Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Queer(ing) Children and Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture

   • Jennifer Higginbotham, Mark Albert Johnston

   Pages 1-30

3. Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature

   • Simone Chess

   Pages 31-55

4. “I Had Peopled Else”: Shakespeare’s Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race

   • Urvashi Chakravarty

   Pages 57-78

5. Queer Time and “Sideways Growth” in The Roaring Girl

   • Melissa Welshans

   Pages 79-98

6. Playing the Early Modern Tomboy

   • Jennifer Higginbotham

   Pages 99-116

7. Queer Apprenticeship in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

   • Mark Albert Johnston

   Pages 117-151

8. Moth and the Pedagogical Ideal in Love’s Labor’s Lost

   • M. Tyler Sasser

   Pages 153-169

9. The Queerness of Precocious Play in John Webster’s The White Devil

   • Bethany Packard

   Pages 171-194

10. “A Prince so Young as I”: Agequeerness and Marlowe’s Boy King

    • Rachel Prusko

    Pages 195-214

11. Queering Gender, Age, and Status in Early Modern Children’s Drama

    • Lucy Munro

    Pages 215-237

12. The Future-Killing Queer and the Future-Negating Child: Camping It Up and Destabilizing Boundaries in Sam Mendes’s Richard III (1992)

    • Gemma Miller

    Pages 239-256

13. Afterword

    • Kate Chedgzoy

    Pages 257-267

14. Back Matter

    Pages 269-281

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This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.

• Theatre
• Renaissance
• Youth
• Gender
• Sexuality
• Queering Childhood
• Early Modern English Drama
• British and Irish Literature

“Kate Chedgzoy’s ‘Afterword’ which praises the collection and suggests that it be followed by research that treats the child as the subject. … A fruitful line of inquiry could be a feminist emphasis on finding minority voices, looking at identities across rather than along vectors of gender and sex.” (Rosalind Kerr, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 42 (1), 2019) “Advocating a radical unknowing regarding the early modern Child and childhood, this fascinating collection challenges even as it extends queer theoretical paradigms.  From the role of race in reproductive futurity to asexuality as a queer orientation, the energy and variety of these essays moves the question of queering beyond the erotic appeal of children and their purported innocence toward the knowledge relations they were conscripted to perform.” (Valerie Traub, Adrienne Rich Distinguished University Professor of English and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan, USA)

 “A historically complex account of queer childhoods. The essays in this fascinating volume are attuned to the historically variable forms of desire between adults and children and they force us to reckon with the contingency of our own sexual moralities. Confronting head on the meaning and validity of a range of erotic encounters between all kinds of bodies, young and old, the scholars gathered here exercise a mode of 'radical unknowing' in order to leave open the meaning of the erotic systems they find in a wide range of texts from the early modern period. Essential reading in queer theory and beyond!”  (Jack Halberstam, Professor of English and Gender Studies, Columbia University, USA, and Author of The Queer Art of Failure and Female Masculinity)

 “In this current climate in which pseudo-scientific claims about childhood are regularly made in the names of cognitivism and neuroscience, it is all the more important and salutary to be able to welcome this volume that engages seriously with childhood as a culturally and historically contingent identity. It will be of great interest to Early Modernist scholarship but also much more widely in showing how childhood crucially inflects issues of history and identity.” (Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Professor of Critical Theory, Director of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media, University of Reading, UK)

 “This collection of essays co-edited by Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Albert Johnston extends the insights of queer theory to the study of children in the Renaissance. After a cogent and theoretically sophisticated introduction, a series of essays demonstrates that Renaissance childhood is very queer indeed. The authors make a persuasive case for the centrality of children to concepts of both the Renaissance and queerness. We can all learn a lot from this collection.” (Stephen Guy-Bray, Professor of English, University of British Columbia, Canada)

• Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

  Jennifer Higginbotham

• University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada

  Mark Albert Johnston

Jennifer Higginbotham is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, USA. Her book, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence, was published in 2013. Her scholarly articles on early modern girlhood, drama, and women’s writing have appeared in the journals Modern Philology, Reformation, Literature Compass, and Sixteenth-Century Journal as well as the collections The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays (2014) and The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (2017).

Mark Albert Johnston is Associate Professor of English at the University of Windsor, CA. His book, Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value was published in 2011 and again in 2016. His essays have appeared in English Literary History, Studies in English Literature, English Literary Renaissance, and Modern Philology, and in the collections Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice: London 1550-1650 (Palgrave, 2010), and Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (2010). 

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