Children and Suffering in Shakespeare's Plays

Author(s): Ann Blake

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 23, Early Shakespeare Special Number (1993),
pp. 293-304
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3507985
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 Children and Suffering in Shakespeare's
Plays
ANN BLAKE
La Trobe University

One way in which Shakespeare's England differed from o

much larger proportion of children in the population. Despite
and child mortality rates - about a quarter of all children fa
age of ten - 'probably something in the region of 40 pe
population consisted of dependent children living at hom
parents'.' This meant, as Laslett wrote, that 'children wer
constant presence in all adult affairs, as in some of the paintin
where children are often seen playing in the background or c
foreground.2 The imaginary worlds of Shakespeare's plays do
reflect these proportions since they do not set out to be socia
adults are more dramatically interesting than children, a
concerned with them. Nevertheless a careful search revea
large number of parts for children, at least thirty. It is parti
ing to discover that some of the more substantial roles a
invention. Young Lucius in Titus Andronicus, the Boy in Henr
Brutus's page in Julius Caesar, have no counterparts i
sources, while the scenes of young Macduff and Mamillius g
the briefest hints. Children were everywhere in I6oo, inc
speare's company where they worked as apprentices to adult
quality of some of these parts makes us recognize that more
than giving the boy actors something to do until they
demanding task of playing women. In his histories and t
speare has created a number of child characters who come to
What follows is an attempt to define the dramatic signif
speare's tragic world of these scenes of children and their suf
The image of the child in Shakespeare's plays takes little
contemporary religious and educational sense of the imperfe
hood. These children are tender-hearted and loyal, brav
Moreover, they are free from adult vices, and emphatically
expresses orthodox Christian doctrine on the child's position
mankind when he writes: 'Assuredly we bring not innocence

1 Keith Wrightson, English Society 158o-I68o, Hutchinson Social History of Eng

son, 1982), pp. 105-06.
2 Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost further explored, 3rd edn (London: Methue

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294 Children and Suffering in Shakespeare's Plays

we bring impurity much rather.' Contemporary writing on the education of

the young begins with a sense of the innate imperfection of children as beings
who must be closely watched and severely disciplined for their own good, in
the hope that soon rational faculties will be sufficiently developed to restrain
natural evil impulses. That view of the young is perhaps reflected in
'schoolmaster' Prospero's efforts to 'nurture' the dark nature of the 'hag-
seed' Caliban, and his own noble daughter, but not in the characterization of
those who actually appear as young children. Though the language of the
plays reasonably enough attaches the adjective 'childish' to the recognized
disabilities of childhood: 'error', 'weakness', 'treble', 'fear', and so on, the
figures of the children themselves are felt to be not so much inferior as
innocent and defenceless.
When Polixenes in The Winter's Tale talks to Hermione of himself and
Leontes as boys, he describes such childhood innocence:
We were, fair Queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal [...]
We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun
And bleat the one at th' other. What we chang'd
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did. Had we pursu'd that life,
And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd
With stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven
Boldly 'Not guilty', the imposition clear'd
Hereditary ours.
(1. 2. 62-75)3

The dramatic context immediately comments on Polixenes's words with the

outbreak of Leontes's sexual rage. Polixenes's sense of innocence here, with
its proper acknowledgement of original sin, 'the imposition [... ] hereditary
ours', is to be found, of course, in many contemporary poems addressed to
children, such as Milton's 'On the death of a fair infant dying of a cough'
which eloquently and comprehensively praises the 'heaven loved innocence'
of those who die young, and it informs Earle's rightly famous 'character' of
'The Child', with its images of 'nature's fresh picture newly drawne in Oyle
which time and much handling dimmes and defaces. This soul is yet a white
paper unscribled with observations from the world, wherewith at length it
becomes a blurr'd Notebook'. And in the world of Shakespeare's plays the
innocence of living children is consistently felt. They may tease and become
tiresome but they never practise that thoughtless cruelty which appears in
the imagery of the plays, most memorably in Gloucester's simile for the cruel
gods: 'As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods. They kill us for their sport'

3All references to the texts of Shakespeare's plays follow William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed.
by P. Alexander (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951).

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 ANN BLAKE 295

(Iv. I. 37). No such boys occur in

themselves are seen primarily as v
wickedness. With one exception, W
in a comic world in The Merry W
children are fated to suffer. Thei
protection but they meet instead
and deaths constitute an image of h
speaking of the murder of the litt
deed of piteous massacre', the horr
defending themselves, or even of u
The most impressive of these s
far-reaching dramatic significanc
duff. The boy becomes a target
apparition to 'beware Macduff', he
rage and frustration at this esc
family killed. This massacre is, lik
savagery. As soon as Macbeth anno
Act Iv Scene i, the audience begin
The castle of Macduff I will su
Seize upon Fife, give to the ed
His wife, his babes, and all unf
That trace him in his line.

(Iv. 1. 150)
When Lady Macduff and her child come on stage at the beginning of Act Iv
Scene 2, the murderers are approaching; Ross warns of danger, Lady
Macduff is fearful, but the audience is certain, and that gives a terrible edge
to her words as she speaks to Ross of her husband's flight: it is a betrayal, and
leaves them all exposed and vulnerable. Ross, though overcome with sorrow
at their plight, can offer no comfort or reassurance, and he leaves. As Lady
Macduff speaks with her son the suspense grows, rising further with the
arrival of the Messenger, who urges Lady Macduff to fly 'fell cruelty' with
her 'little ones'; but the warning is too late. She has time to make one speech
of protest and then the murderers burst in. Only young Macduff is killed on
stage, the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her other children, 'all my pretty
chickens', is, like the murder of Duncan, left to the appalled imagination.
Young Macduff dies with the courage and nobility characteristic of Shake-
speare's children, defending his father's honour and trying to save his
mother's life with a pathetically child-like phrase: 'Run away, I pray you'
(Iv. 2.85). The suspense, and the horror of the butchery of the boy by the
'shag-ear'd' villains is appalling; no wonder the scene was omitted for
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences. It may not match in ghastly
detail the threatened blinding of Arthur by red hot irons, but in King John the
worst does not happen; Hubert spares the boy. The slaughter of young
Macduffoffers no escape: these assassins seem to enjoy what they are doing.

20

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296 Children and Suffering in Shakespeare's Plays

At the heart of the scene is the conversation between Lady Macduff and
her son, Shakespeare's additions to his chronicle source,4 where the pathos
and fearfulness of their situation is heightened by Shakespeare's contrasting
the innocent child's view with the experienced adult's. Left alone with her
son, Lady Macduff gives release to her distress at her husband's betrayal of
his family and her fear for their lives. She does this obliquely, playing a
bitterly humorous game, telling her son that his father is dead. How will he
live now? He is confident that he'll be able to get what he needs, as birds do.
She recognizes this as the confidence of a child, founded, like that of the
innocent creatures of the natural world, on ignorance of difficulty and
danger: 'Poor bird! thou'dst never fear the net nor lime, I The pitfall nor the
gin' (Iv. 2.34-35). With precocious wit he insists that he will survive since he
is not a 'ppor bird'. In her grief and anxiety Lady Macduff repeats that his
father is dead (or as good as), and she throws back her question: 'How wilt
thou do for a father?' But young Macduff's confidence is proof against her
and manifests itself in pert sophistication: 'If he were dead, you'd weep for
him; if you would not, it were a good sign that I should quickly have a new
father' (Iv. 2.60-62). His reliance on his reading of his mother's mood is not
justified, and with his pretence to worldly wisdom he skates over the terrible
depths of her cares. But he is puzzled and questions his mother persistently:
'Was my father a traitor, mother?' and next 'What is a traitor?', a very
child-like order of questions. His mother explains that a traitor is one that
swears and lies, but her son, probably more familiar with the idea of the
wickedness of swearing than with the act of swearing allegiance, brightly
suggests that his father is in no danger: traitors, swearers, and liars will never
be hanged since they out-number the honest men. Lady Macduff comments:
'Poor prattler, how thou talk'st' (IV. 2.63); her capacity to indulge her
precocious son is running out. That the pathos in this conversation comes
across without any sentimentality is due in part to the sharp sense, in their
dark situation, of the discrepancy between an adult's and a child's under-
standing of evil. Lady Macduff has the bitter knowledge that there may be
no reason why she is in danger except that she is in 'this earthly world'. But
young Macduff, for all his knowing talk, is innocent.
That youthful innocence, dramatized throughout the scene, is underlined
by the words of the murderers as the child is killed: 'What, you egg?/ Young fry
of treachery!' (Iv. 2.83). It is this scene between a child and a parent which
brings together in a way unique in the play, and among such scenes in
Shakespeare, images of tender care and nurture by parents of young children
and by creatures of their young. Lady Macduff contrasts her husband's
abandoning of his family with the wren who fights to defend her young in the

4 Holinshed's Chronicle provides a striking visual parallel in the woodcut of Makdowald who, antici-
pating an attack on his castle by Macbeth, slaughters his wife and children and then commits suicide. See
The Historie of Scotland, I577, p. 240, reproduced in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. by
G. Bullough, 7 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964-75), viI, 491.

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 ANN BLAKE 297

nest against the owl: Macduff '

conversation draws on these i
relationship between parents an
incorporates pathetic humour in
bility of the young and their nee
whole scene gives new life to the
nurturing, of birds, eggs, and
natural bonding which Macbeth
destroy the child, and the entire
hateful image of that warfare o
wages all through the play, with
The effect is similar to that in Rich
princes which most clearly inv
actions as cruel for the first ti
established a close, even confiden
speare chooses not to present the
avoid repetition after the murder
less. Tyrrel's announcement is m
and with passionate indignation.
back to Richard, and the dramati
brings about a change in the alleg
Richard, and thus are prepared to
In Macbeth the effect of the mur
can see why Bradley questioned
our abhorrence of Macbeth's cru
feel, with Macbeth himsef, such
Banquo. His sense of the functi
pathos: 'to touch the heart with
springs of love and tears'.6 This
engages our feelings so powerfull
then for the bereaved father, Ma
with the scene in England (Iv.
structure of feeling in the pla
slaughter of his family this is, Jo
we see on stage has the effect
Bradley implied in his phrase 'to
Jones explicitly argues, that the
of 'deep tragic sympathy' for th
achievement in Macbeth is to ma

5 See Bullough,
because II, 239. Bullough
he was consciously believes
avoiding that
material
perhaps because he had been recently accused
prove his independence.
6 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (Lon
7 Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (O

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298 Children and Suffering in Shakespeare's Plays

sympathy aroused in the first place by Macbeth's own victims contributes to

this end.
In his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare had introduced a child:
young Lucius, the grandson of Titus, who, from this point of view, is an early
and less successful version of young Macduff. As Kermode noted, his role is
to contribute to the restoration of sympathy towards Titus.8 And, again like
young Macduff, though without himself becoming a victim, he heightens the
sense of horror: through his innocent, partial comprehension he offers a
distinctly pathetic perspective on the situation around him. His first appear-
ance, in the Folio text, is at the family banquet (III. 2), attended by the mad
Titus and the mutilated Lavinia, where his distress for his grandfather is
pitiful, especially because of his limited sense of adult griefs and wrongs. His
idea of making Lavinia 'merry with some pleasing tale' fits his experience of
life, but not theirs. The boy's tender impulse has a pathetic humour which
anticipates the pathos and humour in the scene in Macbeth. However, at the
end of the play the juxtaposing of pathos and horror goes awry. Young
Lucius's father, now proclaimed emperor of Rome, grieves over Titus's body
and calls on his son to join him:
Come hither, boy; come, come and learn of us
To melt in showers. Thy grandsire lov'd thee well;
Many a time he danc'd thee on his knee,
Sung thee asleep, his loving breast thy pillow;
Many a story hath he told to thee,
And bid thee bear his pretty tales in mind
And talk of them when he was dead and gone.
(v. 3. I6o)
His reference to story-telling is too obvious an appeal: Mamillius in The
Winter's Tale does his own story-telling, and thus creates a less predictably
sweet picture. Moreover, the image of the loving grandsire is awkwardly
juxtaposed to the Titus who has just served a Thyestean banquet, and
stabbed his daughter and the Empress before being killed himself. Young
Lucius's reply is just as disjunctive as his father's speech:
O grandsire, grandsire! ev'n with all my heart
Would I were dead, so you did live again!
O Lord, I cannot speak to him for weeping;
My tears will choke me, if I ope my mouth.
(v. 3. 172)

This image of Titus evoked by the weeping grandchild seems, in the light of
what precedes it, a mawkish indulgence, too obvious and unnecessary an
appeal for sympathy for Titus. Keats, who had some interest in the
sentimental, refused to accept as Shakespeare's these last moments of the
play.

8 Frank Kermode, Introduction to Titus Andronicus in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. by G. Blakemore
Evans (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1974), p. 1022.

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 ANN BLAKE 299

The tragedies of Shakespeare's

include remarkably few child figu
by their weaknesses, to the achie
apparent in Titus Andronicus: how
sentimentality, and how to bring
arousing incredulous laughter. M
and horror with the child Julio in
killed on stage by Antonio and
heightened version of the horror
with Hubert in King John. Little
kiss: "Truth, I love you better th
but finally, with incredible gentl
do even what you will' (Ili. 3.42).
kisses him, but, being a more fu
Clifford, he will not hesitate to k
saying: 'Whilst thy wounds bleed
Marston contrives a final excess o
little dead body and drips the blo
The boy Hengo in Fletcher's Bon
also meets a spectacular death o
'rock'. His loving uncle then haul
Their protracted leave-taking
spun-out pathos. That Webster ca
- at least for some - by the Duch
I pray thee look thou giv'st m
Some syrup for his cold, and l
Say her prayers, ere she sleep

Keeping the reins on pathetic dia

harder for both dramatists. (T
mercifully, silent.) Giovanni in Th
prince, boasting at length of the
Both catechize tender-hearted adults about death. Giovanni's weariness
from grief: 'Lord, Lord, that I were dead, II have not slept these six night
(111. 2. 324-25), saves his speech from sentimentality; Hengo's speeches are
beyond saving and go on for some forty lines. Shakespeare's scenes avoid t
danger, first of all, by being brief. With the exception of the final slo
moving passage from Titus, the scenes allow no lengthy savouring of t
feelings evoked. Further, Shakespeare presents sharply observed, vari
childhood behaviour. His contemporaries sound single, unmixed notes: t
valiant treble or the quiet child mourning lost parents, an episode wh

9 John Marston, Antonio's Revenge, ed. by W. Reavley Gair, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Univer
Press; Baltimore:John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 111 3. 5.
10 The Duchess ofMalfi, Iv. ii. 203-05, inJohn Webster, Three Plays, ed. by D. C. Gunby (Harmondswor
Penguin, 1972). Quotations from Webster follow this edition.

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300 Children and Suffering in Shakespeare's Plays

appeal is easily predictable. Shakespeare, distinctively, brings together

pathos, horror, and humour in scenes which contribute to the significance of
the whole play, while Webster and Fletcher merely display children in
pathetic cameos.
Each of the roles for children in Shakespeare's tragedies, Titus Andronicus,
Macbeth, and Coriolanus, and in what might be called the tragic half of The
Winter's Tale, bears a distinct stamp, and emphasizes different aspects of a
child's nature or experience, to fulfil a particular dramatic function. For
instance, Coriolanus's son, young Martius, makes only one appearance, in
Act v. Scene 3, and speaks one speech, defying his father:
'A shall not tread on me!
I'll run away till I am bigger, but then I'll fight.
(v. 3. 127)

His brave words in a barely understood situation raise a smile and break the
tension of the scene with an easily recognized moment when parents are
amused by their child, and indulge him. Out of this pathetic humour
emerges Martius's symbolic role. As Coriolanus struggles to remain
unmoved by ties of country and family the presence of the child makes it less
and less possible for him to maintain an unnatural distance from his mother
and her demands. He wills himself to reject natural feeling:
I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.
(v. 3.34)

But knowing kin is inevitable as his wife presents their son: 'This is a poor
epitome of yours' (v.3.68). The boy's presence traps Coriolanus into
admitting his natural human ties: 'That's my brave boy' he says as Martius
kneels to him. While still speaking slightingly of the ties of kin - 'woman's
tenderness' - he acts positively in response to them, and it is the child who
has enabled these feelings to be presented simply and directly.
Mamillius in The Winter's Tale has different symbolic functions. His role in
the first part of the play is to embody that state of sexual innocence which
Leontes and Polixenes so insist on in their conversation about their youth,
when they were 'pretty lordings'. All through Act I Scene 2 Mamillius, the
innocent child, is on stage, and Leontes explicitly identifies his own child-
hood self with the boy, a 'kernel, I This squash'. Later in the scene Mamillius
is the audience to Leontes's tirades of sexual jealousy, and in that pathetic
situation, seen in earlier plays, of trying to cheer and please a distressed
adult, the cause of whose distress he does not understand. The contrast
between the innocent child's world and the world of adult sexuality (here
leading to torment and misery) could hardly be more sharply realized than
by these two, father and son, standing side by side. Mamillius's death occurs
half-way through the play, but the idea of children as an 'unspeakable

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 ANN BLAKE 30I

comfort' to their parents continues

melancholy and even a palliative to
that goes beyond the Sonnets' argum
of immortality. The feeling for c
personalities are more important
makes his premature death an irr
end of the play in Leontes's compar
found, returning like her mother as
promise of young life, but not Mam
For what emerges as a variety of
children in the tragic world of extr
his sources or even inventing them
they appear, made immediately d
appeal of light voices, introduce a
moment when the audience's emo
protagonist. The children's deaths
Of course, children are not the o
Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia
But as R. S. White rightly points
children, that is, between children
awareness that perfect innocence is
commentators may even try to per
as in some way contributing to the
or pride. Those less willing to lay b
that even the most virtuous, acting
meet with tension and conflict.
It is not necessary for innocence to be destroyed to have a powerful effect
in the play. One of Shakespeare's inventions is Lucius, Brutus's page in
Julius Caesar, who, though in many ways not typical of children in the
tragedies, has a role which defines the essential place of children in Shake-
speare's poetic perception of the tragic world. Lucius's immediate dramatic
function is to modify our sense of Brutus by allowing him to be seen in a role
which is unequivocally appealing: Brutus endears himself to us by his tender
concern for this dutiful boy. In the last part of Act Iv Scene 3 after the quarrel
with Cassius, Lucius plays and sings for his master, finally singing himself to
sleep. The appearance of the ghost of Caesar soon dispels this peaceful
mood, and the troubled Brutus rouses Lucius and questions the drowsy
child. This incident, the third time in the play that Lucius has been
awakened by his master, repeats the contrast between the sleeping boy and
the restless state of mind of Brutus in the garden night scene. Then Brutus
has to call repeatedly to wake him, and he envies him: 'I would it were my

11 R. S. White, Innocent Victims: Poetic Injustice in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Athlone Press, 1986),
p. 46.

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302 Children and Suffering in Shakespeare's Plays

fault to sleep so soundly' (II. 1.4). When the conspirators leave Lucius has
again gone to sleep, and Brutus talks of the difference between Lucius
and himself:
Boy! Lucius! Fast asleep? It is no matter,
Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber.
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies.
Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
Therefore thou sleep'st so sound.
(11. I. 229)

Unlike Lucius, Brutus cannot sleep: 'Since Cassius first did whet me against
Caesar I I have not slept' (ii. 1. 61-62). He experiences that troubled state of
mind when life becomes 'like a phantasma or a hideous dream'. Macbeth
too, of course, knows that shaken state of man: his speeches poignantly evoke
that peace of mind and ability to sleep which he no longer enjoys. Lucius in
Julius Caesar enacts that blessed state. He stands clearly in the play as a
credible figure who yet effortlessly assumes a symbolic significance which
derives from a blended sense of his youth and carefree mind, his music, and
his sleeping. Tragedy entails physical suffering and death, but pre-
eminently suffering in the mind, mental anguish. An antithesis to that
metaphorical storm and tempest in the mind is, as Wilson Knight made us
see, music.12
From the early history plays Shakespeare gives dramatic prominence to
scenes of the suffering and death of children, with the fate of young princes
anticipating the fuller tragic perception of childhood innocence and its
destruction. In these brief scenes the children ask unequivocally for pity.
Their deaths simply condemn adult cruelty. This is true even of the very
short episode in3 Henry VI where the child Rutland is killed on stage to satisfy
Clifford's blood-thirsty craving for revenge. The grieving father York
declares that in slaughtering a sweet, innocent child Clifford has overcome
all restraints:
That face of his the hungry cannibals
Would not have touch'd, would not have stain'd with blood;
But you are more inhuman, more inexorable-
0, ten times more - than tigers of Hyrcania.
(1.4.152)
York's clamorous description of Clifford's inhumanity would perhaps not
appear in a later play: the extremity of the deed would be allowed to make its
point dramatically, as in Macduff's reception of the news of Macbeth's 'fell
swoop' on his family: 'He hath no children'. But if dramatically redundant,
what York says is just: the murder of young Rutland marks an absolute peak

12 G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest, 3rd edn (London: Methuen, 1953), passim for the
tempests of mortality; on 2 Henry IV, see p. 46; on Julius Caesar, see p. 187. For the sleeplessness of Brutus
and Macbeth, see The Wheel ofFire (London: Methuen, 1930), pp. 126-27.

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 ANN BLAKE 303

of horror in the Henry VI plays, w

carnage is simply felt as 'inhuman
little princes, which, as noted, tu
Richard, constitutes an extreme:
is worth insisting that the prin
because Shakespeare has made th
'pretty prate'. Like early versio
speak with child-like directness,
idealism with precocious wit in
adults and children.
It is in King John that the role of the suffering child, Arthur, assumes
central importance. Shakespeare has made him younger and less politically
ambitious than his counterparts in the historical sources. Though he can
speak nobly of his rights he appears in the first three acts as a pawn in a
political game. It is his tender loving nature, revealed in the execution scene
with Hubert, that is important (Iv. I). Arthur wants nothing so much as to
live as Hubert's son, and to look after him, boasting 'I warrant I love you
more that you do me' (Iv. 1. 3 I). This is a scene of almost unbearable pathos,
submitting the sweet, loving nature of the child to the fear of hideous pain,
though the tyrant's cruelty is averted when Hubert's heart is softened and he
refuses to carry out John's orders. Nevertheless, John's intention is accom-
plished as Arthur, flying from his enmity, dies in his jump from the castle
walls, and Hubert, who spared his life, must now pick up his dead body as
Faulconbridge comments:
How easy dost thou take all England up!
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.
(Iv. 3. I42)

For him Arthur's significance is political. He is the legitimate but lost ruler of
England; in contrast, those who are now struggling for power are no better
than dogs fighting over a bone. But the audience responds to the destruction
of the personal qualities of Arthur, Shakespeare's most prominent child
character. His gentle, loving nature and perhaps his mother's grief at his
death, provide the antithesis to the play's violent world of betrayal, conflict,
and self-assertion. But like the reluctant monarch Henry VI, the 'unworldly'
Arthur is doomed. The human values he represents are shown to exist in the
execution scene when Hubert relents, but they cannot prevail in this political
world.
In that later history, Henry V, Shakespeare incorporated a young victim
who is not a dynastic enemy, but, like Brutus's Lucius, a young page:
the boy who, after Falstaff's death, follows Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph to the

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304 Children and Suffering in Shakespeare's Plays

wars in France.13 He is young, as he admits, and small: the Frenchman calls

him 'Petit Monsieur' (Iv.4. 49); he is a witty page like Moth and Falstaff's
page in 2 Henry IV, all neat jugglers with words and exposers of folly. But for
all his poised wit, his too is an essentially innocent view of the world: adult
folly and corruption sicken him. His vulnerable situation makes him even
more pitiful and never more so than when he says, speaking for all in battle:
'Would I were in an ale house in London, I would give all my fame for a pot
of ale and safety' (1II. 2. 1-13). Shakespeare's inclusion of this figure gives
the Chronicles' episode of the killing of the boys a personal focus and
therefore a greater poignancy which serves to enforce a sense of the horror of
war. Henry V repeatedly confronts the audience with cross-reflecting images
of war, including the suffering of non-combatants, but none is as unequivo-
cally appalling as the reported slaughter of this good page.
These powerful stage images in Shakespeare's histories and tragedies of
adults plotting against children, and killing them, must have reminded the
audience of the archetypal instance in Christian history of such cruelty in
St Matthew's account of King Herod's massacre of the innocents. The story,
read annually as the gospel for Innocents' Day, and recollected in medieval
tales of Jewish cruelty against Christian children, such as that told by
Chaucer's Prioress, formed one of the most dramatically powerful episodes
in the cycles of miracle plays. As a scenic representation of pathos, horror,
and suspense it was challenged only by the pageant of Abraham and Isaac.
For some of Shakespeare's audience, no doubt, the Shakespearean scenes of
the brutal killing of children or the threatened blinding of Arthur would have
awakened memories of theatrical performances during the last years of the
miracle plays: the last performances at Coventry, for instance, were in 1579.
The fifteen-year-old Shakespeare may have seen them. It is possible, as
Emrys Jones has argued, to speak of Shakespeare's indebtedness to these
plays;14 and it may be that he, and other dramatists (the author of The
Yorkshire Tragedy, for instance) learned from them something of the theatrical
possibilities, and management, of stage violence.s5 For audience and drama-
tists these horrific spectacles of violence against children, actual or
threatened, constituted a potent part of their theatrical heritage.

13 J. W. Draper, 'Falstaff's Robin and other Pages', SP, 36 (1939), PP- 476-90, sees the Boy, Falstaff's
page in 2 Henry IV and Robin in The Merry Wives as all the same person. W. Robertson Davies, Shakespeare's
Boy Actors (London: Dent, 1939), also thinks that all three parts are 'probably' the same boy, and notes
that the part which began as a mere stage property to set off Falstaff's size achieves real significance in
Henry V; see p. 163.
14 Emrys Jones, The Origins ofShakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), Chapter 2.
15 See The Yorkshire Tragedy, ed. by A. C. Cawley and Barry Gaines (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1986), p. 8o. A note on Scene v where the husband murders his two sons suggests 'the Jacobean
dramatist may well have drawn on his memories of plays on the Massacre of the Innocents'.

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