Abstract
Historical fiction has long been a staple in the social studies, history, and English curricula of primary and secondary education. Such commercial and critical successes might be linked to the genre’s unique ability to blend educational, didactic, historical, and aesthetic concerns in children’s literature, aspects that are heightened considerably when authors elect to appropriate Shakespeare in their historical fiction. While some critics suggest that the genre of Shakespeare-for-children advocates discourses of normative gender, identity, and behavior, this study maintains that the ongoing cultural capital of the Bard in the classroom and on the bookshelf permits authors the opportunity to consider unconventional expressions of gender. More specifically, this article argues that authors of late-twentieth century historical fiction about Shakespeare turn to the early modern tradition of boy players performing as women in order to embrace alternative gendered identities and models of maturation, particularly as they regard boys and boyhood.
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Notes
For surveys of how Shakespeare has been reproduced for young readers, see Charles H. Frey’s “A Brief History of Shakespeare as Children’s Literature” (2001), Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., and Robert L. York’s Shakespeare and Youth Culture (2006), Velma Bourgeois Richmond’s Shakespeare as Children’s Literature: Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures (2008), and Abigail Rokison’s Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Versions and Adaptations (2013). Texts with more focused approaches have been rare. Megan Isaac’s Heir to Shakespeare: Reinventing the Bard in Young Adult Literature (2000) is a survey text intended for schoolteachers that addresses pedagogical concerns with Shakespeare-inspired novels in the American classroom. Naomi Miller’s edited collection Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults (2003) includes chapters from literary critics, authors, and educational theorists, most of which retain the notion that after engaging with such appropriations, readers will turn to Shakespeare proper. Numerous chapters on Shakespeare and children’s literature have surfaced in recent collections. Critics such as Laura Tosi, Jana Mikota, and Mark MacLeod have situated their work within the context of national politics and the politics of translation. Six chapters in Anja Müller’s Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature (2013) and one chapter in Benjamin Lefebvre’s Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations (2013) address Shakespeare and children’s literature.
This paradigm for the narrative of boyhood maturation in Shakespeare-influenced historical fiction originates in prolific British author Geoffrey Trease’s Cue for Treason (1940), a children’s novel set in England near the end of the sixteenth century that depicts two runaways children who come of age in the theatre.
I offer a working definition of queer as follows: a fluid and unconventional gender identity, sensibility, or process of obtaining and understanding said identity and sensibility; a queer identity and sensibility may, or may not, be linked to sexual acts (Harris, 2010, p. 142), but it always disrupts normative gender identities (Edelman, 2011, p. 17), in turn promoting a more liberating and inclusive identity that challenges, disrupts, and perhaps even dismantles normative values, systems, and identities (Pugh and Wallace, 2006, p. 261).
According to the OED, boy first appears in Scottish English during the early 1300 s to denote a male servant, slave, or assistant, and even into the 1400s and 1500s the word was synonymous with shackles or chains.
Given the Renaissance love of physical grace and eloquence, these first two feminine genderings—gymnastic abilities and language—are probably anachronistic.
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the novel believe that the American Nat Field is the historical boy player Nathan Field on loan from the Children of Paul’s.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a particularly effective drama to appropriate in order to depict the nonnormative gender relations between Will and Nat. Whereas in the previously discussed novels authors use a boy’s performance of traditional femininity or womanhood to develop his confidence in his nonnormative boyhood, King of Shadows finds in the complicated Oberon/Puck relationship an opportunity to explore Nat and Will’s unconventionality. For many gender and queer theorists, explains Dorothea Kehler, Puck is the “queer hero” in Shakespeare “because his pleasures work against or at least challenge ideological constraints”: “Puck is not the only vehicle for queering Dream, but he represents the possibility of queering Shakespeare, the English Renaissance canon, and the culture of the theaters and classrooms in which these high humanist works are daily revived” (1998, p. 48).
Nat recalls this moment in the final moments of the novel when Arby explains to Nat, “You have not lost him…. You will never lose him, never”: “‘Next summer, the Company of Boys will do a production of The Tempest,’ he said. ‘And you’ll play Ariel’… Arby looked at me with a half-smile [and] said, ‘At the end of The Tempest Prospero lets Ariel go free. ‘I shall miss thee,’ he says, ‘but still thou shalt have freedom.’ Go free Nat, Nat—free of grieving. And your two poets will go with you always’” (p. 186).
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M. Tyler Sasser recently received his Ph.D. from The University of Southern Mississippi where he researched the relationships between early modern representations of Shakespearean boyhood and their afterlives in contemporary appropriations for boys. He is the winner of the 2014 Children’s Literature Association Graduate Essay for his archival work on The Snowy Day and several unpublished letters written to Ezra Jack Keats by Harlem Renaissance authors, a version of which appears in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. He is an instructor of English at the University of Alabama.
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Tyler Sasser, M. “No one queens it like himself”: Performing Unconventional Boyhood in Historical Shakespearean Fiction. Child Lit Educ 47, 50–65 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9256-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9256-0