The moral climax of Shakespeare's King John is a scene (act 4, scene 1) of displaced infanticide: Hubert, the king's loyal servant, has been ordered to blind Arthur, a young boy whom John has just captured in battle, after pledging to end the boy's life two scenes earlier. The child is not only Duke of Brittany (a title created for him by John himself) and the king's nephew but, as son of John's deceased older brother Geoffrey Plantagenet, a legitimate claimant for John's own crown; indeed, the battle just completed has been waged unsuccessfully by Arthur's French supporters in order to put him on the English throne. Unaware that the irons being heated in the room are intended for his own eyes, the boy laments his imprisonment to Hubert near the beginning of the scene:

                                                            Mercy on me!
Methinks nobody should be sad but I:
Yet I remember, when I was in France,
Young gentlemen would be as sad as night,
Only for wantonness. By my Christendom,
So I were out of prison, and kept sheep,
I should be merry as the day is long;
And so I would be here, but that I doubt
My uncle practices more harm to me.
He is afraid of me, and I of him:
Is it my fault that I was Geoffrey's son?
No, indeed is't not; and I would to heaven
I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert.

(4.1.12b-24)¹

Hubert responds in an aside to the audience:

If I talk to him, with his innocent prate
He will awake my mercy, which lies dead:
Therefore I will be sudden and dispatch.

In the event, however, the child's words prove irresistible, as Hubert and the audience in whom he confides ultimately wish: as the scene goes on and the boy becomes aware of the horror about to be perpetrated, his pleas to the man whom he would have his father overcome Hubert's loyalty to the king. By the end of the scene, the heated irons have cooled and Hubert has pledged to protect the “little prince” (9b) “for the wealth of all the world” (130).

In the BBC/Time-Life Royal Shakespeare Company video, a definitive late twentieth-century performance of this rarely performed play, the final nine lines of Arthur's speech are cut, along with thirty more lines of the more than eighty that the boy speaks in the rest of the scene. Cutting is of course necessary in even the best of productions, but the silencing of the boy in this scene, the longest continuous dialogue involving a child in Shakespeare, seems to suggest that his words are relatively unimportant. It implies that the child's role is less essential to this scene than Hubert's and, in doing so, it resembles the contemporary critical depreciation of children's voices and roles in the most canonical of English writers. This essay attempts to explain what may account for such a judgment, to question it, and to suggest that the silencing of children's voices in the largest sense is an important theme for Shakespeare and would have been for his audience.

Over the last decade, feminist, cultural, and New Historicist criticism has enriched and altered the study of characterization in Shakespeare. The old paradigm of isolated, internalized development is being replaced by work that sees character development as relational, and the relationship of children to parents is perhaps the most important of these post-individualist emphases. Typically, such work has focussed upon adult children such as Rosalind and Orlando, or Prince Hal, or Lear's daughters, and the like. While such studies address anew the importance of child-parent relationships in the plays and in English Renaissance society generally, they make almost no mention of children characters who are pre-adolescent and whose roles would have been played by child actors on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage.² Indeed, the few critics who have called attention to these figures have dismissed them as insignificant, uninteresting, and unrealistic, speaking a language that seems preternaturally sophisticated (Pendleton 40, Clemen 100-1, Spilka 162) and that Leah Marcus finds typical of sixteenth-century literary children in general (24-25).

This depreciation of child characters and their language reflects a broader view concerning pre-Enlightenment attitudes toward children that is most significantly represented in Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. For Ariès and the social historians influenced by him, the idea of childhood, “that particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult” (128), was nonexistent in medieval Europe and became paradigmatic only in the eighteenth century. For literary critics, influenced by Peter Coveney's groundbreaking study, the appearance of significant children in English works begins even later, with Romantic literature and the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Over the last decade, however, the Ariès thesis has been powerfully questioned by other social historians who have examined previously neglected primary sources such as diaries and autobiographies.³ Moreover, several important recent studies of literary children in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts demonstrate that the child emerges as an important and complex subject in English literature during this period, its innocence and need of guidance both defining its own nature and also symbolically reflecting contemporary social and cultural tensions.⁴ A re-examination of Shakespeare's child characters seems appropriate in light of such new conceptions of Renaissance children, literary and otherwise. My primary focus for such re-examination is King John, one of the most neglected works in the canon and the one in which children are most important. In this play, Shakespeare has altered his sources drastically so that the work's dramatic structure and political theme depend crucially upon two child characters, the royal princes Arthur and Henry. In addition, Arthur speaks more lines than any child character in Shakespeare, so an analysis of what he does and does not say illustrates how Shakespeare makes dramatic use of the words of children rather than simply dismissing such language as unmimetic. Looking at the child figures in King John also furnishes an opportunity to redefine generally the significance of Shakespeare's literary children within their sixteenth-century literary, social, and political context as well as our own failure to take them seriously.

The critical dismissal of Shakespeare's children derives from a sense that their roles are trivial, their characters one-dimensional, and their speeches either uninteresting or too adult-like. There are altogether thirty-nine child characters in the canon, and several of these roles are indeed insignificant, presenting little that is distinctly childlike, the boy actor merely functioning as a servant, messenger, or performer (e.g., Benedick's boy in Much Ado About Nothing, Mariana's page in Measure for Measure, and Lucius in Julius Caesar).⁵ Similarly insignificant roles for adult messengers, servants, and subalterns may be found in the plays as well, however, and the appearance of any children on the stage is unusual in drama and reminds us that actual children were not only part of Shakespeare's own acting company, but enormously popular on stage throughout this period. Peter Thomson notes that there has been little recognition of or even awareness of this phenomenon among social historians or drama critics: “Something about Elizabethan acting ought to be made clearer by the popularity of the boy players, yet that something remains elusive” (112).⁶ One thing suggested by such popularity is a striking new interest in childhood and children within Elizabethan society, an interest capitalized upon by Shakespeare as well as other dramatists.

While the number of Shakespeare's child characters may not seem large in itself, it is extraordinary in comparison to the work of post-Renaissance dramatists writing for an adult audience. The pre-adolescent child nearly disappears in later theater, and for good reason: of all literary genres, drama is most dependent upon voluble and articulate speech. Characters, like children, whose speech is limited in articulation are seldom represented in plays for adults. Depreciation of Shakespeare's articulate child characters ignores the peculiar difficulty faced by dramatists in giving significant voice to the child and threatens to throw the baby out with the bath water. Given significant speech by child characters in these plays, perhaps we should ask how it functions and how is it perceived by other characters in the plays rather than whether it is convincingly childlike to us.

Beyond its naively mimetic assumptions, such criticism seems anachronistic in another way. Ariès's own argument for the evolution of our present conception of childhood defines the Renaissance as a transitional period in which children were gradually regarded as different from adults on the basis of their innocence and ignorance, in need of coddling and loving attention on the one hand and carefully supervised education on the other (128-33). Shakespeare himself uses the schoolboy as the archetypal child in Jacques's speech on the Seven Ages of Man in As You Like It (2.7.144-46). The few adult remarks on children's speech in these plays typically note its innocence or its precociousness (e.g., Richard III, 2.2.17-19; 3.1.132-35). Given the strong Humanist emphasis upon developing and refining the child's potential through education, eloquent boys and girls may not have struck sixteenth-century parents and theatergoers as premature adults, but as perfected children. Indeed, upper-class sixteenth-century children in England “were expected to greet their parents with formalized demonstrations of respect,” notes Marcus (29), and since nearly all of Shakespeare's child characters are noble or gentle and speak only to adults, their language may have seemed more ideal and natural to his audience than it does to us.

The significance of child characters in Shakespeare does not primarily depend upon how closely they adhere to our conception of realistic, individualized children's behavior and speech, in any case. Their importance drives from an Elizabethan audience's sense of the special nature of children: their innocence—which demands protection by and isolation from the harsher aspects of adult society—and their ignorance—which requires education to enable a child's successful integration into that society. Children are significant agents of the breakdown and/or reintegration of adult society in a number of plays, depending upon how they are received by adults. In the four late romances and the romance-like Comedy of Errors, familial and/or social catastrophe is marked by the apparent destruction or loss of infants or children by their parents, while recovery accompanies the children's reappearance years later as adults.⁷ Thus, in The Winter's Tale, the death of the boy Mamillius fully reveals the moral corruption of his father Leontes and virtually freezes the king and his wronged wife in place, while the return of Leontes's daughter Perdita (“Lost”) brings regeneration to Sicily and rebirth for her mother. These plays posit a direct relationship between social health and the welfare of children and may reflect that increasing attention to children's distinctive needs by English Renaissance parents that recent social historians have begun to document. Since the lost children of these plays are recovered as adults, however, there is no representation of children's speech and consciousness, with one exception. The boy Mamillius is represented as an innocent whose words and responses are used by his morally diseased father to further energize Leontes's pathological suspicions of his wife's adultery. Seeing the boy in front of him, the king briefly questions even this child's legitimacy and uses Mamillius's ignorance of his mother's imagined infidelity to help confirm his own certainty that she has been unfaithful.⁸

Leontes's orders to imprison his wife and destroy her infant daughter, whom he rejects as a “bastard,” are the response of a patriarchal arrogance turned murderous. Ironically, in separating Mamillius from Hermione in order to keep the boy uncontaminated by his mother's imagined stain, the King of Sicilia destroys the young child's will to live and is left without an heir. Mamillius's fate is representative of a number of child figures, found most characteristically in the history plays. With one exception (Clarence's daughter in Richard III), all of these children are boys. With three exceptions, including Prince Henry in King John, all of the significant child characters in the history plays are killed or murdered in the course of political and military conflict, or imprisoned, or forced to participate in murderous violence by adult parental figures.⁹ The terrible fate of children in these plays, particularly in the first tetralogy, constitutes an implicit indictment of the aggressive pursuit of power for its own sake that characterized the ambitions of Renaissance sovereigns, who tended to identify the welfare of the commonwealth with their own glory. As dramatized in Shakespeare's histories and some of the tragedies (e.g., Macbeth and Coriolanus), this will to power, implicitly or explicitly patriarchal, is variously and ironically undercut by its effects upon children. First, the need to advance one's own power in order to insure the patrimony of the Crown results in the destruction of everyone else's sons and, ultimately, in the first tetralogy, in the annihilation of the entire male Plantagenet clan. Second, the violence that disfigures or destroys each boy in these plays derives from the very political and military virtues that he is expected to emulate as a youth, the exercise of force to defend or advance himself. Finally, while a rightly ordered public world would protect and develop the potential inherent in childhood, increasingly recognized as a moral and personal imperative by Shakespeare's audiences, the disfiguring of children by the political ethos of these plays calls into question the values of that world.

King John is probably the most striking indictment of politics as usual in the canon, and the role of child characters in this play both reflects and advances beyond the representation of children in the first tetralogy that had preceded it (the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III). Frequently produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth century (Beaurline 1), yet labeled the most cynical of Shakespeare's plays by R. S. White (51), seldom read or taught, and infrequently addressed even by professional Shakespeareans, the play is an anomaly among Shakespeare's works. King John was written between the composition of the first tetralogy and the second (Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V), and it is Shakespeare's only history play written during the Elizabethan period that is not part of a larger four-part structure. Lying outside the providential or political purposiveness that links those two epic dramatizations of pre-Tudor English history, it has room in which to be subversive. A contemporary play, The Troublesome Raign of John, King of England (1591), has been generally regarded as Shakespeare's direct source but also as an inferior, propagandistic adaptation of Shakespeare's play, so that the date of King John has been variously proposed as 1588-90 or 1595-96.¹⁰ Its titular subject, who had defied Roman authority in 1207 but been forced to reconsecrate his crown to the Pope in 1213, had become a Protestant hero after the break from Rome. A vigorously martial ruler, his reign was ultimately unsuccessful: embroiled in inconclusive civil conflicts with his nobles that resulted in the Magna Carta (1215), his regime lost most of England's continental possessions before the king's premature death in 1216, attributed by some sources to his having been poisoned by a treacherous monk. A more mixed combination of virtues and weakness, accomplishments and failures, could scarcely be found in Holinshed and the other chronicle sources. Furthermore, the extreme remoteness in time of John's reign from Renaissance England seems to have provided Shakespeare with an opportunity to question Renaissance political morality in the guise of memorializing a Protestant hero.

Whether Holinshed or the Holinshed-derived Troublesome Raign is Shakespeare's primary source, the play is remarkably centered around John's conflict with a child, Prince Arthur, who, as noted above, was the son of the king's older brother Geoffrey. In King John, history is drastically rearranged to make Arthur's conflict with his uncle define the shape of John's rule. John's conflict with Arthur generates the king's invasion of France and the dynastic marriage between his niece and the French king's son Lewis that temporarily stymies Arthur's claim by granting the boy the duchy of Brittany, events of 1200 that take up the first two acts of the play. But Arthur's dismissed dynastic claims also reinforce the papal legate's excommunication of John in act 3, an event that occurred historically four years after Arthur's death in 1203. The further outbreak of war between France and England that follows in act 3 and results in Arthur's capture by John is thus waged under a Papal interest in the boy's rights that is unhistorical. And John's order for Arthur's death, quickly regretted by the king, results in a revolt of some of John's nobles and a complementary French invasion of England that did not occur until the 1214-1216 period and had nothing at all to do with avenging or rectifying Arthur's demise at John's hands. As Saccio has noted: “The claims and the ultimate fate of Arthur … become the mainspring of the plot, the hinge upon which the whole of John's reign is made to turn” (202).

Shakespeare had earlier made the death of royal children the turning point of action, in the first tetralogy: young Rutland's murder by Clifford at the beginning of 3 Henry VI sets in motion the calculus of vengeful slaughter that is Shakespeare's dramatization of the Wars of the Roses in that play; and Richard III's first order upon assuming the throne, the murder of the Yorkist princes in the Tower, triggers his inevitable downfall. Although the king is not directly responsible for Arthur's death in King John (the child is killed as a result of a fall, trying to escape from his prison just after Hubert has spared him), Shakespeare telescopes and rearranges events unhistorically in this play even more drastically than he had done in the earlier history plays. His replotting of history makes John's treatment of Arthur the fundamental action of his whole reign.

The play's moral catastrophe is centered upon Arthur's claim to the throne: John opposes it by warfare in the first two acts; frustrates it through a dynastic marriage with the French in act 3; tries to eliminate it by destroying Arthur in captivity after war breaks out again; and is ultimately consumed by it even after the child's death. Unlike both Holinshed and The Troublesome Raign, Shakespeare presents this claim as legitimate, for John's mother admits the legal illegitimacy of her son's rule in the first scene of the play (43). This striking innovation from all previous accounts of John's rule, which never questioned his legitimacy, makes Arthur's cause just, and the child himself a figure of powerless virtue, manipulated for their own purposes by all the adult characters in the play. Even the Bastard, John's most loyal and most morally prescient supporter, memorializes the fallen child as a personification of values that are compromised everywhere else in the play:

From forth this morsel of dead royalty,
The life, the right and truth of all this realm
Is fled to heaven, and England now is left
To tug and scamble and to part by th' teeth,
The unowed interest of proud swelling state.

(4.3.143-47)

Finally, in addition to centering his action upon Arthur's claims and valorizing them, Shakespeare is responsible for making Arthur a child. Historically, the prince was sixteen when he died in 1203, and Holinshed notes that he helped lead the army that captured John's mother in Anjou in 1202, an exploit dramatized in scene 3 of The Troublesome Raign. In King John, by contrast, the boy actor playing Arthur was so small that he could be carried off the stage by Hubert alone after his death scene (Holmes 140-41). Thus, Shakespeare has deliberately recast the martial youth as a child, powerless in himself but a vehicle of power for his ambitious mother, King Philip of France and his son Lewis, and the Papal legate Pandulph, all of whom support his claim to England for their own interests.

Prior to Arthur's terrible encounter with Hubert, the disfigurement of the child's innocence is dramatized by the suppression of his voice. Arthur's first words in the play are addressed to the Duke of Austria, purportedly the slayer of Richard Coeur de Lion (the boy's uncle) and one of the commanders under King Philip of France, who is supporting Arthur's cause:

God shall forgive you Cordelion's death
The rather that you give his offspring life,
Shadowing their right under your wings of war.
I give you welcome with a powerless hand,
But with a heart full of unstained love:
Welcome before the gates of Angier, Duke.

(2.1.12-17)

This speech, acknowledging his own weakness, is the only moment in the play in which the boy makes any reference to the political struggle between adults that ultimately consumes him. Elsewhere, his responses are what we might expect of a child, a political innocent scarcely interested in the murderous game of claim and counter-claim played out by the adults who purport to be acting in his behalf. When his mother Constance and his grandmother Elinor vie for his allegiance later in the scene, the boy exclaims in frustration: “Good my mother, peace! / I would that I were low laid in my grave. / I am not worth this coil that's made for me” (163-65). After the dynastic marriage between John's niece and Philip's son that eliminates Arthur's claim to the throne while creating him Duke of Brittany, he responds to his mother's apoplectic grief and anger with a simple plea (“I do beseech you, madam, be content,” 2.2.42) that indicates how his subjection to adult political conflict has disturbed him. His mother's initial response to the outbreak of peace between John and Philip betrays whose interests are really being served by her insistence on the boy's right to John's throne: “Lewis marry Blanch! O boy, then where art thou? / France friend with England, what becomes of me?” (34-35). The boy's implicit indifference to and distaste for pursuing his dynastic claim (which would have been unthinkable in the historical Arthur) is answered by a nearly hysterical reiteration of that claim by his mother, who claims to be protecting his rights rather than her own desire for power.

In the scene that follows, alliances shift again: John's excommunication by Pandulph, the papal legate, forces Philip to break the recent armistice and resume war against England in the name of the Church and Arthur's rights. During this long and complicated exchange of threats and insults, the boy remains silent, his interests supposedly being advanced by the political power-broking and casuistry of the self-interested adults all about him. Because Arthur speaks no words in this scene, he has been literally written out of it in some modern editions (e.g., Matchett, Braunmuller), even though there is no stage direction for his exit in the First Folio source text of the play.¹¹ Removing Arthur from the scene in such editions ironically replicates the dismissal of the child that the adult contestants' political quarrels betoken. The physical presence of Arthur and the boy actor representing him during this fusillade of speeches would strikingly remind an audience of the marginality of his true interests as a child. Kings, mothers, and papal legates claim to speak “for” or “against” him, but he is given no words of his own. Ultimately, Arthur's innocence is used against him: once John has captured his little rival, Pandulph and Lewis plot an invasion of England in the boy's name, certain that John will execute his captive and that the revulsion sure to follow among the English will enable Lewis himself, now the sole claimant, to depose John.¹²

In the interim, however, John's murderousness outruns Pandulph's scenario, for the king orders Hubert to have Arthur done away with even before Lewis's Church-sanctified invasion. John's ultimately self-destructive attempt to remove the threat of Arthur suggests uncertainty about his own patrilineal claim to the throne, and his murderous orders suggest how morally illegitimate he has become as a result. The king insists on a public re-coronation of himself once he is convinced that Hubert has carried out his instructions, even though his nobles rightly point out that such a ceremony betokens deep insecurity and demand Arthur's release from imprisonment. The king's frantic scrambling to win them back after they are convinced of his murder of the child indicates no remorse over Arthur's fate that is not politically motivated. And his subsequent, feckless relinquishing of command to the Bastard (“Have thou the ordering of this present time”; 5.1.77) suggests that the man who ordered Arthur's death is no longer fit to be king. In the end, the illness that afflicts him on his final battlefield, coming after all the catastrophes prompted by Arthur's death, is made to seem an internal punishment for his moral darkening: “This fever, that hath troubled me so long, / Lies heavy on me: O, my heart is sick!” (5.3.3-4)

John's criminality as an infanticide is presented ironically by Shakespeare. His desire to have Arthur killed has become an order to blind him by the time Hubert fails to carry it out; the child is not directly destroyed by John, but dies of a fall when he tries to escape his prison.¹³ John is therefore not guilty of killing Arthur, but he is ultimately punished for simply having the intention to do so. The switch from execution to blinding suggests a politically calculated pulling back from murder that is morally even more repugnant—Arthur will live, but be incapable of replacing his uncle as king. Indeed, John's initial instructions to Hubert just after Arthur has been captured suggest the king's recognition of the moral squalor of his intentions:

KING John:
dost thou understand me?
Thou art his keeper.
HUBERT:
And I'll keep him so
That he shall not offend your Majesty.
KING John:
Death.
HUBERT:
My lord.
KING John:
A grave.
HUBERT:
He shall not live.
KING John:
Enough.

This extraordinarily truncated exchange dramatizes the unspeakability of the crime about to be committed and leads to the encounter between child and executioner. Here the child, increasingly silenced as a political object in the rest of the play, speaks for himself and saves his life. As the dialogue between Hubert and Arthur proceeds from the boy's initial ignorance of Hubert's intentions to horror to final release, Shakespeare emphasizes the power of the boy's “innocent prate” through Hubert's reactions. “His words do take possession of my bosom,” (32) he reflects to the audience as he shows the royal order to the prince. After Hubert has dismissed the other executioners and Arthur breaks his agreement to accept his mutilation without speaking, Hubert attempts to silence him so that the king's will may be done:

HUBERT:
Is this your promise? Go to, hold your tongue.
ARTHUR:
Hubert, the utterance of a brace of tongues
Must needs want pleading for a pair of eyes;
Let me not hold my tongue! let me not, Hubert!

From a contemporary perspective, the child's words in this scene may seem overly studied at points, overly simple-minded at others, and the Royal Shakespeare production on video has made cuts based on those criteria, one presumes. Dramatically, of course, all the words in this scene convert Hubert from political to parental imperatives and remind us that the child's voice must be silenced, in this play and beyond it, if adults are to ignore children's rights to live as children.

Two scenes later, as Arthur, disguised as a shipboy, prepares to leap to freedom, Shakespeare gives him the only monologue by a child in the canon:

The wall is high, and yet will I leap down.
Good ground, be pitiful and hurt me not!
There's few or none do know me; if they did,
This ship-boy's semblance hath disguised me quite.
I am afraid, and yet I'll venture it.
If I get down, and do not break my limbs,
I'll find a thousand shifts to get away
As good to die and go, as die and stay.

(4.3.1-8)

Touchingly childish in its apostrophizing and simple exposition, the speech emphasizes the abuse of childhood that Shakespeare's plays powerfully dramatize for his own audience and ourselves. Defined by others only as claimant to the English crown, Arthur sees himself, rightly, as one whom few do know; in leaving the only person who has protected his childhood innocence, the boy vainly hopes to “get away” from a world in which his identity is politically defined and politically controlled. There is no implication that he intends to find his mother, who is part of the problem that he is running away from.

In fact, although Arthur would be unaware of this, her death was announced to John in the preceding scene, fulfilling the boy's prophecy after his capture that “this will make my mother die with grief!” (3.2.15). Constance's demise belies her name and seems oddly selfish, leaving her imprisoned son behind her, and we might wonder whether she died of grief simply for Arthur's sake or for the sake of the crown that had been lost by his capture.

Arthur's disguise is typical of romance protagonists like Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona or Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, but unlike theirs it will not bring escape or transformation. In fact, Arthur's bold attempt to alter his identity and take control of his life by risking it suggests a passage from childhood to youth that is invariably lethal for male children in the history plays. In the event, he dies upon the ground after his leap from the prison walls: “O me! my uncle's spirit is in these stones! / Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones!” (4.3.9-10). Arthur's apostrophe appropriately identifies John as his murderer morally, and the uncle's spirit may be seen as a synechdoche for the world of political calculation and power-seeking that ultimately has used and discarded this child.

Arthur's fate resembles that of male children in the first tetralogy, but the destruction of children by adult political power is handled with greater irony and complexity in King John. As noted, the structure of the play centers about the treatment of Arthur from beginning to end (the inconclusive war that ends with John's death in act 5 is brought on by the death of the boy), unlike earlier plays in which the destruction of children was one crucial element in a succession of catastrophes (the Henry VI plays) and the maniacal rise and fall of a tyrant (Richard III). Moreover, Arthur's successful appeal to Hubert and the latter's protection of the prince provide a positive picture of the paradoxical strength of childish words and childhood innocence. Hubert, together with the Bastard, is the moral hero of this play, the only adult to protect an innocent child who happens to be Duke of Brittany.

Finally, while Arthur perishes, the play ends by valorizing another character who is both child and legitimate heir to John. Prince Henry, the king's son, appears only in the final act, surrounded by the English nobles who had revolted from John to the French as a result of the death of Arthur. Since Henry was only nine years old when his father died in 1216, Shakespeare's child character was probably played by the same small boy who had portrayed Arthur. In a graphic way, then, Henry is Arthur, that “right and truth of all this realm” mourned by the Bastard, reborn and come again, as if the disguised shipboy had both escaped and returned. (A comparable effect is produced in the BBC/Time-Life production: though different boy actors play Arthur and Henry, each is the same size and wears the same royal clothing.) Young Henry's speech tends to be formal and rhetorical, as in his opening words to the assembled lords concerning his father's fatal poisoning:

It is too late: the life of all his blood
Is touched corruptibly, and his pure brain
Which some suppose the soul's frail dwelling house,
Doth, by the idle comments that it makes,
Foretell the ending of mortality.

(5.7.1-5)

He goes on to analyze the progress of the disease, using an elaborate and typical metaphor of assault upon a fortress, later reflecting upon John's feverish singing through the myth of the swan-song:

                                                            'Tis strange that death should sing!
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,
And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings
His soul and body to their lasting rest.

(5.7.20-24)

Such language may seem unchildish to us, but it simply illustrates that the allowable repertoire of children's stage language for an Elizabethan audience is different than our own. The stage presence of the boy actor himself would directly ensure a representation of boyhood, and the rhetorical control and elaboration engaged in by Henry here would be dramatically appropriate for a scene in which his father is dying and the son is about to be called upon to succeed him. Here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, childishness is registered by the reactions of the other characters as well as Henry's own words and acts: he needs to be comforted by Salisbury concerning John's state; he cannot hold back his tears when his father's litter is brought in; and he breaks down at the end of the play, when all of John's adult attendants kneel in homage to him as King Henry III: “I have a kind soul that gives thanks, / And knows not how to do it but with tears” (108-9).

Henry's boyish eloquence throughout this scene, together with this final tableau of adult subjects pledging him their allegiance, presents the most positive valorization of the child in Shakespeare's histories and tragedies.¹⁴ In the first tetralogy, only one child character escaped the murderous effects of political fratricide, the young Henry, Earl of Richmond, who is blessed by Henry VI (3H6 4.6) before he is rushed by his noble protectors overseas to avoid being murdered by Edward IV. Although Richmond, founder of the Tudor line, returns in Richard III to rid England of the “usurper,” the child in 3H6 does not speak a single word and his quick disappearance emphasizes the lethal conflict between adult politics and the nurturing of children that is ever-present in Shakespeare. In Henry VIII, his last play, Shakespeare presents the only other child in a history play not disfigured or destroyed by history. At the very end of the play, the infant Elizabeth is brought out on stage and saluted with glorious prophecies of her reign (long since past at the time Henry VIII was produced).

In contrast to these silent icons of the Tudor era, who have no part to play in the action of their works, Prince Henry's assumption of the title of his father and the right of his cousin involves both words and actions and combines childhood and political power positively. As William Matchett has noted, the Bastard's decision to pledge his allegiance to another powerless child reverses John's initial frustration and ultimate destruction of Arthur's rights (xxiv). It also prompts the English nobles who had earlier abandoned John to acknowledge his son as their ruler.

The problem of child kings had been dealt with throughout the first tetralogy and would even darken the final chorus of the triumphalist Henry V, which reminds the audience that what Henry had accomplished would be lost under the reign of his infant successor. Thus, the final scene of adult political leaders kneeling before a child might be uncertain or even ominous, particularly since Henry has appeared without previous reference in the play to his existence. Yet this scene ultimately corrects the grim scenario that precedes it. As the political abuse of one child had led to catastrophe for England, so the homage paid to another suggests a different outcome. While the disfiguring of childhood in King John is used to question the pursuit of political power, its preservation validates and symbolizes what is politically just. Led by the Bastard, John's nobles become Henry's, pledging their loyalty to a mourning child whom Shakespeare's audience knew as the longest-ruling monarch in English history (1216-1272):

And happily may your sweet self put on
The lineal state and glory of the land!
To whom, with all submission, on my knee
I do bequeath my faithful services
And true subjection everlastingly.

(101-5)

In this concluding mise-en-scène of four noblemen kneeling before a boy, Shakespeare graphically pays homage to both the potential and the integrity of childhood and suggests that protecting, nurturing, and assisting the child is fundamental to that just political order so rarely found in the history plays, or in the world outside the theater.

Notes

1. All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, with act, scene, and line number references included in the text.

2. See for example Erickson, Patriarchal Structures (which deals with As You Like It, Henry V, Hamlet and King Lear); Leverenz, “The Woman in Hamlet”; McFarland, “Image of the Family in King Lear”; Adelman, “Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus.” Marjorie Garber discusses the overall movement from childhood to adulthood in the second chapter of Coming of Age in Shakespeare, and C. L. Barber deals with parent-child relationships more generally in “The Family in Shakespeare's Development.” Diane Dreher studies the relationship between fathers and daughters in Domination and Defiance. Both Garber (36) and Barber (199) are typical, however, in dismissing actual child characters in the plays as unimportant to Shakespeare and his audience, while Dreher does not discuss them at all.

3. See Wrightson 106-7; Ozment 2, 133, 137; Hanawalt 171. Linda Pollock concludes Forgotten Children by questioning the earlier viewpoint: “Contrary to the belief of such writers as Ariès, there was a concept of childhood in the 16th century. This may have become more elaborated through the centuries, but, none the less, the 16th century writers did appreciate that children were different from adults and were also aware of the ways in which children were different—the latter passed through certain recognisable developmental stages; they played; they required discipline, education, and protection” (267-68).

4. Marcus's study of seventeenth-century poets from Herbert to Marvell is acknowledged in Wooden's account of mid-century Marian sermons, homilies, and plays. Both writers show how childhood became the site of a reimagined return to an earlier, more harmonious, and happier state of English society, Anglican and Roman Catholic respectively. Estrin's close analysis of the foundling motif in Malory and English Renaissance literature suggests that such a theme imaginatively and happily resolved recalcitrant issues of contemporary child-raising (18-26).

5. My count is based upon specific references within the plays showing that a role was cast for a boy actor. For example, the Lancastrian Prince Edward in 3H6 is variously addressed by the York brothers as “youthful Edward,” “so young a thorn,” “brat,” “wilful boy,” and “untutored lad” during his final scene in the play (5.5.11, 13, 27, 31, 32).

6. Within Shakespeare's own company, there were probably twelve adult and four boy actors between 1594 and 1599 (Ringler 125-26). There were seven all-boy companies in London between 1558 and 1603—compared to six major mens' companies—and they had a repertory of eighty plays produced during those years (Murray xvi, Shapiro 261-67).

7. Besides the Antipholi and Dromii, Marina, Guiderius and Arviragus, Mamillius and Perdita, and Miranda, we might note several analogous figures, including Rosalind, Helena, Imogen, and Ferdinand, adult children whose unexpected recoveries by their parents provide happy endings and lead to their own marriages.

8. See 1.2.119-37, 160-63, 186-90, 207-8, 211; 2.3.13-17. In the final passage, Leontes attributes his son's fatal decline to shame over his mother's adultery, which Leontes alone has imagined. Mamillius's death is clearly a function of his innocence, which has been destroyed, along with his life, by his father's insane charges against Hermione.

9. There are nineteen child characters in these plays: two, Prince Edward (3H6, R3) and Falstaff's page (2H4, H5) appear in two plays; two, the traveler's boy in 1 Henry IV and Gardiner's page in Henry VIII, are negligible as child figures. The other fifteen are all thematically and structurally significant, including such a figure as the page whom Richard III misuses to find him a murderer of the royal princes.

10. In the New Arden Edition (1954), Honigmann calls into question the priority of The Troublesome Raign, and Matchett (1966) also argues for King John's being the source of the anonymous play. In the two most recent editions of Shakespeare's play, Braunmuller regards The Troublesome Raign as Shakespeare's source, while Beaurline believes King John is the earlier play. In his edition of The Troublesome Raign, Sider reviews the evidence on both sides of the issue through 1979 and finds it ultimately inconclusive.

11. The most recent editor, Beaurline, restores Arthur to this scene, however, and the silent child remains on stage in the BBC/Time-Life production.

12. This infanticide by proxy is absent from The Troublesome Raign, where Pandulph regards Arthur as “safe” with John and encourages Lewis to claim the English crown directly in his own right (Sider 75: v. 36-41).

13. Holinshed presents three different explanations of Arthur's death—he died of grief, he was murdered, he fell to his death trying to escape—of which Shakespeare chose the most ironic (cited in Matchett 177).

14. In The Troublesome Raign, Prince Henry, like Arthur, is presented as a youth rather than as a child. Among the orders that he issues is a request that Swinsted Abbey be eradicated, since his father has been poisoned by the monks within (xvi.159-62). Such shrill appeals to vengeance and transparent anti-Catholic propaganda are foreign to Shakespeare's more subtly hopeful conclusion.

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