Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Note on the text
- 1 Introduction
- PART 1 SHAKESPEARE'S CHILDREN
- PART 2 CHILDREN'S SHAKESPEARES
- 8 Introduction: reinventing Shakespearean childhoods
- 9 Play's the thing: agency in children's Shakespeares
- 10 Shakespeare in the Victorian children's periodicals
- 11 Growing up with Shakespeare: the Terry family memoirs
- 12 Shakespeare in the company of boys
- 13 Dream children: staging and screening childhood in A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 14 Shakespeare (')tween media and markets in the 1990s and beyond
- APPENDICES
- Index
12 - Shakespeare in the company of boys
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Note on the text
- 1 Introduction
- PART 1 SHAKESPEARE'S CHILDREN
- PART 2 CHILDREN'S SHAKESPEARES
- 8 Introduction: reinventing Shakespearean childhoods
- 9 Play's the thing: agency in children's Shakespeares
- 10 Shakespeare in the Victorian children's periodicals
- 11 Growing up with Shakespeare: the Terry family memoirs
- 12 Shakespeare in the company of boys
- 13 Dream children: staging and screening childhood in A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 14 Shakespeare (')tween media and markets in the 1990s and beyond
- APPENDICES
- Index
Summary
In palaces and on battlefields, in woods, on remote hillsides and in the streets of London, boys swarm through Shakespeare's plays just as they thronged the public and private spaces of early modern England. From the blushing page who accompanies Bardolph (2 Henry IV 2.2) to the ‘youthful parcel / Of noble bachelors’ arrayed for Helena to choose from, dismissed as beardless boys by Lafeu (All's Well That Ends Well 2.3.49–50); from Constance's lament for her ‘absent child’ (King John 3.4.93) to the ‘very pretty boy’ admired for tearing a butterfly apart with his teeth (Coriolanus 1.3.54–5), boys in Shakespeare's plays inhabit a wide range of social and dramatic roles. Revealing that masculinity and youth could intersect in diverse ways in early modern culture, Shakespeare's boys are variously associated with incipient sexuality, play, work, schooling and violence. They are contested objects of desire, devoted servants, singers and messengers.
The history of childhood has often been seen as close kin to the history of the family. But Shakespearean boys, present in families and workplaces, in domestic locations and in the public realm, show that the geographies of childhood and youth extended beyond the home. In particular, the theatre, as a public site where boys played an active and distinctive role, was a cultural space that enabled fantasies and anxieties about boys and their places in the family and in the wider world to be played out.
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- Shakespeare and Childhood , pp. 184 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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