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    Killing Shakespeare's Children: The Cases of Richard III and King John

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    Author
    Campana, Joseph
    Date
    2007
    Abstract
    This essay explores a series of affective, sexual and temporal disturbances that Shakespeare's child characters create on the early modern stage and that lead these characters often to their deaths. It does so by turning to the murdered princes of Richard III and the ultimately extinguished boy-king Arthur of King John. A pervasive sentimentality about childhood shapes the way audiences and critics have responded to Shakespeare's children by rendering invisible complex and discomfiting erotic and emotional investments in childhood innocence. While Richard III subjects such sentimentality to its analytic gaze, King John explores extreme modes of affect and sexuality associated with childhood. For all of the pragmatic political reasons to kill Arthur, he is much more than an inconvenient dynastic obstacle. Arthur functions as the central node of networks of seduction, the catalyst of morbid displays of affect, and the signifier of future promise as threateningly mutable. King John and Richard III typify Shakespeare's larger dramatic interrogation of emergent notions of childhood and of contradictory notions of temporality, an interrogation conducted by the staging of uncanny, precocious, and ill-fated child roles.
    Citation
    Campana, Joseph. "Killing Shakespeare's Children: The Cases of Richard III and King John." Shakespeare, 3, no. 1 (2007) Taylor & Francis: 18-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450910701252271.
    Published Version
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450910701252271
    Keyword
    children; childhood; seduction; sexuality; affect; More... temporality; Richard III; King John Less...
    Type
    Journal article
    Publisher
    Taylor & Francis
    Citable link to this page
    https://hdl.handle.net/1911/78261
    Rights
    This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Taylor & Francis.
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    • English Department Papers and Publications [22]
    • Faculty Publications [4988]

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    Home | FAQ | Contact Us | Privacy Notice | Accessibility Statement
    Managed by the Digital Scholarship Services at Fondren Library, Rice University
    Physical Address: 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005
    Mailing Address: MS-44, P.O.BOX 1892, Houston, Texas 77251-1892
    Site Map