The International Globe Shakespeare Fellowship Lecture
Delivered to launch The Young and Shakespeare Season
Shakespeare’s Globe 11 November 2007
Pyg, Moth, and Little William:
Parts for Boys on Shakespeare’s Stage
I want to begin by remembering an episode in the young life of William Shakespeare,
set in the dog days of autumn, 1593. By mid-October of that year, the playhouses had
been closed for nearly twenty weeks on account of plague; the players were on tour,
the Admiral’s Men travelling first southwest to Bath and Bristol then north to York.
They’d left Will behind in London, and the despondent playwright, suffering from an
incapacitating bout by writer’s block, was holed up in digs around the back of Philip
Henslowe’s Rose, spending hour after mindless hour practising his signature. He had
nothing else to do. The words weren’t coming.
Then, quite unexpectedly, the restraint was lifted, Ned Alleyn and the Admiral’s Men
were back in town, and Will, his writerly brain suddenly on fire with a part – Romeo
– for a young actor he’d glimpsed in auditions, was dashing off speech after speech
for characters called ‘Samson’ and ‘Gregory’. But his Romeo had vanished, so,
ducking out of rehearsals, Will began a swift scour of the Bankside. He didn’t find
his elusive Romeo. Instead, he stopped to talk to a kid – a kid he’d recently seen on
stage; a kid who’d just auditioned for the female lead in Will’s new play, Romeo and
Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter and, for his pains, been kicked out of the playhouse with
the playwright’s boot on his backside; a kid who now was sulking, sitting in the dirt,
feeding live mice to an alley cat, telling the grown-up (who was staring with appalled
fascination) that he was ‘in a play once’, ‘Ti-uus A’dro-i-cus’. And loved it: plenty of
blood; ‘an’ th’ daught-a mut-a-la’ed wiv knives’. Then disclosed his name: John
Webster.
This vignette comes, as you’ve certainly recognised, from no ‘true life’ of William
Shakespeare. It’s a clip from John Madden’s 1998 Shakespeare in Love, and I quote it
in the spirit of Richard Wheeler’s sane observations on the relationship between
biography and interpretation, that ‘Notions of the author’, including ‘some implicit
assumptions about the author as a field of meaning’, ‘enter into all interpretation’ of
Shakespeare, underwrite all our ‘statements about the plays’. For Wheeler,
‘transactions between texts and lives’ constitute ‘proper knowledge’, and we can read
those transactions in either direction, consulting the life to help us interpret the plays,
or the plays to help us understand the life. Lacking ‘true’ life writing about the
twenty-nine year old Will Shakespeare in the autumn of 1593, Madden’s scriptwriters
legitimately (Wheeler might say) recuperate Will’s missing life from his playwriting.
They fill in biography with what is, admittedly, surrogate fiction, but doing so, Tom
Stoppard and Marc Norman tell us (I think) something true about William
Shakespeare. They have him do what his plays tell them Shakespeare would do: stop
to talk to a child.
Now, it is, of course, the case that in early modern England, children, as Peter Laslett
has written, ‘were everywhere’. So stopping to talk to a child might hardly have been
an exceptional activity. But it is also the case that in early modern England, ‘some
people’, as Keith Thomas writes, ‘observed children very closely.’ William
Shakespeare, I believe, was one of those people. From the beginning of his career,
with the Henry VI plays, to the end, with The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII, he put his
close observations on stage, writing astonishing parts for boys – boys seven years old
and upwards – that trained them up for the stage by giving them a significant place in
the story, a place that, as the director Terry Hands has said, ‘takes us to the heart of
Shakespeare’s mystery’. Pyg, Moth, and the so-called ‘little William’ of my title this
evening are place-holders for the three-part work I see Shakespeare doing in this kind:
training apprentices; writing parts that gave them significant work, that made infants
Hercules; and creating roles that we continue to use in our own theatre to explore
contemporary culture’s deeply conflicted attitude to children by telling stories of
childhood that reframe the stories we tell of ourselves. Elaborating these areas of
playwrighterly work, I want to use as prompts four images that capture my thinking
about them. And I want to start with Pyg.
John Pyg. A real boy.
Apprenticed to the great tragedian who led first Lord Strange’s, then the Admiral’s
Men, Pyg was Edward Alleyn’s boy. Mostly, his history is a blank: we have no birth
or baptismal date; we don’t know who his parents were or how he got in with the
players. Disembodied traces of him remain in Philip Henslowe’s theatrical account
book. The Admiral’s Men ordered a ‘a payer of [hair] sleavse’ and a ‘bodeyes’ for a
‘womones gowne’ for Pyg ‘to play allece perce’. The company’s inventories listed ‘j
red sewt of cloth for pyge’; ‘Pyges damask gowne’; ‘j [hare-colour] tafitie sewte of
pygges’; ‘j littell gacket for Pygge’. As these costume inventories show, Pyg played
parts for boys – and girls.
Beyond the tantalising uncanniness of empty costumes in the tiring house wardrobe,
however, what we do know of Pyg was that he was on tour with Alleyn and Lord
Strange’s Men in the summer of 1593 – that period imagined in Shakespeare in Love.
And we know it because he wrote a letter home, addressed to ‘his loving mysteris
Alline’ (Edward’s wife, Joan, who was also Philip Henslowe’s stepdaughter, at her
house) ‘on the banck syd over agaynst the clynk’ prison.
It goes: Mysteris
Your honest ancyent and Loving servant pige hath his
humbell commendation to you and to my goode master
hinsley & mystiris and to my master’s sister bess
for all her
harde delyng with me I send her harty Comendations
hoping to be behowlding to her agayne for the opinyng of
the coberde: and to my neyghbore doll for calynge me vp
in a morning and to my wyf sara for making clean my showes
& to that ould Jentillman mounsir pearle that ever fought
with me for the blok in the chemeney corner
& though you all look for the redy retorne of my proper person
yett I swear to you by the fayth of a fustyan kinge never to
retorne till fortune vs bryng with a Joyfull metyng to lovly
London
I sesse your petty prety pratlyng parlyng pyg
By me John pyk
Then, up the left-hand margin, we get:
Mystiris I praye you kepe this that my mayster may se it for I
gott on to wright it master duotone & my master knows nott of
it.
Clearly, the letter is a spoof: it’s actually written in the unmistakeable hand of Edward
Alleyn, not Thomas Downton. But the signature is, I think, autograph. If Pyg and
Alleyn cooked it up together as a joke, this piece of writing that speaks in Pyg’s voice
is unique, the single example of personal, non-elite letter writing I know of that
survives for a child, certainly for a child actor, in the period.
What does it have to do with William Shakespeare? Eighteen months earlier, in
March 1592, a new play by a playwright new on the London scene opened at
Henslowe’s Rose – its title, ‘Harey the VI’ (a play we now think we know as Henry
VI Part 3). Box office receipts recorded by Henslowe indicate that ‘Harey’ was a
smash hit: certainly, it played continuously at the Rose until plague sent Alleyn, Pyg,
and the rest of Strange’s Men on tour the following year, perhaps taking the London
season’s hit on the road with them. That ‘Harey’ contained one part (Queen
Margaret, whom York, just before he’s killed, calls a ‘tyger’s heart wrapped in a
woman’s hide’) that would mark its playwright as notorious when, within months, a
rival playwright on his deathbed parodied the line as satire, calling Shakespeare an
‘upstart crow’, his ‘tyger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide’. But ‘Harey’ also
contained terrific parts for boys: Prince Edward (historically, a child of eight when he
was knighted and a youth of 18 when he was slain at Tewksbury, both events staged
in the play), and the parallel parts – perhaps doubled parts – of Rutland, the brutally
murdered schoolboy son of York, and Richmond, England’s child-hope, the future
Henry VII (historically, a twelve-year-old in the scene). Were the parts of Rutland
and Richmond parts Shakespeare wrote for Pyg? We’ll never be able to say
definitely. But Pyg’s letter takes us the nearest we are likely ever come to the real
boy (a ‘petty prety pratlyng parlyng’ ‘fustyan kinge’) for whom those roles were
conceived.
Pyg reminds us that writing parts for the stage, Shakespeare was writing not just for
adults but for children he knew, material boys who thought ‘real’ thoughts, lived
‘real’ domestic lives, here a boy roused from bed of a morning, perhaps knocked into
shape with some clips around the ear (that ‘hard delyng’ he mentions), jockeying with
the household cat (‘mounsir pearle’, as I take it) for the warmest place by the fire, a
life expressed with relish and cocky rhetorical flourish. This is a lad who later could
have been first casting for the ‘acute juvenal’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Don Armado’s
sidekick Moth, a kid who’s stuffed with quips and quiddities and smart answers.
Fascinatingly, the play-off in this letter between the hand writing and the voice
speaking captures a performance paradox that we observe on Shakespeare’s stage
where we know that all the boys were written by the adult but hear them uttering
themselves in what passes for the authentic voice of the child. In Shakespeare, adults
constantly make the child. Present on stage or absent, children are narrated, ‘told’,
fashioned in language by adults. They’re objects of adult representation, pawns in
adult power games who carry the burden of adult expectation. But the effect of
theatrical impersonation is that, if adults make children in these plays, children appear
also to make themselves. The dramatic fiction, the immediacy and presentness of the
child in front of spectators on Shakespeare’s stage, gives children space to speak, to
act for themselves, to simulate agency. Like Pyg in the letter taken down by Edward
Alleyn, they perform childhood.
Pyg’s career reminds us, too, of how much writing Shakespeare must have done for
boys: stage plots naming Pyg survive for three Rose plays (though none, alas, for a
Shakespeare play). Ten boy players are called for by name in one of those plots; eight
in the second; nine in the third. Boys, of course, were a theatre company’s future,
their material-in-the-making. They were the apprentices who (like apprentices in
‘legitimate’ trades, whose formal practices the players seem to have mimicked) would
have served for a minimum of seven years, living in their masters’ households
virtually as foster children, learning both their profession and the habits of civil life.
Every one of the company’s sharers – the major actors – would no doubt have taken
on at least one apprentice. Thomas Downton had two: a ‘bigger’ and a ‘little’ boy.
And, as Henslowe’s Diary shows, some of the company’s hired men also served as
masters to apprentices. This means that there must have been lots of boys knocking
about the playhouse – needing to be kept busy. (Demographers calculate that by the
end of the seventeenth century, the under-fifteens in England constituted more than 30
per cent of the population. By my reckoning, they made the same showing on
Shakespeare’s stage.)
It was, of course, the playwright who kept the boys busy on stage: bringing them on
first as mutes and pages; graduating them from speaking servants, messengers and
cross-dressed female attendants to named ‘bit’ parts, then (if they made the grade, like
Nathan Field, for one) to leading women and principal men. A stage busy with boys:
I’ve counted 55 parts for boys in Shakespeare, and I know that’s an underestimate.
Indeed, just the other day I came across another boy I’d never seen before, in Romeo
and Juliet. Mercutio, wounded, cries, ‘Where is my page? Go villain, fetch a
surgeon.’ (Seeing the brawl scene as a scene witnessed by a child: how does that
change our spectatorship?) Boys like Mercutio’s page have largely vanished from our
theatres. John Pyg reminds us to put them in the scene.
And with that in mind, I want to fast forward, 350 years, to my next image,
an Angus McBean still from Michael Benthall’s 1948 Hamlet at what was then
known as the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. This is the play
scene, The Murder of Gonzago. In the left of the frame, backed by Ruritanian
courtiers, Claudius (Antony Quayle) holding Gertrude’s hand (Diana Wynyard,
looking like the widow O’Hara from Gone With the Wind) has his gaze fixed on the
Player King, enthroned, on the dais (right). But the figure who arrests my attention is
the lad who lies sprawled at Gertrude’s feet (far left), focused hard on something as
though he’s watching T.V. – though clearly the technology doesn’t exist. He looks
like Gertrude’s mascot, a ‘little ape’, a miniature version of the adults in his
elaborately frogged jacket and white gloves. Watching Gonzago, he’s clearly
enthralled, his face shining with excitement: the players have arrived at Elsinore!
They’re bringing the gloomy family vault to life with a play! Who is he? Nobody –
just a child; peripheral; nearly, in McBean’s photograph, out of the frame; and, in the
production’s castlist, jumbled together with a load of supernumerary ‘unnamed parts’
far down the programme after Claire Bloom’s Ophelia and Paul Scofield’s Hamlet.
For the longest time, I didn’t know who he was – so I took to calling him ‘little
William’.
‘Little William’ a nobody? That’s wrong! For as this image shows, he’s Prince
Hamlet’s double. Both ‘boys’ are stretched out on the floor, alert. And while the
keen-eyed boy is looking at the Player King in the fake crown on the fake throne,
Hamlet is fixing his look on the ‘player king’, his uncle, a fake occupying his father’s
throne. They compose symmetrical studies in black and white: the little boy
somehow the residual trace, the ghost of the child-who-was-Hamlet, but also
Elsinore’s stake in the future. At the end of Benthall’s production, as the curtain fell,
it was this child who was Hamlet’s lonely witness. As corpses were removed, he sat
on the steps, ignored, sobbing.
‘Little William’ was a part invented by Benthall’s production; but a part that worked
with total understanding of Shakespeare’s habitual practices. Like that Page in the
brawl scene in Romeo and Juliet, the boy placed here alters our perspective, changes
how we watch the story. Hamlet is a play that makes orphans. It’s a play that ends
with the orphan Fortinbras collecting up the body of the orphan Hamlet and, making
the best of ‘unnatural acts…accidental judgments, casual slaughters’, offering to give
him a warrior’s tribute, a soldier’s burial, patching up from ‘purposes mistook’
something ‘royal’. Will heroic recuperation work? Left an orphan of events, Little
William answers ‘no’. Maybe the adults can get on with their lives. His desolation is
entire. Nothing can fix the future in this Elsinore.
Telling this story that lies beyond words written for him, ‘little William’ – by the way,
his actual name is Timothy Harley – helps us to focus on something important when
we go looking for Shakespeare’s parts for boys. We’re not going to find much of them
in the playtext. Even the biggest parts he wrote for boys – Prince Arthur in King
John, Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, little Lucius in Titus Andronicus, Fleance in
Macbeth, young John Talbot in Henry VI Part 1 – have relatively few lines, little to
say: something they share with the parts he wrote for women. Culturally,
Shakespeare’s stage mimics early modern culture at large. As anthropologists point
out, Elizabethan children, like Elizabethan women, constitute what they call a ‘muted
group’, their own ‘values, attitudes, and feelings’ ‘largely excluded from the official
record’. Equally, they’re ‘muted’ in the ‘official’ written record we have of
Shakespeare, the script, that thing that we call the ‘playtext’. But if they don’t have
much to say, they do have much to act. We recognise that the playtext isn’t the whole
play; it’s merely the residue or shards of a much bigger thing, the theatrical
performance. And it’s in performance that Shakespeare’s children achieve highest
visibility. It’s in performance where we’ll find them, placed in the scene, frequently
silent witnesses on adult affairs, telling stories far beyond the text in a voice that
speaks performatively, through the body – like my ‘Little William’, the sobbing final
witness in Elsinore. Often, in scenes where Shakespeare’s grown men do the talking,
his boys do the playing.
So what do they play at?
Frequently, at apprentices: like the boy Talbot in 1 Henry VI who, summoned into
France to be ‘tutor[ed]’ by his father ‘in stratagems of war’, arrives at the front in time
to learn the drill, to achieve manhood by staining his ‘maiden’ sword with enemy
blood – and to die in his father’s arms. Or like Coriolanus’s son, the spitting image of
his dad, another Martius, who, not yet old enough to slaughter Volsces, mammocks
butterflies – that is, shreds them with his teeth. (‘I’ll run away till I am bigger,’ the
tiny-tot declares, ‘but then I’ll fight’.) This miniature ‘epitome’ of the warrior father
is intended, ‘by th’interpretation of full time’ to ‘show’ himself his father’s double, to
be directed by his father’s prayers for him, his life informed with ‘nobleness’, ‘to
shame unvulnerable’; a future soldier who will ‘stick i’th’wars / Like a great sea mark
standing every flaw /And saving those that eye thee.’ So: will little Martius follow
the patriarchal script? Or will he take Rome’s future in another direction? This child
offers an enigmatic site where performance challenges the ending of the play. When,
in Act 5, the women do the impossible, return from their mission to Coriolanus,
who’s vowed to burn Rome to one cinder, with a treaty that will save Rome but cost
Caius Martius his life, they make a silent circuit of the stage as rapturous Rome
applauds them. The women have the boy in tow. Like them, he says nothing. But
whose side is he on? Whose hand is he (perchance) holding? His grandmother’s hand
– Volumnia, who ‘clucked’ her only son Caius Martius to the wars when still a child
and delighted in his killing, in the wounds his body bore? Or his mother’s hand –
Virgilia, a woman repelled by blood, who only wanted her husband alive? The silent
child on display to Rome produces very different endings to Coriolanus. Holding
one hand, he tells us of a Rome where ‘what’s past is prologue’: where ‘here we ago
again’; where the next war is already in waiting, programmed into the infant body of
the orphan. Or, holding another, of a Rome sick of violence. A Rome that wants its
kids demobbed, and for them, a future in peace.
As apprentices, Shakespeare’s boys are left to finish their master’s – or their father’s –
work: like Fleance, whose last words from his assassinated father are ‘Fly, good
Fleance, fly, fly, fly! Thou may’st revenge – …’ It is through Fleance, of course,
whose future issue will return as kings of Scotland, that the Weird Sisters’ prediction
is accomplished. Through Fleance, Banquo is lesser than Macbeth but greater, the
father of kings, though himself, ‘none’.
As apprentices, Shakespeare’s boys typically achieve hard learning. For example,
little Lucius, grandson to the campaign-toughened general who’s spent his whole life
warring for Rome, Titus Andronicus. It’s this schoolboy Lucius who, making his first
appearance in the play late in Act 4, flying onto the stage, dropping his books, his
Latin grammar, his Cato, Cicero – and Ovid – unwittingly reveals the truth about what
happened to his Aunt Lavinia (raped, mutilated, her tongue cut out, her hands severed
from her body) by giving her the Ovidan text – a schoolboy text from Metamorphoses
– that, in Philomela’s story, tells Lavinia’s. It’s the boy who unwittingly sources
Titus’s revenge play. And in the play’s last scene, it’s the boy who sees everything:
Shakespeare puts him on stage to watch his exiled father return home at the head of a
foreign army; to see Rome’s royals arrive for a dinner served up by his grandfather
who, bizarrely, ‘Enter[s] … like a cook’ and dishes out humble pie to Tamora and the
rest before snapping Lavinia’s neck – or otherwise killing her. It’s little Lucius who
watches Titus reveal the house recipe for boy-bake then stab the empress who has
cannibalised her own children before being killed by the emperor whom his father
immediately kills. Spectating on atrocity, it’s little Lucius who listens to his uncle
Marcus, trying to manage mayhem in the wake of this mess of serial slaughter, give
the nerviest speech of his political career, trying to persuade fear-scattered Rome that
it can ‘knit again’ its ‘scattered [political] corn into one mutual sheaf, / These broken
limbs again into one body.’ Finally, it’s the child who is summoned to do the work of
knowledge at the end, where his grandfather’s corpse stands in as his tutor. ‘Come
hither, boy, come, come,’ says father Lucius, calling the child to the body. ‘Come and
learn of us.’ What is the child to learn? ‘To melt in showers’ – that is, to weep;
indeed, to weep until his flesh dissolves and his solid body changes into water, into
rain, a metamorphosis as transformative as the one his Aunt Lavinia suffered. Hard
learning this: that to be fully human is to lose yourself to grief. But there’s more hard
learning still. The child must learn not just to feel but to tell. ‘Thy grandsire loved
thee well,’ says the father:
Many a time he danced thee on his knee,
Sung thee asleep, his loving breast thy pillow;
Many a story hath he told to thee,
And bid thee bear his pretty tales in mind
And talk of them when he was dead and gone.
As we understand it from this scene in Titus Andronicus the duty of the child is to
remember in story, to translate the past into the future by bearing ‘in mind’ and reciting ‘pretty tales’ that keep the dead alive in ‘talk’ when they are ‘gone’. Hard
learning, this: that the child is the adult’s memory.
And that thought prompts my third image, another view of another child who’s both
absent from and present in performance: this time, not seen in a production
photograph but in an illustration, to the 1930 Cranach Press Hamlet.
This engraving is the work of Edward Gordon Craig – actor, director, scenic designer
(and illegitimate son of the age’s greatest actress, who started her career in 1856
playing Mamillius). What Craig gives us here is literally the child as adult memory,
the child animated by remembering. So on the left hand page we see a classically
posed, austerely modernist Hamlet gazing down at a skull, elegantly placed on a
plinth (not, as in the play, unceremoniously chucked stinking out of a grave). On the
facing page, the bodies and roles are reversed. And we see what he’s remembering.
The skull has a body! Yorick is alive! A figure jigging with animation in a plumed
cap and long skirts held up to show the bells on the tips of his flowing sleeves! Yorick
is playing with Hamlet – but a Hamlet who appears only in the imaginary in
Shakespeare’s play: Hamlet the child, the lost boy from a lifetime ago, whom Prince
Hamlet, at the side of the grave remembering Yorick, is suddenly prompted to recall
to his mind’s eye.
In Shakespeare’s 5.1, Denmark’s banished Prince, returning home to Elsinore via (an
odd route) the graveyard, pauses with his friend Horatio to question a man at work.
‘Who’s grave’s this, sirrah?’ he asks. And then: ‘How long hast thou been a gravemaker?’ The Gravedigger answers the second question with a long-winded
mnemonic: he ‘came to’t’, he says, ‘that day our last king overcame Fortinbras’,
which happened to be ‘the very day [Prince] Hamlet was born’; so he’s been a
gravedigger, he calculates, exactly ‘thirty years.’ But then he answers the first
question – ‘Who’s grave’s this?’ – with an object. He hands Hamlet a skull; a skull,
says the Gravedigger, that has ‘lain in the earth three and twenty years’. ‘A whoreson
mad fellow’s it was … a mad rogue … This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the
King’s jester’. As though catching in the throat of the play, the Gravedigger’s line
stops words. And stops time. Cradling this latest mnemonic, all that remains of
Yorick, Hamlet, wonderingly, is overwhelmed by an absent past flooding into his
present, and with it, an absent self. For the ghost of childhood is drawn out of the
grave with the skull: ‘I knew him, Horatio – a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent
fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times … Here hung those lips that I
have kissed I know not how oft’ (5.1.180–185). That ‘I’ who ‘knew him’, ‘kissed’
him, ‘rode on his back’ twenty-three years ago was a boy no more than seven years
old; a boy, son of a warrior king, who, in this memory, is at play with a surrogate
father of gibes and gambols and love. By comparison, how remote the real father
feels, dead only two months – ‘nay, not so much, not two’ (1.2.138) – but for all that,
so utterly distant. Old King Hamlet, we remember from the first act of the play, was
buried in his armour from thirty years back, armour that remembers what he wants
remembered, his victory over Fortinbras of Norway (but doesn’t remember what else
happened that day, his son’s birth). So when he returns as a ghost in that redundant
armour, old Hamlet looks like he’s been dead to his son Hamlet for a whole lifetime.
By contrast, when Yorick returns, he returns the child to Hamlet.
Writing Hamlet remembering himself a child, one of the things Shakespeare contrives
to do is to mobilise boyhoods beyond the limits of the stage while summoning into the
play’s presence other childhoods that Hamlet remembers. In Shakespeare, I want to
say, there are many more boys in play than ever appear on stage. The Prince knows
lots of stories about children – like the New Testament story of King Herod. He
seems to have seen Herod’s story acted – by a player who ‘out-Herod[ed] Herod’.
That means that he’s witnessed the slaughter of Judea’s innocents; he’s seen a
civilisation’s infants killed before his eyes. Then, too, he knows ‘Aeneas’s tale to
Dido’, the story of the fall of Troy told in Virgil and in Ovid. He knows what
happened to the boy Astyanax, Hector’s child, Troy’s heir, thrown from Ilium’s last
standing tower. And from Book XIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the fate of little
Polydore, Priam’s youngest son: his throat cut, his body dumped. And Ascanius: the
last surviving boy of Troy, Aeneas’s child – saved ! And safe in Dido’s Carthage, on
Dido’s lap – until he’s snatched by Venus, who substitutes her own boy-child Cupid
in his place, the child as seducer, wreaking havoc on Queen Dido’s heart.
And with all these remembered children, who show how costly childhood is for
children, Prince Hamlet is somehow also ‘remembering’ another ‘little William’, the
boy, Will Shakespeare: the lad in the Stratford grammar school in the early 1570s
who swotted up his Virgil and Ovid, who learned (that is) the same stories Hamlet
knows; the child who perhaps went with his father to Stratford’s Guild Hall and stood
between his legs to watch tragedians from the city perform the medieval mysteries,
out-Heroding Herod, for the last time before protestant church reformation silenced
them.
If, as Gordon Craig’s image graphically perceives, a phantom child haunts Hamlet,
that’s an idea that returns to Shakespeare in a later play, visited upon Leontes in The
Winter’s Tale where once again the child is the adult’s memory. Hamlet looked at a
skull, dead twenty three years, and remembered childhood. For Leontes, it’s
scrutinising Mamillius, his son, not yet seven years old, not yet ‘breeched’, that is, put
into trousers that mark him a man-in-the-making, that returns Leontes twenty three
years, to childhood. In Mamillius, Leontes sees himself:
Looking on the lines
Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech’d,
In my green velvet coat; my dagger muzzl’d
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,
As ornaments oft do, too dangerous:
How like, methought, I then was to this kernel,
This squash, this gentleman.
The Winter’s Tale offers us Shakespeare’s most troubled, and troublingly complicated
account of childhood. On the one hand, expectation rides high on the child. The
‘gallant child’ Mamillius is an ‘unspeakable comfort’ to the kingdom, a ‘gentleman of
the greatest promise’, one who ‘physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh.’ That is,
the child is miraculously medicinal, a restorative or cordial; homeopathically, he’s
‘hearts ease’ – a wonder drug in a court that, we will see, suffers from tremor cordis,
heartache, broken hearts. But on the other, the innocence of the child on which this
hope rests is a doomed concept. As Polixenes reports of a boyhood he shared with
Leontes, they were like ‘twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’sun’; they had no notion of
the ‘doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d that any did’; they were ‘Two lads that thought
there was no more behind, / But such a day to-morrow as to-day, / And to be boy
eternal.’ But alas, that ‘boy eternal’, like the Eden he occupied as frisking lamb, is
lost to the adult, contaminated by guilt inherited in the blood. The only way he can
regain it is by proxy, through his child, the latest ‘boy eternal’. So Polixenes makes
the same report of his son Florizel that Camillo made of Mamillius: he’s medicinal,
restorative:
He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter:…
He makes a July’s day short as December;
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.
How very useful to the adult that ‘childness’ should be on hand to cure the diseased
imaginary, those ‘thoughts’ that ‘thick’ the ‘blood’. And how tragic that the medicine
doesn’t work. Despite offering his father a ‘welkin’ face, all the evidence Leontes
needs that his sick thoughts about his wife’s supposed infidelity issue from a hurt
mind which ‘childness’ can restore, Mamillius cannot physic the subject who is his
father. Indeed, the ‘thoughts’ that ‘thick’ the adults’ ‘blood’ infect the child instead –
and kill him. Mamillius dies.
Remarkably, Shakespeare sets this doom-laden scenario inside a performative
structure of play. Throughout the whole long second scene of The Winter’s Tale
(nearly 500 lines) as we watch Leontes sliding into dementia, an ‘infection of my
brains’, as he calls it, we’re simultaneously watching Mamillius somewhere in the
scene at play. A busy boy, busy with ‘childness’. Now, play is not an uncontaminated
idea here: telling his son to ‘Go, play, boy, play’, we hear Leontes turning play rancid
by giving it double and triple ‘adult’ suggestiveness: ‘thy mother plays, and I / Play
too; but so disgrac’d a part, whose issue / Will hiss me to my grave. … Go, play, boy,
play.’ But constructing this as a scene of child’s play, Shakespeare tells us – his
damaged spectators – that he has something up his sleeve. He writes a promise in the
scene. The boy Mamillius will be lost. And the tale he tells – the original ‘winter’s
tale’ that Mamillius is telling his mother in 2.1 when his father breaks in – will go
missing. But somehow, in another land, at a sheep-shearing that recalls lambs at play,
the thread of the story will be picked up. The lost will be found – and will remember
loss even as she’s found: a child, Mamillius’s sister, called Perdita.
Child’s play in The Winter’s Tale calls up my final image, of Mamillius (Tam
Williams) at play in Propeller Theatre’s production, 2005
I want to use this image as an epitome of the work of production constantly being
done through the subsequent performance of Shakespeare, to remember how much
cultural play, how much there is to play for, in Shakespeare’s scripts, at a time when
the notion of ‘childness’ both fixates and troubles us. At the outset of this lecture I
suggested that writing children Shakespeare was writing for the stage (for
apprentices), for the play (significant parts), and for the future. For us. We use
Shakespeare to help us think things though. And one of the things he helps us think
through is what we’re doing to the children. Blake Morrison, sitting in a courtroom in
1993 listening to the trial of two children accused of murdering the two-year-old
James Bulger, needed Macbeth. Antony Burgess, writing an epigram for his
dystopian tale of adolescence, A Clockwork Orange, needed The Winter’s Tale.
Needing to ponder our deeply conflicted attitudes to children – are they wonders:
angels who stake our residual claim to Eden; medicine who cures adults’ hurt minds;
or are they devils, a ‘plague-sore’ in the parent’s flesh, reprobates needing ‘the
offending Adam’ ‘whipp’d out of [them]’ – we use Shakespeare to frame the debate –
and Shakespeare to observe how deeply implicated we are in what we’re making of
our children.
Directors of Shakespeare in the past decade appear increasingly to be focusing on
children to explore the work of textual and cultural performance. On film, Penny
Woolcock’s Macbeth on the Estate (1997) offered spectators lost children, ‘weird’,
‘wayward’ children-as-witches, throw-aways in a Thatcherite Britain that was wasting
a generation. Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) had the action in a Rome made a wilderness
of tigers seen entirely through the eyes of a child. On stage, Cheek by Jowl’s The
Winter’s Tale (1999) saw the ghost of Mamillius haunting the ending while Propeller
(2005) staged the play as a child’s darkling fantasy, its final gaze one exchanged
between Leontes and his revenant dead son. Max Stafford Clark’s Out of Joint
production of Macbeth (2004) placed Scotland in an African dictatorship and
mobilised child soldiers to do the work of atrocity. Conal Morrison’s Macbeth at the
RSC (2007) invented a back story, a prologue that staged, Herod-like, the slaughter of
Scotland’s infants – and transformed Scotland’s mothers into witches. Greg Doran in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (RSC, 2005) staged the Indian boy (a puppet, so
literally an object, and, perforce, always surrounded by a doting throng), a child so
abundantly loved by his foster parents who were warring over custody of him that he
was causing uproar in fairyland – but also, in Jonathan Slinger’s unlovely, overgrown, over-weight Puck, staged the unloved child, the child ignored, the child
yearning for parental love. Kneehigh’s Cymbeline (2006) told a story of lost boys,
hurt, and remembering; of warring families, dysfunctional parents, sibling rivalry,
rough fostering. It began as a story of absent children – and told a story of coming
home.
This brief survey of contemporary production brings me to my ending….But what
about the last boy of my title, what about MOTH? This is what I want to say about
Moth, the ‘well educated infant’, the ‘acute juvenal’ of Love’s Labour’s Lost. All
across Shakespeare, children are precious. But all across Shakespeare, we see boys
lost. In Shakespeare, the threat to the child is awful; the loss of the child,
heartbreaking; the killing of the child, the unpardonable crime. But the strength of the
child is awesome. And that’s what Moth – ‘Mote’ – tells us. In the pageant of the
Nine Worthies that Holofernes devises to perform before his royal spectators, Mote
plays Hercules. That’s instructive. Playing Hercules, Mote reminds us that the child
in Shakespeare is not only what adults project onto him. It’s what the actor in the part
projects into the cultural space of performance.