The child characters of Shakespeare's Roman and Scottish tragedies: Dramatic renderings of an ideal future.

摘要

This dissertation uses a new historic approach to argue that the prepubescent child characters who appear in Shakespeare's Roman and Scottish tragedies communicate early modern concerns about education, religious training and moral discipline. Whether early modern English children belonged to the noble classes, gentry, merchants, servants or commoners, their future was both fragile and uncertain. In a similar manner, the young civilization of early modern England was in an extremely fluid and fragile state. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this changing culture faced new challenges. Each of the child characters discussed in this dissertation will provide commentary upon the thoughts and values chronicled in Erasmus' work, particularly the Antibarbari (1520).;This dissertation will argue that, when a prepubescent child character appears in a Shakespearean tragedy, the child represents an ideal or virtue related to the humanist vision of an educated and cultivated future. Each tragedy points out the state's corruption of the ideal each of the dramatic child characters represent. While each of the child characters who appear within these tragedies upholds the humanist ideal of the states civilized future, they do not necessarily represent the reality of childhood within early modern England. Instead, these dramatic children point toward an idealized future. As such, each child character signifies an idealized standard of a compassioned and humanist philosophy. When they appear in the tragedies, each of Shakespeare's child characters demonstrates the social and moral consequences of continuing the traditions of a barbarous and pagan past. These child characters also provide contemporary audiences with insight into early modern concerns about the education, religious training and moral discipline of the realm's children.;Thus, when they appear in the Roman and Scottish tragedies, Shakespeare's dramatic child characters have a dual function. They communicate early modern concerns and ideas about the preparation and fate of the realm's children. These child characters also represent ideologies about the formation of early modern England's future.