Childhood in Contemporary Performance of Shakespeare

Gemma Miller

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350133150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Child characters feature more numerously and prominently in the Shakespearean canon than in that of any other early modern playwright. Focusing on stage and film productions from the past four decades, this study addresses how Shakespeare's child characters are reflected, refracted and reinterpreted in performance. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates close reading, semiotics, childhood studies, queer theory and performance studies, Gemma Miller explores how a close analysis of Shakespeare's child characters, both in the text and in performance, can reveal often uncomfortable truths about contemporary ideas of childhood, as well as offer fresh insights into the plays. Among the works and productions analysed are stage productions of Richard III by Sean Holmes and Thomas Ostermeier; Jamie Lloyd's and Michael Boyd's stage productions of Macbeth and the films of Roman Polanski and Justin Kurzel; Deborah Warner's stage production of Titus Andronicus and filmed adaptations by Jane Howell and Julie Taymor; and stage productions of The Winter's Tale by Nicholas Hytner, and by Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford, and the ballet adaptation by Christopher Wheeldon.

1

From the Facsimile Page to the Plastic Princes: The Effacement of Childhood in Richard III

Richard III features more speaking roles for children than any other Shakespeare play: Prince Edward; Richard Duke of York; Boy and Daughter, children of George, Duke of Clarence; and Page. However, it is common practice for directors to cut the roles of Clarence’s children and the page or re-imagine the page as an adult messenger or aide, thus focusing dramatic attention exclusively on the child-princes, Edward and Richard. Such is the impact of these two young princes that they have provided inspiration for numerous manifestations, adaptations and reinterpretations in the genres of art, theatre and film across the centuries. In terms of cultural purchase, they are arguably as iconic an image of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy as Richard himself. However, although Shakespeare’s representation of the two boys is nuanced and ambiguous, juxtaposing the precocity and verbosity of the princes with the idealized rhetoric of the adults who mourn their deaths, the tendency in visual, theatrical and cinematic representation has been towards smoothing over such ambiguities to present the boys as icons of innocence and vulnerability. This tendency was particularly prevalent in the nineteenth century, when artists such as James Northcote and intellectuals like William Hazlitt immortalized these child-victims as, in the words of Meolwyn Merchant, ‘mawkishly sentimental’ symbols of pathos (1959: 75). Colley Cibber’s 1700 adaptation was still in common use during this period, and his depiction of the two princes as vulnerable innocents reflected an ongoing desire within nineteenth-century culture to draw boundaries around childhood and preserve its privileged status as a time of innocent charm.¹

In both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was common practice for the parts of all of Shakespeare’s boy-characters, particularly the two princes of Richard III, to be played by women. The reasons for this practice of cross-casting were largely pragmatic. As part of the process of protecting and extending the rights of children, legislation affecting the employment of child performers had become increasingly restrictive during the nineteenth century, resulting in more adult women taking the parts of children on stage. Even when a child actor was employed, it was just as likely that a young girl would play the role as a young boy. Gender, it seems, was as much if not more of a factor influencing casting choices as age. It can be argued that it is easier for an audience to accept a woman than a man impersonating a child. Women generally have a smaller frame, higher-pitched voice and smoother skin than men, but this is certainly not always the case. Stephen Orgel argues, in relation to the early modern practice of boys playing female roles, that ‘it is important to bear in mind how time-bound the notion of what “women” look like is’, and in fact, ‘boys do not look any more like women than men do’ (1996: 69). The same argument can be applied to the substitution of women for boys in the Victorian theatre. What was it that made children interchangeable with women in the performance of Shakespeare’s boys? ‘In an era of increasing sentimentality’, as Laurence Senelick explains, ‘[girls] were better than boys at evoking pathos. More tears might be shed over a waif portrayed by a woman (a victim by definition) than over a gangling youth, and the pathetic element was a satisfactory substitute for verisimilitude in male impersonation’ (2000: 267–8). The substitution worked, in other words, because of the coincidence between the political, social and literary constructions of women and children as subordinated groups. The dominant representation of childhood during the nineteenth century, as Carolyn Steedman has argued, was feminine or at least endowed with ‘a feminised set of qualities’ (1995: 8). With the move from sentimentalism to a more realist style of theatre in the twentieth century, the parts have routinely been played by young prepubescent boys. But the emphasis on sentimentality still prevails in many quarters and far from casting Senelick’s ‘gangling youth[s]’ to play the princes, directors have tended to use young boys to evoke pathos and to stage what Bridget Escolme has termed ‘the political dramaturgy of grief’ (2014: 184).

Demonstrations of grief in Shakespeare’s plays can be disempowering and are often both posited against action and gendered female. But, as Escolme explains, these demonstrations of grief can also be, somewhat paradoxically, politically empowering (2014: 190). This can be seen, for instance, in the chorus of mourning women in Richard III who intercept Richard and precipitate his tragic downfall, a scene which has no historical precedent (Smith 2019: 38). The power of collective grieving, specifically in relation to iconic images of dead or doomed children, has been particularly compelling in recent years. The case of James Bulger and the poignant CCTV images is one such example of public demonstrations of grief leading to legislative change, as outlined in the Introduction. More recently, the public response to the photograph of the dead three-year-old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, washed up on the beach of Turkey in 2015, resulted in the Canadian government removing some of the legal obstacles to obtaining asylum and significantly increasing their quota of Syrian refugees.² And in 2017, the case of Charlie Gard, the terminally ill baby whose parents fought a legal battle with Great Ormond Street Hospital for the right to take their son to America for experimental treatment, was widely covered in the world’s press. Media reporting of the plight of the parents, accompanied by emotive images of the baby attached to a ventilator, prompted interventions from Donald Trump and the Pope and resulted in mass demonstrations across the UK. Staff at the hospital even received death threats from outraged members of the public (Gore 2017). The efficacy of the ‘political dramaturgy of grief’ can still be seen in modern productions of Richard III, where the bodies of the dead princes are displayed (and sometimes exploited) in order to turn audience sympathy away from Richard. As recently as the second half of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first century, films by Laurence Olivier (1955) and Richard Loncraine (1995) and stage productions by Roxana Silbert (2012), Tim Carroll (2012) and Jamie Lloyd (2014) have portrayed the two princes as helpless victims of Richard’s tyranny. By foregrounding the prepubescent bodies of the actors, these productions maximized the impact of the boys’ vulnerability by turning them into emotive visual signs of what Judith Butler has termed the ‘precariousness’ and ‘grievability’ of life (2009: 1–33).³

In spite of an ongoing tendency towards reifying and aestheticizing the two boys in this way, however, there has been a small but growing countercultural movement towards a de-idealization of the young princes. In this chapter, I analyse the way in which two productions that are symptomatic of this trend, directed by Sean Holmes (2003) and Thomas Ostermeier (2015), have effaced or undermined romanticized images of childhood. Both productions were staged as a stand-alone play rather than part of the first tetralogy (or adaptation thereof). As a result, they were not shaped by the teleology of a historical cycle; instead, they focused on Richard as the starring character in his own historical tragedy, rather than a cog in the wheel of a political history.⁴ The portrayal of Richard played an integral part in framing the representation of childhood – or more specifically, the effacement of childhood – in these two remarkable productions.

Emerging from the shadows: The page as the future-killing anti-child in Sean Holmes’s Richard III (2003)

Breaking with a long-established convention of cutting, doubling or adapting the child roles in Richard III, Holmes’s production featured five separate child actors to play the roles of Clarence’s son and daughter, the Duke of York, Prince Edward and the pageboy.⁵ It was an adaptation that was heavily invested in childhood: as a symbol, a psychological state and an embodied presence. Where many productions, from Cibber’s 1700 adaptation through to twenty-first-century revivals, have either cut the page entirely, cast an adult actor in the role or doubled it with another role such as Catesby, Holmes decided to give his young page centre stage as Richard’s miniaturized doppelgänger, dressed in a matching outfit and dragging his leg behind him in an imitation of Richard’s limping gait. Not only did this often-overlooked figure provide a dramatic counterpoint to the other children, but, as Richard’s diminutive alter ego, he also problematized hegemonic ideals of the child as a symbol of futurity. In Act 4, Scene 2, the page introduces Richard to Tyrrel who organizes the execution of the two young princes.⁶ In his role as facilitator of infanticide and emblem of Richard’s enduring legacy of tyranny, Holmes’s pageboy was thus the antithesis of Edelman’s future-preserving child. Initially appearing as nothing more than a manifestation of Richard’s inner child, Richard’s page gradually emerged from the shadows to assert his own autonomy. When he dispassionately removed the sword from the grip of his dead master and presented it to Richmond in the final scene, it was as though we were being given a glimpse into a future that was potentially more terrifying than the reign of Richard himself.

Just as he is often excised from performance or re-imagined as an adult, the page is also overlooked in critical analyses of the children in Richard III. Carol Chillington Rutter refers to him as ‘the extra’ and does not elaborate further on the significance of his role (2007a: xiii). Katie Knowles dedicates a chapter to the ‘Pages and Schoolboys’ of Shakespeare’s plays, but does not include Richard’s page in her analysis, choosing to focus almost exclusively on Moth and Falstaff’s page (2014: 90–122). Marjorie Garber’s summary of Shakespearean child characters makes no reference to any of the pageboys, concentrating instead on just the two princes in Richard III, the sons of Macduff and Coriolanus, and Mamillius (1997: 30). Although Catherine Belsey acknowledges Richard’s page in her account of Shakespearean child characters, she does not elaborate on his dramatic or symbolic function (2007: 32). That he does not appear to merit the same attention as the pages in Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Henry IV, Part 2 or Henry V, or in fact the other four child characters in Richard III, is almost certainly a consequence of his relatively small speaking role. Compared to the Duke of York’s forty-six lines, young Prince Edward’s forty-three lines and the twenty-six combined lines of Clarence’s two children, the pageboy’s total of only six lines seems paltry. To dismiss him as unworthy of consideration because of the size of his spoken contribution, however, is to underestimate his important dramatic function within the overall representation of childhood in this play. The only childhood scholar to recognize the significance of the pageboy’s role is Mark Lawhorn, who observes that, as ‘the go-between who brings Richard and Tyrrel together’, the page qualifies assumptions about childish innocence and ‘raises the vexing question of what structurally, thematically or culturally significant purpose the boy figure might be serving’ (2007: 239). The ‘vexing question’ to which he refers, however, remains tantalizingly unanswered in his analysis. It is a question to which Holmes’s 2003 production may provide an answer.

The marginalization of the page is not restricted to the academy but finds its corollary in the theatre, where his role is often cut entirely, as is the case in Ostermeier’s 2015 production, as we shall see. In the original Elizabethan production, as Bethany Packard notes, the part of the page ‘would likely have been doubled by a child actor playing one of the princes’ (2013: 125). Richard Madelaine has similarly argued that ‘boy actors seem to have done a little doubling, usually minor female parts with minor male parts such as pages, and these doubled parts were almost certainly given to the less-experienced boys’ (2003: 232), while Anthony Hammond surmises that ‘the smallest member of the company [played] the pert Duke of York, Clarence’s daughter, and the Page’ (1981: 63). Evelyn Tribble has also argued that young apprentice boy actors would have been trained in ‘scaffolded’ or ‘shepherded’ roles before they were able to progress onto more complex parts. A ‘scaffolded’ role is defined by Tribble as ‘a restricted role’ with an inbuilt framework and structure that ‘prompts the novice actor’s activity’, while a ‘shepherded’ role is one in which the ‘boy actor is led onto stage and directed by a more experienced actor playing a parental/guardian role’ (2009: 7). Taking into account these studies of early modern playing practices, it is fair to assume that the page was doubled with Clarence’s son or daughter, other ‘scaffolded’ roles whose lines and appearances are minimal. From a staging point of view, therefore, there is no practical necessity to cast a separate actor to play the page. His appearance does not overlap with any of the other children and his age is unspecified, making him suitable for doubling, in fact, with any of the other child characters. From a dramatic perspective, doubling the page with one of the other four children (who are, unlike the page, all victims of Richard’s tyranny) would problematize a simplistic representation of childhood as a state of vulnerability and innocence. As intermediary between Richard and Tyrrel, the page is an enabler to the murder of the two princes and therefore an important corrective to the rhetoric of childhood purity that is rehearsed by the female characters in Act 4, Scene 4, and in Tyrrel’s famous soliloquy in Act 4, Scene 3. Given that he has such dramatic potential and that there are minimal practical staging and casting obstacles, it is noteworthy, therefore, that he has been cut from many modern productions. In order to understand why this might be, I will consider the dramatic, structural and ideological effects of choosing to include the pageboy, beginning by exploring his early modern conception.

Shakespeare’s page has his origin in the ‘secrete page’ of Richard as documented by Edward Hall in The Union of the Two Noble … Famelies of Lancastre and Yorks (1547). The brief passage in which he appears is worth quoting in full because it provides some insight into the way in which Shakespeare reinterpreted the role and the resultant dramatic effects:

He [Richard] sayde to a secrete page of his: Ah, whom shal a man truste: they that I have brought up my selfe, they that I went woulde mave moost surely served me, even those fayle me, and at my commaundemente wyll do nothynge for me. Syr, quod the page, there lieth one in the palet chamber with out that I dare wel say, to do your grace pleasure the thing were right hard that he would refuse, meaning this by James Tirel, which was a man of goodly personage, and for the giftes of nature worthy to have served a muche better prince, yf he had well served God, and by grace obteyned to have as muche trueth and good wyll, as he had strength and wytt. The man had an high harte and sore longed upward … which thynge the page had well marked and knowen: wherefore this occasion offered of very speciall friendship spied his tyme to set him forwards, and such wyse to do him good, that all the enemies that he had (except the devil) could never have done him so much hurte and shame.

(Hall 1547: EEBO, image 282 of 640)

What becomes apparent when comparing Hall’s account of the page and Shakespeare’s version is the extent to which the page in Richard III is aware of and complicit in the murder of the princes. In Hall’s version, Richard does not make explicit the task that he has in mind for Tyrrel (‘Ah, whom shal a man truste: they that I have brought up my selfe, they that I went woulde mave moost surely served me, even those fayle me, and at my commaundemente wyll do nothynge for me’), whereas in Shakespeare’s text, his murderous intention is quite clear when he asks the page directly, ‘Know’st thou not any whom corrupting gold / Would tempt unto a close exploit of death?’ (4.2.34–5).

It is not obvious whether Shakespeare intended for the page to overhear Richard’s prior dialogue with Buckingham, in which case he would be in no doubt as to the proposed victims of the ‘close exploit of death’. In this short exchange with Buckingham, Richard makes three references to ‘Young Edward’ (4.2.10; 4.2.14; 4.2.16) and at one point explicitly states, ‘I wish the bastards dead’ (4.2.18). Neither Quarto nor Folio texts note the point at which the page enters, although it is conventional in modern editions to have him enter with Richard at the beginning of the scene, which is when he entered in Holmes’s production.⁷ Whether he overhears Richard and Buckingham’s discussion or not, however, the page’s description of Tyrrel as a ‘discontented gentleman’ for whom ‘gold were as good as twenty orators’ to ‘tempt him to anything’ (4.2.36–9) confirms that he understands the mission to be less than honourable and is thus complicit, albeit by proxy, in the murder of the two princes. This is a notable departure from Hall’s page, who recommends Tyrrel in good faith as a loyal servant with ‘an high harte’, ignorant of Richard’s intent and the ‘hurte and shame’ it would cause. This subtle but deliberate reinterpretation of the role of the page by Shakespeare provides a potent counterpoint to the repeated associations of the two murdered princes with purity that resonate throughout the play, particularly in the idealized rhetoric of the adults who mourn their loss. By the time the page appears on stage in Act 4, Scene 2, the play has already introduced a tension between this narrative of childhood innocence and the embodied reality of the living child in the figure of the precocious, disrespectful and ‘parlous’ (2.4.35) Duke of York, a unique character in Shakespeare’s drama because, as Charlotte Scott points out, he provides ‘the only instance when a character breaks through another’s aside’ (2018: 32), with his interjected ‘what say you, uncle?’ (3.1.80). Shakespeare’s reinterpreted role of the page is therefore not an anomaly but a further complicating factor, whose presence reinforces and expands upon the multiple and contradictory versions of childhood on display in this play. To overlook this character and the significance of his brief appearance is, therefore, to obtain only a partial understanding of Richard III’s nuanced and multifaceted representations of childhood. Moreover, to choose to exclude him from productions is to present a skewed impression of childhood that does not allow for the darker side that is embodied in the page.

Although the overdetermined presence of Holmes’s page can be seen as an extension of Shakespeare’s original intention, he also has much in common with the page in the anonymous 1594 play, The True Tragedie of Richard the Third. In The True Tragedie, the page has a total of 103 lines compared with the six allocated to the page in Shakespeare’s play.⁸ He fulfils multiple dramatic functions: a choric figure who addresses the audience directly; a witness for the allegorical figure, Report; and a faithful servant to Richard who, like Holmes’s page, has a ‘very speciall friendship’ with his master. In Shakespeare’s version, however, he appears in only one scene (Act 4, Scene 2) and his role is limited to that of serving boy, a role which Holmes expanded with considerable consequences for his particular interpretation of both Richard’s and the pageboy’s characters. In his account of playing Richard in this production, Henry Goodman notes that it was his, not Holmes’s, idea to expand the stage presence of Richard’s page from his one appearance in the text to a total of seven scenes.⁹ The page’s role, moreover, was adapted to include a further, symbolic function as the manifestation of Richard as an ‘adult-child’, to use Postman’s terminology ([1982] 1994: 98–119). Goodman describes him as ‘a young boy in [Richard’s] own image’, whose ‘frequent, silent presence’ as his ‘only companion’ symbolized not only his isolation but also the traumatic childhood experiences that shaped his character (2007: 200, 214). Goodman’s account is written from his own personal perspective and therefore inevitably considers only the ways in which the young pageboy impacted upon his role as Richard. What he does not take into account is the additional function of the boy’s expanded role as a counterpoint to the other four child-victims represented in this production. From this point of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Text
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Simulacrum and Surrogation: The Children of Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale (2014/16)
• 1 From the Facsimile Page to the Plastic Princes: The Effacement of Childhood in Richard III
• 2 ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’: The Janus-Faced Child in Macbeth
• 3 ‘Behold the child’: The Burden of Futurity in Titus Andronicus
• 4 ‘No age’: Disappearing Childhood in The Winter’s Tale
• Conclusion: Performing Childhood: Shakespeare and Beyond
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint