Horrible Shakespearean Histories: Performing the Renaissance for and with Children

Abstract

What happens to public knowledge about Renaissance history and culture when it is transformed into a mode of performance aimed at children, or staged to include their participation? How do children engage with such performances, and what do they learn about the Renaissance in doing so? How do the versions of this period offered to children both resemble and differ from those circulating in more formal modes of historical knowledge, and in cultural mediations of history aimed at adults? To what extent are children able to appropriate those discourses in order to produce their own knowledge about the past? This chapter asks how the critical issues addressed in this book are transformed and illuminated by studying the ways in which the history of the early modern period is mediated to children through performance. By examining two contrasting versions of the Renaissance produced for consumption by children as theatre audiences, TV viewers and participants in dramatic workshops, I explore how discourses of the past are configured for children.