Artigo Acesso aberto Revisado por pares

Killing Shakespeare's Children: The Cases of Richard III and King John

2007; Routledge; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450910701252271

ISSN

1745-0926

Autores

Joseph Campana,

Tópico(s)

Themes in Literature Analysis

Resumo

Abstract 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. Keywords: ChildrenchildhoodseductionsexualityaffecttemporalityRichard IIIKing John Notes 1. See also CitationRutter's “Remind Me: How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” and “Looking Like a Child; or, Titus: The Comedy”. 2. See also CitationPartee's “Shakespeare and the Aggression of Children”. 3. Linda CitationPollock's Forgotten Children offers a significant challenge to Ariès’ position in claiming that the concept of the child long pre-dates the early modern period. The disagreement seems to rest in whether or not the concept of the child pre-dates the early modern period and in whether or not shifting concepts of childhood lead to different styles of parental care or neglect. 4. See CitationStewart, particularly chapter 3. 5. These children are not, then, purely verisimilar, despite an understandable desire to extract evidence of the life of actual early modern children from Shakespeare's plays. Blake typifies the claims of critics who find that Shakespeare “enriches the tone of [children's] scenes with the humour of life-like speech and precocious wit in what amounts to a strikingly varied portrayal of children's behaviour” (“Shakespeare's Roles” 123). 6. See Braunmuller (2–17) and CitationMattsson (7–11). 7. For the historical and political context of King John's rule, see CitationSaccio. 8. See, among others, readings of the Bastard by CitationGieskes and CitationHobson. 9. See CitationRyan (38–43) on Jameson's understanding of futurity in The Political Unconscious.

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