Introduction

Abstract

Jokily paraphrasing L.C. Knights’s dismissal of character criticism in How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?, Robert Shaughnessy comments that ‘the last thing the serious critic wants to be bothered by […] is a group of pesky hypothetical kids’.¹ His point of course is to highlight how far the study of childhood in Shakespeare has come since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He cites A.C. Bradley’s remarks on the subject:

Pausing for a moment in his analysis of Macbeth in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), Bradley remarks on the ‘somewhat curious’ appearance of ‘Shakespeare’s boys’ in ‘tragic or semi-tragic dramas’, citing Arthur and Mamillius as examples of Shakespeare’s ‘power of pathos’; as a group, the boys are ‘affectionate, frank, brave, high-spirited… amusing and charming as well as pathetic; comical in their mingled acuteness and naïveté, charming in their confidence in themselves and their world, and in the seriousness with which they receive the jocosity of their elders’. As far as Bradley and his contemporary readers were concerned, this was all that needed to be said on the topic of Shakespeare’s children.²