In Noel Streatfeild’s novel, Curtain Up (US title: Theatre Shoes), before Sorrel is allowed to play Ariel on the professional stage, she must undergo a medical examination and formal interview at the “Education Officer’s Department of the London County Council” in the imposing County Hall. Her chaperone tells her not be frightened, but the idea doesn’t seem to occur to Sorrel, especially as the doctor is “friendly” and appears to be highly knowledgeable about her famous theatrical family and the role she is about to play. He indicates his support for her choice of career, which will mean her leaving full-time school, by saying, “playing a part like that was an education in itself.” (Streatfeild, 2015/1944, p. 405).

This short scene encapsulates the message which Streatfeild wishes to convey to her readers regarding Shakespeare. Knowledge of his plays benefits girls, and is “an education in itself”. This article situates Streatfeild’s career novels within the long history of Shakespeare for children, showing that she was an innovator in this field. She presented Shakespeare as a force who could improve the lives of girls, facilitating their well-being, independence, and their sense of cultural identity within the family or their social class. The engagement that girls in these novels have with the works of Shakespeare includes reading the texts for pleasure, the acquisition of knowledge of the plays for its own sake, and identification with Shakespeare’s characters: all activities encouraged in literature for girls for over a hundred years before Streatfeild. But the “Shoe” novels take the process further into an exciting realm of creative engagement, in which girls act in Shakespeare’s plays on the professional stage, and in doing so, earn prestige, independence and hard cash.

The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature calls Ballet Shoes (2015/1936) “the story that created the genre of the career novel” (Hahn, 2015, p. 48), and the most obvious benefit of Shakespeare to the girls in these novels is that his plays are a means to a career. Streatfeild’s original (and subsequently much-copied) formula is to explore a child’s professional development, emphasising that hard work and sensible behaviour are necessary as well as talent. Streatfeild wrote in an article in 1956, “I have tried in every book I have written, which has professional children of any sort in it, to bring out the hard work and discipline angle” (Streatfeild, 1956). It is a liberating message, and a radical one in 1936, a time when “girls and women are generally still surrounded by messages about female incompetence” (Huse, 1994, p. 41). The runaway commercial success of Ballet Shoes created a market for career novels for girls.

Time and again, the characters must prove their worth as actors by acting in works by Shakespeare. He represents achievement because he is far and away the most prestigious and well-known playwright in English, and the implied author is at pains to point out that professional appearance in his plays is of great benefit to children. Acting in Shakespeare is depicted as a safe activity, and Streatfeild’s novels thematise the need to avoid child exploitation. As a young woman employed as an actress in the Charles Doran Shakespeare Company, she threatened to strike over the poor financial treatment of a fifteen-year-old girl playing Puck (Bull, 1984, p. 79). Her novels are preoccupied with chaperones, licences and fair pay. The welfare of the child is paramount.

The lives of the girls in Ballet Shoes are lived under the constant threat of dire financial penury. They are sent to the Academy purely “to be trained to help support themselves” (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, p. 49) and to keep their fragile, all-female household solvent. Whilst their guardian, Sylvia, works on the accounts secretly until midnight, the girls agonise over how to afford necessities, with detailed sums of shillings and pence repeatedly mentioned. Pauline is weighed down by “the responsibility of being the eldest” and the main breadwinner, whilst Petrova, lacking Pauline’s talent and inclination, bravely soldiers on with various low-paid, low-status acting and dancing jobs, because it is her duty. Against this backdrop, Shakespeare comes to the rescue. Pauline’s first encounter with Shakespeare is framed not in terms of his reputation as a moralist, but in terms of how he might be of practical use to her. Doctor Jakes suggests that Pauline “should learn him” because “He wrote a few good parts for children.” It is something to “work at” (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, p.41). At her career-making audition for the role of Alice, Pauline recites Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: he is the symbolic gateway to her professional progression. Before her audition for Peaseblossom, Pauline is calculating what she might earn: “She knew the fairies’ parts could not be worth much…” (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, p. 214). It is not art, but money, that is at the forefront of her mind. At that audition, Petrova recites The Boy from Henry V. They both get the parts. The importance of the money Shakespeare has brought them is evidenced by the fact that a whole page is devoted to the exact sums they earn, and what they do with the money: “Pauline and Petrova got two pounds a week each as fairies; for the extra matinees they got an eighth of their two pounds, so that they got five shillings extra for each matinee…” (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, p. 245). This unexpected income from Shakespeare is the cause of Pauline consciously taking control of her own finances, deciding how much to save and spend. Crucially, throughout this key chapter (“Independence at Fourteen”), Pauline is shown as capable and mature, with her choices validated by the authoritative female figures of Doctor Jakes and Doctor Smith. She is even emboldened into the unprecedented step of soliciting directly for her next theatrical engagement, as the young King Edward in Richard III. Her triumph in the part attracts huge and flattering attention, but “The only thing she was proud about was that she was able to give Sylvia three pounds nine shillings a week, for she earned four pounds…” (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, p. 276).

That Pauline enjoys so many theatrical triumphs in Shakespearean productions is in keeping with the times. The decade in which Noel Streatfeild wrote Ballet Shoes was one in which Shakespearean innovation was thriving. The 1930s saw the opening of the New Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the opening of the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre with a production of Twelfth Night (Shakespeare in Regent’s Park is called “lovely” in White Boots (Streatfeild, 2020/1951, p. 208)), and an almost exclusively Shakespearean repertoire at the Old Vic, featuring British theatre’s greatest stars. In June 1938, the London Shakespeare festival took place, the brainchild of the Globe-Mermaid Association, which had plans to rebuild the Globe Theatre near its historic site on Bankside. Shakespeare’s plays were frequently broadcast on BBC Radio and released in the cinema. (For example, 1935’s lavish Hollywood production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and 1936’s As You Like It, starring Laurence Oliver). Stratford-upon-Avon had become a year-round tourist attraction. As the journalists Ivor Brown and George Fearon wrote in their entertaining 1939 work on the Shakespeare industry, “Really there is no escaping William Shakespeare now” (Brown and Fearon, 1939, p. 307).

Streatfeild’s career novels accept and propagate the contemporary notion that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English, an unavoidable cultural colossus, and that children should therefore familiarise themselves with his works if they want to belong to the mainstream. The strategies of a dominant ideology, according to Terry Eagleton, include “naturalising and universalising such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable” and “denigrating ideas which might challenge it” (Eagleton, 2007/1991, p. 5). If the cultural domination of Shakespeare is an ideological belief, then the theatre novels of Streatfeild do indeed “naturalise” and “universalise” that ideology. Whereas some critics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, such as Gary Taylor in Reinventing Shakespeare (1990) and Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory (2008), have questioned this proposition (and in doing so, the legitimacy of the concept of literary canon), Shakespeare’s pre-eminence as the finest writer in English was virtually unchallenged in Streatfeild’s time, and indeed had been from about the mid-eighteenth century onwards.

An assumption of Shakespeare’s unassailable greatness has led to his works being co-opted through the centuries to support various ideological stances which go in and out of intellectual fashion. For example, at different points of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elements within Shakespeare’s works were widely cited as proof and justification of contemporary beliefs. These included, amongst others: the Romantic idea of transcendental genius; the proper subjugation of women into a purely domestic field; the superiority of English language and culture over all others; the truth of Christianity over all other faiths.

John Stephens writes, “Writing for children is usually purposeful, its intention being to foster in the child reader a positive apperception of some socio-cultural values which, it is assumed, are shared by author and audience” (Stephens, 1992, p.3). If Shakespeare is seen to embody the values of society at any given time, it follows that it must in some way benefit children to learn about him. It is therefore inevitable that Shakespeare has been very widely shared by adult authors to child readers since the category of children’s literature first began to emerge in the eighteenth century. In the earliest Shakespeare texts for children, Shakespearean extracts are reprinted for elocution practice or learning grammar. But by the end of the century, there is an assumption that (carefully selected) extracts of Shakespeare can have a far deeper impact. For example, in her Female Reader of 1789, Mary Wollstonecraft states that reading Shakespeare can improve a girl’s taste and her comprehension. The breakthrough year for children’s Shakespeare was 1807, the year of Mary and Charles Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare (2016/1807) and Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler’s The Family Shakespeare (2009/1807) The former was the first published attempt to novelise Shakespeare’s plays for children in English. It was an instant commercial success and set the tone for Shakespearean adaptation for children for decades to come: a simplified retelling which eliminates profane and sexual elements, and promotes contemporary ideals (one example in the Lambs’ text is an emphasis upon duty and obedience in girls). The Bowdlers’ Family Shakespeare was a different format, taking some of the play texts and heavily editing them to remove elements which the Bowdlers deemed to be unsuitable for children. In both texts, there is a strong assumption that children need access to Shakespeare, but that in his raw, uncut state he is unacceptable. As the nineteenth century progressed, there was a rapid growth in the market for Shakespeare texts for children: edited playtexts for schools; simplified retellings of the “Tales” for younger children; creative engagements with the texts such as Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850). All were attempts by adults to share Shakespeare with the younger generation, in the hope, as Stephens puts it, “of trying to mould audience attitudes into ‘desirable’ forms” (Stephens, 1992, p.3).

These nineteenth century editings, appropriations and retellings of Shakespeare for children often exhibit their moral purpose explicitly. For example, the Lambs, in their introduction to the influential Tales, claim that Shakespeare’s plays are “strengtheners of virtue” which “teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity” (Lambs 2016/1807, p. xiv). Cowden Clarke, in her Girl’s Own Paper essay “Shakespeare the Girl’s Friend,” argues that Shakespeare’s heroines contain a blueprint of desirable femininity: “in his page she may find warning, guidance, kindliest monition, and wisest counsel” (Cowden Clarke, 1887). In other words, in the nineteenth century Shakespeare texts for girls are often constructed as aids to moral improvement (although the exact nature of that improvement is of course never static). However, Erica Hateley argues that by the end of the century a subtle change of emphasis was underway. In E. Nesbit’s The Children’s Shakespeare (1897) whilst the format was near-identical to the Lambs (short prose retellings of certain plays), the editorial framing had changed. The children in Nesbit’s introduction request the tales not for moral edification, but out of anxiety that they will be considered ignorant without a grounding in these stories: “…Nesbit’s audience is constructed as already understanding that in order to be fully rounded adults they will need to be familiar with Shakespeare, but that familiarity is an end in itself” (Hateley, 2009, p. 48).This concept that familiarity with Shakespeare “is an end in itself” continues as the project of the theatre novels of Streatfeild – and still resonates powerfully today.

Present here in Nesbit’s introduction to The Children’s Shakespeare, as Hateley points out, is the understanding that knowledge of Shakespeare represents cultural capital, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory around “the symbols, ideas, tastes, and preferences that can be strategically used as resources in social action” (Scott, 2015). There is evidence from the eighteenth century onwards that it was considered useful for girls to know Shakespeare so that they might be regarded as educated, but from Nesbit’s time onwards, the idea gains greater depth: it is widely and explicitly recognised that children who know their Shakespeare have a greater chance of success in life, for multiple reasons. For the heroines of Streatfeild, the acquisition of knowledge of Shakespeare is not a moral lesson but pure cultural capital: it enables them to belong to the dominant class, socially, culturally and economically.

One strategy that the implied author of the “Shoe” novels uses to persuade the implied reader of Shakespeare’s importance, is to have the concept of Shakespeare introduced to the child protagonist by a trusted teacher. Her kindness and wisdom lend authority to her high opinion of Shakespeare. For Jakes in Ballet Shoes, Shakespeare is “beloved”. Mrs Storm, the governess in Wintle’s Wonders US Title: Dancing Shoes) is a Shakespearean enthusiast, who “is talking about Twelfth Night” from the very first lesson (Streatfeild, 1995/1957, p. 49).

Shakespeare is seen as such a positive force that he is even relevant to the education of Streatfeild’s non-theatrical heroines, such as Harriet in White Boots (US title: Skating Shoes). Here, Miss Goldthorpe fulfils the role of trusted Shakespeare advocate. Time and again she retreats into a Shakespearean reverie: “She was a great lover of Shakespeare’s plays, and could recite them for hours on end and never repeat herself once. That particular day she was with Henry V” (Streatfeild, 2020/1951, p. 161). By showing the skating prodigy Lalla rejecting Shakespeare, the implied author suggests that Lalla is morally lacking in other ways. The heroine, Harriet, by contrast, shares Miss Goldthorpe’s enthusiasm, as a metonym for what the implied author regards as Harriet’s positive qualities of hard work, selflessness and kindness. When Lalla says, “I wouldn’t have thought it of you, Harriet. You don’t look the mimsy-pimsy sort of person who could like hearing about that silly Viola and that awful Malvolio,” she is condemning herself (Streatfeild, 2020/1951, p.167).

Ideologies define themselves against what they are not. In Streatfeild’s novels, when a character like Lalla voices opposition to the consensus that Shakespeare is wonderful, a false debate is created in which only Shakespeare can be the winner. Thus, Dulcie and Hilary in Wintle’s Wonders, who find Shakespeare boring, are depicted as unserious, two-dimensional creatures in comparison to the Shakespeare-loving heroine, Rachel. Interestingly, Petrova in Ballet Shoes, a character constructed as hard-working and admirable, rejects acting as a career but still likes Shakespeare. One of the loudest voices in opposition to Shakespeare is Mark in Curtain Up, who stubbornly refuses to become an actor and claims to despise Shakespeare: “Mark was determined not to let Grandmother recite Shakespeare at him” (Streatfeild, 2015/1944, p. 438). Unlike Lalla, Dulcie and Hilary, the implied author does not condemn Mark for his crimes against Shakespeare, and grants him success and happiness. This is permissible because Mark is different in another, crucial way: he is one of Streatfeild’s stock character types, the annoying but amusing younger brother (like David in Tennis Shoes, Augustus and Benjamin in Party Frock (US title: Party Shoes), and Angus in The Bell Family), and as such receives indulgent, comic treatment, not moral scrutiny. Moreover, it is shown that Mark’s rejection of Shakespeare does not matter, because the playwright supports him notwithstanding: at his crucial and successful BBC audition, Mark sings “Where the Bee Sucks” from The Tempest.

The wider world of Streatfeild’s novels consistently validates the view that Shakespeare is held in the highest esteem by those in authority. In these novels, productions of Shakespeare are shown to possess higher status than other plays. The production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Ballet Shoes is “far grander than ‘Alice in Wonderland’, a “tremendous production”, “on a very grand scale”, with money spent on the best designers (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, pp. 225, 227). Similarly, Sir Francis’ production of The Tempest in Curtain Up is hugely prestigious: “In the ordinary way he did a London season he performed two or three plays as a repertory, but this time he decided to give all his attention to one production, which should be as beautiful as war conditions would allow” (Streatfeild, 2015/1944, p. 371). One big Shakespeare production would seem to be worth two or three other plays. Even when storylines do not centre on a major Shakespeare production, Shakespeare is mentioned repeatedly and positively as a perpetual backdrop to the lives of the characters: Miriam in Curtain Up sees a ballet of Hamlet; Peter and Santa in The Circus is Coming (US title: Circus Shoes) are depicted as sadly deprived because they do not go to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in The Painted Garden (US title: Movie Shoes), a grown-up Pauline Fossil reveals that the pinnacle of her career is to play Juliet (“Juliet! I’m so happy I can’t tell you.” (Streatfeild, 1961/1949, p. 283)).

Having established that a knowledge and liking of Shakespeare is depicted in the “Shoe” novels as a form of cultural capital and as a source of income, does it also therefore follow that it is a signifier of middle-class status? Since children’s literature first emerged as a distinct category, the child constructed by the text has usually been middle class. Fiction for children in the mid-century was, for the most part, written, edited and published by middle-class people; it was marketed to parents with money to buy it, and to children with leisure to read it. A middle-class child picking up Ballet Shoes in 1936 would find much that was familiar in terms of values and milieu, with focalisation firmly on the middle-class family. In these texts, working class characters are presented as “other”, as I will show. Values are successfully passed from implied author to implied reader when they “are taken for granted by the writer, and reflect the writer’s integration in a society which unthinkingly accepts them” (Hollindale, 2011, p. 39). One such ideology in these novels is that a middle-class identity is natural and normal, and a working-class identity is not. The children in Streatfeild’s novels carry numerous middle-class indicators: singing, dancing and elocution lessons; wealthy relatives; living in big houses; ownership of pets rather than working animals; leisure and holidays. Poverty, which often exists, is genteel, not desperate.

If children’s literature as a genre in the most general sense was designed mainly for middle-class children, it might seem logical that Shakespeare for children would also be exclusive. However, the truth is more complex. Firstly, access to Shakespeare’s plays was far from being a middle-class privilege in the 1930s. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 had established the right to education for English working-class children, and in 1918, compulsory education between the ages of 5 and 14 was passed into law. Shakespeare featured on the curriculum of secondary schools, and was a subject in the public examination called the School Certificate, taken at the age of 16. Working class children in the 1930s may also have visited the theatre on a school trip, as encouraged by the Newbolt Report of 1921, and the Board of Education in 1926.

However, the evidence gathered by Andrew Murphy from working-class autobiographies strongly suggests that working class children in the early twentieth century actually enjoyed Shakespeare less than their counterparts in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth century working-class autobiographers who express an opinion on Shakespeare had often struggled to acquire education and placed great value on every text that fell into their hands. Many went so far as to claim Shakespeare – with his relatively humble origins – as one of their own, and Shakespeare was integrated symbolically into the nineteenth century working-class struggle. For example, Thomas Cooper, the leader of Leicester’s Shakespearean Chartist Association, memorised a number of Shakespeare’s plays as part of his programme of self-improvement, and lectured to his fellow activists on Shakespeare, Milton and Burns.

By contrast, there is a large body of evidence to suggest that, once Shakespeare was embedded in a compulsory school curriculum, some working-class children found his works anything but inspirational. Murphy (2008) and Janet Bottoms (2013) both give numerous examples of working-class children giving the opinion that Shakespeare is boring and irrelevant. Part of the problem was poor-quality teaching, an emphasis on rote learning, philology and historical sources rather than imagination, and (of course) teaching to the exam. Also, as Murphy points out, the working-class children of the early twentieth century had many other claims on their time other than reading officially sanctioned literature, including radio, cinema, popular novels, and the newly professionalised and wildly popular sport of football. Moreover, Shakespeare was becoming increasingly professionalised and therefore less welcoming to working-class people: spoken about in inaccessible ways in academia, and produced in avant-garde productions on the stage, as we shall see.

One indicator that even the most financially embarrassed of Streatfeild’s fictional families are middle class, is that they enjoy the unwavering support of a family retainer or servant of some sort, such as Nana in Ballet Shoes and Hannah in Curtain Up. The subordinate social class of these women is indicated in several ways, such as dialect speech, one-dimensional characterisation, and broadly comic treatment (for example, Hannah in Curtain Up is so naïve that she is too frightened to ride a London escalator). Nana in Ballet Shoes, always selflessly and unquestionably supportive of the Fossil girls, makes a rare outburst of disapproval over their careers when they are about to appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The problem is the revealing costumes (“Petrova had nothing on beyond her tights, except a funny little hat”) which the girls must wear on stage: “Nana, who had taken them to the fitting, was disgusted and said so.” (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, p. 226). The episode proves that interest in Shakespeare is not in itself a marker of middle-class identity, because working-class Nana shows she has a strong opinion on how Shakespeare should be staged and is not afraid to voice it:

Combies of a nasty yellow shade is not what a fairy would wear.

“They’re modern fairies,” the dressmaker explained.

“Modern!… If that’s modern, give me the old-fashioned kind.” (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, p. 226).

The issue is not that working-class people don’t understand Shakespeare, but rather that they have their reservations about the modern productions that were in vogue in the 1930s. Fashions in Shakespeare were changing in a way that the working-classes did not always enjoy or appreciate. Murphy, citing Richard Foulkes and John Carey, explains that Shakespearean productions at the start of the twentieth century moved away from an aesthetic that sought to please the majority and towards a more “progressive” or modernist aesthetic which tended to exclude working-class audiences. In the words of Murphy, “changes in theatre specifically, and in literary culture more generally, effected a bifurcation whereby elite culture (to which Shakespeare was annexed) came to define itself against a popular culture identified as the native province of the working class”. (Murphy, 2008, p.177) Pauline, who has been asked to wear a skimpy costume consisting of a flesh-coloured body suit and some flowers, initially shares Nana’s opinion: “Pauline said nothing, but she agreed with Nana” (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, p. 226); her ability to overcome her reservations and wholeheartedly endorse the modern production is what helps to mark her as middle-class.

Nana’s “disgust” with the modernist production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not only an aesthetic judgment but is rooted in practicality: it is her job to protect the reputations of the girls in her care. Another reason that Nana is constructed as being in the wrong is that she does not realise the prestige of Shakespeare is powerful enough to protect the girls from scandal, even if they are wearing nothing but “combies”. In earlier times, acting was widely considered to be a scandalous way of life, and there was still a lingering doubt over the morals of girls who appeared on the stage. In the nineteenth century, the acting profession had grown in prestige, with Shakespearean acting at the pinnacle; however, actors in pantomimes or melodramas were not conferred the same high status. Sir Henry Irving, the most renowned Shakespearean performer of his age, became the first actor to receive a knighthood (in 1895, the year of Streatfeild’s birth). According to Pascale Aebischer, Ellen Terry (who frequently starred in Shakespearean productions with Sir Henry Irving) used Shakespeare to shore up her reputation. For Terry, Shakespeare was “the creator of virtuous protagonists who could be used for the social vindication of the actors performing those roles, a relatively respectable means of earning a living” (Aebischer, 2007, p.170). Noel Streatfeild trained as an actor against the better judgement of her religious, conservative family, but noted that they found Shakespeare to be socially acceptable even if they did not approve of the profession in general. She wrote in a magazine article, “Carrying my Shakespeare, so that I would be word perfect when rehearsals started, I went back to the Vicarage. ‘Shakespeare,’ said my mother thankfully. ‘How splendid! Daddy will be pleased; it’s so suitable’” (Streatfeild, 1964). Bull points out that Ballet Shoes is the first book for children which depicts actors as respectable, and not as persons of easy virtue (Bull, 1984, p. 140).

In Curtain Up it is strongly implied that the Warren family’s high social status derives not from being successful actors, but from being successful Shakespearean actors. Sorrel never meets her grandfather, Sir Joshua, and only sets eyes on him in the form of a massive, imposing portrait in the role of Henry V. Sir Francis, her uncle, is first introduced as “Sir Francis Brain, the Shakespearean actor” (Streatfeild, 2015/1944, p. 115). By contrast, the acting family in Streatfeild’s Far to Go do not include Shakespeare in their repertoire: although honest, they are also characterised as lower class, constantly aspiring to an acceptance in high society to which they can never belong.

These novels have not only been ascribed to the career novel genre. They also, like The Saturdays series by Elizabeth Enright and the Marlow series by Antonia Forest, belong to the mid-century family novel genre. Nancy Huse calls Streatfeild a “family novelist for children” (Huse, 1994, p. 39). When searching for the unifying features of Streatfeild “Shoe” novels in her study of formula, Lois Kuznets states that the family is one of their “specific cultural themes” (Kuznets, 1984, p. 147). In some of these novels, Shakespeare is shown as being a constituent part of the family’s shared identity, helping its members to bond together.

The trope of the Shakespearean acting company as a substitute family is a recurrent one in children’s literature. The earliest example that I have identified is Geoffrey Trease’s Cue for Treason (2015/1940). Subsequent examples include The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood (1998) and King of Shadows by Susan Cooper (1999). Erica Hateley points out that in all these novels, the new family of Shakespearean actors is a safe refuge for a troubled boy, but disadvantages girls, who, when they attempt to join, are in various ways excluded, humiliated or demotivated. By contrast, the “family” of a theatrical troupe in Streatfeild’s novels is of great advantage to girls.

Another clear difference in Streatfeild’s work is that, whereas in Cue for Treason, King of Shadows and The Shakespeare Stealer, the professional acting company is presented as a metaphorical family, Noel Streatfeild shows the biological family and the acting company as being one and the same. Like the heroes of Cue for Treason, The Shakespeare Stealer and King of Shadows, Rachel in Wintle’s Wonders is a lost child in search of a home after the death of her parents, but unlike them, the new home in which she finds herself is also the nearest she has to a “real” family home – that of her uncle, his wife and their daughter. There, she is introduced to Shakespeare by a kindly teacher and grows to love his plays. This binds her symbolically to her dead father, who was an actor, and of whom her uncle says fondly, “When I was an art student, and your father was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, I would paint at one end of our bedroom, and he would act Shakespeare at the other” (Streatfeild, 1995/1957, p. 51). Likewise, on the death of her paternal grandfather, Sorrel in Curtain Up joins the household of her maternal grandmother, the doyenne of “one of the oldest and one of the most distinguished theatrical families in this country” (Streatfeild, 2005/1944, p. 9). Shakespeare helps preserve a link with her dead mother: “What I believe is, our mother liked reading Shakespeare” (Streatfeild, 2005/1994 p. 64). In her new home, the only way that Sorrel can gain the approval of her emotionally distanced grandmother is by embracing Shakespeare, in particular by appearing on the professional stage as Ariel, with her uncle as Prospero.

Is there any evidence that real girls, influenced by the examples of Pauline, Rachel and Sorrel, have been influenced to think positively about Shakespeare? Here is the testimony of Harriet Jordan, the Australian author of a comprehensive and well-researched Streatfeild blog:

“[Streatfeild’s] writing had two long-lasting effects on my life. The first of these is probably not uncommon for readers of her work: I grew up with an unshakeable conviction that Shakespeare is the greatest English-language playwright ever. When studying his works at school, I was predisposed to enjoy them (unlike most of my contemporaries), and I also made an effort to watch televised versions even when we were not studying them… she … constituted my first introduction to a playwright whose works have enriched my life” (Jordan, 2022).

I am mindful of Alison Waller’s caution against regarding our reading histories as straightforwardly teleological. (Waller, 2020, p. 59) The ways in which the books we love in childhood shape our adult selves is, of course, hugely complex, and Waller’s metaphor (after Peter Hollindale) of the human life as meandering through a landscape rather than walking a straight line is helpful here. It is possible that Jordan’s memory of Streatfeild’s influence on her is in some way mistaken, or altered by nostalgia. However, she seems to sincerely credit Streatfeild in part for her life-changing love of Shakespeare, and it could be, word for word, my own experience. Apart from casual references in the culture that surrounded me (such as hearing quotations, or references in adverts), I am certain that my first meaningful encounters with Shakespeare would have been in the pages of Ballet Shoes and White Boots. Aidan Chambers writes persuasively of how an implied author may, through adopting a child-like perspective and appropriate style, work “powerfully as a solvent, melting away a child’s non-literary approach to reading and reforming him into the kind of reader the book demands” (Chambers, 1995, p. 42). It seems to have worked on me, making me the kind of reader who shared the view that Shakespeare was the most prestigious author.

I would argue that Streatfeild’s career novels participate in an evolutionary moment in the history of children’s encounters with Shakespeare. In many respects the ideological impulses in these texts sit firmly within the norms of the mid-century. In their insistence that knowledge of Shakespeare is vital cultural capital for any child, they participate in the tradition of E Nesbit’s The Children’s Shakespeare, and in the wider contemporary nexus of school curriculum, examinations and university English. They also transmit the widely held ideology amongst middle class English people of that era, that Shakespeare was an essential element of establishment culture. Shakespeare could be – and was – appropriated in support of the Church of England, the Empire and England itself (the latter being a central theme of Streatfeild’s pageant novel, Party Frock).

However, within this conventional framework I have detected messages which break from earlier paradigms of Shakespeare for children. Shakespeare’s value is not as a moral teacher, as suggested by many nineteenth century Shakespeare texts for girls, nor the subject of purely academic study. His works are not monoliths, beyond criticism, but cultural objects subject to opinion. The heroines of these novels learn about Shakespeare in part from the spirited debate about Shakespeare to which they are exposed. For example, Doctor Smith and Doctor Jakes are pleased with A Midsummer Night’s Dream precisely because they find things to criticise; they “enjoyed themselves as true Shakespeareans always enjoy themselves, arguing between each act about the reading of the parts, and the way the lines were said” (Streatfeild, 2015/1936, p.239). This idea is taken further in Curtain Up, in which a variety of voices (such as Sir Francis, Grandmother and – erroneously, because she is working class – Hannah) offer strong, clashing opinions about interpretation. The fact that Sorrel’s interpretation of Ariel is subject to mixed reviews is seen as just a fact of life, not a crushing blow: “It is difficult for anyone to be a success in a part of Shakespeare’s because there are so many people who love all Shakespeare’s work and have strong ideas how his parts should be played” (Streatfeild, 2015/1944, p.424). Crucially, girls’ interpretations can thrive within this marketplace of opinion. Amongst the reviews there are some who praise Sorrel’s performance precisely because it is that of a girl: “Little Miss Forbes spoke Ariel’s lines in a way that is a lesson to far more experienced actors” Streatfeild, 2015/1944, p.425).

These novels insist that Shakespeare helps to construct a happy and successful child. This is a child who is confident in herself, ready to learn, independent, yet able to work constructively with others. These heroines do not merely read or act the roles: they inhabit them. In doing so, they gain access to a strain of pure joy. For example, Pauline loses herself in the role of Puck, and Sorrel does the same as Ariel. For downtrodden Rachel, Shakespeare offers a form of escape from her lonely life: when she reads one of his plays the effect is blissfully transcendent: “she could forget that she was Rachel” (Streatfeild, 1995/1957, p. 91). In time, her Shakespearean education (in particular, her thoughtful self-identification with Shakespearean characters) gives her a unique dramatic training which makes her the perfect casting in a major movie, thus allowing her to escape her stultifying home and become financially independent. By incorporating encounters with Shakespeare with the newly minted genre of the career novel for girls, Streatfeild presents Shakespeare as a dynamically liberating force for girls. Moreover, these encounters with Shakespeare are routinely facilitated by trustworthy, competent women (such as Dr Jakes and Miss Goldthorpe), not men.

The children in these novels do not tremble in Shakespeare’s shadow but engage creatively with him; Phoebe, in Party Frock, is even inspired to be a writer herself. Powerless girls find their voices through identifying with Shakespearean characters. After the strictures of earlier presentations of Shakespeare for children, the girls in these texts are not lectured by Shakespeare, but liberated.