing The Winter’s Tale as a notable exception – and comments that, ‘[n]uclear families with two affectionate parents and two loveable children are sufficiently rare in Shakespeare to suggest that at the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century the ideal is new enough not to be taken for granted’.⁷ Before The Winter’s Tale, however, it is possible to identify an engagement with these issues in Shakespearean drama as, perhaps counterintuitively, the medieval settings and strongly dynastic contexts of the historical-tragedies provide a backdrop against which the struggles of aristocratic boy characters to negotiate their place as individuals in the family and in society are foregrounded sharply. The boys in such plays highlight the double or transitional presentation of the early modern noble family that both Wilson and Belsey identify by performing multifaceted and sometimes contradictory roles – sometimes functioning seamlessly as dynastic objects and sometimes fighting against this construction, demanding to be viewed as individuals, and drawing attention to the familial structures which surround them.

* * *

The tension between child as individual and as object lies at the heart of a debate about the early modern concept of childhood which came to be exemplified, in the later decades of the twentieth century, by the historians Lawrence Stone and Linda Pollock. While Stone argued that ‘the key to all understanding of interpersonal relations among the propertied classes at this time is a recognition of the fact that what mattered was not the individual but the family’, and memorably suggested that sixteenth-century fathers regarded their children as modern men regard family pets,⁸ Pollock maintained that ‘when primary sources are used [ ... ] a much less repressive picture of childhood is presented’.⁹ Even a brief examination of child-rearing advice literature provides ample evidence for both viewpoints and reveals complex and, to modern eyes, conflicting attitudes in which formality and emotional distance coexist with tenderness and attention to the specific needs of infancy. Hugh Rhodes’s Boke of Nurture, or Schoole of Good Manners: for Men, Servants and Children (1577), for example, stresses the importance of harsh punishment, both verbal and physical,¹⁰ while its subtitle’s suggestion that a man’s servants and children are interchangeable and require the same treatment lends credit to Stone’s reading of parent–child relations as based on the survival of the familial line rather than on appreciation of the child as an individual. Yet this text also insists that love should hold equal weight with fear in the child’s regard for its parents.¹¹ And while the anonymous tract The Office of Christian Parents (1616) seems to advocate unconditional affection and care for the child, sternly warning mothers against sending infants out to wet-nurses, it also evokes a more authoritarian parenting style in detailing ‘in what cases the Christian parents may seeke the death of their child’.¹²

If tension exists between the idea of the early modern child as beloved infant – with needs and behaviour peculiar to youth – and as familial possession – to be treated and made use of as best suited its parents (and particularly its father) – then this tension becomes heightened when the child in question is a noble or royal boy and the chasm between his physical and emotional maturity and his political status and significance is more pronounced: as Belsey says, ‘[i]n the case of little princes, the vulnerability of childhood may come into conflict with royal authority’.¹³ In The Education of a Christian Prince (published 1532), Erasmus acknowledges that a powerful political role, such as prince, requires the holder to transcend the natural limitations and follies of age or youth:

In the case of private individuals, some concession is granted to youth and to old age: the former may make a mistake now and then; the latter is allowed leisure and a cessation of toils. But the man who undertakes the duties of the prince [...] is not free to be either a young man or an old one.¹⁴

Shakespeare’s Richard III, King John and Macbeth – the plays at the heart of this chapter – highlight this issue by placing boys in positions of simultaneous political power and personal weakness and dramatising the tensions surrounding boys whose childishness conflicts with their dynastic significance. The boys in these plays are all ‘noble imps’ who are valued for their status as heirs and sometimes identified metaphorically as miniature versions of their fathers.¹⁵ Almost without exception they die because of their patrilineal heritage: killed either in revenge for crimes committed by their forefathers, or murdered by a male relative who wishes to steal their inheritance. Yet they are also vividly drawn and individuated children, whose loss is mourned in personal, affectionate terms: they are ‘imps’ in all senses of the word.

For boys who are destined to be kings, dynasty competes with individuality: the boy is indentified doubly, both as heir and as child, and this chapter will examine the coexistence and conflict of these concepts. Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI, with the murder of young Rutland and the retaliatory killing of Prince Edward, is read as a blueprint for Shakespeare’s later portrayals of murdered ‘noble imps’: a pattern is established in this play wherein the child is identified by those around him in terms of his patriarchal identity, but pleads to be considered as an individual. Richard III and King John provide more sophisticated variations on this theme. The princes in Richard III are complex characters with varied dramatic functions: in their brief stage appearances they are simultaneously over-confident and vulnerable, they elucidate Richard’s character and highlight the marginal dynastic status which he strives so hard to escape, while posthumously they become a symbolic ideal of innocence and lost dynastic promise. Prince Arthur in King John is figured by his enemies and supporters alike as a ‘little abstract’ of his father, but saves his own life by persuading his gaoler to view him as a boy rather than a prince, offering a temporary resolution to the competing demands of dynastic role and individuality. Macbeth’s engagement with this issue is subtly different. Here it is the protagonist’s inability to create his own heir that leads him to attack the children of other men, but while Macbeth’s violent tyranny is predicated on a purely lineal valuation of the child, Macduff’s anguished response to the murder of his family demonstrates the power of affective familial relationships. Indeed, in each of these plays, the death of children acts as a turning point in the plot and the fortunes of the villain/king figure. The act that he believes will secure his throne ultimately destabilises it as the brutal murder of innocents consolidates resistance against him and justifies his removal: the killing of boys becomes, in these plays, a signifier of tyranny that sets in motion the downfall of the tyrant.¹⁶ The Winter’s Tale is a further development of the idea of the doomed heir, a kind of epilogue to the much-revisited theme. Unlike the other boys in this chapter, Mamillius comes from an unbroken family and is not threatened by civil war. Instead it is his father’s suspicion that his dynastic line has been polluted, that Perdita is not his child, which indirectly kills Mamillius. In this late play, the possibility of redemption and movement beyond a destructive patriarchy which preys on its offspring is gestured at in the reunion of Perdita, Hermione and Leontes, but this is only achieved after the sacrifice of Mamillius, and the boy’s absence is conspicuous in the final scene. This chapter, therefore, reads these plays as revelatory of the conflicted and paradoxical position of the early modern noble boy whose high status put him nominally in charge of older, stronger men, while his youth, inexperience and physical weakness made him a victim of those men: these plays explore what it might mean to be a noble imp, and expose the contradictions inherent in that identity.

‘And men ne’er spend their fury on a child’: 3 Henry VI

‘’Tis much when sceptres are in children’s hands’, exclaims the exasperated Exeter of Henry VI, who historically ascended the throne at just nine months old (1 Henry VI, 4.1.192).¹⁷ Presiding over a kingdom that is losing control over its French territories and sliding inexorably into civil war, Henry embodies the problems of the child-king, which will dominate Richard III and King John: he symbolises the power of the crown, but cannot wield it himself, and is thus vulnerable to the manipulation of the competing adults who act as his protectors and proxies. Yet, in other respects, Henry is unlike the other boys this chapter considers. Through the course of the three plays, he grows to adulthood – he is not quite so ‘doomed’ an heir as the princes in the Tower, Prince Arthur, Young Macduff, or Mamillius. He is also precocious in his speech to a degree that is unusual even by the standards of Elizabethan child characters, so that while he calls attention repeatedly to his ‘tender years’ (Part 1, 3.1.74), and while his immaturity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Early Modern Boyhoods
• Part II   Afterlives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index