Shakespeare and Childs Play

" Shakespeare and Child's Play is a marvelous book, rich in historical detail and astute in its observation of how films and stage productions insist that we see - and see through the eyes of - the children in Shakespeare's plays. Rutter offers an account of Shakespeare that is strikingly original. There is no better interpreter of performance writing today." - James C. Bulman, Allegheny College, Pennsylvania "As a Shakespeare scholar Carol Rutter shows how often children guide us to the heart of the mystery. As a theatre scholar she uniquely places the reader at the heart of the action". - Terry Hands, Director, Clwyd Theatr Cymru Shakespeare wrote more than fifty parts for children, amounting to the first comprehensive portrait of childhood in the English theatre. Focusing mostly on boys, he put sons against fathers, servants against masters, innocence against experience, testing the notion of masculinity, manners, morals, and the limits of patriarchal power. He explored the nature of relationships and ideas about parenting in terms of nature and nurture, permissiveness and discipline. He wrote about education, adolescent rebellion, delinquency, fostering, and child-killing, as well as the idea of the redemptive child who 'cures' diseased adult imaginations. 'Childness' - the essential nature of being a child - remains a vital critical issue. In Shakespeare and Child's-Play Carol Rutter analyses a range of recent performances on stage and film, among them: Penny Woolcock's Macbeth on the Estate Julie Taymor's Titus Kneehigh's Cymbeline Greg Doran's A Midsummer Night's Dream Declan Donnellan's The Winter's Tale . This timely study shows how these performances use Shakespeare's insights in order re-examine and re-think these emotive issues in terms of today's society and culture. Carol Chillington Rutter teaches at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. She is author of Enter the Body (2000). Theatre/Shakespeare Studies Cover: Tam Williams as Mamillius in Propeller's The Winter's Tale directed by Edward Hall (2005). Photographer: Robert DayRutter, Carol Chillington is the author of 'Shakespeare and Childs Play', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415365192 and ISBN 0415365198.