Abstract
The introduction analyzes the various historical and contemporary significances of early modern cultural representations of children and childhood in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of queer theory. It lays the groundwork for a discourse of early modern queer childhood studies, engaging with current critical discussions about queer children in the works of queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, James Kincaid, and Kathryn Bond Stockton. Interrogating the significance of premodern constructions of childhood queerness, the editors analyze the respective relevances of narratological, performative, and linguistic ideals and functions; categorical blurring and liminality (age, complexion, physiological development, etc.); temporal and spatial alterity; erotic subjectivity, objectivity, and agency; and differentiations as well as transformations of sex, gender, genre, class, status, race, (dis)ability, humanity/animality, and more. Ultimately, the chapter asserts that queer childhood studies might usefully maintain a productively anachronistic openness both to how children and childhood might have signified as queer for early modern culture, and how those representations might strike us as queer today.
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Notes
- 1.
Karín Lesnik-Oberstein correctly points out that whereas queer theory “defines itself as the dismantling of foundational categories, childhood often escapes this dismantling” (2010, 309); our approach thus attempts to maintain a (de)constructivist approach to both queerness and children/childhood.
- 2.
“queer,” adj. 1. 2017. OED Online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/156236?rskey=gHW2Fo&result=2&isAdvanced=false, accessed September 15, 2017. Further references to the OED will be noted parenthetically.
- 3.
Our nuanced use of the term here concurs with the supportive stance on queer anachronism maintained by critics like Carla Freccero in Queer/Early/Modern, whose “position on queer … would be to urge resistance to its hypostatization, reification into nominal status as designating an entity, an identity, a thing, and allow it to continue its outlaw work as a verb and sometimes an adjective” (2006, 5). In other words, our goal is not to reach a stable, universal vocabulary, but the conditions necessary for queerness to do ongoing critical work .
- 4.
Perhaps telling in this regard, when Arthur Golding translates into English the Aesopian fable about a drunken stag (ceruus) from Arnold Freitag’s Latin text Mythologia ethica, he turns the story into that of a drunken servant (seruus) instead. See Blake and Santos (2017).
- 5.
See, for examples, separate essays by Kincaid and Mohr in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004, 3–16 and 17–30 respectively). For Kincaid , the two roles or functions are mutually dependent and “necessary to our psychic and cultural life .… Defining the child as an object of desire, we create the pedophile as the one who desires” (5). See also Kincaid (1992).
- 6.
This anonymous translation of scripture appears in The proverbs of Solomon: newly translated out of the original tongue. Very commodious for the use of young children (Edinburgh, 1672), B4v.
- 7.
Compare Philip Ayres’s rather late seventeenth-century version of the fable , numbered LXVII, in Mythologia ethica, or, Three centuries of Aesopian fables in English prose (London , 1689), 285–287, with Arthur Golding’s manuscript version of the fable, which appears in Blake and Santos (74–75). In Ayres’s version, the mother ape , running from danger, inadvertently strikes the head of her favorite, whom she is holding, against a rock, while the uncoddled infant survives unharmed by hanging on her back. In Golding’s translation of Frietag, a mother ape , unaware that the hip of her favorite is out of joint, hugs him too hard and thereby kills him. In both versions, the spoiled child dies while the neglected child flourishes. Blake and Santos include an illustration from a copy of Arnold Frietag’s Latin source, Mythologia Ethica, which depicts a female ape holding one of her young in her arms while ignoring the other, who amuses himself, and quotes the scriptural proverb cited above (75).
- 8.
For further discussion of this topic, see Johnston (2017).
- 9.
On staging the signs of puberty , see Sparey (2015).
- 10.
All citations of Shakespeare ’s plays and poems, unless otherwise noted, follow The Riverside Shakespeare (1997).
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Higginbotham, J., Johnston, M.A. (2018). Introduction: Queer(ing) Children and Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. In: Higginbotham, J., Johnston, M. (eds) Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_1
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