Shakespeare in Children's Literature

Gender and Cultural Capital

Erica Hateley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135891251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare in Children's Literature looks at the genre of Shakespeare-for-children, considering both adaptations of his plays and children's novels in which he appears as a character. Drawing on feminist theory and sociology, Hateley demonstrates how Shakespeare for children utilizes the ongoing cultural capital of "Shakespeare, " and the pedagogical aspects of children's literature, to perpetuate anachronistic forms of identity and authority.

Chapter One
Romantic Roots: Constructing the Child as Reader, and Shakespeare as Author

By the nineteenth century a familiarity with Shakespeare was expected of every educated person; the sooner aspirant middle-class children could acquire such knowledge, the better. Shakespeare was thus forcibly transformed into a children’s author. (G. Taylor 207)

Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in the little walks of Children than with Men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography & Natural History.? Damn them. I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights & Blasts of all that is Human in man & child. (Charles Lamb writing to S. T. Coleridge, 1802. Letters 81–82)

As these epigraphs demonstrate, nineteenth-century Shakespeare for children no less than contemporary cases was imbricated with concepts of education and entertainment. The responses to these competing functions within dominant literary cultures of the nineteenth century, often marked temporally as well as ideologically—the (early) Romantic, the (mid-century) high-realist Victorian, and the (late) pre-Modern—can be mapped through major examples of Shakespeare for children produced under their auspices. A consideration of the cultural and critical contexts and content of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare (1807), Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–51), and Edith Nesbit’s The Children’s Shakespeare (1897) offers the opportunity to establish the foundations of today’s appropriations of Shakespeare for children, and reveals attitudes both to children as reading subjects and ‘Literature’ in the form of Shakespeare. They establish the broad paradigms of appropriating Shakespeare (as Author) for Children (as Readers) that have continued throughout the twentieth century, and thus diachronically contextualise contemporary Shakespearean children’s literature and the cultural forces reflected and reproduced by it. These forces include distinctions between Shakespearean plot and language; anxiety about Shakespeare’s authority instructive or poetic; and most significantly for my purposes, the emphatic gendering of the genre and its implied readers.¹

In the complex (and predominantly masculine) interplay of voices that enact and represent the height of English Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century, two significant discourses emerge which prove to be influential throughout that century and well in to the twentieth in terms of constructing Shakespeare for children: one of the great author-artist figure, another of the child as embodiment of Sublime innocence, and figure of natural truths. The intersection of these models—Shakespeare as Author and Child as Reader—produces a new site for the production of cultural meaning: the Shakespearean text for the child audience. However, where ideals meet social reality (commodified publication and real readers), negotiations must be made between the ideal and the real, which reveal the possibilities and limits of Romantic ideology as performed in Shakespeare for children.²

From such varied points of reference as Wordsworth’s poetry, Coleridge’s criticism, Burke’s political philosophy, and Rousseau’s model of child-rearing, an understanding may be drawn of Romantic ideals, and the specific models of author and reader that inform Shakespearean children’s literature in the early nineteenth century. This plurality of voices is characteristic of the British Romantics who, “did not propound a ‘theory’ of Romanticism, as the Schlegel brothers and their circle did in Germany, but such a theory—although it is more like a series of working principles, which are often violated—may be evinced from their responses to Shakespeare” (Bate, Shakespeare 5). Thus, it is too simplistic to assert a single Romantic position, but it is possible to extrapolate a range of ideas based on dominant voices within the group.

The Romantic view of authorship—often figured through, though not exclusive to, Shakespeare—is most clearly articulated by William Word-sworth in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802). ³ This preface is a long, and at times circular, manifesto, but it is worth quoting substantially as an accessible model of the Romantic author:

All good Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply … such habits of mind will be produced that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections ameliorated. (62–63) The Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; … the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time … Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man. (76–77)

This model of authorship obviously functions as a strategy of self-canonisation, but this canonisation is also applied retrospectively to Shakespeare. Wordsworth refers to him throughout, and Shakespeare is established as the ideal figure through whom the privileged discourses of the Sublime, personal experience mediated through nature, and the individual as distinct from the idealised societies of the Enlightenment, may be written.

William Shakespeare, already identified as England’s national poet—thanks in no small part to David Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee—offered a model forebear in a self-legitimising genealogy.⁴ It is important to note that the Romantics do not simply retrieve Shakespeare from an obscure past. Critics such as Gary Taylor, Michael Bristol, and Michael Dobson have cogently demonstrated that the seventeenth no less than the eighteenth century had embraced Shakespeare as “normatively constitutive to British national identity as the drinking of afternoon tea” (Dobson 7). It is this level of symbolic value that makes Shakespeare a worthy object of appropriation for the Romantics, who circulate imaginative cultural capital rather than knowledge-based cultural capital as is demonstrated in commentaries on Shakespeare and his works. In these commentaries concepts of creative authorship and national character coalesce. If at times this involved a degree of distortion, “the necessity outweighed the difficulty and the price of partial or distorted reading was one well worth paying, for the benefits of making use of Shakespeare, of making him contemporary” (Bate, Romantics 9). The distorted or remade Shakespeare as Romantic author and subject is crucial, not simply to nineteenth-century Shakespeare (for children or generally), but also to twenty-first-century understandings of “Shakespeare”.⁵

If Wordsworth’s model of poetry reveals, “how Shakespeare becomes an archetype of the creative imagination which was an essential element of Romantic literary theory” (Han 15), then Samuel Taylor Coleridge demonstrates the simultaneous privileging of the ‘Romantic reader’ within appropriations (in the sense of taking ownership) of Shakespeare:

Another excellence in Shakespear, and in which no other writer equalled him, was in the language of nature, so correct was it that we could see ourselves in all he wrote; his style and manner had also that felicity, that not a sentence could be read without its being discovered if it were Shaksperian. (Lectures 521, original emphases)

Thus is Shakspeare always master of himself and of his subject—a genuine Proteus: we see all things in him, as images in a calm lake, most distinct, most accurate—only more splendid, more glorified. This is correctness in the only philosophical sense. But he requires your sympathy and submission; you must have that recipiency of moral impression without which the purposes and ends of the drama would be frustrated, and the absence of which demonstrates an utter want of all imagination, a deadness to that necessary pleasure of being innocently … drawn away from ourself to the music of noblest thought in harmonious sounds. (Coleridge, Literary 249)⁶

In making Shakespeare a poet, Coleridge is privileging a literary rather than theatrical Shakespeare, in an example of the ways in which “the Romantics contend that the complexity and artistry of Shakespeare’s texts are accessible only through imaginative reading, because the actor tends to degrade their literary and dramatic values for the sake of momentary theatrical effect” (Han 25). Such a privileging (which may also be seen in Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare”) not only makes Shakespeare an ideal author, but also necessarily implies and valorises an ideal reader, for Shakespeare; for Romanticism; for Romantic poetry; and for the Romantic circle’s responses to Shakespeare. Coleridge explicitly made Shakespeare over into a Romantic poet-author most accessible to the Romantic reader, for whom “the romantic poetry—the Shakespearian drama—appealed to the imagination rather than to the senses” (Literary 35).

Just as Shakespeare became the figure of ideal authorship, the child became the figure of ideal readership as a result of discursive connections between innocence and the natural (potentially Sublime). This child, as the possible embodiment of Romanticism, was as heavily debated as authorship. In the eighteenth-century debate on juvenile development, a debate which consolidated early-modern constructions of childhood as a category of individual and social development, the concepts of John Locke (moral neutrality, or the tabula rasa), John Wesley (original sin), and Jean Jacques Rousseau (natural education) were in competition.⁷ Although Locke and Rousseau differed philosophically, their mutual interest in the child as reader offered meat for the Romantics, who in negotiating between these thinkers located their “natural connection between children and higher truths [that] opened the way for a new means of communicating through fiction” (Thacker and Webb 16).

John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) privileged reason as a precondition to moral good, and was deeply concerned with the child as the ‘future adult’. Although Locke was primarily concerned with the development of good citizens, he also offered the proposition that “Learning might be made a Play and Recreation to Children” (208, original emphasis). Locke included specific pedagogical advice regarding reading materials for children:

I think Æsop’s Fables the best, which being Stories apt to delight and entertain a Child, may yet afford useful Reflections to a grown Man. And if his Memory retain them all his life after, he will not repent to find them there, amongst his manly Thoughts, and serious Business. If his Æsop has Pictures in it, it will entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read, when it carries the increase of Knowledge with it. (212, original emphasis)

The combining of entertainment and education here identifies Locke as a key precursor of dominant understandings of children’s literature today, even though literature is of limited concern within his text.

In dialogue with Locke’s Education, Jean Jacques Rousseau produced a semi-fictionalised polemic on child-rearing and education in Emile: Or, On Education (1762), where he took to task those who “are always seking the man in the child without thinking what he is before being a man” (34). Rather than reason, Rousseau identified instinctual feeling and sensory experience as the foundations of valuable childhood, suggesting indeed that the child “ought to receive [lessons] only from experience” (92): reason and morals are to be acquired as an adult. Within a framework of ‘natural education’, Rousseau posited childhood as a time where any outside/adult influence is potentially detrimental to the child, and such influence necessarily includes fictional narratives: “How can people be so blinded as to call fables the morality of children? They do not think about how the apologue, in giving enjoyment to children, deceives them … Fables can instruct men, but the naked truth has to be told to children” (112). Nonetheless, Rousseau used the book as metaphor when describing the child’s ‘instinctive’ learning:

He keeps in himself a record of the actions and the speeches of men, and all that surrounds him is the book in which, without thinking about it, he continually enriches his memory while waiting for his judgment to be able to profit from it. (112)

Rousseau’s response to Locke “quickly attracted a band of ardent supporters in England—Rousseauphiles like Richard Edgeworth, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas Day, and Mary Wollstonecraft” (Cleverley and Phillips 36). Importantly these figures are not only followers of Rousseau in rethinking juvenile education, but are also proponents of a literature for children.⁸ It is thus in the promulgation of a model of childhood drawing on both Locke and Rousseau—the reader who learns through entertainment and the child who instinctively ‘knows’ things—that the Romantics located the ‘reading counterpart’ to their ‘writing genius’.

If the implication of Shakespeare in the construction of Romantic authorship, and “the idealized relationship between adult author and child reader, formed out of the Romantic aesthetic, which serves as a model for subsequent writing for children in English” (Thacker and Webb 13), it is surprising that only two examples of Shakespeare for children in English emerged in the early nineteenth century (and indeed only one that produced prose narrative for an intended child reader). These two examples however, Mary and Charles Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare and Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler’s The Family Shakespeare (both 1807), are crucial to understandings of contemporary Shakespeare for children, and taken together reveal the gendered goals of adaptation that have been inherited as part of the genre. The Lamb and Bowdler texts speak simultaneously to the power and limitations of Romantic ideologies, for while the...

Table of contents

• Children’s Literature and Culture
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One Romantic Roots: Constructing the Child as Reader, and Shakespeare as Author
• Chapter Two Author(is)ing the Child: Shakespeare as Character
• Chapter Three “Be These Juggling Fiends No More Believed”: Macbeth, Gender, and Subversion
• Chapter Four Puck vs. Hermia: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Gender, and Sexuality
• Chapter Five “This Island’s Mine”: The Tempest, Gender, and Authority/Autonomy
• Conclusions?
• Notes
• Index