Noble Imps: Doomed Heirs

Jean Wilson, ‘The Noble Imp: The Upper-Class Child in English Renaissance Art and Literature’, Antiquaries Journal, 70 (1990), 360–79 (p. 361).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 90.Google Scholar

Lawrence Stone, The Family Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenleld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 112 and 105.Google Scholar

Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 23.Google Scholar

Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurture, or Schoole of Good Manners (1577), in The Babees Book, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Early English Text Society, 1868), see pp. 63–5.Google Scholar

Catherine Belsey, ‘Little Princes: Shakespeare’s Royal Children’, in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 32–48 (p. 38).Google Scholar

Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Lester Kruger Born (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 155.Google Scholar

On the connection between child-murder and tyranny see Belsey ‘Little Princes’, p. 35, and Scott Colley, ‘Richard III and Herod’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 451–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008), unless stated otherwise. For further information about boy kings see Charles Beem (ed.), The Royal Minorities of Medieval and Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), esp. Chapter 4 (R.A. Griffiths, ‘The Minority of Henry VI, King of England and of France’), and Chapter 5 (Michael Hicks, ‘A Story of Failure: The Minority of Edward V).Google Scholar

Jeremy Potter, Good King Richard? An Account of Richard III and his Reputation1483–1983 (London: Constable, 1983), p. 145.Google Scholar

Ibid., pp. 151–2. Shakespeare’s decision to place the murder off-stage is in stark contrast to earlier versions of the story. The anonymously authored play The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (entered in the Stationer’s register, June 1594), advertised on its title page that it depicted ‘the smothering of the two young Princes in the Tower’, and the play does indeed take a particularly gory pleasure in the killing — not only showing it on-stage, but also including a blackly comic scene in which the murderers debate how best to dispatch the children. See Anon., The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, 1594, ed. W.W. Greg (Malone Society Reprints, 1929), 11. 1230–50. Shakespeare’s main source, Thomas More’s unlinished History of Richard III (c. 1516), although prose rather than drama, also recounts the details of the murder with a great degree of immediacy and physicality describing how the murderers entered the room and ‘sodainly lapped [the boys] vp amongst ye clothes so be wrapped them and entangled them keeping down by force the featherbed and pillows hard unto their mouthes, that within a while smored and stifled, […] thei gave vp to god their innocent soules’ (Thomas More, ‘The History of Richard III’, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 2, ed. Richard Sylvester (London: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 85.Google Scholar

See Maurice Hunt, ‘Ordering Disorder in Richard III’, South Central Review, 6 (1989), 11–29 (p. 25).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, ‘Kingjohn’, in Shakespeare’s Histories, ed. Emma Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 182–95 (p. 183).Google Scholar

On the legal claims of John and Arthur, see A.R. Braunmuller, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare, King John, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 54–61.Google Scholar

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The Oxford English Dictionary Online gives the following definition: ‘oppress, v. To press forcefully on (a person or thing), esp. so as to cause damage or discomfort; to crush; to crowd; to smother. Obs.’ This supports the connection between the word ‘oppressed’, and ‘pressed’ or ‘impressed’. A connection might even be made with the printing press, which, though not relevant to King John’s medieval setting, would be available to its early modern audiences. For a detailed and wide-ranging exploration of the prevalence of printing and imprinting metaphors in early modern discourses of reproduction, parenting, genealogy and education, see Margreta de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes’, in Alternative Shakespeares, vol. II, ed. Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 65–95. 41.Google Scholar

For a discussion of this debate see Richard P. Wheeler, ‘Deaths in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 127–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Virginia M. Vaughan, ‘King John: A Study in Subversion and Containment’, in King John: New Perspectives, ed. Deborah T. Curren-Aquino (London: Associated University Press, 1989), pp. 62–75 (p. 72).Google Scholar

Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949), p. 42.Google Scholar

Margaret Omberg, ‘Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre’, Studia Neophilologica, 68 (1996), 39–47 (p. 39). It is worth noting that Lady Macbeth’s assertion that she has ‘given suck’ has opened up a Pandora’s box of extra-textual speculation about Macbeth’s childlessness. The opposing positions are epitomised by Marvin Rosenberg and Margaret Omberg. Rosenberg, in an appendix to his book The Masks of Macbeth entitled ‘Lady Macbeth’s Indispensable Child’, imagines a staging in which the Macbeth ‘babe’ — a boy — is present on-stage for a large portion of the play (see The Masks of Macbeth (London: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 671–6). Omberg, on the other hand, counters that ‘such deductions and speculations as these cannot be seriously entertained’ and that ‘no child of Macbeth is present in a play which otherwise makes much of children as characters’ (‘Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre’, pp. 42–3).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

See Elizabeth Nielsen, ‘Macbeth: The Nemesis of the Post-Shakespearian Actor’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 193–9 (pp. 193–4)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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