Shakespeare and Childhood

Kate Chedgzoy is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Newcastle. Susanne Greenhalgh is Principal Lecturer, School of Arts, Roehampton University. Robert Shaughnessy is Professor of Theatre in the School of Drama, Film and Visual Arts at the University of Kent.

This collection offers the first definitive study of a surprisingly underdeveloped area of scholarly investigation, namely the relationship between Shakespeare, children and childhood from Shakespeare's time to the present. It offers a thorough mapping of the domain in which Shakespearean childhoods need to be studied, in order to show how studying Shakespearean childhoods makes significant contributions both to Shakespearean scholarship, and to the history of childhood and its representations. The book is divided into two sections, each with a substantial introduction outlining relevant critical debates and contextualizing the rich combination of new research and re-readings of familiar Shakespearean texts that characterize the individual essays. The first part of the book examines the complex significance of the figure of the child in the Shakespearean canon. The second part traces the rich histories of negotiation, exchange and appropriation that have characterised Shakespeare's subsequent relations to the cultures of childhood in literary realms.

1. Introduction Robert Shaughnessy; Part I. Shakespeare's Children: 2. Introduction: 'What, are they children?' Kate Chedgzoy; 3. Little princes: Shakespeare's royal children in context Catherine Belsey; 4. Father-child identification, loss, and gender in Shakespeare's plays Hattie Fletcher and Marianne Novy; 5. Character building: Shakespeare's children in context A. J. Piesse; 6. Coriolanus and the Little Eyases: the boyhood of Shakespeare's hero Lucy Munro; 7. Procreation, child-loss, and the gendering of the sonnet Patricia Phillippy; Part II. Children's Shakespeares: 8. Introduction: reinventing Shakespearean childhoods Susanne Greenhalgh; 9. Play's the thing: agency in children's Shakespeares Naomi J. Miller; 10. Shakespeare in the Victorian children's periodicals Kathryn Prince; 11. Growing up with Shakespeare: the memoirs of the Terry family Pascale Aebischer; 12. Shakespeare in the company of boys Kate Chedgzoy; 13. Dream children: staging and screening childhood in A Midsummer Night's Dream Susanne Greenhalgh; 14. Shakespeare (')tween media and markets in the 1990s and beyond Richard Burt; 15. Appendix I. Shakespeare's child characters Mark Lawhorn; 16. Appendix II: bibliography of Shakespeare and childhood.