Shakespeare’s ‘terrible infants’?: Children in Richard III, King John, and Macbeth

Abstract

‘These are not, by and large, successful dramatic characters’ wrote Marjorie Garber in 1981, ‘their disquieting adulthood strikes the audience with its oddness, and we are relieved when these terrible infants leave the stage. We may feel it to be no accident that almost all go to their deaths’ (Garber 30). The view that there was something just not quite right about William Shakespeare’s child characters, that their precocity and their pathos rendered them ‘strangely unrealistic’ (Marcus 6), has proved longstanding and difficult to dispel. That the playwright credited with creating characters who precisely reflect and express the depth and complexities of human emotion had penned dramatic children who could appear so odd to modern audiences and critics is a disturbing notion. It has prompted a collective shying-away from these infants; a tacit admission that either Shakespeare was simply not very interested in children or his depictions of childhood reflected an early modern ideal of precocity that was no longer recognizable or relevant. This tendency to treat Shakespeare’s children as a homogenous group, rather than as individuals with disparate and varied functions, has left a gap in Shakespeare Studies, which is only just beginning to be filled.