Abstract
From Lady Macbeth’s “I have given suck, and know/ how tender ‘tis to love the babe this milks me” (1.7.54–5) and Macbeth’s realization of the significance of his “fruitless crown” (3.1.60) and “barren sceptre” (3.1.61), to King Lear’s loss of his daughter Cordelia, to the missing princes in Cymbeline and lost infant daughters Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, the importance of children and the pain of child loss pervades the plays of Shakespeare, as it did the lives of early modern parents. Kathryn Moncrief explores the significance (socially, economically, and personally) of child loss and grief in early modern England, particularly as recorded in diaries and poetry, in relation to the fantasy of recovery and restoration in Shakespeare’s late romances. The chapter suggests that the stage both rehearses mourning and, in staging grief, functions powerfully as place of recovery.
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Notes
- 1.
All references to Shakespeare’s plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare.
- 2.
See Crawford and Gowing, 3; and Stone, 55.
- 3.
See Crawford, 71; and Crawford and Gowing, 3.
- 4.
In the Old Testament, Benjamin is the son of Jacob and Rachel. She names him Benoni (“son of my sorrow”) before she dies just after giving birth. His father re-names him Benjamin. Both names have resonance here.
- 5.
See Kathryn McPherson on women’s efforts to reconcile loss with faith.
- 6.
Houlbrooke (1988), 141.
- 7.
Houlbrooke, 142. See also Houlbrooke for numerous diary accounts of the deaths of children, including infants and adolescents.
- 8.
See Warren Chernaik.
- 9.
The text of Pericles is deeply problematic. Probably first performed in late 1607/early 1608, and first published in quarto in 1609, it was not included in the First or Second Folio. While the precise nature and timing of the collaboration is unknown, many editors (including the Arden, Norton, and Oxford) now posit George Wilkins, who published a 1608 prose version of the story, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, as the likely co-author. Wilkins is thought to be responsible for the first two acts of the play with each author having some contributions in the other parts. For example, this passage is from Q1; the first two lines appear in PA, followed by “In Nature’s garden though by grown a Bud/Shee was the chiefest flower, she was good.” (See textual note in The Norton Shakespeare).
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Moncrief, K.M. (2019). “The King shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found”: Child Loss, Grief, and Recovery in Shakespeare’s Late Romances. In: Miller, N.J., Purkiss, D. (eds) Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14211-7_9
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