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

by Rutter; Carol

• ISBN13: 9780415365192
• ISBN10: 0415365198
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2007-12-20
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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 Child?s-Play Carol Rutter shows how recent performances on stage and film have used the range of Shakespeare?s insights in order to re-examine and re-think these issues in terms of today?s society and culture.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgements

'Behold the Child' or - parts for children

The alphabet of memory in Titus Andronicus

Curing thought in The Winter's Tale

Precious motives, seeds of time: killing futures in Macbeth

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.