Overview

A study of Shakespeare's child figures in relation to their own political moment, as well as our own. Politicians are fond of saying that ""children are the future."" How did the child become a figure for our political hopes? Joseph Campana's book locates the source of this idea in transformations of childhood and political sovereignty during the age of Shakespeare, changes spectacularly dramatized by the playwright himself. Shakespeare's works feature far more child figures—and more politically entangled children—than other literary or theatrical works of the era. Campana delves into this rich corpus to show how children and childhood expose assumptions about the shape of an ideal polity, the nature of citizenship, the growing importance of population and demographics, and the question of what is or is not human. As our ability to imagine viable futures on our planet feels ever more limited, and as children take up legal proceedings to sue on behalf of the future, it behooves us to understand the way past child figures haunt our conversations about intergenerational justice. Shakespeare offers critical precedents for questions we still struggle to answer.

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9780226832548

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Reviews

""This is an ambitious and genuinely innovative book. Campana has assembled a dynamic cluster of themes around the infinitely mutable, malleable, and violable figure of the child in Shakespeare. Roving freely across the breadth of Shakespeare's works, Campana compellingly demonstrates how childhood came to figure the pressures and transformations of sovereignty, biopower, and mercantilism in the early modern period.""-- ""Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine"" ""At a time of 'trafficking' panic and extinction anxiety, the fantasies of harm and futurity that cluster around the rhetorical figure of the child threaten to proliferate out of control. But when did this process start? And what might it take to think the child anew? Returning to a time before modern constructions of childhood in search of answers, in Shakespeare's Once and Future Child Campana finds unexpected resonance in the biopolitical imaginary of early modern literature's 'sanctuary children, ' boy actors, and shipwreck survivors. Fresh and persuasive readings of Shakespeare and his literary contemporaries abound in this beautifully written and philosophically ambitious book.""-- ""Drew Daniel, Johns Hopkins University""

“This is an ambitious and genuinely innovative book. Campana has assembled a dynamic cluster of themes around the infinitely mutable, malleable, and violable figure of the child in Shakespeare. Roving freely across the breadth of Shakespeare’s works, Campana compellingly demonstrates how childhood came to figure the pressures and transformations of sovereignty, biopower, and mercantilism in the early modern period.” * Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine * “At a time of ‘trafficking’ panic and extinction anxiety, the fantasies of harm and futurity that cluster around the rhetorical figure of the child threaten to proliferate out of control. But when did this process start? And what might it take to think the child anew? Returning to a time before modern constructions of childhood in search of answers, in Shakespeare’s Once and Future Child Campana finds unexpected resonance in the biopolitical imaginary of early modern literature’s ‘sanctuary children,’ boy actors, and shipwreck survivors. Fresh and persuasive readings of Shakespeare and his literary contemporaries abound in this beautifully written and philosophically ambitious book.” * Drew Daniel, Johns Hopkins University *

Author Information

Joseph Campana is the William Shakespeare Professor of English and director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University. He is author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity, the coeditor of Renaissance Posthumanism, and was an editor of the academic journal Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. He has also published three collections of poetry, The Book of Life, Natural Selections, and The Book of Faces.

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