Abstract
In her 1990 essay ‘The Noble Imp: The Upper-Class Child in English Renaissance Art and Literature’, Jean Wilson examines the tomb of Lord Denbigh, son of Robert, Earl of Leicester, who died in 1584, aged about four, and argues that it captures something peculiarly double about the identity of this boy, and the nature of his parents’ mourning:
This epitaph reads, at first view, as yet another affirmation by the parvenu Dudleys of their right to a place among the greatest in the land. The tracing of the pedigree back to the remote connection with Richard Beauchamp […] the loyal celebration of the Queen, designed, presumably to associate the family with her, all place this tomb as a celebration of a now-doomed family, rather than the commemoration of a beloved dead child […]. The wonderfully realized little effigy is more ambiguous in its mixture of family pride and individual tenderness. The child wears a circlet to suggest his rank […] but also the skirts which indicate how little he had advanced beyond toddlerhood […].1
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Notes
Jean Wilson, ‘The Noble Imp: The Upper-Class Child in English Renaissance Art and Literature’, Antiquaries Journal, 70 (1990), 360–79 (p. 361).
Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 90.
Lawrence Stone, The Family Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenleld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 112 and 105.
Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 23.
Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurture, or Schoole of Good Manners (1577), in The Babees Book, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Early English Text Society, 1868), see pp. 63–5.
Catherine Belsey, ‘Little Princes: Shakespeare’s Royal Children’, in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 32–48 (p. 38).
Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Lester Kruger Born (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 155.
On the connection between child-murder and tyranny see Belsey ‘Little Princes’, p. 35, and Scott Colley, ‘Richard III and Herod’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 451–8.
All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008), unless stated otherwise. For further information about boy kings see Charles Beem (ed.), The Royal Minorities of Medieval and Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), esp. Chapter 4 (R.A. Griffiths, ‘The Minority of Henry VI, King of England and of France’), and Chapter 5 (Michael Hicks, ‘A Story of Failure: The Minority of Edward V).
Jeremy Potter, Good King Richard? An Account of Richard III and his Reputation1483–1983 (London: Constable, 1983), p. 145.
Ibid., pp. 151–2. Shakespeare’s decision to place the murder off-stage is in stark contrast to earlier versions of the story. The anonymously authored play The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (entered in the Stationer’s register, June 1594), advertised on its title page that it depicted ‘the smothering of the two young Princes in the Tower’, and the play does indeed take a particularly gory pleasure in the killing — not only showing it on-stage, but also including a blackly comic scene in which the murderers debate how best to dispatch the children. See Anon., The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, 1594, ed. W.W. Greg (Malone Society Reprints, 1929), 11. 1230–50. Shakespeare’s main source, Thomas More’s unlinished History of Richard III (c. 1516), although prose rather than drama, also recounts the details of the murder with a great degree of immediacy and physicality describing how the murderers entered the room and ‘sodainly lapped [the boys] vp amongst ye clothes so be wrapped them and entangled them keeping down by force the featherbed and pillows hard unto their mouthes, that within a while smored and stifled, […] thei gave vp to god their innocent soules’ (Thomas More, ‘The History of Richard III’, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 2, ed. Richard Sylvester (London: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 85.
See Maurice Hunt, ‘Ordering Disorder in Richard III’, South Central Review, 6 (1989), 11–29 (p. 25).
Robert Hillis Goldsmith, Wise Tools in Shakespeare (Liverpool University Press, 1974), p. 19.
Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, ‘Kingjohn’, in Shakespeare’s Histories, ed. Emma Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 182–95 (p. 183).
On the legal claims of John and Arthur, see A.R. Braunmuller, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare, King John, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 54–61.
William H. Matchett, ‘Richard’s Divided Heritage in King John’, Essays in Criticism, 12 (1962), 231–53 (p. 235).
The Oxford English Dictionary Online gives the following definition: ‘oppress, v. To press forcefully on (a person or thing), esp. so as to cause damage or discomfort; to crush; to crowd; to smother. Obs.’ This supports the connection between the word ‘oppressed’, and ‘pressed’ or ‘impressed’. A connection might even be made with the printing press, which, though not relevant to King John’s medieval setting, would be available to its early modern audiences. For a detailed and wide-ranging exploration of the prevalence of printing and imprinting metaphors in early modern discourses of reproduction, parenting, genealogy and education, see Margreta de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes’, in Alternative Shakespeares, vol. II, ed. Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 65–95. 41.
For a discussion of this debate see Richard P. Wheeler, ‘Deaths in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 127–53.
Virginia M. Vaughan, ‘King John: A Study in Subversion and Containment’, in King John: New Perspectives, ed. Deborah T. Curren-Aquino (London: Associated University Press, 1989), pp. 62–75 (p. 72).
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949), p. 42.
Margaret Omberg, ‘Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre’, Studia Neophilologica, 68 (1996), 39–47 (p. 39). It is worth noting that Lady Macbeth’s assertion that she has ‘given suck’ has opened up a Pandora’s box of extra-textual speculation about Macbeth’s childlessness. The opposing positions are epitomised by Marvin Rosenberg and Margaret Omberg. Rosenberg, in an appendix to his book The Masks of Macbeth entitled ‘Lady Macbeth’s Indispensable Child’, imagines a staging in which the Macbeth ‘babe’ — a boy — is present on-stage for a large portion of the play (see The Masks of Macbeth (London: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 671–6). Omberg, on the other hand, counters that ‘such deductions and speculations as these cannot be seriously entertained’ and that ‘no child of Macbeth is present in a play which otherwise makes much of children as characters’ (‘Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre’, pp. 42–3).
See Elizabeth Nielsen, ‘Macbeth: The Nemesis of the Post-Shakespearian Actor’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 193–9 (pp. 193–4)
Michael J. Echeruo’s response, ‘Tanistry, the “Due of Birth” and Macbeth’s Sin’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 23 (1972), 444–50.
See James Calderwood, If It Were Done: Macbeth and Tragic Action (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 53–6 and 89–93
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 106–8.
For contemporary discussion of the relationship between parenthood and kingship see, for example, Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, or, The Natural Power of Kings (London, 1680), p. 19.
Stephanie Chamberlain, ‘Fantasizing Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England’, College Literature, 32 (2005), 72–93 (p. 82).
David Worster, ‘Performance Options and Pedagogy: Macbeth’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 53.3 (2002), 362–78 (p. 374).
Ann Blake, ‘Children and Suffering in Shakespeare’s Plays’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 23 (1993), 293–304 (p. 297).
Fred Manning Smith, ‘The Relation of Macbeth to Richard the Third’, PMLA, 60 (1945), 1003–20 (pp. 1015–16).
Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London: Collins, 1976), p. 205.
Miriam Slater, Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Verneys of Claydon House (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 32.
Hattie Fletcher and Marianne Novy, ‘Father-Child Identification, Loss and Gender in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 49–63 (p. 58).
Peter B. Erickson, ‘Patriarchal Structures in The Winter’s Tale’, PMLA, 97 (1982), 819–29 (p. 825).
Susan Snyder, ‘Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter’s Tale’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (1999), 1–8 (p. 4).
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© 2013 Emily Katherine Knowles
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Knowles, K. (2013). Noble Imps: Doomed Heirs. In: Shakespeare’s Boys. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137005373_2
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