Fear in Shakespearean Childhood

Partee, Morriss Henry

doi:10.1353/rmr.1990.0024

rmr

1990

DOI: 10.1353/rmr.1990.0024

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Fear in Shakespearean Childhood

Morriss Henry Partee¹

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Cited by 2 publications

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“…Or, as Heberle puts it, "Shakespeare is responsible for making Arthur a child". More importantly, he notes, Shakespeare's "replotting of history makes John's treatment of Arthur the fundamental action of his whole reign" (34). Foregrounding Arthur in this way, it has been argued, results in the "obscuring of the [play's] Protestant or patriotic message or its relegation to second place" (Waith 193).…”

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Killing Shakespeare's Children: The Cases ofRichard IIIandKing John

Campana¹

2007

Shakespeare

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This essay explores a series of affective, sexual and temporal disturbances that Shakespeare's child characters create on the early modern stage and that lead these characters often to their deaths. It does so by turning to the murdered princes of Richard III and the ultimately extinguished boy-king Arthur of King John. A pervasive sentimentality about childhood shapes the way audiences and critics have responded to Shakespeare's children by rendering invisible complex and discomfiting erotic and emotional investments in childhood innocence. While Richard III subjects such sentimentality to its analytic gaze, King John explores extreme modes of affect and sexuality associated with childhood. For all of the pragmatic political reasons to kill Arthur, he is much more than an inconvenient dynastic obstacle. Arthur functions as the central node of networks of seduction, the catalyst of morbid displays of affect, and the signifier of future promise as threateningly mutable. King John and Richard III typify Shakespeare's larger dramatic interrogation of emergent notions of childhood and of contradictory notions of temporality, an interrogation conducted by the staging of uncanny, precocious, and ill-fated child roles.

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“…(3.4. [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] In the absence of Arthur, Constance conjures an embodiment of death, which she imagines wou ld relieve her suffering. This apostrophe suggests a grim pleasure in the erotic congress that comes from dwelling on death.…”

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Killing Shakespeare's Children: The Cases ofRichard IIIandKing John

Campana¹

2007

Shakespeare

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The Child’s Two Bodies: Shakespeare, Sovereignty, and the End of Succession

Campana¹

2014

elh

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This essay argues that in spite of a recent boom in scholarship on sovereignty, a particular political unit has gone unnoticed: the child and the sovereign. Although Shakespeare’s frequent recourse to child figures in his poems and plays has often been recognized, sovereignty seems to be an element missing from an expanding scholarly literature on the early modern child. Shakespeare critics often attend to the vulnerable personal bodies of children. But it is to the political bodies of children we must attend. Here I discuss what it might be to conceive of the child’s two bodies and how the body political of Shakespeare’s child figures focuses attention on succession and perpetuity. Macbeth , I argue, refracts the succession controversies that afflicted the transfer of rule from Elizabeth to James. Elizabeth, the barren queen, and James, the cradle king, made obvious how the child’s body threatens to displace the king’s. Shakespeare’s plays contribute to an attempt to imagine and comprehend political succession as a subset of sovereignty’s dominion over time.What troubles that dominion is the figure of the child who fails to ensure the “self-evidence” of sovereignty by generation.

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Fear in Shakespearean Childhood

Cited by 2 publications

References 20 publications

Killing Shakespeare's Children: The Cases ofRichard IIIandKing John

Killing Shakespeare's Children: The Cases ofRichard IIIandKing John

The Child’s Two Bodies: Shakespeare, Sovereignty, and the End of Succession

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