Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Note on the text
- 1 Introduction
- PART 1 SHAKESPEARE'S CHILDREN
- PART 2 CHILDREN'S SHAKESPEARES
- 8 Introduction: reinventing Shakespearean childhoods
- 9 Play's the thing: agency in children's Shakespeares
- 10 Shakespeare in the Victorian children's periodicals
- 11 Growing up with Shakespeare: the Terry family memoirs
- 12 Shakespeare in the company of boys
- 13 Dream children: staging and screening childhood in A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 14 Shakespeare (')tween media and markets in the 1990s and beyond
- APPENDICES
- Index
9 - Play's the thing: agency in children's Shakespeares
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Note on the text
- 1 Introduction
- PART 1 SHAKESPEARE'S CHILDREN
- PART 2 CHILDREN'S SHAKESPEARES
- 8 Introduction: reinventing Shakespearean childhoods
- 9 Play's the thing: agency in children's Shakespeares
- 10 Shakespeare in the Victorian children's periodicals
- 11 Growing up with Shakespeare: the Terry family memoirs
- 12 Shakespeare in the company of boys
- 13 Dream children: staging and screening childhood in A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 14 Shakespeare (')tween media and markets in the 1990s and beyond
- APPENDICES
- Index
Summary
This chapter considers the creative and critical implications of changing constructions of the agency of the child as evidenced in written and illustrated adaptations of Shakespeare for children over the past two centuries in Britain and the United States. By ‘agency of the child’, I mean developmental autonomy, demonstrated in the capacity to act, and to learn through acting, in the dual senses of taking action and dramatic performance, both of which can occur through the medium of play. When associated with childhood – particularly of primary-school age – the term ‘play’ conveys a child's sense of pleasure and control over his or her actions at a level that can be guided without necessarily being overdetermined by adults. For this reason teachers and child psychologists have recognized ‘play’ as a crucial component in developmental learning.
It is no coincidence, then, that dramatic ‘plays’, such as the works of Shakespeare, have been embraced by teachers and children's book authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as providing an opportunity to engage children in learning through play. One term that can be applied to the effects of guided play that engages children with Shakespeare as agents of their own learning is transformative initiation, where the goal is not solely to connect children to Shakespeare, but to enable Shakespeare's plays to provide an environment where developmental ‘sea changes’ for individual ‘actors’ are possible.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare and Childhood , pp. 137 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007