Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture

This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.

“Kate Chedgzoy’s ‘Afterword’ which praises the collection and suggests that it be followed by research that treats the child as the subject. … A fruitful line of inquiry could be a feminist emphasis on finding minority voices, looking at identities across rather than along vectors of gender and sex.” (Rosalind Kerr, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 42 (1), 2019) “Advocating a radical unknowing regarding the early modern Child and childhood, this fascinating collection challenges even as it extends queer theoretical paradigms.  From the role of race in reproductive futurity to asexuality as a queer orientation, the energy and variety of these essays moves the question of queering beyond the erotic appeal of children and their purported innocence toward the knowledge relations they were conscripted to perform.” (Valerie Traub, Adrienne Rich Distinguished University Professor of English and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan, USA)

 “A historically complex account of queer childhoods. The essays in this fascinating volume are attuned to the historically variable forms of desire between adults and children and they force us to reckon with the contingency of our own sexual moralities. Confronting head on the meaning and validity of a range of erotic encounters between all kinds of bodies, young and old, the scholars gathered here exercise a mode of 'radical unknowing' in order to leave open the meaning of the erotic systems they find in a wide range of texts from the early modern period. Essential reading in queer theory and beyond!”  (Jack Halberstam, Professor of English and Gender Studies, Columbia University, USA, and Author of The Queer Art of Failure and Female Masculinity)

 “In this current climate in which pseudo-scientific claims about childhood are regularly made in the names of cognitivism and neuroscience, it is all the more important and salutary to be able to welcome this volume that engages seriously with childhood as a culturally and historically contingent identity. It will be of great interest to Early Modernist scholarship but also much more widely in showing how childhood crucially inflects issues of history and identity.” (Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Professor of Critical Theory, Director of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media,University of Reading, UK)

 “This collection of essays co-edited by Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Albert Johnston extends the insights of queer theory to the study of children in the Renaissance. After a cogent and theoretically sophisticated introduction, a series of essays demonstrates that Renaissance childhood is very queer indeed. The authors make a persuasive case for the centrality of children to concepts of both the Renaissance and queerness. We can all learn a lot from this collection.” (Stephen Guy-Bray, Professor of English, University of British Columbia, Canada)

Jennifer Higginbotham is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, USA. Her book, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence, was published in 2013. Her scholarly articles on early modern girlhood, drama, and women’s writing have appeared in the journals Modern Philology, Reformation, Literature Compass, and Sixteenth-Century Journal as well as the collections The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays (2014) and The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (2017).

Mark Albert Johnston is Associate Professor of English at the University of Windsor, CA. His book, Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value was published in 2011 and again in 2016. His essays have appeared in English Literary History, Studies in English Literature, English Literary Renaissance, and Modern Philology, and in the collections Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice: London 1550-1650 (Palgrave, 2010), and Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (2010).