Abstract
In 1851 The Times reviewed a rather unusual performance of a scene from Richard III at St James’s Theatre:
Last night this house was reopened for a singular entertainment. Two young ladies from the United States of America, whose ages are respectively set forth as eight and six years, undertook to amuse an audience by tragic and comic acting. […] To display the tragic powers of the misses Bateman — such is the name of the young artists — the fifth act of Richard III, comprising the tent scene and the combat has been selected. Richard is played by Ellen, the youngest child, who is made up after the picture of Edmund Kean, and his adversary, Richmond, is represented by Kate, the elder juvenile, whose slight and graceful figure is well set off in a light suit of armour.1
This spectacle and its reception resonate with many of the preoccupations and fascinations that dominated the Victorian engagement with childhood, and which influenced the on-stage portrayal, and off-stage appraisal, of Shakespeare’s boys during this period.
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Notes
Anne Varty, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain: ‘All Work, No Play’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 140.
David Grylls, Guardians and Angels: Parents and Children in Nineteenth-Century Literature (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), pp. 22–3.
C. John Sommerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood (London: Sage, 1982), p. 172.
Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), p. 8.
J.P. Banerjee, ‘Ambivalence and Contradictions: The Child in Victorian Fiction’, English Studies, 65 (1984), 481–94 (p. 488).
See ibid., p. 48. For a fascinating account of the flexibility of the term ‘baby’ in the Victorian theatre, and of the variety of ways in which ‘babies’ were represented on-stage during this era, see Anne Varty, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Stage Baby’, New Theatre Quarterly, 21.3 (2005), 218–29.
Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 27.
Laurence Senelick, ‘Boys and Girls Together: Subcultural Origins of Glamour Drag and Male Impersonation on the Nineteenth Century Stage’, in Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, ed. Lesley Ferris (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 80–95 (p. 82).
Victorian productions of Merry Wives tended to make quite a visual spectacle of the child-fairies who ambush Falstaff in Act 5, while routinely omitting the scene involving the slightly lumpen William Page and his Latin lesson. For an interesting account of the importance of fairies in Victorian theatre and their relationship to childhood, see Tracy C. Davis, ‘What are Fairies For?’, in The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History ed. Tracy C. Davis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 32–59.
Alan Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Alan Hughes (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 27.
Grylls, Guardians and Angels, p. 54. For further information on the popularity and frequency of children’s deaths in Victorian fiction, see also ibid., pp. 135–7, and Peter Coveney Poor Monkey: The Child in Literature (London: Rockliff, 1957), esp. Chapter 7: ‘Reduction to Absurdity’.
For an interesting discussion of death scenes, including those of children, in Victorian literature, see Margarete Holubetz, ‘Death-Bed Scenes in Victorian Fiction’, English Studies, 67.1 (1986), 14–34.
Pat Jalland’s study, Death in the Victorian Pamily (Oxford University Press, 1996), provides valuable historical context.
Alan Hughes, Henry Irving, Shakespearean (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 154.
George Bernard Shaw ridiculed the casting of Ashwell as Prince Edward, saying, ‘from the moment she came on the stage all serious historical illusion necessarily vanished, and was replaced by the most extreme form of theatrical convention. […] Nothing can be more absurd than the spectacle of Sir Henry Irving elaborately playing the uncle to his little nephew when he is obviously addressing a fine young woman in rational dress who is very thoroughly her own mistress, and treads the boards with no little authority and assurance.’ Shaw did not decry Ashwell’s talents as an actress, but the convention of casting, concluding, ‘I admit that she does all that can be done to reconcile us to the burlesque of her appearance in a part that should have been played by a boy’ (Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (London: Cassell, 1962), pp. 160–1).
However, as with much of his dramatic criticism, Shaw was swimming against the current of popular opinion and many other reviewers seemed oblivious to the incongruity of Ashwell playing the young prince: The Morning Post found both the princes to be ‘charmingly rendered’ (Monday, 21 December 1896, p. 5, Issue 38857), while The Era considered that ‘Miss Lena Ashwell made a fresh, spirited, and noble Prince of Wales’ (Saturday, 26 December 1896, Issue 3040). For an account of Ashwell’s understudying of Lady Anne, see her autobiography, Myself A Player (London: Michael Joseph, 1936), pp. 84–5.
Geraldine Cousin, Shakespeare in Performance: King John (Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 17.
Elizabeth Inchbald, extract from ‘King John; A Historical Play in Five Acts’, in King John: Shakespeare and the Critical Tradition, ed. Joseph Candido (London: Athlone, 1996), p. 53.
Charles H. Shattuck, ‘Introduction’, in William Charles Macready’s King John: A Facsimile Promptbook, ed. Charles H. Shattuck (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), pp. 2–3.
Eileen James Yeo, ‘The Creation of “Motherhood” and Women’s Responses in Britain and France 1750–1914’, Women’s History Review, 8 (1999), 201–18 (pp. 201–2).
F.A. Marshall, ‘Introduction to King John’, in The Henry Irving Shakespeare, vol. III (London: Blackie and Son, 1888), p. 158.
George Fletcher, Studies of Shakespeare (London: Longmans, 1847), p. 29.
Michael Brooks, ‘Love and Possession in a Victorian Household: The Example of the Ruskins’, in The Victorian Family: Structures and Stresses, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 82–100 (p. 82). For Ruskin’s writings see Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864, 3rd edn (London, 1866), and Praeterita: The Autobiography of John Ruskin (1885–89) (Oxford University Press, 1978).
Paul Goetsch, ‘“Old-Fashioned Children” from Dickens to Hardy and James’, Anglia-Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 123 (2005), 45–69 (pp. 52–3).
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895), ed. Dennis Taylor (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 336.
A.C. Sprague, Shakespeare’s Histories: Plays for the Stage (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1964), p. 22, cited in Blake, ‘Shakespeare’s Roles’, p. 130.
W. Moelwyn Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 75.
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© 2013 Emily Katherine Knowles
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Knowles, K. (2013). Pathos and Tenderness: The Victorian Era. In: Shakespeare’s Boys. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137005373_6
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