Precocity and Performance

Child Characters in Two Shakespeare Plays

Abstract

The article attempts a close study of the child characters occurring in Shakespeare’s Richard III and King John to problematize their location on a grid defined by the cultural or aesthetic binary of precocity/innocence. Whereas Arthur’s ornate, farfetched pleadings in King John lack viability independent of a theatrical idiom, in Richard III we have a page coolly advising an assassination, a brother-sister duo participating in a matrix of adult hostilities that they fail to appreciate fully, Prince Edward whose sense of danger is of little help, and the little Duke of York who glibly defies Richard without gauging his murderous schemes. We need to exercise scepticism about marking these characters straightaway as “innocent” or “precocious,” and have to take account of theatrical mediations as well as trans-cultural, trans-historical slippages in signification. The article gestures towards the agencies (however rudimentary and inefficacious) embodied by such child characters, and tries to investigate how they subscribe to or undercut a unitary, overarching topos of “childhood.”