Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture

Jennifer Higginbotham, Mark Albert Johnston, Jennifer Higginbotham, Mark Albert Johnston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319727684
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319727691
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.

© The Author(s) 2018

Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Albert Johnston (eds.)Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Queer(ing) Children and Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture

Jennifer Higginbotham¹ and Mark Albert Johnston²

(1)

Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

(2)

Department of English, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada

Jennifer Higginbotham (Corresponding author)

Mark Albert Johnston

End Abstract

We begin with a deliberate provocation: queer(ing) early modern children and childhood . Separately, the terms “queer” and “child” have been subjected to intensive scholarly scrutiny—the former recently acquiring playfully prodigious polyvalence but simultaneously becoming threatened with depoliticization and sexual sterilization by its ubiquitous deployment as a catch-all replacement for former critical buzzwords like “carnivalesque,” “abject,” and “subversive”; the latter—particularly following the 1960 publication and 1962 English translation of Philippe Ariès ’s landmark study, Centuries of Childhood—increasingly interrogated as a historically and culturally contingent social construct. So, we wondered, might the two terms, forced to work together, exert productive pressure on each other? This collection—in part the result of that intentionally anachronistic agitation—brings together essays that view the narratological history of childhood through the lens of queer theory while also recognizing the mutual interdependencies of the two fields. Does the representation of children have a queer history? Does childhood invoke queerness, and vice versa? Can queer theory help us to unpack the peculiar aspects of early modern cultural depictions of children and childhood? Our answers to these questions are invariably “yes,” but such inquiries require the negotiation of a shared—if still contested—vocabulary to facilitate meaningful conversation. What constitutes “a child” varies across times and cultures. Furthermore, attempts to ascertain subjectivity or agency —who or what is queer, and who or what is doing the queering —prove as fraught in practice as do endeavors to determine precisely how to define what a child is, or to resolve what criteria unambiguously constitute and encompass childhood. As our essays collectively acknowledge, queerness, children, and childhood are all abstract linguistic constructs—a salient feature that is perhaps nowhere more conspicuous than on the early modern stage, which tended to rely upon the spoken word to create myriad phenomena: day and night; light and dark; time and temporality ; seasons and weather; place and space ; effects and properties ( Macbeth ’s “dagger of the mind” [2.2.38], for example), offstage sights, sounds, and occurrences; and even—as Lucy Munro ’s essay in this collection reminds us—metamorphic transformations . In what follows, we aim to suspend our preconceived ideas about what we think we already know about children and childhood in order to seize upon their discontinuous historical , cultural, and narratological peculiarities. In the process, we not only seek to question how children and childhood might have signified in early modern English culture, but also reflexively to consider why we read early modern children and childhood as queer—what roles and functions are exposed by the queernesses of premodern children and childhoods, which might help us more effectively to query our own historically and culturally specific ideological presumptions?

The zeitgeist of childhood studies has been mobilized by historical and political concerns in recent queer scholarship—what Kenneth Kidd calls “queering the child, or exposing the child’s latent queerness” (2011, 183)—that are particularly relevant to the study of early modern drama. In 2002, Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson asked, “What is Queer Theory Doing with the Child?” in an article that acknowledges the risks of invoking the child, a figure that appears at its “most stable” and “unquestioned and unquestionable” when read “in its absolute singularity” (2002, 35). The child tends, they suggest, to pose an anti-theoretical moment of resistance to analysis because the child as an idea implies the existence of the “real” child whose essential, self-determined identity secures an essential reality beyond language. In her subsequent work on childhood, Lesnik-Oberstein maintains a critical skepticism about attributions of “voice” and “agency” to children, usefully warning humanists how, even in studies employing deconstructivist approaches, “childhood often continues after all to be retrieved as ‘real’ in the end” (2011, 4). Often collapsing this very distinction, Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004) expresses a crucial distrust for the essentialist figure he calls “the Child, ” which he sees as an inevitable symbol of the compulsory heterosexual mandate to reproduce and thereby secure our collective futurity . For Edelman, children unwittingly validate symbolic relations that fetishize their futurity and privilege their innocence, all in the service of a heterosexual , conservative ideology that reproduces itself at the expense of actual, lived, queer experiences. At his most angry, Edelman exclaims, “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized” (2004, 29). This deliberatively offensive attack is aimed directly at members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning and Intersex (LGBTQQI) community, whose demands for equality Edelman sees as having been side-tracked by the assimilationist pursuits of gay marriage and adoption rights—an agenda representing the queer family as an unthreatening extension of, or equivalent to, straight kinship networks. Some queer critics have complained that the gay liberation movement sacrificed too much of its radical identity as a counter-cultural alternative to straight society by insisting that its constituents be recognized as legitimate members of the status quo. Equality under the law , such critics lament, does not necessarily translate into an environment that fosters and promotes queer lifestyles—especially when the obfuscation of queer existences is routinely achieved in the name of protecting the children. The irony is that, even though the modern ideal of childhood innocence would, on the one hand, deny children sexual knowledge , subjective sexual agency, and sexual identity, it insists on the other that children are implicitly straight and in need of vigilant protection from the corruptive influences of deviant queerness. While most activists ultimately support the move toward equality that has been achieved by the gay marriage and adoption movements, some remain critical of how queer relationships have achieved widespread cultural validation only by emulating straight, reproductive marriage, thereby contributing to what we might call the eradication or un-queering of queerness through assimilation. The truly revolutionary move, following this logic, would be for queer communities to reject altogether straight institutions and legal contracts like marriage and parenthood , thereby refusing to surrender to church and state the powers to evaluate, legitimize, and/or invalidate queer social, sexual , and kinship bonds .

So, what do contemporary debates about gay marriage and adoption have to do with queer depictions of children and childhood in early modern drama and culture? As the essays that follow illustrate, early modern assumptions about the patriarchal production of heirs underwrote a conservative social order and political imaginary that bears striking resemblance to the status quo whose futurity Edelman sees modern constructions of “the Child” securing. As Lesnik-Oberstein (2011) reminds us, however, it is crucial to remember that the subject of our study is neither children nor childhood per se, but rather discursive and dramatic constructions thereof, which provide no access to any “truth” about children, childhood, or “the child”—particularly given that no such transhistorical, transcultural essence even exists. While we are sympathetic to Lesnick-Oberstein’s premise that we cannot distinguish or diagnose any (in)correct or (in)authentic voice of the early modern child since “there is no such ‘voice,’ neither for the child nor for any other identity” (2011, 10), we also remain convinced that discursive, dramatic constructions of early modern English children and childhood, like those interrogated in the chapters that follow, rehearse some of the culture’s foremost expectations and ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Queer(ing) Children and Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture
• 2. Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature
• 3. “I Had Peopled Else”: Shakespeare’s Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race
• 4. Queer Time and “Sideways Growth” in The Roaring Girl
• 5. Playing the Early Modern Tomboy
• 6. Queer Apprenticeship in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
• 7. Moth and the Pedagogical Ideal in Love’s Labor’s Lost
• 8. The Queerness of Precocious Play in John Webster’s The White Devil
• 9. “A Prince so Young as I”: Agequeerness and Marlowe’s Boy King
• 10. Queering Gender, Age, and Status in Early Modern Children’s Drama
• 11. The Future-Killing Queer and the Future-Negating Child: Camping It Up and Destabilizing Boundaries in Sam Mendes’s Richard III (1992)
• 12. Afterword
• Back Matter