Shakespeare and Child's Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen [Hardcover]

Shakespeare wrote more than fifty parts for children, amounting to the first comprehensive portrait of childhood in the English theatre. Focusing mostly on boys, he put sons against fathers, servants against masters, innocence against experience, testing the notion of masculinity, manners, morals, and the limits of patriarchal power. He explored the nature of relationships and ideas about parenting in terms of nature and nurture, permissiveness and discipline, innocence and evil. He wrote about education, adolescent rebellion, delinquency, fostering, and child-killing, as well as the idea of the redemptive child who cures diseased adult imaginations.

Childness  the essential nature of being a child  remains a vital critical issue for us today. In Shakespeare and Childs-Play Carol Rutter shows how recent performances on stage and film have used the range of Shakespeares insights in order to re-examine and re-think these issues in terms of todays society and culture.

Arguing that contemporary culture uses Shakespeare to re-think these same issues today as we experience a post-modern crisis in 'childness', Shakespeare and Child's Play first locates ideas of childhood in early modern theorisations and performances then analyses a range of recent performances on stage and film that put our own culture's conflicted responses to the emotive issue of the child squarely in view.